If We Wanted to Create A Habitable Planet From Scratch How Would We Likely Go About it?

[BAYLOR]

What do think you think ? Will Humanity ever be do what the people of Mangrathea ( Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy ) do and create and planets with a core, crust, oreean atmosphere and viable ecosystem.


How do imagine such a thing could be or might be done ?

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

weeeeeelllllll, [whistles through teeth] it'll take a while if you're building the planet literally from scratch. A few hundred million years to squish rocks together by natural causes and wait for them to cool down enough to hold surface water. Might be able to cut this down a bit by using a truly astronomical number of self-replicting robotic spacecraft to nudge rocks into the right orbit.

Better to take a pre-existing, lifeless terrestrial planet. Alter its orbit if necessary- should be a bit quicker, like a few million years work using stray dwarf planets as gravitational tractors. Potentially risky to anything else in the system. Add comets, start sculpting the surface; then just your basic terraforming. I think we're either going to need some fundamentally different physics, or else a whole lot of patience.

It might be tricky to make a planet with the right proportions of chemical elements for Earth life to thrive. Different star systems have different chemical compositions. If you're also designing the life from scratch, that ain't a problem. (Though designing the life from scratch might be a problem.)

 

[worldofmutes]

You can play the game Spore.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Start with lasers, 8:00, day one.

 

[chrispenycate]

The closest I've read is Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper - which is cheating, as they start off with a working star and a gas giant planet, and just bang moons and other odd big rocks together. At that, it took them sixty-five thousand years, mostly in suspended animation, or it would have been anexcessively long book.

Terraforming is a much more reasonable time scale. But even then, just building an inhabitable planet isn't a story many people would want to read - you'll need some character interest, and a few long shots.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Blue and green Mars trilogy starts with a prefabricated planet (a bit cool), a working star, just needs a bit of atmosphere tinkering, and it still takes over a century to stabilise.

Were you considering starting with a gas cloud, a planetary disc, or an already functioning star? We really need a couple of billion years to do a decent job, and even that's bring in organisms from an already stable ecosystem - just going from anaerobic to a free oxygen atmosphere will take several billion years by evolutionary techniques. But go on, think big.

 

[BAYLOR]

Mars might be a good cadet for terraforming.

 

[BAYLOR]

Maybe even the Moon( underground)

 

[BAYLOR]

Or we could simply contact Mangrathea and ask them for planet building advice.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

The Expanse has a reasonable storyline related to terraforming Mars.

Set up a lot of equipment. Put it to work for decades. And then hope that some dead alien civilization will provide you with doorways to other habitable worlds.

 

[BAYLOR]

Seek out the planet Mangrathea and have them custom build a world to order.