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Terraformer Industries Make Methane
It's not easy to make methane (natural gas) from just air (or the CO2 part of air), water (split to get hydrogen from H2O) and of course sunlight (electricity from solar panels). Well, it's easy to make it - but can you make it cheaply enough to compete with natural gas out of the ground?
Don't forget the origin of the word "terraform" not to mention the original terraformer:
— Bill Christensen (@Technovelgy) May 4, 2026
"He had been the original claimant of Obania, forty years ago; and Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock, only two kilometers through—by sinking a… pic.twitter.com/pCAZq8RMD5
Casey Handmer was in seventh grade when he first thought about terraforming a planet. Handmer’s family lived in Sydney, Australia, and his father had taken him to see a talk by Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer and the founder of the Mars Society...At NASA, Handmer worked on projects mapping the surface of Mars, but that wasn’t enough Mars for him. In his free time, he developed his own roadmap for Mars colonization, complete with spreadsheets and CAD models. Martian settlers would need the technological equivalent of the Library of Alexandria—both the knowledge and the means to make a hostile world habitable.
One of the first things we would need is more fuel. We could fly there tomorrow, no problem, but we couldn’t carry enough juice for the return journey. A Martian outpost would also require an entire synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain for all the paints and oils and lubricants used in any industrial process. “How do you make fuel on Mars?” Handmer said. “Well, you make it from carbon dioxide, which is in the atmosphere, and water, which is in the dirt.”
(Via corememory.)
I'm quoting here from Jack Williamson's 1942 story Collision Orbit, in which he coins the word "terraform".
So, did they succeed? You should really read this very detailed article, but they did succeed at making 99% pure methane, but it is not yet price-competitive.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 5/5/2026)
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