If you have the technology to move Mars, you also have the technology to move and modify asteroids, and build thousands of space colonies. We may find that living at the bottom of a gravity well is overrated for our distance descendants. The "Probability Broach" series assumed a huge asteroid belt civilization, and they eventually ended up blowing the otherwise useless Venus into planetoids to make a new asteroid belt to live in.
(As far as Venus is concerned, there may be ways to get rid of some of its atmosphere that would be easier than moving Mars. It might actually be easier to terraform Venus in the long run.)
As for terraforming Mars:
Methods of reflecting sunlight onto Mars with huge mirrors or something might work too.
When Heinlein wrote "Farmer in the Sky," he simply pulled some force field widget called a "heat trap" out of his ass to explain the terraforming of Ganymede. In the anime "Cowboy Bebop," practically every large rock between Jupiter and here has been thoroughly terraformed, including the Jovian moons. The show was not that clear on how that was done, either.
In real life, terraforming is what we call in the engineering biz a "non-trivial problem." Heck, we're still trying to figure out how Earth's ecosystem works, and we live here.
Personally, I think large-scale artificial colonies will be the way to go. After a few generations, you could turn them into generation starships, and nobody would even know the difference.
Space/Science » in reply to How would we move Mars?
Might not be necessary
The whole thread (45 posts)
- How would we move Mars?
- Terraforming & Electromagnetospheres
- Weird.
- There is a way....to move an entire planet
- Create a black hole just behind Mars which would slow its orbital velocity and act as a gravitational tether
- Mars has no magnetosphere
- How about Venus?
- re: How would we move Mars?
- Might not work because any atmosphere released by heat would soon be lost
- Might not be necessary
- Why bother?
- re: What about Earth, then?