139 replies to this topic

[Christian]

According to the documentary I was watching, it could be done in 50-100 years. They were talking about deliberately causing global warming to... make some crap happen, which will eventually let plant life grow, which will in return give us oxygen. Right now, we're not even trying to cause global warming... think what we could do if we actually wanted to make it happen. I'm not saying that this documentary has to be right, and I really aren't smart enough to know anything else on this subject, but I don't see why they would lie in said documentary...

One thing I found rather interesting about what one dude wanted to do, was that he wanted to let the planet evolve by itself, after we have made it possible to sustain life up there... this guy wanted to see what would happen if a new form of life was allowed to evolve on the planet, with only enough human intervention to speed up the evolution process a little. Wouldn't that be amazing?

I find that really hard to believe. Do you know how many natural disasters Mars has? There are tons of them. Especially those deadly sand storms that are said to happen very frequently.

So is the documentary trying to say that global warming would be Ok to happen? That is the most absurd thing i have ever read regarding the Planet's life.

[Rover]

Eh... I don't really have a theory. I just think it will end when it ends, we can't tell when or how it ends.

Edited by ShimmeringFlames, 08 May 2010 - 09:45 PM.

[Jupiter]

According to the documentary I was watching, it could be done in 50-100 years. They were talking about deliberately causing global warming to... make some crap happen, which will eventually let plant life grow, which will in return give us oxygen. Right now, we're not even trying to cause global warming... think what we could do if we actually wanted to make it happen. I'm not saying that this documentary has to be right, and I really aren't smart enough to know anything else on this subject, but I don't see why they would lie in said documentary...

I'd be interested in knowing what documentary. Everything I have read on the subject has had much longer estimates...50-100 years is extremely optimistic, I think...and! if we thought we could terraform a planet in that short a period of time, I can't imagine why we aren't already doing it...

In what is perhaps the first formal study of the matter that NASA sponsored, they determined:

Given sufficient time - on the order of 140,000 years - mats of blue-green algae could cover more than a quarter of Mars’ surface and place in its atmosphere the minimum amount of oxygen humans need for respiration. Earth-adapted lichen would need 10 times longer to accomplish the same feat because lichen grows more slowly than blue-green algae.

Now, that was in the 70s...but still, more recent highly speculative methods proposed would take closer to a millennium, and even they are optimistic and assume that we would have functioning technology on mars that we do not today.

One thing I found rather interesting about what one dude wanted to do, was that he wanted to let the planet evolve by itself, after we have made it possible to sustain life up there... this guy wanted to see what would happen if a new form of life was allowed to evolve on the planet, with only enough human intervention to speed up the evolution process a little. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Yes, that would be amazing.

Once Mars is viable for human inhabitants, however, I think the first colonists will want to recreate a place as close to earth as possible--because it will be inherently alien, and in some sense alienating. So I don't think that this will happen as a matter of choice.

But regardless, the conditions on Mars will force species (including humans) to adapt to the environment over the course of generations. The difference in gravity, sunlight, day length, seasonal length, atmosphere, magnetosphere (and therefore radiation), physical environment (the constitution and properties of the Martian land itself), etc. will all force evolutionary adaptations in whatever species are transplanted to the planet.

[Tree]

I didn't get the third and the last one.

The end of the world? One simple answer, Zelda stops being made, and all forms of Zelda are destroyed.

For an actual doomsday, the sun dies out. We have electricity, so we might be able to survive inside buildings, but going outside would be suicide.

Of course, that won't happen for billions of years, but it's still an inevitable future.

no, the whole world would soon freeze, and everything on it would just die.

[Jupiter]

UPDATE: Here are two good pieces on the challenges to terraforming of Mars:

A review of research regarding the technical challenges to Martian terraformation.

An article on the political and economic dynamics of very large projects in space.

[Christian]

UPDATE: Here are two good pieces on the challenges to terraforming of Mars:

A review of research regarding the technical challenges to Martian terraformation.

An article on the political and economic dynamics of very large projects in space.

I didn't understand that. Would you mind summarizing it?

Also i was watching this: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=8cWje-8b-ug

I don't know how much truth does it have, but what i caught from it is that mars wouldn't be a planet humans and animals can live on. It has no water, atmosphere, or a magnetic field to protect us from cosmic rays. Plus, it's too cold to live there without a spacesuit. We can however live there if our technology are advance enough to create our own food and create mars into a machine planet where machines practically do everything for us.

[Eddy]

I got my own theory here:

Too many Pi's (maths) will appear around the universe, therfore, sufficating the human race and the entire universe with its HORRID decimal numbers.

[Moosh]

When Microsoft outsells Nintendo, Nintendo collapses, Zelda games stop being made, and there is not a single E rated game left on Earth, I will destroy everything with my eye lasers.

[Eddy]

It's kind of hard to live on Mars. You have to grow crops all over the surface to get oxygen.

[Majora]

As far as the cosmos is concerned, a couple decades from now a fairly huge asteroid will pass/miss earth by around 600K miles. 800 or so years away from now is another fairly huge asteroid with TO EARTH OR BUST engraved on it.

1 billion years from now, the sun will be bright enough to make the atmosphere and oceans evaporate. 4 billion years after THAT, the Sun will turn into a red giant and incinerate Earth. Mars will probably go with it, and even then if it doesn't, the Sun will eventually be too dim and the red planet will be the same as pluto, more than likely.

Disease is always a likely candidate for 'end of the world', in a sense. Also War. All them nukes would probably affect most living things to some degree what with all that radiation.

Robot apocalypse, while exceedingly exceedingly EXCEEDINGLY unlikely, is not impossible.

Religion was right! (Though which one?) The sky rips open and, well, need I say more? The SKY. RIPS. OPEN.

There is more and more evidence against the Big Crunch, due to all the Dark Matter and Dark Energy fueling the expansion of the Universe. If the Earth lived through the Sun's end, we might get lucky when Andromeda does the horizontal tango with the Milky Way depending on where the sun/solar system is at the time.

2012? While it seems like some giant hoax, the Mayan's track record should be considered. I could be wrong, mind you, but didn't they have a habit of correctly/accurately predicting things?

Colonizing other plantets is remotely possible. It's certainly not forbidden by any particular laws of nature, but at the time of this post it is incredibly expensive (the only limiting factor, greedy human ****s) and our technology is not at a point where it could be reasonably accomplished.

Edited by Majora, 21 May 2010 - 02:31 PM.

[Eddy]

4 billion years after THAT, the Sun will turn into a red giant and incinerate Earth. Mars will probably go with it, and even then if it doesn't, the Sun will eventually be too dim and the red planet will be the same as pluto, more than likely.

I said something like that earlier in the topic. But a few billion years later the red giant turns into a white dwarf star which is smaller than Earth.

[William]

How it will end? I have no idea. When will it end? Your guess is as good as mine. Will it end? Yes, for humans at least.

[Eddy]

Yes, it will end for humans. When we get engulfed into the sun it's the end for humans forever.

[William]

Yes, it will end for humans. When we get engulfed into the sun it's the end for humans forever.

I'm pretty sure the end will be long before that, and if it's not, then in 5 billion years humans will most certainly off the earth by then.

[Nathaniel]

But when you think about it hard enough, it all seems rather insignificant. Let me show you something...

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=buqtdpuZxvk

So can we have your liver then?