I was referring to the grand future presented with Mars terraforming in a ridiculously short time, and talking about terraforming the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
As for Mars terraforming… we can’t control a 200 parts per million problem in our own atmosphere with a whole civilization’s resources. Mars has at LEAST a 200,000 parts per million problem, and toxic salts in the soil. And it’s covered in crust that has never seen much O2 and will react with and suck it out of the air at a pretty good clip unless compensated for by massive biogenic carbon burial rates.
It is utterly beyond me that anyone could ever consider it possible to terraform Ganymede or Titan. They’re not made of the kind of stuff that is even solid at human temperatures, they’re so cold that according to my calculations boosting the upper ten kilometers of Titan’s crust to human-compatible temperatures would take 50,000 years assuming it was pitch-black and did not radiate any heat to space which is physically impossible (its blackbody temperature would be something like 90 kelvin, you need a hell of a greenhouse...), and the sunlight on Ganymede is 4% that of here and at Titan it’s 1% that of here so I don’t think you could even do that in the first place. These bodies would also have atmosphere lifetimes at human temperatures of single or double digit kiloyears as well as near as I can calculate, especially around Jupiter with the crazy radiation environment.
Isn’t this a bit of a “straw musk”? I haven’t seen it claimed by Musk or anyone competent/high up at Spacex or their fan communities that Mars could be terraformed in a “ridiculously short” time, i.e. < 30 or so years.
Perhaps we should be more precise about what counts as “ridiculously short”, quantify the disagreement, etc.
I was referring to the grand future presented with Mars terraforming in a ridiculously short time, and talking about terraforming the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
As for Mars terraforming… we can’t control a 200 parts per million problem in our own atmosphere with a whole civilization’s resources. Mars has at LEAST a 200,000 parts per million problem, and toxic salts in the soil. And it’s covered in crust that has never seen much O2 and will react with and suck it out of the air at a pretty good clip unless compensated for by massive biogenic carbon burial rates.
It is utterly beyond me that anyone could ever consider it possible to terraform Ganymede or Titan. They’re not made of the kind of stuff that is even solid at human temperatures, they’re so cold that according to my calculations boosting the upper ten kilometers of Titan’s crust to human-compatible temperatures would take 50,000 years assuming it was pitch-black and did not radiate any heat to space which is physically impossible (its blackbody temperature would be something like 90 kelvin, you need a hell of a greenhouse...), and the sunlight on Ganymede is 4% that of here and at Titan it’s 1% that of here so I don’t think you could even do that in the first place. These bodies would also have atmosphere lifetimes at human temperatures of single or double digit kiloyears as well as near as I can calculate, especially around Jupiter with the crazy radiation environment.
Isn’t this a bit of a “straw musk”? I haven’t seen it claimed by Musk or anyone competent/high up at Spacex or their fan communities that Mars could be terraformed in a “ridiculously short” time, i.e. < 30 or so years.
Perhaps we should be more precise about what counts as “ridiculously short”, quantify the disagreement, etc.