"Ross A. Finlayson" <raf@tiki-lounge.com> writes:
> Unlike Venus, Mars doesn't have a toxic atmosphere and regular temperatures
> above 100 centigrade. Perhaps Venus is a better terraforming target, except
> for the temperature, because it has an existing thick atmosphere of chemicals
> to convert into an approximation of Earth atmosphere.
The problem is getting rid of all the stored heat as well as the fact
that the rotation is very slow. Mars is likely easier to terraform, or
at least set upp ecopoiesis - why create *another* Earth when you
could try for something new instead?
> On Mars, on the other
> hand, it would be easier to have companion human settlements to large scale
> environmental engineering.
True. The problem is that bootstrapping the atmosphere and ecosystem
is a rather tricky coupled problem - ideally you want both to help
each other get more dense, but getting that initial push out from the
current cold/dry metastable state into the hypothetically possible
"warm/wet" (still rather cold and dry by Earth standards). Solar
mirrors might help with that initial push, but I guess a widespread
nano-infrastructure on the surface is needed to really succeed in a
short (decades-centuries) time span.
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