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Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target
Raver32 writes "Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary face lift of Mars — a technique called "terraforming" — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on.""
These guys obviously haven't seen Total Recall.
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Jeepers, what is this foreign concept called "terraforming" [that's been discussed for at least 50 years] - I'll try looking for information on this new resource called the Inter-Net and report my findings as soon as possible.
Wish me luck.
RIPLEY: "How many colonists on LV426?"
VAN LEUWEN: "Sixty, maybe seventy families."
RIPLEY: "Families..."
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
If you see any egg shaped pods, run away.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
It is not technology, nor money, he said, the pacing ingredient is marshaled will.
Obviously this "Marshaled will" stuff must be the key ingredient that he's discovered. Just a pinch of that and planets magically become habitable.
So we are hesitant to raise the temperature of our own planet, but its the first thing we want to do to the new one!
Excellent priorities!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
call me nuts, but the idea of breating an atmosphere of water vapor leaves me breathless...
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"Scientist Calls Mars a Terrorism Target"
You are thinking way to small. We need to move Mars and Venus to the trailing Lagrange points in Earth's orbit. That will put them both in the water zone. Then, send a stream of comets from the Oort cloud to crash into Mars - just need to be careful not to miss. Venus just gets the good old fashioned algae/plants method of atmospheric reduction.
By the time we use up Earth, Mars will be ready for wholesale migration, and by the time Mars is used up, Venus will be done simmering. By that time we will be assembling new planets from scratch with asteroids, Mercury, Pluto, Sedna, and whatever other junk we can find.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Regardless, anyone who goes through the expense ... even a government, is going to want some assurance that the rest of humanity won't leech off their work.
Like those pesky Colonials. Give them some arable land really far away and suddenly they think they're a sovereign nation.
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I always wondered if terraforming could just be done my massive planting of hardy fauna.
And I often wonder why I can't just take any type of plant and stick in some styrofoam in the closet and wait for it to turn the closet into a lush arboretum. Yet everytime I try this, everything just ends up dead...
This guy's the limit!
Well, obviously you need to lower the temperature in your closet to about 63 degrees below zero and then pump out 99% of the air, simulating the ideal growth environment found on Mars.
After that, just stick some seeds in and watch them grow.
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I thought Mars needed Women?
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But I don't wanna go where the Bugaloos roam...
This guy's the limit!
Second, isn't the understanding still that Mars has insufficient gravity to preserve its atmosphere and so the solar wind strips the atoms and molecules right off the top, thus explaining the low pressure we see today? How do you counter that?
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"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
As a resident Martian.... I, for one, welcome our new Earth overlords!
While certain varieties of FLORA may be able to survive in a CO2 atmosphere at near vacuum, the FAUNA would find it a tad more difficult.
The near vacuum surface pressure combined with intense cold will kill cactus. Cactus lives in the desert. What you need to plant is something green that grows well in Antarctica. So go look at pictures of Antarctica, and pick your favorite plant from there.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Its perfect.
Every belch from a power plant or a factory will actually be doing some good.
No pollution controls required.
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Let's just toss Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart on a one-way ship, and let them terraform the planet. Sure, me may not actually want to live on a planet designed by two self-righteous, kazillionairres. But the only thing we risk to lose are a couple of crappy TV shows.
If they want to send Rosie O'Donnell, and Donald Trump, then we actually are starting to make a positive shift in Earth's environment.
Now, if we could only ship off those ladies from 'the View'...
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