The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview with Adam Curtis (2018)

Re:The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview wi... by ben_w on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @05:19AM (#26722209)

Mars is colder than Antarctica, drier than the Sahara desert, and has lower air pressure than the top of Mt Everest, and the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants). Making an independent colony on Mars in one generation basically needs us to invent von Neumann machines — not impossible, but a larger economic change than the entire industrial revolution, and even then we might need to use that economic power to crash-land some comets on the red planet to give it useful quantities of nitrogen and water (that said, TIL Curiosity found 1100 ppm nitrates in the soil: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/).

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Re:The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview wi... by adwn on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @07:00AM (#26723096)

> the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants)

Minor nitpick: There are only very few plants that are able to extract nitrogen from the air. That's because N2 is a very stable molecule and it takes a lot of energy to use it chemically. Almost all plants are dependent on other nitrogen compounds they extract using their roots.

[That's the reason why the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes the N2 from the air into NH3 (ammonia), was such a big deal. It is estimated that 50% of the nitrogen atoms in your body once passed through the Haber-Bosch process.]

There's probably plenty of nitrogen in various minerals on Mars. Just not in the atmosphere.

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Re:The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview wi... by ben_w on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @08:46AM (#26724023)

Good point. I was thinking about nitrogen-fixing bacteria etc., but even with that, your point is sufficient.

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Re:The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview wi... by Gravityloss on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @03:38PM (#26730000)

One thing that I only learned recently is that a lot of terraforming is very destructive.

So you would NOT want to colonize a planet first and then terraform it. Instead you would terraform it first. Terraforming Mars for example could involve sending a large number of comets to crash to the planet. If there were existing colonies on the planet, they might be destroyed by the impacts or be inundated by the torrential rains.

Isaac Arthur has some thought provoking videos about this.

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Re:The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview wi... by nytgop77 on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @04:10PM (#26730502)

Just this week I discovered Isaac A. on youtube. I can not recommend him enough if space is thing of interest. (to anybody else reading this)

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