[ExI] Can you terraform Mars

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 3:39 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> 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.*
>>
>>
I thought about this a long time ago. With nanotech, you could make diamond
shells that contain oxygen and raid the atmosphere out as tiny diamond
spheres full of high pressure oxygen. But ghod help you if anyone managed
to set the layer on fire.
Keith

>
>>>
>> *> 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*
>
>
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