It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars.
We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 .
Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environment on Earth today is almost identical to the environment on Earth 1,000 years ago. The atmosphere is about 1023 millibars; 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and 0.04% everything else. Liquid water covers most of the surface, with an active water cycle causing water rain to occur periodically over much of the planet.
The temperature change is so small, that we would not notice it if it were on any other planet in the solar system, and it is far below the noise floor of day-to-day variance
And don't forget that the Earth is more than willing to enter a negative feedback loop -- she will take that 1-2 degree increase in temperature and say "I heard you like warm weather, so I'm gonna release all this trapped methane and CO2 from my frozen parts and let you have it too."
I interpret this as you misinterpreting the opinions here, confusing them with the opinion of unrelated colonization-fanatics, via an unknown mechanism; I will not attempt any defense of either perspective right now.
Attempts to terraform Mars allow humans to try some things and to see what happens. It will allow to make our models of climate more precise.
For now our understanding of a climate based on observational studies. Not a controlled experiment. So when we start to do something having some climatic goals in mind, we'll start to learn a lot. And it would be better for Earth if we started with Mars.
Though we have no time, but it doesn't seem a sufficient reason not to try get at least some experience from terraforming Mars. It may reduce risks.
I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two things at the same time. It's like saying, "People focusing on making movies when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world." or "People focusing on curing fibromyalgia when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world."
The bottleneck to reversing climate change is not money or manpower, it is politics. We cannot force other people (especially in other countries) to do the right thing for the environment. We can, however, do our best to improve things on our side and pressure others to do so as well. And while we are putting our best effort towards that, we shouldn't stop making art, researching medicine, or even, trying to colonize mars.
Also, the research and development needed to colonize Mars may very well yield scientific discoveries that allow us to reverse climate change. And even if it doesn't, and Earth is ruined despite our best efforts here, we won't have all our eggs in one basket.
My point is, I just do not believe that researching colonization of Mars will do anything to thwart our efforts to improve the Earth. Quite the contrary, it may help those efforts.
This times a million. I see it all the time on social media when it comes to news stories too, and it's as ridiculous there as it is here. People have different interests and skillsets, and they don't all need to focus on the same thing at the same time. The folks looking to explore Mars colonisation/space exploration and those working to slow down or prevent climate change are usually entirely different groups, who have studied what they're interested in for years. You can't just chuck them all at a single 'project' and refuse to allow anything else, in the same way we can't pause the rest of human civilisation because your pet issue isn't being sorted quickly enough, or have the entirety of a media organisation reassigned to a single story.
We live in an environment that's we're so conveniently adapted for us that it's easy to take for granted. You can spend your whole life doing damage to this precious thing we all got for free and die before the consequences of your actions catch up with you. It's all too easy to just miss ecological thinking altogether.
On a spacecraft though, or a Martian colony, the f-around-find-out cycle is gonna be deadly short. You're gonna need everyone in board with doing what they need to to stay alive.
Again, something we desperately need on Earth.
So let them fail to colonize Mars. Let them fail 100 times. Because what we learn from those failures just might save us at home.
https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
It's many orders of magnitude easier to afford a $100,000,000 home if you make $10,000 per year than if you only make $1 per year.
But you're never going to afford that home either way.
I had never heard that. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River
On what are you basing this statement? I would argue that entirely depends on the complexity of the species and the time per generation. Bacteria certainly can adapt to extremely different conditions within years, if not even quicker. And these "simple life forms" are arguably much more important for the ecosystem than more complex ones like mammals.
When it comes to changing climate (and some degree of pollution) instead of newly evolved adaptations you get migrations or selection for particular alleles. Adjust up and back down and you can end up with diversity constraints on both ends.
This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web.
Anything you can point me to? :)
What's gone extinct: Virtually all of South America's marsupial megafauna (much of this prior to the arrival of humans, triggered by the rising of the central American ithsmus), mammoths, mastodons, native horses (the species was reintroduced by Europeans), giant ground sloth (Megalonyx), short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, tapirs, peccaries, giant tortoises, the American lion, Miracinonyx (the American cheetah), siaga antelope, several species of llamas, Camelops (a giant camel), and more, all in North America alone. Very nearly the American bison ("buffalo") and California condor, amongst others.
In Europe there were also several species of mammoth and mastodons, native straight-tusked elephants, lions, cave bear, Irish elk, woolly rhinocerous, aurochs, and more.
Australia saw two phases of human-driven extinctions, one triggered by the aboriginies roughly 50kya, the second by Europeans, beginning about 250 years ago.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_megafauna>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...>
It was about what has survived
Large land animals only really survive in Africa
And thus Toxoplasma gondii, from our ever present felines, gains awareness and rules the universe as a hivemind protozoa.
I see some potential for a movie deal here.
That is another important source of aligned biodiversity
We've created varieties, variants, races... no species. They can still interbreed.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.060...
From the Review article “How humans drive speciation as well as extinction”
The very reason we care about the ecosystem in the first place is because we depend on it. That's the most important point - environmentalism is first and foremost about our own survival. Nobody gives a shit about plants and animals for their sake.
This implies two things:
- Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
- Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.
(Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")