How likely is it that habitable planets in the universe have more water surface area then land like Earth?

Very likely. The entire reason earth isn't tidally locked (one side always facing the sun) is because of the action of water against the seafloor.

Wait what? Why aren't other inner planets tidally locked then?

Don't forget the cockroaches

Life can evolve in other chemical compounds, but carbon/oxygen is the most simple and efficient combination. There's no shame in searching for the lowest common denominator.

Because what he said was wrong. Tidal locking has more to do with the star and the position of the planet than the surface contents of the planet.

Does anyone else think that cockroach sounds like a derogatory term for gay Mexicans?

It's kind of a meme and the obvious answer is "too expensive" and "nobody has the authority" but I've always wanted to know why nobody has suggested simply massing up the greenhouse gases from Earth and blasting those fuckers towards mars. Would be able to heat up the atmosphere while simultaneously lowering our temperature.

>If there are COCKaroaches why are there any pussyroaches?

That is sexist.

Very likely, because any solar system that forms the way ours did (and by every indication now, our solar system is run-of-the-mill ordinary) is going to have an "ice-line" beyond which gas giants and comets form, and the gas giants' gravity both mops up the comets during the early stages of planet accretion, and flings the leftovers back towards the inner solar system later. Earth got its water by being bombarded with comets.

No, it wouldn't matter. Mars can't hold an atmosphere because its core is geologically inert, and so there's nothing generating a magnetic field to shield any potential atmosphere from solar wind. If you try to give Mars an atmosphere, the sun will just blow it off again. Sorry.

No, because cockroach IS a derogatory term for Turkish people.

You practically can't throw a rock out there without hitting something filled with water. Chances are that would be pretty common.

Now that I think of it, there could be a distribution of volatiles elements around the galaxy with more iron-rich stars and planets closer to the core, and richer in volatile elements spinward, a bit like the distribution in a solar system, which might be a perfectly acceptable reason to have desert-planets galore the closer you get to the center if you need a reason for such thing in a setting, but I don't believe i ever read anything about that subject.

Tardigrades, man. In my setting, seeding Mars with unicellular algae and tardigrades led among other things to one-inch-long symbiotic photosynthetic tartigrades gently nomading around.

The tardigrades and such were of course just initialy seen as stepping stones for more complex animals and plants introduction to keep going on terraforming the planet. The were even designed to accelerate life cycle and random mutation to increase their chance that some branch would hit the right genetic mix to thrive.

Until Space Shepherds, PETA and other tree-fuckers organisation petitioned that such additional introductions thing would eradicate the new species currently colonizing the planets and that would be an ecological disaster and we had no right to exterminate the "native" animals, etc, etc, and we should let them evolve naturally. Thus ended the terraforming of Mars halfway, which is now tardigrades-land.

That's dumb.

Not only do those organizations have zero actual political power, but the tardigrades were not in any way native to mars, and disturbing their ecosystem was both entirely justified and entirely intentional from the offset.

I mostly needed a reason to keep Mars halfway through because I wanted so. And considering how much they can influence people's point of view, or how efficiently Sea Shepherd (no matter how much I dislike them) was able to fight illegal fishing vessels, in cooperation with some very official organisations, i wouldn't consider them having zero politicl power. But i do agree with you the reasoning is absolutely dumb, because i absolutely think their militant are for the vast majority lead by some sort of self-guilt and pathos rather than reason and objectivity.

We know nothing about the chemical composition of Proxima Centauri b, and do not know its exact size. If it's terrestrial, it's also mostly likely tidally locked. There's a 90% chance it's smaller than 3 Earth masses, which means it's likely a rocky where liquid water could exist, but it could be a hugely more massive gas giant if we're unlucky.

Are you retarded? Even if it were possible to just wizard all the atmospheric carbon into tanks and put it on rockets, the amount of carbon released by the logistics and the launches would eclipse the original problem. It cost billions upon billions of dollars to throw a few metal cans into orbit, with no more habitable space than a few double wide trailers.

It would be easier to build car factories and coal plants on mars.

Mars could retain a functioning atmosphere for about a million years even in the face of solar wind, but it'll definitely just blow off and become thin and lifeless again.

If you want Mars to be habitable for longer, put a large moon in orbit around it. The gravitational pull will stress the planet out and cause it to start melting the core, restarting its magnetic field. It's been theorized that Earth's moon is what's keeping our core alive with the constant stress of its rotation.

Why did you post this in Veeky Forums?

Because everything is Veeky Forums related XD

The biggest reserve of water known in the entire universe orbits a Quasar. 140 trillion times all the water in the Earth's ocean.

NOT FUCKING ENOUGH! WE NEED MORE!

Forget Mars. Colonize and terraform Venus. Have some cloud cities. Easier, cheaper, and simpler to keep + Earth-like gravity. We can fix everything with industrial brute force, but we can't change the gravity of a planet.

if we can cross the upper amto and solve the pressure/corrosion problem is a stable as fuck platform for open mines i heard

How would you go about having a city like that without touching down on the cookie dough like surface of Venus?

Would you hang it from an orbital platform like a reverse space elevator?

Also the atmosphere inside of gas giants does, at a specific level, equate to standard Earth-like barometric pressure, although it's not precisely breathable and might not be comfortable temperature-wise. If you can hang a platform there and solve for the massive lighting problem and temperature, then you have a great research and gas-gathering facility.

>terraform
Then there are no cloud cities. Why bother if they're going to disappear soon?
>easier, cheaper, simpler to keep
m8

youtube.com/watch?v=gJ5KV3rzuag

has giants are, atlesat in my not very knowageble opinion, safer to cloud city-fy, the speeds much highter and harder to fight, yes but with some meteorologist on your time it should be an easy puzzle to figure a safeish spot

venus however the composition of the atmo itself makes the idea hard to make, plus temperatures

Problem of colonizing Gas Giants and their moons is radiation on their magnetosphere. Jupiter's powerful magnetic field creates giant radiation belts which acts as particle accelerators.

It is similar to Earth's Van Allen radiation belts, but much stronger and deadlier. Io, one of Jupiter's moons, is overheated by the presence of this field. It is dangerous to humans AND non-manned spacecraft.

You speciest

The problem is that Silicon is less versatile at forming complex molecular structures (like DNA) and more fragile. It becomes more stable at higher temperatures, like the ones deep underground, next to magma. There could be a shadow Silicon-based biosphere in Earth in form of silicon-based, rock-like microbes deep underground.

Yeah, you would need adequate shielding from that. Of course, if you can get below the radiation belts, you might have an easier time, but craft approaching would have to find a way to navigate around them if at all possible.

Seems like Venus would need less atmosphere to make it habitable. Could also try changing its composition by engineering microbes to skim and live on the atmosphere's upper reaches rather than on the surface. Not sure how to cool it down at that point. Might as well just figure out FTL if at all possible and find habitable planets somewhere else for all the work it would take to terraform.

i cant think a way to ungreenhouse venus, and i dont know any bacteria that cant deal with the heat, composition and radiation at the same time AND help in unfucking the atmo

Cockroaches are actually extremely sensitive to environmental changes. The only reason they can survive outside of the tropics is because of indoor heating.

Well, giving it a magnetic field would help, but that would be next to impossible unless you pull a moon into its orbit and let it start tearing at the planet's mantle, which would probably still take millions of years.

I'm going to go the Aperture Science route and say build a portal from Venus to Mars. We siphon off Venus's extra atmosphere and give it to Mars, see if we can't make both habitable at least for the short term. Probably still need to pull moons in for them, but otherwise you've got maybe a million or at least some hundreds to thousands of years to build on it.

Yeah. If you want to make sure you didn't bring any with you when leaving a roach-infested place, make sure to leave all your stuff outside in the cold for a week or so. My first dorm had an unfortunate case of them, and not only did I go about poisoning the place with boric acid, I also quarantined all my stuff in the car doing the transporting for a week, letting any possible hangers-on to deal with winter chill. Never seen one since.

Also make sure you leave your shoes outside and change clothes into something uncontaminated. Cockroach eggs are hard to destroy and can be tracked around on the bottom of your shoe if you've stepped on one.

Turks are gay Mexicans?

No, Turk's a metrosexual black dude.

Nnnno? Not sure how you got that. He's just a Bromace for the ages going on with JD.

You are roughly 100% incorrect. All we have are some gravitic effects indicating a planet of some kind, in the approximate area where water MIGHT be liquid, assuming it has any at all.

Unless we get so lucky as to have the planet aligned such that it transits the star from our perspective, actual spectroscopy will be next to impossible, and without that, there's almost no way to analyze an extrasolar atmosphere.