Terraforming Horror Show

Sapyx

Sapyx
Zieman said:
Some good points in your reply, these two I don't buy.

Look at Mars in Sol system, it is terraformed.
What was Mars mean temperature before terraforming?
210 K. :)
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Yes, but pre-terraformed Mars had (has) effectively no atmosphere to warm it up. "All you need to do" to terraform Mars, according to ED terraforming theory, is to give it a nice warm breathable blanket of air, and dump down a couple of cometfuls of water to make the oceans. Those two planets linked above already have a nice thick atmosphere that's already breathable or nearly so, and they're still too cold; they can't make them much thicker without making them toxic. Strip away those atmospheres to current-Mars levels and they'd be even colder.

Don't forget, "Earth-like" doesn't mean just "habitable". There are plenty of theoretically habitable (in terms of gravity and breathable air) water worlds, HMCs and even rocky-ice worlds; put on some warm clothes and you can live there indefinitely, or at least until you run out of food. But to bring a planet up to qualifying as "Earth-like", that means you need shirtsleeves temperatures, and that means you need to be in the goldilocks zone. These two planets are simply too cold. Of course, how a planet can qualify as a "water world" and have an average surface temperature far, far below the freezing point of anything feasibly definable as "water", is another question.

The criteria for actually being "Earth-like" are quite narrow. So narrow that, if current scientific theories of the history of Earth are correct, then Earth itself would not have qualified as "Earth-like" for most of its history - there would have been too much CO2, or not enough oxygen, or too much oxygen, or too cold, or too hot.
 

DeRane

D
marx said:
Well, changing the atmospheric composition of a planet is much easier than changing its gravity.
You know, I originally assumed that in Elite, a planet being a candidate for terraforming simply meant that it's in the star's habitable zone. Given some of the examples here, I now wonder if that really is the case.
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I think it holds true, but habitable zone - the goldilocks zone - depends not only the star classification (O to M), but also the sub classification, which changes the temperature of the star.

Case to the point the A's I have been scanning lately. Low level A has surface temp of bellow 7500 K, and you start finding Ice bodies around 4 kLs+ out. High level A has temp of 8000+ K and you can find terraformables as far as 4 kLs out. I see the zone where you find terraformables or ELW clearly linked to surface temp of the star. B can have temp over 13 000 K and terraformables can be found only above 4kLs distances (when there even are planets there, or around B at all). I presume same is true with other star types.
 

Zieman

Zieman
Sapyx said:
Yes, but pre-terraformed Mars had (has) effectively no atmosphere to warm it up. "All you need to do" to terraform Mars, according to ED terraforming theory, is to give it a nice warm breathable blanket of air, and dump down a couple of cometfuls of water to make the oceans. Those two planets linked above already have a nice thick atmosphere that's already breathable or nearly so, and they're still too cold; they can't make them much thicker without making them toxic. Strip away those atmospheres to current-Mars levels and they'd be even colder.
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In game terraformed Mars is at 2.3 atmos, those two are 1.05 & 0.86 atmos, why not add non-toxic gases to bump up the pressure to Mars levels?
Surely you would get enough greenhouse effect with right mix of gases.
 
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Galactic Fork

Galactic Fork
Zieman said:
In game terraformed Mars is at 2.3 atmos, those two are 1.05 & 0.86 atmos, why not add non-toxic gases to bump up the pressure to Mars levels?
Surely you would get enough greenhouse effect with right mix of gases.
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This might be a cop-out, but Mars is Mars. I'd imagine they'd put more effort and cost into Mars than they would other planets. Mars is much less massive than the record holder for least massive terraformable planet. If it was in any other solar system, I doubt they'd give Mars the time of day.
 

varonica

varonica
Zieman said:
This is one example - why not terraforming candidate?
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Got a similar one myself, I have now been checking all the ELW and WW I come across to see what makes the difference and it is indeed the fact that it is tidally locked. All the ones that are terraformable aren't tidally locked, the ones that aren't all seem to be tidally locked so far.
 

Zieman

Zieman
varonica said:
Got a similar one myself, I have now been checking all the ELW and WW I come across to see what makes the difference and it is indeed the fact that it is tidally locked. All the ones that are terraformable aren't tidally locked, the ones that aren't all seem to be tidally locked so far.
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Nope, being tidally locked doesn't prevent a planet being a terraforming candidate.
There are lots of tidally locked terraformables around.

For example:
https://postimg.org/image/v2fqietyr/
 
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Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
Maybe tidally locked worlds would need to be in a different orbit so more of the sun-facing side could be made habitable. The version of the planet around Proxima as used by Stephen Baxter has its (rather miserable) centre of population in a permanent low-pressure system right below the sun with marked degradation as you approach the terminator (and a frozen hellscape on the night side). If such a planet was closer to its parent star, the "green zone" would shift towards the terminator and into permanently windy regions.

TL;DR: check planets with atmosphere neighbouring those that "look good".
 

Komemiute

Komemiute
DeRane said:
Water is heaviest component of that atmosphere. Remove that and pressure goes down fast. So first thing is to dry the planet with water collecting tech.

Pressure going down is going to reduce greenhouse effect and the surface temperature. Next step would likely be technique to crack that CO2 down to C and O2. Remove C and what is left? Oxygen-nitrogen.

With most of the atmosphere gone, the pressure and temp on surface would be pretty close to normal and by choosing the amount of oxygen you re-release into the atmosphere you can actually use that 1.9% nitrogen to build 76-21 Nitrogen-Oxygen atmosphere (1.9% of close to 700 atm pressure is close to 75% of 1 atm pressure).

So yeah, that does look like good candidate. Better than most of those chlorine atmosphere monsters out there.
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+rep. Look kids- this is how you science.
Thank you DeRane! :)

Today I learned something new.
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
This one's a winner. Tidally locked, nice and hot, and look at that almost breathable atmosphere :D

QA7EvNY.png
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
Wow; never seen an Earth-like with "nitrogen magma" before. On the face of it, that planet must be a slushball with a thin scum of life on the surface. The radius is almost identical to Earth, but with all that ice the density's so low that there's less than half the mass and gravity. I've always assumed that Icy and Rocky Ice planets weren't terraformable, and therefore could never form the basis for an Earth-like.
 

Zieman

Zieman
And note that the planet in question is a 'natural Earth-like', not terraformed. The Stellar Forge does produce some outliers at times, it seems... :)
 
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