astrobiology
Asteroid capture through encapsulation
this research paper on asteroid capture through encapsulation and pneumatics (stabilizing the asteroid through spraying it with gas) is super cool; I watched one of the authors give the presentation and it's very compelling.... Mars feels like a really important backup plan. If there’s even a small chance that Earth is fucked from global warming, we need to be able to go to Mars. I heard a cool concept that we can basically artificially create global warming on Mars by putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Unless it’s life or death, I personally wouldn’t move to a planet with less than a million people on it (imagine Austin is the entire world, that feels like the bare minimum for me).
How much money and time would it take to get a million people to Mars?
I’m in favor of us having a backup plan, but I think it should be Venus actually. There are good studies about this. You can build floating cloud cities in Venus, which float at precisely the altitude where the pressure is about 1 atm and the temperatures are even sometimes what...