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Planning For The Colonization Of Mars
Tiburana writes: "NASA recently held a conference called "The Physics and Biology of Making Mars Habitable". The current line of inquiry is to introduce microbes to recreate the greenhouse effect that is wreaking havoc on our environemnt to raise the temperature of the Martian surface to accomodate the types of life with which we are familiar.
" The submittor also expressed some concerns about how humans handling of the Earth - and whether we'll repeat the same problems on other planets.
The statement is not correct. One should say "translucid" instead of "transparent". The fact is that light may reach deeps up to a few millimeters in many rocks. On a desert this is quite important for survival of microorganisms. On Antarctica dry valleys, the most Mars-like environment on Earth, several organisms manage to fight cold, dryness and the higher level of UV radiation of these places, by living at these deeps inside rocks. It is exactly this point that puts into question the idea of a "sterile Mars". Yes, Antarctica is much more benign than Mars but if liquens, algae and bacteria manage to survive this way, then it is theoretically possible that the same could happen in Mars.
In Viking mission times, based on these facts, a group of scientists, one of them Carl Sagan, simulated in lab the Mars environment and discovered a few bacteria that can survive much the same way we see in Antarctica. So the question of very little green Martians cannot be put away until now. Some may counterweight this fact with Viking experiments. But we know now that part of them were flawed or suspect of being so.
Many people talk about the fact that Viking showed no organics in Mars. Curiously the Vikings suggested that Mars possess less organics than the Moon. And this is a nonsense somehow. Mars is much closer to the Asteroid Belt and Jupiter than us. So, in its History it should have suffered more impacts than us. Not only from asteroids but also from comets. How can Mars be more "inorganic" than the Moon? Moon surface receives a lot more radiation and still we got minimal traces of organic compounds. So there is some reason to rise a few serious questions about the reliability of Viking experiments.
So before talking about "colonosations" think: have we exhausted all chances to find Life in Mars?
You should care. Really care. The possible existence of a biotype in Mars will surely rise two questions:
How "martians" may react to concurrence with Earth organisms?
How we, earthlings, may react to concurrence with Martian organism?
Your chauvinism may ignore the first question. However you cannot ignore the second. No matter the level of development and the complexities of parallel evolution in different environments, if we meet then these two questions will arise. You may think that having 2000 times more grey matter than martians may give you some superiority. However, this does not make you a winner in advance. Earth has tons of examples on huge and disastrous epidemics. Mankind has suffered already three huge disasters, two purely due to epidemics. A small carelessness and it may suffer the fourth and most deadly of all.
Well, Martians may not attack humans, but they may attack the biota humans depend on. Note that Mars is THEIR environment, so they already have an advantage here. So Mars may become a very unfriendly planet to live.
But the problem does not end here. Martians, I'm talking about possible ones, may find Earth a very friendly place to live in. So their introduction, even accidental, may produce serious havoc in our world. Don't think about this as a remote chance. If they exist, they may find our atmosphere too deadly to live. But we know that even our earthly "oxygenophobes" manage to live inside our own bodies and even kill us. How many bacteria exists on Earth that managed to survive 4 billion years in oxygen rich Earth? Tons of them. And a lot of them are poisonous to us or even can "eat" us. However they are bound to the harsh concurrence that occurred during this time. This limits somehow their threat.
Now think about an organism that comes here, finds this as its Hawaii and we have no defense against it...
Make no mistake - we can influx it with Nuclear waste, chemicals, pollutants of all stripes and build whatever the hell we want to there. It doesn't make a whit of difference to anyone. No life = No environment = Nothing we need to worry about preserving.
As for point 3, I think you are jumping to conclusions somewhat. Nobody is suggesting that we throw away the Earth - the simple fact is that the Earth we be the home to the vast, vast majority of Mankind for a long time. Just consider Mars a backup. If anything goes wrong here, then our species will live onward somewhere else. It greatly increases our species chances of survival in the long term to occupy two planets, and not just one. The dinosaurs could have done with a similar backup, but they didn't have one, and look what happened to them.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
From the second link: (the "introducing microbes" one)
Above: In many desert environments, Chroococcidiopsis grows on the undersides of transparent rocks, just below the surface.
I've driven through desert areas several times, and I haven't seen any "transparent rocks."
Oh...
Wait...
Never mind.
--Shoeboy
We have scarcely had the chance to properly explore the Martian environment and we're already talking about wreaking havoc on an unexplored ecosystem. Before we unleash the greenhouse effect on a planet we should do a few things first.
1) Understand just what we're doing. We can't even agree if the greenhouse effect is really happening, let alone what factors are significantly contributing to it. We need to know the effects of our actions before we stumbly blindly forwardwith this plan.
2) Properly explore the planet before erasing vast parts or its geological history. I'm reminded of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, which when built in the early 1960s led to flooding that buried countless archeological sites. The 3 Gorges Dam in China is another example. If there is any fossil evidence of life on Mars we may be losing it forever by terraforming the planet.
3) Finally, try fixing our own planet before we undertake the extremely expensive task of relocating to another planet. Now I'm an advocate of the space program, but rather than screw up another planet ecologically, we should fix our own planet first. Or have we already become that extreme of a disposible society that we can throw away an entire planet?
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...