Assuming it was economically feasible, how long would it take to terraform an earth-like planet? Just to adjust the atmosphere to have enough oxygen and to make sure the oceans aren't poison.
>>43577228
How long it would take depends on what shape it's in and what technology makes it economically feasible.
Because if you're talking about finding an anoxic ancient earth like planet and superseding the primitive life on it in order to oxygenate it's atmosphere, it'd depend mostly in the level of dissolved iron, but could probably be accomplished in under a million years if started intentionally.
>>43577228
Depends of how it was before the process started.
Lava world? yeah it might take a centuries.
Desert world would take a few decades.
Depends also of available outside materials, like a comet, if you can divert it to enter atmosphere and burn some of it's ice to kickstart the rain process or whatever.
It would probably be easier genetically engineering humans to suite the climate of the new world.
>>43577498
>>43577505
The plan was to have a planet that looked similar to the way mars does today, except earth sized and earth atmospheric pressure. Then over the course of 200-300 years with the help of terraforming mega structures and importing a menagerie of animals make the planet habitable. It isn't entirely important to the story, I just want the player to know this is what happened, but I need it to makes sense to me personally and actually be plausible.
>>43577721
That's an interesting thought.
>>43577721
This anon is correct. Even terraforming Mars would take thousands of years to do properly.
Better to design a Martian in 20 or 50 years and be done with it.
If it's economically feasible to terraform a planet, then you have access to technology that makes the best we can currently do look like flintknapping. So today we don't really have any idea of what such a civilisation could do, much like someone sitting around back in 5000BC wouldn't have a very good idea about the capacity of modern technology.
But to give a hint to the scale of things, the Earth's atmosphere has a mass of about 5000 trillion tons. Out of that a fifth is oxygen, so you'll need a thousand trillion tons of that. That's a lot of oxygen. So let's get a big tanker to ferry in liquid oxygen, the Knock Nevis, aka Seawise Giant, aka Jahre Viking, currently the largest capacity (and longest) oil tanker ever built.
Now if you want this shit done in a century years, you'll need one such ship ever other second.
So hopefully there's going to be a suitable amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide that you can strip into carbon compounds and oxygen gas using a huge amount of genetically engineered algae and lichen and stuff, hopefully leaving you with suitable CO2 and O2 levels at the end. If you can make the little buggers eat whatever is poisoning the seas while you're at it... How to diversify the flora once things are reaching your desired atmosphere is another question, because if you want shit done fast, well, the upper parts of the oceans are gonna be a bright green sludge. And while these bastards can breed quickly, you'll probably need a few million tons at least for seeding.
Try to have a plan to make the carbon compounds stay where they are afterwards as well.
Of course, major messing around with the atmosphere will most likely make the weather go funking bonkers on you. Especially if you fuck around with greenhouse gasses like CO2. So even if you can somehow pull this off, you still might want to stay away for a few centuries while the climate re-arranges itself.
>>43577228
Depends on the planet? Its size, its general atmosphere, its landscape, and it also depends on the tech, it could be done in a year with super crazy mega tech, or could take centuries with other tech, since the technology doesn't really exist its all speculation
>>43577228
Depends on how advanced the tech you are using is. I mean in theory with a fuck ton of nanites and a lot of biological engineering on a scale we can't barely comprehend today could probably speed it up to maybe a thousand years.
Depends on how realistic we are going here too.
>>43577809
Try to read (or at least a page on Wiki) Red, Green, Blue Mars. Its basically hard-sci fi about transforming Mars.
>>43577865
>>43577809
Also, if this new habitable world has an existing biosphere, it would be fucked up to cause a mass extinction by changing they environment to match Earth Standard. A diversity of human morphs suited to individual worlds would be far better.
>>43577228
What's actually a really scary thought is that I'd imagine terraforming a planet that already supports some kind of life to fit your own species' specific needs would be much easier than terraforming a barren, inhospitable planet. This could create motivation for species to wipe out other life, and could create an interesting plot divice.
