I’m looking forward to being on The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston tomorrow, Friday, October 4, at 12:30 Eastern. We’ll talk about space law, and David sent me homework on planetary protection, so I’ll be reading that today.
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The Space Show
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On The Space Show, you mentioned writing about terraforming. If you don’t know about paraterraforming, I would encourage you to learn about it.
Paraterraforming would be the immediate creation of high-quality environments under domes. Paraterraforming will be inevitable because settlers are not going to wait many years until the entire planet’s environment becomes Earth-like via terraforming.
The automated production of plastic from the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen from the air and hydrogen from the ice. So, very large domes are possible shortly after crew arrives. The Martian air will prevent the large majority of meteorites from puncturing the roof.
Given the composition and quantity of the Martian air, one could use algae bags to convert the CO2 into O2 using sunlight. Then with the O2 and the N2 in the atmosphere one could pump and modify the atmosphere into the domes to have Earth-like air at 0.5 or 1.0 atmospheres. If the roof were like 50 feet high then huge areas housing potentially billions of people could be created. The one caveat is that artificial magnetospheres would need to be created (local or global).
Thanks for stopping by, Doug. I had not heard of paraterraforming. Could these domes be created with current 3D printing technology?