Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Catalysts make a reaction that would happen anyway faster (sometimes much faster), but mostly the way you neutralize acids is by combining them with a like amount of base.
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Leaving the question of what to do with the salt, of course.
It's too early to get too excited about either an optimistic or pessimistic appraisal of terraforming prospects, or terraforming technologies. Maybe we'll discover there's more CO2 on Mars than we know about in some form or another, maybe we'll discover that Mars' gravity and mass are just too low to make it work CO2 or not. Maybe, by the time we're ready to try terraforming it, we'll have tech that looks like magic to us now. Maybe we won't.
Still, I've thought for a long time that SF tends to understate the difficulty and complexity of terraforming. A rule of thumb I use to remind myself of the
scale of terraforming operations: imagine if someone put out a tender for a project to
move the Atlantic Ocean somewhere else.
That helps put this stuff in perspective.