Senator Rand Paul is drawing scrutiny for suggesting terraforming Mars is a substitute for climate action.

Terraforming, which would involve seeding Mars with microbes and other elements of ecosystem, would take an extremely long time.

Critics suggest that efforts to terraform are very far away, while environmental issues are immediate and require our attention.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul has drawn attention with a suggested new agenda to terraform other planets, motivated by a dig at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It all began a year ago, when Ocasio-Cortez remarked that the world would end in 12 years if we didn’t take drastic action on climate change. She later walked back the exaggeratory comment. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and commentator Tom Toles wrote in the Washington Post at the time, “I know, let’s feign alarm that she has exaggerated instead of having genuine alarm about the genuine problem she is raising the red flags over.”

The Five-Hundred-Million-Year Beef

Cut to about a year later, when Paul took both a cheap shot and a moonshot in just a few tweets.

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No @AOC the world will not end in 12 years but we must, absolutely must do something, over the next 500 million years. Some say we should develop a space shield to protect us from the sun’s increased luminosity. I’m not against that but... — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 15, 2020

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Despite climate alarmist predictions, humans will likely survive for hundreds of millions of years into the future. In the meantime, we should begin creating atmospheres on suitable moons or planets. https://t.co/qsBtkbsNAY — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 19, 2020

There’s a lot to unpack here. Paul mentions that humanity must act “over the next 500 million years,” which is a nonstarter—the dinosaurs lived for just under 200 million years altogether, and the longest time elapsed between any of Earth’s half dozen unprompted mass extinction events is less than 150 million years. And the lifeforms that have survived for hundreds of millions of years are ... well, they’re not apex predators who rely on electricity.

Five hundred million years ago, the Earth was mostly covered with fantastical creatures with five eyeballs that we only know about at all because a handful of them died extremely fast in an event that preserved their soft bodies as fossils. They’re so weird and unfathomable from a modern context that paleontological polymath Stephen Jay Gould tried to make up a new evolutionary model to fully accommodate them, and it’s long since been disproven.

But it’s not the arbitrary number that has people talking. “Most Americans have been bamboozled into believing that all reputable scientists believe in global warming and that CO2 emissions are a major problem,” Paul once said , saying coverage of climate change was “hysterics” that was “ absolutely and utterly untrue .” (The bamboozling hysterics have come from NASA, every scientific research body in the U.S., and over 97 percent of scientists .)

It isn’t clear how Paul decided “humans will likely survive for hundreds of millions of years into the future” at all, but his commentary on terraforming and the 500-million-year-long game drew criticism immediately.

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so you believe manmade climate change is possible on every planet except earth — Zeddy (@Zeddary) January 18, 2020

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Nothing survives in its current form for hundreds of millions of years.



Science is hard, eh? — Joseph Goulette (@JosephGoulette) January 19, 2020

When Ocasio-Cortez replied on Twitter, she took Paul to task for stripping context from what she said a year ago.

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Hey Senator! Would you like me to also take your comments out of context and pose them as your earnest position, as you have chosen to do with me?



I assume the answer is yes, especially given that the GOP climate agenda is about as fictional as Spaceballs anyway. https://t.co/42FKq4VMjW — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 15, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez mentions the movie Spaceballs, whose plot involves a “space shield” like the one Paul says he’s considering for sometime in the next 500 million years.

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From Terra Firma to Terraforming

Twitter drama aside, what is terraforming, and could it really be our future?

The piece Paul shared, from Cosmos, details new research about blue-green algae, which aren't just one of the few species older than 500 million years—they're also what kickstarted Earth's life-supporting atmosphere via photosynthesis. NASA is bundling them with fungi in a far-out plan to colonize Mars, not to terraform it, but the reasoning isn't so different.

Cyanobacteria are hardy extremophiles, and they kickstart atmospheric changes that could lead to a warmer Mars with more stable weather and, hopefully, fewer mile-high dirt devils. By adding the right cocktail of microorganisms to the small amount of water on Mars or the right spot on Saturn's moon Titan, we could, after an extremely long time, hypothetically have a planet that might be able to foster Earth-analogous life in this one critical way.

But the lack of atmosphere or nutritious soil is just one of the obstacles to moving humans to another planet or moon. Even with an Earth-like atmosphere, Mars would be much colder. The planet lost its magnet0sphere—the protective shield that blocks toxic solar radiation—long ago, during the same timeframe when its molten core likely stopped roiling and solidified. Any effort to terraform Mars would have to address the missing magnetosphere.

There's also an ethical question in trying to substitute climate action—which is immediate and involves some material discomfort in the form of cutting back, recycling, and so forth—for terraforming, which is a purely hypothetical process on a whole new planet that doesn't belong to anyone. Philosophers have debated the idea for a long time, which at least gives terraforming a moral leg up over those who've colonized around the Earth.

Today, we barely agree about the ethics of sending people to Mars who can never come back, let alone if they had children there who have no choice. In fact, scenarios involving space colonies or long distance travel are good crystallizations of moral questions because the scenarios themselves are so simplified and far away from feasibility. Climate change is already happening—it's not literally pie in the sky.

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