Terra-forming Venus vs Mars

I would like to start this round by re-iterating our measuring sticks for this debate. "1) How close we can get our respective planet to Earth like conditions." [1] Now, it was laid out in the opening round that R4 would be for me to defend my opponent's questions and concerns about my Terra-forming methods. "How many nukes do you think would it take to move Mercury into orbit with Venus? Once you get Mercury in place how do you slow it down to stay in orbit?" The nukes provide energy (via an explosion) to create velocity, not distance. So there is not a set number of nukes that is needed. More nukes will simply get it there FASTER, but since time is specifically listed as not something to be considered, a few ten-thousand (we already have that many) would suffice. Once Mercury is there, Venus will naturally capture it through gravity (so long as the planet is properly lined up), we do not manually need to slow it down. "wouldnt people get mad knowing there are now just 7 planets?" Possibly, but they'll get over it, just like Pluto. Plus, that is really outside the scope of the debate (while it would be nice to talk about that, 8,000 characters is too small for everything that would be nice to discuss). "Venus is really really hot how would the temperature be brought down more than 700 degrees to acceptable temperatures?" This was answered in R2 already [2]. But a quick summary, cutting down the atmospheric pressure (mentioned in round 2 under "carbon"), cutting the CO2 levels (R2, under "carbon" "nitrogen fixers" and "hydrogen"), and speeding up the rotation (R2 under "moon") will make it so that the difference is related to the light energy (proximity to the sun) which was calculated near the end of R2. "Venus has much less water than mars, how would Venus solve its water problem?" This was also addressed in R2. There is a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. From that, we can pull out the Carbon and leave O2 (this is what most plants and a lot of bacteria on earth do as a natural process). We can then add 2*H2 to the O2 to create 2*H2O (As said in R2, the H can be taken from 3 different sources, solar wind being the closest, and we've had the tech since the 90's to do that). "Also Venus has such an ungodly high pressure on the surface, which is also partially molten in some areas, where exactly would people live?" Pressure has already been addressed in R2, as has temp. We shall move on to what I thought was my opponent's best concern about my plan, which he brought up in his R2. That was the tilt of Venus. This is a legitimate concern, and one that I did not address in my OP (ran out of room and honestly thought my opponent would not catch this one if missed). As my opponent mentioned, our moon is the key to our nice comfy tilt. I already talked about bring into a moon that would have the same gravitational force on Venus as our moon does for us (well, 94.4% as strong). This should resolve this issue for us (as well as tides and other fun things). Now, my opponent had question about issues, but none regarding any of my solutions, so I can do nothing but assume that my opponent does not disagree with any of my proposed solutions. Since I have used less than 1/2 of my characters at this point, I'm going to address some of what my opponent said. Again, I'd like to restate that to goal of this debate is to get AS CLOSE TO EARTH AS POSSIBLE. 1) Lunar issues My opponent has said that we could get enough material over time from passing comets and chunks of rocks. However, the ENTIRE asteroid belt is only 4% of the moon. While we can find the occasional stray rock floating around, we are not going to find an entire moon worth of rocks, and the tech to try and do that is absurdly out of our range now. Focusing on one large target is much easier than trying to track down, catch, and gather millions of small ones. The amount of fuel wasted trying to gather them all would be astronomical (lol, astronomy term). Regarding the Roche limit, our moon is about 25x the distance of the Roche limit, while this would be less than 2x the limit and my opponent's only comments are it is "safe enough." We should note, that this is not just some "danger zone" this is the limit that the moon will completely BREAK APART and rain down on the planet. CO2 Mars does have less CO2 because it has less atmosphere. However, my opponent has not said how correcting this % will be "easy" only that it will be faster (because there is less), and remember from the agreed values, that time is not to be considered. Water My opponent offers no solutions to make Mars more like Earth as in being covered in water or able to provide a global habitat, simply says that it is enough to "supply the first people who do live on Mars." This is a long way from anything close to Earth. My opponent brings in some "may be able..." technology that likely a long time away. Remember that our #2 value is using the most current tech that we have and trying to avoid science fiction. Here we have my moon, which is based on Tech from the 50's - 80's while my opponent's is based on extreme futuristic tech that doesn't yet exist. Nitrogen The first of these two is based on info that is not known, only hypothesized. We are currently looking at sending a rover to Mars to look into this [3]. But we need to also look that the numbers for nitrogen that I looked at early is only considering Atmospheric Nitrogen, not all the Nitrogen in the soil on Earth (since we don't know the starting value for Mars or Venus). Now, my opponent also says, "We would not need to undertake a massive manipulation of nitrogen to Mars only if we intend to populate Mars as heavily as we populate Earth." Remember, we are trying to get as close to Earth as possible, not just a few stray colonies underground. Magnetic field My opponent does not actually present any argument for a magnetic field, nor any ideas on how to build or protect the atmosphere. Of course Earth is losing more than Mars, Mars pretty much doesn't have one. But no idea is presented on how to actually create one. We'd still be left with a planet with virtually no atmosphere (as said, the same as 55 mile up, or 9X the altitude of an airliner). The Core My opponent says that early colonization may be underground. So? To be like Earth someday, you'll need to eventually address this issue with a solution, or accept that this is nothing close to "Earth-like." Temperature My opponent says that liquid water use to flow (yes, back when it had an active core and thicker atmosphere, cough cough [4]). My opponent offers no solutions and simply says "Mars used to be much like Earth, then it began to die. If We could figure out what happened, it can be assumed that such a process could be reversed on a small enough scale to allow for humans to colonize Mars." That is the point of the debate, not to say that we can assume that we'll eventually figure it out, but to provide an actual plan, a course of action, to make it reality. I have run low on characters yet again (curse you Juggle, and Webcorp before them) so I shall end this here and look forward to my opponent's R4. [1] Round 1, paragraph 2. [2] pretty much all of round 2. [3] http://news.wustl.edu... [4] http://english.pravda.ru...