Terraforming the Solar System

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Since some posters have framed this question or terraforming in realsitic terms, I'll give my realistic answer.
Why would terraforming Mars and Venus ever be more attractive options than simply improving infrastructure and habitat on Earth? With a much smaller payout of time, effort, and resources, Earth could support tens of billions of human beings. Earth is already terraformed.

It's also already claimed and owned.

The above actually applies to most colonial activity to some degree, the settlement of New England, for ex, by religious expatriates was an unreasonable expenditure of money, effort, and risk...except that they didn't think so by their standards.

There is no humanity, there are only humans, and humans don't work as a whole. Some humans do things, others do other things, the motivations don't make sense looked at 'as a whole', only individually and group by group.

Resources from other planets, if valuable enough to justify paying the costs of getting out there and setting up mining operations, could be extracted by robots.

Doesn't matter for the sort of motivations that drive colonization.

Even if for some reason human beings wanted or needed to live off-world, wouldn't building large space habitats be much easier and cheaper than terraforming Mars or other planets?

Nobody knows. Insufficient data.

The big problem with terraforming in the Traveller world (or most worlds with useful FTL tech and many habitable worlds in the galaxy) is that it's probably easier to find a useful world than convert one. Take away FTL, and the equation changes.

Now, the other big issue with terraforming is that (at least in games and stories), if you've got the power to do it, you're so powerful than many story concepts and gaming ideas becoming very hard to apply.