Counter-counterargument: As Kurzgesagt has told us, mars would overall be terrible. Use Venus instead, they told it is better. Also 3. mars is cool so fck logic
@@libraryofgurkistan counter-counter-counterargument 1 mars is manly 2 venus is girly 3 counter argument to my own counter-counter-counterargument: nevermind i read all tomorrows
the 2nd argument is a bit illogical; the arrival of colonists on mars sorts of presupposes access to long term water resources. flooding mars and dealing with angry NIMBYs is a non consequence
You can theoretically cover gas giants with a shell and then terraform the shell. You end up with an Earth-like planet but with a way bigger surface area.
@@gregoryturk1275 In Jupiter's case you just have to make the shell bigger and the gravity will be weaker because you'll be further away from Jupiter's core.
I'd say that while space habitats may be better, there is such a thing as "para terraforming" where you just wall off parts of the planet from everything else, and only terraform that particular area. For example with Mars, that'd be sealing the top and entrances to valles marinaris and making the bottom of it earth-like. It May be a bit more difficult than your run of the mil space habitat, but if we Really want to walk on another planet without a space suit, this would still be a Lot easier than doing it to a whole planet.
I don’t think this is mutually exclusive with wider planetary-scale terraforming either. So long as one doesn’t interfere with the other terraforming can be conducted on the outside and people can still live comfortably in earth like conditions underground until the time is right to start settling the surface.
@@KateeAngel we want to expand into space, earth will inevitably die out (even if it takes a very long time), and space habitats could hold more people than earth ever can
Eventually, space habitats become artificial planets (not anytime soon, but on a timescale of millennia it's a likely possibility in some cases). At that point, space habitats are a million times cooler than a simple planet.
Or perhaps cybernetics is the ticket to space settlement. Get rid of our biological baggage and voila, we can survive and even thrive beyond Earth, and as a convenient bonus, we'd become immortal too!
There’s also Para terraforming and bio forming that are both much easier. In Para terraforming you basically dome over a section of the planet and then terraform that section. With Bio forming you genetically engineer yourself and a bunch of plants and animals to be able to live on the surface naturally. I’d like to hear your thoughts on these ideas.
Bio forming sounds great until you realize that you’d be trapped living in a dome or other habitat and you’d look outside to see a dead uninhabitable wasteland for your entire life, I’d rather be able to breathe the fresh air of the atmosphere and swim in the oceans of the planet I live on
@@dillonblair6491 if you’d be fine with being confined to living in a dome on a dead rock your whole life that’s fine, but I personally like to be able to go outside without specialized equipment
@@downwindfish1 In a para-terraformed domed city, nobody is gonna be like "oh God I can't walk around in the Martian desert" It's like saying we shouldn't have space ships because people will look out the window and want to go outside 🙄
There are easier options so in the "near" future I think you're right. But given the fact, terraforming is doable we eventually will just do it by the same logic we are drying swamps to build cities on when there so many other places where a city could be built with less effort. Why are people living in venice? The city literally sinks into the water etc etc. You get the idea.
Just because we say something is "doable" in theory doesn't mean it is in practice. Any political stability or economic crash that happens along the way will turn it into a gaudy failed megaproject like those fake islands in Dubai. There are a million potential points of failure. More importantly: it's not necessary! Space is space. People should get over that and accept that it's never gonna be "just like Earth." You like Earth? Stay here.
@@DinoCism Your argument of just staying on Earth and be content here really is arrogant in my opinion, the same political instability that makes Earth megaprojects failures are also the same kind of shit that makes people want to leave it. Earth is a big planet and all, but it isn't immune to bugs, far from it. Space habitats, Terraformed Planets, and the sort acts like backups in-case Earth becomes uninhabitable (and no, this isn't about climate change, by the time we can have permanent populations outside of Earth, we either already found solutions to survive under it or we have already solved the issue long before we establish said permanent populations) or if it turns into 1984.
Venice is a bad example. A swampy lagoon was the best and easiest location for them because it allowed them to engage in vast amounts of trade/shipping without having to drastically alter the landscape. The entire city is basically a port. As for why they stay now, it's because its their home.
Very interesting how you brought up the point of colonists on Mars being opposed to the terraforming due to flooding, landscape changes, culture, etc. This is almost exactly what occurs with the Martian colony/nation in The Expanse. The people eventually drop the terraforming efforts that began with the first colony after their focus shifts to their immediate existence and the culture of Mars. Very valid concerns and I'd agree that space habitats are more viable in Humanity's expansion into our solar system. The value of Mars being fully terraformed / effort required to do so only makes sense once we are established in our solar system with the infrastructure in place.
Even tho i agree that space habitats are more practical I dont feel like describing space habitats as being paradises is accurate for me they just hit that weird uncanny valley but instead of it being a humanoid that activates it, Its the environment. I just imagine them feeling fake. Like yes, the plants, animals, and soil I'd assume are real, but everything else would just be fake. Like the best way i can describe a space habitat looking is like limbo from ultrakill. The area in the game tries to capture the feeling of earth but at the same time fails. I can't put my finger on exactly why the idea just sounds a bit horrifying and just weird to me. It probably has to do with the fact that the sky would be highly obstructed by the other side of the habitat. Or the fact everything would be man made unlike a planet where nature made it. Also, to whoever readed this, im sorry for this essay I wrote. I just wanted to get my thoughts out somewhere. I also wanted to see if anyone can see where im coming from. Anyways, good job on the video.
Yeah, I have no idea why space habitats are advocated as a good solution. At *best* it seems like it would be like living on a cruise ship, but more likely it would feel prison-like and bleak. Additionally, they seem profoundly fragile. A terrorist with a single grenade or a pea-sized meteorite or an out of control spacecraft could completely destroy the entire habitat with a single stroke.
@duncanbeggs4088 that’s true with modern day space stations, but we’re not talking about those I’m talking about space habitats that are possible with modern day materials that would have the total living space of a small *country* and you can put engines on them to avoid large debris strikes, and you can put shielding on them to avoid small strikes. Modern day space stations get hit by micro meteors all the time and are fine the problems you mentioned won’t be problems with the habitats im talking about, or have already been solved with modern stations I’m well aware of everything you said, and i wouldn’t be recommending space habitats instead of planets if there weren’t very good solutions for all of the problems I recommend isaac arthur who goes way more in depth about this stuff
Supporting argument: Kurzgesagt made a video providing evidence that 1. Mars is a bad place to live 2. Venus is better and easier to terraform because it's more similar to Earth than Mars
@@SonOfTheChinChin Firstly that would still take several lifetimes and secondly we wouldn't be able to do anything now because it's frozen with several oceans worth of CO2 that we would have to find a way to still remove in large quantities
What about the Venusian day, which is longer than a year? I've never heard of a way of changing that. Meanwhile, Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than Earth's.
@Luna-ux9by you don’t need to change it to terraform venus you need to put a lot of shades in orbit to cool it down, when you’re done just repurpose those shades to block and reflect light across venus on a 24 hour cycle and you have a day length
One being the naturally depressing nature of living in a hollowed rock and looking out to see nothing but the cold void of space, same thing with colonists living underground or in habitats on Mars, it would be depressing
@@Xenotaris most habitats would have artificial lighting to simulate day-night cycles? creating a sun-like light and powering it will be challenging, but it's doable.
While your not wrong, i think their is a few flaws with asteroid housing or space stations that could make terraforming worth it. Firstly both the asteroid and space station would be incredibly cramped with tight corridors and artificial lighting, with minimal plant and animal life if any. Which while livable will take a massive psychological toll on humans living there, as shown by just a few years of the pandemic. Secondly asteroids and space stations have a dagree of cosmic horror being adrift in space on a object that has a decent chance of crashing into something else along with simply just being surrounded by emptiness for millions of miles with no way to leave. Unlike an island you cant even swim , you are just stuck there. Theirdly the asteroids and space stations will require eletronics and technology to function, from food to life support, tbeir is no if ands or buts about that. Which means one catastrophic failure and everyone there is suddenly dead. And as i touched on earlier they are a closed system that will likely require outside supplies from shipments to survive long term. If something goes wrong in the supply chain due to politics, an act of terror or rebellion to just general incompetentce and human or technological error that could cause problems, its completely possible for a supplier to withhold supplies for one reason or another. And if something does go wrong or somebody sinply wants to go somewhere else, they will need a ship, what if they run out of ships or the ships on board have restricted access to all sorts of other stuff. Point being alot can go wrong, its not a perfect solution Compared to terraforming which offers long term security at the cost of time and recources. Eventually people will be able to walk outside on the red planet and see animals running around, be able to breath without a suit and see feilds of plants. If something goes wrong with a habitat system of housing they could still comfortably live, along with being able to grow food into the soil and raise animals to eat, something way harder to do on a space station. A terraformed mars will offer long term security and psychological comfort. Max efficiency is not everything, peoples mental health matters alot and it will deteriorate being on a cramped space station or an asteroid. You could stuff hundreds of people into boxes with a bed and gruel, they will technically survive but i think a good chunk of them will go insane in the process.
Solutions: just make the habitat so big it can support its own ecosystem (such as an O’Neill cylinder); build propulsion engines that let you pilot the colony around and avoid asteroids or weapons to destroy them
This post says it very well, total efficiency is actually kinda counterproductive to space colonization. Sure, you could stuff everyone into pods and force them to eat algae paste mixed with synthetic proteins, but that would definitely impact the mental health of those subjected to those living conditions in the long run.
you wouldn’t be able to notice the distance tbh (except for the fact that you’d see the ceiling, but you can stop that by putting a wall that looks like a sky in the way)
We don't need to do it but we should still do it. Energy requirements are enormous sure, but I don't think that's an really an issue. With enough technology I don't think energy requirements are a barrier for us. Depending on how great automation gets the possibilities really open up. Space habitats are great sure but we can absolutely do both, and I think eventually we will do both. People often ask things like "what's the point of a dyson sphere, there's no way humanity needs that much energy." Well, here's an example of a perfect use for that amount of spare energy. The argument that it takes a long time to finish I find interesting because that hasn't really stopped humanity from finishing projects before. We've already built things that took centuries to finish. As for the day cycle argument, I could be wrong but I don't believe the planet's rotation matters that much when we can brute force any day/night cycle we want on any planet using cheap mirrors and shades to block or let in any amount or even specific frequencies of light whenever we want. Personally, I think it makes perfect sense to terraform Venus because of its gravity and because any potential cloud cities that are already on it could either land and be turned into regular cities, converted into orbital space stations, or kept in the air with the aid of some future technology. As for Mars, I agree with you that there are valid reasons for keeping it Mars-like, at least for a while. Para terraforming Mars I do think makes sense. Para terraforming as in making specific areas on Mars habitable, but not the planet itself, like for instance domed craters, pressurized lava tubes, and underground cities.
Or just do the cloud cities and fuck trying to change anything while wasting the solar system's resources. If people want to live in space they need to stop being little bitches about it and accept that maybe *they* will have to be the thing that changes, rather than the entire environment around them. Terraforming as a concept is just a potential resource pit that could wreck space colonization before it even starts in earnest. It's a terrible idea on every level.
Small problem with the space habitats sadly. The artificial gravity that would be produced by spinning would very likely result in the shift of all your organs to one side of your body after prolonged use. Sadly we just don't have a good solution for artificial gravity at this moment. A better idea would probably be single cities on mars encased in domes or other protective material to create a localized earth environment. Good video though, keep it up!
that problem becomes less noticeable the bigger you make your habitats, and there are present day materials strong enough to make something big enough to mitigate it (not entirely but enough to make it a smaller problem)
That's assuming that you're always facing the same direction the whole time you're in the habitat - why would people be doing that? Just requiring that crew switch the orientation they lie in bed every 'night' would easily prevent this issue.
@@SirBenjiful well... a huge deal of humans spend the majority of their day sitting at their desk looking at their computer, effectively facing the same direction the whole time
@@matroqueta6825 Just have mirrored office layouts and mandate that people take turns on working on each side of the room. These "problems" are so easily solved it's laughable.
Counter argument: "It's much easier to fix Earth than to Terraform another planet" Yeah. It is. But terraforming isn't an "anwser" to global warming. It's just another project that can be, and will be done by humans. By the time we'll even start planning how to terraform a planet, and going through with the plans, the amount of energy we would posess would be far greater than the one we have now. (This can be done in multiple ways, harnessing all of earth's natural renewable energy, making a dyson swarm, ect.) So by then, it would be easier. No one is saying "Oh man, global warming sure is a tough problem to solve! Lets terraform and colonize mars!" That's just stupid. We'll terraform other planets either way once humanity is more advanced, just because we can't. The pyramids of giza were a huge feat for people back then aswell, and that spanned multiple generations to complete. Who says we can't do the same but on a bigger scale? The question of terraforming isn't answered with a "never" but a "not now" instead. "There would be countries that are against terraforming." WHO in their right mind would be against that? Do you want to: A. Live in a hellish, radioactive desert for the rest of your life? Or B. Start a project to make the place/planet you call home an actual habitable place where you don't need suits, can breathe without one, and are not in constant exposure to solar radiation? Now onto the space habitat VS terraformed mars: Space habitats are indeed great and I do agree with you. But you do not have to choose between the two. As I said, in order to heat up mars, future humans may think of another solution with the vast amounts of energy at their disposal. Like.. for example, not bombing the planet with asteroids, but instead, moving the entire planet closer inside the habitable zone, with giant "boosters" or whatever they might come up with. This is what I mean when I say that if terraforming is theoretically possible with our current technology, it would be even more possible generations later.
I think the case could be made for terraforming in order to replicate earth-like ecosystems for organisms that aren’t human, i.e. other animals and plants. At least on a very long timeline, of course not as an initial project as soon as we set foot on another planet. I think that we have the responsibility to ensure the long term survival of all life on earth, not just our own species.
thing is you can do that with space habitats too there’s nothing stopping you from building millions of nature preserves for every possible type of life on earth
1:18 our best option is mass production of sulfur hexaflouride which is a greenhouse gas 25,000 more powerful than co2. The Martian atmosphere is 2.5 trillion tons so we would need 100 million tons of sulfite hexaflouride to equal the whole atmosphere but it probably would need more.
3:10 terraformation would obviously be warned about and would be planned from the very day we set foot there. A noah's ark level flooding would not happen to any cities.
that’s not what i’m saying of course terraforming would be planned but eventually, the area where your city is will be flooded it’ll be slow but it will happen, and you’ll be burying centuries of history you can’t really move the area where humans first landed on mars for example or a memorial to some famous person who died there or a famous landmark
@@Kyplanet893 and i said that the preparation for it would include not making cities directly in areas where they would be flooded at all. If earth had no water and you were actively trying to flood it back up again to today's levels, you would probably not want to or try to build cities in the mariana trench or in the bottom of the oceans.
We should definitely terraform mars, just not a lot. Mars isn't a very good for humans, and I agree space habitats are better. But one thing is for sure, to build them is gonna take a lot of manpower and time. And people need to be fed. Terraforming mars a little and bioengineering some microbes, lichen and plants, turning stone and sand to soil and soil to gardens, we could begin supplying a lot of food which would be cheaper to send to space. We only need relatively few farmers who can live in small insulated habitats. Remote control most of the time and suit up every now and then when things need to be fixed. Space is a premium if you make it yourself, and food just take so much space. Especially since we want variety, unless you wanna see how long a colony of space settlers can avoid stabbing each other over only being served algae mush 3 times a day all year. That said, don't think it would be worth terraforming it enough to support meat production, but a few plants should be doable. At least until we can print O'Neil cylinders by the dozen a week.
You're just completely missing the biggest, most obvious reason to terraform Mars (and/or any other planet): *Politics*. The race to put a satellite in space, the race to put a man in space, the race to put a man on the moon--these were mainly driven by politics, not by the practicality of doing them. Tell me that either the US and USSR still would have spent money on the space race the way they did without the political pressure of not wanting to let a major rival do it first. And I feel the need to bring this up because we don't live in a world where people get together, discuss ideas, and pick the best idea. We live in a world where a select few people can make decisions for entire countries based on personal feelings, or even a well-placed bribe. Politics is more important than practicality.
i thought about this but terraforming takes centuries no government system survives that long, there could be dozens if not hundreds of ideology changes during the terraforming that’ll slow it or make it faster, or pause it entirely or there could be other countries on mars who don’t want to terraform, or terrorist groups who *really* don’t want a terraformed mars politics works against terraforming. The space race was a short-term goal where the US and USSR were just trying to beat the other. Terraforming is a very different thing
Wouldn't it be easier to ditch our biological baggage and become cyborgs? Then it would be much easier to reside beyond Earth. Going at least somewhat cybernetic would greatly reduce our need for life support systems on other worlds and in outer space itself.
>literal coolest thing ever >UMM ACTUALLY THIS IS A LE BAD IDEA AND THIS IS WHY SCIENCE SAYS THAT EXPERTS AGREE THAT 9/10 PROFESSIONALS IN THE DIELD SAY
2:13 Terraforming Mars before we fix Earth is a bad idea. But never terrarorming Mars at all? You lost the plot dude. The whole point is a back up home for humanity were an asteroid, or gamma ray burst, etc. to destroy Earth. Plus we'll have to do it in a billion years from now anyways when the Sun swallows Earth. And you can't make the argument, "We won't be here in a billion years" because I can just say, "We won't be here in 100-300 years" for Climate Change. It's the same logic. So if you care so much about humanity's future then it's logically consistent to both be pro fixing Climate Change AND terraforming Mars because both of these share the same motivations. 3:37 You're just assuming people will colonize the lowest elevations of Mars before Mars gets its oceans? Wouldn't space agencies like NASA have the foresight not to build there? I hear they're pretty smart. Additionally I highly doubt we'll have cities on Mars before it gets it's oceans because it'll probably take Mars about the same amount of time to develop a proper atmosphere as a hydrosphere. So this should be a non-issue. But even if it was, bro WHO CARES? Flood them cities. Fuck em. The greater good outweighs history. History is just nostalgia. We'll have technology like video to remember any old Martians by. 6:05 An asteroid's gravity will be significantly less than Mars' gravity or a rocky planet's gravity. This will lead to struggles to maintain muscle and bone mass. While losing muscle and bone mass will also be a problem on Mars, it will be even worse in your space habitats hollowed out in asteroids. Plus where are these citizens going to get their water and resources from? Having a terraformed planet you live on doesn't have problems like, "Where will my water or resources come from?" Don't get me wrong bro. I hate Elon Musk just as much as the next guy but a broken clock is right twice a day. Just because Elon said it doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It's not guilty by association. People are not their ideas. And we should be terraforming planets for future humans for the same reason we should be trying to fix our climate for future humans. Now I agree with you that fixing Earth's climate takes priority. But to give up on terra forming all together? Bro come on. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water here. We absolutely need to be terraforming planets in the future. For humanity, for science, for art. And think about it. The more humans there are, the more science and art we get. And terra forming planets means more humans which in turn means more science and more art. I don't see why you're not getting this. I think the only reason we shouldn't terraform Mars is if it had life on it. Then we might accidentally cross contaminate the planets and bad things might happen. Plus if we Terra formed a planet that already had life on it, that would mean extinction for the aliens. But you didn't mention that as a reason in your video so you can't use it against me. Plus that's IF Mars has life on it and it probably doesn't.
1. if there’s ever an apocalypse on earth, then the goal isn’t to survive long term. The goal is to get back to earth as fast as possible to rebuild. That’s where all the good soil for food is. That’s where all the people are. Trying to live without earth is just not going to work 2. I highly doubt nasa would find the perfect location for a mars colony and then go “ah no let’s go build it on this shitty area higher up because there’s a chance a few hundred years from now this will become an ocean”. Nobody thinks like that. The resources are right there. Mars is hard to develop. We need the best places immediately. (also, nasa and spacex have target landing sites for future crewed mars missions already. They’re all low elevation areas. Because that’s where the resources are.) and the major problem with flooding cities is the people working on terraforming will live on mars. the people working on terraforming will be living in the cities getting flooded. They won’t want to destroy their homes when they’ve already been living just fine for generations 3. you can make asteroids spin to create artificial gravity. I said that in the video. They get their resources from other asteroids. You can move the habitat anywhere in the solar system. You can go to where the resources are. You don’t need to worry about where they’re coming from, because they’ll come from everywhere. Space habitats also will allow for more total living space than planets, several thousand times over. Space habitats will allow for QUADRILLIONS of people, a fully terraformed mars can maybe host a trillion at the absolute max. You’ll have all the art and science and society on space habitats. Planets aren’t superior just because we currently live on one I’m not saying terraforming is a bad idea because elon musk said it. I’m saying terraforming is a bad idea, and how elon musk wants to do it is even worse because it wouldn’t even work. I also didn’t say we should give up on terraforming because we need to fix earth. I said that fixing earth will always be easier than terraforming. Which just ties back to my first point, if there’s ever an apocalypse on earth then it will always be easier to fix earth than to go restart somewhere else
@Kyplanet893 1. The whole point is that we'll have a second Earth like a terra formed Mars for any survivors of the apocalypse to refuge to. Also we don't want humanity to go extinct if another dinosaur level asteroid impact were to happen. All the dust it would put in the atmosphere would block all the sunlight for years making growing crops impossible and leading to mass starvation UNLESS any would be survivors fled to Mars. 2. You never explained why low elevation levels on Mars would be the, "perfect location" for building a settlement. And like I said by the time they got around to doing something like that, Mars would already be flooded by the established hydrosphere anyways. So it's a non issue. 3. How do you know the asteroids will rotate fast enough to establish an artificial gravity strong enough to negate muscle atrophy? Wouldn't that require a lot of costly fuel to obtain and sustain the rotation? Wouldn't we be saving money and resources by relying on natural gravity? You know, like using a terra formed planet.
@cumulus1869 1. growing crops isn’t impossible with an asteroid impact. There’s a reason 100% of all life didn’t go extinct already. Because plants can survive. Also, if we want to terraform mars, we will at minimum need to hit it with thousands of asteroids. That means we have the ability to deflect them, meaning asteroid impacts won’t happen on earth. It also implies we know how to do genetic engineering to make life that can even survive on mars, which means if worst comes to worst we can engineer plants to survive on an apocalyptic earth, and i would guess we would already have a bunch of them just in case something like that happened and it would be much easier to put refugees in space habitats, because you can move them to low earth orbit to pick up passengers easier. 2. low elevation areas are perfect for settlements because they have higher atmospheric pressures, which blocks slightly more radiation, and almost all areas on mars with ice in any significant quantity are low elevation. 3. yes, asteroids can move fast enough to make 1:1 earth gravity, or higher (or lower for that matter, you can set the gravity to whatever you want). You don’t need fuel to keep it spinning, you only need to spin it up once. The only fuel you’ll need is if you want to change the speed, otherwise it’ll just keep spinning forever because there’s nothing in space to stop it. That’s why all planets today rotate. And the 1/3 g of mars is still bad for humans. You can’t fix that. You can set the gravity to whatever you want on a space habitat
@@Kyplanet893 1. It wouldn't be impossible but our ability to feed billions would be significantly reduced and there WOULD be a great famine and a lot of people dying and fighting and killing each other for what remained. Having a backup planet that could help lessen the burden of feeding these people during a hypothetical dino-killing asteroid would reduce the loss of human life over if we didn't have one. Therefore a terraformed planet that also grows crops is a valuable asset to human extinction reduction. 1a. This still doesn't discount random quasars/pulsars pointed at Earth like a gun that we don't know about that would strip Earth's atmosphere making it uninhabitable and irrecoverable. Concerning your point about deflecting asteroids, this isn't Armageddon where we can just nuke it or deflect it and be fine. NASA's DART mission only *slightly* deflected the asteroid. And yes while terraforming planets implies technology like redirecting asteroids, these asteroids are probably going to be very small and easily controllable. If we do decide to use the resources of a big asteroid, we're probably going to mine the material and send it to Mars in smaller, more easily manageable chunks then just flinging the whole thing at the planet. So I don't think terraforming requires or implies technology of manipulating the paths of asteroids the size of the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. 2. Well I mean if we're at the point where the best place for a settlement is low elevation areas because of high atmospheric pressure shielding from radiation, then we're not being realistic here. You're not going to get a settlement the size of a city that lasts long enough to produce artifacts of culture to be worried about in some great flood because it's too expensive to justify to any earth government, let alone a united one. It'd be better to just terraform it and wait to colonize. 3. The solar wind would slow it down. We know from gravitational waves that black holes lose energy due to gravity from said gravitational waves, so gravitational waves would slow it down. The interaction of the asteroid with the gravity of other planetary bodies in the solar system would slow it down. When supply rockets from Earth touch down on the asteroid it'll slow it down and also destabilize it's orbit. When said rockets take back off to go back to Earth, they'll destabilize it's movement and also slow it down some more... 3a. Not to mention the constant resupplying would cost a lot of money in rocket fuel and while rockets have gotten cheaper in the past few decades, they're still not cheap! These space habitats would have to make enough money to have a return on investment in order for any corporation, nation, group of nations (what have you) to invest their money into building one and I'd doubt they'd be worth more than just mining outposts but at that point why make it somewhere to live? Just let the robots do it. Once it gets going, a terraformed planet would not need constant rockets resupplying it.
It would be far easier and cheaper to 'terraform' the moon than Mars, and unlike Mars the moon appears to have useable resources that could be mined, unlike mars, which is mineral poor. The water locked on mars is nice, but, that does not come close to overcoming all mars negatives. Mars atmos press = 1% of Earths lol. No magnetic field, toxic soil etc.
Your second major point doesn’t make a lot of sense given you haven’t presented a cohesive premise. Are you arguing against terraforming Mars? Or are you arguing that the Martian landscape would need to be settled in some capacity for many generations before the terraforming process would be completed at which point eventually those early settled areas would need to be flooded out of necessity, meaning terraforming Mars is a bad idea due to the probable social unrest? It’s not really clear in your video. Either way it’s a contrived talking point that relies on a very specific set of circumstances having had taken place of which there is no established argumentative premise.
argument for space habitat: we don't want just us human to spread unto outwards, we want bring LIFE with us too i.e animals, bacteria etc now, to support that biodiversity we need a land big enough to begin with, and i don't see how o neil cylinder solve that issue. but hey, that's just my side of arguments. take it lightly
I agree, just gave mars to musk to be the king of mars, i preffer titan. Because it has a pressure a bit more in common with earth, and would be easy for some colonist to go to the asteroid belt or close moons to mine resources. Also i want to be the king of titan because i just want to change the name to Tit to be the Tit,s king. And for our people to be call Titans and for our anthem to be Dicke Titten from rammstein. And declare a sacred war against the orbital colonies of Uranus and las vegas, and their twisted ways. Only Tits can show the real path of humanity on the dark void of space, and Uranians and Martians are just wrong. I fight for Tits and for a stable colony on this very system. Thats why our future its in titan and not in mars.
There is something that doesn't sit well with me that we can't even manage what we already have and we are serious about living on Mars. It's like having a raging alcoholic as your life coach. 😆 We can't even define what a woman is and we are going to get serious of colonizing another planet?
Well step 1 is getting the deflector set up at the Sun-Mars Lagrange point and I don't really hear anyone talking about that. Without a magnetosphere, any attempt at terraforming will end in failure. But with a shield and maybe dropping some ice-meteors on it, we're already 90% the way there -- just do that and wait 20-30 years for that to stabilize.
the reason they don't talk about that is that it's a metastable point. a shield would have to be stationkept, and if Mars loses it they have to reinstall a new one. a better idea I've seen is a superconducting magnet around the equator, but that then has to be maintained against mishaps. then there's Warhammer's idea of an orbital ring, which is expensive to say the least. best idea I've seen is the one where they cut bits off of Phobos to make a shield.
@@zimriel the problem isn't orbitting the L1 point, that's solved science. Just need a little ion thruster and the propellant should last centuries (probably longer than the craft). The real problem is power. A 1 tesla coil would need tens of kilowatts of power, continuously. If it collects that from solar, it would be huge, and even pulling that from a reactor makes for a fairly large nuclear power source. Being metastable is not a big challenge, not nearly as difficult as engineering absurdities like constructing a planetary Halo ring. If inhabiting the planet were not important for the next few hundred years, we could just use ion thrusters to drop Phobos onto Mars and kick-start its core. Still more practical than a Halo ring.
If you want to know about the only truly important imperative and urgent reason against space colonization of any kind, then check out the irrefutable moral argument at the bottom of the Talk page associated to the space colonization Wikipedia page.
Id disagree in that making mars more habitable makes literally everything better and easier for its inhabitants (they can survive without suits, pressurized habitats arent necessary, gravity is less of an issue and has less pitfalls as opposed to your asteroid rotation idea, although a spinning habitat can be made on mars), psychologically humans will do better in an earth like environment, etc. Im not opposed to also colonizing asteroids, even massive asteroids like Vesta are interesting to me and have potential for settlement (ceres is a dwarf planet and ill never call it an asteroid) but making planets more habitable should take precedence over spinning, hollowed out asteroid colonies. (Again, thats not to say we cant do both or that im opposed to also doing this)
Oh yes living in a spaceship forever will definitely not cause your bones to become brittle from a lack of gravity unless you somehow solve the zero G problem with artificial gravity
no one of the things i said in either this one or the similar video about terraforming venus is that to give mars or venus enough water to make oceans, you’re going to need to hit them with thousands of asteroids, meaning you’re going to need to change the orbits of thousands of asteroids by comparison hollowing out just one single asteroid and spinning it up would literally be thousands of times cheaper and moving thousands of asteroids just one aspect of terraforming so in reality it’d be even cheaper than that it’s the difference between billions of dollars and quadrillions
i think the challenges of both would more or less equal out you can get to asteroids easier than you can get to mars, and you can get bigger rockets to asteroids, but asteroids require more work than just setting up a dome
Even if we did terraform Mars, it would be pointless. Mars has no magnetosphere anymore. Any atmosphere we manage to produce there will get stripped by solar winds.
making the magnetic field is actually the easiest part of this whole process all we need is a very big magnet at L1 or a big cannon shooting charged particles off Phobos
even without a magnetosphere, if we gave the planet an atmosphere useful for humans, it would take hundreds of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years for it to blow away. it's just, as the video points out, getting the atmosphere in the first place is *pointlessly* hard. As in, very doable, just why bother when so many other options are easier and cheaper.
Technically, if you imagine colonists creating a hadron collider the diameter of both Americas, it can occur. You can also put it on L1-type orbit, with relatively small space ships to correct the position once in a while. Atmosphere is also less of a ,,technical" problem, as we may get nitrogen e.g. from Neptune or Titan. The two main issues, that you can probably guess by now, are costs and logistics of all of it. Imagine how much money you'd have to spend to just collect resources, engineers, designers and installers for the hadron collider and how much resources you'd have to throw to design a mission to Mars alone - and now add to it all the costs and logistics of transporting incredible amounts of very unstable materials to where they should go. You'd need colonies all around Solar System, including Neptune, just to make it remotely possible.
I think terraforming Mars is a great idea. It's a neighbor planet further from the sun. Sun is increasing luminosity and Earth will one day become too hot to sustain life. We must do that before this happens because if we don't we would all be doomed, since there are still no known habitable exoplanets & they are light years away
I agree so much with most of this but the 'cities will be flooded' bit - I doubt the terraforming company would build below the desired "high tide" mark
but what about all the cities built before terraforming was even considered the best places to build on mars are also the places with the lowest elevation
Instead of first terraforming mars, we gotta restartart its core to get a magnetic field going and find a way to increase the mass of mars. Mars' gravitational pull is so weak that an atnosphere would be lost to space anyways. Then the objective of terraforming shouldn't be to make it like earth but instead make it survivable with enough surface habitats or space suits, etc. I propose we shift all of our manufacturing to mars and make it a giant production hub instead of a second earth, this way, pollution wont be a massive issue since people would be in suits or domes anyways and earth could just be one huge food production hub/ living space
mars is not a good place for a production hub it’s so far away from earth that the travel costs make it infeasible the moon is right there, it has all the materials earth has, an easy way to travel there, and lower gravity making launches easier there’s no reason to mine mars when you could mine the moon
@@Kyplanet893it’s more economically efficient nowadays to source fruits from South America and package them in Thailand to arrive at your supermarket in California than to make those fruits yourself. Who knows what the technological and economic world of the 24th century will look like. Albeit I do see the Moon as the more practical option regardless.
Restart its core???? impossible unless you’re god, just using a large fusion-powered electromagnet to create a magnetic field inbeteeen mars and the sun would make more sense
@@salutic.7544 That has less to do with logistics and more to do with the exploitation of the global south i.e. you’re analogizing a socioeconomic interaction with a physical/technological process.
@@Kyplanet893 no I mean in the video you said the act of people terraforming Mars would flood people living in the deep hidden levels of Mars. Then you talked about how it would be like flooding Europe or the USA. I thought you meant like unknown indigenous life forms but you literally said flooding countries on Mars 🤣 Lost me
the problem with habitats is that, while cheaper, they would require strict demographic control on the level unimaginable. That would open the path for some of the most totalitarian regimes known to real history and fiction.
@@roccovolpetti7363 not a solution. Thought experiment: the habitat is at its population limit, mom gives birth to a kid. How would building a new habitat help here with the totalitarianism problem? The kid gets separated from the parents and goes to another habitat? Or the entire family is forced to go another habitat? Both of those solutions are cruel and totalitarian.
not really these aren’t space stations, they would function more like island nations you don’t see the maldives or vanuatu forcing parents to leave their kids because they don’t need to. They get resources from trade or grow them in farms or get them from the ocean (which would be equivalent to mining asteroids for this metaphor) these aren’t rigid space stations, they’re living structures capable of trading and expanding just like any island yeah space and resources are limited but the same problems are on islands and you really don’t see this happen (or if you do it’s clearly not every island)
I’d like to raise a counterpoint; space habitats are neat ideas but I doubt many asteroids would be strong enough to withstand its own weight spinning so fast. This would mean that a lot of the energy in construction is simply used to reinforce the asteroid. Now I agree that full on terraforming mars is a bad idea, I still would think that having thousands of small Martian and lunar settlements underground would be overall easier than thousands of spinning asteroid bases. Now in an ideal world I’d imagine we would have a combination of all these ideas put in practice in some form. But I still believe colonization of celestial bodies are likely the easiest option.
I think the biggest argument for terraforming mars (in the future) is the added benefit of security. A space habitat is fragile and vulnerable to collisions from space Debris, and if a major accident happens there won’t be any way to really “fix” the space station (as all the oxygen would have escaped and the entire population would have died). On a planet though, the only way to wipe out the entire human population is a large asteroid collision or a nuclear war or something like that. If humanity evolved on a space station, our chances of survival would have been much lower. Also, this is the same reason why colonizing Luna and other moons is a good idea: planets are less fragile than space stations and guarantee population security better. Edit: I know that you could put shielding on rotating space habitats to prevent micrometeorites from damaging the hull, but long term they are still vulnerable to an event like a freak solar flare or collision from a larger space object.
where does this myth come from *space habitats are NOT fragile, or vulnerable, or weak* you’re thinking of modern day space stations, those are not the things i’m talking about the shielding you can put on these things can be *kilometers* thick. As in, it could tank a point blank nuclear blast and be fine and we know how to deal with solar flares already. That isn’t a problem. Also, if your space habitat doesn’t know how to avoid a large object, then that’s just natural selection. You would be able to see the object years in advance and have more than enough time to avoid it. If there’s a space habitat that can’t take the extremely easy and simple steps to just move out of the way then they can blame their own stupidity for their deaths I really need to make a space habitat video because i have no idea where all this wrong info is coming from
That’s actually true, but I still think that in the long run we will eventually terraform Mars. Simply because of human ambitions, sure, you can build a million copy and paste spinning coke cans everywhere, but humans still like actual planets similar to their own planet, you know? But I agree that we should focus on colonizing the moon and building space habitats first.
Earth's gravity on an asteroid? Such quick rotation would pulverize the entire structure. I agree with your points on terraforming Mars in the near-future but im not convinced with your points on space habitats
However yeah you're right that space habitats are more efficient than terraforming, but i'd reckon many people would have issues with that, specially considering that space habitats are way weaker than planets and that they would be artificial and thus prone to human error. Planets would not have accidents causing 5-10 billion people to all die.
What makes you think that? There's a million ways everyone on a planet could die when the planets we are talking about are Venus and Mars. People think terraforming is a guaranteed thing that 100% can exist in the real world based on sci-fi they've read. There is no reason to think it works in practice.
It is a bit of a stretch to say, that real terraforming Mars is possible in the first place. That implies, that you could go through that process and afterwards you would have a self sustaining living world, but that is not the case. You need an artificial magnetic field to keep it going at all and the water reserves on Mars are quite limited, so, no green planet without extensive and sustained artificial irrigation. You just can´t get anything close to an earth2 on Mars. It is less wasteful and not any more technology dependent to cover almost all of the surface with interconected habitats and biodomes with sufficient radiation protection. And if a future civilization needs that much additional space, that will be easier to achieve then gigant space habitats at the same scale, because the material for Mars habitats exists on mars, whilst asteroid mining only gets you so far. Assuming, that Mars gravity is sufficient for long term human well being, colonizing Mars would be one of the obvious steps, then. Of cause, it is all nonsense for now, but for a distant hypothetical future in which we also have the means to built gigantic space habitats (with equaly big capacity) with spin gravity, not utilizing Mars by covering it with living space on a planet wide scale would be weird.
Colonisation of space is in general terrible idea. Mining or having some science bases on Moon and planets would be useful, but why move there to live your whole life in such places? Oh and it is not actually necessary to "save humanity" or anything, cause if you have technology to establish long term space colony, you also would have technology to avert any disaster or save people from it right on Earth. Would also be cheaper, most likely
I mean we already know what parts mars are below sea level, and therefore scheduled to be flooded. We could just … not build in those areas. We all know what the endgame is
5:17 but we need to have other living beings with us, ie animaps, insect, bactetia etc and in my opinion, we need a planet to do that, space habitat aren't enough to sustain closed system enviroment. imo anyways
the space habitats im talking about (which are completely possible under known science with present day materials) could have the living area of a small country they are more than big enough to have ecosystems
@@Kyplanet893 i'mean, the coriolis effect isn't great to support the life forms in my opinion. hey, just take my opinion lightly okay, i'm just a random kid from third world country anyways.
If we can live on a planet like Mars without terraforming it, then what would be the point in terraforming it anyway? Also, a point that you didn't mention, is that if there is still indiscovered life on Mars, we'd potentially be eradicating it before we've even discovered it!
I can't help but notice you strawman'd bad arguments for terraforming which I too disagree with. The majority opinion on it I can find is that we don't need to terraform Mars but it's a step towards leaving the solar system and it, like space habitats, makes sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket so to speak. You assume pro-terraformation says we need to colonise Mars and that it implies we shouldn't create space habitats too. Idk anyone even on TH-cam who is pro-terraforming and also anti-space habitat. Both are options. The argument we shouldn't focus on terraforming can be applied to many things in humanity; why focus on space habitats for that matter? Or space at all? Or why focus on deep-space astronomy? Why focus on deep sea exploration? Not a bad video if to point out the benefits of also working on space habitats, but dismissing one idea in favour of the other instead of doing both is pointless. We have enough resources on Mars, in the asteroid belt and on Earth to make both happen and more. I wont get into a back and forth in the comments, especially with the insufferable and pretentious Anti-Elon Musk people I can spot cause I have better things to do, just thought I'd share this much though. Keep up the good work on your channel.
didn’t mean to make it sound like we couldn’t do both, i agree just because you’re terraforming mars doesn’t mean you can’t also build space habitats, didn’t mean to make it sound like we had to do one or the other my bad but terraforming is just a needlessly complicated endeavor when there are easier ways to make living space most people i’ve seen who know about terraforming at all don’t know the other options, so that’s what i was trying to promote here
A few points I disagree with, You mentioned the difficulty of modifying day length. I disagree that modifying the day length of a planet is difficult: it is a relatively simply thing (for a spacefaring civilization) to set up large thin sunblocking sheets at solar lagrange points to block out all or most sunlight, simulating night time. This could of course also be used to immensely reduce temperatures wherever needed. Secondly, and more generally, I disagree with how you portray terraforming in this video. I agree that the popular notion of 'terra'-forming that involves making a planet Earthlike is mostly wishful thinking, however, I don't think that's the form of terraforming that will prove most useful to us. Instead, there are many cheap, simple, or passive stop-gap measures one can take to make a planet more habitable for humans without resorting to immensely expensive projects. Hell, sticking some extromophile microbes in an aerosal and spreading them all over the surface is a form of terraforming, and all you need to do that are a few drones. My point is that terraforming is only unrealistic if you decide arbitrarily that it needs to be done very quickly. I imagine that the best use for terraforming is through self-replicating gardener probes, sent in waves ahead of human expansion to extrasolar planets to begin the process of slow terraforming so that human colonization has a greater selection of viable planets to choose from. Something that has only a moderate initial cost for research and development, and could have immense potential for far-future humans even if they mostly only want to live in O'Neil Cylinders.
Good work! And sensible too. Thank you, and please build on this in the future. Here's my 2 bits for what it's worth: 1] Terra-forming an entire world IS foolish, and impractical. On Mars, localized terraforming may be possible, however. I agree with you that Hellas Basin is a consideration. Heating this location by several means like the addition of heavy gases or a thermal reactor would release water locked up in Ice along the higher boundaries of his immense valley. 2] Rather than "nuking" the polar cap, directing a small asteroid into it would add more heat than many nuclear explosions, and it would be clean.
I'm really glad you pointed out that terraforming is politically impossible whenever there are existing populations on the planet. It's weird how almost nobody seems to think about this. If SpaceX settles Mars then they will be the ones preventing Mars from ever being terraformed.
Maybe full-scale terraforming is out of the question but I'd still rather live on a colonized planet than a hollowed-out asteroid. With a planet you have room for exploration and expansion, you can't expand anywhere inside an asteroid without some sort of massive engineering project. To add to that, if one hole or crack develops on the asteroid somewhere then you'd have a massive atmospheric blowout which would kill anyone who isn't sealed off, necessitating the need to design the asteroid with partitions to separate the populace into sections, which would make the place feel even more cooped-up. On a planet's surface a man could build himself and his family a habitat & house and go out to explore the surface or visit other habitats whenever he wants, that freedom sounds much more appealing than being perpetually stuck in a rock with a million other people all living in apartment blocks. Maybe I just feel this way because I'm a country man.
the part people always forget is how uninhabitable earth is for us. most of our planet is intolerably hot and dry and most of the rest of it is wet and icy. even if we managed to coopt a system where, in 2000 years itll be close to earth like, it would doubtlessly be as cold as the Arctic, windy, dusty (Martian sands are made of perchlorate salts which are super toxic) which would disincline people from leaving their shelters without suits anyway. and honestly, considering the first life forms would be microscopic, and would have eons to colonize the planet, it'd probably be stinky and muddy too. Earth is 33% desert and growing every year. and Mars is nearly 100% i don't think it's unreasonable to focus on shrinking our deserts rather than one we would not be able to use for another 3000 years
also join my discord server here: discord.gg/kt9sTqtz9Z
(as well as check out isaac arthur's videos he's pretty cool)
Counterarguments:
1) Mars cool
2) I watched a video by Kurzgesagt, so it must be a good idea
Counter-counterargument:
As Kurzgesagt has told us, mars would overall be terrible.
Use Venus instead, they told it is better.
Also 3. mars is cool so fck logic
Counter-counter arguments:
1- Elon Musk had sexual intercourse with my mom
2- I watched a video by kyplanet so it must be a bad idea
@@libraryofgurkistan counter-counter-counterargument
1 mars is manly
2 venus is girly
3 counter argument to my own counter-counter-counterargument: nevermind i read all tomorrows
@@libraryofgurkistanwell hey, there's at least a somewhat habitable area up in the clouds of venus. Mars is just a dead rock
@@libraryofgurkistan I WANT AND WHAT AN AMERICAN WANT AMERICAN GET RAHHHH 🦅🦅🦅🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
the 2nd argument is a bit illogical; the arrival of colonists on mars sorts of presupposes access to long term water resources. flooding mars and dealing with angry NIMBYs is a non consequence
Elon Musk ain’t recovering from this one 🗣️💯💯💯🔥🔥🔥
can’t wait for him to personally respond to this video
@@Kyplanet893 dont tempt fate man. you DO NOT want a million angry muskrats descending on you channel.
@@aleckto28Both comments and dislike do increase engagemant
Another banger Bruhza5870 comment
He richer then you
Nah, we aren’t thinking big ENOUGH. Terraform Jupiter.
(for legal reasons this is a joke)
You can theoretically cover gas giants with a shell and then terraform the shell. You end up with an Earth-like planet but with a way bigger surface area.
We will get squashed like a bug because gravity
@@gregoryturk1275 In Jupiter's case you just have to make the shell bigger and the gravity will be weaker because you'll be further away from Jupiter's core.
@@SubtleHawk Ah, didn’t think of that. Would still be really cold though. Better off building a giant ring around the habitable zone.
Where do you get the money from?, golden asteroids?
I'd say that while space habitats may be better, there is such a thing as "para terraforming" where you just wall off parts of the planet from everything else, and only terraform that particular area.
For example with Mars, that'd be sealing the top and entrances to valles marinaris and making the bottom of it earth-like.
It May be a bit more difficult than your run of the mil space habitat, but if we Really want to walk on another planet without a space suit, this would still be a Lot easier than doing it to a whole planet.
Somebody watches Issac arthur
I don’t think this is mutually exclusive with wider planetary-scale terraforming either. So long as one doesn’t interfere with the other terraforming can be conducted on the outside and people can still live comfortably in earth like conditions underground until the time is right to start settling the surface.
This is the way
Counter point: I think it would be cool if we turned all the rocky planets into blue and green. #earthsupremacist
Counter argument: I think it would be cool if we turned all of the rocky planets to scorched and hellish
Earth earth earth earth supremacy! Down with those martians
I think your hasthag will unironically bring serious detractors criticizing you for the second word lmao
@@generalmarkmilleyisbenedic8895 sir, it’s a joke not me trying to engage in policy discussion.
@@GroverSpellshartVIyoooo wanna engage in policy discussion
We should do it for shits and giggles
Only sane response here😂
This is so funny it made me shit and giggle
the real gigabrain strategy would be to terraform the sun.
thats called covering it with a bunch of solar panels to collect energy
oh wait thats just a dyson sphere
@@shinygoldenpotion1587 so just… live on the solar panels?
No more sunshine for you
According to North Korea this has already been achieved
Not today but maybe in the future
counterpoint: rule of cool
but yes, space habitats are the future of humanity
Maybe staying on Earth with its stable biosphere if don't f it up should be our future?
@@KateeAngel we want to expand into space, earth will inevitably die out (even if it takes a very long time), and space habitats could hold more people than earth ever can
@@_apsis Or it becomes an ecumenopolis. Or a galactic empire park. Or a Vatican.
Eventually, space habitats become artificial planets (not anytime soon, but on a timescale of millennia it's a likely possibility in some cases).
At that point, space habitats are a million times cooler than a simple planet.
Or perhaps cybernetics is the ticket to space settlement. Get rid of our biological baggage and voila, we can survive and even thrive beyond Earth, and as a convenient bonus, we'd become immortal too!
There’s also Para terraforming and bio forming that are both much easier. In Para terraforming you basically dome over a section of the planet and then terraform that section. With Bio forming you genetically engineer yourself and a bunch of plants and animals to be able to live on the surface naturally. I’d like to hear your thoughts on these ideas.
Bio forming sounds great until you realize that you’d be trapped living in a dome or other habitat and you’d look outside to see a dead uninhabitable wasteland for your entire life, I’d rather be able to breathe the fresh air of the atmosphere and swim in the oceans of the planet I live on
@@downwindfish1
Literally nobody is bothered by that
@@dillonblair6491 if you’d be fine with being confined to living in a dome on a dead rock your whole life that’s fine, but I personally like to be able to go outside without specialized equipment
@@dillonblair6491bruv you're an insanema male
@@downwindfish1
In a para-terraformed domed city, nobody is gonna be like "oh God I can't walk around in the Martian desert"
It's like saying we shouldn't have space ships because people will look out the window and want to go outside 🙄
There are easier options so in the "near" future I think you're right. But given the fact, terraforming is doable we eventually will just do it by the same logic we are drying swamps to build cities on when there so many other places where a city could be built with less effort. Why are people living in venice? The city literally sinks into the water etc etc. You get the idea.
Just because we say something is "doable" in theory doesn't mean it is in practice. Any political stability or economic crash that happens along the way will turn it into a gaudy failed megaproject like those fake islands in Dubai. There are a million potential points of failure. More importantly: it's not necessary! Space is space. People should get over that and accept that it's never gonna be "just like Earth." You like Earth? Stay here.
@@DinoCism Your argument of just staying on Earth and be content here really is arrogant in my opinion, the same political instability that makes Earth megaprojects failures are also the same kind of shit that makes people want to leave it. Earth is a big planet and all, but it isn't immune to bugs, far from it. Space habitats, Terraformed Planets, and the sort acts like backups in-case Earth becomes uninhabitable (and no, this isn't about climate change, by the time we can have permanent populations outside of Earth, we either already found solutions to survive under it or we have already solved the issue long before we establish said permanent populations) or if it turns into 1984.
Venice is a bad example. A swampy lagoon was the best and easiest location for them because it allowed them to engage in vast amounts of trade/shipping without having to drastically alter the landscape. The entire city is basically a port. As for why they stay now, it's because its their home.
Very interesting how you brought up the point of colonists on Mars being opposed to the terraforming due to flooding, landscape changes, culture, etc. This is almost exactly what occurs with the Martian colony/nation in The Expanse. The people eventually drop the terraforming efforts that began with the first colony after their focus shifts to their immediate existence and the culture of Mars. Very valid concerns and I'd agree that space habitats are more viable in Humanity's expansion into our solar system. The value of Mars being fully terraformed / effort required to do so only makes sense once we are established in our solar system with the infrastructure in place.
People will advocate terraforming Mars and then turn around and deny anthropogenic climate change lmao
Even tho i agree that space habitats are more practical I dont feel like describing space habitats as being paradises is accurate for me they just hit that weird uncanny valley but instead of it being a humanoid that activates it, Its the environment. I just imagine them feeling fake. Like yes, the plants, animals, and soil I'd assume are real, but everything else would just be fake. Like the best way i can describe a space habitat looking is like limbo from ultrakill. The area in the game tries to capture the feeling of earth but at the same time fails. I can't put my finger on exactly why the idea just sounds a bit horrifying and just weird to me. It probably has to do with the fact that the sky would be highly obstructed by the other side of the habitat. Or the fact everything would be man made unlike a planet where nature made it. Also, to whoever readed this, im sorry for this essay I wrote. I just wanted to get my thoughts out somewhere. I also wanted to see if anyone can see where im coming from. Anyways, good job on the video.
I didnt expect to see an Ultrakill mention on a video about terraforming 😭 fair point tho
I mean, in that case anything to do with humans leaving earth is uncanny and horrifying in your mind.
Yeah, I have no idea why space habitats are advocated as a good solution. At *best* it seems like it would be like living on a cruise ship, but more likely it would feel prison-like and bleak. Additionally, they seem profoundly fragile. A terrorist with a single grenade or a pea-sized meteorite or an out of control spacecraft could completely destroy the entire habitat with a single stroke.
@duncanbeggs4088 that’s true with modern day space stations, but we’re not talking about those
I’m talking about space habitats that are possible with modern day materials that would have the total living space of a small *country*
and you can put engines on them to avoid large debris strikes, and you can put shielding on them to avoid small strikes. Modern day space stations get hit by micro meteors all the time and are fine
the problems you mentioned won’t be problems with the habitats im talking about, or have already been solved with modern stations
I’m well aware of everything you said, and i wouldn’t be recommending space habitats instead of planets if there weren’t very good solutions for all of the problems
I recommend isaac arthur who goes way more in depth about this stuff
Supporting argument: Kurzgesagt made a video providing evidence that
1. Mars is a bad place to live
2. Venus is better and easier to terraform because it's more similar to Earth than Mars
1. That's the point of terraforming
2. Venus is much harder to modify due solely to its atmosphere.
@@dillonblair6491just build solar shade at venusian L1
@@SonOfTheChinChin
Firstly that would still take several lifetimes and secondly we wouldn't be able to do anything now because it's frozen with several oceans worth of CO2 that we would have to find a way to still remove in large quantities
What about the Venusian day, which is longer than a year? I've never heard of a way of changing that.
Meanwhile, Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than Earth's.
@Luna-ux9by you don’t need to change it
to terraform venus you need to put a lot of shades in orbit to cool it down, when you’re done just repurpose those shades to block and reflect light across venus on a 24 hour cycle and you have a day length
So true. I wish more people recognized the huge problem of a lack of a magnetosphere.
Artificial magnetospheres exist, it isn't an unsolvable problem.
@@coolstuffifound9896😂😂😂😂 lol yeah? Where is the artificial magnetosphere on the scale of the whole planet? And how much would it cost to build it?
@KateeAngel "it's hard so we can't do it"
Void Dwelling has issues of its own too.
One being the naturally depressing nature of living in a hollowed rock and looking out to see nothing but the cold void of space, same thing with colonists living underground or in habitats on Mars, it would be depressing
@@downwindfish1"cold void of space" bruh it's just gonna be the same as looking at the night sky
@@absolute_buffoon8533 A night sky that will never change from being night. That would effect alot of people who are used to a day night cycle.
@@Xenotaris how do you know tho
@@Xenotaris most habitats would have artificial lighting to simulate day-night cycles? creating a sun-like light and powering it will be challenging, but it's doable.
While your not wrong, i think their is a few flaws with asteroid housing or space stations that could make terraforming worth it.
Firstly both the asteroid and space station would be incredibly cramped with tight corridors and artificial lighting, with minimal plant and animal life if any. Which while livable will take a massive psychological toll on humans living there, as shown by just a few years of the pandemic.
Secondly asteroids and space stations have a dagree of cosmic horror being adrift in space on a object that has a decent chance of crashing into something else along with simply just being surrounded by emptiness for millions of miles with no way to leave. Unlike an island you cant even swim , you are just stuck there.
Theirdly the asteroids and space stations will require eletronics and technology to function, from food to life support, tbeir is no if ands or buts about that. Which means one catastrophic failure and everyone there is suddenly dead. And as i touched on earlier they are a closed system that will likely require outside supplies from shipments to survive long term. If something goes wrong in the supply chain due to politics, an act of terror or rebellion to just general incompetentce and human or technological error that could cause problems, its completely possible for a supplier to withhold supplies for one reason or another. And if something does go wrong or somebody sinply wants to go somewhere else, they will need a ship, what if they run out of ships or the ships on board have restricted access to all sorts of other stuff. Point being alot can go wrong, its not a perfect solution
Compared to terraforming which offers long term security at the cost of time and recources. Eventually people will be able to walk outside on the red planet and see animals running around, be able to breath without a suit and see feilds of plants. If something goes wrong with a habitat system of housing they could still comfortably live, along with being able to grow food into the soil and raise animals to eat, something way harder to do on a space station. A terraformed mars will offer long term security and psychological comfort.
Max efficiency is not everything, peoples mental health matters alot and it will deteriorate being on a cramped space station or an asteroid. You could stuff hundreds of people into boxes with a bed and gruel, they will technically survive but i think a good chunk of them will go insane in the process.
Solutions: just make the habitat so big it can support its own ecosystem (such as an O’Neill cylinder); build propulsion engines that let you pilot the colony around and avoid asteroids or weapons to destroy them
I agree
@@roccovolpetti7363Even then, they are still more vulnerable to catastrophes than an entire planet.
This post says it very well, total efficiency is actually kinda counterproductive to space colonization. Sure, you could stuff everyone into pods and force them to eat algae paste mixed with synthetic proteins, but that would definitely impact the mental health of those subjected to those living conditions in the long run.
Efficiency wise I agree but I’d much rather live in a world than relatively tiny habitats
you wouldn’t be able to notice the distance tbh
(except for the fact that you’d see the ceiling, but you can stop that by putting a wall that looks like a sky in the way)
@@Kyplanet893 that rarely works, unless we have the ability to make walls really feel like windows to the outside world
Habitats could be made rather large and linked with short distance spaceflights.
We don't need to do it but we should still do it. Energy requirements are enormous sure, but I don't think that's an really an issue. With enough technology I don't think energy requirements are a barrier for us. Depending on how great automation gets the possibilities really open up. Space habitats are great sure but we can absolutely do both, and I think eventually we will do both. People often ask things like "what's the point of a dyson sphere, there's no way humanity needs that much energy." Well, here's an example of a perfect use for that amount of spare energy. The argument that it takes a long time to finish I find interesting because that hasn't really stopped humanity from finishing projects before. We've already built things that took centuries to finish. As for the day cycle argument, I could be wrong but I don't believe the planet's rotation matters that much when we can brute force any day/night cycle we want on any planet using cheap mirrors and shades to block or let in any amount or even specific frequencies of light whenever we want.
Personally, I think it makes perfect sense to terraform Venus because of its gravity and because any potential cloud cities that are already on it could either land and be turned into regular cities, converted into orbital space stations, or kept in the air with the aid of some future technology. As for Mars, I agree with you that there are valid reasons for keeping it Mars-like, at least for a while. Para terraforming Mars I do think makes sense. Para terraforming as in making specific areas on Mars habitable, but not the planet itself, like for instance domed craters, pressurized lava tubes, and underground cities.
Or just do the cloud cities and fuck trying to change anything while wasting the solar system's resources. If people want to live in space they need to stop being little bitches about it and accept that maybe *they* will have to be the thing that changes, rather than the entire environment around them. Terraforming as a concept is just a potential resource pit that could wreck space colonization before it even starts in earnest. It's a terrible idea on every level.
Bro, just go to the center of the Galaxy and unlock the staff of life
Small problem with the space habitats sadly. The artificial gravity that would be produced by spinning would very likely result in the shift of all your organs to one side of your body after prolonged use. Sadly we just don't have a good solution for artificial gravity at this moment. A better idea would probably be single cities on mars encased in domes or other protective material to create a localized earth environment. Good video though, keep it up!
that problem becomes less noticeable the bigger you make your habitats, and there are present day materials strong enough to make something big enough to mitigate it (not entirely but enough to make it a smaller problem)
Build, build, build!
That's assuming that you're always facing the same direction the whole time you're in the habitat - why would people be doing that?
Just requiring that crew switch the orientation they lie in bed every 'night' would easily prevent this issue.
@@SirBenjiful well... a huge deal of humans spend the majority of their day sitting at their desk looking at their computer, effectively facing the same direction the whole time
@@matroqueta6825 Just have mirrored office layouts and mandate that people take turns on working on each side of the room. These "problems" are so easily solved it's laughable.
Counter argument:
"It's much easier to fix Earth than to Terraform another planet" Yeah. It is. But terraforming isn't an "anwser" to global warming. It's just another project that can be, and will be done by humans. By the time we'll even start planning how to terraform a planet, and going through with the plans, the amount of energy we would posess would be far greater than the one we have now. (This can be done in multiple ways, harnessing all of earth's natural renewable energy, making a dyson swarm, ect.) So by then, it would be easier. No one is saying "Oh man, global warming sure is a tough problem to solve! Lets terraform and colonize mars!" That's just stupid. We'll terraform other planets either way once humanity is more advanced, just because we can't. The pyramids of giza were a huge feat for people back then aswell, and that spanned multiple generations to complete. Who says we can't do the same but on a bigger scale? The question of terraforming isn't answered with a "never" but a "not now" instead.
"There would be countries that are against terraforming." WHO in their right mind would be against that?
Do you want to:
A. Live in a hellish, radioactive desert for the rest of your life?
Or
B. Start a project to make the place/planet you call home an actual habitable place where you don't need suits, can breathe without one, and are not in constant exposure to solar radiation?
Now onto the space habitat VS terraformed mars:
Space habitats are indeed great and I do agree with you. But you do not have to choose between the two. As I said, in order to heat up mars, future humans may think of another solution with the vast amounts of energy at their disposal. Like.. for example, not bombing the planet with asteroids, but instead, moving the entire planet closer inside the habitable zone, with giant "boosters" or whatever they might come up with. This is what I mean when I say that if terraforming is theoretically possible with our current technology, it would be even more possible generations later.
Yep. It's completely stupid and unworkable. No magnetic shield means any atmosphere created would be blasted away by the sun anyways
only on geologic time scales, and with enough engineering even that can be mitigated
I think the case could be made for terraforming in order to replicate earth-like ecosystems for organisms that aren’t human, i.e. other animals and plants. At least on a very long timeline, of course not as an initial project as soon as we set foot on another planet. I think that we have the responsibility to ensure the long term survival of all life on earth, not just our own species.
thing is you can do that with space habitats too
there’s nothing stopping you from building millions of nature preserves for every possible type of life on earth
At that case you risk this life evolving in very unrecognizable and unstable manner.
1:18 our best option is mass production of sulfur hexaflouride which is a greenhouse gas 25,000 more powerful than co2. The Martian atmosphere is 2.5 trillion tons so we would need 100 million tons of sulfite hexaflouride to equal the whole atmosphere but it probably would need more.
Honestly, I'd rather live on a planet than an Asteroid
3:10 terraformation would obviously be warned about and would be planned from the very day we set foot there. A noah's ark level flooding would not happen to any cities.
that’s not what i’m saying
of course terraforming would be planned
but eventually, the area where your city is will be flooded
it’ll be slow but it will happen, and you’ll be burying centuries of history
you can’t really move the area where humans first landed on mars for example
or a memorial to some famous person who died there
or a famous landmark
Or angry Areologists trying to stop the terraforming plan
@@Kyplanet893 and i said that the preparation for it would include not making cities directly in areas where they would be flooded at all. If earth had no water and you were actively trying to flood it back up again to today's levels, you would probably not want to or try to build cities in the mariana trench or in the bottom of the oceans.
problem is the best places to build settlements are all in low elevation areas
the most easily accessible water for example
The settlers who first come to Mars may be ready for terraforming, but not their great grandchildren.
2:30 lmfao😂😅😂😅😂 so damn true!
Terraform mars so we can somehow manage to fuck up another planet, go "oh no this planet is fucked, lets move to another one" and repeat the cycle
Habitats can also move. Like to other star systems. If that’s your home anyway there’s less ethical problems heading off on multigenerational voyages.
A good video that serves as another evidence as to why Elon Musk has no fucking idea of what he’s doing
We should definitely terraform mars, just not a lot. Mars isn't a very good for humans, and I agree space habitats are better. But one thing is for sure, to build them is gonna take a lot of manpower and time. And people need to be fed.
Terraforming mars a little and bioengineering some microbes, lichen and plants, turning stone and sand to soil and soil to gardens, we could begin supplying a lot of food which would be cheaper to send to space. We only need relatively few farmers who can live in small insulated habitats. Remote control most of the time and suit up every now and then when things need to be fixed.
Space is a premium if you make it yourself, and food just take so much space. Especially since we want variety, unless you wanna see how long a colony of space settlers can avoid stabbing each other over only being served algae mush 3 times a day all year.
That said, don't think it would be worth terraforming it enough to support meat production, but a few plants should be doable. At least until we can print O'Neil cylinders by the dozen a week.
Fuck it
TERRAFORM OUTER SPACE ITSELF
Tyler.
*you’re a genius*
You're just completely missing the biggest, most obvious reason to terraform Mars (and/or any other planet):
*Politics*. The race to put a satellite in space, the race to put a man in space, the race to put a man on the moon--these were mainly driven by politics, not by the practicality of doing them. Tell me that either the US and USSR still would have spent money on the space race the way they did without the political pressure of not wanting to let a major rival do it first.
And I feel the need to bring this up because we don't live in a world where people get together, discuss ideas, and pick the best idea. We live in a world where a select few people can make decisions for entire countries based on personal feelings, or even a well-placed bribe. Politics is more important than practicality.
i thought about this
but terraforming takes centuries
no government system survives that long, there could be dozens if not hundreds of ideology changes during the terraforming that’ll slow it or make it faster, or pause it entirely
or there could be other countries on mars who don’t want to terraform, or terrorist groups who *really* don’t want a terraformed mars
politics works against terraforming. The space race was a short-term goal where the US and USSR were just trying to beat the other. Terraforming is a very different thing
Don't be afraid to call Elon Musk an idiot, just say it out loud.
O'Neill cylinders with artificial gravity sounds like the way to go!
Wouldn't it be easier to ditch our biological baggage and become cyborgs? Then it would be much easier to reside beyond Earth. Going at least somewhat cybernetic would greatly reduce our need for life support systems on other worlds and in outer space itself.
I sure would hate for terraforming to go wrong and turn an uninhabitable planet uninhabitable. 🤣
Void Dwellers moment
Something coukd go wrong during terraforming and destroy the planet
>literal coolest thing ever
>UMM ACTUALLY THIS IS A LE BAD IDEA AND THIS IS WHY SCIENCE SAYS THAT EXPERTS AGREE THAT 9/10 PROFESSIONALS IN THE DIELD SAY
Look at the terraforming of LV426. Very expensive for the Weland Yutani Corporation. 😅
2:13 Terraforming Mars before we fix Earth is a bad idea. But never terrarorming Mars at all? You lost the plot dude. The whole point is a back up home for humanity were an asteroid, or gamma ray burst, etc. to destroy Earth. Plus we'll have to do it in a billion years from now anyways when the Sun swallows Earth. And you can't make the argument, "We won't be here in a billion years" because I can just say, "We won't be here in 100-300 years" for Climate Change. It's the same logic. So if you care so much about humanity's future then it's logically consistent to both be pro fixing Climate Change AND terraforming Mars because both of these share the same motivations.
3:37 You're just assuming people will colonize the lowest elevations of Mars before Mars gets its oceans? Wouldn't space agencies like NASA have the foresight not to build there? I hear they're pretty smart. Additionally I highly doubt we'll have cities on Mars before it gets it's oceans because it'll probably take Mars about the same amount of time to develop a proper atmosphere as a hydrosphere. So this should be a non-issue. But even if it was, bro WHO CARES? Flood them cities. Fuck em. The greater good outweighs history. History is just nostalgia. We'll have technology like video to remember any old Martians by.
6:05 An asteroid's gravity will be significantly less than Mars' gravity or a rocky planet's gravity. This will lead to struggles to maintain muscle and bone mass. While losing muscle and bone mass will also be a problem on Mars, it will be even worse in your space habitats hollowed out in asteroids. Plus where are these citizens going to get their water and resources from? Having a terraformed planet you live on doesn't have problems like, "Where will my water or resources come from?"
Don't get me wrong bro. I hate Elon Musk just as much as the next guy but a broken clock is right twice a day. Just because Elon said it doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It's not guilty by association. People are not their ideas. And we should be terraforming planets for future humans for the same reason we should be trying to fix our climate for future humans. Now I agree with you that fixing Earth's climate takes priority. But to give up on terra forming all together? Bro come on. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water here. We absolutely need to be terraforming planets in the future. For humanity, for science, for art. And think about it. The more humans there are, the more science and art we get. And terra forming planets means more humans which in turn means more science and more art. I don't see why you're not getting this.
I think the only reason we shouldn't terraform Mars is if it had life on it. Then we might accidentally cross contaminate the planets and bad things might happen. Plus if we Terra formed a planet that already had life on it, that would mean extinction for the aliens. But you didn't mention that as a reason in your video so you can't use it against me. Plus that's IF Mars has life on it and it probably doesn't.
1. if there’s ever an apocalypse on earth, then the goal isn’t to survive long term. The goal is to get back to earth as fast as possible to rebuild. That’s where all the good soil for food is. That’s where all the people are. Trying to live without earth is just not going to work
2. I highly doubt nasa would find the perfect location for a mars colony and then go “ah no let’s go build it on this shitty area higher up because there’s a chance a few hundred years from now this will become an ocean”. Nobody thinks like that. The resources are right there. Mars is hard to develop. We need the best places immediately.
(also, nasa and spacex have target landing sites for future crewed mars missions already. They’re all low elevation areas. Because that’s where the resources are.)
and the major problem with flooding cities is the people working on terraforming will live on mars. the people working on terraforming will be living in the cities getting flooded. They won’t want to destroy their homes when they’ve already been living just fine for generations
3. you can make asteroids spin to create artificial gravity. I said that in the video. They get their resources from other asteroids. You can move the habitat anywhere in the solar system. You can go to where the resources are. You don’t need to worry about where they’re coming from, because they’ll come from everywhere.
Space habitats also will allow for more total living space than planets, several thousand times over. Space habitats will allow for QUADRILLIONS of people, a fully terraformed mars can maybe host a trillion at the absolute max. You’ll have all the art and science and society on space habitats. Planets aren’t superior just because we currently live on one
I’m not saying terraforming is a bad idea because elon musk said it. I’m saying terraforming is a bad idea, and how elon musk wants to do it is even worse because it wouldn’t even work.
I also didn’t say we should give up on terraforming because we need to fix earth. I said that fixing earth will always be easier than terraforming. Which just ties back to my first point, if there’s ever an apocalypse on earth then it will always be easier to fix earth than to go restart somewhere else
@Kyplanet893
1. The whole point is that we'll have a second Earth like a terra formed Mars for any survivors of the apocalypse to refuge to. Also we don't want humanity to go extinct if another dinosaur level asteroid impact were to happen. All the dust it would put in the atmosphere would block all the sunlight for years making growing crops impossible and leading to mass starvation UNLESS any would be survivors fled to Mars.
2. You never explained why low elevation levels on Mars would be the, "perfect location" for building a settlement. And like I said by the time they got around to doing something like that, Mars would already be flooded by the established hydrosphere anyways. So it's a non issue.
3. How do you know the asteroids will rotate fast enough to establish an artificial gravity strong enough to negate muscle atrophy? Wouldn't that require a lot of costly fuel to obtain and sustain the rotation? Wouldn't we be saving money and resources by relying on natural gravity? You know, like using a terra formed planet.
@cumulus1869
1. growing crops isn’t impossible with an asteroid impact. There’s a reason 100% of all life didn’t go extinct already. Because plants can survive.
Also, if we want to terraform mars, we will at minimum need to hit it with thousands of asteroids. That means we have the ability to deflect them, meaning asteroid impacts won’t happen on earth. It also implies we know how to do genetic engineering to make life that can even survive on mars, which means if worst comes to worst we can engineer plants to survive on an apocalyptic earth, and i would guess we would already have a bunch of them just in case something like that happened
and it would be much easier to put refugees in space habitats, because you can move them to low earth orbit to pick up passengers easier.
2. low elevation areas are perfect for settlements because they have higher atmospheric pressures, which blocks slightly more radiation, and almost all areas on mars with ice in any significant quantity are low elevation.
3. yes, asteroids can move fast enough to make 1:1 earth gravity, or higher (or lower for that matter, you can set the gravity to whatever you want). You don’t need fuel to keep it spinning, you only need to spin it up once. The only fuel you’ll need is if you want to change the speed, otherwise it’ll just keep spinning forever because there’s nothing in space to stop it. That’s why all planets today rotate.
And the 1/3 g of mars is still bad for humans. You can’t fix that. You can set the gravity to whatever you want on a space habitat
@@Kyplanet893
1. It wouldn't be impossible but our ability to feed billions would be significantly reduced and there WOULD be a great famine and a lot of people dying and fighting and killing each other for what remained. Having a backup planet that could help lessen the burden of feeding these people during a hypothetical dino-killing asteroid would reduce the loss of human life over if we didn't have one. Therefore a terraformed planet that also grows crops is a valuable asset to human extinction reduction.
1a. This still doesn't discount random quasars/pulsars pointed at Earth like a gun that we don't know about that would strip Earth's atmosphere making it uninhabitable and irrecoverable. Concerning your point about deflecting asteroids, this isn't Armageddon where we can just nuke it or deflect it and be fine. NASA's DART mission only *slightly* deflected the asteroid. And yes while terraforming planets implies technology like redirecting asteroids, these asteroids are probably going to be very small and easily controllable. If we do decide to use the resources of a big asteroid, we're probably going to mine the material and send it to Mars in smaller, more easily manageable chunks then just flinging the whole thing at the planet. So I don't think terraforming requires or implies technology of manipulating the paths of asteroids the size of the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs.
2. Well I mean if we're at the point where the best place for a settlement is low elevation areas because of high atmospheric pressure shielding from radiation, then we're not being realistic here. You're not going to get a settlement the size of a city that lasts long enough to produce artifacts of culture to be worried about in some great flood because it's too expensive to justify to any earth government, let alone a united one. It'd be better to just terraform it and wait to colonize.
3. The solar wind would slow it down. We know from gravitational waves that black holes lose energy due to gravity from said gravitational waves, so gravitational waves would slow it down. The interaction of the asteroid with the gravity of other planetary bodies in the solar system would slow it down. When supply rockets from Earth touch down on the asteroid it'll slow it down and also destabilize it's orbit. When said rockets take back off to go back to Earth, they'll destabilize it's movement and also slow it down some more...
3a. Not to mention the constant resupplying would cost a lot of money in rocket fuel and while rockets have gotten cheaper in the past few decades, they're still not cheap! These space habitats would have to make enough money to have a return on investment in order for any corporation, nation, group of nations (what have you) to invest their money into building one and I'd doubt they'd be worth more than just mining outposts but at that point why make it somewhere to live? Just let the robots do it. Once it gets going, a terraformed planet would not need constant rockets resupplying it.
It would be far easier and cheaper to 'terraform' the moon than Mars, and unlike Mars the moon appears to have useable resources that could be mined, unlike mars, which is mineral poor. The water locked on mars is nice, but, that does not come close to overcoming all mars negatives. Mars atmos press = 1% of Earths lol. No magnetic field, toxic soil etc.
Your second major point doesn’t make a lot of sense given you haven’t presented a cohesive premise. Are you arguing against terraforming Mars? Or are you arguing that the Martian landscape would need to be settled in some capacity for many generations before the terraforming process would be completed at which point eventually those early settled areas would need to be flooded out of necessity, meaning terraforming Mars is a bad idea due to the probable social unrest? It’s not really clear in your video. Either way it’s a contrived talking point that relies on a very specific set of circumstances having had taken place of which there is no established argumentative premise.
2:16 they’re both equally hard
Governments and Corporations don’t care about either
argument for space habitat: we don't want just us human to spread unto outwards, we want bring LIFE with us too i.e animals, bacteria etc now, to support that biodiversity we need a land big enough to begin with, and i don't see how o neil cylinder solve that issue.
but hey, that's just my side of arguments. take it lightly
I agree, just gave mars to musk to be the king of mars, i preffer titan.
Because it has a pressure a bit more in common with earth, and would be easy for some colonist to go to the asteroid belt or close moons to mine resources.
Also i want to be the king of titan because i just want to change the name to Tit to be the Tit,s king.
And for our people to be call Titans and for our anthem to be Dicke Titten from rammstein.
And declare a sacred war against the orbital colonies of Uranus and las vegas, and their twisted ways.
Only Tits can show the real path of humanity on the dark void of space, and Uranians and Martians are just wrong.
I fight for Tits and for a stable colony on this very system.
Thats why our future its in titan and not in mars.
This is like people in 1960 talking about how should we explore Jupiter with a fission rocket at 2001😂
It is actually quite easy and a good idea. The Dutch created an entire country and are happy with it. You just do something else.
There is something that doesn't sit well with me that we can't even manage what we already have and we are serious about living on Mars. It's like having a raging alcoholic as your life coach. 😆 We can't even define what a woman is and we are going to get serious of colonizing another planet?
Well step 1 is getting the deflector set up at the Sun-Mars Lagrange point and I don't really hear anyone talking about that. Without a magnetosphere, any attempt at terraforming will end in failure. But with a shield and maybe dropping some ice-meteors on it, we're already 90% the way there -- just do that and wait 20-30 years for that to stabilize.
the reason they don't talk about that is that it's a metastable point. a shield would have to be stationkept, and if Mars loses it they have to reinstall a new one.
a better idea I've seen is a superconducting magnet around the equator, but that then has to be maintained against mishaps.
then there's Warhammer's idea of an orbital ring, which is expensive to say the least.
best idea I've seen is the one where they cut bits off of Phobos to make a shield.
@@zimriel the problem isn't orbitting the L1 point, that's solved science. Just need a little ion thruster and the propellant should last centuries (probably longer than the craft).
The real problem is power. A 1 tesla coil would need tens of kilowatts of power, continuously. If it collects that from solar, it would be huge, and even pulling that from a reactor makes for a fairly large nuclear power source.
Being metastable is not a big challenge, not nearly as difficult as engineering absurdities like constructing a planetary Halo ring.
If inhabiting the planet were not important for the next few hundred years, we could just use ion thrusters to drop Phobos onto Mars and kick-start its core. Still more practical than a Halo ring.
I think as technology progresses it’s only naturals that we start terrforming planets it will happen at one point it’s undeniable
We’re here to stay 🌏
If you want to know about the only truly important imperative and urgent reason against space colonization of any kind, then check out the irrefutable moral argument at the bottom of the Talk page associated to the space colonization Wikipedia page.
Start with making our shit better. Even if you’re going with terraforming
I love the idea of terraforming just because of the scale and if we ever do it, it would be super epic
Id disagree in that making mars more habitable makes literally everything better and easier for its inhabitants (they can survive without suits, pressurized habitats arent necessary, gravity is less of an issue and has less pitfalls as opposed to your asteroid rotation idea, although a spinning habitat can be made on mars),
psychologically humans will do better in an earth like environment, etc.
Im not opposed to also colonizing asteroids, even massive asteroids like Vesta are interesting to me and have potential for settlement (ceres is a dwarf planet and ill never call it an asteroid) but making planets more habitable should take precedence over spinning, hollowed out asteroid colonies. (Again, thats not to say we cant do both or that im opposed to also doing this)
Oh yes living in a spaceship forever will definitely not cause your bones to become brittle from a lack of gravity unless you somehow solve the zero G problem with artificial gravity
as i said in the video, space habitats are big enough to be able to spin to create artificial gravity
@@Kyplanet893 wouldn't that be just as expensive as terraforming?
no
one of the things i said in either this one or the similar video about terraforming venus is that to give mars or venus enough water to make oceans, you’re going to need to hit them with thousands of asteroids, meaning you’re going to need to change the orbits of thousands of asteroids
by comparison hollowing out just one single asteroid and spinning it up would literally be thousands of times cheaper
and moving thousands of asteroids just one aspect of terraforming so in reality it’d be even cheaper than that
it’s the difference between billions of dollars and quadrillions
@@Kyplanet893 fair enough, but one more thing, wouldn't also be cheaper to just build enclosed cities on Mars? Think Mars City from Doom 3
i think the challenges of both would more or less equal out
you can get to asteroids easier than you can get to mars, and you can get bigger rockets to asteroids, but asteroids require more work than just setting up a dome
space habitat are better then terraforming but both need infrastructure in spaces .
Even if we did terraform Mars, it would be pointless. Mars has no magnetosphere anymore. Any atmosphere we manage to produce there will get stripped by solar winds.
making the magnetic field is actually the easiest part of this whole process
all we need is a very big magnet at L1 or a big cannon shooting charged particles off Phobos
We can create artificial magnetic field by using artificial setellites
even without a magnetosphere, if we gave the planet an atmosphere useful for humans, it would take hundreds of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years for it to blow away.
it's just, as the video points out, getting the atmosphere in the first place is *pointlessly* hard. As in, very doable, just why bother when so many other options are easier and cheaper.
Technically, if you imagine colonists creating a hadron collider the diameter of both Americas, it can occur. You can also put it on L1-type orbit, with relatively small space ships to correct the position once in a while.
Atmosphere is also less of a ,,technical" problem, as we may get nitrogen e.g. from Neptune or Titan. The two main issues, that you can probably guess by now, are costs and logistics of all of it. Imagine how much money you'd have to spend to just collect resources, engineers, designers and installers for the hadron collider and how much resources you'd have to throw to design a mission to Mars alone - and now add to it all the costs and logistics of transporting incredible amounts of very unstable materials to where they should go. You'd need colonies all around Solar System, including Neptune, just to make it remotely possible.
I think terraforming Mars is a great idea. It's a neighbor planet further from the sun. Sun is increasing luminosity and Earth will one day become too hot to sustain life. We must do that before this happens because if we don't we would all be doomed, since there are still no known habitable exoplanets & they are light years away
I agree so much with most of this but the 'cities will be flooded' bit - I doubt the terraforming company would build below the desired "high tide" mark
but what about all the cities built before terraforming was even considered
the best places to build on mars are also the places with the lowest elevation
Instead of first terraforming mars, we gotta restartart its core to get a magnetic field going and find a way to increase the mass of mars. Mars' gravitational pull is so weak that an atnosphere would be lost to space anyways. Then the objective of terraforming shouldn't be to make it like earth but instead make it survivable with enough surface habitats or space suits, etc. I propose we shift all of our manufacturing to mars and make it a giant production hub instead of a second earth, this way, pollution wont be a massive issue since people would be in suits or domes anyways and earth could just be one huge food production hub/ living space
mars is not a good place for a production hub
it’s so far away from earth that the travel costs make it infeasible
the moon is right there, it has all the materials earth has, an easy way to travel there, and lower gravity making launches easier
there’s no reason to mine mars when you could mine the moon
@@Kyplanet893it’s more economically efficient nowadays to source fruits from South America and package them in Thailand to arrive at your supermarket in California than to make those fruits yourself. Who knows what the technological and economic world of the 24th century will look like.
Albeit I do see the Moon as the more practical option regardless.
Restart its core???? impossible unless you’re god, just using a large fusion-powered electromagnet to create a magnetic field inbeteeen mars and the sun would make more sense
What? Mars has more than enough mars to hold on to an atmosphere. It’s the magnetic field that’s the issue
@@salutic.7544 That has less to do with logistics and more to do with the exploitation of the global south i.e. you’re analogizing a socioeconomic interaction with a physical/technological process.
Wait, people live on Mars?
if we’re terraforming it they would kind of have to
and in the hundreds of years it’ll take someone will eventually try and succeed
He was doing so well but he lost me there. Going to Mars is stupid full stop.
@metatechnologist it is, but someone will do it eventually in the centuries it’ll take to terraform
plus you need people there to terraform it anyway
@@Kyplanet893 no I mean in the video you said the act of people terraforming Mars would flood people living in the deep hidden levels of Mars. Then you talked about how it would be like flooding Europe or the USA. I thought you meant like unknown indigenous life forms but you literally said flooding countries on Mars 🤣 Lost me
lmao
So... basically tiny hollow Earths? xD
Amazing
the problem with habitats is that, while cheaper, they would require strict demographic control on the level unimaginable. That would open the path for some of the most totalitarian regimes known to real history and fiction.
Why, just build more habitats
@@roccovolpetti7363 not a solution. Thought experiment: the habitat is at its population limit, mom gives birth to a kid. How would building a new habitat help here with the totalitarianism problem? The kid gets separated from the parents and goes to another habitat? Or the entire family is forced to go another habitat? Both of those solutions are cruel and totalitarian.
not really
these aren’t space stations, they would function more like island nations
you don’t see the maldives or vanuatu forcing parents to leave their kids because they don’t need to. They get resources from trade or grow them in farms or get them from the ocean (which would be equivalent to mining asteroids for this metaphor)
these aren’t rigid space stations, they’re living structures capable of trading and expanding just like any island
yeah space and resources are limited but the same problems are on islands and you really don’t see this happen (or if you do it’s clearly not every island)
Terraform uranus if ya know what I mean, badamtssssss.
“Living Space”
Sounds familiar…
Are there any rocks in saturn's rings big enough to colonize?
saturn’s rings in general can be colonized
they’re a good place to get water without having to land on something
@@Kyplanet893sick
I’d like to raise a counterpoint; space habitats are neat ideas but I doubt many asteroids would be strong enough to withstand its own weight spinning so fast. This would mean that a lot of the energy in construction is simply used to reinforce the asteroid.
Now I agree that full on terraforming mars is a bad idea, I still would think that having thousands of small Martian and lunar settlements underground would be overall easier than thousands of spinning asteroid bases.
Now in an ideal world I’d imagine we would have a combination of all these ideas put in practice in some form. But I still believe colonization of celestial bodies are likely the easiest option.
Rubble pile in an impermeable bag
With our current level of technological advancement the idea of creating human settlements on asteroids is as unrealistic as terraforming Mars.
colonizing asteroids is orders of magnitude easier than terraforming anything
It's pretty terrable I would say
We seen so multiple things at once
Better idea hear me out Halo installations
Silly.
How would you change gravity in a space habitat?
make it spin faster or slower
I think the biggest argument for terraforming mars (in the future) is the added benefit of security. A space habitat is fragile and vulnerable to collisions from space Debris, and if a major accident happens there won’t be any way to really “fix” the space station (as all the oxygen would have escaped and the entire population would have died). On a planet though, the only way to wipe out the entire human population is a large asteroid collision or a nuclear war or something like that. If humanity evolved on a space station, our chances of survival would have been much lower. Also, this is the same reason why colonizing Luna and other moons is a good idea: planets are less fragile than space stations and guarantee population security better.
Edit: I know that you could put shielding on rotating space habitats to prevent micrometeorites from damaging the hull, but long term they are still vulnerable to an event like a freak solar flare or collision from a larger space object.
where does this myth come from
*space habitats are NOT fragile, or vulnerable, or weak*
you’re thinking of modern day space stations, those are not the things i’m talking about
the shielding you can put on these things can be *kilometers* thick. As in, it could tank a point blank nuclear blast and be fine
and we know how to deal with solar flares already. That isn’t a problem.
Also, if your space habitat doesn’t know how to avoid a large object, then that’s just natural selection. You would be able to see the object years in advance and have more than enough time to avoid it. If there’s a space habitat that can’t take the extremely easy and simple steps to just move out of the way then they can blame their own stupidity for their deaths
I really need to make a space habitat video because i have no idea where all this wrong info is coming from
That’s actually true, but I still think that in the long run we will eventually terraform Mars. Simply because of human ambitions, sure, you can build a million copy and paste spinning coke cans everywhere, but humans still like actual planets similar to their own planet, you know? But I agree that we should focus on colonizing the moon and building space habitats first.
I like space realism
So... terraform Deimos?
Earth's gravity on an asteroid? Such quick rotation would pulverize the entire structure.
I agree with your points on terraforming Mars in the near-future but im not convinced with your points on space habitats
i linked a detailed video about it at around 8 minutes i think
@@Kyplanet893 oh thanks i will check it again
However yeah you're right that space habitats are more efficient than terraforming, but i'd reckon many people would have issues with that, specially considering that space habitats are way weaker than planets and that they would be artificial and thus prone to human error. Planets would not have accidents causing 5-10 billion people to all die.
" Planets would not have accidents causing 5-10 billion people to all die."
This will age poorly in a few decades with climate change.
What makes you think that? There's a million ways everyone on a planet could die when the planets we are talking about are Venus and Mars. People think terraforming is a guaranteed thing that 100% can exist in the real world based on sci-fi they've read. There is no reason to think it works in practice.
3:10 blud what the fuck are you yapping about
The future?
The closest thing that we could do to terraforming a planet would be to make biodomes, but even then, space habitats seem 100x better
No... We could definitely do terraforming. The point isn't whether we could. Its whether the effort of doing so is proportional to the benefit.
erm… naysayer!!!!
It is a bit of a stretch to say, that real terraforming Mars is possible in the first place. That implies, that you could go through that process and afterwards you would have a self sustaining living world, but that is not the case. You need an artificial magnetic field to keep it going at all and the water reserves on Mars are quite limited, so, no green planet without extensive and sustained artificial irrigation. You just can´t get anything close to an earth2 on Mars. It is less wasteful and not any more technology dependent to cover almost all of the surface with interconected habitats and biodomes with sufficient radiation protection. And if a future civilization needs that much additional space, that will be easier to achieve then gigant space habitats at the same scale, because the material for Mars habitats exists on mars, whilst asteroid mining only gets you so far. Assuming, that Mars gravity is sufficient for long term human well being, colonizing Mars would be one of the obvious steps, then. Of cause, it is all nonsense for now, but for a distant hypothetical future in which we also have the means to built gigantic space habitats (with equaly big capacity) with spin gravity, not utilizing Mars by covering it with living space on a planet wide scale would be weird.
Colonisation of space is in general terrible idea. Mining or having some science bases on Moon and planets would be useful, but why move there to live your whole life in such places?
Oh and it is not actually necessary to "save humanity" or anything, cause if you have technology to establish long term space colony, you also would have technology to avert any disaster or save people from it right on Earth. Would also be cheaper, most likely
space colonization doesn’t need people to live their whole lives there
I'm not convinced that we're going to be able to mine outer space resources anytime soon.
I mean we already know what parts mars are below sea level, and therefore scheduled to be flooded. We could just … not build in those areas. We all know what the endgame is
5:17 but we need to have other living beings with us, ie animaps, insect, bactetia etc and in my opinion, we need a planet to do that, space habitat aren't enough to sustain closed system enviroment. imo anyways
the space habitats im talking about (which are completely possible under known science with present day materials) could have the living area of a small country
they are more than big enough to have ecosystems
@@Kyplanet893 i'mean, the coriolis effect isn't great to support the life forms in my opinion. hey, just take my opinion lightly okay, i'm just a random kid from third world country anyways.
@@vinniepeterss when stations get large enough the Coriolis effect begins to lessen, with stations this big it shouldnt be a problem
If we can live on a planet like Mars without terraforming it, then what would be the point in terraforming it anyway?
Also, a point that you didn't mention, is that if there is still indiscovered life on Mars, we'd potentially be eradicating it before we've even discovered it!
I can't help but notice you strawman'd bad arguments for terraforming which I too disagree with. The majority opinion on it I can find is that we don't need to terraform Mars but it's a step towards leaving the solar system and it, like space habitats, makes sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket so to speak. You assume pro-terraformation says we need to colonise Mars and that it implies we shouldn't create space habitats too. Idk anyone even on TH-cam who is pro-terraforming and also anti-space habitat. Both are options. The argument we shouldn't focus on terraforming can be applied to many things in humanity; why focus on space habitats for that matter? Or space at all? Or why focus on deep-space astronomy? Why focus on deep sea exploration?
Not a bad video if to point out the benefits of also working on space habitats, but dismissing one idea in favour of the other instead of doing both is pointless. We have enough resources on Mars, in the asteroid belt and on Earth to make both happen and more.
I wont get into a back and forth in the comments, especially with the insufferable and pretentious Anti-Elon Musk people I can spot cause I have better things to do, just thought I'd share this much though. Keep up the good work on your channel.
didn’t mean to make it sound like we couldn’t do both, i agree
just because you’re terraforming mars doesn’t mean you can’t also build space habitats, didn’t mean to make it sound like we had to do one or the other my bad
but terraforming is just a needlessly complicated endeavor when there are easier ways to make living space
most people i’ve seen who know about terraforming at all don’t know the other options, so that’s what i was trying to promote here
"... the insufferable and pretentious Anti-Elon Musk people..."
Aww, did they insult your billionaire daddy?
@@DinoCism rent free
Absolutely no point if you can’t restart the core to generate a EM field.
there are easier ways to make a magnetic field than restarting the core
@@Kyplanet893 I can believe that.
A few points I disagree with,
You mentioned the difficulty of modifying day length. I disagree that modifying the day length of a planet is difficult: it is a relatively simply thing (for a spacefaring civilization) to set up large thin sunblocking sheets at solar lagrange points to block out all or most sunlight, simulating night time. This could of course also be used to immensely reduce temperatures wherever needed.
Secondly, and more generally, I disagree with how you portray terraforming in this video. I agree that the popular notion of 'terra'-forming that involves making a planet Earthlike is mostly wishful thinking, however, I don't think that's the form of terraforming that will prove most useful to us. Instead, there are many cheap, simple, or passive stop-gap measures one can take to make a planet more habitable for humans without resorting to immensely expensive projects. Hell, sticking some extromophile microbes in an aerosal and spreading them all over the surface is a form of terraforming, and all you need to do that are a few drones.
My point is that terraforming is only unrealistic if you decide arbitrarily that it needs to be done very quickly. I imagine that the best use for terraforming is through self-replicating gardener probes, sent in waves ahead of human expansion to extrasolar planets to begin the process of slow terraforming so that human colonization has a greater selection of viable planets to choose from. Something that has only a moderate initial cost for research and development, and could have immense potential for far-future humans even if they mostly only want to live in O'Neil Cylinders.
Good work! And sensible too. Thank you, and please build on this in the future. Here's my 2 bits for what it's worth:
1] Terra-forming an entire world IS foolish, and impractical. On Mars, localized terraforming may be possible, however. I agree with you that Hellas Basin is a consideration. Heating this location by several means like the addition of heavy gases or a thermal reactor would release water locked up in Ice along the higher boundaries of his immense valley.
2] Rather than "nuking" the polar cap, directing a small asteroid into it would add more heat than many nuclear explosions, and it would be clean.
I'm really glad you pointed out that terraforming is politically impossible whenever there are existing populations on the planet. It's weird how almost nobody seems to think about this. If SpaceX settles Mars then they will be the ones preventing Mars from ever being terraformed.
Maybe full-scale terraforming is out of the question but I'd still rather live on a colonized planet than a hollowed-out asteroid. With a planet you have room for exploration and expansion, you can't expand anywhere inside an asteroid without some sort of massive engineering project. To add to that, if one hole or crack develops on the asteroid somewhere then you'd have a massive atmospheric blowout which would kill anyone who isn't sealed off, necessitating the need to design the asteroid with partitions to separate the populace into sections, which would make the place feel even more cooped-up.
On a planet's surface a man could build himself and his family a habitat & house and go out to explore the surface or visit other habitats whenever he wants, that freedom sounds much more appealing than being perpetually stuck in a rock with a million other people all living in apartment blocks. Maybe I just feel this way because I'm a country man.
the part people always forget is how uninhabitable earth is for us.
most of our planet is intolerably hot and dry and most of the rest of it is wet and icy. even if we managed to coopt a system where, in 2000 years itll be close to earth like, it would doubtlessly be as cold as the Arctic, windy, dusty (Martian sands are made of perchlorate salts which are super toxic) which would disincline people from leaving their shelters without suits anyway. and honestly, considering the first life forms would be microscopic, and would have eons to colonize the planet, it'd probably be stinky and muddy too.
Earth is 33% desert and growing every year. and Mars is nearly 100% i don't think it's unreasonable to focus on shrinking our deserts rather than one we would not be able to use for another 3000 years
isn't "Terraforming a planet" kind of redundant? That's like saying "Earth freezing the earth"