I've been wondering for a while, will terraforming Mars be a goal in the game? Or will the game just stick to enclosed cities?
Will terraforming Mars be a goal in the game?
- Thread starter Cedar Valley
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That reminds me, I gotta load up Terragenesis again. I hear they've added the Trappist system...
They mentioned in their gameplay video that terraforming is out of the scope of the game. The game spans decades. Terraforming would be a couple centuries away. So no.
However, the early stages of a terraforming process could be implemented in the early stages of colonization, so I can easily see the implementation of a terraforming process as a mid-endgame goal.
Mmmh, you want long-term terraforming (i.e. retaining the atmosphere) you need at minimum raising the planetary mass to about 1/4 of Earth's. Could make for a fun end-game story line, but would be pretty apocalyptic for anyone already on the surface.
Yeah, the mass problem is the real limiting factor to terraforming Mars. The Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy discusses dropping asteroids regularly and in large numbers to slowly increase Mars' surface water quantities, but it really doesn't confront the real mass issue. The quantity of matter you'd need to drop to make Mars habitable is more than you could extract from the asteroid belt, let alone questions of how you'd deliver that to the surface without rapidly wiping out all life on the surface. The only thing I could think of would be to drop most of the matter on the equator and keep settlement well away from the matter, but even so....
I suppose the goal would mostly be to reduce the harsh conditions on the surface, thereby reducing the protective measures required to travel on the surface.
Low-level bombardment could be interesting, increasing atmosphere thickness and water content and so on at the cost of seismic activity and economic costs. Far from full-scale terraforming over the timeline, though.
Fewer meteors later at the cost of more meteors now. )))
To permanently increase the atmosphere of Mars and make it into a genuine Earth-like world is definitely something that would take that much mass. What most people talking about terraforming suggest though is that on a human time scale (aka just a couple hundred years to a thousand years) it is possible to use far less material and to even largely use resources already found on the surface of Mars to accomplish the task of thickening up the atmosphere of Mars that might last for a few million years.
The trick to getting the material onto Mars is mostly one of dispersal. If it was ground up into pebble sized rocks or even something like sand, almost all of the material would burn up in the upper atmosphere or fall to the ground in an extremely gentle fashion as simply atmospheric dust. Stuff this size is constantly hitting the Earth right now even as I type this out. Only the larger stuff is what you see as shooting stars.
Astronomers on Mars might get pissed from all of the debris in the sky messing up their astronomical observations, but that again isn't new to anybody doing stuff like that here on the Earth either.
Yes it would be nasty to have something the size of Phobos (or even Phobos itself) crash into the surface, but hopefully anybody who has the energy and resources to be moving objects that size around the Solar System also has discovered 19th Century technologies of TNT and other explosive compounds that would permit those larger rocks from falling down onto Mars in one piece and causing significant problems. Even crashing Phobos onto Mars wouldn't destroy all colonies on Mars, but it would make a nice sized crater and take out perhaps a couple domes.