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Mars Terraforming Debate
blackhelicopter writes "This Guardian article describes the implications of terraforming Mars - the subject of NASA's forthcoming debate. Quote from Dr Lisa Pratt, a Nasa astrobiologist, concerning life probably already on Mars: 'We simply cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious sensitive evidence we are seeking'."
Given our experiences with Biosphere 2 and my own attempts at gardening, I think Mars is safe for a while.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Oh no! We'll destroy the non-existant yet vibrant ecosytem!
I find it incredible that terraforming of Mars is considered an alternative today. Expect an enviromental discussion that will exceed that of the Kyoto protocol many times over.
It's interesting to me that now that all of Earth now is claimed by some group or another that we would begin moving to other planets. I find it hard to believe that we would form any type of terraforming operation without some political agenda. I'd imagine that being the country to pioneer such an operation (ie: USA) would be the biggest stick policy of them all.
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I say terraform it as soon as we can.
Human survival, wellbeing, and expansion should trump all other concerns. We are the measure of all things.
Second, a species with only one planet is necessarily at greater risk than a species with two planets. We need the insurance policy.
I love science. But the value of another planet to our species is greater than the cost of losing the odd microbe or two that might be found on Mars.
I say, "Let's Go!"
Next thing you know those crazy Reds are taking down the space elevator and Mars is one moon short!
I stole this Sig
i think we should focus on cleaning this planet up before we decide to punt and basically make a new one.
I think we should make a backup before we start applying patches.
I'm not very concerned with messing the precious barren desert they have going there...not as much as I am about our lush diverse ecosystem anyways.
And if there is life there, well its sure to be better suited to its native environment than what we bring along. At worst we get our first scientific data about how our bacteria interact with xenobacteria.
You can't take the sky from me...
Man, this post made me think of "Total Recall".
It'll never happen. Why? Terraforming is a multigenerational undertaking. So far the only human creation to span many generations has been religions and the wars they involve.
Mammoth tasks like terraforming a planet simply cannot be done given the current state of human psychological development. Who here would work on a project that would only be fulfilled hundreds of years after your death?
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
How to terraform a planet:
Step 1: Devise a reliable method of getting vehicles to the planet.
Step 2: Terraform the planet.
I think we should work on step 1 before worrying about step 2.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
The issue of terraforming has been argued extensively in science fiction for years. The most notable books on the topic are by Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars (a hard-sci-fi trilogy on the terraforming of Mars and its consequences).
I think what is interesting is that if the earlier article regarding methane emissions being discovered on mars. If it does turn out that it is coming from some lifeform , no matter how advanced or primitive. Is it ethically right to go marching in there and changing the whole ecosystem?
Where does one draw the line?
On earth humans have caused extinctions many times over. It is only in recent years that we try to preserve waning species. If we go to another planet we should take these philosophies with us wherever we call our home; if we do decide to colonize or terraform another planet it should be done in away that doesnt destroy any life that already exists there.
I do have another opinion though; Mankind is life, a very successful form of life. It seems to me that our aging planet is not going to last forever; Man has always looked up into the stars in awe and wonder, I beleive that it is our destiny to be up their in the heavens, that is the ultimate challenge life has to face. Just because we call Earth "Home" , why should it not be the case that the universe is our "Home" ?
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Well, we can't "muck up" mars since it's already dead or mostly dead. And we can't give up on earth and move to mars because, transportation costs aside, fixing mars' problems will be *way* more expensive then cleanup on earth.
Terraforming mars will always be a secondary hobby project for earthlings. And it seems silly to say "we should get our own house in order first" because 1) we'll never be perfect; that's no reason not to start other projects, and 2) there are billions of humans, so we can work on projects in parallel.
I think terraforming mars and cleaning up earth's environment are synergistic goals anyway; both will benefit from lessons learned in the other. Mars is a great testbed since it *can't* be mucked up any worse than it already is.
Kim Stanley Robinson's books about terraforming Mars got me more interested in ecology than any non-fiction book I've ever read. I think because ecological writers tend to have a hopeless anti-human perspective: we're a sinful blight upon the environment; we mess it up accidentally, and anything we try to do to fix it will probably go horribly wrong; best thing we can do is curl up and die. Robinson on the other hand paints an image of humans creatively taking responsibility for ecological problems and fixing them.
Long-term, humans will have to leave this planet at one time or another. While I agree we could be using this one more efficiently, and that terraforming is a bit too far off to worry about just now, debating the morality of terraforming is just silly. Survival of the fittest!
Isn't this just a tad premature? I mean, we haven't managed to get people to Mars yet. We're probably not going to find life there until we do, and since we've landed craft there already, there's a good chance that any life that is there has been infected already by terrestrial strains of whatever. Let's revisit this debate in about ten years when we've got some evidence and when we have some sort of space capacity that will allow us to get people back and forth to Mars. Until then, this and other articles like it are more than useless wanking that reminds me of the homegrown human-apologist "earth first" eco-wackos.
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
Not to mention [a]ny life we haven't found *yet*.
I may be "jumping to conclusions" on this one, but do you possibly thing that's what she meant by 'We simply cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious sensitive evidence we are seeking'
Not only was that in the article, it was in the freakin' post. Anyone who modded you insightful should have the backs of their hands tapped hard with a spoon.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Aren't we going to terraform Mars or Venus?
Terraforming is a long-term project requiring technology significantly advanced over what we have today. Even terraforming advocates admit it would take a minimum of 200 years to modify Mars to the stage where even simple anaerobic microorganisms and algae can survive. [Ref: Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, Martyn J. Fogg, SAE Press 1995.] Space habitats, on the other hand, can be built with today's technology, and would be homes in space which people initiating the program could move into within their lifetimes.
Interstellar travel may someday become possible, but we have no guarantee that Earth-like planets will be as plentiful in the Milky Way galaxy as they have been in Hollywood, CA.
What advantages would orbital settlements have over a colony built on another planet?
Sunlight also drives the life-support system of the habitat, so the day/night cycle can be set to whatever is convenient. Compare this to the moon, where there is 14 days of continuous daylight, and then a 14-day-long night. Here, some alternate energy source would probably have to be used half the time.
Zero G would be a liability if there were no alternative to it. Astronauts experience loss of bone mass and muscle tone after prolonged exposure to weightlessness. But most of a space habitat would be under Earth-normal gravity, although there would be easy access to regions of reduced gravity and zero G (perhaps for personal flight). With planets, on the other hand, you have to take the gravity that's there, and it's often the wrong kind of gravity to keep us healthy. Lunarians or Martians would probably not be able to visit the Earth (nor accelerate at 1 G).
Seastead this.
Long ago scientists knew that the planet has a cold core. How much lower would our oceans be if we had a cold core allowing water to seep under ground. Mars may have had less water and other starting materials becuase earth and venus got most of them.
Jupiter in the same manner sucked up more gasses and is larger than Neptune or Uranus.
It's possible that mars when it's core was warm enough had some shallow seas but then again it also had a thin aphmosphere from the beginning without enough gasses emitted from the time the crust cooled and volcanoes adding to the mix before plate tectonics on the planet shut down which it did so long ago there's no mention of any existance of faults on the surface of mars.
It's my belief that mars by the time it became tectonically stable and then dead not enough gasses were emitted into the aphmosphere to keep things thick enough for water vapor to exist on the surface in large amounts and much of it possibly has been blown into space. The rest is liquid deep below and frozen into the surface.
For any useful terraforming on the planet once we were able to pollute the aphmosphere to thaw things out a bit we'd still be faced with bringing water to the planet. One way would to have robots digest asteroids and free hydrogen to build giant ice blocks and hurl them to the planets surface or bring ice from europa and send it down to the surface of mars.
But first even the thought of terraforming another planet to live on would involve a huge change in the econmic forces driving the world economy. So I doubt it'll even begin during my lifetime.
Wow...the amount of anti-human hate going on in this discussion is mind-bending.
First of all, it's not as if we're about to start terraforming tomorrow. Even the most zealous of the Mars exploration types (i.e. Robert Zubrin of The Mars Society) don't think it should be done until the planet has been explored in depth.
Secondly, keep in mind that we'd really be *fixing* a planet that nature has let die here. All of our new data shows that Mars was once a very life-friendly planet, with oceans, etc.; now it's a cold, nasty place that's only getting more inhospitable as time goes on. Doesn't it make sense to reverse that process and expand the realm where life is viable?
Third, it's not like doing this would necessarily kill any life forms on Mars anyway. The process would be extremely gradual -- we're talking hundreds of years or more here -- giving microbes, etc. plenty of time to adapt. Heck, we might be giving a boost to what life there might be on Mars.
Fourth, it's not as if we've even ruined Earth anyway. People tend to forget that one solid volcanic eruption puts out more CFCs than all of human industry ever has. Environmentalists greatly overstate humanity's impact on the planet in their effort to take down industrialized society. We're not doing that poorly here, and what we've learned on Earth would certainly be applied to terraforming of Mars. Heck, the Red Planet might end up being less polluted/more natural than Earth!
So just calm down a bit and take a moment to consider some of the positives that might come with terraforming Mars. It could be a Really Good Thing.
How To Get Humans To Mars
Though the scientific potential of finding alien life is staggering, and one should do everything first to detect it, when push comes to shove, it's a matter of balancing things.
This implies that, when reasonable efforts are done to detect it, and none are found, I think one should go through with human colonisation. Anything else would amount to a moratorium: you are NEVER completely sure that there is no niche somewhere on a planet where life (as we know it or not, jim!) exists. Infact, those planets that have the most potential to sustain (alien) life, will often be those that have the most potential to be fterraformed.
And, while some may dispute it, human life (or at least intelligent life) comes first, period. We can see that in the reality on earth as well. While I'm all for procedures and inventions that reduce the medical experimenting on animals, for example, I do not subscribe to the idea of the ultra-greens that evrything in this regard should be forbidden and abolished. It's doubtfull that animal experiments can be totally abolished, and I have no problem with the necessary experiments, to ensure medicines are as safe as possible for human use. I think most would agree. This established one thing clearly: ultimately, humans come first (at least over non-sentient other beings).
In practical terms, what does this imply? Well, science certainly must have it's shot, and the discovery of alien life would be wonderfull and potentially very important, even in our daily lives. But, if, say, in 20 years of searching, nothing is found, and one can be reasonably sure that there is no life (or it's in such remote niches that it will not rapidely be contaminated anyway), I think one should start terraforming the planet, so that humans (and the earth ecology to sustain them) may thrive on another planet, thereby augmenting our survival (and that of the earth ecology).
If life IS found, however, things become more difficult. Certainly the timeframe in which to colonise/terraform would be much longer (if ever), depending on the level of alien ecological presence on the planet (small niches or not). Certainly, one could not let that alien life die, so, even if one did decide to terraform, then only after an artificial, viable surroundings is developped (sort of closed zoo, thus), where the alien ecology may be sustained indefinately.
I'm not going into safety-concerns here, since that's another topic.
But let's face it: when/if there are other alternatives in keeping alien (non-sentient) life in existence, then one should do that and go on with what is of most use to the human race anyway.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Then, of course, there will be all those mars patents to file.
I'm allready getting ready to a couple. The first relates to the use of circular device mounted on a central pivot to ease the problem of transport over the martian surface, whilst the second one is all about the application of temperature elevated hydrogen hydoxide in space colonization.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
No, it is decades-premature-story about a decision that can't be taken without information that will be learned these coming decades.
Seriously, no one will start changing Mars without decades of research first. That is just too stupid -- it's a straw man.
And, if they do terraform Mars sometime in the future, the decision will be based on information we will have learned between now and then.
It would be better to discuss how to lower the price of getting hardware into orbit. Before that happens, anything else are just pipe dreams and a very few tons of exploratory robots.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Not with masses of plant and equipment. The costs of getting them there are pretty trivial, we already have plenty of probes on the planet. They just have to be able to carry an aerosol canister to disperse them. The hard part is designing microbes which will thrive and multiply in the environment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Yes - the planet appears to be warming up. That much I don't dispute. But here's a newsflash for you: the planet is many billions of years old and we've been monitoring it for, what, 200-300 years? How the hell can we be 100% certain that the warming isn't a cyclic thing that the planet does every so often?
There is evidence to suggest that Ice Ages are a cyclic event in Earth's histroy (every 10,000 years or so, and we're due for one any time now), and that the planet warms up for a number of years, just before going into an Ice Age.
How arrogant can we possibly get as to think that we have even and inkling of understanding into how the planet works on an astronomical scale?
I'd say so.
And if we can terraform an entire planet to save our species, I'd imagine we could save ourselves on our own planet without having to jump to another.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
There is one major problem with Terraforming Mars. Mars has a virtually non-existant magnetoshere. the Magnetosphere deflects the solar wind arround earth. This means prevents large ammounts of hard radiation from reaching the surface (which would kill basically all life as we know it) as well as preventing the solar wind from blowing away the atmosphere. This is the leading theory about why Mars atmoshpere no longer exists to the degree it once did.
The Kyoto protocol was controversial because it was attempting to balance man's need to survive financially with man's need to survive ecologically. Nobody wants to destroy the planet, but everybody needs to eat. Plus it came to symbolize a much larger conflict between the Bush administration's self-interested unilateral actions and much of the rest of the world's eglatarian compromising.
Terraforming Mars has none of the risk of the Kyoto protocol. Whether or not we terraform Mars is basically irrelevant to the ecology of Earth. Likewise, as there isn't a strong industrial base on Mars it is pretty financially irrelevant in the short term. Essentially, the two groups debating this will be hardcore scifi geeks (like me) who want to colonize the universe and hardcore environment geeks who feel that everything is better untouched by human hands.
Personally, I feel that terraforming Mars will give Earth agencies experience in the vital area of fixing ecological nightmares. As for "screwing up" Mars, people generally point to Earth turning into Mars if we mess up this planet sufficiently. Mars is just about the worst-case scenario. Personally I'd rather have the fallback position that if global thermonuclear war were to wipe out our planet, at least life from Earth would continue somewhere. That, and the ample room such a planet would provide plus the enduring environmental investment sounds quite worthy of the loss of pristine, untouched land berift of much beyond sterilized soil and historical rocks. Much of the research into that could take place LONG before we are in a position to actually terraform the planet. After all, two out of three landers agree that the planet is a pain to get to, with one abstention.
Now, where the heavy debate is going to lie years down the road is whether or not terraforming a planet gives ownership rights to that planet, and if, for example, the people living on that planet have the right to cede from an offworld government that made life on that planet possible. That's going to be a huge, sticky debate mixing fundamental beliefs about freedom and democracy with entrenched and represented commercial interests and unspoken debts to powerful entities.
The ______ Agenda
Terraforming other planets is fun, but first we really need to terraform Earth. Between desertification, global warming, overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, slash&burn traditional farming, chemically-enhanced modern farming, genetic engineering of plants, moving species between ecological niches, sooting up the polar regions in ways that reduce the planet's albedo, and a lot of other things those pesky primates have been up to, this planet is becoming significantly less Earth-like. It's time to look at changing that. There have been a range of proposals to do things about it, from the Kyoto politics to Giant solar reflector shields in space to Bruce Sterling's Viridian Manifesto.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Personally, I'd like to see us gain the ability to create human-friendly environments away from Earth. But discussing the issue seems to me to be a pointless exercise, best left to university classrooms and NASA cafeterias during lunch hour.
Why? Because we're not even remotely capable of actually doing any terraforming, for several reasons:
1: We don't have the technological ability. We have some marginal sense of what might work, and lots of good ideas, but we're decades away from having the technological means to terraform.
2: We don't have the economic ability to terraform. This is the real kicker. Assume that even a modest, trial attempt to terraform would cost $100 billion dollars; since we don't have even $1 billion to spend on it, we're at least a hundred orders of magnitude away from having the financial means to engage in even the most limited terraforming.
3: We lack the political & social drive to engage in terraforming. Assuming (1) and (2) from above were no longer problems, there would need to be a strong, global, urgent demand that we engage in terraforming. There are many ways we might conceive of this happening, but none of them are apparently in the works, as of yet. This may change, but if it did, then we could spend time then debating the ethics of terraforming Mars, which, by then, will have been investigated to a much greater degree than it currently is.
I figure we ought to be spending our money, time, and effort doing that investigation, rather than getting worked up over ethical debates that, ultimately, don't matter one whit.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Yes, terraforming Mars is clearly the solution to all our problems.
After all, if you have exceeded the credit limit on one credit card, it's not that your spending habits are out of line with your income, it's that you need another one, right?
Folks, if we can't live well and sustainably on a planet as nice as Earth, adding Mars into the mix won't help.
I hear a lot of people saying we should fix up this planet first, but even if this planet was in perfect condition our population would eventually grow to numbers the Earth can't support.
We are intelligent beings who (in my opinion) should be able to expand into space. I'm not saying we recklessly terraform planets and suck up all of the resources. We need to realize what we've done to Earth and not do it again.
On top of our species very survival, Mars can also be used as a pad for further space exploration in our never ending quest to find extraterrestrial life, specifically intelligent beings like ourselves.
and we're going to go bring a dead planet back to life?
Damn, we're destroying Earth at a faster pace than it can repair itself and we won't accept responsiblity to care for it, how the hell are we going to take care of TWO planets?
Not to mention, what if there is some dormant life there? Do we destroy it to replace it with life as we see fit?
And what about the soil? Are there nutrients there to support growing plant life? I doubt it. How will we fertilize the soil? Who will pay for all this pie in the sky BS..
We better take care of what we have here first.
Fix Earth first. Once it's gone, it's gone.
Extinction is forever..
I think too many people read too much science fiction. Science fiction is escapism from reality.
As more and more data is showing, it appears Mars once had a much denser atmosphere that probably supported liquid water. There is also evidence that Mars once had an Earth-like dipole magnetic field and magnetosphere which protected the ancient Martian atmosphere from the radiation of the solar winds. Many researches now believe that without a magnetic field the Martian atmosphere was simply eroded away by the solar wind.
1 .htm n etic.html /
I am merely a layman on this subject, but it seems to me that without somehow restarting the Martian dynamo to generate a global magnetic field, the idea of terraforming Mars will always remain science fiction.
With this information, it seems to me that the idea of terraforming Mars is a joke. Am I missing something?
References:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3016_mag
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/17marsmagnet
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
How very StarTrek of you. Unfortunately you assume that other build blocks for life were tried and abandoned on earth. Most biologists do not believe that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And if we can terraform an entire planet to save our species, I'd imagine we could save ourselves on our own planet without having to jump to another.
Most all of the money we dump into this crap is a waste. And I'm not trying to be a troll. But seriously, we want to make Mars inhabitable. Why not start a little smaller there pancho. Like Africa.
The problem with this.. besides it being probably completely impossible, is that before we ever started reaping any potential benefits of this experiment, we will immediately start taking this planet for granted. I don't know, that probably sounds like hippy stuff, but I think it's true.
There wouldn't necessarily be any evidence of other types of life being formed here on earth because they simply are not successful... the succesful genetic makeup, once it finally took, would have overrun the planet long before the first multicelled organisms ever appeared. Any evidence of prior types of life existing would be drowned out by the presence of the far more abundant successful organisms.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
New worlds are not opened and settled by ethicists, moralists, or other contemplative types.
Columbus, Pizzaro, Cortez, and others were interested in wealth, property and prestige.
And they weren't worried about who or what was destroyed while they were acquiring those things.
Exactly like those planning sessions, what you said here sounds eminently reasonable but it isn't.
The earlier you start thinking about something, the less data you have to work with, the more likely you are to paint yourself into a bizarre political corner long before real information surfaces. Once trapped there, it can be surprisingly difficult to reaim things in the light of reality as it arrives.
I vote for writing more scifi stories about it. That way the people that matter can read them and think, "Wow, what an imagination this dude has... hmm..." and start thinking about it without making any formal political commitment to a particular approach, and without establishing the foundations for a sea of red tape like that hobbling NASA and the US public space effort as you read this.
Think about Arthur Clarke or better yet Robert Forward. I can't see us running into a RocheWorld or Dragon's Egg anytime soon, but Forward's laid out some "harmless" thought experiments well in advance, realistic in that they don't posit any serendipitous breakthroughs in physics (barrinjg catastrophe, we could probably build his whacking great frequency multiplier a decade or to from now), and we seem to be surprisingly close to having his "Christmas Tree" avatars in real life.
When real data rolls up, untenable positions can be quickly and quietly dropped, and public positions can be established and worked from which bear at least a passing resemblance to Real Life(tm).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, I can't think of a reason either. Which is why I as an environmentalist don't want to destroy industrialized society. I only want to sacrifice a little economic efficiency for the sake of long-term viability. And it's why I don't go making up evils as my dissenter's motivations when there are other, more rational explanations.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
How arrogant can we possibly get as to think that we have even and inkling of understanding into how the planet works on an astronomical scale?
My bio professor made a short convincing argument supporting some form of regulation of fossil fuel consumption back in '83. It boils down to this: Soon, the third world will be hopping onto the industrialization bandwagon (and that included the 1+ billion Chinese). At some point billions of tons of carbon will be added into the atmosphere. How can there NOT be climatic changes when that much chemical material is inserted into the atmosphere? (You can't be a scientist with any understanding of chemistry, physics, or ecology and not realize that.) If you live in the Gobi desert, sure, any change would be an improvement. Do you really think the US is going to improve or even retain its living conditions with global environmental change?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Despite this being /. I decided to perform a bit of research, so here are a few links to pages that I think support my point, that terraforming as far as a more hospitable atmosphere on Mars is possible:
They may be wrong, I may be wrong, but simply claiming the fact that the current Martian atmosphere is very thin as proof that no sustainable atmosphere is possible on Mars, that does not cut it. I will grant you that a 99% earth-like biosphere is unlikely, but a lot less is needed for it to be of use to a colony. Even a slight increase in temperature and pressure would make it easier to live on Mars, some plants might be able to grow (genetically modified mountain plants), the domes (or whatever it might be) needed for habitation might have to handle a smaller difference in pressure, or the time an astronaut might survive in an accident might increase.
And besides, even if it only lasts a few thousand years, an atmosphere might still prove useful. Not that I think we should do something like this without considering the consequenses, but once we have the technology, the trade-offs and risks might prove to be small enough for us to attempt terraforming Mars.