What if Mars and Venus were habitable?

[Orionblamblam]

the conservative results
produced by Crawford & Mader have been used in the following analysis.

It's gratifying to see that you are accepting of conservative analyses. Soon we'll see you quoting Ben Shapiro and OAN.

In all seriousness, only Chicxulub is strong enough to break the modern economy ...

Ah, to be young and optimistic again.

 

[Kat Tsun]

As I said, whatever is going to break the global economy is going to be something more of an issue than a space rock. Like a proverbial mountain of debt or some bizarre structural issue with a certain novel type of banking contract. You know, actually complicated problems that are hard to solve, because few people understand them and fewer people can understand the problems they might pose.

Space rocks are simple and so predictable you can use a protractor to calculate its path.

The problems it can pose are also simple: it's a big rock that falls on things and breaks them. It's not hard to visualize or model.

So it's not a big deal unless it's really, really big. Like multiple miles big. Apophis is a pebble in comparison to real rocks like Chicxulub, and the US Air Force is about an order of magnitude more dangerous than it, which is why it wouldn't be a huge deal if it hit the Earth. Even in the worst case of hitting Bos-Wash most of the world would continue about their lives as normal.

I'd suggest you stop watching Roland Emmerich movies but I think Armageddon is a Michael Bay film.

 

[Orionblamblam]

So it's not a big deal unless it's really, really big. Like multiple miles big. Apophis is a pebble in comparison to real rocks like Chicxulub, and the US Air Force is about an order of magnitude more dangerous than it, which is why it wouldn't be a huge deal if it hit the Earth. Even in the worst case of hitting Bos-Wash most of the world would continue about their lives as normal.

You'd be a hoot as a defense attorney:
"Oh, come on, it was only a school bus full of orphans. In the grand scheme of things selling them to be turned into sausages was no big deal."

 

[Kat Tsun]

Yes, I think there's an important difference between 30 feet and 5280 feet in terms of wave height. Why do you ask?

Anyway this digression has gone on long enough. Venus being habitable would be cool but it's a bit flat. I guess if you drove a comet into it it could have a big lake. You'd need to cool him down for him to crack his egg and become a real planet, preferably after introducing water, so it could form a lithosphere. It might be too late for that though.

Mars is probably never going to be habitable because it's too small to sustain an atmosphere, too geologically dead to sustain tectonic motion/magnetic field, too far away to make crops viable, and the gravity is probably going to result in deformed foetal development or outright miscarriages in the embryonic stages. Microgravity is rather harsh on the development of blastocysts since they apparently need 1g to properly differentiate, although they still polarize normally, no one really knows what a full microgravity embryo would develop like either. They tend to die more often than normal at some point early in the foetal stage due to the odd cellular differentiation.

Unless you have some way of making Mars triple its mass I don't think it would ever work as a permanent human habitat. Not worth the trouble. Venus is most promising since it's similar in gravity, which solves the biggest hurdle, but it's kinda muggy and doesn't have much in the way of water. Whatever you'd need to do to make it livable is still a lot easier than Mars probably.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Yes, I think there's an important difference between 30 feet and 5280 feet in terms of wave height. Why do you ask?

Indeed. Kill 5280 people, that's bad. Kill 30? Nah, it'll be fine.

Mars is probably never going to be habitable because it's too small to sustain an atmosphere,

On geological timescales? Sure. On human timescales? Pfff. If we have the ability to give it an atmosphere, we can top it off every century or so on Impact Day.

too geologically dead to sustain tectonic motion/magnetic field,

We can give it a field.

too far away to make crops viable,

Citation needed.

and the gravity is probably going to result in deformed foetal development or outright miscarriages in the embryonic stages.

Citation needed.

 

[martinbayer]

Yes, I think there's an important difference between 30 feet and 5280 feet in terms of wave height. Why do you ask?

Indeed. Kill 5280 people, that's bad. Kill 30? Nah, it'll be fine.

Mars is probably never going to be habitable because it's too small to sustain an atmosphere,

On geological timescales? Sure. On human timescales? Pfff. If we have the ability to give it an atmosphere, we can top it off every century or so on Impact Day.

too geologically dead to sustain tectonic motion/magnetic field,

We can give it a field.

too far away to make crops viable,

Citation needed.

and the gravity is probably going to result in deformed foetal development or outright miscarriages in the embryonic stages.

Citation needed.

Wave heights are equivalent to a number of people - what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

 

[Orionblamblam]

what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

You stay classy.

 

[martinbayer]

what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

You stay classy.

I do indeed - thanks for the superfluous advice though ! I note however that you ducked answering my question, but it looks like Iowa State University, that legendary hub of aerospace innovation, it is then.

 

[bobtdwarf]

This might come in handy for further discussion of impacts. https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/ImpactEffects/

 

[Orionblamblam]

what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

You stay classy.

I do indeed - thanks for the superfluous advice though ! I note however that you ducked answering my question, but it looks like Iowa State University, that legendary hub of aerospace innovation, it is then.

Oh, good. I have a stalker.

 

[Kat Tsun]

what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

You stay classy.

I do indeed - thanks for the superfluous advice though ! I note however that you ducked answering my question, but it looks like Iowa State University, that legendary hub of aerospace innovation, it is then.

A guy I knew in university was from Iowa. He was 18 and on track to graduate with dual majors in nuclear and chemical engineering in two years due to AP credits. He later dropped one of the tranches tho, but still a cool guy, very chill, really really smart.

Yes, I think there's an important difference between 30 feet and 5280 feet in terms of wave height. Why do you ask?

Indeed. Kill 5280 people, that's bad. Kill 30? Nah, it'll be fine.

Mars is probably never going to be habitable because it's too small to sustain an atmosphere,

On geological timescales? Sure. On human timescales? Pfff. If we have the ability to give it an atmosphere, we can top it off every century or so on Impact Day.

too geologically dead to sustain tectonic motion/magnetic field,

We can give it a field.

too far away to make crops viable,

Citation needed.

and the gravity is probably going to result in deformed foetal development or outright miscarriages in the embryonic stages.

Citation needed.

Citation: Earth is 1g. Plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight. The further you get away from either of these the harder it becomes to live.

Venus would probably be fine with a solar shade or something though. It's better to be closer to the Sun than further away after all. Much easier to cool things off than to make them warmer. If Venus didn't have its noxious atmosphere but a breathable one it would be an exceptional candidate as a second Earth.

Barsoom can be a slave plantation for the British or Belgians to exploit for resource extraction I guess. Maybe you can turn the Moons into robotic death fortresses to keep the alien sepoys in line. There's plenty of science fiction stories based on the Sepoy Mutiny and British Raj so it's not too much of a stretch since people have thought of it before. It's too crummy for people to actually live on though, much like how India was too crummy for the British Empire to bother moving the royal family to.

Before we go to space we need to make new men who can ration resources in an industrial rather than hunter-gatherer style or something though. A species that could actually ration resources in the long-scale, rapid-fire manner you'd need to accommodate potential technological pathways would not survive past hunter-gatherer because hunter-gatherers have short time horizons measured in weeks or months at most. But short time horizons tend to spell death in industrial environments where short time horizons are closer to years or decades.

A bit of a Catch-22 honestly.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Citation: Earth is 1g and plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight.

And yet plants grow in a wide varieties of light levels and temperatures.

Before we go to space we need to make new men who can ration resources in an industrial rather than hunter-gatherer style or something.

Ye gods no. The *last* thing we need to make are "new men." It's a tragically awful idea.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Citation: Earth is 1g and plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight.

And yet plants grow in a wide varieties of light levels and temperatures.

Yes if you put a wheat plant in the Arctic I'm sure it will grow. Make sure you replace the ice with iron oxide, silicon dioxide, and various other oxidized forms of sand and minerals, and give it a healthy bath of salt for flavor.

Mars is entirely inhospitable to all forms of Earth life. It's saturated in toxic chemicals. It's cold. It's a literal desert. More salt than the Salt Lake flats.

You might as well ask why people don't grow summer wheat in the Sahara anymore. Or why the Mormons aren't beating Montana at cereal grain production. Because cereals don't grow in dry, sandy places that have little water and large amounts of salt. If it were breathable whatever life evolves would likely be bizarre by normal biochemistries because it would need to subsist in a heavily chlorinated desert with large salt lakes dotting the place.

Think brine shrimp with sharp rocks and slingshots I guess for animal/sepoy life. Plant life would likely be limited to lichens and algae, similar to the Dead Sea, and perhaps some exothermic extremophiles at the deep depths that live near geologic vents (let's give Mars some credit, if she has an atmosphere, she has tectonic activity) or something.

Again, we know what it would look like. We have plenty of analogues on Earth. None of them are particularly appealing places to live. If you want to live on Mars you can try buying a plot of land in north Utah for pennies and building a shack in the middle of the salt desert. Then try subsistence farming. Literally the same thing. You can also try mining quartz in the same place, or possibly just grinding up some 5G crystals, and snorting them, and that should give you your daily dose of Martian dust and eventual lung cancer.

Conversely we know almost nothing about Venus's soil compositions, but we know that any sort of habitable Venus would be so alien to the actual Venus that it might as well be Elysium compared to even a wet and watery Mars.

Mars dry: Salt desert.
Mars wet: Salt swamp.

It doesn't really get any better unless you're a protist, a sea crustacean, or something, then it's pretty swell because those are weird.

If it makes you feel better Martians would find us just as icky but they'd probably be worse off so we could conquer them and enslave them to dig out iron that would somehow be worse than Manchurian ore. Maybe they'd have coal too. Polish Space Empire can smog mog Olympus Mons instead of Western Europe and make crummy iron starships and iron oxide powered rockets while slapping shrimp men around with big sticks because we'd be unstoppable ogres on Mars until the skeletal atrophy hits.

Before we go to space we need to make new men who can ration resources in an industrial rather than hunter-gatherer style or something.

Ye gods no. The *last* thing we need to make are "new men." It's a tragically awful idea.

Then humans will go extinct.

Realistically it's probably too late to colonize space since humans decided to shoot their energetic wads of easily available petrochemicals on driving to the store and delivering food to supermarkets, instead of building space rockets, because humans are lazy and impatient relative to an ideal Industrial Man. But that's the hunter-gatherer brain at work. An industrial brain would set aside those resources for future exploitation and continue living in broadly primitive lifestyles for low energy consumption until a time when the resources could be expended on population explosion/dispersal.

Rinse, repeat.

The only actual difference is time preference. Industrial brains have time preferences measured in years or decades. Hunter-gatherers have time preferences measured in weeks or months.

But as I said it's a Catch-22: Industrial brains would starve to death pre-agriculture because they would hoard all resources and hunter-gatherer brains die out post-agriculture due to resource overuse. You might even call it a "tragedy" of "the commons".

More than likely a metamorphic stage that occurs when a certain level of population density triggers it, would work, where the species grows into a chrysalis and is formed into stem cells. This followed by rebirth as a second stage of the animal where it is adapted for thinking in a much longer time horizon, would be the most optimal method of doing it. You can then have your cake and eat it too so long as you don't think too much about the fact that going into a chrysalis is functionally indistinguishable from death.

OTOH the same is true of "mind uploading" and tons of people would sign up to be turned into a computer hard drive.

Mammals differentiating into a mass of unorganized stem cells is pretty neat as an idea, though, and something actually possible.

I think I'm just turning into a biopunk aficionado though. Which is funny because 10 years ago I hated the genre. Not enough chrome.

Anyway if you're think of a dreadfully blase and insipid "new men" vs. "old men" war, I don't think that would be anymore likely than "secular" vs. "Amish" war in the United States (the actual Amish wars were between two Christian sects, after all) esp. considering Deist America artificially traces its own history to legal doctrine espousing the inherent rights of Anabaptists and Quakers. Old humans would probably have some customary legal protections by fiat (they are the sires of the new men, so they would have some established filial and cultural cachet) and they have nothing that any sort of transhuman spacefarers could possibly want that they wouldn't already have by virtue of being in leadership or managerial positions.

Transhuman overmen would likely be too busy fighting a literal doctrinal war over whether or not chrome or chrysalis is the ideal form of surpassing the time preference concerns of oldthinking, as generally people tend to fight people more like themselves than people who are very very different.

But you'd need some sort of bigly expansion of time preference to make proper use of scarce resources to colonize a star system.

Otherwise people will just squander all the energy on driving to the store instead of walking because hunter-gatherers are inherently lazy and like using machines, even if it takes more energy to make a machine, because it is "better" to the brain than simply using leg muscles. Brain probably can't think of walking more than a mile or two in any direction in most parts of the United States, partly due to distance, partly due to the brain on some level considering machines to be part of the environment due to unseen/unknown energetic expenditures.

But transhuman overmen are impossible so it's all a bit silly. I just think that's the only way you'd ever see a person living on Ganymede.

 

[martinbayer]

what diploma mill did you get your degree from?

You stay classy.

I do indeed - thanks for the superfluous advice though ! I note however that you ducked answering my question, but it looks like Iowa State University, that legendary hub of aerospace innovation, it is then.

Oh, good. I have a stalker.

No, you have a LinkedIn profile. In case you forgot, I'm one of your direct contacts .

 

[Michel Van]

Mars is probably never going to be habitable because it's too small to sustain an atmosphere, too geologically dead to sustain tectonic motion/magnetic field,

We could build Dome Cities, wrapt Mars in superconducting wire
or move the Asteroids (16) Psyche and (4)Vesta into orbit of Mars and kickstart geological process by tides forces
maybe it restart Mars magnetic field

too far away to make crops viable,

unproven, first who wanted to test this was Elon Musk the Result: SpaceX

and the gravity is probably going to result in deformed foetal development or outright miscarriages in the embryonic stages.

unproven, there were testing on insects, Frogs, birds an Mice in zero gravity, but i don't have reports on that

Microgravity is rather harsh on the development of blastocysts since they apparently need 1g to properly differentiate, although they still polarize normally, no one really knows what a full microgravity embryo would develop like either. They tend to die more often than normal at some point early in the foetal stage due to the odd cellular differentiation.

unproven, long stay on Moon are needed to gain data or artificial Gravity expertment with animals in Low earth orbit.

Unless you have some way of making Mars triple its mass I don't think it would ever work as a permanent human habitat. Not worth the trouble. Venus is most promising since it's similar in gravity, which solves the biggest hurdle, but it's kinda muggy and doesn't have much in the way of water. Whatever you'd need to do to make it livable is still a lot easier than Mars probably.

We could build Dome City on Mars or floating cities in sky of Venus.
Or start to build O'Niel habitats, right gravitation, right Air pressure with ecology you want...

 

[Kat Tsun]

Dome cities lol. You can build dome cities under the ocean it would be easier, less hazardous, less expensive, and more habitable. Boom, new land found. It was on the continental shelf the whole time. It's under 500 meters of ocean and five miles off the coast. You can literally drive there in a boat if you want and dive down. Or take a submarine. So easy compared to space. Why not consider that? It's just as alien, perhaps even more, because it's far more interesting than some dead salt desert. There's actual life there.

If you dismiss that, but don't dismiss building dome cities millions of miles away on an alien world, you might actually be delusional.

Re embryoes it's not unproven at all it was done on Kibo. It cuts fertility roughly in half when IVF embryos developed under microgravity are transplanted into mice that are in 1g. It's not possible to test full microgravity development (there is no centrifuge on ISS) but it probably wouldn't do any favors to an embryo or developing foetus, judging by the fact that IVF embryos tended to abort at twice the rate of control transplants.

Insects, amphibians, and reptiles aren't mice models nor mammals so they don't actually count. A gecko reproducing has about as much in common with human foetal development as an apple or a pinecone. Separate classes of animals. Entirely different reproduction methods. Not relevant whatsoever. Even then I'm not sure any geckos actually managed to propagate because they all died.

You don't need to go to the Moon to test a centrifuge in low orbit.

You go to the Moon to go to Mars and plant a flag, gather some rocks, and go home.

JAXA's bulk orbital experiments have been about trying to get mammals to reproduce in space. That was their major contribution to ISS science payloads and it's been that way for years. NASA traded something (I think launch priority for Kibo) for the centrifuge module, which was promptly scrapped along with the habitation/galley module, because the Space Shuttles were flying coffins that kept exploding and NASA lost ISS launch windows as a result.

Without the centrifuge it's impossible to test how a mice model carries to term in microgravity in simulated Martian or Lunar gravities, but you can still develop a embryo or blastocyst on a clinometer and the results are...pessimistic to say the least. But you're gonna have to blame the Space Shuttle for being a death trap that constantly exploded on that, as it's not really NASA's fault except that they bought the thing in the first place.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Citation: Earth is 1g and plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight.

And yet plants grow in a wide varieties of light levels and temperatures.

Yes if you put a wheat plant in the Arctic I'm sure it will grow. Make sure you replace the ice with iron oxide, silicon dioxide, and various other oxidized forms of sand and minerals, and give it a healthy bath of salt for flavor.

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

Before we go to space we need to make new men who can ration resources in an industrial rather than hunter-gatherer style or something.

Ye gods no. The *last* thing we need to make are "new men." It's a tragically awful idea.

Then humans will go extinct.

Nope. But deciding in advance what to turn humans into? yeah, no. the Soviets tried that sort of thing before... a bunch of "experts" declare in advance what needs to happen, and kill millions in the process because their ideology is more important than actual science. "Intelligent design" over "evolution," "state control" over "free market." No. if mankind is to change, let mankind change. Don't force it.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Citation: Earth is 1g and plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight.

And yet plants grow in a wide varieties of light levels and temperatures.

Yes if you put a wheat plant in the Arctic I'm sure it will grow. Make sure you replace the ice with iron oxide, silicon dioxide, and various other oxidized forms of sand and minerals, and give it a healthy bath of salt for flavor.

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

Does the Arctic not get less light than the rest of the Earth? News to me. Do plants not absorb nutrients from the soil, as well as water, with which to build themselves up, construct large solar collecting panels, crack CO2, and create carbohydrates, only to repeat the process?

They also need fungal dependence because plants have evolved to exchange nitrogen in the soil with fungi for carbon, but rhizobium and injection of fungus could maybe help. Maybe. You still need to get rid of the perchlorates somehow.

Before we go to space we need to make new men who can ration resources in an industrial rather than hunter-gatherer style or something.

Ye gods no. The *last* thing we need to make are "new men." It's a tragically awful idea.

Then humans will go extinct.

Nope.

I dunno, humans seem to be a bit stuck on a wet rock with easily available means of escape rapidly shrinking. It's only been a century and a half and we're tapping out tons of previously unsavory or readily dismissed methods of petrochemical extraction. We went from rock oil being so worthless it was something you spat on to being so valuable we compare it to gold, perhaps we'll go back to it being so worthless in the future, but I don't think anyone is gonna ride a thermite rocket into space.

Methane clathrates would be a good reason for having dome cities on the ocean floor though.

the Soviets tried that sort of thing before... a bunch of "experts" declare in advance what needs to happen, and kill millions in the process because their ideology is more important than actual science. "Intelligent design" over "evolution," "state control" over "free market." No. if mankind is to change, let mankind change. Don't force it.

It'll change into the grave either way, because all things die. I'd rather have something that is similar to humans flying around in space rather than having something that is similar to humans crawling around ancient steel skeletons of buildings.

Humans as they exist aren't exactly great at handling resources in the long term. The Great Filter is looking more and more like a consequence of 50,000 year old computer trying to correct problems using 150,000 year old software that was never designed for the task and is probably actively inimical towards succeeding. In other words, hunter-gatherer mindset cannot escape a planet because of a pretty simple problem.

Jevons' paradox ain't gonna wait. You need to make people who aren't vulnerable to expending all energy on frivolity.

No, you have a LinkedIn profile. In case you forgot, I'm one of your direct contacts .

I haven't even *thought* of LinkedIn in well over a decade. Strange that you did.

What's strange about it? I currently have 6,229 connections, including Newt Gingrich (he's pro space, after all).

Do you still have a MySpace account? America Online? Prodigy? Catch the latest episode of "Star Search" on your VCR?

Professional people still use LinkedIn though. It's probably the most used job-related social media site in the world. It's more like Facebook or Twitter than anything. I know my university had a free course/seminar on LinkedIn like 2 years ago for graduating engineers.

Comparing it to MySpace just because it's old is kinda silly. There's no Zoom to LinkedIn's Skype.

 

[zen]

Catch the latest episode of "Star Search" on your VCR?

You're joking, my Betamax is worn out after watching a recording Shogun

 

[Orionblamblam]

Citation: Earth is 1g and plant life evolved for its quantity of sunlight.

And yet plants grow in a wide varieties of light levels and temperatures.

Yes if you put a wheat plant in the Arctic I'm sure it will grow. Make sure you replace the ice with iron oxide, silicon dioxide, and various other oxidized forms of sand and minerals, and give it a healthy bath of salt for flavor.

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

Does the Arctic not get less light than the rest of the Earth? News to me.

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

Professional people still use LinkedIn though. My university had a free course/seminar on LinkedIn like 2 years ago for graduating engineers. It's a pretty standard thing innit?

OK, boomer.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

They're literally the same thing. Light (not "sunlight") is just an energy source the plant uses. You can use a giant spotlight but this is grossly inefficient. You can also use hydroponics, but again, grossly inefficient. Now try running a modern city on nothing but hydroponics and indoor gardening. No importing no farms only indoor lights.

So yes, you could shine bright lights with a nuclear reactor plant or SBS rectenna farm on the plants and they probably wouldn't care, that requires a level of industrialization and space construction capability we won't have in 100 years. We're just now getting to the point where you can cheaply deploy a Brilliant Pebbles constellation only 40 years after it showed up as a concept in the first place. Who knows how much more slowly aerospace technology will develop in the future.

While I'd appreciate the stoic, spartan accommodations of a future Mars colony as a Stakhanovite moral endeavor, it would quite literally need to be run as a Soviet command economy, or perhaps a military battalion or naval vessel despotism. Probably using a really big computer to calculate work:joules/kilocalorie allocations coupled with a surveillance state to ensure that slacking isn't occurring. Or else it would literally die. Because people will slack because people are inherently lazy and can't be motivated easily to work for a common goal.

Most space stuff to actually colonize it, is so brutal an environment that only a communist dictatorship would be able to survive. The last time people faced conditions about as bad as future space colonists would face would be the Age of Sail I suppose.

It would attract a certain kind of person I suppose, but only the kind that like hard work and moving around a lot. Certainly it wouldn't be the next Wild West because there'd hardly be any cause for banditry or "being able to live on your own" or whatever. It would be highly regimented and organized like a ship at sea, or some idealized forms of communist states, with a lot of top-down direction and expectations of rapid completion of work. When the outside environment is literally trying to kill you and the nearest resupply station is a million miles away you kind of need to be very self sufficient, but not in the "American frontier" sense, more in the "pure Soviet industrial autarky" sense.

Professional people still use LinkedIn though. My university had a free course/seminar on LinkedIn like 2 years ago for graduating engineers. It's a pretty standard thing innit?

OK, boomer.

Hey man I'm just saying if it's good enough for like two Americas worth of professional guys with CVs it's good enough for most folks.

Literally no one uses Xing or Meetup anymore and those are about as old.

 

[Archibald]

Folks,

Both Mars and Moon have giganormous underground caves - lava tubes - courtesy of their gravity being so much lower than Earth. Accordingly, lava tubes can grow to truly epic sizes without collapsing.
Data from GRAIL showev immense voids below the surface of the Moon OCean of Storms. Scientists did the maths, and their minds were blown.
See attached: caves 3 miles "high", "wide" and... 100 miles long.

For the sake of comparison, Lanzarote or Hawai lava tubes are no wider than 30 ft.

Spelunking Kazumura Cave: The World's Longest Lava Tube — Shaun Busuttil

Recently discovered, Kazumura Cave is a unique national treasure of both geological and cultural significance.

www.shaunbusuttil.com

La Corona lava tube with its 7.6
km length and 10-20 m diameter is one of the world’s largest volcanic cave complex.

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2019/EGU2019-16620-1.pdf

 

[Orionblamblam]

Your argument was with light levels. Now you're changing it to chemistry.

They're literally the same thing.

Ummmm...

 

[Orionblamblam]

Folks,

Both Mars and Moon have giganormous underground caves - lava tubes -

Lava tubes would make for great initial colonies. But as terraforming gets to the point that rain begins to fall, decisions would need to be made...

 

[Kat Tsun]

They're the same thing, yes. Light without good soil = no plant. Good soil without light = no plant. Luckily Mars has neither so we don't need to choose. People have put plants into simulated Martian regolith and it's about as hospitable as a salt desert.

Because that's what Mars is.

At some point the planet was covered entirely in water. Maybe there was a island where Olympus Mons is, as it's pretty heckin' tall, but the rest of it was probably an ocean. It was also really salty. A true water world. It eventually lost its atmosphere due to being too weedy to properly develop tectonic activity and a hot enough core to sustain a dynamo magnetosphere, which led to solar wind stripping. Then the water dried up when Mars's atmosphere got too weedy to hold all the water in. Some of it froze and lives underground, but it's still hella salty.

Plants like soybeans, one of the best possible candidates for a Martian agriculture basis, simply don't germinate right when there's high concentrations of perchlorate and crummy loose sand that can barely hold water. That's after you solve the incredible energy consumption needed to artificially illuminate and irrigate a patch of Martian dirt. You would need to continuously import calcium from Earth to maintain plant growth.

You could also recycle the bones of the dead, that would likely be important, as people in protein starved environments (New Guinea) on Earth ended up doing that for a long time. Even if the atmosphere were breathable the issue of soil wouldn't change. You would just be able to go outside without a spacesuit.

So maybe you'd be able to drive space rovers around on the one day a month you get off instead of playing microgravity tennis I guess.

 

[Orionblamblam]

They're the same thing, yes. Light without good soil = no plant. Good soil without light = no plant. Luckily Mars has neither so we don't need to choose.

Mars has perfectly adequate light. We just need to tinker with the soil. Humans are good at that sort of thing; compared to the Negev or Arizona or Utah, Mars is just a matter of scale.

You would need to continuously import calcium from Earth to maintain plant growth.

You'd very likely need to import a *lot.* But that's what the comets, asteroids and moons are for.

If Elon Musk could snap his fingers and make Mars earthlike tomorrow, in a few million years Mars would start looking pretty ratty again. But in a few million years the descendants of Man will probably be able to play with planets like billiard balls.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Comets, asteroids, and moons don't have limestone. Neither does Mars, naturally.

Martian light isn't adequate without substantial support. This is achieved by construction of greenhouses and artificial lighting apparatus. That's kind of shitty if you can breathe to begin with, because you need to make glass and artificial supports, and ship starter components there. If you need to grow large tracts of farms, and you need to raise cereal crops, it's wholly inadequate. It's fine for vegetables though, provided you have enough electrical reserve to actually run it all. That's a dubious prospect even with nuclear energy or SBS rectenna farms, and not really conductive to the wildest "ISRU" fantasies.

It would likely require a deliberate series of missions to build and construct orbital facilities, followed by construction of ground rectennas (if you want SBS, which would be crummy on Mars, naturally) or installation of large nuclear powerplants. Perhaps you could use thorium breeders since you'll need to stop by the Moon anyway.

You might as well not have a breathable atmosphere though since you'll be spending all your time indoors anyway. As I said the only thing that will grow on Mars natively would probably be lichens or algae, since they don't care, grow in similar conditions on Earth (ancient seabeds of the far northern tundras), and probably won't be too heavily harmed by salt in the soil. Lichens and stuff live in the Atacama and Patagonian deserts, which are heavily salted, dry, and cold.

Humble communist pond scum farmers skimming the surface of Martian salt pools is kind of aesthetic though. Space Chile guided by cybernetic hand of Allende's ghost in the machine will grow many lichens in the green moss flats.

But it isn't wheat fields or anything of the sort. It's more like "ancient Sami moss eating peasant" poverty tier. Until you solve the cereals question and the embryonic development problems, which seem insurmountable, it's nothing more than a glorified oil rig since it isn't going to support successive generations.

Venus would still be the better option even if it's a dumpster fire on par with Mars. At least you can have kids there lol.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Comets, asteroids, and moons don't have limestone.

So? Neither does your average farm. A farm has *soil,* which can be manufactured on an industrial scale if you actually put in the effort.

I remain confused about why you think engineering stops at the Karman line.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Comets, asteroids, and moons don't have limestone.

So? Neither does your average farm.

I, too, live 220 million miles from the nearest limestone quarry.

A farm has *soil,* which can be manufactured on an industrial scale if you actually put in the effort.

Soil has...calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus, no salt. At least one of these is missing from Mars. Thus ISRU is a failure and Mars is inhospitable the moment calcium shipments stop from Earth. The colony dies. End of.

At least with Venus you can raise oysters or something and maybe acquire a native source of calcium because it's 1g. You'd need to import entire blocks of oceanic biosphere to an inimical alien terrain but that's simple right? It only takes about ten words to say so it must be simple. Alternatively you can use the CO2 in Venusian atmosphere and fix it down into calcium carbonate, but that'll take a few hundred or million or hundred million years to complete.

Of course since it's breathable in this example that's impossible. You're stuck with importing unless there's tons of CO2 or something trapped in the soil or some acidic seas.

I remain confused about why you think engineering stops at the Karman line.

You're just greatly underestimating the extreme difficulty of cultivating plants in alien biomes. Probably because you have no experience in agriculture and don't know enough about the problem faced with Martian regolith, which is utterly inhospitable. Try growing radishes in your backyard that's usually a good starter for agronomy experience.

Or better yet you could ask yourself why no one grows wheat in the Patagonian desert or why Salt Lake City isn't ringed with cornfields.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Comets, asteroids, and moons don't have limestone.

So? Neither does your average farm.

I, too, live 220 million miles from the nearest limestone quarry.

Non sequitur.

A farm has *soil,* which can be manufactured on an industrial scale if you actually put in the effort.

Soil has...calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus, no salt.

Yup. And Mars can be made just like that.

I remain confused about why you think engineering stops at the Karman line.

You're just greatly underestimating the extreme difficulty of cultivating plants in alien biomes.[/quote]

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Try growing radishes in your backyard that's usually a good starter for agronomy experience.

Try growing a radish in Mars regolith analog. Can you do it using the straight stuff? probably not. can you modify the regolith to turn it into soil? Maybe not *you,* but I bet you that someone could. If this can be done with one kilo of regolith, it can be done with a trillion tons of regolith. It'll take a quadrillion times the resources and effort, but for a species with access to the resources of the solar system, that will be no biggie.

Or better yet you could ask yourself why no one grows wheat in the Patagonian desert. Lol.

Because why would they? Why don't they pave over Manhattan with solar panels? Because there are better places for that sort of thing. But Mars, right now, is useless for anything... but it *can* be made into something useful: a living world. This can also be done with Luna and Venus; arguably also with several moons of the gas giants.

 

[Kat Tsun]

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Humanity is so smart that it can't figure out how to ration petrochemicals or decide to use nuclear power to solve an incoming energy crisis, but it can somehow colonize a solar system.

One, two things that are so simple that multiple groups of people decided they were both good ideas and executed them with varying degrees of success (occasionally doing both, but mostly just either/or), and the other: a task so infinitely more difficult than all things previously done before or mentioned that we've not only never done anything close to it, but have seen no evidence to suggest it's possible in the first place by anything in existence in the natural world.

Okay.

By the way we're talking about mammals that stop breeding the second you introduce them to air conditioning and microwave ovens.

It's one thing to say "I can make an airplane". You can because birds fly. Birds are powered flying machines. They fly by flapping wings with motors and they are small so they are probably weaker than people. Plausible but will require evidence.

It's another thing to say "we can shape the world to our desire" as the wet dirtball that same set of mammals lives on is being increasingly polluted with particulate aerosols, plastics, and noxious chemicals, and while people are independently deciding this is bad and needs fixing, no one is able to pull together enough clout to stamp down firmly and say "we need to do this".

One is a plausible and reasonable deduction that requires observation of the natural world to confirm, much as how Newton observed the movement of water across rocks in a river and developed the concept of Newtonian fluids. The other is a religious delusion that elevates man's unique tool solving ability to be comparable to nature itself, despite all natural evidence suggesting the contrary.

If we're considering mega scale architectural capabilities on part of humans to shape the natural world in the celestial sphere, then Venus is still the better option. Because there's no way to make a planet have more gravity without making it bigger. That 0.3g is really gonna hurt the descendents of Martians who, at best, would turn into non-human subspecies in a few hundred or thousand generations. At worst they wouldn't exist. Venusians would likely be somewhat swarthier lads, but otherwise human, though. As far as anyone knows the slight differences in gravity between Venus and Earth likely wouldn't matter (maybe they'd be slightly taller too).

Which is important when we're talking about species survival rather than life in a panspermian sense. Gravity is the real killer at the end of the day but the soil is also crummy. I would prefer Venusian algae farms in all seriousness, and maybe the acidic salt lakes can be fixed with starter cultures of carbonate producing bacteria, that can be fed to oyster farms, to provide a native calcium economy that would reduce dependence on Earth.

If the point of a colony is to eventually be totally independent and totally backup to the original home planet then Venus is your only shot. It's just Earth's younger, more tsundere twin.

tl;dr Mars is inherently bad for Earth life. Venus is also bad but less inherently bad since it's similar size to Earth. These are the most important attributes. If both have breathable atmospheres, there's literally no reason to go to Mars. Ever. Even if they both have crummy soils Venus wins every time. The only reason people like Mars IRL is because of KSR's books and because it isn't covered in a noxious atmosphere of sulfuric acid and massive pressures like Venus.

Apparently it's easier to imagine making Mars geologically active than it is to imagine putting a solar shade in front of Venus and seeding it with iron or ice though. Maybe it's because people have no sense of scale for the difficulty of the former. One is orbital mechanics and the other is something so (literally) hard we don't even know what the mantle looks like, and people think that low gravity doesn't affect them or doesn't have severely detrimental effects on human physiology. Lol.

 

[publiusr]

Titan gives new life to petrochemicals though-and if "Planet Nine" winds up being a grapefruit size black hole...those together might be more of a boon to humanity than jungle Venus or Old Mars. Now to look at Miranda's open pit quarries

 

[PMN1]

Titan gives new life to petrochemicals though-and if "Planet Nine" winds up being a grapefruit size black hole...those together might be more of a boon to humanity than jungle Venus or Old Mars. Now to look at Miranda's open pit quarries

This was from one of Niven and Pournells books on Black Holes in a story called 'Pluto is Black'

Pluto was a puzzler, however. An object six times Earth's mass was expected to show a disk when observed using large telescopes, but Pluto did not. Furthermore, the planet had a bizarre tilted orbit that partly overlapped that of Neptune.

As astronomers continued their observations of Pluto, they revised estimates of its size downward. By 1960, some astronomers thought that it was about the size of Earth; others thought it might be as small as Mercury. This only increased the mystery surrounding the planet, for if it was to account for the observed discrepancies in Neptune's orbit, then it had to be several times as massive as Earth. Some astronomers proposed the existence of another, larger planet beyond Pluto. One scientist proposed a much more novel explanation.

George Peterson Field was the pen name of Dr. Robert Forward. Safely hidden behind the protective cloak of his nom de plume, the newly minted Ph.D. physicist speculated in a "science fact" article in the December 1962 issue of Galaxy science fiction magazine that Pluto was a gift from a "Galactic Federation."

He began by calculating that a body about the size of Mercury but with six times the mass of Earth would be so dense that it would have to be made of the collapsed matter found only in certain dwarf stars. Such an object could not exist naturally; unrestrained by the massive gravity of a dwarf star, it should have exploded long ago. Therefore, Forward asserted, Pluto must be artificial.

He suggested that Pluto was in fact a "gravity catapult." He wrote that "it would have to be whirling in space like a gigantic, fat smoke ring, constantly turning from inside out." A spacecraft that approached the ring's center moving in the direction of its spin would be dragged through "under terrific acceleration" and ejected from the other side.

If the acceleration the ultradense smoke ring gave the spacecraft were about 1000 times the acceleration Earth's gravity imparts to falling objects, then the ring would boost the spacecraft to nearly the speed of light in about one minute. The passengers and crew would, however, feel nothing as their spacecraft accelerated, for the gravitational force from the roiling ring would act on every atom of it uniformly. The ring would slow by a small amount as it accelerated the spacecraft.

Forward wrote that a "network of these devices in orbit around interesting stars" would provide "an advanced race" with an "energetically economical" means of star travel. The rings in the network would "cartwheel slowly" so that over time they would point at many possible destination stars.

A spacecraft accelerated by a ring could, upon arriving at another star in the network, enter that star's ring moving against the ring's spin. This would decelerate the spacecraft very rapidly and increase the ring's spin by a tiny amount. In effect, the spacecraft would pay back the network for the acceleration it borrowed when it began its journey.

Forward ended his article by noting that such a device could be shot through space by a larger gravity catapult and braked "by pushing against a massive planet," such as Neptune. This, he added, might account for Pluto's odd orbit with respect to the eighth planet. He speculated that, at some time in the past, the Galactic Federation had noted the rise of humans and had launched Pluto toward Sol to serve as "a coming out present."

Forward's concept is so imaginative and appealing that it ought to be true. New data on Pluto soon ruled it out, however. In 1977, James Christy of the U.S. Naval Observatory Western Station, located just a few kilometers from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, found Pluto's moon Charon. The discovery of a body orbiting Pluto enabled astronomers to calculate its mass accurately for the first time. Pluto, as it turned out, has only one-quarter of 1% of Earth's mass. Subsequently, it was found to have a diameter of only about 2350 kilometers, making it only two-thirds as large as Earth's moon. After the turn of the 21st century, Pluto was found to have four more moons, all smaller than Charon.

Though Pluto did not turn out to be a link in a galactic transportation network, it did turn out to be a link to something big. Pluto was the first member of the Kuiper Belt to be found. The Kuiper Belt, a part of the Solar System long theorized but only confirmed beginning in 1992, is the "third realm" of bodies orbiting the Sun after the Sun-hugging realm of the rocky planets and the realm of the giant planets. It is far bigger than the first two realms combined. As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, we know of over 1000 bodies in trans-Neptunian space. Astronomers estimate that more than 100 times that number might exist. Assuming that New Horizons continues to operate as planned, mission planners expect to direct it past several more Kuiper Belt Objects after the Pluto flyby.

If Pluto is so small that it cannot account for the discrepancies in Neptune's orbit, then what does? In August 1989, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune. By carefully tracking the robot spacecraft, celestial dynamicists refined their estimate of Neptune's mass. When they did, the observed discrepancies in its orbital motion vanished. There was thus never a need to find a Planet X. Error had led to coincidence, and the result was mysterious Pluto.

 

[Archibald]

There is more to this.

Percival Lowell, Clyde Tombaugh and all the others after Herschell and Le Verrier discoveries, were looking for Planet X at 50 AU (AU = Earth - Sun distance of 150 million kms).
Pluto was found at 45 AU, but was too small; and now we have half a dozen Pluto size bodies all over the place (KBOs).
Nowadays we know, as said above, that Uranus and Neptune orbital aberrations are non-existing, thanks Voyager 2 for that.

Yet Planet X is not dead ! After 1992, a decade later it returned.
- there might be a Mars-size planet at 150 AU
- there might be a Neptune-size planet, but at 1500 AU

So in a sense, Planet X did exist, except for different reasons and at a different places.

 

[Justo Miranda]

The word colonize is already meaningless, if humanity had in the future a good reason to leave its home planet, there are much better and infinitely cheaper options: Orbital stations with 1G, clean air without insects or pests, regulated temperature, without earthquakes or tsunamis, or volcanoes. It makes no sense to colonize because in the future there will be no surplus population, nor will the possession of land be the cause of wars because we will have access to the infinite resources of asteroids and we will be able to create food from solar energy. Only religious fanaticism and terrorism will remain to torment us.

 

[Orionblamblam]

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Humanity is so smart that it can't figure out how to ration petrochemicals

Yes we can, and we've been doing so for well over a century.

Rest pretty much ignored. Too many errrors and false assumptions.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Titan gives new life to petrochemicals though-and if "Planet Nine" winds up being a grapefruit size black hole...those together might be more of a boon to humanity than jungle Venus or Old Mars. Now to look at Miranda's open pit quarries

If you have to mine Titan for petrochemicals you should probably stop using them.

You can make most petrochemical products from seawater, trees, and a lot of electricity. Which Earth has in abundance. We won't because it's pointlessly expensive but it's a plausible production chain if you're really bad at industrial policy.

The word colonize is already meaningless, if humanity had in the future a good reason to leave its home planet, there are much better and infinitely cheaper options: Orbital stations with 1G, clean air without insects or pests, regulated temperature, without earthquakes or tsunamis, or volcanoes. It makes no sense to colonize because in the future there will be no surplus population, nor will the possession of land be the cause of wars because we will have access to the infinite resources of asteroids and we will be able to create food from solar energy. Only religious fanaticism and terrorism will remain to torment us.

The vast majority of historical wars were probably caused more by personal insults, national slights, and financial debt than by resources i.e. non-tangible concerns that cannot be settled by increasing tangible access to hypothetical mineral deposits.

No one invaded Crimea or Afghanistan for its vast mineral riches or great financial wealth. Caesar didn't invade Gaul because it was super rich or because the fur wearing, half naked, bearded Germanic barbarians were culturally or economically more advanced than Rome. More land will absolutely cause more wars in the future because I own this side of the fence, you don't own that side of the fence, and I'm going to build a thing on it. No your surveyor is wrong, the land ends here, fight me. Pretty simple stuff.

There are tons of wars over ambiguous legal language or land ownership rights. There's even somewhat obscure ones, and oodles of family blood feuds. "War" is just a family feud or village dispute taken to large scales after all. Infinite hypothetical resources are kind of irrelevant at the end of the day. Only a limited quantity of resources is available at any one time, after all; there are so many hours in the day, and people can only work so hard, which ultimately don't change how people feel. Even Kazakhstan is sitting on hypothetically infinite LNG reserves and yet its gas prices just tripled (and their entire automobile economy is built around methane).

Anyway there's a finite number of asteroids, they are hardly infinite.

Infinite land or oil or whatever only exist in comic books and poor macroeconomic models. It's not a useful assumption to make. It's a lethal one if you're trying to predict outcomes of wars I suppose.

Resource availability, access, and distribution (all separate things) doesn't predict wars very reliably either.

The Soviet Union didn't fight a war with itself in 1930. The Chinese didn't fight a war in 1960. The British didn't fight a war during the entire rationing period. The Soviets just increased grain production by improving irrigation and distribution methods were improved with more trains. The Chinese peacefully deposed Mao after he went on a law and order populist binge post-Great Leap Forward by inviting Deng back to rule the country. The British didn't even vote the Tories out so literally nothing happened. Clearly resource shortages aren't a good universal cause of wars because there are plenty of options available to not do wars, like just not fighting.

Generally wars tend to be caused by cascades of prior failures, occasionally going back decades, of which famine or resource limits are a trigger rather than a root cause.

But that's a complex subject that requires examining individual wars in isolation, and not a neat and tidy theory that explains all history in the Marxist vein, so there's probably some deeper underlying thing that has yet to be discovered. But Marxism has a good and intuitive appeal, much like its Whig antecedents, so it's forgivable that pepole try to find universal laws and meanings where they don't exist to try to neatly explain greatly disruptive and ultimately unrelated historical events that look similar on the face of it.

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Humanity is so smart that it can't figure out how to ration petrochemicals

Yes we can, and we've been doing so for well over a century.

Rest pretty much ignored. Too many errrors and false assumptions.

Strange how you never actually point these errrors out.

I guess I'm the only guy posting links to stuff about trying to grow soybeans in Martian regolith simulants with large quantities of salt, pointing out that Mars was probably a planet-wide (and broadly lifeless due to apparent lack of limestone) brine lake in its ancient past, and that the former marine seabed of the Atacama Desert in Chile approximates Mars in terms of insolation and adaptibility to plantlife (it's rubbish, much like the Salt Lake desert, but that place is hot and not cold) but without the calcium deposits from all the dead fish. Which is important to grow plants. Plants love calcium.

But sure, I'm the one making false assumptions. Not the guy saying "you can give Mars a magnetic field" as if it's as simple as erecting a shed or putting up a fence, in a hypothetical situation where Venus is breathable and liveable without a pressure and heat-resistant spacesuit...

Okay. Yeah, I'm sure people would flock to Mars if Venus of all places had a breathable atmosphere with liquid water (which is naturally necessary to have a breathable atmosphere) and probable calcium deposits as carbon fixation into limestone is a universally good method of absorbing excess CO2.

Now that I think about it I suppose if you swapped Venus and Mars's orbits then Venus might actually be breathable without any significant intervention. It's big enough to sustain a geological dynamo so it wouldn't lose all its water or atmosphere, like the runt Mars did, it's just too close to the Sun so it's constantly hot and never cracked the tectonic plates. By now it's already lost all its water so it will need an injection of a few comets worth (maybe) but it's still a better candidate for colonization even with the hellish atmosphere.

If it's breathable there's no contest. No one would visit Mars unless they were some space marine biologist studying ancient seabeds.

They probably wouldn't find anything but it would be interesting I guess if you really like digging in long-dead marine seabeds.

 

[Orionblamblam]

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Humanity is so smart that it can't figure out how to ration petrochemicals

Yes we can, and we've been doing so for well over a century.

Rest pretty much ignored. Too many errrors and false assumptions.

Strange how you never actually point these errrors out.

Because I don't have all day to point out and correct errors. You proceed from the assumption that because it's beyond us *not* that it will be beyond us *forever.* That is a flawed premise, and everything that flows from it compounds the error, especially when it's internally inconsistent, such as:
"a religious delusion that elevates man's unique tool solving ability to be comparable to nature itself, despite all natural evidence suggesting the contrary."

Which implies that man cannot do by intent what man has done by accident, unless you believe that anthropogenic global warming is magic.

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels makes the sort of impact that a single cometary impact could make... and humanity could, in time, work up *thousands* of cometary impacts onto Mars or Venus or Luna.

 

[zen]

Hmmmm this is getting way OT and pointlessly so.

If Venus and Mars are more habitable, we would certainly be trying to colonise them.

 

[Kat Tsun]

No, I'm not. What I'm doing, and you're not, is understandign that humanity is smart enough, and could reasonably soon be *powerful* enough, to take a shitty sandbox and make it bloom.

Humanity is so smart that it can't figure out how to ration petrochemicals

Yes we can, and we've been doing so for well over a century.

Rest pretty much ignored. Too many errrors and false assumptions.

Strange how you never actually point these errrors out.

Because I don't have all day to point out and correct errors. You proceed from the assumption that because it's beyond us *not* that it will be beyond us *forever.* That is a flawed premise, and everything that flows from it compounds the error, especially when it's internally inconsistent, such as:
"a religious delusion that elevates man's unique tool solving ability to be comparable to nature itself, despite all natural evidence suggesting the contrary."

Which implies that man cannot do by intent what man has done by accident, unless you believe that anthropogenic global warming is magic.

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels makes the sort of impact that a single cometary impact could make... and humanity could, in time, work up *thousands* of cometary impacts onto Mars or Venus or Luna.

I don't think humans deliberately set out to make the world very hot. If you don't intend to do something how can you do it intentionally? Equally I don't think it's possible to make Mars have more gravity without adding more mass, which would be a prerequisite for humans to live there.

If Venus has a breathable atmosphere you can live on it just fine. It's basically Earth 2 in all meaningful metrics. If Mars has a breathable atmosphere you can't live on it. It's too small and the gravity too weak. Humans didn't evolve in 0.3g, they evolved in 1g. Venus has very slightly less than 1g, but it's within the average of Earth's gravity if you measured it.

The further you get from conditions where humans evolved, the harder it becomes to live. So why make things more difficult? You wouldn't. No one does this. The only reason people like Mars IRL is because it's easier to imagine living on a dry, cold, dead rock than it is to imagine living in a hot, muggy, high atmospheric pressure Earth.

You also complain about me thinking that time preference is a barrier to space colonization, which is arguable (I think it's born out by evidence, but that's an open question as well given we aren't great at making rockets yet still), yet you suggest that a literal subspecies or likely new species of Homo adapted for living on Mars would be a preferable alternative to humans that can think about resources in a longer time horizon? Lol. The difference between a species that doesn't care (or is genuinely happy about) that it's living in a Space Amish subsistence farming economy with spaceships, and a species that is adapted to 0.3g, would be probably be wildly different in anatomy alone much less thinking. If you care about human life then only Venus makes sense.

The truth of the matter is that Venus is the easier of the two to colonize over multiple generations, by virtue of being closest to Earth in conditions, especially conditions that are beyond plausible control. It's relatively easy to adjust a comet's trajectory to impact an object (we do this all the time on smaller scales) compared to restarting a dead geologic fossil or increasing a planet's mass triply. It's one thing to suggest that people, in a million years (they are no longer people at that point, they're probably some other animal), might make a planet bigger. Maybe.

But then you'd probably just make a planet wholesale from a star or something. So why bother with Mars, again? It has no advantages in the scenario. Its only advantage now is that it's much easier to get there and get to the surface because it isn't covered in a giant atmosphere.

Hmmmm this is getting way OT and pointlessly so.

If Venus and Mars are more habitable, we would certainly be trying to colonise them.

Venus for sure. Mars less so, as there's nothing there worth looking at now, much less if we could easily access Venus's surface.

Mars's interest would be for biologists in the same sense that Antarctica is interesting for climatologists. This won't change with a breathable atmosphere, it will just be more well known and accepted in general, since no one actually talks about the issue of embryo development in microgravity or reduced gravity.

Humans (and most terrestrial life besides microscopic forms) probably can't survive without natural or artificial selection adaptations in conditions too wildly different from Earth norms in terms of oxygen-nitrogen balance, temperature ranges, and gravities. This is somewhat obvious, I think. Spending time in space is bad for you, after all, and you're still under the effects of the Earth's gravity in orbit.

Once you build all the radiation protection, the greenhouses, the powerplants, etc. you still have to face the issue of reduced gravity that no practical engineering can fix unless you want to install a multiple hundred meter long cylinder centrifuge and use that as a basis for a colony. But then why not build that rotating habitat in space where it's much easier to maintain and construct new equipment and replacement parts for?

Mars's biggest issues are because it's a planetary pebble on the extreme end of the habitable band of planets. This isn't solved by making it breathable, it just becomes more evident, I guess.

Conversely the only barrier to not living on Venus is because it's covered in a thick smog of sulfuric acid. You remove that you've just made a second Earth that's slightly hotter, but since it's breathable and livable it probably can't be that much warmer.