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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.
i'm in favor of detonating lots of nukes on mars, just to see what happens.
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!
Yeah, maybe they could have a pay-per view special to fund the costs.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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
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.
I think the time scales involved are very large. It would be like pouring water into a sieve with very small holes.
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.
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.
Foo: I'm in favor of detonating lots of nukes on mars, just to see what happens.
Bar: Not sure, but I think seeing Venus's atmosphere sent outwards a few hundred kilometres would look pretty cool.
Baz: Yeah, maybe they could have a pay-per view special to fund the costs.
Interestingly, I just listened to someone discuss the awesome power of a sight that fewer and fewer people have seen: nuking the Earth.
On NPR's Fresh Air, former Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Reed talked about his new book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. In addition to his policial role, he was for a while a "consultant to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a well-known center for nuclear weapons research." As such, he helped design nuclear weapons, and was present during their testing.
He pointed out that witnessing an above-ground nuclear detonation was itself a life-changing event, and that the experience colored the decisions of all who saw and felt it. The light, he said of a Christmas Island blast, wasn't just bright -- it was all-enveloping, even through the way-beyond-dark goggles. And the instant blast of heat, that made you want to run away, anywhere, just to get away.
But nuke tests are now performed underground, where the awesome power is visible only as instrument ticks and a dimple in the ground. As the old scientists die, there are fewer and fewer people who have witnessed a nuclear blast as it would occur in the above-ground world.
The whole concept is so abstract, we can now discuss the idea of blowing one up on another planet, without even breaking into a sweat. Unfortunately, there are plenty of folks in the militaries of the world who can do the same sort of abstract thinking in reference to their own planet.
Damn, that got a lot deeper than I thought it would...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.