Bro. The Sahara desert is over 9 million square kilometers. Let’s say our wildest dreams could be realized and we managed to re-green half of the Sahara, it would still leave an area larger than all of India for your highly specialized mice and lizards. They’d be fine.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Frankly, there’s no point. We already know how to green the Sahara. That fact is not in any doubt. You don’t actually prove anything or accomplish anything by doing so. We have all the technology; there’s just no economic reason to do so. Spam solar panels, desalination plants, and water pipelines. Technologically, it’s quite simple. Performing such a thing would prove nothing about our ability to settle Mars. The technical challenges are completely different. Whether we can actually settle Mars is a different question entirely. Settling somewhere on Earth does not provide any useful information on whether we can do so on Mars.
And ultimately, the point of expanding off Earth is so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. You’re just proposing that we more heavily exploit our current basket, rather than expanding out to another one.
And terraforming is hardly the first step here. You don’t jump directly into something like that. You figure out how to build a city first. Once you have a billion people living on Mars, then you can consider something as grand as terraforming.
mirshafie@europe.pub 21 hours ago
Lol okay no, there’s no reason to continue this exchange any further. You’d have a billion people holed up on a dead planet flr what, “science”? Get the fuck out of here.