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We can not walk around naked almost nowhere here on Earth, too. We need clothes, sun glasses... and other uncountablee means of phenotype augmentation. I understand you dogmatical attitude towards the term "terraforming", but considering the vast spectrum of very hostile environments even here on the mother/home planet, we have to allow much broader deffinition of terraforming. For example such, generalised to cover any environment production or modification allowing full-life cycle habitation by standart human biological unit, even less. The canonical full-scale "geological terraforming" is unachievable ideal even here on Earth -- it was and comperativelly soon shall be practically uninhabitable by the present "human condition" units. If we blindly stick on the terms that will lead to functional taboo on using the term "terraforming" or/and to endless unusefull coinage of pseudo-greco/latin terms. Let say that the "terraforming" is just an ONE WORD slang for modifing or constructing an environment towards full or partial human compatibility. The descriptive term in that light should be "standart human life supporting artificial ecology construction".
About the human breathable-floid presure endurance limits:
For breathing gasses the lowest level is the boiling point of body tissue water -- it evaporates at human body temperature of 36-37 degrees centigrade at 0.07 Athmospheres ( but at least 0.15 Atm of oxigen presure are necesarry for breathing, so this is the lower limit); the upper is 80-100 Atm. for hydrogen mixture with traces of oxigen (no smoking!!! - although the mixture is not explosive); even bigger for liquid breathing -- water, fluorides...
World water ocean saturated replenishingly with enough oxigen concentration for human liquid breathing is "terraformed", isn`t it?
Or high-mountain environment with one sixth of the sea level presure of pure oxigen?
http://www.paulbirch.net]www.paulbirch.net -- about how to terraform, move, spin planets quickly..., also pay attention to the concept allowing with the use of existing or proven materrials and technologies to terraform astronomical bodies with very high mass and abcense of solid surface -- gas giants, brown dwarfs, main sequence stars, white dwarfs, neutron and quark stars, black holes... the materials include also vast mentioning and parameter estimates for the macaroni-habitat -- the logical extreme of the cilindrical rotating space colony design ( see also: http://www.distant-star.com/issue13/jan … fibers.htm about the latter):
http://www.paulbirch.net/SupramundanePl … lanets.zip
the Supramundane actual worldbuilding concept shows how to deal with and utilize huge natural gravity wells, bodies with surface gravity much higher than 1G (i.e. with higher "H-value"). The macaroni-idea depicts the way of effective megastructural colonization of star systems with lack of substantial bodies ( including star mining for non-H/He elements).
Inbetween these two ways (and of cource combined with them, depend on the innitial/natural body supply en situ) lies the realm of the bodies -- planets, planetoids, moons -- with mass lower than this of the earth, with less surface gravity, etc... from the scale of the Pluto, Mercury, Mars, the earth`s/gas-giant`s moons, huge asteroids, etc. According to the proposed to the International Astronomical Union planetary taxonomy by Gabor Basri (ask Google about: "Gabor Basri", "planemo", "fusor"), every body having substantial self-gravity to provide it with round shape balancing the lithostatic precure of the body, is "planemo" = planetary mass object (including dozens of bodies in the Solar system now out of the planets` list: Sedna, Ixion, Ceres, Vesta, the Moon, Triton, the Galileans... + the planemos free roaming in the interstellar space) and these with mass big enough to start nuclear fusion in certain period during the life of the body (including the brown dwarfs) are "fusors".
There is a notion that the fusors in the galaxies are accompanied with vastly outnumbering the big planets hosts of sub-terran in mass "planemos" in every formed system (as it is in our case here in the Sol system), that many of the stars would lack earth-mass bodies, and the mankind should learn how to terraform these midgets ( which have enough gravity to make uneconomical their disnmantle for rotating space colonies...). Notice in the works of Paul Birch and Freeman Dyson, that the energy supply of the any kind of habitat (from the rotating space colonies, through the terraformed little planemos and eartsized planets, to the supramundane gigantic artificial ecologies) is practically independent form the distance to the certain fusor: soletas for the distant ones -- out to 2-3 ly from the fusor, parasols for the most star-neared bodies...and sollar lasers. The arcology = artificial ecology (see "Soleri") could be illuminated by any means of creating, redirecting, modifying light.
All this in the post was aimed for the purpose of formal generalization of the terraforming and covering the whole spectrum of the item: Lets assume that terraforming is: any kind of activity providing atificial environment capable of suppoirting unaugmented or unmodified human life during it`s full life-cycle, than we have three levels:
1.From lesser bodies (meteoroids, asteroids, comets, dust, interstellar medium... anything under planemo size) -- non-planetary included material + the stars themselves -- extract materials and biuld rotating colonies (from hollowed-out and baloon-formed asteroids, packedged ice structures and Stanford designs up to many thousands of light years long macaroni/spagety megastructures ).
2.Terraform directly every planemo with solid/liquid surface -- from the lower bound of 500-600 km in diameter to slightly bigger than Earth (actually little more than 1g surface gravity or the H-value is the limit) -- including micro-terraforming, partial and suboptimal terraforming, world domes/tents, artificial magnetospheres, sollar-wind hydrogen-scoop resupply devices and other "hard technology" shortcuts for preserving the atmospheres from dissipating, runing the hydrological cycle... everything...
3.Everything over 1g surface gravity -- supply with terraformed supramundane shells.
Comments?
Isn`t it possible the athmosphere introduced on astronomical bodies with little H-value to be held or returned back in with electromagnetical means? I mean a concept similar to M2P2 or mag-sail, so the ionised atoms with escape velocity to be redirected back in the athmosphere?