Could We Terraform Mars?

Humanity’s future is glorious. As we master space travel, we’ll hop from one lifeless world to the next. Life will blossom in our path and the galaxy with shimmer with beautiful Earth-like orbs. Hmmm… maybe. This won’t sound so far fetched if we prove we can do it at least once. If we successfully terraform Mars.

Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt O'Dowd
Graphics by Murilo Lopes
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

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We already have the technology to bring humans safely to Mars and set up small settlements - or at least could do within a generation. But those settlements will need to be cocooned - shielded against the deadly cold, intense radiation, and the fatal lack of atmospheric pressure. Surely if we want to thrive on Mars – to make it into our second home – these settlers, or their descendants, will need to be able open the airlocks, shed their spacesuits, and step out onto a survivable surface. We’ll need to terraform Mars, as our first step in terraforming the galaxy.

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سلطان الخليفي

[Barwasser]

3:05 "Surely we can just nuke the Poles"



*Polish people sweating profusely*

[tigerstripes]

Lego sponsoring a video about re-building planets (essentially) is so oddly appropriate.

[tesfayet]

The more I hear about Mars, I learn how special earth is!!!

[jeffwisener]

I would be more confident if we could clean up the water in Detroit first 😆.

[northernskies]

Earth: "We have to stop global warming!"
Mars: "We need global warming!"

[kerravon]

I love how whenever a headline is phrased as a question, the answer is inevitably no.

[SgtMacska]

Meanwhile on Mars: “could we marsiform Earth?”

[danwhitehurst]

Neil DeGrass Tyson had a great comment about if we would ever teraform Mars if we had to leave earth because we damaged the planet.
“ if we had the technology to teraform another planet why wouldn’t we just fix our own planet first”

[theworstomen]

Thats just a greenscreen hes not actually in space guys.

[LoopHoleLeeRoy]

Watching videos about Terra-forming other planets makes me have a greater appreciation for Earth.

[EazymoneyBicch]

So far I'm 19(of 250+) videos into the massive playlist of ALL Spacetime videos. The wonderful part of this is that at the end of each video I get a "sneak peek" of what the next video is about!!!! I absolutely love it...

[mattsamoto]

some of this goes right over my head, but I enjoy the content and try to learn what i can from explanations. Plus space is just cool, so yeah.

[Lesbiologist]

"We cannot restart Mars' magnetic field... [by] melting the core."

Sounds like quitter talk!

[tycel]

I'm more of a we should build a station on the moon first kind of guy

[MrCharlesdick]

we could hypothetically tunnel a few miles down into Mars, establishing an underground atmosphere. There isn't enough gravity to do much with the surface.

[scienceontheright]

Sounds like Venus' clouds are a better target for our first off-world home.

[niIIer]

"A MAN HAS FALLEN INTO THE RIVER IN MARS CITY..."

[hultanu]

I love and hate PBS Space Time.
Love them for being so damn interesting and educative..
But i hate them because i start looking at one video and BOOM, its 4:00 AM. You have to wake up in 4 hours and get to work.

[Evan.the.Butler]

The idea of the dome cities remind me of Luna (the Moon) from The Formic Wars series. But if we're considering extreme futuristic tech, what would it take to restart Mars' magnetosphere? Would just melting the core work, or would we have to constantly remelt it since a continual strong heat source doesn't exist?

[MJDavis]

People keep talking about Mars, but I just can't get passed one thing, the goldilocks zone. Mars has moved through this area and is now at the last part of this zone, as everything continues to expand. The earth is about halfway through. If we are going to terraform anything we should do it with a planet that has just started its way into this zone, or put the same amount of effort into perfecting the one we are already on.