• Question: Do you think it would be possible to terraform most of the planets and moons in the solar system? (titan,venus, mars ect)

    Asked by anon-253697 on 7 May 2020.
    • Photo: Jon Noble

      Jon Noble answered on 7 May 2020:

      What a great question! By terraforming, I’m guessing that you mean convert the planet or moons to the point where we could live on them without spacesuits and grow plants outside.

      There are two things required to make this happen – they need to be hot enough that we could comfortably live outside, and be able to have an atmosphere that we could breathe.

      In the inner solar system, the planets get blasted by solar rays coming out of the sun, which strip away a planets atmosphere. We are lucky on Earth because we have a magnetic core that deflects the solar rays and helps protect our atmosphere. – but Mars doesn’t have any real atmosphere at all.

      Once we move to the outer solar system, things start to get very cold. Some of the moons around Jupiter and Saturn are sligtly hotter due to volcanoes or heating due to gravityfrom the nearby huge planets. But they don’t really have any atmosphere. So I think if we were able to terraform any planet or moon, it would be out around Jupiter or Saturn.

    • Photo: Daire Harvey-Carroll

      Daire Harvey-Carroll answered on 7 May 2020:

      Great question! Short answer is not right now unfortunately – but maybe at some point in the distant future. The main problem we have to overcome is that things change at a planetary scale very slowly. Any changes we made to other worlds – even using science fiction level technology that doesn’t exist right now – would take hundreds if not thousands of years so it would require a level of planning and forward thinking that humans don’t tend to be too good at.

      There are people working very hard to make life in space possible. I had an amazing chat with a brilliant woman at a conference last year who is studying how we can grow vegetables in space to supplement astronauts’ diets. Studying our own atmosphere is also showing us how human actions can really impact life on a global scale.

      Really, I think our priority should be to look after this one planet we already have which is perfect for hosting all sorts of wonderful life and make sure our actions don’t change how it functions too much.

    • Photo: Rehemat Bhatia

      Rehemat Bhatia answered on 9 May 2020:

      I’m not sure about this one as I am an ocean scientist by training! But Jon and Daire have both given great answers 🙂

    • Photo: Giovanni Maddalena

      Giovanni Maddalena answered on 11 May 2020:

      It took billions of years for Earth to terraform itself! Could we do it quicker? Maybe. But not right away.

      Let’s rewind a bit. Our planet used to be a ball of lava. It was so hot that all of the water was evaporated into the atmosphere. Eventually things cooled down and the water began to form oceans. However, there was no oxygen. Where do we get oxygen from? Plants! We believe that plants which grew in the ocean (like algae) helped Earth become what it is today. It sucked the Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere and turned it into oxygen.

      It took a very long time to produce enough oxygen but they got there eventually. Now we have discovered organisms which can survive in all sorts of conditions. We know that microscopic life can be found in cold ice, boiling hot springs and dangerously toxic waters – these are known as extremophiles.

      One day we may be able to take extremophiles which are adapted to survive on the cold Titan, or the hot Venus or the dry Mars. We may be able to engineer them to produce oxygen, just like plants. If we leave them alone for a few years they might begin the process of Terraformation on other planets and moons in the solar system.

    • Photo: Jacque Cilliers

      Jacque Cilliers answered on 14 May 2020: last edited 14 May 2020 10:01 am

      Very interesting question.

      Terraforming is the act of changing the atmosphere of a planet so that it looks like Earth’s atmosphere. I assume you mean long term?

      You wouldn’t be able to terraform ALL planets in the solar system. You need a few things to be present first.

      You need a decent temperature which can sustain life. This is generally accepted to be the temperature at which water remains liquid. This depends on how far the planet is from the sun, and is called the goldilocks zone, because the temperature is just right! Earth and Mars are in this zone. Which would then include the moon. Venus and Mercury are too hot, while Planets beyond Mars are way too cold, including titan, which has a surface temperature of -179 degrees C (That’s liquid nitrogen temperature!). That’s cold enough to freeze a human solid in seconds.

      The planet also needs to be able to hold an atmosphere. This means that the planet needs to be able to keep its atmosphere around the planet. The moon cannot do that because it’s too small and doesn’t have a good magnetic core. The bigger a planet the higher its gravity is and the better it can hold on to its atmosphere, which is attracted to the planet by gravity. The magnetic core produces a magnetic shield which protects the planet against gamma rays from the sun. Without it, the sun would just strip the atmosphere off the planet, like what happened on Mars…. So Mars is out of the question too, unfortunately.

      I would love to see a planet get terraformed one day, but right now its looking impossible. Mars would be the best bet, but you would need to find a way to protect the atmosphere from the sun. The way to do this would be to create a strong magnetosphere around the planet.

      I’m open to suggestions.

Comments

  • Photo: Andrew_Y

    Andrew_Y commented on :

    I think you’ve got some great answers above already. Taking a different tack, and wearing my science fiction reader hat, I’d recommend a (fat) trilogy of books by Kim Stanley Robinson – Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars – that carefully imagines the scientific process by which we might turn Mars from a cold, airless desert into somewhere that life might flourish openly on its surface. Lots of writers have imagined making Mars more Earth-like, but Robinson really goes to town. So if you’re interested in how we might make Mars – or other planets / moons – habitable, it’s a great place to start (albeit a fictional one!).