Hi everyone, welcome back to Seeker Plus and our final episode on the weather.
I’m your host Julian.
If you missed our first two episodes, we touched on what makes forecasting the weather so dang hard
and whether it’s possible to control the weather.
There are a lot of things to unpack in those topics, so be sure to check them out if you haven’t.
But today, we’re going to talk about modifying the weather on steroids.
Yeah, let's talk about terraforming, which just means Earth-forming.
Chances are by now you’ve probably heard the word thrown around too, whether in movies,
books, or on the news.
But what does terraforming actually entail?
If this were to happen in the future, where are some likely places this could go
down?
And of course, something we’re all thinking, what are the odds of something like this succeeding?
Well, let’s start off with something near and dear to my heart: video games.
If you're like me, you’ve played your fair share of games and in some of them you can
build and construct without limitations, you can make whole cities, you can alter environmental
conditions, and do all these things on other worlds.
And that's basically the idea of terraforming.
The line of thinking goes that an environment isn’t suitable for humanity, whether because
it’s too hot, or too cold, or maybe just it doesn’t have an atmosphere that we can “breathe”, so
the planet is modified to accommodate all of these pressing needs.
Which is just so self-centered.
I don’t see why we can’t change ourselves with some genetic engineering.
That way we can finally kick this oxygen habit, but we’re just so high maintenance.
We’d rather change the whole world than change ourselves.
Really something to think about.
Anyway, those are the basic rules of terraforming and usually when it crops up in sci-fi the
process takes anywhere from a few decades to maybe a century.
Usually a footnote that’s glossed over so our space heroes can get on with the
business of doing space heroics.
In reality terraforming would be so much more difficult than most fictional adventures portray
it to be.
One of the first scientists to propose a terraforming project was actually Carl Sagan, yes the Carl
Sagan.
He published an article in 1961 that involved altering Venus to make it more Earth-like.
Before diving into his proposal, if it sounds strange to imagine that such a famous scientist
would propose an outlandish idea that is steeped more in science-fiction than science fact, well
here’s a little more context for you.
Scientists had just figured out how to modify the weather about 15 years earlier with
cloud seeding experiments, which is all about modifying clouds to increase precipitation.
So, it wasn’t far-fetched to believe that this concept could be taken even further to a global scale
and alter a climate.
By the 60’s were also when we finally learned more about the conditions on Venus, especially
its thick clouds, that upended decades of previous thought about the planet.
So in his article, he suggested infusing Venus’ carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere with algae
that would convert the CO2 into organic compounds and reduce the runaway greenhouse effect, hopefully
cooling the planet.
Now obviously, this proposal never came to fruition and later on, Sagan himself even thought the
idea was flawed.
Again, terraforming is much easier said than done.
You may have seen our last series all about Venus and some of you may be wondering
if we could terraform such a hellish planet, and I think that's a good place to start.
There are three major obstacles or conditions that would need to change if we wanted to
seriously terraform Venus.
First, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, so we’d need to find a way
to cool the planet down.
One of the more common ideas thrown around here involves constructing a large, massive
shade or multiple smaller shades around L1, the first Lagrange point between Venus and
the Sun.
Obviously, this shade would cool down the planet, but it would also block both solar
wind and solar radiation from reaching it.
Venus’s temperature would quickly fall from the point where it currently melts lead to
something a little more aggreable.
The carbon dioxide that makes up about 96% of the atmosphere would turn to liquid and
as the pressure drops, this liquid would start to freeze and fall to the surface as dry ice.
This affects the second major roadblock to terraforming the planet: Venus’ atmosphere.
Like I mentioned, the atmosphere is toxic from carbon dioxide.
One estimate suggested that about 500 quintillion kilograms of excess CO2 would need
to be removed from the atmosphere.
The atmosphere is not only deadly and contributing to a runaway greenhouse effect, it’s
also about 90 times more pressurized than Earth. It’s kinda like Master Hand from
Super Smash Bros. It will crush you and not think twice about it.
But when the temperature drops and the CO2 turns into frozen mountains on the surface,
the pressure would also fall.
We could then launch the frozen CO2 into space, turning it into a moon orbiting the planet
and use it as storage for future things down the road.
Maybe we’d keep our popsicles there.
It all seems pretty ridiculous when you’re talking about a dry ice moon.
But if massive shades around the planet don’t work out, well maybe there’s another proposal
involving chemical reactions, which actually makes Carl Sagan’s idea sound more reasonable
than he might have thought.
A more recent idea includes seeding the atmosphere with hydrogen, triggering a chemical reaction
with the CO2 to create graphite and water.
The water would rain down onto the planet’s surface to form oceans, covering most of it
while the graphite could be sequestered.
Again, somehow I don’t know.
The third obstacle involves Venus’ rotation.
It’s very, very, very, very, very slow, rotating about once every 243 Earth days.
We’re not made for those long, extended periods of sun and darkness, ask anyone who’s spent
a winter in Alaska or Scandinavia.
So to fix that, one idea involves bombarding the planet with asteroids to speed up its
spin, however we would need more asteroids than in the entire solar system
to accomplish that.
And, we’d probably destroy the planet’s surface while we were at it and that’s generally
considered a no no.
So the next idea would be to ignore changing the rotation entirely by going back to something
like those shades I mentioned earlier.
Basically, we would need to construct another set of mirrors around the poles to reflect
light onto Venus and create a 24-hour day/night cycle, similar to what we’re already
used to.
I think you’re starting to grasp the monumental absurdity of all of this.
It would take an unfathomable amount of time and work, and the most likely scenario would
include a combination of tactics.
To begin with, we’re years and years away from having technology that would even let
us construct something like giant shades or mirrors in space anyway.
And just think about the logistics!
Woof!
None of the ideas explain how we’d successfully get a breathable atmosphere either, which
as many of you know, is key to making a place Earth-like.
So terraforming Venus, in any respect, is not happen in our lifetimes or our children’s
lifetimes or even our great-great-great-great grandkids lifetimes.
I think you get the idea.
Maybe that’s why some people want to focus instead on terraforming Mars.
The conditions there aren’t as harsh, but still it’s no picnic.
So not to get your hopes up from the get go, but Mars does run into similar challenges
like we see on Venus with temperature and atmosphere.
However, instead of thinning the atmosphere and cooling the planet like Venus, for
Mars, we would need to do the opposite.
So to make Mars a habitable world, we’d need a thicker atmosphere, a warmer planet,
and of course, we’ve got to make the atmosphere breathable, right?
A handful of the proposals out there actually do manage to address a couple of these issues
at the same time by setting off a greenhouse effect on the planet.
These ideas often call for introducing compounds like ammonia, methane, fluorine or chlorofluorocarbons
into the atmosphere, warming up the place.
Now, I figure we could kill two birds with one stone and basically do the Patrick Star
meme where we just take the CO2 from Venus and put it on Mars…
Using magic or something, I haven’t really sketched out all the details.
Even if we thickened Mars’ atmosphere there would still be the challenge of keeping it
there.
Mars’ current atmosphere is so wispy because it’s constantly stripped away by solar wind.
To counter this, there is a proposal to create a magnetic field at the Sun-Mars L1 Lagrange
Point.
Just a human-made magnetic field big enough to surround a planet.
That ought to do it, right easy.
So at this point in the hypothetical scenario, we’ve got a thicker atmosphere and a magnetic
field, but the atmosphere still isn’t breathable.
It would be full of greenhouse gasses, so one idea suggests flooding the world with
cyanobacteria to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis.
Cyanobacteria have the distinction of making Earth a breathable world billions of years
ago, so maybe we could trigger a similar effect on Mars to make it oxygenated.
But who knows if that would actually work, right?
If you’re like me, you’ve probably had plenty of times where your meticulous plans
went awry.
Imagine trying to terraform a whole world.
I’m almost positive that things won’t go as planned because that’s often not how
life works.
All of these ideas are massively complicated and I’ve oversimplified them on purpose
to make a point.
To get each proposal done in real life requires mind-boggling amounts of funding, technology
we don’t have today, and possibly thousands of years to even make a dent.
Which is maybe why it seems like I’m glossing over details here.
Let’s take a step back for a minute.
The ideas I’ve mentioned so far are early conceptualizations about remaking a world
in the image of Earth, having a clear plan with details just isn’t in the cards yet
and it probably won’t be for a long time to come.
Maybe the real question that we should be asking is why?
Why do we want to terraform another world?
Well, probably one of the most glaring reasons is we’ll need a place to go in case there’s
a global catastrophe, like an asteroid impact, or nuclear war, or effects from a warming
climate.
Trust me, if Earth dies, we’re going to try pretty darn hard to find a new home, whether
that’s Venus, Mars or some place else.
But what if there’s not a catastrophe that we can point to?
What if there just aren’t enough resources?
That’s another reason people use in conversations about terraforming.
We will simply run out of resources because of a growing population.
Right now in 2022, there’s a little under 8 billion people worldwide.
Most estimates suggest Earth’s carrying capacity is between 8 and 16 billion people,
so we’re right at the cusp of that range.
Now I’m not trying to sound the alarm bells here because fear-mongering about limited
resources is nothing new and it has often led to tragic consequences.
Currently, there are tons of projects aimed at increasing food, water, and energy production,
and lots of them look promising.
That’s been the trend for centuries and there have been plenty of past innovations
that have made sustaining larger and larger populations possible.
Nonetheless, running out of resources is a concern that will continue to be talked about
for years, among other reasons for leaving our home world.
So it’s likely terraforming, in some capacity, will be discussed too.
But will anyone actually see the fruits of their labor?
Honestly, if I was a betting man, I’d say the likelihood of terraforming one of our
neighboring planets like Venus or Mars is about as small as me being named Supreme Ruler
of Earth.
Prove me wrong, I like the sound of that, but I just don't think it's going to happen.
The idea of terraforming makes great sci-fi fodder but it’s an incredibly impractical
undertaking.
It looks like Earth is going to remain the only planet that's truly welcoming to us, you know so long
as we don’t trash the place too badly.
Alright, that’s it for this episode of Seeker+, thanks so much for joining.
I’ve touched base on a few different things here, but I’m curious to know what you think.
Would you live on a terraformed Venus or Mars?
Or even in like a glass dome because we couldn’t terraform the whole planet?
Or would you prefer to stay here on Earth, even with the risk of you know mega hurricanes and nuclear war,
and that sort of thing?
Let us know. You can find us on twitter @seeker and I’m also on there, @huggetout.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time for Seeker Plus.