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Terraform Mars Using Oasis Greenhouses
An anonymous reader writes "The Director of the Mex-Areohab project, Omar Diaz, is interviewed today on the feasibility of modifying the Martian climate and terraforming with mini-greenhouses. At higher than 5,000 meters above sea level, on the volcano Pico de Orizaba, the Mexican model can be compared to many oases in the desert and contrasts with industrial-scale terraforming by Zubrin and McKay, among others, who use fluorocarbons, orbital mirrors, polar melting and pollution machines. One planet's pollution is another planet's rain machine, but the thrust of the interview seems to maintain that micro-terraforming is just faster and more efficient."
Before anyone writes a cheque for this plan, I say they should have to terraform the moon first as a proof of concept.
The moon would be orders of magnitude more difficult than mars for some basic reasons.
You need to have something to work with before you can start terraforming. The moon has a lot of rock. So does Mars, but Mars has different kinds of rock, and it also has ice and CO2.
A planetoid needs a reasonable amount of gravity to retain a gaseous atmosphere before it bleeds off into space. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, the moon has none.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I think a critical thing here is that Mars is much easier due to having enough gravity to actually hold a terraformed atmosphere in place - something the moon is lacking.
Unlike microwavable dinners, we can't just nuke it to heat it up. Or can we? While massive use of nuclear detonations on Earth would chill the planet ("nuclear winter"), would the immense release of various gasses and energies actually increase the average temperature of Mars? Not that I would seriously suggest we start our first off-planet colonies with an interplanetary nuclear barrage or anything.
We'll outsource all of our industry to Mars!
Benefits:
- Cheap Martian labor (They don't even USE money up there!)
- Lax environmental law
- Low taxes
- No import/export tarrifs
- Cheap raw materials (The whole planet is made of frikkin' iron!)
and after a few thousand years we'll have a brand new hospitable planet. Of course there are some drawbacks. For one, the commute is going to be hellish. But where else are we going to go after the labor market in China starts demanding decent pay and working conditions? We've got to think ahead, people!
This is a great idea, and I think it could be impleemnted in our life time (Provided the USians quit spending all of their money on weapons). If every one is still worriend about saftey SEND ME!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Is it my imagination, or have we finally found something to terraform?
Terraforming Mars is fun to think about but ultimately useless. In a few billion years, our sun will go red giant and boil away Earth's oceans and royally screw up the terraformed Mars as well. If we REALLY want to think about a space travel project that has the capacity to preserve the human race after our sun runs out of hydrogen to burn, we'd start colonizing extra solar planets. That way when one sun goes nova, there's plenty of humans in other solar systems. Only then is our race truly immortal! Until of course we get invaded by species 8472, the Borg, the Dominion, the Romulans, the Klingons, the Xindi, or... oh wait.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
When the first humans start living on mars, i assume they will need all the resources availiable, and wont be interested in venting precious oxygen into the atmosphere.
However, as we get a decent foot hold established there, this will become more feasable. The article doesnt mention how many of the 'units' will be needed, but i would guess it will be a very large number. So we are probably talking about factories produceing the units from local materials.
It also seems that it would be a waste of resources to have CO2 factories (humans) tending the O2 factories ('units'), so the units would probably need to be fully automated.
Even if this terraforming method isnt used on mars, research into it could greatly benefit us here on earth. I hope we hear about more about this.
I think the grandparent was joking.
.. welcome the notion of standing Liam and Noel Gallagher on Mars to play their own brand of 'I wish I was John Lennon' BritPop to the microbes. Unless they bred, in which case it might not be so good.. 'Maahs Attaahks' anyone?
Err... correct me if i'm being an idiot here, but I thought the reason Mars' atmosphere was so thin was because it lacks a complete magnetic field. When the planet 'died' (assuming it did) a bazillion years ago, solar wind from the sun hosed the planet and blew away much of its atmosphere, or so i'm told.
So... wouldn't that make terraforming Mars kind of like pouring water into a sieve?
I can see you don't work anywhere near end-users. You'd think they were joking, too. But they still break their cupholders.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Yes, well according to every Dr. Evil movie I'd ever seen, it didn't seem like it would be so hard to settle on the moon...
An interesting proposal was part of the story, "Mining the Oort" (IIRC, by either Frederick Pohl or Poul Anderson, it's sitting on the shelf at home.)
****SPOILER ALERT******
Eventually they smacked Mars with a series of comets in one locality. The impacts built a long, deep valley. They also released a pile of water vapor. Since the valley was the lowest area of topography around, most of the released vapor settled there. I forget how deep the valleys were, but in the bottoms they were able to achieve some decent partial pressures. Of course it wasn't O2, but water vapor, ammonia, and some other cometary traces. But correcting the gas mix is the 'easy' part of terraforming once you've got the right atoms in the right place.
Going for deep valleys either does away with the dome entirely, or possibly doming over the top of the valley.
Getting inhabitable valleys then looks more like the Mars of C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Manned mission to Mars for 55 million? The two rovers that are wondering around the surface cost 810 million.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Why not? Cover a huge valley with a nice strong material, and then start pumping extra atmosphere into it. Maybe some derivative material of the space elevator cable.
It's not any more outlandish than other ideas I've read.
ok, putting aside the need for a magnetic field for a moment, how about letting evolution take hold:
use a mirror to concentrate light to warm an area with water and melt it. Introduce our best microbes to said area, giving them a fair amount of nutrients from earth, but at a controlled rate. The microbes reproduce, and gradually mutate, some of these traveling to the edge of the life zone, and becoming pioneers on the mars surface: surviving with less water, etc. The life zone continues to grow, with the most hardy pioneers on the fringes and the microbe manifest destiny to cover mars begins.
The problem is, this could take a very long time. Chemical processes, including life, tend to move slower at lower temperatures. Those multi-hundred year old lichens in antarctica would seem like bamboo/kudzu by comparison.
According to population experts (as opposed to the lay man...) the world population will peak about 2060. Perhaps in your lifetime! China and most of Europe already does not have enough births to maintain a study population, with Europe only seeing population increases because of immigration.
It doesn't take a lot of gravity to hold an atmosphere in place. Look at Titan, it has a mass of only 1.35E23 Kg (compared to Earth's 5.98E24 Kg) and atmosphereic pressure of 1.6 bar. The moon has a mass of 7.35E22 so surely it could support a breathable atmosphere (say 0.5 bar).
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
I think you have your ratio of US to world spending wrong:
e / Spending.asp
http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spendersFY03.html
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrad
It is much closer to 1:1 rather than 3:1. Though your point still holds - we could probably afford to cut military spending in order to increase spending on other activities, and (the cynic's view) spending on space is a good way to keep our military technical superiority even if it isn't directly weapons spending.
-Marcus
ps. Nor do I believe that the US makes 55 billion profits on land mines.
Hey, we've got plenty of extra pollution here on Earth. And Mars could use more pollution to help terraform. So why don't we just ship all our extra pollution to Mars?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
You don't need so much mass to keep a thick atmosphere that far out in the solar system.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
>A planetoid needs a reasonable amount of gravity to retain a gaseous atmosphere before it bleeds off into space. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, the moon has none.
So isn't the thickness of the atmosphere more or less proportional to the planet's mass? If so, Mars' atmosphere is about as thick as it is going to get... it simply doesn't have enough mass to keep enough gas material from bleeding off into space, or else the air would already have more density.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, gets removed and is replaced by oxygen, which isn't very reactive in the infrared. The atmosphere is less able to hold heat, and so the planet cools (except the exosphere, which actually heats up and increases the rate at which the atmosphere is escaping). CO2 ice builds up on the ice caps, and so the atmospheric pressure drops. These plastic greenhouses might make the planet worse.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I'm sure that helps but lets look at Venus, 4.9E24 Kg (slightly lighter than Earth), surface temp of almost 500 deg C and air pressure of 90 atm.
It seems to me that the reason some planets have an atmosphere and others don't is simply the availability of volitiles such as CH4, CO2, N2, O2, NH3, etc.
If Venus and Titan can both support such thick atmospheres, I don't see why the Moon can't.
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
Sounds familar to Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars. The Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars is a good trilogy about mars terraforming. I'd recommend it if this topic intrests you.
Go Gusties
Everything I needed to know about terraforming I learned in kindergarten: You're not allowed to play in the neighbor's sandbox (whether nor not there's anyone home) as long as you keep pooping in your own. Nobody gets to terraform Mars until they can prove they can terraform Earth for the better, instead of for the worse. I think that's a fair test of both capability and intent, with the side benefits of a cleaner sandbox for everyone and a much better idea of what's being done wrong (and thus by whom).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Venus has slightly less mass than Earth (about 90%), but Venus's atmosphere is over 90 times thicker than Earth's (around 9100%).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
>So isn't the thickness of the atmosphere more or less proportional to the planet's mass?
A number of factors, including mass, determine the thickness of a planet's atmosphere. Others include composition and temperature, along with a whole host of more subtle effects.
Mars, in fact, could (and did, at one point) have an atmosphere as thick as the Earth's. Mars' atmosphere was literally blasted away by meteor impacts early in the solar system's history. Mass was definitely the main factor here: because of Earth's larger mass, its escape velocity is higher than Mars'. So the Earth was able to pull back significant amounts of atmosphere afer an impact, whereas impacts on Mars simply blew the atmosphere off into space.
But I don't think there's any reason, now that impacts are considerably more infrequent, that Mars couldn't retain a more dense atmosphere.