If we could theoretically terraform some other planet, why can't similar things be done on earth to improve our atmosphere?
Especially now w/ renewable energy at historically low prices.
My fear is that once this kind of technology is deployed at scale, it could make industry far too complacent again.
We will _never_ terraform Mars, I doubt a human will ever set foot there. I doubt we'll even survive as an advanced species for 200 more years.
We actually _have_ every bit of necessary technology to sustainably run something very close to modern society, and we are too stupid collectively do fix terrestrial political problems. We don't even need to terraform our own planet, we just have to stop digging up coal and pumping up oil and burning it. No wasteful and inefficient "negative emission" stupidness is necessary. This is like "clean coal". It's something that very, very wealthy people that make money from oil and coal bring up to essentially troll the populace, and distract them from the problem until we're as close to the brink as possible.
I'm sorry to be depressing, but this magical thinking about sending people to Mars and terraforming planets is counterproductive.
edit: I take it back, we can terraform a planet. The sum total of human activity for 150 years has warmed the Earth few degrees (though they are a critical few degrees)
But never landing a human on Mars seems like a bad bet to me. With Musk/SpaceX pushing for it, and our history of landing rovers there, it seems like putting some people on Mars, however briefly, is in our future. I'm curious why you feel this way.
I dont know about a return trip though, but I do think long term inhabitation is possible. Especially, with our advances in robotics, genetics, and medicine.
Also remember it takes a lot less to launch a rocket off of Mars. For instance, you only need 33 tons of propellant to get an 18 ton MAV off the ground[1]
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151002-mars-missi...
I mean, we just managed to do in 150 years what previously took ~100 THOUSAND years of natural activity to achieve.
Not a big deal. I don't know why people are even freaking out about it.
Which, from what I can tell, should make us more worried, since it shows how drastic and unpredictable the climate can respond to changing conditions, like greatly increasing the carbon in the atmosphere.
Regardless of how innefecient it is to feed positive change through impossible dreams, insisting on idea that humans are self-destructive species that will destroy themselves and what's around them is borderline neurotic and ignores the continuum-nature of evolution of Earth.
Humans have been terraforming the planet since life has appeared on here.
AGW won't destroy life on Earth, just a bunch of it. We'll also probably relegate most human civilization to northern parts of North America and Asia. The process of that happening will, bluntly, will be warfare and genocide. The sea level increases will destroy quadrillions of dollars of current value of investment in infrastructure. We will have used up all easily accessible sources of hydrocarbon, mineral, metal, and radioactive deposits. I'm sure than 500M-1B humans will figure out a new way to get buy, but it will be very different that what you or I would be used to. I'm unabashedly cynical on this. We've known about this for over 30 years, and have seen predictions turn out correctly in real time for 20.
It's like http://epistle.us/inspiration/godwillsaveme.html, except replacing them with the broader population and scientists. Read stuff like this: http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0912/full/climate.2009.12...
Eg the IPCC predicts a 1 foot sea level rise in 100 years. Watching the news, you'd think it was 6 ft. Those are both extreme values due to uncertainty.
It's actually 1-6 feet in 80 years, now, and current models predict slower rise that is being currently observed, ie, risk to upside.
Life's too short to be stuck inside the dark cocoon.
That's the problem, it's all just theory and even for Mars we don't think it would be easy. For planets like Venus, straight impossible at our current level of tech and the constraints of such worlds.
Mars may very well be much easier, but the bias towards Mars may also be largely cultural: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag
It seems to me that stopping emissions will be a lot easier and cheaper than capturing them, but if it turns out that capture gets the job done, then that's great too.
Who's to say that, as soon as emissions are neutralized, some won't again try to exploit the fact that it's "less dangerous to pollute more" as a competitive advantage? At least until there's another crisis down the road.
You'd obviously need to ensure that capture capacity kept up with emissions, but at least it would be really easy to come up with the correct price for a carbon tax.
So in comes this notion of capture. Capture to me means taking existing processes which produce carbon dioxide and somehow sequestered. So you've got a plant that burns natural gas to produce electrical power. If you capture the carbon dioxide and somehow incorporate it into something else that people need, they have an incentive to keep it capturing. The obvious example would be bricks. Use the bricks to build a structure, people preserve and use the structure. The carbon dioxide is captured. Obviously no one has figured out how to create room temperature bricks of carbon dioxide.
My issue with this project is they basically are shoving some carbon dioxide containing material in the ground and saying it is somehow captured. It might stay down there for a million years or just a few months. It's like the fracking industry claiming it doesn't impact the environment.