this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I dont think it'll ever happen. Mars doesnt have a magnetosphere and as a result solar winds would erode away the added gasses and water vapor we manage to add into the system. Even if we were able to manage to get a breathable replenishing atmosphere I imagine the solar radiation would do bad things to us. We'd need like science fiction levels of shielding to keep it livable and we'd need to reach far off sci-fi levels of technology.
I imagine since there is an atmosphere that a pressurized dome city would be less fragile than say a structure on the moon since little holes and leaks wouldnt lead to dramatic explosive decompression. So colonization might be pretty doable but I think a green mars is unlikely.
Dome cities would be much more achievable, but still incredibly difficult unfortunately. It's cool to think it may be feasible in the next generation or two.
The atmosphere erosion is not really an issue. It take 100s of millions of year to erode the atmosphere so at humanity scale it's not really a problem.
It seems to me that Venus would be a better terraforming candidate than Mars. It will be a monumental amount of work and time with technology and materials that don't exist today thought. However, Venus feels like its in a better place physically and metaphorically. Huge problems to overcome before we could even start, but it seems like the right ingredients are there already which we can't say for Mars.
My dream is covered canyons with cliff dwellings. But I would settle for a dome+tunnel city.
Yeah, I figured Mars would be an underground territory since that seems to be where any nutrients might be anyway. Trying to form an atmosphere there suitable for life is likely impossible, but cave cities would be theoretically doable.
Although I don't know how I feel about terraforming other planets in general. Humans have destroyed this one so much that I feel like giving us another is akin to not teaching a child not to destroy their stuff. On the other hand, it would just be cool to see what humans have accomplished.