Urgelt
Urgelt
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

What if I told you that you could add an atmosphere to Mars capable of supporting liquid water at the surface — practically for free?

There is a way. Or rather, there *will be* a way. The technology isn’t quite here yet, but it’s probably less than a century out.

AI is going to upset everything we think we know about economics. Self-replicating robots governed by AI will produce work with no human input other than top-level guidance. These robots will take many forms and perform many chores, mostly right here on Earth, but there’s nothing to prevent us from designing such robots for deep space and assigning to them missions.

They’ll obtain energy from the sun. They’ll manufacture what they need to complete assigned tasks from resources present in space. Though this is an oversimplification, there’s no reason we could not place some of these robots where they can tweak the orbits of comets and send them towards Mars.

Bombarding Mars with comets will change everything: it’ll add mass to the planet’s atmosphere, it’ll heat up the place, and it’ll liberate gases from the crust, too.

This is a long-time-scale effort, though. It could take dozens, or even hundreds, of years to maneuver one comet into a rendezvous with Mars. (Multiple comets can be acquired as parallel efforts, though.) But it won’t cost humans on Earth any sustained expenditure of money. Once we set the task to competent AI-driven robots, they’ll pursue it for us.

In 500 years or less, Mars will have an atmosphere comparable to Earth’s. As Ethan pointed out, Mars can’t hold onto an atmosphere, but the time scale over which it will lose it is in the hundreds of millions of years — quite satisfactory for human purposes.

It’ll still take a lot of work to make Mars congenial to human life (and the life pyramid which sustains humans), but once we have AI-driven robotics working well enough, we can assign that work to the robots, too.

Today, we think in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars in real money to accomplish even the modest goal of sending a couple of humans to visit Mars. But technology is moving us into a completely different economic paradigm. Look ahead, not backward, for ideas as to what’s possible and what it will cost.

    Urgelt

    Written by

    Urgelt