[ExI] Can you terraform Mars

[Adrian Tymes]

I see a few common errors in that game.

1) Assuming that only one solution can be used at a time.

"Which would work better: X, Y, or Z?"  The answer in many cases is,
"most or all of them together beats any single one of them", kind of
like how the problem of increasing humanity's electricity production
without wrecking the environment is wind AND solar AND other
solutions.

2) Assuming the resources for this would come out of a specific other budget.

"Some researchers object to the idea of terraforming Mars because they
worry that it would detract from efforts to safeguard Earth’s
environment — and would use valuable resources that could help our own
planet."  Bullshit.  Research into terraforming Mars can also find
solutions to terraform Earth - not "instead of", but the exact same
projects.  If a terraforming effort were to go through, it is sheer
arrogance - and, to be clear, probabilistically incorrect (as in "not
literally 0% chance of being true, but 0.000...001%, which is close
enough") - to assume that all or most of the budget for that would
otherwise have gone to improving Earth's environment.

3) Outright misstatements of fact.

For instance, on the redirecting nitrogen-rich asteroids into Mars
option, they say, "But terraformers would have to identify a distant
asteroid, send a spacecraft to it, steer it towards Mars and smash it
into the planet. This would take as much energy as all of humanity
consumes in a few months on Earth."  This is blatantly incorrect.
Identifying a distant asteroid is done all the time for trivial
amounts of energy.  Constructing a spacecraft capable of steering such
an asteroid would likewise be well within the energy budget of current
deep space missions, that don't bankrupt Earth's energy budget.  Once
the spacecraft is launched, it takes nearly 0 further energy from
Earth (not exactly 0 because there's still telemetry).  The problem is
more one of scale: you couldn't do this with just one asteroid as the
text implies.  You'd need a lot - and finding, let alone redirecting,
that many would take time.  (Though, being done over time, the energy
to manufacture and launch the spacecraft would remain a tiny
percentage of Earth's energy budget over that time.)

And then a less common fallacy: "What’s more, many scientists are
careful to note that terraforming Mars is not something that has to be
done; leaving it alone is a perfectly valid choice."  Well, no,
nothing ever absolutely has to be done.  Lying around and doing
nothing all day every day until you starve to death is physically
possible.  There are far more compelling reasons to not terraform
Mars, at least not at this time: most to all of the proposed benefits
of terraforming Mars can be achieved to better degrees with faster and
less expensive solutions - for example (for not quite all, but most,
of the proposed benefits), orbital habitats closer to Earth (at least
at first) spun to create 1G with thick enough radiation shielding.

On Sat, Jun 27, 2026 at 7:40 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> The people at the journal Nature have concocted a little game about terraforming Mars; I doubt if our AI overlords will have much interest in doing so, nor do I think they have the patience because it would take a long time, but it's sort of fun.
>
> Can you terraform Mars
>
> John K Clark    See what's on my list at  Extropolis
> 3nn
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