[ExI] Can you terraform Mars

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jun 27, 2026 at 10:40 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote

* >> The tougher nut to crack is Venus.*
>>
>
> *> Mercury makes for a harder challenge.*
>

*I don't think so. Thanks to its crushing atmosphere Venus is hotter than
Mercury even though it's further from the sun. And Mercury has a higher
percentage of metals than Venus or the Earth which makes it a more
attractive target than Venus.  For years people thought Mercury permanently
kept one hemisphere towards the sun and the other hemisphere facing away
from it, and that turned out to be almost true but not quite;
its gravitational locked to the sun so that it makes exactly 3 rotations
for every 2 orbits around the Sun. The result is that even though it only
takes 88 earth days for the planet to orbit the sun, on Mercury the time
between sunrise and sunset is 176 Earth days. A Mercury day is longer than
a Mercury year.  *

*It would be nice if Mercury's rotation could be slowed down a little more
so that the two hemispheres really were permanently locked to the sun as we
once thought they were, but that would probably be an even bigger project
than terraforming Mars. *

*As for terraforming Jupiter… well forget it. *

*John K Clark*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260628/55a07828/attachment.htm>