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Comment by TwoNineA | Hacker News Reader

I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best (paraphrasing): It takes less money and effort to fix Earth than to terraform Mars.

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However there are a lot of entrenched interests that would be harmed by any large-scale attempts at fixing earth. Even if you paid for it out of your own pocket and brought your own engineers, your attempt at fixing Earth would face strong opposition. Meanwhile barely anyone would oppose your attempt at improving Mars.

The article is however spot on that terraforming Mars looked easier 30 years ago than it looks now, with all the new knowledge we have from Mars rovers. Now any "realistic" plan would be millions of people living in pressurized habitats and venturing out in suits, not billions walking on the surface in t-shirts. Closer to what we see in The Expanse than to what we dreamed up in the 80s and 90s

I don't remember the source but I also like this quote: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

Classic Neil, always something smart-sounding to say about the wrong thing. It's more about discovery and adventure than fleeing a dying planet. To quote someone that I'm sure is Neil's intellectual superior, "¿Por qué no los dos?"

Because at this rate we'll be lucky to get enough funding and cooperation just to prevent Earth from warming by 4+C, and we need all hands on deck for that.

I know deGrasse is apparently in private, a bit of a ahole, but in this case he is completely correct: https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY

https://youtu.be/IdjtK54Lprw?t=266

That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here

And you are going to explain why instead of just stating an opinion...since an opinion is not an argument...right?

For starters "Terraforming Mars" is not a prominent feature of Musk's Mars plans. He's repeatedly stated that it's possible to do so, but the things he's consistently said he wants to do are to establish a Mars colony and turn it self-sufficient. Then maybe terraforming as a long-term goal, but the success of his mars colony does not depend on terraforming at all.

On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites

deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024

This is probably a good time to tie it back to the article. Because however good or bad a critic Neil DeGrasse Tyson is, Kim Stanley Robinson is an order of magnitude better. And KSR calls bullshit in large part because the entire surface of Mars contains perchlorate at levels at least 30,000x above levels deemed safe on Earth.

Mars is almost perfectly optimized to make perchlorate as lethal as possible because Mars has extremely fine electrostatically charged dust that is suspended in the air everywhere even on clear days, covers the surface of the planet and gets into everything. Dust on Mars is 1 to 3 microns in size while sand on a typical beach is at least 500 microns. That plus global dust storms, it's a perfectly complementary pairing of lethally small and efficiently distributed. Life extectancy shrinks to 5, 10, 15ish years, maybe 20.

What's the fix? Some kind of human genetic engineering, or centuries of bacteria repairing the soil? Those aren't happening in our lifetimes.

It's not even about terraforming. Fixing earth is cheaper and easier than establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

Classic sarcastic ironically detached drive-by HN comment. Where is the money going to come from to do both? Every dollar spent on discovery and adventure could be invested in Earth based projects.

> "¿Por qué no los dos?"

Because right now we're not investing in fixing Earth but seriously investing in an infeasible Mars mission.

Because colonizing Mars is only slightly more realistic than breeding unicorns.

The only advantage of terraforming Mars is that if you do it wrong you're not making it worse for anybody that lives there. It could be a good test bench if it wasn't for the elephant in the room: it takes a very long time to terraform a planet

There's also the tiny detail that we are technologically incapable at the moment.

Well, that's why it's a good idea to have a place to try things out, so we can learn.

But of course, doing that is highly impractical for many other reasons.

Terraform Earth!

> Terraform Earth!

Already in the act of being done; Just not in a way that's friendly to life... :(

Of course that is true, every Mars enthusiast will agree. Not a single person is saying to leave Earth behind to rot. Agree with Mars proponents or not, but at least don't argue against strawmen. Their actual argument treats Mars as a backup strategy for humanity and a science outpost

I completely agree... IF the implied caveat is “for ALL of us”.

If, on the other hand, you are talking about an extremely small subset of the population (maybe the size or of the world’s billionaires, their families and key staff), it might be cheaper to partially “terraform” within very large bio-domes that moderate Martian excesses (UV at the surface, dust storms etc), than to repair the Earth. In the former case you’re limiting scale to what you need without having to deal with the ungrateful peasants that are just after your money.

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