If terraforming Mars is possible, then controlling Earth Climate should be a piece of cake.

No magnetosphere. That means along with no water or air, you have to live in a microwave on 'thaw'. Sounds pretty harsh to me.
Maybe we would be better off reversing global warming on Venus and terraforming it.

Since we won't be terraforming planets this century, if ever. I say colonize the moon first.

We have to bring nearly everything with us anyway, air, water, food, building supplies, etc. The moon is closer, so incredibly cheaper to ship to. Also, it's possible to send a rescue mission or send up unexpectedly needed equipment, not so on other planets.

Cloud cities ignore the insurmountable problem all Mars colony ideas have ignored, radiation. As far as I know, Venus is like Mars and has no magnetosphere, meaning little to nothing to protect from solar radiation. Being above the atmosphere, or on Mars without one, makes it worse. On the moon, you could expect underground colonies and few surface excursions, and the rock could provide the protection and seal in atmosphere. That could also be done on Mars....but why?
Also, as I understand it, they have found water on the moon, so one less thing to ship to space (although there's all the water we need already flying around Saturn if we can harvest the rings).

If they're really thinking 'cloud cities', why isn't anyone making them on earth? It would be like making more of the one thing no one has manufactured yet, more 'land'. The same could be said for underground colonies. Come on, science, get to it!

FYI, I caught the full podcast over the weekend and I have to say that the Eddie is a total douche-bag, prone to hyperbole, and oftentimes just uneducated about stuff (you should have heard his brilliance when Joe stated talking about terraforming and life on Mars).

I should point out that I am a Joe Rogan fan, or at least, I enjoy his podcast. Joe may be a tremendous stoner and spends WAY too much time talking about drugs, but he is also VERY well read and can be incredibly insightful at times. Some of his podcasts are really amazing. This one... not so much. I've enjoyed some of VICE's shtick (especially when they went to North Korea), but they really are self-important, HEEEEY MAAAAN, douches and hearing this guy really brought out the worst about them...

Unless someone else gives me further evidence, I'm putting this report of the TED "cult" under the "suspect" header.

Making of Terraform

Making-Of TERRAFORM from ArtFx on Vimeo.

Without the "Get your ass to Mars and trigger an alien terraforming factory to make a breathable atmosphere in 30 seconds" part, it may not be a piece of total crap. I never could understand why Hollywood would take such an interesting premise and turn it into utter dreck.

I'm still not getting excited.

>> ^kymbos:

Guy Pearce is the best. Otherwise, I have no idea what most of you people are on about. Is this some kind of cult book being made into a film, that has you guys shitting all over something that looks pretty good?


Weyland-Yutani was the company Ripley worked for in the Alien movies. They were the shadow company responsible for terraforming the planet where the Aliens were discovered (by Humans, anyways) and the creation of the android Bishop. They also played some smaller role in the shitty AVP/Predator movies.

This video is a promo for the movie Prometheus, a prequel of sorts to the Alien franchise. It's going to be pants creaming.

Man owns everything nature produces, according to the Bible and free market philosophy.

I don't really see why anyone would pause to consider the moral and ethical consequences of doing these sorts of things, as long as there's money to be made.

I suspect that in our own solar system, our progress is going to be slow enough that we'll have a pretty damn good idea of whether there's life someplace before we strip mine and terraform it. I also think that at first the cost/benefit analysis will make it so we'll prioritize scientific research of alien life above mining and colonizing.

Once we start talking about an interstellar migration, I think all bets are off though. The cost of establishing the first few interstellar colonies is going to be so high, we're probably not going to blink twice about eradicating even sentient life to secure them.

Maybe once we've exterminated a few planetary ecosystems (including our own, naturally), some sort of environmentalist movement will rise up to try to protest the expansion of the colonial empire, but they'll just be ignored as dirty fucking hippies who hate humanity.

Of course, there's always the chance that we'll outgrow capitalism before we start flying to the stars. It'd be nice if we at least learned how to treat every member of our own species as if they're people before we started encountering people who definitely aren't human beings.

A guy can dream, I guess.

We've already got a global air conditioning system, it's called the hydrological cycle. It was working pretty darned well until we started screwing with its essential components, chopping down and burning the trees that were storing the sun's heat, converting the land to agriculture whose stored energy we're only releasing by eating the food produced. Add to that the industrial revolution, now we're burning fossil fuels, containing sun's energy stored from millions of years ago.

Much of the desert we see today was once forest. If you consider that fact, this is where the potential for terraforming really hits home. Restart the hydrological cycle in areas where we've destroyed it through deforestation, use technologies like seawater greenhouses on a wide scale, use them to grow food and forest, then we're starting to solve the problem.

Of course, that's not exactly what she said...

Well, if the suggestion is in essence to develop a cooling mechanism on a planetary terraformer scale, it's no less intelligent than ignoring the problem. Lets be optimistic, at least she's not a denier.

Terraforming now please. Get me off of this crazy prison planet.

>> ^marinara:

/me played civ I to death. loved/hated it. IMHO best was alpha centauri. you could design your own units, terraform land, lots of nice stuff.
i actually bought civ IV, but was real frustrated. I played the CIV V demo and was impressed that they fixed a lot of the CIV IV crap. I feel you with the interface clunkiness.
I'm still playing Sins of a solar empire. if you can stand the longish games, it's a pretty good strategy games.
Oh, master of magic.


Sins is great, I highly recommend the expansions. They added in star bases, so late game, you don't have to be constantly running your main fleet around the edges of your empire. The game bogs down my machine multiplayer though. Can't have more than 4 star systems before it slows to a crawl.

/me played civ I to death. loved/hated it. IMHO best was alpha centauri. you could design your own units, terraform land, lots of nice stuff.

i actually bought civ IV, but was real frustrated. I played the CIV V demo and was impressed that they fixed a lot of the CIV IV crap. I feel you with the interface clunkiness.

I'm still playing Sins of a solar empire. if you can stand the longish games, it's a pretty good strategy games.

Oh, master of magic.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.


I've read the whole series, many times and according to Niven the Ringworld was constructed as a filled shell. Planets, planetoids and asteroid belts from neighboring systems were broken down and through a never explained process, transmuted into a unique alloy called Scrith. That shell was then contoured like a bas-relief, bulges for oceans, depressions for mountains and filled with earth, water, oxygen, plants etc.. Still a massive undertaking to be sure, esp. at sub-light speeds but not as bad as assembling a giant jigsaw.

Sub-light speed technology is assumed as any civilization capable of FTL travel would find it far easier to terraform and inhabit existing worlds.

Kind of low quality video. Here is a pretty high resolution picture of Mars terraformed:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/images/TerraformedMarsGlobeRealistic.jpg