Flowing Water Discovered on Mars

Dolphy writes "BBC News has the latest big scoop on the Mars phenomenon. Researcher Tahirih Motazedian apparently uncovered proof quite some time ago of flowing water and surface change on Mars."

Comments

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[ZigMonty]

Mars is constantly leaking gases, and oxygen, being lighter than C02 would escape even more easily. You may be able to generate a thick C02 atmosphere for a short time, but once the temperature started to rise you might start loosing gas faster than you could produce it.

Define "short time". Are we talking a million years? 10,000?

Even if the atmosphere only lasts a short period on a geological timescale, it would still give us plenty of time for useful colonisation. Maybe even enough time to develop a way to make the teraforming permanent. Remember how old our civilisation is. A couple of thousand years is a very long time.

Re:Terraforming wont be so hard after all..

[eclectro]

This is a very big fantasy some people have.

There are a couple of reasons Mars has an atmosphere 1/100th of our own.

One reason is because Mars has less mass than the Earth. Hence there is less gravity to "hold" onto a thick atmosphere like what we have on Earth.

Secondly, Mars did have a denser atmosphere at one time, but was probably eroded away by the solar wind. The loss of a strong magnetic field probably didn't help things either.

To prevent the erosion of some future atmosphere, you probably would need to restart the magnetic field. Maybe you could drill down to the core and plant a big bomb to restart it.

So terraforming is still (extremely) hard after all. I didn't get into the astronomical amount of energy required to do it either.

So it looks like that if you wanna live on Mars you're gonna have to strap on some airtanks.

And don't forget the long-johns either, because it's cold there too.