Or send some microbes which convert it into oxygen. You are right Mars doesn't have enough resources to support anything.
that's an interesting proposition. If terraforming is really about engineering the right microbes to slowly (over several millenia even?) the atmosphere to habitable for humans, do we currently have the technology to actually accomplish it? Or is it still too advanced form of engineering?
With concerted effort I’m sure we can do something about it in a couple decades at best.
The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks. If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale. Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some…
City blocks? Sweden has a scale model of the solar system that stretches across the entire country - north to south. And even then it isn’t actually big/long enough for the entire solar system.
The best view of the solar system I've experienced that could be incorporated into classroom learning is a VR tour. It not only shows you the relative distance really well, it also shows you the size of the planets relative to each other and you really get an intuitive sense of the massiveness of the sun (and other stars), for example.
Humans had civilization before we knew how to use fossil fuels, we just didn't have industrial civilization. AIUI civilization mostly consists of agreeing to live and work together in groups bigger than Dunbar's number.
Yeah of course would you'd need to redefine civilization as "inudstrial" civilization for my argumentn to make sense. Still, check out parent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563017 tl;dr: we've kickstarted civilization due to our harnessing of energy. If the venusians didn't have that option they would've probably lived as cavemen and couldn't have prevented or foreseen the disaster.
Unless the disaster was self-inflicted by the Venusians, when they unleashed the sequestered carbon by harvesting energy.
This is one of the reasons this story sticks in my mind.
It's interesting that multi-cellular life developed on Earth around the same time these scientists hypothesize Venus would have become uninhabitable. Unrelated... still, fun to think about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h...
My working hypothesis is that the galaxy (if not at least the solar system) is teeming with rocks containing Protozoa that are ready to colonise any planet with the right conditions (in a matter of thousands of years after the conditions are right) the moment they are ready. Perfectly explains everything we see and honestly would not be surprising at all.
We need to start developing meaningful working hypotheses and make judgement calls instead of waiting till we have definitive proof. This was similar to how basically no one was surprised that every star out there has planets around it yet we were writing sci-fi under that assumptions for basically a century before definitive proof.
The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks. If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale. Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some…
City blocks? Sweden has a scale model of the solar system that stretches across the entire country - north to south. And even then it isn’t actually big/long enough for the entire solar system.
I read Doreen's comment as at least city blocks.
Sweden was, last I checked, larger than a city block.
That's practically guaranteed. Eventually, the Sun will expand so much that Earth's atmosphere will boil clean off. A mega-civilization with enormous power could move Earth, buy some time, but nothing lasts forever.
Why move earth when you could just throw up some shade? By then things would be so different it's impossible to imagine what humans might do or be capable of our interested in - if we're still around.
Shade won’t help much when the sun is a red giant star…
What's mindblowing is the search for planet 9...once you start to realize that we are surrounded by thousands of dead solar systems (brown dwarfs that very likely were red dwarfs before) in our immediate neighborhood. Imagine what we could accomplish by mining their resources!
What does this mean? Surrounded by thousands of dead solar systems? Like nearby (dark) stars?
They are called brown dwarfs... but it's better to link the NASA backyard worlds project directly for the curious:
What's mindblowing is the search for planet 9...once you start to realize that we are surrounded by thousands of dead solar systems (brown dwarfs that very likely were red dwarfs before) in our immediate neighborhood. Imagine what we could accomplish by mining their resources!
What does this mean? Surrounded by thousands of dead solar systems? Like nearby (dark) stars?
It means OP does not have the slightest clue of what he is talking about. I hope he is talking about trans-neptunian objects in THIS solar system.
What does this mean? Surrounded by thousands of dead solar systems? Like nearby (dark) stars?
They are called brown dwarfs... but it's better to link the NASA backyard worlds project directly for the curious: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...
I suspected so. But all those objects are in this solar system.Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar bodies.
I think it's the way it's presented. We still have a sort of Newtonian "clockwork" view in primary education of astronomy.
The "clockwork" view is objectively incorrect due to being the wrong scale. (Some) Accurate scale models of the solar system get played out across city blocks. If it's a tinkertoy style model or a drawing within a book, it's made up BS. There are no books large enough to actually show it to scale. Edit: For the pedants of the world, I have added "(Some)" to my sentence. "Not all accurate scale models" of course. Some…