08-04-2019, 06:14 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Aerogel martian habitats.
The more primitive algae were probably less efficient in producing oyxgen. It would take time to get that system right especially as oxygen is a deadly poison to anaerobic lifeforms. And the earliest lifeforms were anaerobic. Or at least evolved from anaerobic lifeforms.
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08-04-2019, 09:11 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Aerogel martian habitats.
Sure, but the point is, even speeding it up a million times is thousands of years.
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08-05-2019, 07:13 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Aerogel martian habitats.
The real bottleneck is that life creates wholesome conditions for life. Small amounts of biomass have small slow effects. It is the cumulative effects that make the big changes. The built up is incredibly slow, but once the tipping point is hit, change is rappid and profound. To speed up terraforming, you've got to get to the tipping point faster. Which is the vast problem.
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08-05-2019, 12:48 PM | #24 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Aerogel martian habitats.
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Of course 'speeded up' might easily mean converting 2 billion into 2 million or 20,000. Still a long time on a human scale. Also, Earth 4 billion years ago was already a better terraforming candidate than Venus or Mars today. A lot of how hard terraforming is depends on how close your target world is to what you want. An interstellar society would have far more potential 'targets' to choose from.
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08-05-2019, 01:09 PM | #25 | |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Aerogel martian habitats.
Quote:
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