Terraforming

"All civilisations become either space faring or extinct."
-Carl Sagan

 Terraforming

Current projections show that the world's population will reach 9 billion by around 2050.

Our worlds population is currently growing at 1.15% per year.

In 40 years the population of Earth has doubled.
Doubled.

That's a growth of 3 billion per year.

We need more space - and fast.

The  more the population grows, the more food we need. The more energy we need. The more homes we need.

The more space we need.

Logically the human race needs to move and branch out from our home planet and soon. But since the space travel technology we have today isn't amazing perhaps we should looks for places closer to home, in our Solar System.

This is where terraforming comes in.

 

An artists conception of a terraformed Mars.

Humans can obviously not survive the temperatures of Mars (on average around −63 °C).
We can't survive the radiation on Mars' surface.

and without a great supply of water or a place to grow crops without an indoor maintained environment sources of nourishment would be bleak.

These problems restrict us as we need to wear space suits in order to survive for even a quick mission on planets like these.

And do you know how much these things cost?

A space suit today costs around 13-16 million dollars.

So some how I don't think a selection of the human race will be prancing around mars in these super priced suits.

We need to alter the environment of mars itself which will allow the human race to live how they are ... and their are certain ways to do this - as fantasy as it sounds.

The first step is that we would need to heat up Mars. 

The good thing about terraforming is that it is all a chain reaction - and technically it has happened before. On the planet we are on right now. Years ago our planet was riddled with lava and plate tectonics but now it is home to features like lush forests and fields. So this transformation can take place and maybe to induce it on other planets like Mars we should just look back to our distant past.

Heating up the planets temperature would start the process of a chain reaction by melting the supposed frozen carbon dioxide around Mars. Increasing the volume of carbon dioxide in the air is the basis of the 'plan'.

We all know that the basis of photosynthesis is that plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen right? So eventually by introducing plants or structures such as stromatolites onto the planet the planets environment could essentially become healthy enough to support human life.

Anyway, this is the basic idea of terraforming and I will be talking about it in more detail and describing some of the methods in future posts. I'm sorry for our strange blog schedule recently and we should get it back soon - (Ben is away at the moment and I will be taking over some of his posts.) But thank you for reading guys - Chris.