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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • This article is more about where is more convenient to make a first off world base than terraform. It’s very hard to make a base on mars and the moon but a moon base is much easier.

    Terraforming is a whole another beast though. You’ll need to be able to create industry on Mars with local resources to begin terraforming, notably harvesting solar energy. Wind energy is going to be absolute ass to begin with since the air pressure on the moon in 1% of earth’s so we’d need to do a stupid amount of climate change just to make it as livable as Mount Everest Basecamp. Probably we’d need to electrolyze all of the surface rust for oxygen and then we’d still need to deal with radiation issues because of it’s still missing the molten core.

    More realistically we’d need a Dyson sphere around Mars, a shaft that goes all the way to the core and blast it with the power of the sun for centuries to kickstart the core again. Not sure about the calculations on that one. Could off by many factors of 10. Once done it can be sealed and the insulation will keep it going for a longer than we’d have to worry about.

    I personally think a floating city on Venus a lot nicer. At 50-60km elevation the air in breathable for humans so we’d just have to make massive blimps.




  • I live in Iceland and we try to predict volcanic activity all the time and it’s off by weeks or months. To be fair, that’s a blink of an eye on a geological scale so it’s pretty accurate but the nature of the problem is that you have so many forces that all interact with each other.

    It’s pretty similar to “how far can you tip the chair back before it falls” but we don’t know the size, weight and shape of the chair really well. You just need one fracture in the rock from previous earthquake to throw all the calculations off.

    I don’t know the context of the post but I imagine it’s media related, like a seismologist saying “could be as soon as tomorrow” and the journalist just saying “earthquake tomorrow”. Also seismologist don’t shut up is true.