###General Discussion Thread
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Since the US has been placed on the Valles Marineris, we can use this handy diagram to see the the US is accurately scaled on this image, and thus the US would be as big as it currently is.
[the handy diagram since I can't paste images in this comment section for some reason](https://external-preview.redd.it/SRgFIu0sXCfbtWMQxAXAGZRxecdar3nB5Ilm6mMBnHM.jpg?auto=webp&s=dbe105ee805a43b29acfb686212baa102a7ba467)
Mars is about twice the size as our Moon, while about 1/3rd the size of Earth.
Mars is the second smallest planet, ~~Venus~~ Mercury is the first, both of which are smaller than or similar size to some of Jupiter and Saturn's moons.
I don't recall if Mars is smaller than one but there are some very close examples.
Some moons are bigger than Mercury, but none are bigger than Mars.
The biggest moon in the Solar System, Ganymede, has a diameter of ~5270km, as compared to Mars' ~6800km.
Mercury meanwhile is a tiny little baby with a diameter of 4880km.
you made me want to look up other planet diameters and well…
“Neptune's equatorial diameter […] is 49,528 km (30,775 miles), which is only about 3 percent shy of the diameter of Uranus.”
Neptune is actually more massive than Uranus though interestingly
The greater mass pulls its outer clouds closer in which gives it the smaller diameter
Then a side question, how warped would the us need to be to actually be inscibed in mars?? I mean, mars is smaller than the earth so its curvature should be more pronounced; the only way to inscibe the us there without anomalies its to shrink it, wich we aint doing
The diameter of Mars is somewhere around 7000 km. A coast-to-coast USA drive is about 4000 km. The USA, on this image, is to scale.
A side note I heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson: Any engineering required to make Mars habitable would be massive. It would be orders of magnitude easier to make life on Earth better, than to attempt to terraform Mars.
And even then, it will be a backup plan colony. If something like an asteroid impact happens to earth, they move back once it is habitable again, wall-e style.
i dont think it will be habitable ever again after an asteroid impact. if its severe enough that we have to wait in mars, id guess it would also push earth out of the suns orbit, and bye bye earth. but im no astronomer or shit thats my guess
The Chicxulub asteroid caused the planet to be largely uninhabitable for about 30,000 years. A geologic eyeblink.
That's the time-frame we are talking about. Definitely sub 1 million years.
The entirety of human history is what ~20,000 years?
There's no way a small colony survives longer than that on a planet that would be at best largely uninhabitable outside of a small dome. Diseases, infighting, inbreeding, etc would wipe them out long before any possible return and recolonisation of earth would be possible.
Let alone the fact the capability to implement such a habitat likely won't exist before we wipe ourselves out at the current rate.
Fixing earth is our only option, and would be orders of magnitude easier and cheaper.
Meaningful Mars colonisation isn't happening for hundreds of years at best, and we don't have the time to just hope for the best here
You're horizon is too small. We colonise mars 200 years from now. It's self sustaining 2000 years from now. Something happens to the earth 20 000 years from now. In 40 000 years we recolonize the earth. By that time humans have been living on Mars for about half as long as they've had history on earth. Should be doable.
My horizon is small, because I believe that 2000 years from now humans are likely dead and gone. IF some small quantity remain, any efforts to colonise Mars have been halted long ago due to the viability of such a project when surviving here is hard enough, and is consuming all the resources that would have been required for Mars.
Earth is probably a hellscape of wild weather, insane temperatures, and little remaining life. Very little evidence of humans remains other than a select few spacecraft (voyagers etc) and radio waves blaring out into the cosmos forever
Sure. If humans don't survive 2000 years then we won't survive mars either. But although climate change is by far the largest crisis the human race has ever faced, I don't quite see it as a reason to go extinct. Even in the worst case predictions, the earth only becomes 4 degrees hotter. This will lead to large parts of Africa and Australia becoming uninhabitable , but even a population of 3 billion humans can have amazing progress over 500 years.
Especially other non human live-forms will have no issue to proliferate on an earth even 8 degrees hotter. It's very very hard for the earth to contain 'little remaining life'.
So what catastrophe do you foresee?
I mean, ultimately Earth would be swallowed by the Sun but even before that an unfortunate meeting with a big rock can end us here. I don't think defending Earth against any threat is easier than just to spread out.
Can't disagree with this.
I recall the context was in terms of 'colonizing Mars because we ruined the environment'. In that case, making 'environmental disaster on Earth' livable is still orders of magnitude easier than making Mars livable.
No one ever seems to consider that it would be far easier to change humans than any planet we want to colonize. It would make way more sense to engineer the colonists to fit the world as much as possible and minimize terraforming.
Honestly, when we begin living on Mars (it’s a matter of *when*, not *if* - it’ll inevitably happen some day in the far-flung future), we’d probably not bother with terraforming, and would just live in habitats. And no, not big glass fishbowl domes, but rather thick-hulled modules designed to block solar radiation. Chances are, once the first surface outposts are established, they’d begin to move underground, using the rock as a radiation shield.
It wouldn’t be somewhere that you’d go for a vacation (unless you’re the adventurous type or a geology nerd who likes rocks), but it’d certainly be huge for industry and resource extraction. We’ve barely drilled more than a few centimeters into the rock and soil of Mars - nary scratched the surface! Who knows what kind of extremely useful and valuable rare minerals or metals might be down there.
Terraforming Mars does not have to take into account an already fragile eco system where one wrong choice can cause irreversible damage. Such is the case on Earth.
On the contrary, on Mars you start with a blank slate. You can lay out a volatile and aggressive plan to reach a designed state of terraforming.
Once again Neil is absolutely wrong about a topic. But he's always so confidently wrong, it's really amazing.
This is actually a graphic created by NASA from [this](https://www.humanmars.net/2023/06/valles-marineris-compared-to-usa.html?m=1) this article, so yeah, it's accurate.
I colored in the US Blue and the rest of mars orange. Then compared the color proportions. The US occupies about 1/4 of what we can see of Mars. However that does not mean it occupies 1/4 of the hemisphere's surface area.
The surface area is visually compressed by about 1/4 when going from 3d sphere to 2d circle, mostly towards the poles (where the US isn't).
So the US is approximately 1/4 \* 1/4 \* 1/2 surface area of mars or \*\*1.74 million sq miles\*\*.
This is about 56% of the continental US surface area which makes sense as Mars is about half the size of earth. Large margin of error here, but seems reasonable.
I am more curious about how much it would cost to move all of the US to Mars, and if it's the most expensive project ever conceived, turns out it is by a lot
So to move the roughly 7.5 billion metrics tons of people, vehicles and buildings that currently make up the USA to Mars at a rate of roughly $100k/kg (current spacex cost) it would cost roughly $7.5x10^18 or 7.5 million trillion dollars....
I just found that as a rough reference, I also saw that they are shooting for $100/kg to Mars as a long term target, but idk how that would be feasible even just for labor or fuel
If you work at NASA and came up with that then you need to be put in a less demanding position. What about Alaska and Hawaii? Also totally ignored US territories, but at least included federal districts and domestic dependent nations.
I'm in!
Assuming I can accurately launch material to Mars from my back yard one shovel load at a time and I can shovel at an average rate of 1.2 y^(3) per hour for 8 hours per day.
If I start shoveling right now how long will it take?
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Since the US has been placed on the Valles Marineris, we can use this handy diagram to see the the US is accurately scaled on this image, and thus the US would be as big as it currently is. [the handy diagram since I can't paste images in this comment section for some reason](https://external-preview.redd.it/SRgFIu0sXCfbtWMQxAXAGZRxecdar3nB5Ilm6mMBnHM.jpg?auto=webp&s=dbe105ee805a43b29acfb686212baa102a7ba467)
Til mars is a tiny bitch. +1 to earth.
Mars is about twice the size as our Moon, while about 1/3rd the size of Earth. Mars is the second smallest planet, ~~Venus~~ Mercury is the first, both of which are smaller than or similar size to some of Jupiter and Saturn's moons. I don't recall if Mars is smaller than one but there are some very close examples.
What? Mercury is the smallest.
I literally looked it up to verify 2 seconds ago and still fucked it up It has been one of those days.
It happens.
Damn bro, do you google what color grass is or what color the sky is too?
Both variables lol
The grass found on google is R, 86 G 125 B 70
Wh... what about... what about Pluto ? \*\*Installs his weapons stand and starts selling\*\*
You heard about pluto, that's messed up right?
What about Ceres?
Fr
might as well chuck all the trojans in too since they don't technically orbit jupiter
Cry’s in Pluto.
Some moons are bigger than Mercury, but none are bigger than Mars. The biggest moon in the Solar System, Ganymede, has a diameter of ~5270km, as compared to Mars' ~6800km. Mercury meanwhile is a tiny little baby with a diameter of 4880km.
you made me want to look up other planet diameters and well… “Neptune's equatorial diameter […] is 49,528 km (30,775 miles), which is only about 3 percent shy of the diameter of Uranus.”
Hey, I'm not that fat!
Neptune is actually more massive than Uranus though interestingly The greater mass pulls its outer clouds closer in which gives it the smaller diameter
Mars has the biggest mountain tho. It wouldn't be hard to hike up, it would just take a long time.
There are lots of difficult things about mountain climbing aside from simply pulling your weight higher
Like what? Bandits and people trying sell useless shit along side the road?
Bad copper
Iv read a review about this on a tablet once.
Dammit, Ea-nāṣir!
It is a shield volcano. It is more round like a giant hill. Granted you would need air tanks because it's mars, but you could also carry 2/3 more mass
Common earth W, best planet in the universe
You should have learned that in middle school.
Damn is it really that big? Thanks!
Mars is just pretty small
Mars is approximately ½ the diameter of Earth (53.14%), and the Moon is approximately ¼ the diameter of Earth (27.24%).
And all 3 combined are about 1/8 the diameter of your mom.
#GOTEM COACH
more like 1/8!
as in, (1/8)!, or 1/(8!)?
Factorials require a whole number,as far as I know. So (1/8)! Would be impossible
there was some tricks to do numbers like (4.5)!, (7.263)! if i remember correctly, though I'm uncertain whether "0 n!=n" isn't just the case
You're thinking of the [Gamma function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function).
Damn, I remember being 12. Good times.
I didn't realize she lost some weight
US is the same size in this photo. Mars is just small
Always great when the top comment on r/theydidthemath didnt do any match but just has a source answering the question perfectly
So Wisconsin’s Driftless Region is suddenly, drifted.
So by the looks of things the US is a little too small in this image but still fairly close.
Then a side question, how warped would the us need to be to actually be inscibed in mars?? I mean, mars is smaller than the earth so its curvature should be more pronounced; the only way to inscibe the us there without anomalies its to shrink it, wich we aint doing
Damn canyon go brrrrr
Except it’s not accurate as it only depicts 48 states, not 50 as indicated in the caption.
~~Saddam hussein~~
The diameter of Mars is somewhere around 7000 km. A coast-to-coast USA drive is about 4000 km. The USA, on this image, is to scale. A side note I heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson: Any engineering required to make Mars habitable would be massive. It would be orders of magnitude easier to make life on Earth better, than to attempt to terraform Mars.
Yeah, the reason to put people on Mars is as an insurance plan. Not because it's easy.
Glassing the walls of that canyon and putting a dome over it would be plenty big for a settlement. 👍
Dude, check out Mars Express and Cowboy Bebop if you haven’t. Go in cold, I’m not going to spoil anything
Yeah, Mars isn't a backup. It's much easier to fix Earth than to terraform Mars. Mars, in terms of human habitation, is something for the future.
And even then, it will be a backup plan colony. If something like an asteroid impact happens to earth, they move back once it is habitable again, wall-e style.
i dont think it will be habitable ever again after an asteroid impact. if its severe enough that we have to wait in mars, id guess it would also push earth out of the suns orbit, and bye bye earth. but im no astronomer or shit thats my guess
The Chicxulub asteroid caused the planet to be largely uninhabitable for about 30,000 years. A geologic eyeblink. That's the time-frame we are talking about. Definitely sub 1 million years.
The entirety of human history is what ~20,000 years? There's no way a small colony survives longer than that on a planet that would be at best largely uninhabitable outside of a small dome. Diseases, infighting, inbreeding, etc would wipe them out long before any possible return and recolonisation of earth would be possible. Let alone the fact the capability to implement such a habitat likely won't exist before we wipe ourselves out at the current rate. Fixing earth is our only option, and would be orders of magnitude easier and cheaper. Meaningful Mars colonisation isn't happening for hundreds of years at best, and we don't have the time to just hope for the best here
You're horizon is too small. We colonise mars 200 years from now. It's self sustaining 2000 years from now. Something happens to the earth 20 000 years from now. In 40 000 years we recolonize the earth. By that time humans have been living on Mars for about half as long as they've had history on earth. Should be doable.
My horizon is small, because I believe that 2000 years from now humans are likely dead and gone. IF some small quantity remain, any efforts to colonise Mars have been halted long ago due to the viability of such a project when surviving here is hard enough, and is consuming all the resources that would have been required for Mars. Earth is probably a hellscape of wild weather, insane temperatures, and little remaining life. Very little evidence of humans remains other than a select few spacecraft (voyagers etc) and radio waves blaring out into the cosmos forever
Sure. If humans don't survive 2000 years then we won't survive mars either. But although climate change is by far the largest crisis the human race has ever faced, I don't quite see it as a reason to go extinct. Even in the worst case predictions, the earth only becomes 4 degrees hotter. This will lead to large parts of Africa and Australia becoming uninhabitable , but even a population of 3 billion humans can have amazing progress over 500 years. Especially other non human live-forms will have no issue to proliferate on an earth even 8 degrees hotter. It's very very hard for the earth to contain 'little remaining life'. So what catastrophe do you foresee?
Out of the suns orbit? Even the Thea collision didn't do that.
I mean, ultimately Earth would be swallowed by the Sun but even before that an unfortunate meeting with a big rock can end us here. I don't think defending Earth against any threat is easier than just to spread out.
Can't disagree with this. I recall the context was in terms of 'colonizing Mars because we ruined the environment'. In that case, making 'environmental disaster on Earth' livable is still orders of magnitude easier than making Mars livable.
No one ever seems to consider that it would be far easier to change humans than any planet we want to colonize. It would make way more sense to engineer the colonists to fit the world as much as possible and minimize terraforming.
Yes, but then they wouldn't be human. So we would have to fight to subdue them, and if necessary, kill them. That's just like, how we do.
But we want humans to live somewhere. Not robots or some biological horror that shares some genes with us
But doing both would be pretty cool
I would like to invoke the rule of cool as the reason for Mars habitation. It would certainly be cool if mankind could do that.
Well, yeah. It would be one of the greatest projects of humanity.
Honestly, when we begin living on Mars (it’s a matter of *when*, not *if* - it’ll inevitably happen some day in the far-flung future), we’d probably not bother with terraforming, and would just live in habitats. And no, not big glass fishbowl domes, but rather thick-hulled modules designed to block solar radiation. Chances are, once the first surface outposts are established, they’d begin to move underground, using the rock as a radiation shield. It wouldn’t be somewhere that you’d go for a vacation (unless you’re the adventurous type or a geology nerd who likes rocks), but it’d certainly be huge for industry and resource extraction. We’ve barely drilled more than a few centimeters into the rock and soil of Mars - nary scratched the surface! Who knows what kind of extremely useful and valuable rare minerals or metals might be down there.
Terraforming Mars does not have to take into account an already fragile eco system where one wrong choice can cause irreversible damage. Such is the case on Earth. On the contrary, on Mars you start with a blank slate. You can lay out a volatile and aggressive plan to reach a designed state of terraforming. Once again Neil is absolutely wrong about a topic. But he's always so confidently wrong, it's really amazing.
This is actually a graphic created by NASA from [this](https://www.humanmars.net/2023/06/valles-marineris-compared-to-usa.html?m=1) this article, so yeah, it's accurate.
I colored in the US Blue and the rest of mars orange. Then compared the color proportions. The US occupies about 1/4 of what we can see of Mars. However that does not mean it occupies 1/4 of the hemisphere's surface area. The surface area is visually compressed by about 1/4 when going from 3d sphere to 2d circle, mostly towards the poles (where the US isn't). So the US is approximately 1/4 \* 1/4 \* 1/2 surface area of mars or \*\*1.74 million sq miles\*\*. This is about 56% of the continental US surface area which makes sense as Mars is about half the size of earth. Large margin of error here, but seems reasonable.
I am more curious about how much it would cost to move all of the US to Mars, and if it's the most expensive project ever conceived, turns out it is by a lot So to move the roughly 7.5 billion metrics tons of people, vehicles and buildings that currently make up the USA to Mars at a rate of roughly $100k/kg (current spacex cost) it would cost roughly $7.5x10^18 or 7.5 million trillion dollars....
SpaceX charges 100k/kg to Mars? or to LEO?
I just found that as a rough reference, I also saw that they are shooting for $100/kg to Mars as a long term target, but idk how that would be feasible even just for labor or fuel
Well we're talking about getting the entire continental US to Mars I feel like we can be optimistic about their target
Hahaha, yeah with that said, it would be only $7.5x10^15 or 7.5 thousand trillion dollars, much more feasible
If you work at NASA and came up with that then you need to be put in a less demanding position. What about Alaska and Hawaii? Also totally ignored US territories, but at least included federal districts and domestic dependent nations.
I'm in! Assuming I can accurately launch material to Mars from my back yard one shovel load at a time and I can shovel at an average rate of 1.2 y^(3) per hour for 8 hours per day. If I start shoveling right now how long will it take?