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I love the idea of terraforming. Not for the usual reasons, though; I seriously want to gouge my own eyes out whenever I hear someone say, “We need to terraform other planets, because we're doing so much damage to the Earth!” Seriously, if we had the technology to completely transform a dead hellish rock like Mars or Venus into a livable biosphere, then surely we'd have the capability to fix whatever minor issues are going on with the Earth. Put down the bong, already!
Nonetheless, I do believe that it is mankind's long-term destiny to spread throughout the solar system, at the very least, and possibly even beyond. The Earth is our cradle; it's warm and cozy and safe, but we can't stay here forever if we mean to reach our full potential. The challenges and dangers of terraforming and space colonization will spark a new era of invention and discovery… though I suspect it's still very far down the road from where we are today.
Anyway, I thought it would be fun to do a head-to-head comparison for some of the more popular destinations for human colonies, and we'll start today with the Big Two: Mars and Venus…
Venus is slightly closer to Earth at its nearest approach (40 million km, as compared to 55 million km for Mars), but more importantly, launch windows from Earth to Venus occur once every 584 days, whereas for Mars it's 780 days. Also, since any likely Venus habitat would be a cloud colony, you can expect less complications when it comes to landing.
Well, this one obviously goes to Mars… or does it? The tantalizing thing about Mars is that it looks so very Earthlike, and we can all picture that with just a little nudge in the right direction, we could walk around without a space suit and breathe and farm there. Well, it needs a lot more than a nudge. The most optimistic estimate from a serious scientist (Robert Zubrin) is that it would take 900 years to create a breathable atmosphere on Mars, and the more authoritative timescale is closer to 100,000 years (yes, that's not a thousand, not ten thousand, but one hundred thousand). So in either case, Mars or Venus, you'll be living in enclosed habitats for the foreseeable future.
Worse still, it may be impossible for Mars to hold onto an atmosphere at all because it has no magnetic field to prevent the solar wind from stripping its atmosphere away. And as if that's not enough, the Martian atmosphere contains very little nitrogen, which makes up the bulk of the type of air we humans breathe. We would need to find a way to synthesize it, or bring a lot of it with us if we planned on building colonies there. Venus, on the other hand, is rich in nitrogen and oxygen can easily be extracted from the carbon dioxide in its clouds through a number of simple processes, such as photosynthesis in plants.
Below the clouds, Venus is the ultimate realization of Hell incarnate. But at the “butter zone” in the upper atmosphere, Venus actually has a very Earthlike air pressure and a habitat inflated with an Earthlike mixture of oxygen and nitrogen would float like helium does in our atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen can easily be harvested from the Venusian atmosphere, so it's a completely sustainable concept. You'd have to figure out a way to deal with the sulfuric acid though. That's a problem. And also, Venus has a very slow rotational speed. It takes Venus 116 Earth days and 18 hours to complete one rotation. Unless you have mobile habitats to adjust for it, that will wreak havoc on any agricultural scheme.
Meanwhile, dust storms on Mars aren't just nasty; they're downright apocalyptic. They can cover the entire planet and last for weeks. And this isn't harmless terrestrial beach sand you're dealing with either; Martian regolith is jagged and razor sharp. It has tremendous destructive potential for any manmade infrastructure on the Red Planet's surface.
Also, because it has no large moons to stabilize its axial tilt, Mars goes through dramatic changes in rotational axis, and these lead to wild swings in the planet's climate over hundred and thousand year cycles. Any long term plans to terraform Mars need to take this into account. Oh, and if you think Mars is a good place to move in case Earth gets hit by a doomsday asteroid, it's worth noting that Mars, being much closer to the asteroid belt, suffers catastrophic impacts five times more often than the Earth does. Again, this has major implications for any tenuous biosphere we may try to introduce there.
Venus has no soil, at least not that we can easily get to, so that's not good for agriculture. Mars, on the other hand, has tons of soil but its atmosphere is completely useless. It gets even better though, because the Martian soil isn't just sterile; it's poisonous. Martian soil is salty, but it's not the kind of salt we can eat; it contains a kind of salt called perchlorates, at levels toxic to humans. So Martian soil will need to be heavily processed before it can be used for agriculture. Venusian soil… we know nothing about, but it's probably gross. And if you need to bring soil with you to Venus, that probably limits the size of any large-scale human colonies there, which is sad because Venus is actually a really good place for growing crops. It gets way more sunlight than we do here on Earth, it has tons of carbon dioxide, and you can extract water from the airborne sulfuric acid. It's a giant greenhouse, basically. Probably smells terrible though.
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