Nevertheless, to have any meaningful effect, these legal regimes need to be in place for decades. Even if this is a crude oversimplification not doing justice to the inherent value of nature or a habitable climate, for economists it has the advantage of turning environmentalism into a quantifiable business rationale. In a more abstract manner, the legal regimes they install could all be explained in terms of being business cases to buy future agricultural productivity. At the opposite end of the scale, businesses receive money for permanently removing C02 from the atmosphere and prevent it from acting as a greenhouse gas. Polluting companies were given a permit to vent only a limited and decreasing amount of CO2 into the air, which would entice these businesses to pollute less. Simple concepts from the modern phenomenon of global environmentalism are good enough. There, to address complex issues, humanity often works with vague plans.įor instance, what was the Business Case for Carbon Credits? In any case, the derived Business Cases (afforestation, carbon capture, reduction) were the result of installing a legal regime that created artificial scarcity where there was none. But the question remains: how could we make this gradual approach scale to the entire planet of Mars?įor inspiration on a workable example of how we can come to terraform Mars, we needn’t look far. In the same vein, we understand there is a small expansive business case to supply Martian domes with gases. In the Dutch case, the economic benefits that were noticed when small plots of land were drained, were enough to gradually convince an entire nation to follow suit. The surprise is that it eventually only took two centuries to drain the entire country. In Holland, the Dutch started draining small private pieces of land and marshes before their isolated victories over the water gradually turned into an even more ambitious project of national importance. Nevertheless, small steps can grow into large strides. The more ambitious real estate agent and the Dutch nationals who rid their country of water will nod affirmatively, but even they would admit that the scale is beyond pharaonic. (For a break down of the business plan cost of a possible engineering approach to this problem, take a look at our article “ Terraforming Mars impossible? Not so fast: It only takes 40 Apples to turn Mars into Eden.“) The question is, is there an important enough business case to terraform an entire planet? So yes, a small industry to supply relatively small domes with imported resources will eventually take off. Gradually these transport routes will become more established, expand and become common.įorward-looking entrepreneurs could organize the import of Nitrogen from the Venusian atmosphere, which has too much of it, and provide fertilizer for agricultural food production in the existing domes on Mars. A small Eden would be created which, with its lower gravity, could be an ideal retirement home for the elderly.įirst, you would import only the urgently needed and noble buffer gases from other celestial bodies. Plants and humans would thrive without requiring oxygen masks, domes or pressure suits. The radiation protection would be as good as on Earth. The advantages of doing this are obvious. from Venus, which has 90 BAR worth of it in a mix of CO2, N, and H). We probably will not allow this to happen.Īt the same time, there are doubts the business case will be there to import CO2 and other gases to MARS on a planetary scale (e.g. This could cause problems, not only for the Martian environment, but it could even hinder shipments to Mars, which would no longer have an atmosphere to slow their orbital velocities and would see a dramatic increase in propellant needs, since even the thin Martian atmosphere can slow a ship down for free with >90%. Indeed, there is only so much CO2 to compress into city size habitable domes, a scheme called para-terraforming, before you run out. Sure, we can turn them into propellant, breathable gases, plastics, fertilizer, and metals, but with regards to the ones we can get from the Martian atmosphere, there are not enough of them. It has the resources for large colonies and it would be a waste not to use them.īut some of those resources are limited. Another human colony or a biological hazard zone forever made off limits for humans by planetary protection rules? Somehow I believe insights will evolve and Mars will indeed not become a forbidden planet, but another node in the interplanetary human network of thriving settlements. (image credit: Daein Ballard – CC BY-SA 3.0)
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