too stupid of an idea to address seriously

It's easier/cheaper to build floating cities over Venus, which is also closer to Earth's gravity.

lol he believes that “mars” is real

We should probably address problems on Earth while we wait for Musk and his ilk to get at least one person to Mars in the first place.

The problems on Earth are exactly why we should be striving to colonize Mars in the first place.

Get your ass to Mahz

lol he believes that “mars” is real

Are you too a fellow donut earth believer?

now that's a nice old sep7ameme

Too much energy and resources would be required to do such a thing, it'll be ridiculously hard and take so long to achieve decent results

The amount of time it would take isn't surprising, and I think whatever resources it would take to make another planet habitable for us would be worth it. What are your sources saying the resources required would be to much?

Quote from: Naru on April 12, 2018, 07:53:22 PM

Too much energy and resources would be required to do such a thing, it'll be ridiculously hard and take so long to achieve decent results

The amount of time it would take isn't surprising, and I think whatever resources it would take to make another planet habitable for us would be worth it. What are your sources saying the resources required would be to much?

we'd have to build domes and carry so many resources over time to just build those "habitable" zones. theres no atmosphere to even keep in whatever we'd "terraform" if we were "successful". this tech is too hard to do in our lifetimes and not guaranteed.

Ender is back!

I forgot you could do that

Mars is a meme planet with no real resources or reason to settle aside from the reason that it looks cool. The planet's core is essentially dead, meaning there's no magnetic field to protect the surface from deadly space radiation. As a result, all colonial buildings would have to be built underground and pressurised, just like a space habitat. Not too bad, right? Well, Mars' atmosphere is thin enough that, for human purposes, it's a vaccuum, but for attempts to land on the planet, it's the worst kind of atmosphere. Solar wind blows away any significant atmosphere but there's just enough there to be awkward - spacecraft landing on Mars will burn up in the atmosphere if they are built with no consideration for atmosphere but the atmosphere is also too thin to be used for direct aerobraking (such as landings on Earth or Titan) - requiring a joint mechanism for landing that incorporates rocket engines and parachutes, increasing complexity and cost for any mission landing on Mars. This is less space useful for "dry" mass (people, food, water, supplies, anything that isn't the spacecraft structure + fuel essentially).

What else does Mars have? Well, there's the one-third Earth gravity that could cause the potential for muscle atrophy and reduced bone density (among other potential health risks we can't estimate yet), particularly for those growing up in such an environment. People growing up on Mars and living their entire lives there would have to perform rigourous training regimens to ever be able to go back to Earth-normal gravity, as otherwise their bodies would weigh three times as much as they would be used to. What about the drastic temperature variation that Mars recieves every day-night cycle that would quickly wear down and destroy exposed components such as communications equipment, I mean that's pretty drastic. This is all before considering that Mars has no particular natural resources that make it suited for habitation. Where Ceres, Deimos, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa have multiple-Earth's-worth of water ice, Titan has ample hydrocarbon lakes and the biggest heat sink in the solar system or Mercury has sunlight, Mars has nothing. Want minerals? The asteroid belt has you covered by an order of magnitude more, while also being much cheaper and less costly in regards to Delta-V to obtain. Even Mars' moons Deimos and Phobos are incredibly useful staging areas, as their essentially null gravity makes landing and extraction of ice easy, but their gravel-esque composition makes them easy to hollow out for cheap radiation shielding. But even then, if you can protect against radiation on Mars, you can do it a million times cheaper in space, while also being able to control the gravity of your habitat because of based centrifugal force, meaning you can easily live in 1G gravity your entire life.

This is all before considering that terraforming is a project that would require at least a civilisation at level two on the Kardashev scale (complete control of all resources of a given star) - where we only rank at barely 0.7 (not even capable of fully harnessing our own planet). Good luck trying to melt a literal planet's worth of mass to restart the core for that magnetic field, and another planet's worth to increase the gravity to Earth's. Not to mention the question of where you're going to get all of that water from to fill the oceans and the air to breathe, because all that mass has to come from somewhere too.

It's probably just easier to build a shit ton of space stations in a Dyson Sphere orbiting the sun tbh fam. Planets are more trouble than they're worth.

>the virgin mars


>the chad o'neill cylinder

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kid.