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Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.
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I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets to the lifeforms.
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Neither is realistic; living on the Moon or Mars or any other planet is a fantasy.
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Both probably, but you cannot really adapt life to no water and hard radiation. (at most sustain it in stasis, but not growing)
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Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively speaking.

At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."

Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.

But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.

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> Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem.

Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.

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If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?
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No, as terraforming means changing that.

Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.

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Just exposing the Martian soil to water for some time is enough to destroy the perchlorates.

(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)

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In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy.
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Doing something like that at planetary scale is science fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.
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To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.

We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?

It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.

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Talking to computers and expecting computers to answer coherent English was science fiction 4 years ago. Don’t lose faith
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I wouldn’t go that far. It was pretty clear a long time ago that humans spending so much time filling the internet with content was going to eventually enable neural networks to pretend to communicate.

The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.

Keeping humans alive is hard.

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Emergent complexity doesn’t really apply to material sciences and organic chemistry in the same way it does for machine learning and digital systems.
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I would not be so pessimistic. Look what the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for our atmosphere.
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Maybe we’ll turn all of Mars into paperclips with our efforts! Glorious paperclips. First Mars, then the universe!
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If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.

Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.

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> In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy

NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/

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Which dome construction material would be transparent to sunlight but block ionizing radiation?
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1) Why do you need sunlight?

2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.

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Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not possible with current materials.
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