- When is global warming a good thing?
When you're colonizing Mars.
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Let's face it, Earth has been a great place to live.
2,000 years ago the human population numbered around
300 million, then by 1900 it was closer to 1.7 billion,
and today in 2015 we're talking 7.3 billion people.
Eventually we won't be able to provide
enough food for everyone who is here,
so it might mean looking at other options,
like another planet, but other planets
aren't nice like Earth is.
If we want to colonize a place like Mars we would have
to send self-contained habitats up to the surface.
It's not a practical way to house millions
or even billions of people, but what if instead
of trying to adapt to the conditions of Mars,
we adapt Mars to us?
I'm talking about terraforming,
engineering a dead planet to be more like Earth.
That used to be the stuff of science fiction,
but recently scientists have taken a more serious look at it
and it's starting to sound possible.
Let's look at Mars.
The surface of Mars is beyond freezing cold,
we're talking minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit
or about minus 60 celsius,
that's colder than the south pole here on Earth.
Also, the atmosphere of Mars is about 1% as dense
as Earth's, and that leads to another problem,
it doesn't protect the surface of Mars
from deadly radiation coming from outer space,
and you get the idea.
But scientists have come up with some interesting ideas
on how we might be able to overcome those problems.
For one, they look at the polar ice on Mars.
That ice isn't just water, it's also frozen carbon dioxide.
So if we can melt that ice, two things would happen.
Water would flow out onto the surface of Mars,
and CO2 would be released into the Martian atmosphere.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so it can help trap heat.
If we used a series of satellites with mirrors,
we could direct sunbeams at the polar regions of Mars,
melt the ice, release carbon dioxide,
and slowly warm the surface.
We could also send Martian landers to act
as sort of atmosphere factories.
They would land on the surface and start to convert dirt
into more powerful greenhouse gases.
They'd essentially be really high-powered pollution machines
but in this case the pollution
is actually helping the planet.
It would warm up, water would flow,
and then we would do what our ancestors did 12,000 years ago
and sent us on this population explosion
in the first place, we would plant seeds.
Well, really spores.
At first we'd probably want to start off
with something like cyanobacteria or lichens.
Flowers and forests would come later.
These possibilities are amazing,
but there's still some really big questions
we would have to answer in order
to make Mars colonization a reality.
For one, the gravity on Mars is about 38% that of Earth's,
which means the basketball games
on that planet would be phenomenal.
But we honestly don't know what that would do
to a human being over the course of a lifetime.
Also we have to ask ourselves,
why is the Martian atmosphere so thin in the first place?
One hypothesis is that Mars was once very much like Earth,
but because it lacks a protective magnetosphere,
a lot of that atmosphere was stripped away into space.
The magnetosphere is sort of an invisible
force field that deflects radiation,
and Mars just doesn't have a strong one.
To create a strong one we might have to do something crazy,
like melt Mars' core or circle the planet with permanent
magnets, frankly we don't know the answer to this.
There are also ethical concerns.
By terraforming the planet we might wipe out
any existing microbial life that's already on Mars
or erase existence of past life,
which would be pretty tragic.
But terraforming is a crucial part of humanity's future.
Sooner or later we're really going to have to look at it,
and maybe we'll be looking at terraforming
a body within our solar system,
or maybe we'll look at journeying much further out
to an exoplanet around a distant star system,
and maybe those exoplanets will be
more like Earth in the first place.
But I have a question for you guys.
Whether it's tomorrow or thousands of years in the future,
what body in our solar system
do you think we should terraform first?
Should it be Mars, should it be the moon?
Maybe you've got your heart set on Venus,
or hey, how about Titan?
Whatever the answer is, I want to hear
your thoughts in the comments below.
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and making this possible.
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