February 12, 2019 • 43 mins
Can we make another planet habitable?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Okay, Daniel, how many times in your life do you
think you've moved, like from one house to another so
many times. There was one period when we actually moved
back and forth across the Atlantic. I think it was
seven times in four years. That's wild. Yeah, from California
to Geneva and back. It was insane. Well, the hard
part is when you need to do renovations right, Like
(00:28):
if you're the home that you're moving into is not
quite habitable, that's right. You want to get it just
as you like it. You wanted to be nice and cozy,
you wanted to be comfortable place to live. You want
all those things right. And that's hard enough when the
other place you're living is across town or across the country,
or even somewhere else on the planet. Yeah, but now
imagine if you had to move to a whole another planet.
(00:50):
I'm not sure I can get my wife on board
for taking the kids to Mars or to the moon
or did you better it's a little further than Geneva.
It's a time of it for the traveling in Switzerland,
and I'm not sure how we'd find a contractor to
do that work, Like, who's going to do the renovations
of my lunar base Elon Musk. He's probably got a
company already for it. So you five different kinds of flooring.
(01:13):
It's called house X the flooring company. The flooring company.
Oh perfect. Hi, I'm h and I'm Daniel. Welcome to
(01:39):
our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm a
particle physicist, but I like thinking and talking about all
sorts of crazy things in science, and I make cartoonists
and mostly I'm just crazy. I got nothing to say
to that. You're totally a sane, a normal person, and yeah,
(02:01):
I'm so not saying that. Um. And this is our
podcast in which we take things in the universe and
try to explain them to you, make them understandable. We
don't want you to be intimidated by the fancy words
and science. Who wants you to understand them so you
can impress people of cocktail parties when they ask you
what is the Higgs boson or how does something actually work? Yeah,
we want you to imagine what it's like to travel
(02:22):
the universe and to see all these amazing things out there. Today,
we're gonna talk about living on other worlds, terraforming, terraforming.
Is that like the ceramic thing that you make statues
out of. I think if you want to make a
really big planet size statue, then you could call that terraforming. Yeah. Wait,
(02:45):
I think I'm thinking about terra cotta. That's different. Terra cotta.
That's right. Can you build a planet out of terra cotta? Right?
That would be the largest pottery wheel in the in
the history of the universe. Yeah. So that's a big
question is can we be an InterPlaNet hairy species? Can
we can humanity live in multiple planets? That's right? And
this this is a really important question because if we
(03:07):
want to survive for thousands or millions of years, we
can't keep all of our eggs in just one planetary basket.
You know, one comet comes and slams in the Earth
and kills everything on Earth. Poof, we're dead. But if
we have people living on Mars and the Moon and
you know, and somewhere else, then we could survive such
cataclysm as a species. You mean as a species, not
me or you individually. Like I'm not going to jump
(03:29):
up there and catch the commet and save the planet
or anything like that. But from the point of view
of humanity. It seems like a really important project to
get off this rock, get living somewhere else. Yeah, Or
like if we ruling this planet, right, Like, if we
mess it up somehow and Earth is no longer happenable,
what's going to happen to humanity? We have to go
somewhere else. And you make us sound like we're a
(03:49):
bunch of kids making a mess in the living room
or something like you don't have faith that we're gonna
be able to take care of this planet. You think
we're on a on the trajectory to climate doomsday, where
more like little kids burning tires inside of the house,
you know what I mean? Like that's an officially recommendation people,
Jorge says, do not burn tires inside your house. Just
do it in the backyard. Right, Generally that's a bad idea. Yeah,
(04:12):
is that how you start your cozy family evenings? Let's
go burn some tires outside? Um. Yeah, But this is
even bigger than that. This is bigger than can we
go to another planet? Can we establish a base on
another planet? This is can we make another planet habitable?
So you can live outside, you can breathe the air,
you can run around, you can grow crops. So you
meaning we can go to another planet and live there,
(04:33):
but we would be in space suits and inside of
some kind of base the whole time. That wouldn't be
a lot of fun. That would not be a lot
of fun. I mean, I think if you went to
Mars and just build a colony, like you know, out
of ships and domes and stuff like that, you'd basically
be living on Antarctica, you know, be cold and dry
and unpleasant, and you have to pee in a space
suit all the time, and it would not be like
living on Earth and be very hard to imagine millions
(04:56):
or billions of people living that way on Mars right
or anywhere else. So if you want to really want
to establish non Earth population centers, you have to figure
out a way to make the planet itself habitable without
space suit. Yeah. So that's where the term terraforming comes from.
And so we were curious to know how many people
out there, including you, maybe knew this term. Yeah. So
(05:17):
I went out in the street and I asked people,
have you heard of terraforming? Do you know what it is?
What does it mean? Is it possible? Here's what people
had to say, I've heard the word before, but I
don't actually know anything about it. Okay, I used the
form like how the Earth got formed? Okay, No, I
haven't heard terraform before. No, No, I have no terraform.
I've heard of it, I don't know the meaning of it. Okay,
(05:40):
um on another planet forming the environment or something like that,
something along those lines. A right, is that like when
you dig up the planet. I've heard of the term,
but not the definition. What's your best guess what it
might be? How the Earth forms or how any planet
forms or good. Yeah, I have heard of terraforming. Terraforming
is whole fully something when we can be a step
(06:01):
three civilization. I forget the correct connotation. But you'll maybe
get a lot of energy from the Sun and be
able to use that to go and colonize another planet
and make the human race become a multiplanetary species. Do
you think that's realistic? No? I think we have way
too much on Earth that we need to take care
of still, and that it's a sexy idea, but I
think that it's not gonna happen for some long amount
(06:22):
of time. All right, So a lot of nose. Maybe
I was asking the wrong question. I was asking people
have they heard of terraforming, and most of the people,
except for one very smart gentleman I had a lot
of a lot to say about it, had never even
heard of the word. Right. They're like, just not even
part of something they think about or or talk about
or wonder about. Right, So that's good. We can we
(06:42):
can explain people what the word means. Nobody thought it
was terra cotta. Nobody except for you things that has
to do with pottery, That's right, very Chinese soldiers. Except
for now. Somebody now is going to be listening to
this podcasts. They're gonna come away with it that that's
their takeaway, right, that terraforming is making an earth out
of terra cotta. But maybe a more interesting question to
have asked would have been like, do you think it's
(07:03):
possible to turn Mars into a habitable planet? Right? That's
I'm curious what people would have thought about that. But anyway,
in another universe and another multiverse, I asked that different question.
Do you think people would have known or thought it
was possible or not? I don't know, but I'm always
surprised to hear what people think. I would have would
like to know what people think is possible if that's
sort of a feasible project the humanity could pull off.
(07:25):
I mean, man, massive planetary engineering, as you'll hear in
today's podcast, folks, it's not a small project to undertake.
That's a word, planetary engineering. The idea that you can
change an entire planet. That's amazing, right, Yeah, And you
know it's something people thinking about for Earth. Right. Geo
Engineering is the study of, like, can we solve our
climate climate problems by doing some crazy engineering, you know,
(07:48):
like deflecting the Sun's rays or or you know, injecting
things into the atmosphere or pulling CEO two out of
the atmosphere, like these massive engineering projects as desperate measures
to reverse climate change. It's gonna become center stage more
and more, and then in the next few years, I
think be cool to we get that as a degree,
you know, in your diploma planetary engineer. Yeah. Well, you know,
(08:11):
the more people burned tires outside or in their living room,
the more we're gonna have to worry about this stuff
and counteract it. So somebody's got to think about it.
There's a lot of really fun papers about geo engineering.
People have crazy schemes to try to cool off the
Earth or I mean a lot of it sounds really
risky to me. It's not like we really understand the
way the atmosphere works. So trying to tweet it and
twiddle with it, like dialing the knobs on the atmosphere,
(08:32):
that scares me. Seems tricky. If you don't have a
lot of faith in engineers, generally, I feel, well, you know,
sometimes you have to put your faith in the engineers
because you have a desperate problem. Right, But when it's
a when it's a system that you know they don't understand,
Like we can't predict the weather very well, right, so
how can you predict what happens when you seed clouds
(08:53):
or when you put huge mirrors in space? Like And
that's a fine thing to do on another planet where
you know you have a million year is to figure
it out, or a thousand years to figure it out. Um,
an infinite budget. But when it comes to Earth, our
home less open to this kind of crazy experimentation. I
would be very concous. We only have one planet and
so you know we if we miss it up tinkering,
it could be bad news. Yeah, exactly, Um, would you
(09:16):
put the whole climate into the hands of engineers and say, hey,
tinker away, see what happens. I think it'd be cool
just to be be called the P you know, like
Planet arr engineer. You just want the title, you don't
want the responsibility. Ye say it part of com planetary
Engineer pH D and P. Yeah. So let's get into it.
(09:43):
So what is terraforming? What is what is the concept
of terraforming? Yes, so, just from the word terror meaning
earth and right informing meaning forming, it means take another
planet like Mars or another planet and make it like
the Earth, make it to be able to sustain human life, right,
make it habitable, yeah, make it habitable, make it a
place that you might want to go, right, right, But
(10:05):
is it? So it's basically the concept of making it
so that you can step outside without a space food,
take a deep breath and enjoy the sun and the
air on Mars, yeah, or any other planet. I mean,
And that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in
science fiction stories all the time. Right, they land on
some planet, they set down, they open the door, they
take a deep breath, and they go ah, yeah, yeah,
(10:26):
smells pretty sweet on planet x y Z. But there's
nothing toxic or dangerous when I breathe this air, right, Yeah,
exactly exactly, And that's that strikes me as very unlikely.
I mean, that would be wonderful if it happened, but
it strikes me as very unlikely. But that's the point,
is being able to step outside without a space, food
and breathe and live. But is that the only motivation
(10:46):
kind of to enjoy the outdoors in another planet or
is there something more that you know, we can't physically
live that many people inside of a base or inside
of a constrained environment. Yeah, I think if you want
to if you want to really spread across the planet,
you've got to make the whole thing habitable. I mean,
if you're gonna build domes and live inside domes, that's
(11:06):
that's not nearly as fun, right, and it's it's constrained exactly. So, um,
if you want to have agriculture that supports a large population,
you can need to have plants growing, and so either
you have to build a dome the size of the
planet or just make the planet into a dome, right,
eventually having domes impractical? Interesting? Okay, So let's get into
the details and what does it mean to be habitable.
(11:29):
For a planet to be habitable, like, what do we
need to change in other planets to make it more
like ours? Yeah? So you need an atmosphere. You need
non toxic atmosphere with oxygen in it. You need to
have enough water, right. Um, you need the temperature to
be reasonable. Right. You can't be a frozen instantly or
boiled to a crisp as soon as you step outside. Um.
(11:51):
You also, and that's not even enough, right. You might think, well,
that's a tall order, and it is, but even that's
not enough. You need things like shielding from cosmic rays. Right.
If you're a place where the radiation is much higher
than it is on Earth, then you need to be protected.
Having an atmosphere will do some of that for you,
but it might not be enough. Um. So I'd say
those are the basics. Water, temperature, atmosphere, um, and shielding
(12:13):
from cosmic rays. Those are the four elements. It's a
lot of things to get right, you know already. I mean,
so it just seems like four things. But that's that's
a big list of requests for your for the flooring
company or whatever it is we're gonna hire to to
renovate the Moon for us, Well, it's just four things,
but it's four things the size of an entire planet, right,
Like you, it's not about like changing in a little dome.
(12:35):
It's it's an entire gigantic space that you need to
have these, right, Yeah, exactly. And we have that situation
on Earth, which is wonderful, but it's not like that
happened overnight. You know, this is a billions of years
process to get to where we are today, and now
we're talking about engineering it and doing it in hopefully
less than a billion years, right, So it's gonna be
harder to do on another planet, or it didn't happen
(12:58):
by itself in a shorter amout of time. Yeah, it
kind of makes you think how precious it is the
conditions that we have here. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we should review,
like roughly how that happened on Earth, how we got
to habitable planet on Earth. Earth was formed big ball
of hot lavats that it's cooled down a little bit,
but then it was dry and so as we talked
about a podcast episode a while ago, um, we got
(13:20):
water by having comets smashed into the Earth's surface. And
comets are basically huge snowballs in space, and so we
brought water in from outer space. We ordered it right
on door dash or something. Can you deliver like a
thousand commets tomorrow, Hey arrowhead, we need a couple of
trillion gallons please, yeah, exactly. So that's where we got
(13:40):
the water right from space comets um. And then life started, right,
and life and produced some carbon dioxides. This is very
very early life like microbes that could eat things like
metals and rock and all sorts of stuff that existed
on the planet Um and produced some carbon dioxide. And
we also got some carbon dioxide by venting from volcanoes.
(14:00):
So that's how we got our atmosphere from microbes and
from volcanoes. That gives us an atmosphere that has a
lot of carbon dioxide in it, right, But then we
need the oxygen, and the oxygen came when microbes, actually
cyanobacteria in particular, and then later algae and plants figured
out how to photosynthesize. For the instance, this essentially is
breaking down C O two into oxygen and carbon, right,
(14:24):
and so some of that oxygen is released in the atmosphere.
And see, you have huge amounts of microbes and algae
and plank in the ocean doing this all the time,
and the trees now doing this produced enough oxygen to
give us an atmosphere that was breathable for animals. Right,
So that's how we got water, we got pressure, we
got oxygen. Yeah, And it's all sort of tied together, right.
(14:45):
The living things are tied together with the things in
the rocks and the things that came from out of space,
and it all sort of mixed together too, and that's
where we evolve. Right. It's not like these are the
ideal conditions for any life. It's just that these are
the conditions in which we grew up in and so
that's what we need, right. That's right, And you're right there,
(15:05):
all tied together. It's hard to get one without the other.
You know. Having enough water helps you with all these cycles,
and having the right pressure in the atmosphere helps keep
the water on the planet, and caps keep the temperature right.
And so it's a very complicated, delicate system, and it's
very easy to throw out a balance. I'm amazed, frankly
that we haven't screwed it up already. You know that
it's lasted this long where we're well on our way.
(15:27):
I think expectations are are not low enough. That's right.
Too many people are burning tires inside. Yeah. Um, okay,
so let's get into the then how you would do
it and another planet. Let's get into the details of
of peeing, not peeing, but peeing planetary engineering a whole
(15:49):
other planet to be just like our cozy Earth. But
first let's take a quick break. Al Right, So, how
do we set up a livable situation on Mars so
(16:12):
that we can do cartwheels in the grass and enjoy
and take deep breaths and drink from rivers and raise
our children care free? Right, that's the goal? Yeah, how
do we change the planet in which we would die
if we stepped outside, to one in which it would
be nice to go out and take a walk. Right,
We basically want to turn Antarctica into southern California. Right.
That seems how hard could that be? Right? Well, we're
(16:32):
well on our way for that too. Antarc global warming
is the new Southern California. Yeah, so we're going to
start with Mars because that's the nearest planet. Right, that's
kind of the best candidate we have for maybe moving
the entire species to Right, that's right, this is a
ridiculous project, possibly potentially impossible, costing zillions of dollars and
(16:54):
maybe taking zillions of years. But of the impossible destinations,
we mightsidder, Mars is sort of the least impossible. So yeah,
that's the one people people talk about a lot, the
least impossible. Okay, so there's a sliver of a chance
that we might be able to pull this off, yeah, exactly.
And so to figure out whether this was possible, I
(17:15):
actually made a call to an expert, professor Jim Castings
at Penn State University. He was he knows a lot
about terraforming and Mars. He's thought about this. And when
I first called him up and I asked him, I said,
is terraforming Mars possible? He said, just flatly no, I
can't be done. I was like, well, that was a
short phone call, right, it was gonna be a this
will be a short podcast. Yeah, But then I said possible,
(17:36):
no next time, thanks for tuning in. So he said no.
He said he's an expert, he's worked with NASA. He's
like no, yeah, he's thought about like you said no.
But then I said, okay, what if I give you
an infinite amount of money. He was like, okay, mab Yeah.
So then he considered it as an infinite number of
years and he said, okay, infinite amount of time and
infinite amount of resources, then we can do it. Wow.
(18:00):
So there's it's about the resources. When you say it's impossible,
it's not um like it violates any laws of physics.
Is just that we he didn't foresee how we would
pull this off with the resources that we have. Yeah. Well,
as you'll hear when we talk about this, it's going
to be expensive. Right. So the first problem is Mars
has hardly in the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is mostly
(18:21):
carbon dioxide. Right, There's almost no oxygen on Mars. So
problem number one is you need an atmosphere on Mars. Right,
But an atmosphere you mean like a layer of gas
surrounding the planet, because currently it doesn't have much of that.
That's right, So that when you step outside you take
a deep breath, you get a breath instead of like
your lungs boiling um, which seems less comfortable. Right. I
(18:43):
don't want to we adds for the resort that we're
going to start on Mars. We don't want um, images
of our guests having their lungs going inside out and
their blood boiling into space. Right, yeah, like Arnold trash
Negger in total recall. Yeah that was a documentary exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
well he could when he goes outside of Mars and
like his eyes bug out and yeah exactly. Um. And
(19:05):
so that's one problem is the atmosphere. And connected to
that is the temperature currently on Mars. I checked the
web this morning. It's negative sixty three degrees celsius on
the surface of Mars. Right, Chili chili definitely not Southern
California standards. Right. And those two things are connected. Is
it connected to the the fact that there is no atmosphere,
(19:26):
you know, like vacuum is by definition kind of cold. Right, Well,
there's that, I mean, but also there's nothing to store
the Sun's energy. Right. The Sun hits Mars and and
warms it up, but then the energy just floats off
into space, right, It just radiates back onto space. But
an atmosphere acts like a blanket, right, and so it
keeps the Sun's energy on the planet. That's one of
(19:47):
the reasons why we have global warming here on Earth
is that we're thickening the blanket we have of carbon
dioxide is keeping more and more of the Sun's energy.
So Mars has almost greenhouse, right, Yeah, it acts like
a greenhouse. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and so most
of the energies bounces right back into space. So the
fact that you don't have an atmosphere and you don't
and you and you're too cold are connected, right, which
(20:08):
is bad. Had an atmosphere, it could warm up, Yes, exactly.
So one strategy for warming up the planet is to
give it an atmosphere. Right. So for example, um, I
asked the professor, I said, you know what if we
um use the carbon dioxide that is on Mars. Because
Mars has a bunch of carbon dioxide, It has a
bunch of water, but it's mostly frozen in the ice caps, right,
(20:29):
so in the polar caps. So there's these huge amounts
of basically dry ice which is frozen carbon dioxide on
the surface. And so people have been thinking what if
we could melt that somehow? Right, what if you stick
it in a microwave? If you can build a planet
sized microwave, then I think all these terraformy projects will
be easy. Um. But no, say, for example, you sent
(20:50):
up a bunch of nukes, right, you nuked the ice
caps on Mars. Yeah, vaporized all of it, right, and
then you would have some gas in the atmosphere, right,
And so that's sort of a step in the right direction.
So you propose that to him, what do he say?
The problem with that is that there's not enough. Right.
Even if you did that, it would be like one
(21:10):
of the carbon dioxide, you need to make enough pressure
on the planet so that you could warm it up. Right,
So you need some other source of carbon dioxide. Now,
this is something which is in contention. Some people say, Oh,
there's a lot of more carbon dioxide that's sort of
buried under the ground, and as soon as you start
warming it up, that carbondox will be released into the
atmosphere and it's sort of be a runaway greenhouse effect.
(21:32):
It has to already be in on Mars. Like, we
can't bring enough CEO two, like we have. Our problem
is we have two munch c O two. We can't
just take it to Mars. No, we could, that's another solution, right,
but it's easier to start with the CEO two on Mars.
And some people think there's just not enough c O
two on Mars, so that even if you melt the
ice caps and warm up all the rocks, that you
just won't get enough C two. But that's the point
(21:53):
of contention. Nobody's entirely sure. But if there isn't enough
CEO two on Mars, as you say, we could bring
some in it. You could find some comets or some
you know, asteroids that are mostly CEO two and just
sort of nugs them towards Mars and crashed them onto
the surface. Oh man, wouldn't that cause other problems? Well,
I think you'd want to do that before you build
(22:14):
your resort um otherwise, I mean, what problems would it cause?
I don't I mean, it sounds sort of naive, But like,
what's the danger with crashing an asteroid onto the surface
of Mars? Like nobody lives there. What's the worst that
could happen if we on other planets? Um? No, that's
a that's a realistic approach. And this is what I
(22:35):
meant when I said, like massive resources can Now you
have to build a huge spaceship and you have to
get it out there to the asteroids system, and you
have to somehow like find an asteroid or nudge you
towards Mars, and like this is already costing a lot
of money. Now we're talking about asteroid wrangling. Yeah, exactly,
that's another cool job description. Yeah, asteroid wrangling. You're gonna
get a lot of PhDs. You're gonna be like Bruce Banner,
(22:55):
You're gonna have like seven pH D so you can
solve any problem. Okay. So so that's where the costs
start adding up, Like to get the atmosphere we need,
you just need this these huge engineering problems which caused
the money for people to do exactly sign up for them, right, Yeah,
(23:16):
but there's there's more problems, like say you could do that,
so you can nuke them, pull the ice caps and
you can get some c O two, and then you
bring in enough asteroids and you get enough c O
two to warm up the planet. Then you have another problem,
which is that the atmosphere is then toxic because in
order to get enough c O two to make like
a blanket to keep the planet warm enough, you need
(23:37):
a lot more c O two on Mars than you
do on Earth. And the reason it's just that Mars
is further away from the Sun and it's smaller, so
it doesn't get as much sunlight, so it needs a
thicker blanket. Right, So you need a lot more c
O two on Mars and you do on Earth to
get to the right temperature. The problem is if you
put that much CEO two to the atmosphere, it kills humans.
So humans cannot breathe that atmosphere like could and you
(24:00):
just make up for it by adding more oxygen more oxygen. Well,
for you don't want an atmosphere with too much oxygen
because then everything it just ignites simultaneously. Um. And also
oxygen doesn't have the same properties as CEO two in
terms of warming. Right. Each of these gases have a
very different behavior in terms of planetary warming because they
act different in the atmosphere. So that's not just not
(24:20):
possible to do just straight CEO two. Um. But then
the people have some other ideas, like maybe we could
bring in some ammonia, because ammonia is a really good
atmospheric warmer. Um. But pneumonia doesn't last very long. Um.
So then I asked the professor, I said, well, what
if you had some other way of warming it? Right,
instead of just using CEO two, what if you brought
the CEO two up to a level where humans could
(24:41):
breathe it, and you had some other technique for bringing
up the temperature, like burning tires. Do you have a lot,
a lot of extra tires in your life and you're
desperate to get rid of Is that what I'm hearing here?
You know what I mean? Like, couldn't you create heat
another way? Yes? Planet, Yes, And so one other way
is to just increase the amount a solar solar exposure, right,
(25:02):
to get more sunlight onto Mars. So build a big
mirror in space and just focus a bunch of energy
onto the surface of Mars. You mean, like kind of
like um, like little kids do with the magnifying glass
and ants. Yeah, exactly, kind of focus more sunlight onto
the spot where the planet is. Yeah, you know, like
those little um camping ovens that are just aluminum foil,
(25:25):
and you can put hot dog in the middle of
it and focuses the sun's rays on and eventually your
hot dog warms up. That's the scenario, except Mars is
the hot dog. Okay, So, but you'd have to build
gigantic mirrors. Yeah, the Mars has about half as much
solar radiation as Earth. Does that means the mirror would
have to be about the size of Mars right now,
we're talking about huge planet sized mirrors in space, and
(25:49):
you gotta get them right. You know, if you too
much or too little, and all of a sudden all
of your guests and your resort are freezing or fried up. Right,
So you're really going to be trusting these pH d
p s to to get this right into never fail right.
This has to work forever and always right. So it's
a it's a tricky task, and all of this is
(26:09):
just to warm up the planet, right, Yeah, exactly, So
you've got to bring into problem number one exactly exactly.
Are you feeling less enthusiastic now, it's just like training
on the thermostat you know, that's just the beginning of
your problems. Yeah, So you bring in an atmosphere somehow,
you warm up the planet right, and then what do
you have? You have a planet has the right temperature,
(26:31):
has enough CEO two in it. But you also want
to be able to grow crops, You want to be
able to breathe, right, so you need to produce oxygen. Now,
I remember the way that happened on Earth was that
we had basically algae and phytoplankton. And also it's a
little green microbes that are capable of producing oxygen. Um,
and that's cool, and we could do that again. We
could just like launch a huge tub of of plants,
(26:53):
you know, of algae into the new lakes on warm
Mars and they could just we could wait for them
to do their thing. We could just make Mars moldy.
That's right, that's right, make Mars funky again. Um. Yeah,
And that all sounds great, And you might be thinking
that sounds wonderful because then we're using the power of microbes.
(27:14):
They multiply fast, and they can spread all over Mars
and we can green the planet. Um. So I talked
to a microbiologist. Um. One of them is my wife,
and I also consult consulted them Professor Heather Beans, she's
at Arizona State University. And they tell me that agreason
will estimate for how long it would take to produce
enough oxygen is about a million years. Oh my goodness.
(27:37):
Even if we put giant tubs of algae there, it
would take a million years to process all that t
O two into oxygen. You would take a million years
unless you know, you want to add another degree and
you want to do like plankton engineering and create some
new kind of microbe that's better at producing oxygen. But
you have take about a million years, and you know
it took it took like ten of the six or
so years on Earth. It was not a fast process.
(27:59):
So what what's the factor? Do you just not have
enough algae or do you see algae juice? You know,
if you max out the number of amount of alogies
you could have on Mars, it would still take a
million years. So in your mind's eye, you have like
the surface of Mars is covered with ten ft of
algae or something or something. Yeah, I'm all right, let's
go into the max algae scenario. Even in that scenario,
(28:22):
it still takes about a million years. And the reason
is that algae are not in the business of producing oxygen.
It's not why they do it. They photosynthesize and but
in that process they produce oxygen. They also use some oxygen.
So the amount of oxygen that's like produced is spare,
is not It's not a lot um And yeah, so
there's sequestering some carbon. They're producing some oxygen, but it's
(28:43):
not an efficient way to make oxygen. I mean, it's
it's nice because the sort of runs itself, and it's
historical because it's the way we did it on Earth.
So that's nice and cozy, but it's not a very
fast way to make a to make a planet have
enough oxygen it and I want to talk about that
some more, but first let's take a quick break. Okay,
(29:12):
So then what can we do? Can we bring oxygen
in other ways? Yeah? Well we could bring water, right,
we could bring water in and we could split it,
make the H two O into H and O and
uh and use that oxygen. That would take a lot
of time and a lot of energy, right, splitting water
into oxygen and hydrogen takes a lot of energy. But hey,
if we're building planetary sized mirrors and shepherding afterwards around
(29:34):
the around the solar system that I'm assuming we have
access to a huge amount of energy. So yeah, we
could certainly do that. Meaning maybe grab another comment with
water and crash it onto Mars. That's right, splash it
now into your ocean of algae that you have, pumping
away oxygen into your atmosphere like a cooking project. We
have the splant here, just grab some comments from over here,
(29:56):
some asteroids r here. Mix it all together. Yeah, yeah,
it's a cooking project. Um. And even if you do that,
even if you accomplish all of those things, you still
have another problem, which is that Mars doesn't have a
magnetic field, and the magnetic field is really important in
shielding from cosmic rays. Remember, cosmic rays are just tiny
particles from space and they're usually charged, and so a
(30:20):
magnetic field will bend them. Here on Earth, we have
a magnetic field, and it bends a lot of the
radiation from space and protects us and also protects our atmosphere. Right,
so let's assume that we heated up the planet and
we created enough oxygen for us to step outside and breathe.
We still have a big problem, which is that it
would all just blow away, right, that's right. The magnetic
(30:43):
field keeps the atmosphere from getting blown away from the
solar wind and from other kinds of cosmic rays. And
so we need to create a magnetic field for Mars.
And the size of the planet, the size of the planet,
and as um, as crazy as that sounds, it's maybe
the easiest task of all the things we've talked about. Today,
because you don't need to like go inside of Mars
(31:04):
and like get the core spinning to give you a
magnetic field, which is how we think we have a
magnetic field on Earth. You just need to provide a
magnetic shield. And that might be as simple as putting
a huge magnet out in space between the Sun and
Mars to provide like a you know, a bending so
that the particles don't hit Mars. And if you can
get the magnetic field a little closer to the Sun,
you can create sort of a magnetic envelope or a
(31:26):
shadow to protect the planet. Wait, is it the easiest
problem that we have in this is creating planet size
force field using a planet size magnet. That's right. If
you had if you had to pick each of these
tasks to solve, that's the one I would recommend pick
because that one's easiest and cheapest. Also, if you've solved
(31:51):
all these crazy problems, you might be able to make
Mars habitable. That's right. So you build an atmosphere, you
trunk in a bunch of CEO two, You warm a
planet with this, mirrors, you seated with things that produce oxygen.
You provide a magnetic field then you wait a million years.
You forgot to wait a million years apart. Don't pack
your bags yet, you're gonna put your underwear back in
(32:11):
your drawer. People. Um, it's gonna take a long time
before Mars is habitable, even if we started tomorrow. Um,
and you know, we can get there earlier with various basis.
We don't have to complete the terraforming to start living
on Mars. But for the deep future, if we want
humanity really have a home on Mars, to be comfortable there,
to to have plants growing and crops and all sorts
(32:32):
of things, really healthy ecosystem, then yeah, we gotta do
the terraforming. And it's gonna take a long time. So
there is this liver of possibility. It would just be
really really expensive and might take a long time exactly.
It would be expensive, it would take a long time. Um,
but it's not impossible. So given infinite time and infinite resources,
(32:52):
it is possible. And you know, on this show we
talk about things that are totally impossible and things that
are just difficult and expensive. And and I like when
things are just difficult and expensive because then you can
just say, well, pass it off to the engineers I'm
sure they'll figure it out. Right, You, as a physicist,
can just wash your hands, be like, it's not my
fault anymore, that we're dying as a species exactly. If
(33:13):
physicists our job is to move something from impossible to possible.
The rest is details, right, That's that's what we really
have the engineers for. You know, eventually there'll be an app.
You know, you could just um uh, you know, terraform
my planet with with your app or something. It will
take five seconds. And who wrote that app? Engineers? Engineers
and they made all the money. Okay, so and they
(33:35):
deserve it. A lot of a lot more rich engineers
out there than rich physicists. If you ask me, I
was gonna say something, but I forgot you were going
to say something, but you got distracted by the huge
pile of cash you have as an engineer. Sorry, I
was counting my gold coins. I forgot what you were saying. Okay,
(33:59):
So that's Mars. That's maybe one of the closest and
and maybe least sour impossible tasting of the options. But
there are other possibilities within our solar system, or maybe
outside our solar system. Right, that's right, There are some
other places that we could consider living. For example, there's
the Moon. Right, the Moon is even closer than Mars,
(34:19):
and so from the point of view like getting stuff
there and doing the engineering, it's even simpler. The problem
is that the Moon is has a lot of the
same challenges as Mars, but it's even smaller, so the
gravity is is much much less, which means it would
be really hard to hold onto an atmosphere even if
you did all the work. You crashed a bunch of
comments into the moon. Um, you warmed it up somehow
(34:40):
with mirrors, and you give it a nice atmosphere, the
atmosphere which is leak away. Right, there's not enough gravity
to hold onto the atmosphere on the Moon. You have
to be big enough. There's a size requirement, yeah, exactly,
have to be big enough so that you have enough
gravity to hold onto the atmosphere. Right. It's like you
don't want to buy somebody a fancy new jacket. If
it's they're just going to throw it away. And that's
basically it would be like, if we build an atmosphere
(35:01):
on the Moon, it's just going to float away into
space because the Moon is not big enough to hold
onto it, but at least you would have enough cheese. Right,
That's that's right. It would be a fun party while
it lasted, right. Um. But if you're looking for like
a you know, thousands and thousands of years kind of solution,
like you want to establish a human base there, it's
just not really a good good idea. I mean, it
might last hundreds of years, you might even get a
thousand years out of it, but you need to continuously
(35:23):
replenish the atmosphere because it'd be constantly running away from you,
because it'll just float out into space. Yeah, exactly, and
just be constantly farting out your life source into space.
So the Moon your far back in right, your planet,
all right, So that's moon, the Moon. What about other
planets in the Solar System. Well, Venus is interesting because
(35:46):
it has exactly the opposite problem, right, Venus Mars we
talked about has almost no atmosphere. The Moon is no atmosphere.
Venus is the other problem, has way too much atmosphere.
Venus is like we're afraid Earth might be in a
million years is it's covered in carbon dioxide and it's
way too dense. It's like ninety times the density of
(36:07):
the atmosphere on Earth, right, so you'd be crushed two, right, Yeah,
And all that CEO two on that planet for all
those years has really heated it up. So it's like
four hundred and something degrees on the surface of Venus
all the time, right, That's not just like during the summer,
that's all the time. So the problem with Venus is
(36:27):
the opposite. You need to get rid of some of
that atmosphere and that will help Venus cool down. And
so that's that's hard, Like how do you get rid
of atmosphere. It's the opposite problem. You need to take
out CEO two. Yeah, And so people have crazy ideas.
They're like, well, you know some ideas like somehow get
that CEO two sequestered, you know, fire bunch of stuff
into the atmosphere of Venus like magnesium or calcium, or
(36:50):
you know, bombarded with hydrogen so that it forms water
or um, you know, with all sorts of other stuff.
These strategies to try to get the CEO two out
of the atmosphere onto the surface, which has its own problem.
And there are other strategies like make huge scoops and
scoop off the atmosphere, right, Like like just gather it
up and scoop it off Like that seems crazy to me,
Like you're going to build an enormous spoon, like, you know,
(37:14):
dig into the atmosphere Venus. It sounds crazy, but reasonable
people talk about this stuff. You're like, it's physically possible,
So get to work engineers. Yeah, and then I thought,
you know what if we could take some of the
CEO too off of Venus and bring it to Mars.
Or we could solve two problems at once, Right, what
if you could crash Venus into Mars and create the
perfect planet? Now you're going too far. Okay, we can
(37:36):
talk about planet sized mirrors, but we can't talk about
smashing them together. That's just totally impractical. Um. Yeah, so
that's you have am there's a limit to your flavors
of that's right. The other problem with Venus is that
it rotates really slowly. A day on Venus is two
hundred and forty something days on Earth, right, so you
(37:57):
have like really really long nights and really really long
day So that's a pretty hard way to live. So
it to really live on Venus, you'd have to like
speed up its rotation somehow, And people have talked about
how to do that. Yeah, like if you wanted to
get ready the atmosphere, you could build like a huge
jet which punches, which pushes the atmosphere out into space,
and that could act like, um, like a nozzle, right
(38:19):
to speed up the rotation of the planet. Now this
is I mean, it sounded crazy, but like, um, that's
a real solution. Okay, So that's venus. Um. We have
the opposite problem. Where else where else could we go?
Maybe outside of our solar system. Yeah, one of the
most promising things is not engineering a planet that's close by,
but picking the right one. You know. It's like, don't
(38:42):
choose from the cars that are available to you in
your neighborhood. If none of them work, like, go drive
thirty miles to find the right one, you know. And
so one option is to look for extrasolar planets, right
planets outside our solar system around other stars. And recently
we have amazing technology to do this. We found thousands
of them and just find one that has the right characteristics,
that has the right amount of solar radiation, has an atmosphere,
(39:05):
maybe even has liquid water, um, you know, and from
that point of view that we'd be starting from a
pretty good spot. It's not unlikely we could find one
that has carbon dioxide rich atmosphere with the right pressure
and the right temperature and liquid water that there's nothing
unreasonable about that expectation. So that's more like terror finding
than terraforming, right, you know what I mean? Like it's
(39:27):
you're looking for one that already looks like ours. Yeah,
and even in that scenar area, there of some big problems.
Like problem number one is it's super duper far away, right,
So it's gonna take a long time to get there,
if if that's even possible. Um. And you have to
figure out that it's a good destination before you get there,
because you don't want to travel for a thousand years
and then turn around because oops, you know, we forgot
(39:48):
the shopping list or oops, went to the wrong place. Um.
The other problem is what do you do when you
get there? Right, you want to establish an ecosystem on
the planet, and having enough CEO two and you seed
it with lie if and it produces oxygen, even that
is not enough to make like farmable land. Right. What
you need then is soil. You need to cover the
planet somehow with with dirt that you can use to
(40:10):
grow plants, and that's complicated, right, getting the getting dirt
to work, getting soil to work is hard. We don't
even understand how it works. On Earth. You know, people
are studding. It's not just dirt. Dirt is not just dirt,
you I mean, you can't grow things and just sand, right,
sand and water you need. Most of the soil that
we have on Earth is basically decayed plants, right, is
leaf litter and other stuff that has died. So now
(40:32):
you've got to start that process on another planet. You
have to somehow seated. You can bring some soil and
you can put it out there and it'll grow and spread.
But to get the right balance of all those microbes
working in just the right way to support the plants
that you need to feed your people, that's not an
easy problem to solve. And you can't just like truck
in a planet's worth of soil from Earth. Right, people
on Earth are not gonna be happy about that, And
(40:53):
that's expensive. So it's a hard problem to solve. Even
when you get there. You can just go to home
deep and by trillion bags of soil, that's right, It's
just not enough soil to fill another planet. And so
that's the kind of thing that would take a lot
of experimentation and a lot of time, but it is feasible. Okay,
So we learned that there are a lot of different
flavors of impossible. That's right, hoping beyond hope. Yeah, yeah,
(41:18):
they're not impossible, right, All these things could be done,
and you know, these are the ideas we have now.
And if we're talking about things we're doing over thousands
or millions of years, you've got to hope that human
ingenuity is going to come up with even better solutions,
better strategies, new energy sources, ways to do this kind
of engineering. So give us some time. I think we'll
figure it out. Yeah. We might not be desperate now,
(41:38):
but we might be more desperate later. Yeah, so throw
another tire on the fire and uh, you know, make
some plans to live on Mars. That really makes you
think about how fragile our planet is. You know, like
we're so lucky not to be like Mars, and if
we're not careful, we're gonna end up like Venus, you know,
totally uninhabitable. In either case. Yeah, you know it's good
(41:58):
to have negative role model. Right, we see some pretty
terrible examples around us of what happens when planets go
off kilter Mars lost its atmosphere, Venus overcooked. It's so,
we're pretty lucky to be right in this sweet spot,
and we better take care of it because it's gonna
be a long time before we are capable of making
another planet be home to a substantial population. So the
next time you go outside, take a deep breath and
(42:20):
savor it. That's right. You're not likely to get that
anywhere else. That's right. All right, everyone, Well, thanks for
lifting this upbeat episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
If you have questions about what we said and you
want to hear more about it, send us an email
at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Or if
you have another suggestion for a topic you'd like to
(42:40):
hear us talk about, send it on over. Or if
you have a question about physics or philosophy or dating
or small mammals or whatever, just send it on over. Yeah,
if you have questions about ceramics like terra cotta, don't
ask us. We don't know anything about it. All right,
see you next time. Thanks for listening. If you still
(43:08):
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Orge dot com
Okay, Daniel, how many times in your life do you
think you've moved, like from one house to another so
many times. There was one period when we actually moved
back and forth across the Atlantic. I think it was
seven times in four years. That's wild. Yeah, from California
to Geneva and back. It was insane. Well, the hard
part is when you need to do renovations right, Like
(00:28):
if you're the home that you're moving into is not
quite habitable, that's right. You want to get it just
as you like it. You wanted to be nice and cozy,
you wanted to be comfortable place to live. You want
all those things right. And that's hard enough when the
other place you're living is across town or across the country,
or even somewhere else on the planet. Yeah, but now
imagine if you had to move to a whole another planet.
(00:50):
I'm not sure I can get my wife on board
for taking the kids to Mars or to the moon
or did you better it's a little further than Geneva.
It's a time of it for the traveling in Switzerland,
and I'm not sure how we'd find a contractor to
do that work, Like, who's going to do the renovations
of my lunar base Elon Musk. He's probably got a
company already for it. So you five different kinds of flooring.
(01:13):
It's called house X the flooring company. The flooring company.
Oh perfect. Hi, I'm h and I'm Daniel. Welcome to
(01:39):
our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm a
particle physicist, but I like thinking and talking about all
sorts of crazy things in science, and I make cartoonists
and mostly I'm just crazy. I got nothing to say
to that. You're totally a sane, a normal person, and yeah,
(02:01):
I'm so not saying that. Um. And this is our
podcast in which we take things in the universe and
try to explain them to you, make them understandable. We
don't want you to be intimidated by the fancy words
and science. Who wants you to understand them so you
can impress people of cocktail parties when they ask you
what is the Higgs boson or how does something actually work? Yeah,
we want you to imagine what it's like to travel
(02:22):
the universe and to see all these amazing things out there. Today,
we're gonna talk about living on other worlds, terraforming, terraforming.
Is that like the ceramic thing that you make statues
out of. I think if you want to make a
really big planet size statue, then you could call that terraforming. Yeah. Wait,
(02:45):
I think I'm thinking about terra cotta. That's different. Terra cotta.
That's right. Can you build a planet out of terra cotta? Right?
That would be the largest pottery wheel in the in
the history of the universe. Yeah. So that's a big
question is can we be an InterPlaNet hairy species? Can
we can humanity live in multiple planets? That's right? And
this this is a really important question because if we
(03:07):
want to survive for thousands or millions of years, we
can't keep all of our eggs in just one planetary basket.
You know, one comet comes and slams in the Earth
and kills everything on Earth. Poof, we're dead. But if
we have people living on Mars and the Moon and
you know, and somewhere else, then we could survive such
cataclysm as a species. You mean as a species, not
me or you individually. Like I'm not going to jump
(03:29):
up there and catch the commet and save the planet
or anything like that. But from the point of view
of humanity. It seems like a really important project to
get off this rock, get living somewhere else. Yeah, Or
like if we ruling this planet, right, Like, if we
mess it up somehow and Earth is no longer happenable,
what's going to happen to humanity? We have to go
somewhere else. And you make us sound like we're a
(03:49):
bunch of kids making a mess in the living room
or something like you don't have faith that we're gonna
be able to take care of this planet. You think
we're on a on the trajectory to climate doomsday, where
more like little kids burning tires inside of the house,
you know what I mean? Like that's an officially recommendation people,
Jorge says, do not burn tires inside your house. Just
do it in the backyard. Right, Generally that's a bad idea. Yeah,
(04:12):
is that how you start your cozy family evenings? Let's
go burn some tires outside? Um. Yeah, But this is
even bigger than that. This is bigger than can we
go to another planet? Can we establish a base on
another planet? This is can we make another planet habitable?
So you can live outside, you can breathe the air,
you can run around, you can grow crops. So you
meaning we can go to another planet and live there,
(04:33):
but we would be in space suits and inside of
some kind of base the whole time. That wouldn't be
a lot of fun. That would not be a lot
of fun. I mean, I think if you went to
Mars and just build a colony, like you know, out
of ships and domes and stuff like that, you'd basically
be living on Antarctica, you know, be cold and dry
and unpleasant, and you have to pee in a space
suit all the time, and it would not be like
living on Earth and be very hard to imagine millions
(04:56):
or billions of people living that way on Mars right
or anywhere else. So if you want to really want
to establish non Earth population centers, you have to figure
out a way to make the planet itself habitable without
space suit. Yeah. So that's where the term terraforming comes from.
And so we were curious to know how many people
out there, including you, maybe knew this term. Yeah. So
(05:17):
I went out in the street and I asked people,
have you heard of terraforming? Do you know what it is?
What does it mean? Is it possible? Here's what people
had to say, I've heard the word before, but I
don't actually know anything about it. Okay, I used the
form like how the Earth got formed? Okay, No, I
haven't heard terraform before. No, No, I have no terraform.
I've heard of it, I don't know the meaning of it. Okay,
(05:40):
um on another planet forming the environment or something like that,
something along those lines. A right, is that like when
you dig up the planet. I've heard of the term,
but not the definition. What's your best guess what it
might be? How the Earth forms or how any planet
forms or good. Yeah, I have heard of terraforming. Terraforming
is whole fully something when we can be a step
(06:01):
three civilization. I forget the correct connotation. But you'll maybe
get a lot of energy from the Sun and be
able to use that to go and colonize another planet
and make the human race become a multiplanetary species. Do
you think that's realistic? No? I think we have way
too much on Earth that we need to take care
of still, and that it's a sexy idea, but I
think that it's not gonna happen for some long amount
(06:22):
of time. All right, So a lot of nose. Maybe
I was asking the wrong question. I was asking people
have they heard of terraforming, and most of the people,
except for one very smart gentleman I had a lot
of a lot to say about it, had never even
heard of the word. Right. They're like, just not even
part of something they think about or or talk about
or wonder about. Right, So that's good. We can we
(06:42):
can explain people what the word means. Nobody thought it
was terra cotta. Nobody except for you things that has
to do with pottery, That's right, very Chinese soldiers. Except
for now. Somebody now is going to be listening to
this podcasts. They're gonna come away with it that that's
their takeaway, right, that terraforming is making an earth out
of terra cotta. But maybe a more interesting question to
have asked would have been like, do you think it's
(07:03):
possible to turn Mars into a habitable planet? Right? That's
I'm curious what people would have thought about that. But anyway,
in another universe and another multiverse, I asked that different question.
Do you think people would have known or thought it
was possible or not? I don't know, but I'm always
surprised to hear what people think. I would have would
like to know what people think is possible if that's
sort of a feasible project the humanity could pull off.
(07:25):
I mean, man, massive planetary engineering, as you'll hear in
today's podcast, folks, it's not a small project to undertake.
That's a word, planetary engineering. The idea that you can
change an entire planet. That's amazing, right, Yeah, And you
know it's something people thinking about for Earth. Right. Geo
Engineering is the study of, like, can we solve our
climate climate problems by doing some crazy engineering, you know,
(07:48):
like deflecting the Sun's rays or or you know, injecting
things into the atmosphere or pulling CEO two out of
the atmosphere, like these massive engineering projects as desperate measures
to reverse climate change. It's gonna become center stage more
and more, and then in the next few years, I
think be cool to we get that as a degree,
you know, in your diploma planetary engineer. Yeah. Well, you know,
(08:11):
the more people burned tires outside or in their living room,
the more we're gonna have to worry about this stuff
and counteract it. So somebody's got to think about it.
There's a lot of really fun papers about geo engineering.
People have crazy schemes to try to cool off the
Earth or I mean a lot of it sounds really
risky to me. It's not like we really understand the
way the atmosphere works. So trying to tweet it and
twiddle with it, like dialing the knobs on the atmosphere,
(08:32):
that scares me. Seems tricky. If you don't have a
lot of faith in engineers, generally, I feel, well, you know,
sometimes you have to put your faith in the engineers
because you have a desperate problem. Right, But when it's
a when it's a system that you know they don't understand,
Like we can't predict the weather very well, right, so
how can you predict what happens when you seed clouds
(08:53):
or when you put huge mirrors in space? Like And
that's a fine thing to do on another planet where
you know you have a million year is to figure
it out, or a thousand years to figure it out. Um,
an infinite budget. But when it comes to Earth, our
home less open to this kind of crazy experimentation. I
would be very concous. We only have one planet and
so you know we if we miss it up tinkering,
it could be bad news. Yeah, exactly, Um, would you
(09:16):
put the whole climate into the hands of engineers and say, hey,
tinker away, see what happens. I think it'd be cool
just to be be called the P you know, like
Planet arr engineer. You just want the title, you don't
want the responsibility. Ye say it part of com planetary
Engineer pH D and P. Yeah. So let's get into it.
(09:43):
So what is terraforming? What is what is the concept
of terraforming? Yes, so, just from the word terror meaning
earth and right informing meaning forming, it means take another
planet like Mars or another planet and make it like
the Earth, make it to be able to sustain human life, right,
make it habitable, yeah, make it habitable, make it a
place that you might want to go, right, right, But
(10:05):
is it? So it's basically the concept of making it
so that you can step outside without a space food,
take a deep breath and enjoy the sun and the
air on Mars, yeah, or any other planet. I mean,
And that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in
science fiction stories all the time. Right, they land on
some planet, they set down, they open the door, they
take a deep breath, and they go ah, yeah, yeah,
(10:26):
smells pretty sweet on planet x y Z. But there's
nothing toxic or dangerous when I breathe this air, right, Yeah,
exactly exactly, And that's that strikes me as very unlikely.
I mean, that would be wonderful if it happened, but
it strikes me as very unlikely. But that's the point,
is being able to step outside without a space, food
and breathe and live. But is that the only motivation
(10:46):
kind of to enjoy the outdoors in another planet or
is there something more that you know, we can't physically
live that many people inside of a base or inside
of a constrained environment. Yeah, I think if you want
to if you want to really spread across the planet,
you've got to make the whole thing habitable. I mean,
if you're gonna build domes and live inside domes, that's
(11:06):
that's not nearly as fun, right, and it's it's constrained exactly. So, um,
if you want to have agriculture that supports a large population,
you can need to have plants growing, and so either
you have to build a dome the size of the
planet or just make the planet into a dome, right,
eventually having domes impractical? Interesting? Okay, So let's get into
the details and what does it mean to be habitable.
(11:29):
For a planet to be habitable, like, what do we
need to change in other planets to make it more
like ours? Yeah? So you need an atmosphere. You need
non toxic atmosphere with oxygen in it. You need to
have enough water, right. Um, you need the temperature to
be reasonable. Right. You can't be a frozen instantly or
boiled to a crisp as soon as you step outside. Um.
(11:51):
You also, and that's not even enough, right. You might think, well,
that's a tall order, and it is, but even that's
not enough. You need things like shielding from cosmic rays. Right.
If you're a place where the radiation is much higher
than it is on Earth, then you need to be protected.
Having an atmosphere will do some of that for you,
but it might not be enough. Um. So I'd say
those are the basics. Water, temperature, atmosphere, um, and shielding
(12:13):
from cosmic rays. Those are the four elements. It's a
lot of things to get right, you know already. I mean,
so it just seems like four things. But that's that's
a big list of requests for your for the flooring
company or whatever it is we're gonna hire to to
renovate the Moon for us, Well, it's just four things,
but it's four things the size of an entire planet, right,
Like you, it's not about like changing in a little dome.
(12:35):
It's it's an entire gigantic space that you need to
have these, right, Yeah, exactly. And we have that situation
on Earth, which is wonderful, but it's not like that
happened overnight. You know, this is a billions of years
process to get to where we are today, and now
we're talking about engineering it and doing it in hopefully
less than a billion years, right, So it's gonna be
harder to do on another planet, or it didn't happen
(12:58):
by itself in a shorter amout of time. Yeah, it
kind of makes you think how precious it is the
conditions that we have here. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we should review,
like roughly how that happened on Earth, how we got
to habitable planet on Earth. Earth was formed big ball
of hot lavats that it's cooled down a little bit,
but then it was dry and so as we talked
about a podcast episode a while ago, um, we got
(13:20):
water by having comets smashed into the Earth's surface. And
comets are basically huge snowballs in space, and so we
brought water in from outer space. We ordered it right
on door dash or something. Can you deliver like a
thousand commets tomorrow, Hey arrowhead, we need a couple of
trillion gallons please, yeah, exactly. So that's where we got
(13:40):
the water right from space comets um. And then life started, right,
and life and produced some carbon dioxides. This is very
very early life like microbes that could eat things like
metals and rock and all sorts of stuff that existed
on the planet Um and produced some carbon dioxide. And
we also got some carbon dioxide by venting from volcanoes.
(14:00):
So that's how we got our atmosphere from microbes and
from volcanoes. That gives us an atmosphere that has a
lot of carbon dioxide in it, right, But then we
need the oxygen, and the oxygen came when microbes, actually
cyanobacteria in particular, and then later algae and plants figured
out how to photosynthesize. For the instance, this essentially is
breaking down C O two into oxygen and carbon, right,
(14:24):
and so some of that oxygen is released in the atmosphere.
And see, you have huge amounts of microbes and algae
and plank in the ocean doing this all the time,
and the trees now doing this produced enough oxygen to
give us an atmosphere that was breathable for animals. Right,
So that's how we got water, we got pressure, we
got oxygen. Yeah, And it's all sort of tied together, right.
(14:45):
The living things are tied together with the things in
the rocks and the things that came from out of space,
and it all sort of mixed together too, and that's
where we evolve. Right. It's not like these are the
ideal conditions for any life. It's just that these are
the conditions in which we grew up in and so
that's what we need, right. That's right, And you're right there,
(15:05):
all tied together. It's hard to get one without the other.
You know. Having enough water helps you with all these cycles,
and having the right pressure in the atmosphere helps keep
the water on the planet, and caps keep the temperature right.
And so it's a very complicated, delicate system, and it's
very easy to throw out a balance. I'm amazed, frankly
that we haven't screwed it up already. You know that
it's lasted this long where we're well on our way.
(15:27):
I think expectations are are not low enough. That's right.
Too many people are burning tires inside. Yeah. Um, okay,
so let's get into the then how you would do
it and another planet. Let's get into the details of
of peeing, not peeing, but peeing planetary engineering a whole
(15:49):
other planet to be just like our cozy Earth. But
first let's take a quick break. Al Right, So, how
do we set up a livable situation on Mars so
(16:12):
that we can do cartwheels in the grass and enjoy
and take deep breaths and drink from rivers and raise
our children care free? Right, that's the goal? Yeah, how
do we change the planet in which we would die
if we stepped outside, to one in which it would
be nice to go out and take a walk. Right,
We basically want to turn Antarctica into southern California. Right.
That seems how hard could that be? Right? Well, we're
(16:32):
well on our way for that too. Antarc global warming
is the new Southern California. Yeah, so we're going to
start with Mars because that's the nearest planet. Right, that's
kind of the best candidate we have for maybe moving
the entire species to Right, that's right, this is a
ridiculous project, possibly potentially impossible, costing zillions of dollars and
(16:54):
maybe taking zillions of years. But of the impossible destinations,
we mightsidder, Mars is sort of the least impossible. So yeah,
that's the one people people talk about a lot, the
least impossible. Okay, so there's a sliver of a chance
that we might be able to pull this off, yeah, exactly.
And so to figure out whether this was possible, I
(17:15):
actually made a call to an expert, professor Jim Castings
at Penn State University. He was he knows a lot
about terraforming and Mars. He's thought about this. And when
I first called him up and I asked him, I said,
is terraforming Mars possible? He said, just flatly no, I
can't be done. I was like, well, that was a
short phone call, right, it was gonna be a this
will be a short podcast. Yeah, But then I said possible,
(17:36):
no next time, thanks for tuning in. So he said no.
He said he's an expert, he's worked with NASA. He's
like no, yeah, he's thought about like you said no.
But then I said, okay, what if I give you
an infinite amount of money. He was like, okay, mab Yeah.
So then he considered it as an infinite number of
years and he said, okay, infinite amount of time and
infinite amount of resources, then we can do it. Wow.
(18:00):
So there's it's about the resources. When you say it's impossible,
it's not um like it violates any laws of physics.
Is just that we he didn't foresee how we would
pull this off with the resources that we have. Yeah. Well,
as you'll hear when we talk about this, it's going
to be expensive. Right. So the first problem is Mars
has hardly in the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is mostly
(18:21):
carbon dioxide. Right, There's almost no oxygen on Mars. So
problem number one is you need an atmosphere on Mars. Right,
But an atmosphere you mean like a layer of gas
surrounding the planet, because currently it doesn't have much of that.
That's right, So that when you step outside you take
a deep breath, you get a breath instead of like
your lungs boiling um, which seems less comfortable. Right. I
(18:43):
don't want to we adds for the resort that we're
going to start on Mars. We don't want um, images
of our guests having their lungs going inside out and
their blood boiling into space. Right, yeah, like Arnold trash
Negger in total recall. Yeah that was a documentary exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
well he could when he goes outside of Mars and
like his eyes bug out and yeah exactly. Um. And
(19:05):
so that's one problem is the atmosphere. And connected to
that is the temperature currently on Mars. I checked the
web this morning. It's negative sixty three degrees celsius on
the surface of Mars. Right, Chili chili definitely not Southern
California standards. Right. And those two things are connected. Is
it connected to the the fact that there is no atmosphere,
(19:26):
you know, like vacuum is by definition kind of cold. Right, Well,
there's that, I mean, but also there's nothing to store
the Sun's energy. Right. The Sun hits Mars and and
warms it up, but then the energy just floats off
into space, right, It just radiates back onto space. But
an atmosphere acts like a blanket, right, and so it
keeps the Sun's energy on the planet. That's one of
(19:47):
the reasons why we have global warming here on Earth
is that we're thickening the blanket we have of carbon
dioxide is keeping more and more of the Sun's energy.
So Mars has almost greenhouse, right, Yeah, it acts like
a greenhouse. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and so most
of the energies bounces right back into space. So the
fact that you don't have an atmosphere and you don't
and you and you're too cold are connected, right, which
(20:08):
is bad. Had an atmosphere, it could warm up, Yes, exactly.
So one strategy for warming up the planet is to
give it an atmosphere. Right. So for example, um, I
asked the professor, I said, you know what if we
um use the carbon dioxide that is on Mars. Because
Mars has a bunch of carbon dioxide, It has a
bunch of water, but it's mostly frozen in the ice caps, right,
(20:29):
so in the polar caps. So there's these huge amounts
of basically dry ice which is frozen carbon dioxide on
the surface. And so people have been thinking what if
we could melt that somehow? Right, what if you stick
it in a microwave? If you can build a planet
sized microwave, then I think all these terraformy projects will
be easy. Um. But no, say, for example, you sent
(20:50):
up a bunch of nukes, right, you nuked the ice
caps on Mars. Yeah, vaporized all of it, right, and
then you would have some gas in the atmosphere, right,
And so that's sort of a step in the right direction.
So you propose that to him, what do he say?
The problem with that is that there's not enough. Right.
Even if you did that, it would be like one
(21:10):
of the carbon dioxide, you need to make enough pressure
on the planet so that you could warm it up. Right,
So you need some other source of carbon dioxide. Now,
this is something which is in contention. Some people say, Oh,
there's a lot of more carbon dioxide that's sort of
buried under the ground, and as soon as you start
warming it up, that carbondox will be released into the
atmosphere and it's sort of be a runaway greenhouse effect.
(21:32):
It has to already be in on Mars. Like, we
can't bring enough CEO two, like we have. Our problem
is we have two munch c O two. We can't
just take it to Mars. No, we could, that's another solution, right,
but it's easier to start with the CEO two on Mars.
And some people think there's just not enough c O
two on Mars, so that even if you melt the
ice caps and warm up all the rocks, that you
just won't get enough C two. But that's the point
(21:53):
of contention. Nobody's entirely sure. But if there isn't enough
CEO two on Mars, as you say, we could bring
some in it. You could find some comets or some
you know, asteroids that are mostly CEO two and just
sort of nugs them towards Mars and crashed them onto
the surface. Oh man, wouldn't that cause other problems? Well,
I think you'd want to do that before you build
(22:14):
your resort um otherwise, I mean, what problems would it cause?
I don't I mean, it sounds sort of naive, But like,
what's the danger with crashing an asteroid onto the surface
of Mars? Like nobody lives there. What's the worst that
could happen if we on other planets? Um? No, that's
a that's a realistic approach. And this is what I
(22:35):
meant when I said, like massive resources can Now you
have to build a huge spaceship and you have to
get it out there to the asteroids system, and you
have to somehow like find an asteroid or nudge you
towards Mars, and like this is already costing a lot
of money. Now we're talking about asteroid wrangling. Yeah, exactly,
that's another cool job description. Yeah, asteroid wrangling. You're gonna
get a lot of PhDs. You're gonna be like Bruce Banner,
(22:55):
You're gonna have like seven pH D so you can
solve any problem. Okay. So so that's where the costs
start adding up, Like to get the atmosphere we need,
you just need this these huge engineering problems which caused
the money for people to do exactly sign up for them, right, Yeah,
(23:16):
but there's there's more problems, like say you could do that,
so you can nuke them, pull the ice caps and
you can get some c O two, and then you
bring in enough asteroids and you get enough c O
two to warm up the planet. Then you have another problem,
which is that the atmosphere is then toxic because in
order to get enough c O two to make like
a blanket to keep the planet warm enough, you need
(23:37):
a lot more c O two on Mars than you
do on Earth. And the reason it's just that Mars
is further away from the Sun and it's smaller, so
it doesn't get as much sunlight, so it needs a
thicker blanket. Right, So you need a lot more c
O two on Mars and you do on Earth to
get to the right temperature. The problem is if you
put that much CEO two to the atmosphere, it kills humans.
So humans cannot breathe that atmosphere like could and you
(24:00):
just make up for it by adding more oxygen more oxygen. Well,
for you don't want an atmosphere with too much oxygen
because then everything it just ignites simultaneously. Um. And also
oxygen doesn't have the same properties as CEO two in
terms of warming. Right. Each of these gases have a
very different behavior in terms of planetary warming because they
act different in the atmosphere. So that's not just not
(24:20):
possible to do just straight CEO two. Um. But then
the people have some other ideas, like maybe we could
bring in some ammonia, because ammonia is a really good
atmospheric warmer. Um. But pneumonia doesn't last very long. Um.
So then I asked the professor, I said, well, what
if you had some other way of warming it? Right,
instead of just using CEO two, what if you brought
the CEO two up to a level where humans could
(24:41):
breathe it, and you had some other technique for bringing
up the temperature, like burning tires. Do you have a lot,
a lot of extra tires in your life and you're
desperate to get rid of Is that what I'm hearing here?
You know what I mean? Like, couldn't you create heat
another way? Yes? Planet, Yes, And so one other way
is to just increase the amount a solar solar exposure, right,
(25:02):
to get more sunlight onto Mars. So build a big
mirror in space and just focus a bunch of energy
onto the surface of Mars. You mean, like kind of
like um, like little kids do with the magnifying glass
and ants. Yeah, exactly, kind of focus more sunlight onto
the spot where the planet is. Yeah, you know, like
those little um camping ovens that are just aluminum foil,
(25:25):
and you can put hot dog in the middle of
it and focuses the sun's rays on and eventually your
hot dog warms up. That's the scenario, except Mars is
the hot dog. Okay, So, but you'd have to build
gigantic mirrors. Yeah, the Mars has about half as much
solar radiation as Earth. Does that means the mirror would
have to be about the size of Mars right now,
we're talking about huge planet sized mirrors in space, and
(25:49):
you gotta get them right. You know, if you too
much or too little, and all of a sudden all
of your guests and your resort are freezing or fried up. Right,
So you're really going to be trusting these pH d
p s to to get this right into never fail right.
This has to work forever and always right. So it's
a it's a tricky task, and all of this is
(26:09):
just to warm up the planet, right, Yeah, exactly, So
you've got to bring into problem number one exactly exactly.
Are you feeling less enthusiastic now, it's just like training
on the thermostat you know, that's just the beginning of
your problems. Yeah, So you bring in an atmosphere somehow,
you warm up the planet right, and then what do
you have? You have a planet has the right temperature,
(26:31):
has enough CEO two in it. But you also want
to be able to grow crops, You want to be
able to breathe, right, so you need to produce oxygen. Now,
I remember the way that happened on Earth was that
we had basically algae and phytoplankton. And also it's a
little green microbes that are capable of producing oxygen. Um,
and that's cool, and we could do that again. We
could just like launch a huge tub of of plants,
(26:53):
you know, of algae into the new lakes on warm
Mars and they could just we could wait for them
to do their thing. We could just make Mars moldy.
That's right, that's right, make Mars funky again. Um. Yeah,
And that all sounds great, And you might be thinking
that sounds wonderful because then we're using the power of microbes.
(27:14):
They multiply fast, and they can spread all over Mars
and we can green the planet. Um. So I talked
to a microbiologist. Um. One of them is my wife,
and I also consult consulted them Professor Heather Beans, she's
at Arizona State University. And they tell me that agreason
will estimate for how long it would take to produce
enough oxygen is about a million years. Oh my goodness.
(27:37):
Even if we put giant tubs of algae there, it
would take a million years to process all that t
O two into oxygen. You would take a million years
unless you know, you want to add another degree and
you want to do like plankton engineering and create some
new kind of microbe that's better at producing oxygen. But
you have take about a million years, and you know
it took it took like ten of the six or
so years on Earth. It was not a fast process.
(27:59):
So what what's the factor? Do you just not have
enough algae or do you see algae juice? You know,
if you max out the number of amount of alogies
you could have on Mars, it would still take a
million years. So in your mind's eye, you have like
the surface of Mars is covered with ten ft of
algae or something or something. Yeah, I'm all right, let's
go into the max algae scenario. Even in that scenario,
(28:22):
it still takes about a million years. And the reason
is that algae are not in the business of producing oxygen.
It's not why they do it. They photosynthesize and but
in that process they produce oxygen. They also use some oxygen.
So the amount of oxygen that's like produced is spare,
is not It's not a lot um And yeah, so
there's sequestering some carbon. They're producing some oxygen, but it's
(28:43):
not an efficient way to make oxygen. I mean, it's
it's nice because the sort of runs itself, and it's
historical because it's the way we did it on Earth.
So that's nice and cozy, but it's not a very
fast way to make a to make a planet have
enough oxygen it and I want to talk about that
some more, but first let's take a quick break. Okay,
(29:12):
So then what can we do? Can we bring oxygen
in other ways? Yeah? Well we could bring water, right,
we could bring water in and we could split it,
make the H two O into H and O and
uh and use that oxygen. That would take a lot
of time and a lot of energy, right, splitting water
into oxygen and hydrogen takes a lot of energy. But hey,
if we're building planetary sized mirrors and shepherding afterwards around
(29:34):
the around the solar system that I'm assuming we have
access to a huge amount of energy. So yeah, we
could certainly do that. Meaning maybe grab another comment with
water and crash it onto Mars. That's right, splash it
now into your ocean of algae that you have, pumping
away oxygen into your atmosphere like a cooking project. We
have the splant here, just grab some comments from over here,
(29:56):
some asteroids r here. Mix it all together. Yeah, yeah,
it's a cooking project. Um. And even if you do that,
even if you accomplish all of those things, you still
have another problem, which is that Mars doesn't have a
magnetic field, and the magnetic field is really important in
shielding from cosmic rays. Remember, cosmic rays are just tiny
particles from space and they're usually charged, and so a
(30:20):
magnetic field will bend them. Here on Earth, we have
a magnetic field, and it bends a lot of the
radiation from space and protects us and also protects our atmosphere. Right,
so let's assume that we heated up the planet and
we created enough oxygen for us to step outside and breathe.
We still have a big problem, which is that it
would all just blow away, right, that's right. The magnetic
(30:43):
field keeps the atmosphere from getting blown away from the
solar wind and from other kinds of cosmic rays. And
so we need to create a magnetic field for Mars.
And the size of the planet, the size of the planet,
and as um, as crazy as that sounds, it's maybe
the easiest task of all the things we've talked about. Today,
because you don't need to like go inside of Mars
(31:04):
and like get the core spinning to give you a
magnetic field, which is how we think we have a
magnetic field on Earth. You just need to provide a
magnetic shield. And that might be as simple as putting
a huge magnet out in space between the Sun and
Mars to provide like a you know, a bending so
that the particles don't hit Mars. And if you can
get the magnetic field a little closer to the Sun,
you can create sort of a magnetic envelope or a
(31:26):
shadow to protect the planet. Wait, is it the easiest
problem that we have in this is creating planet size
force field using a planet size magnet. That's right. If
you had if you had to pick each of these
tasks to solve, that's the one I would recommend pick
because that one's easiest and cheapest. Also, if you've solved
(31:51):
all these crazy problems, you might be able to make
Mars habitable. That's right. So you build an atmosphere, you
trunk in a bunch of CEO two, You warm a
planet with this, mirrors, you seated with things that produce oxygen.
You provide a magnetic field then you wait a million years.
You forgot to wait a million years apart. Don't pack
your bags yet, you're gonna put your underwear back in
(32:11):
your drawer. People. Um, it's gonna take a long time
before Mars is habitable, even if we started tomorrow. Um,
and you know, we can get there earlier with various basis.
We don't have to complete the terraforming to start living
on Mars. But for the deep future, if we want
humanity really have a home on Mars, to be comfortable there,
to to have plants growing and crops and all sorts
(32:32):
of things, really healthy ecosystem, then yeah, we gotta do
the terraforming. And it's gonna take a long time. So
there is this liver of possibility. It would just be
really really expensive and might take a long time exactly.
It would be expensive, it would take a long time. Um,
but it's not impossible. So given infinite time and infinite resources,
(32:52):
it is possible. And you know, on this show we
talk about things that are totally impossible and things that
are just difficult and expensive. And and I like when
things are just difficult and expensive because then you can
just say, well, pass it off to the engineers I'm
sure they'll figure it out. Right, You, as a physicist,
can just wash your hands, be like, it's not my
fault anymore, that we're dying as a species exactly. If
(33:13):
physicists our job is to move something from impossible to possible.
The rest is details, right, That's that's what we really
have the engineers for. You know, eventually there'll be an app.
You know, you could just um uh, you know, terraform
my planet with with your app or something. It will
take five seconds. And who wrote that app? Engineers? Engineers
and they made all the money. Okay, so and they
(33:35):
deserve it. A lot of a lot more rich engineers
out there than rich physicists. If you ask me, I
was gonna say something, but I forgot you were going
to say something, but you got distracted by the huge
pile of cash you have as an engineer. Sorry, I
was counting my gold coins. I forgot what you were saying. Okay,
(33:59):
So that's Mars. That's maybe one of the closest and
and maybe least sour impossible tasting of the options. But
there are other possibilities within our solar system, or maybe
outside our solar system. Right, that's right, There are some
other places that we could consider living. For example, there's
the Moon. Right, the Moon is even closer than Mars,
(34:19):
and so from the point of view like getting stuff
there and doing the engineering, it's even simpler. The problem
is that the Moon is has a lot of the
same challenges as Mars, but it's even smaller, so the
gravity is is much much less, which means it would
be really hard to hold onto an atmosphere even if
you did all the work. You crashed a bunch of
comments into the moon. Um, you warmed it up somehow
(34:40):
with mirrors, and you give it a nice atmosphere, the
atmosphere which is leak away. Right, there's not enough gravity
to hold onto the atmosphere on the Moon. You have
to be big enough. There's a size requirement, yeah, exactly,
have to be big enough so that you have enough
gravity to hold onto the atmosphere. Right. It's like you
don't want to buy somebody a fancy new jacket. If
it's they're just going to throw it away. And that's
basically it would be like, if we build an atmosphere
(35:01):
on the Moon, it's just going to float away into
space because the Moon is not big enough to hold
onto it, but at least you would have enough cheese. Right,
That's that's right. It would be a fun party while
it lasted, right. Um. But if you're looking for like
a you know, thousands and thousands of years kind of solution,
like you want to establish a human base there, it's
just not really a good good idea. I mean, it
might last hundreds of years, you might even get a
thousand years out of it, but you need to continuously
(35:23):
replenish the atmosphere because it'd be constantly running away from you,
because it'll just float out into space. Yeah, exactly, and
just be constantly farting out your life source into space.
So the Moon your far back in right, your planet,
all right, So that's moon, the Moon. What about other
planets in the Solar System. Well, Venus is interesting because
(35:46):
it has exactly the opposite problem, right, Venus Mars we
talked about has almost no atmosphere. The Moon is no atmosphere.
Venus is the other problem, has way too much atmosphere.
Venus is like we're afraid Earth might be in a
million years is it's covered in carbon dioxide and it's
way too dense. It's like ninety times the density of
(36:07):
the atmosphere on Earth, right, so you'd be crushed two, right, Yeah,
And all that CEO two on that planet for all
those years has really heated it up. So it's like
four hundred and something degrees on the surface of Venus
all the time, right, That's not just like during the summer,
that's all the time. So the problem with Venus is
(36:27):
the opposite. You need to get rid of some of
that atmosphere and that will help Venus cool down. And
so that's that's hard, Like how do you get rid
of atmosphere. It's the opposite problem. You need to take
out CEO two. Yeah, And so people have crazy ideas.
They're like, well, you know some ideas like somehow get
that CEO two sequestered, you know, fire bunch of stuff
into the atmosphere of Venus like magnesium or calcium, or
(36:50):
you know, bombarded with hydrogen so that it forms water
or um, you know, with all sorts of other stuff.
These strategies to try to get the CEO two out
of the atmosphere onto the surface, which has its own problem.
And there are other strategies like make huge scoops and
scoop off the atmosphere, right, Like like just gather it
up and scoop it off Like that seems crazy to me,
Like you're going to build an enormous spoon, like, you know,
(37:14):
dig into the atmosphere Venus. It sounds crazy, but reasonable
people talk about this stuff. You're like, it's physically possible,
So get to work engineers. Yeah, and then I thought,
you know what if we could take some of the
CEO too off of Venus and bring it to Mars.
Or we could solve two problems at once, Right, what
if you could crash Venus into Mars and create the
perfect planet? Now you're going too far. Okay, we can
(37:36):
talk about planet sized mirrors, but we can't talk about
smashing them together. That's just totally impractical. Um. Yeah, so
that's you have am there's a limit to your flavors
of that's right. The other problem with Venus is that
it rotates really slowly. A day on Venus is two
hundred and forty something days on Earth, right, so you
(37:57):
have like really really long nights and really really long
day So that's a pretty hard way to live. So
it to really live on Venus, you'd have to like
speed up its rotation somehow, And people have talked about
how to do that. Yeah, like if you wanted to
get ready the atmosphere, you could build like a huge
jet which punches, which pushes the atmosphere out into space,
and that could act like, um, like a nozzle, right
(38:19):
to speed up the rotation of the planet. Now this
is I mean, it sounded crazy, but like, um, that's
a real solution. Okay, So that's venus. Um. We have
the opposite problem. Where else where else could we go?
Maybe outside of our solar system. Yeah, one of the
most promising things is not engineering a planet that's close by,
but picking the right one. You know. It's like, don't
(38:42):
choose from the cars that are available to you in
your neighborhood. If none of them work, like, go drive
thirty miles to find the right one, you know. And
so one option is to look for extrasolar planets, right
planets outside our solar system around other stars. And recently
we have amazing technology to do this. We found thousands
of them and just find one that has the right characteristics,
that has the right amount of solar radiation, has an atmosphere,
(39:05):
maybe even has liquid water, um, you know, and from
that point of view that we'd be starting from a
pretty good spot. It's not unlikely we could find one
that has carbon dioxide rich atmosphere with the right pressure
and the right temperature and liquid water that there's nothing
unreasonable about that expectation. So that's more like terror finding
than terraforming, right, you know what I mean? Like it's
(39:27):
you're looking for one that already looks like ours. Yeah,
and even in that scenar area, there of some big problems.
Like problem number one is it's super duper far away, right,
So it's gonna take a long time to get there,
if if that's even possible. Um. And you have to
figure out that it's a good destination before you get there,
because you don't want to travel for a thousand years
and then turn around because oops, you know, we forgot
(39:48):
the shopping list or oops, went to the wrong place. Um.
The other problem is what do you do when you
get there? Right, you want to establish an ecosystem on
the planet, and having enough CEO two and you seed
it with lie if and it produces oxygen, even that
is not enough to make like farmable land. Right. What
you need then is soil. You need to cover the
planet somehow with with dirt that you can use to
(40:10):
grow plants, and that's complicated, right, getting the getting dirt
to work, getting soil to work is hard. We don't
even understand how it works. On Earth. You know, people
are studding. It's not just dirt. Dirt is not just dirt,
you I mean, you can't grow things and just sand, right,
sand and water you need. Most of the soil that
we have on Earth is basically decayed plants, right, is
leaf litter and other stuff that has died. So now
(40:32):
you've got to start that process on another planet. You
have to somehow seated. You can bring some soil and
you can put it out there and it'll grow and spread.
But to get the right balance of all those microbes
working in just the right way to support the plants
that you need to feed your people, that's not an
easy problem to solve. And you can't just like truck
in a planet's worth of soil from Earth. Right, people
on Earth are not gonna be happy about that, And
(40:53):
that's expensive. So it's a hard problem to solve. Even
when you get there. You can just go to home
deep and by trillion bags of soil, that's right, It's
just not enough soil to fill another planet. And so
that's the kind of thing that would take a lot
of experimentation and a lot of time, but it is feasible. Okay,
So we learned that there are a lot of different
flavors of impossible. That's right, hoping beyond hope. Yeah, yeah,
(41:18):
they're not impossible, right, All these things could be done,
and you know, these are the ideas we have now.
And if we're talking about things we're doing over thousands
or millions of years, you've got to hope that human
ingenuity is going to come up with even better solutions,
better strategies, new energy sources, ways to do this kind
of engineering. So give us some time. I think we'll
figure it out. Yeah. We might not be desperate now,
(41:38):
but we might be more desperate later. Yeah, so throw
another tire on the fire and uh, you know, make
some plans to live on Mars. That really makes you
think about how fragile our planet is. You know, like
we're so lucky not to be like Mars, and if
we're not careful, we're gonna end up like Venus, you know,
totally uninhabitable. In either case. Yeah, you know it's good
(41:58):
to have negative role model. Right, we see some pretty
terrible examples around us of what happens when planets go
off kilter Mars lost its atmosphere, Venus overcooked. It's so,
we're pretty lucky to be right in this sweet spot,
and we better take care of it because it's gonna
be a long time before we are capable of making
another planet be home to a substantial population. So the
next time you go outside, take a deep breath and
(42:20):
savor it. That's right. You're not likely to get that
anywhere else. That's right. All right, everyone, Well, thanks for
lifting this upbeat episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
If you have questions about what we said and you
want to hear more about it, send us an email
at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Or if
you have another suggestion for a topic you'd like to
(42:40):
hear us talk about, send it on over. Or if
you have a question about physics or philosophy or dating
or small mammals or whatever, just send it on over. Yeah,
if you have questions about ceramics like terra cotta, don't
ask us. We don't know anything about it. All right,
see you next time. Thanks for listening. If you still
(43:08):
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Orge dot com
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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