Space Farms

Send these little buggers to Mars. They can terraform it for us...
VIDEO: Tiny Animal Can Survive In Space
(my apologies if you get the lame ad before the video...nmf)

"survive" does not mean that they are actually living as in shuffling around nibbling on the ISS's paint. They go into a dormant state. Not much terraforming going on.

Not that I don't like your profile pic, but have you ever thought about changing it to a wet blanket?

Heh, well, the sooner we get rid of the things that aren't going to work, the quicker we get to a solution that does. If you want to terraform Mars, go study the ecology of deserts and mountains...

More like the ecology of cryogenic partial vacuum chambers... The worst environment on Earth is a good day anywhere else in the Solar System. People need to wrap their heads around that fact.



Sorry, someone has to pay the reality check around here.

When I was a kid I read a book in which the writer suggested it would take 100,000 years to terraform Mars. Ever since then I've thought the whole terraforming idea was kind of lame. Even if wild, unforeseen breakthroughs shaved millennia off that time it would still be many many generations (at least) before humans could take so much as a short stroll without a pressure suit and/or a layer of SPF 1,000,000 sunscreen.

So please don't misunderstand me. I don't expect terraforming to serve as an alternative to more conventional methods of colonization, at least not for thousands of years, but I do like to hear, read and discuss the possibilities no matter how far fetched they may seem. Who knows what benefits may come from efforts that began life as a terraforming research project, but morphed and evolved into something else... this is how progress happens folks (it's also how bazillions of taxpayer dollars get flushed down the toilet, but that's a whole different discussion.)

Plus water bears are just friggin' cool. I'm thinking somebody with a YouTube channel should do a tardigrade tribute/parody of our space exploration efforts... hmmmm... why not me?

100K years is optimistic. The only way to make Mars "habitable", or Earth-like is to increase it's mass. Short of compressing its density by shrinking its atoms, the only way to do that would be to gather up a bunch of asteroids and dwarf planets and collide them with Mars. It would take millions of years for the dust to settle enough for us to start planting flowers.

I'm hesitant to engage too deeply in a debate about terraforming Mars as it is probably irrelevant for the foreseeable future, but then again this is the Space Fellowship Forum, this wouldn't be the first irrelevant debate...

Imagine that we transplanted Mt. Everest to Antarctica, covered it with toxic dust, and bathed it in UV radiation. That would be a MUCH easier place to live and work than today's Mars. Now introduce some really hardy microbes that produce something useful to humans and you've got a virtual Garden of Eden.

I don't think we will ever truly terraform Mars - EVER - but with several centuries and several hundred trillion dollars, we could vastly improve its habitability for future explorers.

That is just it. The "traditional" vision for terraforming Mars, as in making it an analog of Earth, simply isn't possible. It can never support the pressures and temperatures that are required for terrestrial biological processes to function. Technology can't overcome basic physical fact. It it a fantasy from 19th century science fiction that is persisting in the face of the reality of the environment.

The best you can hope for will be mega-structures that encloses enough volume within which we can create terrestrial "bio-spaces".

I'm sold! When do we start?

Oh yeah, we've gotta get about 300 million Americans and 7 billion other people interested in space exploration again.

No, you only have to get the few that control the resources interested.

farm panels mıght be used. itis something like solar panels, algeas prodüce basic proteins and carbonhidrat. then you could feed some insects with theme. insects because of low gravity, will probably goona be cat sized in a few decades naturaly, by natural selection. Cockroachs are naturaly sufficent to live with radiation and also their respiratory tract makes them leave with love presure and o2 levels, so algea-Cockroach farms would be profitible.

I don't think even P.T. Barnum could sell cockroach steaks.