Terraforming the Solar System

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Yeah, we had some discussion of the subject for Transhuman Space, and basically decided it was crazy. It's something like a thousand years for the atmosphere to just cool down to the point where you can try to do something more about it, and you'll probably have to import a mid-sized kuiper belt object to provide a usable quantity of water (with THS tech, that added additional time because you'd have to let the KBO slam into Venus, which would add some extra heat; that can be avoided with Traveller tech). We didn't really get into the topic of how to bind the CO2 in methods that don't make trouble, I think using blue-green algae to process it was many thousands of years.

I've never heard a plausible terraforming proposal that didn't involve time spans of at least centuries, to be honest, unless you posit technology so far ahead of ours that it's not quite clear why you need to terraform at all.

Even Mars would be a bitch.