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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!
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.
A manned mission to Mars is estimated to be 55 million. Even with the inevitable over-spending it's a pittance in comparison.
And just to make my self sound cool: The mission to mars could probably be paid for with the profits the USians make from the production of land mines they have covered southeast Asia with.
The point is money is obviously not a problem, the prioritization is!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I haven't noticed "terraforming Mars" being proposed because of over-population of species-survival.
... you don't need that many kids (or any?) Our planet can easily sustain us for a long time to come, at least assuming we take care of it. The damage isn't irreversible -- if we're smart, she'll last us a while.
... the moment we set stuff down on Mars, we've got people sending us rent bills for plots of land they "own" ... maybe we should get that resolved first?
We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys
Species-survival? Our sun's not going anywhere. Based on the usually-suggested timelines for evolution of mankind, we're just getting started, and have plenty of time to figure things out (so long as we don't wipe ourselves out first.) It would be far more in the interest of self-preservation to dismantle our nukes than to find new planets. We're a bigger danger to ourselves than the sun, or likely aliens.
No, I'd say we're thinking of terraforming Mars for other reasons:
- The hell of it. (No, really.)
- Research. (How does life develop? Were we an accident? Necessary?)
There's no reason to feel we need to rush it, just so we can "get down to business" using Mars for ores or habitation. We're comfortable here. We're rushing because we've watched enough sci-fi to have an idea of what might be possible -- and we want to see it happen.
Besides
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?
ou don't need that many kids
We interrupt this silly post to point out that this is slashdot, these people REALLY aren't part of the problem. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
I like ideas that use local materials and conditions to our advantage. But this has some technical problems:
You will need to seal the walls and floor of the valley/crater your using to prevent gas escapeing faster than you can pump it in.
You will also need to keep the cover in place and it will require a lot of force. Complex plants need a minimum of about 0.5PSI to survive, and the current martian atmospheric pressure is so small it can be a saftey/fudge factor.
100 square meters worth of cover needs approximately 350tons of force to hold it in place. But since martian gravity is about 1/3 that of earth, we really need over a 1kiloton of force. So it isnt impossible, it's just difficult. Partially covered lava tubes might be the best place to try this idea, they shouldnt be too porous, and the igneous rock would make a good anchor for the cover.
But remember i calculated for plants, and not humans, we require much greater atmospheric pressure to survive and thus a much stronger cover.
Responding to you and your parent. First, colonizing Mars would increase the sustainability of our species - it is far more likely that the earth will be hit by a big astroid before the sun runs out. Furthermore, we are fairly certian that we have tons of time before the sun runs out, but cant' predict when the next big astroid will come - could be 5 years from now, or it could be 10,000. So getting all our eggs out of this basket that is Earth is more important in the short-run than getting out of the solar system.
... you don't need that many kids (or any?)
We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys
Actually that is a short-sighted solution to the problem. The european birth rate has been dropping for some time now, while universal health care has been increasing life expectancy. They are now realizing that they will be in a real jam in a couple decades when the average age of the population is 64.
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
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
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.
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