Asteroids! Are a real problem. And we haven’t figured out a way to prevent any of them from hitting our blue planet. Some of them are capable enough to wipe out the entire living population here. Something that happened with Dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. Is there a way to save humanity from such an accident? Yes, there is. If we become a multi-planetary species!
Closest Suitable Planet?
Let’s analyze the planets in our solar system…
Mercury - Extreme temperature range- Daytime (430 degrees Celcius), Nighttime (180 degrees celsius)
Venus - Runaway greenhouse effect- surface temperature - 460 degrees Celcius
Jupiter - Giant ball of Gas!
Saturn - Another spinning ball of gas.
All the other planets are too far from the sun to be warm enough for us. Going closer to the sun means that there will be more radiation, water cannot remain in the liquid form which is a major constraint. Going away from the Sun, we will freeze to death. Earth seems to be a perfect place😊. We need an Earth-like planet to move to.
Earth-Mars Similarities
It turns out that there is a planet like ours next to us. Mars! It Rotates around its central axis in a day. It is also tipped on its axis just like Earth is. It already has some of the necessary ingredients that life may need to survive. Icy Polar caps, Frozen water under its surface, A very low average temperature of -80 degrees Celcius but according to ‘Curiosity Rover’ (Love the Name!😎) on the surface of Mars, the temperature goes as high as 6 degrees celsius. We will be able to stay here if we manage to heat up this planet.
How do we terraform Mars?
Elon Musk says, there are 2 possible ways to add heat into Mars’s atmosphere. A quick way and a long way. A quick way is to drop nuclear bombs on the poles of mars, melting the water and creating a dust storm that will cover the planet’s surface, trapping the Sun’s heat and warming up the planet. Another way is to add reflector satellites into Mars’s orbit that will focus Sun’s radiations towards the planet’s surface, melting the polar caps and setting up a chain that will keep generating the greenhouse effect slowly but surely to warm up the planet’s atmosphere.
I wonder when we will see people visiting us from Mars. Whenever they will, I am sure they would never try to pick a one on one against people on earth. They will be much weaker just as their planet’s gravity!
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