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Asked by jennymacd to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
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Martin Archer answered on 13 Mar 2013:
At the moment none of the planets in the solar system are quite right to support human life. Some people think we might be able to modify Mars to make it more habitable like heat it up a bit with greenhouse gases and generate an atmosphere somehow.
In terms of planets around other stars, we’ve found hundreds of planets and some might be capable of supporting life. But we have no idea whether they have nice atmospheres for us to breathe and they’re also really really really far away. So far we’ve not even sent a spacecraft outside of the solar system, Voyager 1 launches in the 70s is nearly at the edge of the solar system right now.
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Grant Kennedy answered on 15 Mar 2013:
As Martin said not yet, and nothing in the Solar System looks right for humans without being modified quite a lot.
One of the main focuses of our search for planets around other stars is to find ones that we might be able to live on. The reason isn’t that we want to go live on them though, the reason is that if the might be good enough for us, they might also be good enough for aliens, so they might have life!
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Amy Tyndall answered on 21 Mar 2013:
Not officially, but it’s been talked about for a long time (even in old science fiction novels) about the possibility of ‘terraforming’ either the Moon or Mars to support human life by modifying their atmospheres and heating them up (e.g. by creating an artificial greenhouse effect to trap heat on the planet’s surface).
But, as ever, politics and money will prevent that from being a possibility for a loooooong time!
Comments
jennymacd commented on :
Thank you! That is very interesting.