Where could we Terraform?

Where could we Terraform? From the writer of The Terraformers’ Toolkit.
(The Terraformers’ Toolkit: Everything you have ever wanted to know about terraforming and our future in space. The where, why, when, how and what of terraforming.) www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09X6739P...
Mars
Mars is further from the sun than Earth, and so receives less light and warmth than we do. However, it is a rocky planet with all the elements needed for our survival in its regolith. The downsides are its cold temperatures (-63 C, -81 F) and its lack of a breathable atmosphere. It does however have a day length only about 40 minutes longer than our own, making days and nights very familiar.
The moon
The moon is right next door, but lacks an atmosphere, is subject to solar and cosmic radiation and has 14 day days and 14 day nights. Therefore its surface gets very hot during the day and very cold at night. It also lacks certain key elements on its surface such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. It seems preposterous to suggest that we could give it an atmosphere, but Saturn’s moon Titan which is just a little larger has a thick 975 km (605 mile) thick atmosphere.
Venus
Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and is considerably hotter. It has a carbon dioxide and nitrogen greenhouse atmosphere 92 times thicker than ours, with surface temperatures of 457 C (854 F). However, it is a rocky planet very similar in size to Earth. Another downside is that it has a very slow rotation, with days and nights lasting 60 earth days.
Each of these rocky bodies is a potential terraforming target. However they would all be hard to terraform, each requiring modification of its atmosphere so that it would have 1 bar at the surface. Venus it the most difficult as we have to remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but that could be super useful for us in our interplanetary future.
Asteroids
One of the asteroids (Ceres) in the asteroid belt is actually spherical, kept that way by its gravity. It could well be given a shell beneath which a warmed and breathable atmosphere could be built. It would likely serve as a rest and recuperation centre for people engaged in mining asteroids for precious metals our descendants could use in their technology.
Outer Solar system Moons
Further from the sun there are lots of moons we could terraform, but they are all very cold with very little sunlight. Water is freely available on most of them, but it’s often so cold it it behaves like rock and would need considerable power to warm it up.
Exoplanets
The distance to our closest star alpha centuri is 4.3 light years or 270,000 au (astronomical units). An astronomical unit is defined as the distance between the earth and our sun.
The best kind of propulsion for long distance space travel uses a nuclear engine to heat and eject a propellant such as hydrogen or xenon. But even the best of these would take hundreds of years to get to alpha centuri. This means the crew would ether have to hibernate or be composed of multiple generations, with each teaching the next in a generation ship.
However, alpha centuri is much smaller than our sun with lower gravity which means it may sterilise its planets with very powerful solar flares. Alpha centuri is part of a triple system of three stars orbiting around each other. The other two are more like our sun and may posses habitable planets.
In our local region about 7% of the stars within 33 light years of us are like our sun, with similar luminosities and chemistries, so may have planets our descendants may live on one day.
The galaxy
Our galaxy is a giant spinning disk of 100 billion stars about 100,000 light years across, rotating every 250 million years.
We are on what is called the outer spiral arm, about 26,000 light years from the super massive black hole Sagittarius A which holds the galaxy together.
Some parts of our galaxy have stars which have chemistries like our sun’s but others don’t. Equally the central region close to our black hole may be subject to gamma ray bursts which would probably sterilise any planted there.
Summary
So there are places we could terraform in our own solar system, with some being much harder than others, and there are sun like stars all around us, but we will have to have much better rocket engines to get us there within a human life time.
I’ll talk more about the planets and moons in our solar system in future videos.

[@bigspicydad8970]

Cool vid

[@ryokutraining9430]

Venus terraforming always fascinates me. Wish more sci fi explored it