Wizard CaT wrote:Also, Venus has 100% cloud cover no? People might tend to go insane without seeing the sun.
Mitsukara wrote:I think people could adapt to a 100% cloud cover, but it would certainly bother some people when it was still a new thing. If it were plausible, I'm sure they'd take trips off the planet just to see the sun now and then.
Sun domes. From Bradbury's
The Long Rain. Sorry, just came to mind.
I'm with Mitsukara. As a Willamette Valley person, I'm used to months without sun. Tacking on a few more months... Hell. I don't really even
like sunlight. It's bright and unpleasant.
Quaeras wrote:Second, terraforming is unethical! We'd be polluting a planet that was never meant to have the types of life we'd be bringing. Tales abound of interplanetary contamination. We'd be imposing our presence on a planet that may have life we cannot detect- How long did it take us to find the deep-sea life we now know exists? How recent are the Hydrothermal vents that Alvin just discovered less than 25 years ago?
I hope you understand if I find it difficult to mind this. Many of these planets, if they have life, has small ecosystems which I'm not sure I could be paid to give a damn about except if I were specifically a xenobiologist or somesuch. Study for science, learn and explore, but if we can get off this rock and develop terraforming technologies, we might be able to bring those technologies
home. And use them
here.Volair wrote:When
Cassini launched in the 90's, I was paying attention. I waited for it to reach its destination. Truly. I WAITED.
And waited.
And WAITED.
I'm gratified to know I'm not the only one. I was also waiting tensely on Galileo. These were very long missions; Voyager is history to us, especially now that the receiver has been defunded, but I can only imagine the first few years waiting for those probes to hit Jupiter.
Anyway, so we don't settle Titan. We settle Mars and rocks. (Why rocks? Because they're more predictable than the weather patterns of Mars.)
Again, I can't care about the ethical issues if the colonization and terraforming process make the masses (and there will be masses, no exodus for us! We're too dumb for that) on Earth live better with their world.