3 Key Technologies to Start Terraforming Mars in Our Lifetime

Can we move Mars closer to the Sun?

Greetings from Odilon, for Earth to form Mars, robots could be sent to excavate caves for future shelters, send seeds of cold-resistant grasses to be tested, separate minerals useful for future industrial processes or transform them with robots into intelligent machinery.tenks

Isn't Mars a moon from the planet that used to be there!!

Starship...Starship. It can't even make to orbit in one piece.

The argument about ethics of terraforming Mars is so silly in my opinion. If there are microbes in Mars soil, they’ve had millions of years to figure it out and they have not done anything so too bad so sad.

Great guest! Love to hear more of her work and subsequent updates.

Ye of little faith…🙄. Starship will come through…what competition? I’ll wait.

It's pointless to terraform mars. The water will just sublimate into space. The dirt has toxic perchlorates which destroys life. There's no magnetic field so cosmic rays just destroy all life. Many other problems. So terraform somewhere else instead.

How about starting with the Moon, which is much closer and convenient for launching ships to Mars?

all these silly people who worship the devil really believe science tells them the truth when its just all an agenda to keep you devil worshipping , nobody in any of your lifetimes are going to any planet or moon come back with evidence before you die and prove me wrong please , you cant go to space end of story wake up.

What a right couple of space cadets these two are.

If you warm up Mars you won't get water, you'll get steam. There's not enough pressure for water.

Interesting human. Not only to listen to, but also to watch.
Loved the interview. Plenty of thought food there.
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It isn't even crumbs of pie in the sky. Can't that nice lady find a real job?

Can we use static electricity? As a way to heat up mars .

What if you did every technology all at the same time ?

We can turn mars into a prison..

Fraser seems a lot more positive about Mars colonisation and terraformation than he was when interviewing the Weinersmiths re their book "A City on Mars" (which isn't about a city on Mars, incidentally).

The nanorods proposal shows, I think, that as soon as we start applying human ingenuity to the problem we are going to make much more rapid progress than previously thought possible.

No.

Terraforming a planet, lol !

Step one, Don't.. overshoot mars and mine ceres for fuel station and crew hub, have ships gather up small asteroids and send fuel, water and rare minerals to the moon from ceres, have a shipyard and science Metropolis on the moon, then after you've broken the limitations for materials, start shipping drills and everything needed for building an underground city of obscure proportions.. dome lights and landing sites is all that is needed on the surface, nuclear is the obvious answer for power generation for all this.. also, crew transport should be nuclear, mineral and fuel need not be, shipping time doesn't matter when you have a conveyor belt of matching orders arriving every season, (just like shipping of ye ol')

Hey, quit being so hard on Mars. (Hehe, I said hard on) At least it's close and it actually has a surface and isn't as bad as Mercury, Venus, Your anu... I mean Uranus or Pluto. Yes, Pluto. Which is a planet. I mean, what's your second choice besides Mars? Some Moon that would take us 3 years to get to? I highly doubt that there's any better candidates to move to than our ginger neighbor.

Until we can restart the core, and that is hundred of years away, Mars will never look anything like Earth, and anything we try will just be a waste of time, no atmosphere, low gravity, people born there would never be able to ever visit earth.

I do not believe that Dr DeBenedictis' approach to terraforming is necessarily the most beneficial, efficient or even cost effective way to 'terraform' Mars. Mars should be geoformed to setup the right circumstances to create the habitable planet that has been agreed upon. Principally it should be changed to the degree that humans can comfortably live in a breathable, earth-identical pressure and composition atmosphere. The fourth planet from the Sun has many disadvantages that make the prospect of settling the planet by organisms corresponding to terran biota difficult and time-consuming. I agree that a scientific discipline associated with certain technological companies and engineering schools should be created today as there is interest in transforming Venus and exploiting Mercury as well. Ultimately, the practices and ambitions associated with 'settling' the Solar System will dictate the prospects and possibilities not the human imagination. I believe there is a case to be made to simultaneously make sections of Mars and domes friendly to Earth based life and machines while setting up the circumstances to make long term deep changes to the planet. It might even be preferable to initiate catastrophic changes to the geology of Mars to alter the basic characteristics to make very long term evolution of biota possible, even without human influence. I think it is foolish to alter biology to adapt to Mars, which either do not efficiently alter the environment of Mars or never help create an Earth like or 'terran' environment. It is simplistic to genetically modify certain simple organisms to adapt to the perchlorate ridden soil of Mars the hard radiation, very low atmosphere pressure and high CO2 content of the atmosphere. It makes more sense to me to immediately transform or transport the raw materials to create a pressurized nitrogen oxygen atmosphere, 're-till the soil' {or at least sections of it} and even make geological changes to maximize the habitability of the planet. This might include creating ocean basins in the north of the planet and even cracking the planet to create tectonic shifting of plates. Creating a magnetic field might be necessary ultimately, not simply because it can help protect the atmosphere passively, but it can also help to mitigate any solar storms that would impact any civilization on Mars. Liberating the existing water and gases on Mars is time consuming and expensive but may be supplemented by active transport of materials from the moons and asteroids in our Solar System. What may not be necessary is to implant an altered Earth-based flora that adapts to how Earth is now. That would involve Aresforming patches of Earth biota and then implanting that on the red planet. I believe we should terraform Mars without resorting to interim steps. The point may be moot as people like O'Neil have pointed out that it might be more cost effective to build orbiting habitats rather than trying to force entire planets moons and asteroids to mimmick Earth to the point of habitability. Nevertheless we can create another blue-green-brown jewel in the heavens if we do it right. ty if you have read some or most of this. ty Fraser for your great videos and Dr. DeBenedictis for educating us in this interview about terraforming.

Bwhahaha I loved it when she Shut down Fraser's leftoid colonialism tripe.

Instead I forgot the magnetic field problem whatever terraforming they do is just going to fail

She is mad like an omar

It's impossible to terraform Mars without a magnetic field to stop the atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind. I won't say "never going to happen" but its a very long way off.

Liked the interview. A young scientist with optimism!

Nope. You'd have to scrape the entire planet 's surface of all perchlorates.

There’s another scenario, we find organic forms of life but they share resemblances at DNA and chirality level? so is impossible to differentiate it from ours, can be possible as a panspermia Mars to Earth or Earth to Mars.

This talk of endangering indigenous life forms on Mars is too woke, even for me. First things first. If we are going to extend prerogatives to alien lifeforms, it might be best to start with immigrants.

Great questions and interactive discussion Fraser 👍🏼

Erika is Amazing! Great research! Super intelligent. Well spoken!

All of this belongs in the medium of science fiction novels, not in a discussion of science and engineering. Maybe you can use the hot gas generated in presentations like this, to generate an atmosphere. Then teleport it to Uranus.

Amazing discussion!! Now we’re getting somewhere (and we don’t have to nuke Mars)

Fantasy

Equatorial greenhouse. 30 north 30 south, 9,000 feet high. iron oxide provides o2 and iron for the biosphere frame.

She's so optimistic. She's cool…!

As much as I love SpaceX and Elon's vision of pushing humanity forward to become space-faring, I am absolutely 100% against terraforming Mars. There is just so much valuable science there, specifically potential answers to questions regarding the origin of life that can't be answered elsewhere. And that science could be lost forever if we start terraforming. I like the idea of terraforming in general as a long term plan, but I'm more so abide by the concept of "gravity wells are for suckers." We need to focus first on building large-scale space habitats, as well as space-based industrial complexes.

All of the planets have been warming internally since we entered the S1 dark matter stream 30+ years ago. If we redirected some of the dark matter circulating in the solar system we could warm Mars to a comfortable temperature.

What's crazy is we've been accidentally terra(de)forming Earth since about 1850 and we've been accelerating the process since the 1970s. Imagine how fast we could terraform planets if we really set our minds to the task. If you want fantastical, go for terraforming Mars and Venus at the same time. Set up a continuous conveyor belt of Aldrin cyclers between the two planets and scoop atmosphere from Venus and dump it into Mars. Edit: I would hazard a guess that Rocketlab is the closest company to becoming second to a commercial reusable rocket. Blue Origin have launched once acing the orbital bit but not the reusable bit. The suborbital tourist rocket doesn't count. Rocketlab have a ton of data on orbital rocketry including partial reusability (and an orbital class engine reuse). But for mass to orbit, Starship is going to the big daddy of rockets for some years. When it works, the Chinese will be copying it at pace. Edit 2: It's hard to claim that humans are good stewards of our environment. We're going through possibly the largest bio extinction event right now. We are losing thousands of species annually. Edit 3: Both finding life AND not finding life on Mars are remarkable results. Edit 4: Why not selectively breed micro organisms for perchlorate reduction towards lower and lower pressures in CO2 atmospheres?

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Very inspiring talk. Thank you @DrErikaDeBenedictis for your great vision. Please clone yourself in orders of magnitude, we need more scientists like you. 8-) . Thank you @fraser that was a very good invite!

I find it hard to be concerned over the fate of mythical Martian microbes.