Astronomer royal calls for 'Plan B' to prevent runaway climate change

[muriel_volestrangler]

44. This is put forward as a claim to solve the environmental problems on Earth

So, yes, there would be a need to ship billions of people off. Ship factories off? (a) Then we don't have the products (b) That would also be a huge effort, because factories are massive too. Recreating an industrial civilisation on another planet (one that is then capable of launching rockets back to us to deliver the products you want manufactured millions of miles away) is not just like saying "we'll build the next factory out there". And the same goes for power plants. Move them elsewhere and you still need to get the energy back to us. Even putting them in orbit (which is not 'terraforming' by any definition - and note that it is terraforming that I am saying is science fiction, in this sub-thread) is extremely expensive, and as you point out, we don't use but a fraction of the available solar energy that hits this planet every day - so the far-easier fix for "what do we use instead of fossil fuels" is "solar energy that already arrives here", not "solar energy that we have to go to heroic lengths to collect and then tranfer to Earth in a different form".

"Terraforming doesn't need to immediately result in being suitable for human life to be called terraforming. It's much easier to make it suitable for plant life or even microbial life."

This is a thread about Earth's environment. Getting microbial life to survive on another planet might be a nice hobby, but it would do precisely zero to fix our problems. So, for that matter, would terraforming a planet so that plant life (a huge task - plants need oxygen in the atmosphere at similar levels to us, water, nitrates and more) alone could survive there. We're not saying that we have such a shortage of food that we need to send it by rocket from Mars.