Life on Mars has captured our imagination
for many generations and we have wondered what life would be like there even before
H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds”. So, today we will tackle that topic. We spent most of the Spring in the Upward
Bound Series, looking at all the ways we might be able to get into space faster, cheaper,
and safer than now. Once you get up there though the question
becomes ‘what now?’. Now the usual answer is that you can colonize
planets, and of course that is our focus for this series. Yet, it often seems like discussions of this
spend most of their time talking about how to get there or some small colony of five
or six people or maybe even a hundred or so. Which isn’t much of colony honestly, or
they jump all the way to terraforming the planet with a population of millions or billions
already. I do want to spend some time on that phase
of things, but the middle ground often gets ignored. So we’ll discuss true terraforming but save
a more detailed look at that for next month’s episode on Colonizing Venus. Similarly, we often talk about the role of
robots in space travel and colonization, and it will likely play a big role in exploring
and colonizing, but we’ll save a more detailed look at that for Colonizing Titan, after Venus. Connecting this episode to those two and others
which may follow, we will look at concepts like trade for networking these places to
each other and Earth. A colony, besides just serving as more living
space for us, really needs to have some commodity it offers and others it needs. We always want any given colony to be as self-supporting
as possible but at the same time, it does help to have trade to both optimize production
and help keep everyone welded together. A common feature in discussions of extraterrestrial
colonies is them breaking off, so you get Earth versus Mars, and we’ll talk about
that notion a bit today and throughout the series. Now you don’t have to have seen any of the
episodes on this channel to watch this one, but it is a bit of a sequel to the Upward
Bound series and our previous discussions of Industrializing the Moon and Asteroid Mining
are essentially part of this series too, so if you haven’t seen them yet, you may wish
to watch them afterwards. In any event, we are not interested in how
to get to Mars, or what the ships that transport people there are like, so we are going to
jump to our colony already in progress. One or more of the systems discussed in the
Upward Bound series are in place and we’ve got some orbital habitats around Earth and
some serious resource extraction on the Moon. In orbit around the Moon we have Borman station,
named for the commander of the first manned ship to orbit the moon back in 1968. We’ll assume the main base down on the Moon
is Armstrong Base and the main hub close to Earth is Gagarin Station. We’ll be spending a fair amount of time
on Borman Station in the series as our jumping off point to the solar system, so let me add
that it is a rotating habitat simulating roughly Martian gravity. This was done for two reasons. First, it gives folks going back and forth
from Earth and the Moon a mid-point of gravity to get used to the gravity at their destination;
second, it lets us test the long term effects of Martian Gravity on people, as well as construction
and equipment tolerances for Mars. A ship going straight from Earth or Gagarin
Station to Mars might use a rotating section that began at Earth gravity and spun down
to Martian normal, during the trip, but we will say most transit to Mars goes between
Borman Station around the Moon to Mars. Leaving from the Moon to Mars has some advantages,
but the one we are mostly interested in is that you can bring fuel and raw materials
up from the Moon, and it’s lower gravity well, rather than Earth. Plus, starting a major base on the Moon let’s
you prove it is viable before you start sending people far further away from potential help. Now we are going to assume we are not sending
passenger ships to Mars at slow speeds, opting for more energy intensive approaches, but
for a large bulk cargo shipments around the solar system you do probably want to use these
most efficient approaches. These can take years however, so it’s great
for moving bulk material around but not people. When our ship leaves Borman station, it will
be carrying a few hundred new colonists on a trip of several weeks to Mars, which already
has 3 principal settlements on it of a few thousand people each. This ship is the first of many planned ones
now that a space elevator has been planned on Mars. This ship will be carrying it, and indeed
it is going to become the new space station hub for Mars. As we’ve discussed before, it’s easier
to build elevators on lower gravity planets, one on the Moon can be done with conventional
materials for instance, Mars is harder but a good deal easier than Earth. We’ll leave it academic if anyone has managed
to make an Elevator down to Earth and assume they have an Orbital Ring instead, but we
will assume someone has made one strong enough for Mars and that it got manufactured down
on the Moon. As mentioned, part of Borman Station’s purpose
was to test if people could handle Martian Gravity in the long term, and it got started
before the first Martian colonies did. We don’t know if 38% of normal gravity is
something people can tolerate in the long term but for today we will assume the answer
was yes, just with some supplementary medication and exercise. Should that turn out not to be true, I think
Mars would be unlikely to ever become a genuine colony of Earth, or rather, you’d probably
have a lot of rotating habitats around Mars that considered themselves Martian, but the
planet itself would basically be a place folks spent time down on working there at mining
facilities, not a home. Sort of a reverse of the concept of a classic
coastal city, everybody lives on the land and many go to work in the sea, often for
protracted periods, only here lots of people work on the planet but everyone lives in orbit. So for the last few decades since men first
stepped foot on Mars they’ve been testing this notion and concluded that indeed, this
gravity is sufficient and, unlike on the Moon, they don’t need to use mixed spin and normal
gravity for folks on the surface, something we’ve discussed before, or cyborg people
up. Healthy exercise and some supplements are
enough. They’ve also got an orbital ring complete
around Earth and a new production method for carbon nanotubes to allow for a decently strong
and cheap space elevator that can handle Martian gravity. With this in mind, the drive to colonize Mars
has grown, and it is also economical to go there for tourism, at least marginally economical. Most people couldn’t afford it and most
who can don’t want to, but at least many thousands of folks can and do want to visit,
so Borman station plans to start two-way trips there leaving monthly with a couple hundred
people each, many of whom will remain as colonists. When this ship arrives though it is going
to park in geostationary orbit, technically areostationary orbit since it is Mars not
Earth, but we will use geostationary in our discussion of any orbit around any planet
or moon that keeps hovering over the same spot. In our case, that will be 17,000 kilometers
above Mars, closer than geostationary is for Earth. And they will hovering just over Pavonis Mons,
a large mountain on Mars a good deal taller than Mount Everest and quite close to the
equator, in the Tharsis Region. Humanity’s first Martian base was near there
and is typically just called Pavonis. We will name the ship turning space station
Port Tharsis. The other two settlements are close by, a
ways northwest at Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, and the other
in Valles Marineris, to the southeast, one of the largest and longest canyon systems
in the solar system. Now by default you want to have a space elevator
right over the equator, and indeed we will place Port Tharsis right over the Martian
Equator, but as we discussed in the Space Elevators Episode, you can connect multiple
tethers to the same space station that connect elsewhere than the equator, balancing out
their forces, much like guy wires on a tower, so long as at least one of those connects
to the north and south hemispheres each. So while a single space elevator just south
of Pavonis is an option, we will instead be dropping three tethers down, then moving their
ends to connect to the top of Olympus Mons, to Pavonis, and to Marineris canyon settlements. So they have three, which provides plenty
of redundancy and gives us direct access to space and vice-versa. This is handy because while Pavonis is the
oldest and biggest settlement, a lot of folks at Olympus and Marineris prefer to keep their
settlements independent, and until recently Pavonis was the nominal planetary capital. There’s been quite a lot of arguing about
that recently. The original Mars colony was under the United
Nations and since it can often take an hour for a message to get to Earth and back with
a reply, the security council has a commander there who oversees things and is at Pavonis. With all the new colonists arriving folks
have been discussing something a little more permanent and democrat and independent. Back when it’s just a few hundred people
this was fairly laughable; they needed to phone home for everything and everyone was
a specially trained and vetted expert at something. This is changing. As we step out of the first landing car arriving
at Pavonis down that elevator, they are proudly celebrating their first café being opened,
and as we look around at our other fellow travelers, we are reminded of their own backgrounds. Having spent many weeks traveling with them,
we know them well enough and most are not experts. This is no longer a mission where the best
and brightest can be selected and screened for stability. One of our companions is the new magistrate
who is supposed to be replacing the former magistrate who dealt with minor misdemeanors
but there were very few of those and never any felonies, so he spent most of his time
helping people with legal documents dealing with issues back home. Divorces, trusts, wills, etc. In a colony of several thousand it is a rare
day at least someone hasn’t had a family member back on Earth die or had some sort
of issue involving a relative. Mars, the planet named for the God of War
however, has just had its first big fight, a barroom brawl off at Olympus over independence,
and instead of replacing the magistrate, who will be remaining in Pavonis, he is heading
off to be the magistrate at Olympus. The original colonists didn’t have a lot
of folks with legal or law enforcements backgrounds among them, there’s a lot of things they
need to have, and at the same time they have more than enough specialists from a lot of
fields. All of that is going to have to change as
they transition from being an outpost to a permanent colony. But what about Pavonis? What is this settlement like? As a new colonist looking around, we do see
domes and quite a few, but not as many as we’d expect for a town of a few thousand. But beyond those the view, while breathtaking,
is quite barren. Most of the settlement is in caves and lavatubes
in and around the giant mountain. Those domes are just for hydroponics. Going inside, it seems a bit dreary even,
and we find ourselves wondering what the appeal is to come to Mars. Oh sure, the first few thousand folks who
came here did so for the simple motivation of coming here. People go to Mount Everest or Antarctica just
to go there, but precious few decide to live there. In the short term that’s not too big a problem,
even if only 1% of 1% of Earth’s population wanted to come to Mars that would still be
a million people, far more than the current population, and of course once there they’ll
have children themselves and doubtless there will always be more people wanting to come
to. And yet, what is the appeal? What drove colonization on Earth? It’s very unlikely many folks would be sent
to Mars as prisoners, as with Australia, or to flee religious persecution as was the case
with many American colonies. There’s no luxury crops like sugar or tobacco
to grow in plantations on Mars. Mars has plenty of iron, but so does Earth
and the Moon. It is a breathtaking place to vacation, low
gravity with mountains that dwarf anything on Earth and vast canyon systems too, and
that’s something since some folks might visit, subsidizing the colony, and decide
to stay too. Its major export right now is curiosity, prestige,
and wonder, which keeps the money flowing from Earth, for now, but Earth doesn’t particularly
need anything Mars has. Folks sitting around the new Pavonis Café
discussing the future of Mars try to think of stuff, but they mostly can only see things
Mars can import or export to other planets, and right now the only other planet besides
Mars and Earth with any people on it is Venus which has a small scientific outpost floating
in its atmosphere. There are also a few experimental mining operations
in the asteroid belt and various robot probes poking around the planets and moons of the
outer solar system. Trade, they think, has to wait on the rest
of the solar system getting settled, and they worry there might be a catch-22 in there,
since the motivation to settle all the places seems to revolve around other places already
being settled too. Of course they talk about terraforming Mars
one day too, not just living inside mountains and lava tubes and domes, and some say that
it isn’t even something far ahead in time, but never, that there is no advantage or purpose
to trying to give Mars its own atmosphere and oceans. That they should keep on just making new domes
with air inside them and basically turn the giant mountain they live in into one big arcology,
essentially a giant mountain hollowed out into a skyscraper. The folks over at Marineris feel a bit differently
though, and that’s where we are bound. We could, of course, take the elevator back
up to Port Tharsis and back down to Marineris, but instead we will be taking a ground vehicle. The lack of any serious atmosphere makes flight
on Mars very difficult, but it also means high-speed rail is cheaper since there’s
not much air drag to fight. That’s going to be a while because while
it would be very handy, building a few thousand kilometers of track between Olympus, Pavonis,
and Marineris won’t be easy. In some ways it is easier than on Earth, low
gravity makes bridges over chasms cheaper, and you can get away with much sharper inclines
up and down craters and hills, but you’ve only got a population of thousands, not millions,
and you have to use a lot larger percentage of your population for just basic food and
life support here too. Oxygen is plentiful enough, but it all has
to be liberated from water or baked out of rock. Nitrogen for plants is hard to find, and every
acre or hectare of crops you want to grow needs a dome over it first, or artificial
lighting if done underground in a lavatube or cave. You can’t plant your crops in raw Martian
dirt either, it has to be done hydroponically or in soil made by taking that dirt and processing
it in huge vats full of microbes and algae first. The notion of transforming Mars into an Earth-like
planet is daunting to say the least. It’s not worth doing, says the driver, going
on about how at Marineris they’ve decided the future is in robust para-terraforming. That’s where you just slowly cover an entire
planet over in domes, to keep the air in and the local soil out. Glass above, concrete below, and you just
add dirt you’ve made into them. They plan to eventually dome over the entire
Valles Marineris cavern system. The drive there is slow going, part of why
they want that rail system, because there’s no gas station on Mars and no air for them
to use to burn that gas anyway. Everything is electric and battery operated. They don’t really have the manpower for
building rail or power lines yet and Earth said no to shipping those in. What they’re really hoping for back at Pavonis
though is one of those new fusion reactors from back on Earth. They’re big, heavy, and getting one to Mars
would be a problem; but once here, they don’t need above ground domes anymore. They could do all their growing in vast lavatubes
and caverns that wouldn’t need sunlight then. Valles Marineris is stunning in scope. It’s not that it is 4000 kilometers long,
it’s that it is 7 kilometers deep and at its widest, over 200 kilometers. It’s almost incomprehensible, even in low
gravity, to imagine a single bridge spanning that, let alone a dome. Fortunately our real destination is Noctis
Labyrinthus, a series of maze-like smaller chasms on the western edge of Valles Marineris
closest to Pavonis Mons. It begins just a few hundred kilometers southeast
of Pavonis and its many smaller, narrower chasms are filled with an icy fog. This pilot project for terraforming has selected
one of the narrower, shorter, and shallower canyons, and they are busy walling up the
end so they can dome the whole thing over and pump in water from the ice in the area
to make the first lake on Mars. It’s stunning to take in the scope of this
dome, just a few kilometers long and wide, and you are already wondering about cracks
or meteor strikes on it and how they plan to deal with them, let alone how they plan
to build titanic ones across the wider parts of the main Valles Marineris chasms. As we settle in we start seeing four distinct
viewpoints among the colonists. Here in Marineris, the interest is all in
domes: endless domes to eventually cover the whole planet. And the focus is on how to manufacture them
and repair them and harden them against cracks and meteor strikes. Grids of radar and lasers to shoot down incoming
meteors, possibly tall curtain walls around the edges to help minimize erosion damage
to the domes from dust storms. Individual smaller domes connected with airlocks
or great big ones with graphene supports and liquid patches that could be rapidly sprayed
on any crack or hole. They envision not so much a Green Mars as
a Greenhouse Mars: a ‘worldhouse’ as it is sometimes called. They point out that it is far easier to get
all the nitrogen and oxygen they need for atmosphere, when it is only maybe a hundred
meters high, not kilometers. If you want to have normal air pressure just
from gravity alone, with no ceiling or walls, you need to have a lot of air piled on top
of air. On Earth, every square inch of surface has
14 pounds of air over it, stretching many miles, or 10,000 kilograms per square meter. On Mars, because of the lower gravity, you
actually need more air per unit of area, to have normal air pressure. That means your atmosphere has to go up higher. On Earth, at the top of Mount Everest, it’s
fairly hard to breathe as the air has thinned out a lot by that height, and the pressure
dropped. If we could transport Olympus Mons back to
Earth, at 22 kilometers in height, the air density wouldn’t even be a tenth of what
we are used to. Conveniently on Mars, since the atmosphere
would have to stretch up higher, you might still be able to breath all the way at the
peak of Olympus Mons, and still be able to down at the bottom of those chasms, where
pressure would keep rising, though odds are they’d all be full of water anyway. That’s what the folks at Olympus Mons want,
the second philosophical camp for Mars. They want to terraform the whole planet, so
you can walk around anywhere without a spacesuit around you or a glass dome above you. We’re curious about them, though the folks
at Marineris say they’re all blue sky dreamers and more than a bit batty, but we decide to
visit them anyway. To do so we first have to go back to Pavonis,
and meet with folks from the other two camps. One of them is simply the pessimism camp. They think this whole idea was a mistake and
they shouldn’t have come here at all. They are going home when the next colony ship
arrives, there’s always plenty of space on those for a return trip, and they’re
irritated the most recent ship became Port Tharsis instead. They’re basically loitering around Pavonis
sowing pessimism. They’re still pro-space expansion, they
did come here in the first place after all, but they’re thinking planets and moons besides
Earth are for robots to live on, and people should stick to arcologies on Earth or perhaps
rotating habitats in orbit. That’s our fourth camp too basically. They like the idea of having settlements down
here on Mars but they think, now that there’s easy access back to orbit with the elevators
up to Port Tharsis, that they can have just a few settlements planetside but do most of
their living up in orbital habitats, like all the ones being built around Earth these
days, and settlements here should be mostly about comfort for the folks who need to be
down here overseeing mining. Yes robots would be handy but they still need
a lot of oversight and a lot of times it’s just easier to use a person. But they want nice, contained, truly Earth-like
habitats and they figure all their other industry and agriculture can be done on those in orbit. There’s no need to dome over the whole planet,
let alone terraform it. Just a few places here and there for mineral
extraction, ice mining, and for the tourists to visit of course. Indeed, better to leave the planet mostly
as-is. They figure no tourist is going to want to
visit domes; they want to see the natural terrain. They’re all for a few of these projects,
doming over a few chasms, having a few lavatube habitats underground or in the mountain caverns,
but they’d rather see Martian settlement mostly happen in orbit. They are somewhat open to the notion of terraforming
Mars centuries down the road, but the way they see it, they first need to get their
industries built up and have exports. This way, they can eventually pay for the
huge amounts of nitrogen, and probably water too, they’d need to bring in from other
planets or comets. So we set out on the much longer trek to Olympus
Mons, and the last stretch is rather grueling because they have set themselves up all over
the mountain including the peak, and we do want to see Mars from the peak of the tallest
mountain in the solar system. It is no surprise that there is a bar up there
and it is the one the fight broke out at earlier when we first arrived. We run into our friend, the magistrate there,
and share a drink. He informs us that this is not the home of
the second philosophical camp, the folks that want to terraform Mars completely, but rather
three camps who argue with each other a lot. One group does want to terraform Mars, while
the other group wants to bioform people and plants on Mars. And indeed, that’s split into two subgroups
as well. One wants to set up an ecology where everything
can live on native Mars dirt and not as thick an atmosphere, less nitrogen than Earth too,
but thicker than now. Plants genetically engineered to use the native
soil. People engineered to live on thinner air and
better adapted to the local gravity. The other group wants to go completely native:
organisms tailored from the ground up to live on Mars as-is; people cyborged up to walk
around without spacesuits, who don’t need to breathe and are safe from radiation concerns
too. Why, they say, should we put all the effort
into making this planet livable to humans and earth life, or even meet halfway in the
middle, if we can just make new life that can live here? The magistrate seems to have been converted. There’s so many problems with terraforming
he says. The planet has virtually no air but when the
duststorms come they are like a nuclear winter, blackening the sky for days or even weeks
at a time, so solar power can be unreliable and plants need supplemental lighting. If you get oceans and moisture in there, that
would stop; but suddenly exposing the planet to lots of water is likely to result in huge
flash floods and tsunamis of mud, with no plants and roots to hold them down. It will never have enough gravity to be like
Earth, even if we dropped every asteroid in the belt and every moon around Jupiter on
Mars, we still wouldn’t increase the gravity that much, and it would be kind of wasteful. But even ignoring the gravity, we’d need
to bring in air from elsewhere. Sure there’s enough oxygen, oxygen is plentiful
pretty much everywhere in the solar system. But not nitrogen. The only abundant supplies for that besides
Earth are Venus, Titan, and of course the Sun itself. But good luck lifting that nitrogen off of
a star. He points out that it isn’t like moving
a few colonists; we’re talking about moving atmospheres and those are pretty heavy. Earth’s atmosphere is 5 billion megatons,
mostly nitrogen, and when we think of big ships, even huge oil tankers, a single megaton
is about as much cargo as they could carry. If one arrived carrying a megaton of nitrogen
every day, it would take 100 million years to bring in enough nitrogen, and without a
magnetosphere on Mars, it would probably evaporate away before we finished. No one wants to wait a hundred million years,
so that means you’ve got megaton tanker ships arriving not every day but at least
thousands of times a day, or ships far larger. And until near the end, there’s not much
use to that existing atmosphere, part way through you can start adding water and possibly
some tailored plants to get some basic ecological cycles going. During that whole time, inhabiting the planet
still means living inside domes or caverns and you’d have to worry about those being
destroyed in the geological chaos of a planet gaining oceans and atmosphere. To keep that atmosphere there, we’ll also
need to ring the planet in satellites, sucking in solar power to run electromagnets and create
an artificial magnetosphere. Mars is cold and far from the sun too, so
you probably need to be considering orbital mirrors to bring in some more light. Those are both fairly hard tasks, though both
are dwarfed by the task of bringing in all that nitrogen and probably water too. This is not a terraforming episode, we did
one of those before and will look at such concepts again in the next episode on Venus,
but it is always good to remember that terraforming a planet fundamentally alters it. It’s not the existing one just turning blue
and green, all but the biggest landmarks are going to cease to exist as sea rises and land
slides under torrential storms. No, this episode is about colonizing Mars
and we see a handful of paths for doing that. There’s the terraforming route, make the
place as much like Earth as you can, and as we discussed in that terraforming episode
you have tons of options depending on how far you are willing to go, up to and include
adding mass to a planet or changing its day length or even moving the thing to be closer
or further from a star. If you’ve got the will to do it, and the
resources, you can terraform Mars to whatever degree you see fit. But it requires orders of magnitude more effort
to do that than some of our other options, it’s less finding a cave to live in then
building an entire mountain on a plain so you can drill a cave into it. Possible but probably not ideal. Bioforming is an option, but again it comes
down to how far you are willing to go, just in a different direction. You might be able to limit yourself to fairly
minimal tweaks to plants, animals, and people, and meet halfway in-between, terraforming
part way too, but once you open the door to that path, there is the question as to why
not walk down it further? And how far is too far? And since the path for meeting in the middle
still takes many centuries at least, isn’t that likely to end up as a sliding standard
as people move the milestones on what is acceptable? If you are modifying people to the point that
they can breathe easily in very thin air, why not in no air? And why not just go the full cyborg route
and not need food or air? In that context why do you even need planets,
except maybe for raw materials, and maybe why even a body at all, in favor of a digital
existence in a virtual landscape of your choosing, on any planet including surreal landscapes
which are not physically possible? And that is an option too. So is the option of making Martian mean folks
who live around Mars, and some who just go down to work the mines or visit the place. The slow disassembly of the planet to construct
rotating habitats, built as needed. I don’t know which is best, I guess that
will be for the Martians themselves to decide down the road. If I had to guess though I would wager on
a little of all of the above. There’s a mistake in thinking for instance
that you actually have to terraform an entire planet or not at all. As an example, the mountains, Pavonis and
Olympus Mons, sit in the middle of volcanic caldera, and when you think of things like
caldera or craters you often think of a bit of bowl with a rim around it. There’s nothing stopping you from extending
that straight up, like the Great Wall of China encircling a place only 10 or 20 kilometers
high. That sounds like an insane project, but it
really is no different then doming over such an area or manufacturing a rotating habitat. You could then fill just that area with air
and water, some would leak out, but just to the rest of the planet, so you could build
one that was decently small to begin with, fill it with air and water, and just keep
adding more to it, localized terraforming that also slowly terraforms other areas if
you want. A similar concept is building up your atmosphere
by doming over areas and just filling them with new air and not worrying about what gets
lost to leakage. You don’t necessarily need a full Earth
Atmosphere on the planet either. People can survive for short periods in much
lower pressure than Earth’s, and some organisms might do just fine in it even without modification,
and it doesn’t take too much air to give you a shield against most meteors. People might get used to wearing masks when
they go all the way outside, which might not be too common if they just need to repair
leaks. Indeed since those various crack and spots
near the leaks will be in between the local native environment and the artificial one,
it’s not a bad place to experiment with limited bioforming, the methods where you
meet halfway in the middle. Heck, there is even a chance we might find
some simple life on Mars, unlikely but we can’t rule it out yet. That of course raises the issue of whether
or not it is okay to colonize a planet that already has life on it, and if so, do simple
microbes count? But also, if we did find life there, it might
be very valuable. Odds are there are a lot more marginal planets
like Mars out there in the galaxy than Earth, and being able to use those, or some modified
version of them, to help in early terraforming might make them very valuable indeed. I don’t know what the future of Mars holds,
but if I had to guess, if we checked back on our colony in the year 3000, I would expect
a little of everything. Yes some Great Walls of Mars encircling some
place that was genuinely terraformed. Yes giant domes over chasms, with protection
from meteors and self-sealing capabilities. Yes smaller domes, yes big underground cities
or hollow mountains artificially lit by fusion power. Yes some people who have modified themselves
to live in the natural Martian environment, or to meet it halfway in between. And yes, a swarm of rotating habitats above,
where people live and grow food and manufacture materials for export and handle imports of
giant ships carrying water and air. Each one generating a magnetic field for its
own protection and to act in concert as a shield for the planet below. Indeed each with its own defense grid to shoot
down meteors that might hit them or the planet, and orbital mirrors that bring in more light. They might eventually have to choose to terraform
all the way or not, to bioform or not, or even to disassemble the planet for materials
or not. But for a very long time they could choose
not to occupy somewhere in the middle but the whole spectrum of options, if and until
they decide which is best. And as I often say when it comes to colonies,
it’s not just that we nowadays don’t know for sure which options are best, what with
having never done it, but it isn’t our decision anyway, it’s for the folks who live there
to decide, and they have centuries to make that decision and they can change it down
the road. They may be so removed from us by then that
they don’t want to be much like Earth. We’ll discuss making planets more Earth-like
by terraforming more in our episode on Colonizing Venus next month, but next week we will be
returning to Earth and following up on the Rare Earth Hypothesis notions that Earth-like
planets are incredibly rare by asking if intelligence, especially human level intelligence, might
be quite uncommon to develop even on Earth-like planets, in our close out episode of the Fermi
Paradox Great Filters series, Rare Intelligence. For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the like
button, share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
This is the only channel on YouTube I feel obliged to support and Patreon due to his quality in selecting subjects and eye-opening videos.
Way offtopic, but what Accent is that? Sounds like some strange Hybrid.
Aaaaaaand I want to play stellaris again. Thanks a lot OP
I stopped once he talked about only needing good exercise and supplements to live healthy in mars gravity. Radiation protection is more important than how we get there and determines everything we build to house humans long term. This is true on Mars, the moon, space station, whatever.
Mars has no magnetic field and its atmosphere is way too thin for any rad protection. If we wanted to live on Mars any time soon it will most likely be underground or at the very least heavily shielded buildings. Also because of the thin atmosphere you are more susceptible to meteorites making it to the surface. One good shower could shotgun a new colony right out of existence.
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One thing I don't understand: if we go for colonization, current efforts to preserve the planet from contamination will be moot, especially if we go for a self sustainable colony and we need some form of agriculture on site. we could then jump-start the effort seeding bacteria to break down the soil and maybe enrich the atmosphere.
How would we adapt to Mars' gravity since it's only like a third of Earth's?