Man, that title. They grew everything in sand. Regolith is filled with concentrated salts, and there's no liquid water that we know of. At best, this experiment shows that if your inedible moss in a flower pot is briefly exposed to actual Martian conditions, it might survive when you bring it back inside.
I heard sometime interesting regarding that recently, if we have the ability to terraform Mars, we'll have the ability to hear on earth. So why not just fix it here where it's millions of times easier than doing it on Mars.
The solution for Earth isn't going to be some pie-in-the-sky terraforming (which, I'd like to note, means "to make Earth-like") project, but changing our psychotic economic system that depends on infinite growth and consistently elevates the worst of us into positions of power.
That's why I think we'll never manage to unfuck ourselves. There's just way too much power invested in keeping things the way they are
We won’t have the ability to terraform Mars until we try to terraform Mars.
Perhaps Mars’s greatest contribution to our civilization wont be that it hosts cities or future life, but rather simply that it gave us a place to experiment so we could test things once before implementing them here.
So why not just fix it here where it's millions of times easier than doing it on Mars
¿Por qué no los dos?
Also, I'm not entirely convinced that the problems are analogous. Mars needs to be warmed up, Earth needs to be cooled down. I think a more appropriate challenge would be terragorming Venus.
Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It's at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it's still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.
Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.
First of all, "terraforming" means "to make Earth-like"; climate mitigation is one thing, but if we let things here get bad enough that we have to start thinking about terraforming Terra, we've pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch at that point. Ending up with an Earth that is no longer Earth-like would mean that things have gone sideways so badly that I doubt we'd have the industrial capacity or resources to deal with it.
Second, terraforming Mars involves a vastly different process than unfucking our climate and ecosystems. For example, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which on top of being thin is mostly CO2 and doesn't have more than trace amounts of oxygen. There's also no magnetosphere to speak of because its "core dynamo" essentially died when its core cooled down and plate tectonics etc stopped being a thing, meaning that any atmosphere you do manage to generate is continuously getting blasted away by radiation.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we've pumped too much energy into the climate system and we'd have to somehow get it "out" again.
The tech needed to terraform mars is thousands of years away. There isn't enough water or O2 on Mars to terraform it. As well as a whole host of other issues that we currently have no idea how to fix. (The lack of a magnetosphere is a huge one)
We should... ya know, make sure there is no life there first. Even a small planet is a big place, and we've looked in very few places. Also even if there is no life there's still a lot Mars could tell us about what a pre-biotic Earth was like.
I just think we need to examine the only other terrestrial planet in the system that won't light on fire on fairly thoroughly before trying to terraform it into a Wish.com version of Earth.
Cool article but I think they need a huge NASA like chamber for emulating Mars surfaces conditions, with air, pressure, radiation, and soil conditions. Getting anything, even bacteria to live in those emulated conditions would be huge news.