Terraform Humans First, Then Mars?

An anonymous reader writes "Related to the future of Mars, NASA released the transcript of an expert panel which debated terraforming the red planet. Planetary scientists including NASA's Planetary Protection Officer, John Rummel, and science fiction writers (Kim Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg Bear) chimed in. When asked if Mars should be transformed to a place where humans could walk without life support suits ("naked"), Sir Clarke responded, "Perhaps we should ask the Martians first." Can it be done quickly-- or at all? Is terraforming ethical? If humans colonize, are the colonists on a one-way trip akin to exile?" Read on for a bit more.

"A consensus seemed to be that like waking a sleeping giant, planet building seems possible if oxygen is not a requirement and some microbial life is dormant underground. But the question of making a planet suitable for plants alone seems to span tens of thousands of years. The remaining science fiction notion was terraforming humans, instead of planets, and making us survive on what is now a very alien world."

Comments

ET, is that you?

[rsrsharma]

Is it really a good idea to think about terraforming a planet before we're sure that there isn't any life on it?

Re:ET, is that you?

[Chess_the_cat]

Why? This isn't Star Trek. The Prime Directive is fiction only. The most there'd be is maybe some bacteria and who really cares about that?

Re:ET, is that you?

[polyp2000]

I think that you have to make a decision like this on a case by case basis. When it boils down to the bare essentials, life is life, and life will do its best to spread unto the far reaches of the universe, by hook or by crook, with or without us. Is it right not to seize the opportunities for our race to achieve this? My own personal belief is that it is our duty and responsibility, not just for us but for future generations to explore and spread our seed where ever it can be sown. That said we should endeavor to do this in a sensible and responsible manner and do our utmost to achieve our goals in harmony with the universe around us.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Timesprout]

When our new Hyper Intelligent Sulphur Breathing Galactic Sprout overlords arrive here to do a spot of terraforming cos they think we are just strange stupid organisms, I vote we dont let Chess_the_cat handle the negotiations

Re:ET, is that you?

[miope]

Yeah, and in five hundred years people will be ashamed of the "barbarians pre-space humans who exterminated bacterial diversity on Mars". I'm talking seriously, we should try to avoid repeting errors... in Colon's time, nobody knew that European's diseases could be fatal for indians... and that *was* understandable given the lack of scientific knowledge of the era. Nowadays we know the scientific, historic social, and ethical value of life and diversity, so, we should be more careful with our actions. And remember that this bacteria could give us lot of insight about the beginings of life and evolution in general. P.S. English is not my primary language... I'm doing my best effort ;-)

Re:ET, is that you?

[schmoo.me]

I would think the baterium might.

Re:ET, is that you?

[techno-vampire]

in Colon's time, nobody knew that European's diseases could be fatal for indians...

Yes, and as soon as they did, they took advantage of it by giving the Indians blankets from smallpox patients to get rid of them faster. Now, as you say, we have better ethics than the Puritans and other early American colonists. I agree that we need to make as sure as we can first that we're not harming existing life, or at least finding ways to preserve it. I really doubt that there's much there to worry about but it needs to be considered and due dilligance taken.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Herschel Cohen]

Expansion without rational limits assures massive die offs.

Look at the mess here on this planet - <I><B>are you really</I></B> suggesting an expansion of this <I>blessing</I> even upon an (assumption) unpopulated planet?

Re:ET, is that you?

[JWSmythe]

Your english is fine. :)

I'd imagine a few problems with teraforming Mars..

First off is the point that you made. If we use some process to make the atmosphere more earth-like, we could encourage the growth of anything that may be lying dormant there, or we could kill it. We've only explored a very small part of the planet, and still don't have complete information about everything we've found. For example, what are those little balls that they found in the soil? Probably just rocks, I'd imagine, but maybe not. They have found traces of water (mostly mud-like). I'd imagine that we'd do something with the free-standing water, to get it to vaporize, making the atmosphere thicker, which would also likely start weather patterns and rain.

To make the atomsphere more earth like, we'd probably send some plants over, such as algae, and maybe grasses. As it grows, it may cover artifacts that could be interesting. I'll use my own back yard as an example. When I moved into this house, the yard was all dirt and rocks. We spent a week digging up rocks, but there are still some small rocks in the dirt. We then planted grass. The yard is now very lush and green, but it is hopeless to think you can see the little rocks that were there.

Imagine "teraforming" Giza (Egypt). Occasionally, archeologists find interesting rocks, like the Rosetta Stone, simply sticking out of the sand, because wind blew sand away from it. If someone encouraged grass to grow there, through aquaducts and irrigation, sand wouldn't blow away, and whatever is burried will remain burried until someone tries to build a strip mall on top of yet another unidentified tomb.

Personally, I'm all for teraforming Mars. For a long time, I've believed that for Humanity to survive, we *MUST* have colonies on more than just Earth. We have the technology to kill everything on this planet in minutes, and it takes a mistake by one person to start that chain of events. Maybe through our own greed and industrialization, we've already set the earth on a fatal spiral through pollution. There are also other events that can happen, which are on more of a sci-fi scale. What if the sun goes super nova? What if a giant asteroid crashes into the earth?

Sure, we don't have the technology now to colonize a planet light-years away. Just like a child, we need to learn to take baby steps, before we can run. Mars is becoming close enough for us to 'practice' on. It probably won't be perfect, but it will be an attempt. After several attempts, we'll do better at it.

If we never teraform Mars, if humanity debates it for the rest of eternity, we'll never learn to travel faster or further, and doom ourselves to eventually overpopulate the Earth and die.

Likewise, if we never populate Mars, our space travel technology will be very slow to grow. Necessity is the mother of invention. If we have a need to travel the distance between Earth and Mars faster, someone will invent something which can achieve this. It may not be a super-cool spacecraft. Our own science fiction has eluded to creative solutions, although technologically impossible at this time such as Wormholes, transporters, and 'Stargate' (good show).

Eventually, we will have the technology to go to distant galaxies, but we have to manage to at least get people to the next planet first. In the last 100 years, we've come a long way. The wright brothers flew their first powered airplane in 1903. Now we can fly all the way around the earth at several times the speed of sound. Wars do great things for technology. Jet and rocket powered craft were innovated during WWII. Slow progress has been made with other forms of aircraft. The cold war was great for pushing space technology, even if it was only for political reasons. America had to do better than the Russians, so we were each trying to out-do each other.

The first

Re:ET, is that you?

[Oligonicella]

"We have the technology to kill everything on this planet in minutes"

No, we do not. You are spouting nonsense.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one...

Oh never mind.

Re:ET, is that you?

[operagost]

I assume you are referring to the incident allegedly concocted by Lord Amherst. I don't know whether he was a Puritan, but I suggest that your condemnation of all Puritans for the actions of one man would be unacceptable in any case.

Re:ET, is that you?

[canadian_right]

I kill thousands of bacteria everytime I wash my hands. If Mars has bacteria, but some in a 'zoo' and terraform away.

Re:ET, is that you?

[heptapod]

Aliens terraforming the Earth? Whoops, they're too late becaus the Earth is already as earthlike as it is going to get!
Perhaps the term you were looking for is xenoformation.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

"just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there" - Gil Grissom

Re:ET, is that you?

[dfenstrate]

Would it be more accurate to say we have the technology to kill the majority of the world's population within hours? I don't think many ICBM's take more than a half hour or so to do their work.

Re:ET, is that you?

[blkmagic]

I don't know how I feel about terraforming and destroying microbial species, personally. On the one hand, there may be some ethical issues, but on the other, it may come down to survival of our own species. There's something to be said for survival of the fittest, and humanity has destroyed thousands of species throughout its expansion. When a new housing development goes up, a certain type of mosquito may be exterminated. Species become extinct every day. Is it really preferable to have people living on the streets (realizing we're not there yet) in favor of a mosquito that may have become extinct on its own anyway? I'm not really advocating either course and think more research is necessary, obviously, but if terraforming Mars (or another planet) provides humanity with a second lease on life, I hope that we can use resources more responsibly with a second lease on life.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Artifakt]

The historical trend is to define "worthy of preservation" more broadly, at least in western culture. Not only have we seen a general repugnance against racism and euginecism develop that would probably surprise the hell out of our bloody minded ancestors, but there have even been words such as speciesist introduced to extend that repugnance to at least the abuse of the higher animals. Of course, these are far from universal.
If you think of it as us taking territory from bacteria, it sounds oh-so-hypersensitive and politically uber-correct to think we should care, but if you think of it as though there must be a minimum value to any whole, complete ecology, even one made up entirely of simple life forms, it makes more sense.
If Mars even has bacteria, and it turns out there is nothing exceptional about them, we will probably terraform the planet eventually. But the first thing we should conclude on finding a bacterium not native to our own world is not that Mars has nothing but bacteria, but that it has an ecoystem, and the only other example of an ecosystem we know is a complex and marvelous thing indeed.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Lord_Slepnir]

For what it's worth, you have better English than most people I know who were born and raised on that language

Re:ET, is that you?

[Artifakt]

Of course the early Spanish and such knew that European diseases could be fatal to the "Indians". But, they didn't have a germ theory of disease or other modern explanations, and they didn't know about immunity mechanisms at all. They were genuinely surprised to see diseases that had a relatively small mortality rate in Europe, or that generally took months to kill, spread so fast among the indiginous peoples, and often kill within a day or two. This is confirmed by the many letters and messages they wrote relating how remarkable it was. Most of these were sent by Roman Catholic monks, who it appears often genuinely tried to help, but by gathering Native Americans into crowded conditions usually made things worse.
The Bio-warfare attacks with smallpox laden blankets and such generally happened in the 1700's to 1750's, not the 1500's. Those people's ethics probably weren't any better than the Conquistadores, but they understood a bit more about the technical end of handleing Smallpox and other diseases. One of the most notable of these was Lord Amherst's decision to distribute blankets known to be full of smallpox, an attack which he justified in his letters and memoirs on Biblical grounds, although the second most well documented use of smallpox was at the order of a mercenary garrison commander near what is now Chicago ILL, who was a freethinker and justified it on the grounds of European racial superiority. While these two attacks are the only ones with extensive documentation made at the time by the chief perpetrators, it seems probably that there were more, ranging from a low estimate of about 10 to more than 100 depending on the historian's best guess.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the "value of life" is more than many who mutter the words seem to think, bacteria is a source of many biotech and medical advancements, wouldn't the potential be even greater with a whole separate tree of life at our disposal?

Re:ET, is that you?

[ron_ivi]

Parent wroteThe Bio-warfare attacks with smallpox laden blankets and such generally happened in the 1700's to 1750's, not the 1500's.

Interesting. Note that bio-warefare agents getting out of control dates back quite a bt further - likely to the 1346 Siege of Caffa. This page from our government's center for disease control has interesting details.

On the basis of a 14th-century account by the Genoese Gabriele de' Mussi, the Black Death is widely believed to have reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack. This is not only of great historical interest but also relevant to current efforts to evaluate the threat of military or terrorist use of biological weapons.

Bet the guy who wrote it never thought it was also relevant to exploring Mars.

Re:ET, is that you?

[rkuris]

And what constitutes "sure" for you?

You can never prove that something does not exist. If we wait for "proof" that there is no living thing on Mars, we might as well never start. You can only be sure up to some level of certainty. Making that call is what might be difficult.

Re:ET, is that you?

[ultranova]

Isn't this an argument for exterminating the Martian bacterians so we don't die of nasty new diseases, not against it ?

Really, there are places for diversity, but I think we have a large enough gene pool of infectious diseases, don't you ?-)

Re:ET, is that you?

[kevlar]

Holy Crap. Its not like there is actual plant and animal life on Mars. Its a dormant planet. The best we could do is find some bacteria that might be frozen in the ice caps, but even then, bacteria is bacteria. It is barely life and if it does exist on the planet, its borderline extinct because of climactic changes. There is no ethical reason to revive a bacterial species from the dead and make sure it flourishes. On the other hand, there is an enormous ethical reason to make human life flourish on places other than Earth. A dormant planet is the most ethically clean place to do it!

Re:ET, is that you?

[Tablizer]

Sure, we don't have the technology now to colonize a planet light-years away.

Actually, we probably do. It would just be very very expensive. Use nuclear power to make a multi-generational ion-drive ship. It may take hundreds or thousands of years to reach a habitable planet, but doable. The nuclear power could be used to grow plants and recycle human waste. You don't have to go light-speed to travel to stars; just have a lot of power and a lot of patience.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars does not have a magnetic field and therefore cannot be colonized.

Earth's magnetic field protects us from the solar wind. All of Earth's life would be gone within a few hundred years if Earth's core were to cool and the magnetic field were to disappear.

The surface of Mars has been completely sterilized by the solar wind and there is no life on Mars.

Your point is good because it brings out the fact that NASA KNOWS there is no life on Mars. NASA simply want to extract dollars from the taxpayers' pockets.

Go to Astronomy Picture of the Day and enter Mars and Magnetic field and then go to PBS and check out that NOVA episode about Earth and Mars's magnetic fields.

Re:ET, is that you?

[techno-vampire]

I'm sorry you took my comments about the improper conduct of certain Puritans as a condemnation of all. Granted, going by their own (sometimes) standard of collective responsibility they could all be considered guilty, I hold none responsible except for those who actually committed the act.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am quite sure that there is no life on Mars. The only reason that NASA is not also sure, is that if they were to admit it, their funding would be drasticaly cut.

Re:ET, is that you?

[jamesh]

Even if we do have the technology, human beings aren't sane enough to be stuck in 'confined space' like a starship for a few weeks, let alone a few generations.

I've seen the movies. I know what to expect.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Donny Smith]

> before we're sure that there isn't any life on it?

How _sure_ you need to be that there's no intelligent life on Mars? I think it's quite obvious already.

I read about some animal-rights nutcases protesting against any interference with existing life forms (!= intelligent life) to which a researcher commented "Let's get real - bacteria don't have no rights".

Re:ET, is that you?

[hashwolf]

most there'd be is maybe some bacteria

When the colonizers will begin sneezing and getting fever you'll know that the martians are attacking.

Re:ET, is that you?

[ignavus]

And in other news today, the whole population of the United States - except for those descended from the pre-Columban inhabitants - decided to emigrate to their ancestral countries of origin.

"Settling North America was really bad - there were other people already there. We should have respected their rights," said outgoing president Bush.

The new President of the US (United Sioux), Chief Speaking Bull, announced that he looked forward to the re-emergence of the buffalo on the (now uninhabited) great plains. "But we will keep horses - and firearms", he added. "And broadband."

The rewly minted coins of the US have adopted the motto: "In Great Spirit we trust". There was some debate about what that actually meant.

Re:ET, is that you?

[CanadianCrackPot]

The sun cannot go supernova it doesn't have the mass, a star's core has to have several times the mass just in its core for that to happen.

As to your idea of screwing over all life with pollution that can never totally happen. Plants when they first evolved took in the carbon dioxide, and put out oxygen eventually they would have suffocated if oxygen breathing animals hadn't come along. So modern pollutants mixed in at the right rate won't totally screw life.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Sj0]

You do realize that by existing, by simply running around and being alive, you destroy millions, if not billions of microbes every single day, right?

Bacteria is born to die. If the human race can extend it's reach(and perhaps come a bit closer to understanding the universe first hand) by terraforming mars, I'll be on the first colonization craft there -- after all, adventure is the spice of life, isn't it? :D

Re:ET, is that you?

[Sj0]

Ever been to a big city? I'd say there are plenty of people who can be stuck in a "confined space" their entire lives and not really care...

Re:ET, is that you?

[Sj0]

Nobody says we'd have to kill 'em ALL, but what are a few specimens for the lab compared to a whole new world to explore IN PERSON?

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You base your thoughts exactly on what? Fuzzy ideas from reading/watching tv?

Re:ET, is that you?

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Is it really a good idea to think about terraforming a planet before we're sure that there isn't any life on it?
Seriously. If you show up with 10.000 giant diggers and some really spiffy biological 'I can grow trees in 5 minutes' mixture, im pretty sure you have checked out the underground, plus done at least SOME research.

But on top of that... Major companys are probably ignoring this anyway... Money above all remember, this is a world of economics... :/

Actually, this is starting to sound like on of my Scifi movies....

Re:ET, is that you?

[spirality]

Certainly by 1750 there was an inoculation available for small pox. In fact in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography he mentions being sad that he did not get his son inoculated. He son died of the small pox at the age of 4 or 5, which would have been in the early 1700s. Still the Chinese had a method of inoculation that I believe was around during the Ming dynasty, something like 1300- 1644. I'm not so sure about the first date and I feel a bit too lazy to look it up. Still the inoculation would have exited by 1644. On a side note Voltaire wrote about the smallpox inoculation in his "Letters On England".

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to correct someone's very understandable mistake in a snotty way, don't supply a fictional word in it's place.

Maybe you were going for xenoforming.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Eideewt]

P.S. English is not my primary language... I'm doing my best effort ;-),/i> You're doing better than many people here.

Re:ET, is that you?

[James Turpin]

Tell that to the Martians living in the underground tunnels who are technologicly a thousand years ahead of us and deliberately let their planet's suraface die in order to camoflauge it from interstellar invaders. For millenia they have viewed Earth as a tactical decoy, and when we decided to ironicly invade them and mess-up their plans, we will have outlived our usefulness to the martians and they will simply have to nuke us then re-terraform earth to again function as a proper decoy. Then maybe you will understand the appropriateness of the 'sleeping giant' analogy. Isn't ignorance bliss?

Re:ET, is that you?

[James Turpin]

Those projections were based on the assumption that it really was Warsaw vs. NATO, and that the most important targets would be redundantly hit be several nukes. If you spread the nukes out a little bit instead of just concentrating an redundant annhilation of the United States and Russia and certain closely allied states, you get much more damage. So, yes, we do have the capability to destry the world, but no, it wouldn't happen from a straight-forward nuke exchange between Cold Ware Warsaw and NATO, because their objectives would be to redundantly destroy each other rather than to destroy the world. That aside, official projections do not adequately take into account long-term affects of fallout and resulting climate changes. That makes the projections pretty worthless in my opinion.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the real solution to push space technology is to have a space based war, too really get going we would need an alian invader to fight.

Re:ET, is that you?

[JWSmythe]

Honestly, you're right. The government will throw billions (trillions?) into stopping anything it sees as a military threat. The best thing for our space program was the cold war. Besides the political "we're cooler than you" aspect, most of the space program happened during that period.

If there should be a valid military threat against the United States from space, and we were on the losing side of it, you'd be sure the government would throw anything they needed to at it, to make sure we were the biggest and strongest.

It's a sad fact, but one we have to accept. I'd prefer to see funds being thrown at improving mankind, rather than at war. They money is available, as is obvious at the over $4 billion per month that the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars are costing. That kind of money could pay researchers to develop really interesting things instead.

I don't have access to the documentation about Bush's plan for putting man (i.e., America) on the Moon again, and on Mars, but I'd guarantee that somewhere in those plans is mention that if we don't get there first, another country will have the advantage in future military conflicts.

We have a lot of things to thank for war, either for development, or the extend to which they exist. Jet aircraft (WWII Germany), the Interstate Highway System (STRAHNET and the Eisenhower Interstate System), television/radio (remember next time you hear an EBS broadcast), GPS, etc, etc...

Re:ET, is that you?

[eam]

I don't know. It's been more earthlike in the past, and it doesn't appear to be heading in the right direction now ;-)

Maybe we should be thinking about terraforming Earth.

Re:ET, is that you?

[Suidae]

What if the sun goes super nova? What if a giant asteroid crashes into the earth?

It doesn't even have to be a stellar event, one good super volcano like the one currently 'overdue' at Yellowstone would be quite enough. Evidence shows that humanity may have been nearly wiped out by such a volcano 80k years or so ago (down to no more than a few thousand people worldwide).

Suggestion...

[telstar]

If we're going to make it a place where people walk around naked, we're going to need two new websites. One where we can vote who to send to Mars ... and a second with up-to-the-minute webcams from the red planet.

Re:Suggestion...

[powera]

Up to the Minute? There is at least a 3 minute lag between Earth and Mars, so it would be at least 3 minutes back.

That's the problem people don't think of when they deal with interstellar travel. Most sci-fi has some FTL communication, it's only a few books that don't. I'm not sure that entanglement will ever work itself out, so it might never happen.

Re:Suggestion...

[Apreche]

There is a very very good one shot anime called "Voices from a Distant Star" aka "Hoshi no Koe". The entire plot of this one episode OAV is the slowness of interstellar communication.

In addition to that, this anime is grade A production quality, and the entire thing was made by a single person in his house with his computer and other animation supplies. One guy. The original voice actors were him and his wife. It's available on DVD in the US, I highly reccomend it.

Oh yeah, as for terraforming. I ask myself one question whenever ethics are involved. Who will get hurt? For example, it is not ethical to do shoddy work if you are a contractor. Why? because you are potentially hurting people. What if that roof caves in? no good. Depending on how and why we terraform mars it may or may not be ethical. If you can do it without harming anybody who isn't consciously making a sacrifice, then it is all good. As for changing people, you are almost certain to hurt someone doing that, so its probably less ethical.

Re:Suggestion...

[Timesprout]

Good point. I have often wondered what would happen if there was a diaspora of humans into space without some type of FTL communication and the 'human' connection becomes weaker and weaker. What are the odds that one group will turn into a bunch of warmongers and seek to conquer the rest.

Re:Suggestion...

[RevAaron]

Read "The Night's Dawn Trilogy" by Peter F. Hamilton to find out! Includes the Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God.

Re:Suggestion...

[tzanger]

I'm not sure that entanglement will ever work itself out

heh heh heh... not quite as subtle as I normally like my puns, but good nontheless.

Re:Suggestion...

[geekd]

They have FTL in Nights Dawn, so your comment is pointless and off topic.

have a nice day!

-geekd

Re:Suggestion...

[aardvarkjoe]

Despite the grandparent poster's claims, large civilizations which are limited by lightspeed are a very common theme in science fiction -- especially classic science fiction. Although I can't recall any books offhand that deal with the specific situation you mention, I'm sure that there are dozens.

Re:Suggestion...

[PolyDwarf]

Speaking of off topic, the post the guy was replying to specifically said FTL communication, not FTL travel.

The Night's Dawn series had no FTL communication and made quite a point of saying that it did not (Well, aside from affinity, and that was only good for in-system communication, and only by a subset of humanity).. Communication between star systems was more a pony express style system, where FTL ships would bring news, media, etc. from other systems. Mention is made more than once about pirates making a good chunk of money by delivering pirated copies of music to a system beforr the "official" copies made it in. The lack of a coherent communication system amongst the star-systems also contributes heavily to the main incident in the book (Being intentionally vague here), and is commented on by the characters in the book "Gee, if we didn't have to wait for ships to get from here to there, we'd be much better off".

Random Plug : The Night's Dawn series is a great set of books to read.. I'd recommend them to any sci-fi reader.

Re:Suggestion...

[RevAaron]

They had FTL travel, but not FTL communication. The lack of FTL comm is a big reason for the problems they have in the book containing the problem.

you too have a nice day!

Re:Suggestion...

[Anonymous Coward]

FTL travel, but not communication? Gimme a fucking break here.

Solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

I already have a large device called "Genesis" that can terraform a planet in mere days.

Re:Solved.

[Khakionion]

I have a device called "Genesis" as well. It's really good at rasterizing planets. With over 65,000 colors. Hell yes.

Re:Solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

SEGA joke?

Re:Solved.

[MrBlue VT]

Actually Pixar did that as one of their first projects. It was pretty impressive back in the day. It's still not too shabby.

Re:Solved.

[kunudo]

"yes, I assure you, the project will be finished in 7 days, thanks to our GENESIS[tm] technology platform bla bla bla..."

Sounds like meeting with a client... Are you selling something?

Please, no missionaries in space, think the green men from the Horsehead nebula would feel like worshipping a human when most of _us_ don't?

Re:Solved.

[dosius]

I thought the Sega Genesis could only do 64 of 256 colors.

-uso.

Re:Solved.

[Kamel Jockey]

GENESIS?!?! Genesis allowed is not!

Eventually...but not now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually we will want to do this, and go even further then Mars, but the technology does not exist to do it cheeply yet.

Wait till until we can do it with cheep intelligent or near intelligent robots.

Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[WhiteBandit]

I've recommended this on quite a few occasions. Check out Dr. Zubrin's book The Case For Mars. The last half of the book deals with terraforming Mars.

In short, it would be "relatively easy" to create the amount of oxygen that would be needed for us to survive. However, the atmospheric pressure is so low that we will probably never be able to walk around the surface without some sort of protective suit (or oxygen mask).

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[smokin_juan]

Not really knowing anything about the subject, I'm wondering - if you can pressurize a person for deep sea diving then why can't you de-pressurize them for mars walking?

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[chimpo13]

In short, it would be "relatively easy" to create the amount of oxygen that would be needed for us to survive.

Why? Are we sending up Limbaugh and O'Reilly to provide hot air? Drum roll. Is this thing on? And another thing, about those airline peanuts...

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[WhiteBandit]

Not really knowing anything about the subject, I'm wondering - if you can pressurize a person for deep sea diving then why can't you de-pressurize them for mars walking?

Nope. The pressures are extremely different. The pressure on Mars is about 10 millibars, or about 1 percent of the equivalent atmospheric pressure on Earth.

At this pressure, water immediately turns to vapor. So in effect, your blood would end up boiling. Anyeurisms and things as blood vessels in your brain explode.

Deep sea diving is different in that we're piling on a lot more pressure on our bodies. It's fairly easy for our bodies to cope with more pressure. Depending on how deep you dive, the equivalent atmospheric pressure would be about 15 times greater. I'm not sure how much our bodies could sustain (just doing some simple googling on this), but that is probably near the limit.

But based on the sole fact of low pressure and lowering the boiling point of water, I'd say no.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[drinkypoo]

We will probably never be able to walk around the surface without adding more gases to the atmosphere. Of course, that's part of the idea. If there is substantial CO2 locked into the martian regolith as suggested (or invented as a plot device) in the Mars (Red, green, blue, purple... okay I made the last one up) books by Kim Stanley Robinson, then it will be possible to thicken the atmosphere perhaps to something like that found in the Alps.

As suggested in the books, the solution may be to free up whatever CO2 or even other gases which are not convenient to have in the atmosphere, then skim a few comets (I know this is a nontrivial process) through the atmosphere to thicken it further. After all it doesn't really matter what kind of inert gases we introduce into the atmosphere to raise pressure for the most part.

While the Mars books are fiction, they are at least Science Fiction, and not just fantasy. As far as I can tell, they are based on hard science...

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[kylemonger]

Without pressure the oxygen in the air will not diffuse into your blood stream. This is worse than simply holding your breath because oxygen uptake stops immediately; when you hold your breath there is still pressure and air in your lungs. The air pressure on Mars is so close to zero that for the purposes of human respiration it does not matter. You are essentially in vacuum and you'll have about 10 seconds to git right with Gawd before you black out.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every meter of water depth you go down adds one (1) bar of pressure on you (aka one atmosphere). That means if you dive 2 meters, you have 3 atmospheres and so on.

Given that the world record apnea divers go to 130 meters, 15 times is a way undershoot, at a 130 meters, you have 131 times atmospheric pressure exerted on you.

And people have dived way deeper than that in submersibles.

Now I don't know if they are actually protected from that pressure all the way - they remain within a (de)pressurized canister that maintains a relatively steady air pressure, but what's for sure is that those apnea divers are proof that the human body can withstand at least a hundred fold.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[Guppy06]

"Every meter of water depth you go down adds one (1) bar of pressure on you (aka one atmosphere)."

Try 10 meters.

H20 @ 1013.25 hPa (a/k/a "milibars") & 20 degres C = 998 kg/m^3 = 97.90 hN/m^3 (at 9.806 65 m/s^2)

1013.25 hPa / 97.90 hN/m^3 = 10.35 m

Yes, seawater is denser, but it's not that denser.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[swillden]

Deep sea diving is different in that we're piling on a lot more pressure on our bodies. It's fairly easy for our bodies to cope with more pressure. Depending on how deep you dive, the equivalent atmospheric pressure would be about 15 times greater.

To amplify, because our bodies are made mostly of water and incompressible solids, increased pressure has very little direct effect on us. We have some internal air spaces that have to be equalized, but once that's done, increased pressure does little. In fact, the only way in which increased pressure does affect us is in that it alters the behavior of our body chemistry somewhat. At the pressures that divers go to (people have been to over 30 atmospheres, and we could probably take far more than that) the most significant change is the way in which gases dissolve and permeate our tissues.

Higher pressures causes more of a given gas to dissolve into our blood and tissues. For example, as high amounts of nitrogen dissolve into our tissues we experience a narcotic effect (called "nitrogen narcosis"). Oxygen is a highly volatile element and becomes toxic in large amounts. For this reason, very deep diving uses a lot of helium and very little oxygen or nitrogen. Lowering the percentage of oxygen in the breathing mixture keeps the amount of oxygen in the diver's body below toxic levels. Deep diving is done on oxygen mixtures that are so thin you'd asphyxiate if you breathed them on the surface.

And that leads directly to a major problem with trying to breathe on Mars. In the martian atmosphere, the pressure is so low that even if you were breathing 100% O2, you'd die of oxygen starvation.

To understand why, you have to understand a little about how mixed gases and dissolved gases behave under pressure. The key concept is called "partial pressure", and it's very simple. The partial pressure of a gas in a mixture is simply the ratio of that gas times the pressure of the whole gas. So, if you're breathing 20% O2 at sea level (one atmosphere), you're breathing O2 with a partial pressure of 0.2 atm. For convenience partial pressure of O2 is written "ppO2".

In direct correspondence to partial pressure, there's another concept called "partial tension". Tension is the measure of the "pressure" of gas dissolved in a solid or liquid. In your body, the amount of a non-inert gas, like O2, that participates in chemical reactions is directly proportional to the partial tension of that gas. In turn the partial tension of a gas in your body tissues is equal to the partial pressure of that same gas in the air you breathe (well, it's not always equal, it takes time to reach equilibrium, and some other factors mean that it's never *exactly* equal, but never mind all that). It's reasonable to just assume that, at equilibrium, ptO2 = ppO2.

So, in order to have enough O2 to function, your bodily tissues have to have a certain ptO2. Your tissues could equilibrate to the martian atmospheric pressure (assuming the boiling point of water doesn't become an issue), but you'd die because even at 100% O2 the ppO2 = 0.01 atm. IIRC, you need about five times that to function.

At the high end of pressure scales, your body can endure ppO2 of up to about 2 atm. Divers generally try to keep it below 1.6 atm, 1.4 atm is what the training agencies recommend. So, at 30 atm, breathing gas with only 1% O2 is perfectly adequate, even though you'd asphyxiate with so little oxygen at sea level. 1% O2 at 1 atm is a ppO2 of 0.01, just the same as 100% O2 at 0.01 atm, i.e. Mars.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[ultranova]

Take a deep breath by expanding your lungs. Close your mouth and hold your nose (or close your throat with that muscle which keeps food from getting to your lungs when you swallow) and exhale. Feel the pressure rising in your lungs.

Of course, if the pressure is only 1/100 of Earth's sea level pressure, you wouldn't get much in an usefull pressure, but still...

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, my bad.
I have been scuba diving in mercury recently so you'll understand my simple mistake.

Re:Oxygen requirements = yes, Pressure = no.

[Suidae]

Additionally, at below around 3psi atmospheric pressure, it becomes difficult for the body to generate enough pressure differential to move gasses in and out of the lungs effectively. So in a 1 or 2 psi pure oxygen environment, you'd still suffocate, because you can't move oxygen into and co2 out of the lungs quickly enough.

I believe this can be solved with a forced air respirator though.

first start with a magnosphere

[Camel Pilot]

1. Magnosphere
2. Atmosphere
3. h2o
4. ???
5 Profit

Re:first start with a magnosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Magnosphere
2. Atmosphere
3. h2o
4. populate
5. Profit

Re:first start with a magnosphere

[Anonymous Coward]

4. eBay

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

"Terraforming" humans? You mean changing them genetically to fundamentally become an entirely different species? That's far more absurd than terraforming Mars.

Remember, just because Mars won't become a grassy paradise overnight doesn't mean humans can't live there in the meanwhile. Humans can live in surprisingly little space, when combined with hydroponic gardens and nuclear power. Dome cities, or underground cities, would work and support millions of inhabitants while the surface of the planet is slowly transformed.

Re:Nope

[Trailwalker]

Mars won't become a grassy paradise overnight

Neither did southern California. You need to have a little more faith in the ingenuity of unabashed greed.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be areoforming? After all, we already seem to be adapted to live on Earth...

Re:Nope

[mbrother]

But Dan Quayle said we could live there!!!

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

By the time it is feasible to terraform mars, it will be much more practicle to enhance/replace our human bodies. One must live in some environment, and having more durable bodies gives you many, many more options. For the most freedom, eventually people (if you can call them that then) will choose to exist primarily in the world of information.

Wether or not you like these ideas, is irrelevant, and thankfully, the universe is vast enough for us to go our separate ways. Though, it will mostly be the new generation of "people" who colonize the further reaches of space, since our fragile bodies simply won't weather the radiation and acceleration necessary for such ventures.

I think there are more than a few folks who would happily trade in their current lives to exist as a process in some fantastic VR of the future. Certainly, an even greater number would appreciate a body durable enough to exist in space, or perhaps just survive the impact of your SUV.

We can "Terra"-form mars since its close, but we are not going to make it elsewhere in our current form. Meanwhile, we are simply confining our future generations to the same feeble, limited existence, because thats how God intended it. Or perhaps it is due to an inferiority complex or pure envy; in any case, it makes me ill.

Problems

[SolidCore]

But there are two problems. First, even if all Mars's available carbon dioxide were coaxed into the atmosphere, it still wouldn't necessarily warm the planet enough to make it a comfortable place for humans, because no one knows just how much carbon dioxide is there. Second, the best way to get Mars to release its carbon dioxide spontaneously is, well... to warm it up. It's kind of a vicious cycle.

Re:Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

All that is needed is a large supply of carbon. From that NH4 could be created which is a much more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. Also, often overlooked is that H20 is a greenhouse gas, so releasing a large amount into the atmosphere would also heat up the planet. Actually, any gas released into the atmosphere (since it is so sparse) would be a greenhouse gas. Since Mars is somewhat similar to Earth and the Earth itself is 50% by mass oxygen, an O2 atmosphere wouldn't be that hard. Power to do this? Nuclear of course. Hell, PNE's might even be useful for releasing the H20.

Re:Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah! Ammonia on my mind (part of my job). Oops, meant CH4.

Re:Problems

[CrowScape]

So... we start cattle ranching on Mars?

Re:Problems

[Mycroft_VIII]

Earth is 50% Oxygen by mass?? seems a little high, any sources for that?

Mycroft

Re:Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

From a google on "Element Distribution in the Earth", I got many sites, one of which has this graph. It seems the consensus among those sites that the crust is 46% oxygen which is not a suprise to a geologist since most crustal rocks are silicates. The mass of the entire Earth is about 30% (oops, I was too high). Still oxygen makes up an impressive fraction of the mass of the Earth.

Re:Problems

[Mycroft_VIII]

I'll say impressive, even 30% is a lot. But mentioning silcates, I was under the impression silicon was the biggest single element in the crust. I probably read silicates and simply didn't remember it right.
thx
So all we need to do ship a double giga shitload of crust to mars and we make serious progress on terraforming it. Hmm... on second thought ...

Mycroft

What?

[OrthodonticJake]

The idea of 'terraforming humans' makes me think of some scientist dragging a rake over my face. My point is that it sounds like that would hurt, and I don't think many people will support scientific experiments on human beings that allow us to breath Martian air no matter how benign they are. And besides, what's ten thousand years? Those plants will be done in no time!

science

[sstory]

I wouldn't ask scifi writers can/should we terraform. I would ask ethicists if we should, and chemists, astrophysicists, etc if we can.

Re:science

[OrthodonticJake]

I don't know; science fiction writers have been right about the future of technology many times. Of course, you could argue that it's because they imagine something and then scientists see their ideas and say "Lets do that", but I think there's at least one other factor involved. The more scientific of the scifi writers try to make their writing as explainable as possible, and it's that goal that makes their ideas easier to implement. So I think that having the science fiction crowd along for the ride is definitely a good idea.

Re:science

[Chuckaluphagus]

While I will agree with you in some part, a number of the most famous science fiction authors have been serious scientists in their own right; Sir Arthur Clarke is a co-inventor of the orbital satellite, and Asimov had multiple degrees in chemistry and biology.

Science fiction authors also think about this sort of matter on a regular basis, and not as a mere idle notion. Combine that with significant knowledge of the subject matter, and it isn't unreasonable for the government to be asking them what their views on terraforming are.

Re:science

[Rostin]

Agree. I think this is the same kind of thing that you see on TV where they ask celebrities onto talk shows to discuss things like the economy or foreign policy. They don't know anything, but it's good for ratings. But in this case, it's government money, presumably. It makes me wonder who the first person was that suggested that they have a discussion about terraforming Mars, and if anyone else in that meeting laughed out loud before realizing he/she was serious.

Re:science

[sam_handelman]

Of course, you could argue that it's because they imagine something and then scientists see their ideas and say "Lets do that", but I think there's at least one other factor involved.

Or, you could argue that science fiction writers predict everything (cities on the moon, flying cars, hyperdrive), and SOME of it turns out to be possible.

Those writers who predict something possible are "prophetic", but it is largely a question of chance and selective memory.

However, I am a biologist - and I have the minimal ethical training required by my Institutions' NIH training grant.

Personally, I think it is ethical to terraform a planet which is not presently inhabited (by life of any kind.) Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition.

Given the risk to the experimental subjects, I do not think it is ethical to "terraform" (or otherwise genetically engineer) human beings.

However, the more relevant question is not "should we do it?" because - we will. Ethical or not, sooner or later, some people will do it. This applies both to human genetic engineering and to planetary terraforming.

The pressing question, therefore, is how should those who choose to do these things (whatever you think about the ethics) go about doing it? Acknowledging that a thing should not be done at all, and then stepping back from that and considering how to minimize the negative imapct when it is inevitably done, can be a difficult feat of mental gynmastics, but in the coming centuries I think it it something peopole of conscience are absolutely going to have to do - in parallel with efforts to stop the more monstrous excesses from being perpetrated at all.

P.S. - Terraforming Mars will be fairly difficult. In a billion years or so, when the photodensity on Mars (and on Earth) has risen (because the Sun is getting bigger), Mars may look very attractive.

At that point, the big problem with Mars is the lack of a strong magnetic field, which makes it difficult to retain water vapor in the martian atmopshere. This is a problem now but it gets worse as the level of solar radiation striking Mars goes up.

This doesn't mean nothing can live on Mars - we can make micro-organisms that could live on Mars with a, frankly, fairly modest budget and present day technology. There are some things down in the Antarctic that might be able to survive as-is somewhere on Mars (although I doubt it.)

The atmosphere is also very thin, and the level of sunlight so small, that it is highly unlikely that we will be able to warm the place up enough for us to wander outside "naked" merely by changing the components of the atmosphere (which could be done with the afforementioned genetically engineered microbes).

Covering the large stretches of the planet in insulated greenhouses (built by self replicating solar powered robots) is probably the best solution if you want a vaguely earthlike environment. This can be done well in advance of the billion year timeframe, of course, and allows you to retain water vapor and a very high temperature.

Re:science

[Orne]

Quite insightful, since the mantra of modern science appears to be Discovery without accounting for Morality. Human Embryonic Stem Cells comes to mind...

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
--Albert Einstein

Re:science

[eztcld]

I would ask no-one and make up my mind based on the same extrapolations you use to justify consulting 'experts'.

Re:science

[Hard_Code]

Well, not all ethical questions only concern living things. There of course is the issue of destroying life that we don't know exists, or that MAY develop there, or destroying geological features that might have scientific or archaeological value, or any number of issues.

I also don't necessarily concur automatically with the "well-somebody-will-eventually-do-it-so-let's-just -do-it-now" line of argumentation.

Note that none of this actually indicates I'm /against/ terraforming Mars, but just that I don't think its not an ethical issue at least to some degree.

Re:science

[mbrother]

I'm an astrophysicist and an SF writer, and the writers they had on their panel all know an enormous amount of stuff about Mars -- much more, in the global sense, than any typical super-specialized scientist. And maybe it's because I haven't studied "ethics" as a discipline and have an agnostic's distrust of other people trying to tell me what is right and what is wrong, but I'd just as soon keep "ethicists" out of the whole deal. Most policy decisions aren't made on the basis of ethics anyway, but on the basis of economics and public opinion. Still, if we want to bring in ethics, why not novel writers? I'd probably prefer to listen to Dickens, or Fitzgerald, or Morrison, about what is right and wrong for human beings than "ethicists."

Re:science

[Pyromage]

I wouldn't ask scifi writers can/should we terraform. I would ask ethicists if we should, and chemists, astrophysicists, etc if we can.

Did it occur to you that the people that have most pondered the ability to and impact of terraforming are the SF writers? Did you consider that those same people are often Ph.D's?

The SF writers are most likely far better versed in the issue than any 'ethnician'. They have been debating the ethics of just such an operation since terraforming was conceived. Which, by the way, was concieved by a SF writer.

No, their input is of much value. Your ethnicians ideas are as well, of course. But the writers and thinkers I would ask first, not last.

Re:science

[No Such Agency]

"Personally, I think it is ethical to terraform a planet which is not presently inhabited (by life of any kind.) Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition."

Ann Clayborne would not like you, no she wouldn't...

Re:science

[Have Blue]

No, he's the inventor/discoverer of the geosynchronous orbit.

Re:science

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're worried about destroying life that MAY develop, you're committing an ethical violation simply by being alive.

Re:science

[CAIMLAS]

Ask ethicists if we should?

Who are they to decide on something like that? Am I not a human myself, able to make ethical decisions if asked? All people are. Granted, most people don't, because they act selfishly. But what's to stop an ethicist to get blindsided by the glory of being someone that helped instigate the colonization of Mars for humanity, to forever go down in history?

Re:science

[sstory]

"While I will agree with you in some part, a number of the most famous science fiction authors have been serious scientists in their own right;" That's not contrary to my point. If the best scientists you can pick also happen to be SciFi writers so be it. But they should be picked based on their expertise, instead of their celebrity. Think in terms of a different field. I wouldn't want a tort-reform panel to include John Grisham. Yeah, he's got a law degree, but if you can't find better people on the subject then you don't know what you're doing.

Re:science

[cheekyboy]

actually re greenhouses, you could actually build massive ROOFS over some of those massive valleys/gorges that are like 10's of miles long and a few km wide, and very deep, you would have then a locked in super uber earth like environment that could grow into a fullsized normal city. At those locations you could also (but should) build backup cities inside the sides of the mountains/valleys.

Now designing a smart surface that wont break (see through rubber?) and that wont collect dust (some repelent). Or add some outside robot cleaners to clean the surface.

Yes it would be cool to build 100's of these at lots of valleys and deep craters with ceilings on em. But just one would be way cool, and way cheaper / quicker than any terraforming.

SO yeah first start of with a dome as the 'work site' that builds the cover to a valley or crator.

Re:science

[mabinogi]

What the hell is an ethicist?

Do you outsource your morals too these days?

Personaly, I make up my own mind about what's right.

Re:science

[khallow]

I wouldn't ask scifi writers can/should we terraform. I would ask ethicists if we should, and chemists, astrophysicists, etc if we can.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of who is qualified to do what. Some Sci Fi writers have thought a great deal about terraforming and its consequences. Discounting their collective insights and speculation is unwise.

Ethicists won't give you a yes/no answer. Real ethicists won't say "No, you shouldn't terraform Mars because it's 'unethical'". Instead, they can help you meet certain ethical goals. For example, we probably want to preserve as much of any life forms we discover as possible. How should we do it without damaging the wellbeing of the human race and other intelligent lifeforms? Ethicists can help us decide what our goals should be ethically and can help us construct useful rules, procedures, and projects for carrying out those goals. I wouldn't trust an ethicist to decide what's right and wrong. After all, they could be far more unethical than I am. But they would be useful to consult when I'm considering the harm of my actions to others.

Finally, I wouldn't consult chemists, astrophysicists, etc to see if we "can" terraform. After all, we know roughly what is needed to terraform Mars. It needs a certain balance of elements in its atmosphere and first couple meters of dirt (which eventually will become soil). Once that happens Earth life will grow just fine and the process is pretty stable and self-substaining. The question is how much will it cost and how long will it take?

Re:science

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't ask scifi writers can/should we terraform. I would ask ethicists if we should, and chemists, astrophysicists, etc if we can.

Many science fiction writers are scientists.

In my opinion, you *have* to be a scientist to be a good sci-fi writer -- which is why I parefer "hard" science fiction.

Re:science

[TheLink]

And even if there were living creatures, I bet we kill more cells and lifeforms a day just from worldwide chicken consumption alone.

Whether it is responsible and justifiable is the issue. If all Mars has is some dumb algae that doesn't do much, I won't really be too enthusiastic about spending billions to preserve vast tracts of it. Add time and people costs as well.

Coz by spending all that, you have less to spend on other arguably more important things.

Re:science

[Mycroft_VIII]

Better yet, how about covered conyons as a way point durring the many decades/centuries a terraforming operation is likely to take.

Mycroft

Re:science

[Mycroft_VIII]

Not to mention Asimov probably wrote MORE science fact than he wrote fiction. He was extreemly prolific. I think somthing in the hundreds of books.

Mycroft

Re:science

[jsebrech]

Acknowledging that a thing should not be done at all, and then stepping back from that and considering how to minimize the negative imapct when it is inevitably done, can be a difficult feat of mental gynmastics, but in the coming centuries I think it it something peopole of conscience are absolutely going to have to do - in parallel with efforts to stop the more monstrous excesses from being perpetrated at all.

Use of soft drugs is an excellent current real life example to see the effectiveness of strategies. It's interesting how different countries have responded to drugs. It does seem like going after every instance of use is ineffective. Like you said, people will use it. Better to legalize lightweight, relatively harmless, use, and then to punish those who do real damage with it.

Re:science

[danila]

No, he is the inventor of the geosynchronous satellite.
</pedant mode>

Re:science

[danila]

When you want to know about something interdisciplinary, like terraforming Mars, your best chance is to ask a scientist/engineer with experience in terraforming. Barring that, the next best option is a scientist with good knowledge, experience, imagination and the ability to put it all together. The last two qualities are usually missing in most scientists. An old study I once saw (made in 1980s) showed that most specialists are only capable of looking less than 5-7 years into the future, after that their experience breaks down.

Science fiction writers, on the other hand, often are quite comfortable thinking about the future, decades or centures ahead. And if they have the necessary scientific background, they are as good experts as you can ever find.

Re:science

[sql*kitten]

I would ask ethicists if we should

In my experience, "ethicists" are people who're no good at science and so instead, out of a twisted, bitter sense of jealousy of those who are, spend their time trying to tell scientists what they can and can't do, with no better reasoning than "because I say so".

I say, if no-one's getting hurt (or at least, no-one who isn't a volunteer is getting hurt) then it ain't no-one's business but those involved. And I think most sane humans would agree with me.

Re:science

[sql*kitten]

Given the risk to the experimental subjects, I do not think it is ethical to "terraform" (or otherwise genetically engineer) human beings.

Let's say person A is a doctor with some sensible ideas about how the human body can be adapted to survive better on Mars. Maybe he has a technique for making lungs more efficient at low pressure, just for an example.

Let's also say person B is an educated adult, in full possession of his or her mental faculties, who thinks this research is worthwhile, perhaps wants to be a Mars colonist someday, and volunteers for the programme.

Now person C, an "ethicist" says that A and B can't work together, and, having nothing better to than practice rhetoric since he doesn't actually do any science himself, persuades politicians to authorize use of force against A and B. By what right does C do what he does?

Re:science

[dvk]

> I wouldn't ask scifi writers can/should we terraform. I would ask ethicists if we should, and chemists, astrophysicists, etc if we can.

Unless ethics is a real scientific discipline (as in, you can obtain verifyable results based on *scientific methods*, as opposed to a bunch of BS handwaving, asking and ethicist about an answer to anything important is dumb.
While an ethicist would be very good at coming up with QUESTIONS or ISSUES, their discipline is not designed for answering them, if only because they are unaware of the factors affecting the decision and because there are no un-questionable assumptions in ethics for most part.
You can not *prove* whether wiping out a rare frog species is ethical or not (or for a more real life example, whether torturing people to obtain information in ticking bomb scenario).
It depends on te underlying assumptions which are only true or false subjectively.

As far as I'm concerned, the only provable "corect" ethics is the one which establishes a "more successful" ESS (Evolutionary Stable Strategy) for a given set of humans.
And we don't know nearly enough to compute which one that is, due to various side effects.

-DVK

Exile

[Anonymous Coward]

If humans colonize, are the colonists on a one-way trip akin to exile?

The real problem isn't getting onto Mars. The real problem is getting off of Mars. Gravity on the surface of the moon is .16G. Gravity on Mars is 0.4g, or more than twice as much.

Meaning that it takes a lot more fuel to get off of Mars, probably more than could be realistically provided in a landing craft.

The question will eventually become, do we put humans on Mars before we have the technical ability to get them off the surface. If we put them on the surface before we have the ability to get them off, then yes, it will be effectively gravity by exile.

Re:Exile

[Anonymous Coward]

effectively gravity by exile.

Exile by gravity perhaps?

Re:Exile

[tokabola]

Actually, the Martian environment has everything needed to make rocket fuel. Nasa already has a plan that sends a robotic fuel factory to Mars so when people get sent later they'll have all the fuel they need to return to earth. It would take less fuel to return, since mars has a lower escape velocity and a solar "parachute" could be used to lower the orbital velocity (in reference to the sun) and reduce the orbital distance (from the sun) to match the earths orbit.

So we modify the humans rather than the planet....

[reality-bytes]

Its probably not ethical or even remotely possible *yet*. But perhaps we go along the path of genetically engineering humans to be ultra low-burn systems with skin as thick as lead so they can walk around on the Martian surface with nothing more than an oxygen tank to sip from?

Its improbable, but you can grow a human in 20 or so years, terraforming a planet takes generations......

Terraforming humans?

[idontneedanickname]

"The remaining science fiction notion was terraforming humans..."

Terraforming isn't the right word. Terraforming is forming planets to make them more like Earth (Terra). Purposefully altering humans/human physiology does not yet have a word accosiated with it, I think.

Re:Terraforming humans?

[Rosonowski]

Vissicitude, I think.

Re:Terraforming humans?

[jhoger]

There is a simple word for it: adaptation. Tailoring maybe.

There are hard ways and less hard ways to do that.

Natural selection would be the hard way, and I doubt we could be adapted in that way in any reasonable amount of time.

Genetic engineering would be another way

A third way might be some sort of symbiotic relationship with another biological life form or articificial organism that could metabolize CO2 at a sufficiently fast rate. You still have to deal with climate and weather issues I suppose.

Re:Terraforming humans?

[jdavidb]

In Kim Stanley Robinson's spectacular trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, the word "areoforming" was used to describe Mars' effect on humans, or more specifically, the effect of living on Mars in isolation from earth on human society.

Re:Terraforming humans?

[idontneedanickname]

That adaptation/tailoring does not yet have a word associated with it. There are certain terms like 'biomoding' and such, but because the technologies are still being developed, mostly as medical treatments and not for enhancement, there is no popular vocabulary to go with them.

Re:Terraforming humans?

[No Such Agency]

"Purposefully altering humans/human physiology does not yet have a word accosiated with it, I think."

I believe the word is "Eugenics".

Re:Terraforming humans?

[sql*kitten]

I believe the word is "Eugenics".

Eugenics has a taint about it these days, but like most things, it's neither good nor evil in itself. Back in the early 20th century, eugenics meant that maybe college professors should be encouraged to marry other college professors, top athletes should be encouraged to marry other athletes, etc. I can't see anything wrong with this, providing everyone involved in a volunteer of course, and the kid gets to choose what they actually want to be when they grow up. People make decisions of spouse all the time based at least partially on how they want their kids to turn out, why not do it in an organized way?

<pedantry>

[rdsmith4]

That's "Sir Arthur," not "Sir Clarke."

Let's teraform Earth first!

[Anonymous Coward]

...assuming "teraform" means to allow us all to walk around naked.

The sure would change trips to the beach. "Hey Jim, check out that naked chick over there. Man, she would look hot in a bikini!"

nice idea but

[Man in Spandex]

At the point that we are, I doubt to see any of this anytime soon.

We have trouble transforming some places on earth which badly need transformation.

Lets terraform some irradical place on earth (antarctica?) and then see how it goes!

Re:nice idea but

[bool morpheus()]

Good idea, let's melt the polar ice caps.

But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Bad Vegan]

Wait wait! Let's finish the job here first. Once we're done Venusforming Earth, we can Terraform Mars.

I'm sure we can figure out some capitalist-distributed scheme that Wall Street loves while changing the atmosphere of Mars as we've done here (deforestation, carbon-based energy industry, too many cow farts, etc.). Of course, the real question is how long will the Mars atmosphere be breathable by "naked" humans before it's unbreathable again thanks to the top-selling 2050 Ford Evacuate super-SUV......

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[radixvir]

the top-selling 2050 Ford Evacuate super-SUV......

dont forget the 2050 Hummer H6

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Oligonicella]

"capitalist-distributed scheme"

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Oligonicella]

"capitalist-distributed scheme"

What a dumb-ass statement. Like socialist and communist countries don't behave similarly with regards to the environ.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[helpfulcorn]

Of course, as a whole we treat the earth like shit, but more Socialist countries like Germany recycle a hell of a lot more than the US. But, we don't have to worry about that because I'm sure it will be "The United States of Mars" and become a strictly American venture and everyone else will be marked as a terrorist. =X

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Art Tatum]

I hate to point it out to you, but Socialist nations like Poland, the Soviet Union, and China poluted a whole FUCKING HELL of a lot more than the U.S. ever has or ever will. Just a data point for ya.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[tonythejuice]

Excellent point. The venusification of our home planet does highlight the need to move humans off the planet -- But I'd suggest we settle on the moon first. Doing anything to mars will be a huge waste of resources just due to the vast distance involved. And forget about terraforming --- if mars is settled, it's gonna be with enclosed spaces. And if you're going to settle in enclosed spaces -- might as well go for the moon first. Or well... yeah I guess once earth is venusformed, we'll need to live in enclosed space here too. The moon will be good practice.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Bad Vegan]

Actually, my original comment was not to merely indict capitalism (which resulted in the knee-jerk anti-commie comments), but to say that it is primarily a distributed system of capitalist consumption and corporate activity that is the dominant ongoing reason for our sorry environmental state.

There may be other systems at work, but nothing compares to the program of capitalism in its seemingly viral ability to infect, adapt and expand through-out the world.

We can debate good vs. bad, but you can't say that socialism has won the day and is the dominant form of industrial activity. History and current stats show us otherwise.

You're right that the old Soviet commies and China have a HORRIBLE record on the environment. That's not a distributed scheme though, but a state-centralized scheme. I presume that we agree that state-centralized schemes tend to be less sustainable (when it comes to economic production at least). History has shown this in both the collapse of the USSR and the changes in China.

The point here is simple: distributed-capitalist schemes are more nimble and widely entrenched due to their distributed nature and are lot more difficult to remove (i.e. not top-heavy) than top-down state-centralized schemes.

Hybrid socialist/capitalist schemes like that of many Euro countries seem to be doing a much better job of taking the strengths from both systems. But we still have a long way to go before we have a sustainable society on this planet....why do we think we have the capacity to build it on another planet?

Thanks for the feedback and the opportunity to clarify.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[Art Tatum]

I actually wasn't responding to your post. And I was probably a bit harsh on the guy I was responding to. It just gets me a bit upset when people start talking about how much destruction we're inflicting on the environment (which I really don't believe in that much anyway) while ignoring the far greater impact that other economic systems have had.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[smchris]

There's a conspiracy theory for you. It's all a corporate plot to charge us for transport to and lodging on terraformed Mars.

Re:But we're not done with Venusforming Earth....

[dvk]

> We can debate good vs. bad, but you can't say that socialism has won the day and is the dominant form of industrial activity. History and current stats show us otherwise.

OK, generally a well-thought-out response, but you're forgetting one important fact:
USSR may have (luckily) disintegrated after 70 years, but in that timeframe if fucked up the environment in its territory as well as many others a WHOLE lot more than entire Western world did in the last 300 years.
Oh, and I actually LIVED in Russia over a half of my life, so I happen to know what I'm talking about :)

-DVK

A whole new look at reinveting one's self

[bastardadmin]

Hmmm... get enrolled into some gene therapy sessions for a one way trip to live on a world with what would otherwise be a hostile environment?

Interesting concept.

I also like Clarke's point... what do we really know about managing and altering an ecosystem on Mars that may exist (or have existed)?
We cannot even manage our own.

It has already begun.

[The Living Fractal]

Humans have already begun terraforming themselves, just look at all the overweight Americans whom I sure claim that eating six double-cheesburgers a day is really 'optimizing' their body size for Mars' 2/3rds of Earth gravity.

All joking aside, the only good reason for humans (at this point in the game) to live off of Earth is simple: Eliminate the 'all our eggs in one basket' problem once and for all. And in light of recent news (things like the VISA bacteria), I believe it is high time we got our asses in gear and actually did it.

Mars seems to be a sennsible choice for a permanent colony off-world. I seriously doubt much in the way of profound new discoveries would come from just living on Mars in colonies (think total recall, but with the right amount of gravity and no alien reactors or Ahhnold), and thankfully that's not why we would do it.

It will be much, much easier as soon as a space elevator is built and operational, though. So let's forget about terraforming mars or humans, because by the time we are done doing that we'll probably all be dead from something else.

All we need is more research into the mass-production of nanotubes (making really, really long ones and connecting them together effectively) and we're over the major hurdle.

I'm hoping for around a 15-20 year timeline until the first one is built.

Alpha Centauri

[Atmchicago]

Perhaps we should look at the video game Alpha Centauri, a very underrated turn-based strategy game. The game takes place on an Alien planet, and requires heavy terraforming, including removal of the natural environment, to allow your civilization to grow. A quote from the game:

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.

CEO Nwabudike Morgan

"The Ethics of Greed"

The prevalence of anoxic environments rich in organic material, combined with the presence of nitrated compounds has led to an astonishing variety of underground organisms which live in the absence of oxygen and "breathe" nitrate. Likewise, the scarcity of carbon in the environment has forced plants to economize on its use. Thus, all our efforts to return carbon to the biosphere will encourage the native life to proliferate. Conversely, the huge quantities of nitrate in the soil will be heaven to human farmers.

Lady Deirdre Skye

"The Early Years"

Re:Alpha Centauri

[drinkypoo]

Alpha Centauri is apparently inspired, at least in part, by the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson. All of the archetypes in the book are represented by the leaders in AlphaC, which is one of my favorite games ever. I love playing as the flower children and unleashing swarms of locusts of chiron upon my enemies, especially after building the dream twister and other psi-related special projects.

Anything AlphaC has to say about terraforming was said better by the Mars trilogy. You have the Greens led by Hiroko who say that life will find a way and cannot be denied. You have the reds originally led (however unwillingly) by Ann who says that it is nothing less than criminal to terraform a world that you do not understand and will never understand as a result - any life which might be present on the planet will likely be destroyed and/or become indistinguishable from the life you spread upon it. You have the pure scientist (Sax) who wants to terraform Mars for his own convenience (a common theme in scientific development) and just to see if it can be done, how it can be done, et cetera. And so on, and so forth. In fact if the books have a failing it is that the characters are too transparently archetypical, but nonetheless they're books that I read eagerly, seldom stopping, and still reread periodically. The space elevator, terraforming of assorted planets, and even modification of humans for life on some of them, meeting the planets halfway. Truly amazing stuff and much more insightful and realistic than AlphaC, however good the game is - and it is.

Good Idea?

[AnomalyConcept]

Is terraforming even a good idea? Mars ended up the way it is because of its position in the solar system. It was not 'meant' to sustain life from Earth. Hypothetically, life forms can exist on any planet, with each unique to their respective environments. I don't think terraforming is a really good idea. Is it really necessary to change a planet (or ourselves) in order to do whatever the intent (exploration, colonization, etc) is? In that case, should we attempt to 'engineer' a race (or a group of people) suitable for this purpose? I know this is unrelated, but this brings to mind the Xel Naga of Starcraft fame; they engineered the Protoss and the beginnings of the Zerg, and look what happened (a good RTS game, but that's irrelevant =P).

Re:Good Idea?

[mbrother]

The position of Mars in the solar system is not exactly why it ended up the way it did. We now know, for instance, that liquid water oceans once existed on its surface and that it was warmer in the past. What's really done in Mars is its small size and the fact it has cooled off. In the past, volcanic outgasing gave Mars a much thicker atmosphere and an enhanced greenhouse effect. When the interior cooled and the volcanoes stopped, that was it for new atmosphere. The low surface gravity also made it harder for Mars to retain much of that atmosphere. The sun has actually gotten substantially more luminous since it was formed (about 40% if I recall correctly) and will continue to brighten over its lifetime. A few billion years from now and Mars will be the prime real estate.

Re:Good Idea?

[Zippity-Doo]

My question is why we think we need to have humans involved at all? It seems more logical to me to use robotic means to terraform and set up a planet to be created "in Earth's image." By sending people (genetically engieered or otherwise) to Mars, you run any number of real risks that will ultimately subvert the efforts of this program. If you don't believe me, just look at how much scrutiny the budget for NASA gets scrutinized every time a piece of crap space shuttle blows up. How bad would it suck if you were an individual on Mars with supplies running out and you can't get back because decides that you cost too much to society.

Re:Good Idea?

[mbrother]

If we do send robots, we should be damn sure they don't have a "battle mode," because if watching all those Mars movies taught me anything, it is that the battle mode will always turn around to bite you in the ass.

Re:Good Idea?

[canadian_right]

Well, we better stop farming then as it is obvious that the Earth wasn't meant to support so many people. A lets get rid of cars, plans, and trains - people were not meant to travel so fast or far. And refridgerators - the Earth wasn't meant to store fresh food more than a day in the summer.

Get real. We will terraform Mars someday - just because we can.

Re:Good Idea?

[Zibblsnrt]

Hey, the position of cities like Denver or Winnipeg weren't meant to sustain populations in the hundreds of thousands in warmth and comfort through the winter, but they do. If you want to complain about the natural order of things being upset, you might want to take a look about you and think about how much sense some places currently make.

I mean, augh. Barrow, Alaska. Town! There! Countless millenia of evolution, and Mother Nature gazes down upon the hairless African savannah-primates building a town in one of the crappiest locales on the planet for hairless African savannah-primates, and goes, "WTF?"

-PS

Re:Good Idea?

[sql*kitten]

Mars ended up the way it is because of its position in the solar system. It was not 'meant' to sustain life from Earth.

Kid, most of the Earth wasn't meant to sustain human life. But we have stuff - clothes, houses, central heating, plumbing, etc etc - that allows us to survive in otherwise hostile environments such as... anywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, where humanity is generally reckoned to have originated. Unless you could (if you so wished!) walk around naked outside all year without freezing to death, then you're a settler in an alien environment.

Mars is really no different; just a little more difficult than say Alaska, but certainly do-able.

Re:Good Idea?

[AnomalyConcept]

Hmmm, interesting points. This is what the Slashdot community is about, no? Many different points of view, all which are unique and insightful. I do see how it can be considered that regions outside the sub-Sahara desert can be seen as hostile. However, humans have already adapted to these regions, and 'looking back' at it, it wasn't all that hard. Of course, if the adaptation of humans for Mars (or any other 'hostile' environment) goes through, I'm sure those 'looking back' at it wouldn't think it was terribly hard either. However, it would, because of the basic necessities needed to sustain human life. One of the comments here mentioned water, and also talked about oxygen. How difficult would it be to modify the entire cell structure so that oxygen was not a primary requirement for biological function? Also, what about the pressure differences of the atmospheres?

Obligatory George Carlin Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"In case you haven't heard, the latest disaster for the rest of the universe is that the United States is going to go to Mars...

Ok! Ah Yeah!

We're going to go to Mars and the colonize deep space with our:
Microwave Hotdogs, Plastic Vomit, Fake Dog Shit, Cinnemon Dental Floss, Lemon-Scented Toilet Paper,
and Sneakers with Lights in the heels...
And all these other impressive things we've done down here..
Let me ask you this?! What are we going to tell the intergalatic space council minsters when when of our teenage mother dumps her newborn baby into a dumpster? Huh? How are we going to explain that to the space people? .... "

the toughest bit

[kylemonger]

The toughest bit would be getting Mars to have a magnetic field around it again, to keep the solar wind from peeling away the atmosphere (again) and to keep out most of the ionizing radiation. Without that protective field, all terraforming efforts are a waste of time.

Re:the toughest bit

[InfinityWpi]

"We're men. We have rockets. We have Saran-Wrap.... FIX IT!" --Lewis Black

Re:the toughest bit

[geekoid]

I wonder if we could get some material and build something in space that stays between the Sun and mars, and filters out the harmfull 'rays'

Yes, Everyone love Raymond is a Harmfull Ray.

Re:the toughest bit

[Doubting Thomas]

Marshall Savage (The Millenial Project) figured we could get about 100,000 years of breathable atmosphere on Mars, even without an ionosphere. The way I see it, if we still need Mars badly at that point, we're probably an evolutionary dead-end anyway.

Re:the toughest bit

[mp3phish]

Actually, that isn't the biggest problem.

Loss of magnetic field is by far the least or the problem with thinning atmosphere. The main problem is the cooling of the core which reduces volcanic activity. You see, all planets with an atmosphere lose mass (in the measurement of air particles/second) over time. This is because near the top of the atmosphere, statistically speaking, there are always some particles which will collide with another and reach escape velocity in the correct trajectory, thus going off into space (and then possibly captured by a low temperature rock out in the asteroid belt or orc cloud) The magnetic fields help reduce this but that is not the point.

The point is that the only replinishment of these lost particles is volcanic activity. Without it (or very much of it) your planet will thin out too much to sustain our lives. No matter how much of a magnetic field you add to mars (even if you figure out how to do it artificially) you will never create the volcanic activity you will need to get atmospheric pressure anywhere near what we will need.

Eventually, in billions of years, Earth will have the same problem.

Easy enough...

[Arcanix]

We cover the planet with the dirtiest factories we can imagine churning out CO2 and other delightful pollutants to create the greenhouse effect and intersperced with them a dense forest that converts the CO2 into oxygen. Wait 40,000 years. Convert factories into family fun centers and pave over troublesome forests and now we're ready for humans.

Before someone else says it....

[alptraum]

In Soviet Russia, the ground terraforms you!!

I honestly feel that instead of spending billions fixing up Mars, instead that money should be used on Earth to fix problems that exist here, right now. Hunger, environmental problems, political strife, etc. It'll be a very long time before anything that occurs on Mars has any effect on the majority of human civilization, while investment in fixing Earth problems can have a more immediate global effect for us all.

In addition, we shouldn't view Mars as a place to run off to if we screw Earth up badly.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[ChrisMaple]

Hunger is a signal that it's time to eat. Why do you wish to get rid of this important function of human bodies? Malnutrition and starvation are things that are better to get rid of, but they have more syllables so they're hardy to use in demagoguery.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[An Onerous Coward]

It's becoming increasingly clear that we need someplace to run off to when we screw up the Earth too badly. We've got six billion people on the same ship, and nobody has bothered to install lifeboats.

Also, the sooner we start working on Mars, the sooner we'll start learning how environments actually work, and the sooner we'll gather the expertise needed to avert major catastrophes.

The way I see it, terraforming Mars is an absolutely necessary safety measure, and no amount of money spent on problems "back home" will provide that safety. If we can turn Mars into a self-sustaining world of 20-million people or so, I don't see anything short of alien invasion or Sol going nova that could wipe us out.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[cheekyboy]

America is doing it already, by killing all dictators one by one until we have a full western centric earth with no muslims or wackos, because you know, God indended only one god and no other religions, so we gota outlaw everything that is not christian based ;)

Re:Before someone else says it....

[ChairmanMeow]

The problem with this is human nature. It would be great if we were capable of fixing eveything here before we go anywhere. However, as humans, we are incapable of fixing our problems simply because we can never agree on how to fix our problems, or what our problems are in the first place. Terraforming Mars, however, provides an escape route when things go wrong (note that I said when, not if), and also helps give us technology that will make life here easier, and get us closer to actually fixing our problems.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[gonzo_bozo]

Well, establishing permanent colonies elsewhere in the solar system and beyond is obviously not a choice we have, we humans are compulsive explorers and there is nothing to stop us. Although, I think there is no hurry. If resilience of intelligent life is the goal, deep down Earth's crust is a pretty safe and cheap place to colonize if we consider all eventual dangers we can think of. I think that communication satellites were pretty much all of what space could offer us for now. So to meet the aforementioned goal, I suggest we go down instead of going up.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[stwrtpj]

I honestly feel that instead of spending billions fixing up Mars, instead that money should be used on Earth to fix problems that exist here, right now. Hunger, environmental problems, political strife, etc. It'll be a very long time before anything that occurs on Mars has any effect on the majority of human civilization, while investment in fixing Earth problems can have a more immediate global effect for us all.

Overall, I agree with this idea, but I want to make sure we don't get into a zero-sum game here. Certainly I don't want -- or expect -- terraforming to start on Mars tomorrow. Or next year, or possibly next century. I also agree that we have to devote time to our problems here. But this does not have to be done at the expense of totally shelving the idea of terraforming.

This is similar to a debate I get into with my wife on occassion. I show great enthusiasm for the space program that she does not, largely for the same reasons you cite. I try to explain to her that this is not a zero-sum proposition. Our total expenditures on space exploration account for a tiny fraction of what we spend on our current social programs (or defense for that matter).

So I think we should continue to spend some small amount of time and effort -- and money -- studying questions like terraforming. After all, terraforming takes a great deal of time, and it may very well be something we have to do in order for humanity to survive long-term. We can keep our planet totally pristine and pollution free, and we will still have to leave in 100 million to 500 million years' time when the sun's gradual warming makes Earth uninhabitable.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[Zibblsnrt]

Well, establishing permanent colonies elsewhere in the solar system and beyond is obviously not a choice we have,

Sure it is. Why wouldn't it be?

I like the idea of building both down and up myself, but sooner or later a rock the size of Cyprus or something will hit this planet, and failing that the sun'll eat it anyway...

-PS

Re:Before someone else says it....

[jlehtira]

I think you can't fix politic strife by spending billions. Many other problems here on Earth fall in the same cathegory; money alone can't fix them. However, money will "fix" a colony on Mars.

We have more resources than a simple one called money. Focusing the whole humanity to fix one (set of) problem(s) is also impossible to do. After all, people will do what they want to do. Let's do everything.

Re:Before someone else says it....

[Sj0]

I find that as long as you don't turn it into a religion, atheism/agnostism is generally accepted too.

Those who turn not believing in anything into a religion deserve no sympathy, imho anyway. :)

How terraforming mars will work

[Barryke]

How Stuff Works: How Terraforming Mars Will Work

life: spread it around

[jdrogers]

I have thought about this alot. Growing up in an environmentalist family, I tend towards the "leave nothing but footprints" ideals. There have been so many times in history where humans have royally fscked up a new environment by spreading disease or introducing an unchecked species with no natural predators.. But is this different?

Obviously, if there is no life there, its not as if we would be destroying a species or habitat, but how do we prove there is no life there?

We are at a unique point in the grand scheme of things because for the first time in history, we as a species have the capability to spread life beyond the bounds of our world. Life wants to spread. With this new found cpability, is it our duty to help it spread?

Now, terraforming is a bit extreme, but I really struggle with even the basic idea of wether it is ethical to, say, introduce bacteria to other worlds and give life a chance to do what it does in other places.

Re:life: spread it around

[russellh]

The big picture answer is that life will end with the death of the sun. But life doesn't want to die. It will spread from Earth and this solar system one way or another. We're a piece of the puzzle whether we want to be or not, whether now or in a million years.

There is a word

[Hershmire]

It's called breeding.

If oxygen is not a requirement,

[vlad_petric]

perhaps we can send these guys over! Lost world of mutants discovered

The interesting thing about the sulfur-based ecosystem discovered in Romania is that it was formed apparently with mutations that ocured quite fast on an evolutionary scale (thousands of years as opposed to millions).

We will obviously see a lot of mutations if we send life on an alien world. So my question is - are we gonna repeat the Australian eco-fiasco at a planetary scale ?

It has to be said...

[cmackles]

I for one welcome our new Martian overlords.

We dont need to terraform!!

[gareth6889]

Just ask Arnie where that fucking alien button is to turn the air conditioning on!

To churn out CO2

[Kickasso]

you need a C and two Os first. Where do you propose we should get them? Transport from Earth?

Re:To churn out CO2

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocks. Even the Earth is 50% by mass oxygen (mostly in iron oxides). Carbon can be found in carbonates (which Spirit found). With a large power source (nuclear maybe) they can be seperated and combined.

Re:To churn out CO2

[garyok]

C1 and C2 carbonaceous chondrites (water- and carbon-bearing asteroids). Smash those puppies into the surface after stealing them from the asteroid belt. You get a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere on the way in and from the crap kicked back up on impact, and a pile of complex carbon molecules and other assorted chemical goodies in a handy lump on the surface. No more prospecting. You can use the stuff for fuel, chemical engineering, whatever.

• A. It will be a cool show.

• B. I will give shit about martians when they stop being stuck-up and start talking to us.

• C. The martians won't be a problem after this anyway.

So, let just do it! C'mon - it'll be fun!

But... it'd be easier to do on the Moon and the manufactured products would be closer to Earth. Plus the Moon is stone cold dead and it's got more sunlight for solar energy (if you're into that tree-hugging hippy crap) to run your factories (just burning the organic molecules is a bit of a waste). And we'd be able to see the show without telescopes.

So, everybody's in agreement then - we blow up the Moon.

Evolution on Mars

[wombatmobile]

Assuming the ethical question of whether to change Mars or not was resolved in the affirmative, how might life be introduced to the red planet sustainably?

Bulldozers, cows and fish are all problematic for such a distant destination.

But what about microbes... and a lot of time? What might be the result of microbes?

Fish, cows and bulldozers perhaps?

Is that what happened on Earth?

Re:Evolution on Mars

[An Onerous Coward]

Eventually, perhaps, if the environment was sufficiently hospitable for a very large volume of unicellular bacteria.

But "eventually" could be a very long time. You have to remember that it was nearly three billion years between the emergence of the first proper cell and multicellular organisms that could leave traces in the fossil record. Nobody can say for sure what was going on at the time, but it seems like the jump from single cells to multiple cells is a difficult one.

Re:Evolution on Mars

[sadler121]

or we could load up a ship full of embryos of Fish/Cows/etc. and then when we get to Mars grow the embryos in tanks, into full species.
We may not have the tech now, but it could be generated in 10-20 years. I mean we already grow human embryos in petri dishes, this would be doing the same, except in large tanks (which of course would be built on Mars)

Gravity on Earth is 1G and people have left Earth

[Rares Marian]

I would say getting them off Mars would be easier than getting them off Earth.

On the other hand Australia was exile for British convicts. Look at what a wonderful place it is now :)

Terraform Earth First

[cmacb]

Seems to me if we have the technology to terraform Mars then we should be able to call a halt to all ecological activism here on Earth. Too mch green house gases? Just set the terraformer on "high" for a few months and clean it all up right?

I bet if someone does the math they'll figure out that anything mankind could set up on Mars to generate an atmosphere would have to run for... oh, a hundred thousand years or so (one of the articles says 40 thousand) to have any noticable effect. Which gets us back to why man with all his evil ways hasn't been able to ruin Earth yet. (not that we should be TRYING to ruin Earth or anything).

Re:Terraform Earth First

[mbrother]

This suggests a funny short story to me (I don't think I could make it sustain an entire novel) in which different countries fight over terraforming Earth. Allies and enemies would be determined primarily by latitude. Canada and Russia would be pumping greenhouse gases like crazy into the atmosphere, while countries farther south would be growing giant forests to lock up the carbon.

Re:Terraform Earth First

[shadowbearer]

That's an interesting story idea. One could just as easily make a serious short story out of it - by showing just how badly such actions would screw things up :)

Would have been a nice one for Asimov's F&SF magazine back when; and it reminds me of another short story, whose name completely escapes me, where two alien races came to "liberate" Earth from each other, and ended up nearly completely destroying it. Dangit, I can't even remember the introductory phrase from the story, or I could google it. Grr!

SB
PS - Taking a day off from The Schedule? ;-) Good for you!

Re:Terraform Earth First

[mbrother]

No, not really taking a day off, just letting myself have a very short vacation! I'm making good progress on the new novel, doing nearly 1500 words a day, but really need to do 2000 words a day to finish on the schedule I want. I have a NASA proposal due next week, too, so I can't really take time off the day job, either, not if I want a shot at the $600k I'm requesting.

Blueheart

[j14ast]

Blue heart (cant rember the author) is a excelent book that is about doing precicly what he is proposing: adapting humans for the purpose of colinizing a alien world. It is a interesting read about the effects that such adaptions might have on society (the apdapted humans esensialy were a diffrent species and had thier own culture and customs) and the rekindaling of racism (apparently people had blended to the point of it beaing moot untill adaptions) that occurs in the face of such a huge devide. I highly recomend it

Re:Blueheart

[j14ast]

It was by Alison Sinclair
http://www.sff.net/people/asinclair/wrib lue.html

make a bigger pie

[daraf]

If (when) we have the ability to terraform another planet, we should definitely do so.

From an environmental habitat point of view, I would argue that we are an overly successful species in terms of reproduction (mostly due to awesome public health and healthcare systems). Combine that with the fact that we are naturally pre-disposed against culling significant portions of our world population, and it's apparent that there aren't going to be any less of us in the foreseeable future.

Creating / expanding our existing habitat by a significant amount (e.g., 1 red planet's worth) would allow us to decrease our average environmental impact per area.

This might also have the side effect of easing existing social inequities in our world; we spend a lot of collective effort both trying to get 'more of the pie' and trying to 'divide up the pie equally'. I say it'd be better to just make a bigger pie.

On the issue of possibly impacting existing life, I'd argue that exploration and colonization is more important than microbes and red dust.

Re:make a bigger pie

[Skavookie]

The growth rate of the human population is currently declining and is expected to continue declining. In fact, there is increasing optimism that the worl population will stabilize at about 9 billion fifty years from now.

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educ ators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Populatio n_Growth.htm
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/P/Populations.html#Predicting_Future_Populati on_Size
http://www.enn.com/features/1999/05/052799/worldwa tch_3421.asp

No problems in finding imigrants.

[Anonymous Coward]

The imigrants will be no problem.. People have imigrated to new places several times before in history. Give me a habitable mars, and i am out of here :)

It is in our nature.

Finally!

[Mr2cents]

At last a profitable plan!

You could probably call it 'Terranforming'

[Space cowboy]

... or possible martianforming. All you need to do is eat some of that Monsanto crap, and you'll be halfway there :-)

[note to the humour-impaired - the above is not entirely serious...]

Simon

Maybe we should solve home planet problems first ?

[master_p]

Not that I don't like the idea of the space age where people from Earth will routinely travel from/to other planets, but it seems that pressing issues are piling up on Earth: poverty, foundamentalism, ignorance, ecological destruction and pollution, failing economies, oil wars, huge military spendings, terrorism, and many other issues.

If all these issues are not dealt as soon as possible, then, I believe, we must prepare ourselves (or our children) about huge wars, especially over natural resources. Many knowledgable people say that the future wars will be about water.

Please excuse my ecological save-the-world rumblings that may shatter your dreaming about a space future. I do believe that humanity's future is in the stars, but unfortunately there is another step before it that must be successfully completed...and every day that passes it seems more and more impossible...

Re:So we modify the humans rather than the planet.

[wmspringer]

Which of course leads to the question...if you did that, would they still be human?

I imagine there must be a number of stories about Earth going to war with "aliens" who used to be human..

Landis

[criordan]

There is a Geoffrey A. Landis short story that won the Hugo a few years ago about exiling criminals to Mars. Really good read, as is his novel Mars Crossing. Also the mentioned RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. The last two get kind of hokey, but they taught me the basic idea of how terraforming Mars would take place. I.e. giant mirrors, melting ice comets in the atmosphere, causing seismic activity to release gases, etc. In Robinson's books most of the terraforming takes place within a few hundred years, but in reality it would probably be more like a few hundred thousand years before Mars' atmosphere becomes Earth-like. If it every does become technologically feasible I truly think that terraforming Mars should become a top priority. I doubt anyone would ever be willing to cough of the money for it, but for the long term benefit of the human race it really is important.

Re:Landis

[criordan]

There is a Geoffrey A. Landis short story that won the Hugo a few years ago about exiling criminals to Mars. Really good read, as is his novel Mars Crossing.

Also the mentioned RGB Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is worth a read. The last two get kind of hokey, but they taught me the basic idea of how terraforming Mars would take place. I.e. giant mirrors, melting ice comets in the atmosphere, causing seismic activity to release gases, etc.

In Robinson's books most of the terraforming takes place within a few hundred years, but in reality it would probably be more like a few hundred thousand years before Mars' atmosphere becomes Earth-like. If it every does become technologically feasible I truly think that terraforming Mars should become a top priority. I doubt anyone would ever be willing to cough of the money for it, but for the long term benefit of the human race it really is important.

Edit: This is how it should be formatted. Sorry!

Re:Landis

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that short story is called "Falling Onto Mars." Not much about terraforming in it, but yes it is about using Mars as a one-way destination that has replaced Earth's overcrowded obselete prison system. I think Analog might have an archive of it, try checking out google.

Australians

[SanityInAnarchy]

Why don't we repeat the Australia prison-island with a prison-planet?

Since it'd be virtual exile -- exile Microsoft, the NSA, the RIAA, the MPAA, Congress, Pakistan, Israel...

Then check back in a few hundred years and see what we've got!

Disclaimer: Not everyone in these groups deserves to be exiled. But few Australians today would consider Australia exile.

Re:Australians

[harkabeeparolyn]

Screw that. Why should convicts get to go to space?

There are plenty of desert islands and rocky atolls in the Pacific we can let the convicts "terraform". We begin by airdropping the first several hundred thousand of them and letting them starve to death out there to produce topsoil for the plants that will follow. Air drop bugs, earthworms and a few other things and then just keep those nutrient rich prisoners comin'. Pretty soon we'll have a tropical paradise and we can start over on a new island.

Re:Australians

[Anonymous Coward]

We begin by airdropping the first several hundred thousand of them and letting them starve to death out there to produce topsoil for the plants that will follow.

Starvation doesn't really matter if you airdrop them sans parachute.

Re:Australians

[smithmc]

Since it'd be virtual exile -- exile Microsoft, the NSA, the RIAA, the MPAA, Congress, Pakistan, Israel...

I think you just described the Golfrincham "B" ark.

Marsiforming humans

[Alrescha]

"The remaining science fiction notion was terraforming humans, instead of planets, and making us survive on what is now a very alien world."

Read:

"Man Plus" (c) 1976 by Frederick Pohl

which deals specifically with the idea of modifying a man so as to enable him to live unaided on the surface of Mars.

A.

Re:Gravity on Earth is 1G and people have left Ear

[wmspringer]

Yes, but we don't have to ship fuel vast distances across space to get it to Earth..

Once upon a time...

[CBob]

Anyone remember James Blish?

It's been a VERY long time since I read his one collection of short stories about the transformed "humans" and such.

Well I for one...

[Shadow Wrought]

welcome our terraformed Matian overlords.

On a serious note I could see some serious conflicts arising out of a Martian race of humans. We have a hard enough time getting along when there is a difference in gender, race, religion, and/ or politics. A new species could only lead to more conflict methinks.

Terraform mars in 10 mins!

[Polybius]

Start the reactor!

Why not a practical combination of the two?

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

Why pose the question as black and white? Just as we evolved on Earth to our environment and continue to do so, why wouldn't we do the same for Mars? We could begin terraforming and our bodies will grow into the changing environment.

It isn't a given that our bodies would change so much that we wouldn't be able to come back to Earth either. By the time we have created a way of life efficient enough to survive on Mars to Terraform it, we should be able control our own evolution with more precision. We could theoretically start modifying ourselves while we send terraforming bots, those that were sent to Mars would be more efficiently suited to the mission and to life on a partially terraformed Mars. I'm sure, this could be accomplished in 100 years. In the meantime, we could send human explorers to research the engineering of this plan and to determine the existance of life. If we find life, it will most likely be simple, and we can engineer it life we do everything from algae to cows on Earth to terraform it for us.

We are under no obligation to preserve simple life in a pristine state, only how to learn to cohabitate with native life, unless it threatens our species, in which case, we have a right to exterminate it.

I don't see how any of this is more complicated than an engineering effort and the financial backing. There are clearly enough people worldwide interested in doing this, that it could be accomplished. Perhaps the Open Source community should develop a collaberative application that would allow the organization of an "Open Source" engineering effort to solve the technical issues, thus reducing the startup cost of the effort.

With the R&D infrastructure provided, private enterprise might be able to profit enough to make improvements worthwhile. Although, I think we have to ensure that a future extraplanetary society has a similiar ideology of civil rights and freedom that we have, lest we create our future interplanetary enemies. The combination of corporate influence with an unforgiving pioneer world where individuals depend on society to provide, has the danger of giving birth to fascism.

BTW, this was a great Saturday afternoon article. ;-)

Re:Why not a practical combination of the two?

[RyoShin]

There are two problems with that:

First, you have to believe in evolution. Failing that, adaptation might actually be more accurate in this case.

Secondly, adaptation/evolution takes some time to do. It isn't instantaneous. If people are going to live on Mars, they need to be able to go right down and start living, not live in some half-way house for a year, being fed increasing amounts of the Martian air/environment until they fully adapt (if they even can.)

Even if people went there and adapted, you'd still have people who come and have to wear suits to survive.

Plus, I have some blubber, but I'd find it hard to adapt to temperatures that cold.

Re:Why not a practical combination of the two?

[RyoShin]

I need to RTFP. I apparently missed a paragraph, negating somewhat my previous post. :/ I don't know if we'd be able to modify the human body to fit Martian life without actually being on Mars itself. And, if we wait for the terraforming, what's the point in modification/adaptation? Plus, you'd then also have to adapt/modify loads of animals and trees, because shipping meat etc. from earth to Mars would cost a pretty penny.

Re:Why not a practical combination of the two?

[Anonymous Coward]

with no magnetic field, the sun's radiation would lead to massive amounts of genetic mutation. one thing's for sure...the surviving 'martians' definetly wouldn't get melonoma.

It is certainly ethical. Humanity comes first.

[Adolph_Hitler]

We should do whatever it takes to establish and secure the survival of our own species first. So yes its ethical. Should we do it now? That's debateable.

I think it might be a good idea to start now before we destroy ourselves in nuclear war or face over population and capitalism collapses. However we should limit the amount of money we spend on this project and perhaps our great grand children will actually see this project completed.

Right now our main concern should be preventing our own self destruction here on earth.

this is completely stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Who ever gets there first and lives there will decide. To rule mars you have to live there....wasn't all this decided in the american revolutionary war...or in haiti...or mexico...or africa...or india...why would anyone think mars would be any different is beyond me.

stendec@gmail.com

Don't hold your breath

[Ars-Fartsica]

Its good they talked to scifi writers about this because that is all it is - scifi. We can't even terraform the Western US in a sustainable fashion (we are technically in a worse drought than the dust bowl right now), so why would we think we could do it on Mars?

Re:Don't hold your breath

[geekoid]

"we are technically in a worse drought than the dust bowl right now"

and yet we can all still get a glass of water if need be. That seens sustainable to me.

Re:Don't hold your breath

[Ars-Fartsica]

and yet we can all still get a glass of water if need be. That seens sustainable to me.

Ignorance is bliss. Count the forest fires each summer - they are rising as sprawl consumes the Southwest in the midst of a long term drought. Measure the levels of The Colorado River. Oh, you also seem to forget water rationing in California not even a decade back...

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why we need to terraform Mars! To get away from these problems.

Re:they got my respect

[Bastian]

They are really good at playing scientist. I mean, almost everything they said came from existing scientific theory, and they generally kept their concepts straight. They even listed references!

Granted, none of those references were related to actual citations, and they referneced entire newspapers rather than specific articles. And they mostly just supported the parts of concepts they liked without explaining why they didn't like the rest. But still, A for effort!

medium-pressure is useful

[r00t]

Anything you can do to reduce suit pressure will
make your knees and elbows easier to bend. You can
also reduce the weight of the suit.

So, how about 85% oxygen and 15% water vapor at
20% of normal pressure? That's the same amount of
each as 17% and 3% at normal pressure.

At the very least, pressures like those at the
top of Mount Everest should be tolerable.

If the martians have a problem...

[RyoShin]

They can take it up with whatever we use to start terraforming it.

Or, we can give them a giant diamond to appease them. And then ranch their bug-cattle things.

I'm all for terraforming Mars. I think we'd need to have space domes on the moon, first.

Also, it's only unethical if we're actually killing/destroying things on Mars. Sure, the ground will change a lot, but, except for bacteria, there's been no life on Mars. If there is, I'm sure Terraforming will bring it out, and then we pause and take it from there.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly true about Sci-fi writers!

"At that point, the big problem with Mars is the lack of a strong magnetic field, which makes it difficult to retain water vapor in the martian atmopshere. This is a problem now but it gets worse as the level of solar radiation striking Mars goes up."

More info for those who are wondering: Mars had water from about 3.9 to 3.0 billion years ago (which was recently confirmed by MER-A, MER-B, and Mars Express). At about 3.0 billion years ago Mars' magnetic field collapsed (generally attributed to the faster cooling rate of a smaller planet like Mars compared to the Earth--while Mars is theoretically differentiated, the key temperatures and pressures for the melting point of iron in the core which is required for a magnetic dynamo have slid towards solid). The collapse allowed the solar wind to strip the atmosphere of gases which is why it now only is about 1% of the pressure of our atmosphere.

Re:Pretty stupid, eh ?

[mbrother]

Actually, it does matter what "inert" gases are used since even many noble gases can have narcotic or anesthetic effects when taken into the blood. Perhaps this is more of a problem at higher pressures, but I doubt it can be completely ignored at lower pressures. Simplest and best would be to try to recreate an Earth atmosphere, since nitrogren is a very common element that can be obtained from comets and doesn't have ill effects at less than a full atmosphere.

I'm a hard sf writer and the hardest part of the new book I'm working was designing a breathable atmosphere for a dark matter planet. I had to cheat and invoke alien technology in the end, but it works.

Sir Clarke?

[verloren]

According to Debrett's the correct form would be "Sir Arthur", or if you're being very formal, "Sir Arthur C Clarke".

Your best effort

[Anonymous Coward]

Is already better than half the people I work with.

here is your new overloard:

[geekoid]

Martian Overlord

Pressure = No: Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a reason why Mars has no atmosphere, it is because its lack of mass (1/3 of of Earth) prevents it from having a gravitational field that will sustain an atmosphere like Earth's.

Any atmosphere that is put on it will slowly bleed away into space until it again returns to the equilbrium point it is at now.

Re:Good Idea? Bad Idea.

[Bastian]

I can see the scenario right now: After hundreds of years of tweaking, we finally succeed in engineering a subspecies of humanity that is capable of surviving on the surface of Mars without asphyxiating horribly. With great fanfare, we send them over, only to have them all die of dehydration as soon as the initial water stores run out. A few survive beyond that time by drinking each others' urine, but even then things fall apart after the initial food stores run out and they start to eat each other.

When asked what the hell they were thinking, Earth officials shrugged their shoulders and responded, "We got so excited about creating our very own little green men that we forgot to take into account the fact that Mars is a completely barren planet." They went on to muse that before they try colonizing Mars again they should try and alter the planet's surface to be capable of supporting complex animal life forms.

Re:Gravity on Earth is 1G and people have left Ear

[Guppy06]

"Yes, but we don't have to ship fuel"

Um... if we don't have to ship them water, they can make their own rocket fuel they same way we do: cracking hydrogen and oxygen out of water.

It's called Eugenics

[Anonymous Coward]

See also "Nazism" and "1920s American eugenics movement", from where Hitler took at least some of his ideas of achieving the 'master race.'

Oh, America. What the hell are you about anyway?

bizarre

[Cyno]

So we want to terraform Mars now? How is that going to be profitable? How is that not going to be a complete waste of our talents, time and resources? Are we going to find God on Mars or something?

There seems to be a huge gap between the perceptions of reality among the conservative elderly and us science fiction fans. Aren't we concerned about the various social problems we should be dealing with here on this planet? Or do we somehow believe that terraforming Mars will solve all our problems overnight or provide that amazing replicator technology we keep dreaming about so communism will finally be a possibility instead of a dirty word.

You people crack me up. :P

Re:bizarre

[mbrother]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series addresses both the technological and social problems in plausible and interesting ways. But I guess what you're really asking about is the South Park underpants gnomes problem: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Profit! Only now, the gnomes have stepped it up to terraforming!

Re:Pretty stupid, eh ?

[drinkypoo]

Invoking alien technology is more acceptable to me than having humans invent mysterious new technology. That was something I liked in Babylon 5, actually, when Sheridan walks onto the white star and is agape at the teensy little ship having artificial gravity and asking how it works. Aliens have it, but humans don't, and that made it more believable to me.

Anyway, narcotic effects are a problem? Sounds like it would induce both head tripping and immigration to me ;)

Re:Breeding

[idontneedanickname]

I don't think this would apply since we're talking about altering already existing humans to be able to live in a different environment. Also the traits that would let a human survive in that environment are nocexistent in the human genepool as far as I know, so you'd have a hard time finding someone to use for breeding those traits.

Re:So we modify the humans rather than the planet.

[mbrother]

So, if the way to modify humans requires genetic changes as you suggest, is it any more ethical to modify the people? It's likely we'd have to change them before they're born and they'd have no choice in the matter. We'd be creating an entire new race, something that would perhaps be an even bigger and more important issue than that of terraforming an entire planet.

Earth First?

[carcosa30]

Not Earth First as in AKs and birkenstocks

Earth first as in the way things are going we may need to terraform Earth before we ever get to Mars.

Right now, with rapidly accelerating desertification, we're marsiforming Earth. When the CEO of Shell Oil is "terribly worried" about the environment, that's when you know we are FUCKED.

Re:Earth First?

[dvk]

> When the CEO of Shell Oil is "terribly worried" about the environment, that's when you know we are FUCKED.

Why would CEO of Shell Oil not be as much - or more - concerned about environment than you, the High Priest of Self-Riteous Enviromentalists?

Because he benefits from Oil-based economy? And you don't?
So, are you trying to tell me that you:
- Don't drive cars
- Don't fly on planes
- Don't use ANY plastics (what do you think is plastics industry based on?)
- Don't use computers or ANY electronics which aren't ultimately powered by oil?
- Don't enjoy all the medical benefits that are only possible because our oil-based economy made modern medical advancements possible
- Don't live in peace protected from a lot of people who want to kill you, take your stuff and rape your family's women (you HAVE studied human history, haven't you?). Well, it's oil-devouring planes and tanks and oil-based economy taht lets the armies to function which prevents that
- And nobody in your family owns ANY stock (in retirement funds/401Ks/etc...) in any company which benefits from oil.

If you couldn't honestly say "yes, every single one of these items is true about me", then the ONLY difference between the CEO and you is the degree of benefitting from oil. Except unlike him, you can't do anything - or are doing anything - to make oil-based economy any environmentally better, and he does.

And since any CEO is mostly interested in future profits/growth (which is what determines stock price), he will not want the ecology to collapse - that would lead to dramatic fall in the share price. So even assuming that he isn't enviromentally concerned just by virtue of being a human being like you, he stil would be by virtue of being a CEO.

Re:Gravity on Earth is 1G and people have left Ear

[wmspringer]

Good point.

How heavy/bulky is the equipment needed?

the first thing we should do

[geekoid]

is think small. Send microbs.
Plan very long term. If some amazing break through happens, then great, change plans.
But if we can get to thepoint where SOMETHING is growing, we should put a huge freaking piece of granet*, and carve information who started it and why. Do it so people unamiliar with our culture can figure it out.
This way, if our current 'world order' is thrown back into the stone age, when we rise again and take a shot at interplanetart space travel, they will know what our plan was.

I would like to put something on the moon as well that is clearly identifiable from a backyard telescope on the moon as well.

*well, obviously it won't be granet, but my point is some kind of marker that will lass for many thousands of years. Perhaps even something in space.

Re:the first thing we should do

[kyle_b_gorman]

while it will probably be obvious to intelligent life that our big ol' marker is 'code' if you will (and by that i mean written language, which is just a code we all know), i doubt our silicon soon-to-be-masters will be able to read it. unless you have SOME language in common, there's pretty much no way to bootstrap a new language other than using human children's innate, still utterly amazing ability to just figure everything out, language-wise.

though i'm no expert in the genre, there are plenty of sci-fi books about intergalatic war between terrans and a race that we can't even communicate with. some (think OSC's Ender's Game) have aliens who don't even communicate using any sense at all, but rather through something we've never evolved, telepathy.

the cognitive science community has one thing that they want those searching for intelligent life to know...bet on us not being able to communicate if you find some.

you seem to overlook

[geekoid]

the fact that technology to terraform a planet would also be useable on this planet as well.

Zubrin has it all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste time trying to smash hundreds of puny asteroids into Mars in order to terraform it? Clearly it would be much easier to simply smash the Earth into the red planet. The Earth is bigger than all of those asteroids combined, so as you can imagine, the whole process would be quite speedy. It also solves the problem of transporting humans to Mars, and would result in much better ping times when playing interplanetary CS.

bottom line

[geekoid]

survival of the species.
Any species that doesn't expand into new enviroment, or create one to fit them(as is the case here), they are doomed to disapear forever.

does that mean if mars was habitied with sentiant life(see John Carter of Mars), I would want to wipe them out? no. Unless they started to expand and wipe us out.

Equipment

[Chris Acheson]

You can do it yourself with a glass jar, two wires, a battery, and something to collect the gasses with.

Of course, when I tried it, my electrodes kept corroding off. Not sure what to do about that.

Re:Equipment

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do it yourself with a glass jar, two wires, a battery, and something to collect the gasses with.

Of course, when I tried it, my electrodes kept corroding off. Not sure what to do about that.

try taking apart a cheap carbon zinc battery (the ones labeled "heavy duty"), then take the carbon rod out of it, and clean it up using soap and water, and then brushing it with steel wool. be careful of the mangnese dioxide in the battery (the black stuff), it isn't very water soluable, so it's very difficult to clean up.

next, make the rod the positive end, and a galvanized bolt the negative end, and they will last a lot longer. the less current you put through, the colder the water stays and the longer the rod lasts. 3V@.5A is usually good.

if you can figure out a good way of collecting it (which i won't describe here), you can fill up bottles with it (and glass ones if you're crazy) ;). they are very loud. just be careful of the 2 litre ones.

Of Course It's Ethical!

[reallocate]

We've been terraforming this planet for thousands of years, ever since we started farming. Asking if terraforming Mars is ethical is like asking of it is ethical to plant a wheat field.

The question of ethicality is always posed a if it is an either-or proposition: Either something is ethical or it is not. That's how this question will certainly be framed by the anti-human wing of the environmental movement.

Now, ignoring the fact that different people have different ethical frameworks, humans have every right to move and migrate and exploit any territory they can lay their hands on. We have an obligation to act responsibly and wisely, but that does not include being ashamed of being human and rejecting the legitimate role we play as a sentient species in the Universe.

Earth is populated today because people migrated from one place to the next. Mars is the next place.

Re:Gravity on Earth is 1G and people have left Ear

[KD5UZZ]

Less than the weight of the fuel it would create. As such, it doesn't matter. Even a few hundred lb of gear is worth the investment... IF there is enough water.

Its all about 'playing god'

[reality-bytes]

As far as I can see the ethical argument comes down to 'playing god'.

Now, if you believe in an entity which you worship and fear, you can't do these 'body mods' because you would upset your God. (in most cases of 'Entity known as God'; please advise)

With a leap of thinking for the those who don't have a god; can *we* be 'God'?

Re:Its all about 'playing god'

[mbrother]

My novel Star Dragon is full of biotech and "bodmods" -- as an issue of individual choice for the most part. I have some sample chapters up on my website and some of the things I do with it are clear in the very first scene.

Re:Its all about 'playing god'

[canadian_right]

Why isn't this thread which is actually discussing the issue at hand not being modded up?

Genetic engineering someone to live on Mars would entail radical changes that would create a being almost unrecongnizable as human. I don't think that is somehting you can impose on a person before they are old enough to give informed consent.

Frederick Pohl's story "Manplus" covered this exact situation.

Re:Its all about 'playing god'

[mbrother]

You're right -- Manplus is a great novel looking at just this issue. Is Pohl's novel still in print? I haven't read it since college in the mid-1980s.

Harm is wider than just life

[markbo]

Harm is, even in the most general sense, something you do to living things, so bringing life to a dead planet is harmless by definition.

I think this is too narrow a definition of harm. We "harm" cultural items all the time: art, ancient buildings, etc. And we "harm" systems of things like ecosystems, outside of the impacts on individual living things. Try plowing over a portion of your local (unihabited) desert and see if people agree that no "harm" is occuring... Just because there's no life on a planet, doesn't mean we can't harm it.

Mars has intrinsic value by just being Mars, not be being some warped Mars where we can now install new Walmarts.

Re:Harm is wider than just life

[sp0rk173]

Try plowing over a portion of your local (unihabited) desert and see if people agree that no "harm" is occuring

The desert was a bad example. It's extremely fragile and you WOULD be disturbing many many living things you can't see, which would then echo to larger living things that you can see.
for more info

I think it would be interesting to see if any kind of weak ecosystem exists on mars below the surface...like say...a colony of people living 6 inches beneath the surface, all named Mortonson.

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[mbrother]

Frankly, I think we're going to have all the problems you speak of a hell of a lot longer than it would take us to colonize/terraform Mars. I also find it unlikely we're going to do a tremendously better job solving those problems by shutting down the space program (which has bettered our lives in many profound ways, e.g., communications satellites, weather satellites, etc.).

Nuke Mars

[militiaMan]

All the ICBMs in the world might warm up Mars a little and sterilize it for future use.

Just fire and wait a thousand years.

Seriously.. If we were to inhabit Mars before Armageddon which we won't we would simply alter peoples genetics for the climate. That would open whole bunch social differences for people that don't come back. This is something a One World Leader proponent does not want. Hard to have a single leader for very different groups.

Man Plus

[monopole]

This was the plot of the book Man Plus, which had a man retrofitted into a cyborg capable of living on Mars without a spacesuit. In the end it turns out to be a plan of the networked computers of earth to extend themselves into space.

At whatever cost

[maggern]

Sir Clarke responded, "Perhaps we should ask the Martians first." Can it be done quickly-- or at all? Is terraforming ethical?

I feel somewhat guilty for stating this but: "We should survive at any cost".

Surviving is not unethical, it is the very nature of any living thing.

I'm sure Sir Clarke is a smart and experienced person, but his answer just seem stupid to me. We should colonize. We should survive. We should dominate the universe if it insures the survival of humans. In all: "No mercy" when it comes to our survival.

You know, I still prefer venus

[argoff]

IMHO, it's still alot easier to have a blimp in the upperatmosphere of venus than it is to have a habitat on mars. In the upper atmosphere the air pressure is about the same (as earths), the gravity is about the same, the temperature is about the same, and venus even has a thick enough atmosphere to protect from solar radiation and protecting against the sulfuric acid wouldn't be that hard (compairatively) either.

Re:You know, I still prefer venus

[sadler121]

Perhaps we should look into cleaning up Venus, and terraforming it before we start looking at terraforming Mars, (or hell we could do both at the same time).

Venus is pretty much what Earth is going to look like if we continue with our super-dupper SUV's, 15 MPG gas guzzlers, coal fired power plants, etc. If we can start to terriform Venus, or at least get a probe down there that lasts for more then 5 minutes. We could learn a lot about how to prevent the same from occuring to Earth.

All in all, Venus has sometimes been deemed Earths "sister" planet, in that it is close to the same size as Earth, and has a lot the same qualities that Earth has less its ultra toxic atmosphere.

Lets go to Mars, and colonize it, were running at 6 billion+ people on Earth right now, and with out some kind of sever population control we are going to run out of room soon. Though as we goto Mars and colonize it, we should also keep our eyes on Venus, and possably use the tech, knowledge of colonizing Mars, to colonize Venus.

Re:You know, I still prefer venus

[myowntrueself]

I am no chemist, but maybe there is a chemical reaction involving CO2, sulphuric acid and iron oxide which could benefit both Venus and Mars?

Re:Paradise, A World Without Negroes

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking racist pig. They're called people of color, as in: "Imagine a world without people of color!" or "All people of color must hang!" Stop and think about your choice of words before you slander people of color again.

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[canadian_right]

The problems on Earth are 100% political, and no matter how long we wait the problems of poverty, fanatics, etc... will be with us. We have God like powers with our technology compared to just 300 years ago, but this has not brought rational cooperation between all people. If we wait until all the problems on Earth are solved we will still be waiting when a comet wipes us out.

Terraforming and colonizing Mars should be done as soon as possible. It will mean that the human race will survive an Earth wide disaster. Colonizing Mars will never directly help population problems on the Earth (we can't ship people faster than we breed), but it is still a noble goal.

Best efforts.

[Tatarize]

This is the internet, most native speakers are so bad that there is a rather large grey area. You're English is perfect. Although, I can tell you nativly speak Spanish. The reason... You said "Colon" and not "Columbus".

Re:Best efforts.

[Tatarize]

"You're" ... FRICK! I was trying to not mess up there. But, it reinforces my point.

Re:Best efforts.

[karstux]

Although, I can tell you nativly speak Spanish. The reason... You said "Colon" and not "Columbus".

Ah, thanks for mentioning this... and here I was wondering wether he referred to a grammatical instrument or a rather displeasing part of the human anatomy!

The Ethics of Human Alteration

[Mulletproof]

"Is terraforming ethical? If humans colonize, are the colonists on a one-way trip akin to exile?" Read on for a bit more.

Is it ethical?????? I'm sorry, but that question boarders way to close to environmentalist extreemism country there. The rational that we have to keep everything in it natural, unaltered state is ludicris quite frankly. I mean really; I support archeology and research for a finite period of time, but if it's as dead as it appears to be thus far (or even nothing more than single cell life), it's our planet to with as we please. We are masters of our own environment and destiny and the "ethics" of a "hands off mars!" policy is assnine, quite frankly, especially in regards to a dead world. ESPECIALLY when we don't know where the next habitable planet is, let alone how to get there in the next few lifetimes.

It's a big red rock. Do some research and get on with your life; terraforming, stage one.

As far as settlers go, you make it sound like there would be a total lack of will, eager volunteers and that we'd be forcing people to settle a lifeless baron rock. While it may be lifeless and baron, I suspect the line for that opportunity would be several miles long. It's only unethical if you make the decision for them or don't make them fully aware of the risks involved. It's tough to call an ethics flag when the canidates are volunteers.

You would think that question would be the other way around-- Isn't it unethical to mutate the human race on a gentic level like this story is suggesting? Again, I could give a crap with volunteers, but it's a lot more weighty and ominous subject than terraforming a lifeless world or sending volunteers to settle it. The focus is entirely wrong there. Change the dead planet or change the human species... Honestly, lets get some perspective here.

What a great idea!

[operagost]

Inviting science fictions writers to determine the fate of Mars exploration? Brilliant! Now, let's get Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts to develop an antiterrorism strategy!

Re:What a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a really hard time imagining it'd be any worse than Bush/Cheney's anti-terrorism strategy.

Really.

Re:What a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is Clancy would be even more hard-nosed about it.

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[legLess]

Quoth the poster...

... it seems that pressing issues are piling up on Earth: poverty, foundamentalism, ignorance, ecological destruction and pollution, failing economies, oil wars, huge military spendings, terrorism, and many other issues.

Most of these issues have been "piling up" for millenia. They're not new, only magnified by (a) the huge human population increase of the last several centuries, and (b) near-instant communication nearly anywhere in the world.

If all these issues are not dealt as soon as possible, then, I believe, we must prepare ourselves (or our children) about huge wars, especially over natural resources. Many knowledgable people say that the future wars will be about water.

And they're right, and there's nothing we can do to prevent those wars unless we eliminate human greed. Which we won't.

The human race is smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. We must pursue multiple goals simultaneously. Ultimately it's a stark choice: if we don't get off this rock, we will die here.

It works both ways...

[Takuryu]

Who is to say that the bacteria don't just decide to exterminate us, instead? All it takes is a single one to hitch a ride to Earth and find a host...

Regardless, I vote that we terraform the Sahara Desert first... it would be good practice and actually serves a purpose NOW as well as in the future.

Re:It works both ways...

[Tokerat]

Who is to say that the bacteria don't just decide to exterminate us, instead? All it takes is a single one to hitch a ride to Earth and find a host...

The bacteria doesn't actively decide to kill us. Bacteria do not have brains to think with.

Re:It works both ways...

[Artifakt]

There's plenty of places we can practice. What happens if we pump desalinated seawater into Death Valley USA? How could we establish a timetable for re-shaping Mars when we don't really know much time it would take the Brazilian rain forest to reclaim the land at its current fringes if it started being protected now?
If we're betting we can establish new species on Mars, wouldn't it make sense to first restablish some more Earthly species in ranges we have wiped them from right here? A hundred or so years ago, we failed in attempts to reestablish the Passenger Pigeon to the wild or keep it alive in zoos. We've just now gotten pretty good with the American Buffalo, and results on the Eastern Red Wolf and the Giant Panda are still mixed at best. Looking at the endangered species list, I'd say until things come off of it (in a positive direction only) at least as fast as they go on, we are not ready for Mars.

Re:It works both ways...

[khallow]

The bacteria doesn't actively decide to kill us. Bacteria do not have brains to think with.

Minor correction to your second sentence. No bacteria that we know of has a brain that we know of to think with in a way that we can currently comprehend.

Re:It works both ways...

[Drooling Iguana]

But by "Terraforming" the Brazillian rain forrest we'd have to be careful not to have our changes screw up the surrounding ecologies. With Mars, we have a clean slate to work with.

Re:It works both ways...

[johannesg]

What happens if we pump desalinated seawater into Death Valley USA?

If you want to do something like that, do it in the middle east. That way you are also contributing something tangible towards world peace.

Re:It works both ways...

[Sj0]

You know, there are two different ways to take that remark, and I think I'll take it in the "people with plenty who don't live in the middle of a desert don't become terrorists" way, instead of the "we should drown millions of people" way. :P

Re:It works both ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the middle east they already use desalination plants in to provide water for the golf courses.

Re:It works both ways...

[Artifakt]

One of the things holding this back in the middle east is the massive ammount of power needed to desalinate that much sea water. Initial designs for such systems assumed Nuclear power would be used. A lot of other governments would prefer it if that power came from non-nuclear sources, at least for Palestine, Libya, Iran, and Syria, and Iraq until it settles down (yeah, right). So poverty in the area limits people's options directly - "We can't afford a 200 Mw power plant!", and indirectly - "... and you wouldn't trust us with it anyway.".

Re:It works both ways...

[Jamie Lokier]

Of course bacteria make active decisions to attack and kill other cells with particular characteristics. You don't need a brain to make decisions like that.

Furthermore, while a single bacterium is not comparable with a human brain (as far as we know), a colony of communicating bacteria is potentially more capable. A brain is a colony of neurons, after all. A brain has more structure than a random assembly of cells, but the same is true of a bacterial colony that's had millions of years to evolve.

-- Jamie

Re:It works both ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless, I vote that we terraform the Sahara Desert first... it would be good practice and actually serves a purpose NOW as well as in the future.

What makes you think the desert doesn't serve a purpose as it is? We still don't have a complete model of weather and ecology on planet Earth, so it's quite possible that deserts play their own roles in Earth's ecology. Making wholesale changes to deserts might be just as disastrous as cutting down entire forests.

If you want to practice, grab a large asteroid.

-hadohk

Re:It works both ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

But think about what we could do with all of that salt!

Re:It works both ways...

[another_henry]

Bollocks. There's no way anything biological the size of a bacterium could possibly think.

Re:It works both ways...

[khallow]

That's true. We don't know of anything biological (or otherwise) that is the size of a bacterium and thinks. But most of the human race weighs less than 100 kilograms of bacteria. So why couldn't large masses of bacteria (well in excess of the weight of the heaviest human) become intelligent?

Re:It works both ways...

[Tokerat]

Reminds me of that short story by Issac Asimov.. i forget the name but a man on another world thinks he is halucinating and it turns out to be insects that can combine their nervous systems and become "cels" of a larger creature.

Re:It works both ways...

[johannesg]

Of course. If I wanted to drown people I could just as well use salt water. You don't think I'd care about the salt water stinging their eyes before they die, now do you? ;-)

The Pentagon agrees with you

[Ars-Fartsica]

They in fact prepared a study specifically stating that wars over natural resources could start as soon as the next two years as ecologically issues plague global communities.

Re:The Pentagon agrees with you

[bool morpheus()]

As if there wasn't already a war for oil...

Re:The Pentagon agrees with you

[dvk]

> As if there wasn't already a war for oil...

Yep... you're right. Saddam did invade Kuwait for oil.

Oh, was your dumbnessness referring to US invasion of Iraq, which had the (predicted) net effect of RAISING oil prices both short (due to the war/security situation) and long term compared to simply shutting down the whole embargo and buying oil from Saddam on the cheap (a lot cheaper than tnew Iraqi government will sell it)?

Oh yeah, I forgot, you're a liberal and live in your own world... you think that USA actually OWNS all the oil resources in Iraq after the war and gets that oil free.

*sigh*

Re:The Pentagon agrees with you

[bool morpheus()]

What on earth are you talking about? I'm totally anti U.S. being in Iraq, I say we mind our own damn business and stop messing around with everyone else. Despite your low Slashdot ID, you're a total moron.

* YAWN *

[fiannaFailMan]

You can set your watch by it. Every time a space-related item appears on /., there's at least one post from a "let's solve all the Earth's problems and create a utopia first" merchants.

In the words of Mohamud, 'the poor will always be with us.'

Re:* YAWN *

[superyooser]

In the words of Mohamud, 'the poor will always be with us.'

Cool, Mohamud quotes Jesus.

Re:* YAWN *

[Zibblsnrt]

Sometimes they even stick around long enough to answer when asked why humanity can't perform two tasks at once, too.

-PS

Ethical?

[N8F8]

Rule #1: Ensure the survival of the species.

Right now are eggs are in one basket -Earth. 99% of the life on this planet has been wiped out several times already. Human extinction on Earth is a matter of when, not if. Spread the eggs to the planets then the stars.

The Mars as Utopia fantasy continues

[Ars-Fartsica]

The problems on Earth are 100% political, and no matter how long we wait the problems of poverty, fanatics, etc... will be with us.

But when we go to Mars all of these issues will go away, right? Resources will be even harder to obtain than they would be on Earth...I would expect conflict to break out within the first decade of colonization.

Re:The Mars as Utopia fantasy continues

[Skavookie]

Ok first of all, that's clearly not at all what the parent post is saying. It is saying that these problems are fundamental and will never go away (unless the entire human race is destroyed, anyway). It is saying that just waiting around until those problems are solved (which they never will be) is foolish. It is saying that if we colonize space then at least some seed of humanity might survive (although in light of the previous point perhaps that's not a good thing).

Second, early on resources might be harder to obtain, but there will also be a much smaller population and thus less demand for resources. Eventually the infrastructure for harvesting space and Mars-bound resources will be built and it will become increasingly easy to harvest these resources. Yes, resources will be scarce, but they always are, here on Earth and elsewhere.

Third, "necessity is the mother of invention." The scarcity you mention will force the colonists to develop ways of dealing with it, ways that could be applicable here on Earth. For example, it would finally force us to stop depending on oil, and at the same time provide alternatives (e.g. orbital solar collectors or something we havn't thought of yet).

In conclusion, colonizing Mars will not give us a "utopia," but getting off this rock is the only viable way forward.

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[Anonymous Coward]

That's who we are we like to leave our mess behind and try to forget them. Those depressing issues are not to be bothered. It's been like this since our existence. We know that we can't solve it 'cause of our greed and the government that we are in.

It is part of nature that these things suppose to happened. It is part of the cycle of life. The earth is trying to balance itself--if there's too many people then something will happen to lessen the number. With 6 billion and growing faster; I am sure that the problems will get worst to the point where there will be a great war over resources.

Solutions:
Whatever could be done in less time, so:
1) Terraform Mars or other planet
2) Engineers ourslves to live in harsh environment
3) Build space station while waiting to terrform mars.
I would just rather colonize the moon now rather than Mars. We have the technology to do this. While we are colizing Mars, send a terraformer to Mars. At this point we live on the moon and wait for our new HOME (Mars-Earth). When all of these happened remember me that I gave you this vision and make a GREAT MARS PYRAMID in HONOR OF ME. I also demand that you let me be OVERLORD of Mars and make my chidlren and descedants ROYALS of Mars.

Just my two Marcents.

Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable

[Pan T. Hose]

The terraforming of Mars seems to be, in my opinion, unfortunately quite unavoidable, to say the very least, and that is because of all of us who are "marsaforming" Earth so well that soon we sadly will be unable to live here any more. That's very sad. It might not be a problem for us, but for our children or grandchildren.

I am sure one day someone will remember the timeless implications of our today's Slashdot discussion looking at the Mars University and will say: "Very impressive. Back in the 20th century we had no idea there was a university on Mars," to which his professor will answer: "Well in those days Mars was just a dreary uninhabitable wasteland... much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable, when the university was founded in 2636." That will be a great day in our history.

I am very excited. I dream of being able to ski on Mars one day. That would be amazing. We definitely have to bring some water there and lower the temperature somehow to freeze it (we could use the process of so caled desublimacion to change the steam--a product of hydrogen and oxygen synthesis--directly into snow). That would be great. I am so excited. I haven't read such an exciting article for a long time.

The Slashdot headline is misleading, though. We don't need terraforming of humans, but rather marsaforming. I, for on, am already terraformed quite well, thank you. I hope Slashdot editors will correct this mistake as soon as possible. Other than that, the very idea of marsaforming humans instead of terraforming Mars is novel and extremely exciting. Great read.

Also, I find the ethical implications very interesting. After all, who gave us the right to live on Mars? The answer is sadly: no one. But does that mean we should not live there? Probably yes.

Re:Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable

[smallpaul]

It is kind of ludicrous to suggest that human beings will have affects on the planet that are so severe that it becomes easier to fix the atmosphere of another planet with the wrong size and distance from the sun than to fix our own atmosphere. It is like making such a mess of your house that it is cheaper to buy another house and replace all of your stuff then clean up your existing one and the stuff in it. Life on earth can easily tolerate the slight differences of temperature and atmosphere caused by pollution and greenhouse gasses. Society-as-we-know-it may not survive it easily but life will.

Re:Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

We seem to have our first volunteer. --Wake me up when we get there. I'll be sleepy in the back of the Astrovan.

Re:Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I find the ethical implications very interesting. After all, who gave us the right to live on Mars? The answer is sadly: no one. But does that mean we should not live there? Probably yes.

Errr... what do you mean "gave us the right"? Is there some higher authority we don't know about yet who grants these rights? The reason that 'sadly noone' give us that right is because there IS noone to give out these rights. And rightfully so! But, if you really want to, I'll hereby assume full authority over the planet Mars and also hereby grant a perpetual right to humankind to colonize it. Now, someone (me) gave us "the right".

Re:Mars terraforming is unfortunately unavoidable

[dvk]

> Also, I find the ethical implications very interesting. After all, who gave us the right to live on Mars?
> The answer is sadly: no one. But does that mean we should not live there? Probably yes.

So, who gave "us" - by the way, who are these "us" you refer to? Why do you presume to speak for me? - the right to not colonize Mars when the alternative is to have a big chnk-of-rock wiping out entire Earth biosphere as we know it even if humans don't succeed themselves?

Barring a belief in some supereme power (which, if it exists, makes the whole ethical question moot), NOBODY gives anyone any right.
E.g. lifeforms on Mars have no more rights to Mars than humans do. And if you find that chauvinistic and heartless, please imagine yourself a survivor of a shipwreck who's near an inhabited island. Then tell me that you have no *ethical right* to go live on the island just because some tribe is alread there. (You may not have any enforceable right if the natives just catch and eat you of course :)

-DVK

Masters of Ori-- er, Mars

[Mulletproof]

It's all good... I'll have Terraforming researched in another three turns and the plant built in five. Next in que will be the Marine Barracks and Missile Bases since the Psilons appear to be getting a tad unruley. That Stellar Converter is going to take forever, though....

Who said anything about ....

[fiannaFailMan]

terraforming the whole planet? There's a great idea in Cowboy Bebop where cities built on Mars are sunk into craters and a great wall is built around them that generates some sort of air curtain that keeps an oxygen atmosphere inside so that people can walk around under open skies while most of the planet remains untouched.

Re:Who said anything about ....

[mattdm]

Heh. "Some sort of air curtain." Yeah, just make one of those and we'll be all set. Also, you know what'd be good? Faster than light drive, and maybe if we could jigger up some quantum teleporters.

Re:Who said anything about ....

[buttahead]

At first I laughed hard at this... but remember that many great ideas come from odd-ball ideas that aren't based on existing technology. These leaps of thought are sometimes a jump into a new realm of technology.

Currently we do have the tech to make gas flow between two curtians of flowing gas. I'm not sure this could be made into a protective dome... but without forward thinking, we're all stuck where we are.

Re:Who said anything about ....

[fiannaFailMan]

I hope you've got karma to burn because if ever there was a post qualifying as a troll, that was it. Did it ever cross your mind that the technology for generating 'some sort of air curtain' might be an interesting technology to try and develop? You never know, it could be a damn sight easier than terraforming a whole planet.

Re:Who said anything about ....

[fiannaFailMan]

In the Cowboy Bebop movie and TV shows the curtain seems to go up to a high altitude but not curving over the city to form a protective dome. It's not clear how it works or how high it goes, but supposing it was only a mile or two, I'm not sure if the carbon dioxide atmosphere outside would spill over into it. CO2 is heavier than oxygen, isn't it?

Re:Who said anything about ....

[mattdm]

Sure, sure, karma, whatever. It's not a troll, though. The other things I mentioned would be really "interesting technology to try and develop" too -- and also easier said than done.

Sure, I can see how you could basically block a doorway using air pressure. But how's this supposed to _work_ on a larger scale? How much energy do you need to generate the required airflow at the base to make this extend even a few hundred feet into the air? Even assuming that an air barrier would be effective at all.

Patronizing to the max

[GorillaTest]

> are the colonists on a one-way trip akin to > exile How dramatic. Frankly bub, it's none of your business what other people do. Why don't you tend to your own knitting?

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[khallow]

Not that I don't like the idea of the space age where people from Earth will routinely travel from/to other planets, but it seems that pressing issues are piling up on Earth: poverty, foundamentalism, ignorance, ecological destruction and pollution, failing economies, oil wars, huge military spendings, terrorism, and many other issues.

I see several problems with your viewpoint. First, most of the "problems" aren't urgent. They will take a long time to fix if they ever do get fixed, eg, poverty, ignorance, and fundamentalism. I note also that the list includes a number of problems that we decided not to solve. It's extremely stupid to delay the future of the human race because some people chose to remain ignorant. Poverty is being cured via a slow steady increase in global living standards. We are solving that problem.

Then there are problems of some urgency that can be solved in part due to space development. Ecological destruction, economic failures, and oil wars fall in this category. It's pretty obvious that no space-based civilization can depend on oil for its energy source. Hence, they won't be fighting oil wars. As mentioned in some good replies to your post, discoveries in space can help us solve problems on Earth.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere we need to get off Earth before we die. In particular, these "oil wars", "military spendings", and "ecological destruction and pollution" are dangerous because we're trapped in a game that will become zero-sum if we occupy all Earth-based niches and refuse to jump to space. Eventually, you can win only by taking from others. The game will be rigged to encourage the very problems you mention.

Frankly, I have trouble understanding why there should be resistance to space development. This opposition appears to me to be driven by both ignorance and some sort of parasitic luddite fundamentalism. I don't buy that there's an either/or choice here. We don't have to throw away the future to solve the problems of the present. Frankly, I think if we fail at space development, then we won't solve the various problem you mention above either.

Obvious Solution.

[crhylove]

If there's no life there, and even if there is some microbial life, there is no question in my mind that ethically we have the RESPONSIBILITY to spread life (not just our own) to other planets. The sheer volume of planets without life vs. the planets that do have life should be enough to convince anyone who finds beauty in variety to endorse terraformation.

And the how doesn't have to be that difficult. bombarding the atmosphere with nitrogen rich asteroids over a hundred years would probably make the planet fairly liveable in under 500 years, depending on how many asteroids are availble, and how much money/time/effort is put into it.

Now we need to quit bombing Iraq and just get started.

Crucifixus Etiam

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised not to have seen a reference to this superb Walter M. Miller, Jr. story in this thread. Doesn't anyone read classic science fiction any more?

The story, published in the early 1950s, deals with the process of acclimatizing humans to live on Mars. It's a very powerful piece of literature!

ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this as a difficult problem in ethics. If there is life on Mars we shouldn't terraform it. If there is no life on mars we should terraform it. It is unethical for a lifeform to destroy another unless it's existance is threatened. (maybe not even then) . It is ethical for life to move into noninhabited spaces. How is this not obvious?

Terraform ME (or my neighbour...)

[Ralph Spoilsport]

OK, the great OZ has been asked to weigh in on this. So:

1. Terraforming will be a big deal. So, THINK BIG, but doable.

The biggest problem with Mars is that it isn't Big Enough or Wet Enough. Its gravity is weak and any kind of terran atmosphere / water condition wouldn't last very long. Also, there's a lot of water there, but not enough to really make it happen.

SO: this is what we do-

We figure out a way to send Saturn's moon Iapetus to collide with Mars. Iapetus is mostly water ice. Since Mars has very little atmosphere, it'll plow into Mars straight on and destroy the place. However: in the ensuing melee, Iapetus will Melt. Result? Instant Oceans of Water. Many Miles Deep. We turn Mons Olympus (into Olympic Island) into a base of operations. We'll have all the water we could possibley want and then some. We use solar power to crack huge amounts of it into Oxygen. Introduce plankton and sea critturs and get a carbon cycle going and food from the sea. Sure: the water will tend to break down in the upper atmosphere, and without an ionosphere, it will tend to breakdown and disappear, but it will take HUNDREDS of millions of years for that to happen to the water introduced by Iapetus.

2. to al the ninnies who say "spend that money on Earth and Feed The Poor." I reply: we can easily do both. Just KILL THE RICH and TAKE THEIR MONEY and set up a properly socialist system. Tere will be a lot of resistance from the running dog jackals and the deluded dupes of the capitalist conspiracy, but it's nothing an SKS can't take care of. Problem solved. Bascially: If we DON'T get people onto Mars, we're definitely screwed as someday an asteroid will come and thump us a good one, and all the money you pissed away on a bunch of poor retards isn't going to help their poor retarded progeny from surviving said asteroid strike.

3. Martians will be the second step. The first step is homo futuris - a genetically enhanced human species that lives an order of magnitude longer, has an IQ that would be off our charts and is resistant to most, if not all, contemporary communicable diseases, and has had its genome cleansed of disease (esp. cancer) propensities. If we can get to homo futuris, then we can think about developing a species that can knit bones and reproduce in some fraction of our gravity with a reduced atmosphere...

the Great OZ has spoken!

RS

It must be...

[reality-bytes]

Bad Karma

Sorry, I couldn't resist :)

adaptation not eugenics

[khallow]

Terraforming isn't the right word. Terraforming is forming planets to make them more like Earth (Terra). Purposefully altering humans/human physiology does not yet have a word accosiated with it, I think.

"Eugenics" is deliberately chosing who gets to have children in order to achieve desired characteristics (eg, Nazis who wanted a "master race"). I think "biological adaptation" (or perhaps just "adaptation") is more accurate since for example, this includes genetic engineering of both the individual's DNA and their germ line DNA in order to exist better in the environment, but you should include plenty of other possibly non-biological tricks. Eg, it may be impossible for most Martians to exist unaided in the long term Martian environment, but easily managed with various articial machines and habitats.

wouldn't it marsidapting humans?

[perlchild]

cuz humans are pretty much already terradapted(or terraformed, but I think terradapted says what is meant better). Terraforming means(i am not a linguist) to "shape like Terra" humans can't be shaped like Terra, but they are sure fitted, or adapted, to the shape of Terra.

Not to mention the fact...

[sean.peters]

That if you did manage to get enough CO2 into the atmosphere to warm the planet sufficiently... you wouldn't be able to breathe the atmosphere, even if there was also sufficient O2. Carbon dioxide isn't just an asphixiant - if you breathe any significant quantity of it, even if there is plenty of O2, your blood chemistry gets fouled up - and you die. CO2 is poisonous.

Sean

Re:Not to mention the fact...

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose of the CO2 is to heat up the planet. That doesn't mean that CO2 is the only gas in the atmosphere. O2 as well as N2 could be released. Anyways, the biggest issue is the atmospheric pressure is so low that an explorer would require a pressurized spacesuit (because the pressure is even below the triple point pressure so all liquid and solid water will go gaseous, including that in your skin). If the atmospheric pressure can be raised, it could be possible for someone to walk around with insulated clothing and a self-contained breathing apparatus (similar to SCUBA). This would make work on Mars much easier.

Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[alexhmit01]

Some spouting nonsense. Official projections of a FULL nuclear exchange between the Warsaw Pact and NATO (i.e. all the nukes) was 10% of the world's population destroyed. So unless they were off by a factor of 10 , we're not capable of killing EVERYONE, and a factor of 5 to hit majority. On top of that, we have maybe 20% of the warheads that we had then...

Most ICBMs were NOT designed to destory cities (contrary to left wing propoganda) but to hit limited military targets, primarily the other side's ICBM silos (to win a nuclear war, you must eliminate a second strike...)...

The Tomahawk Cruise Missile was designed to deliver a nuclear warhead within 7 feet of its target... That would allow you to hit each silo with ONE missile, instead of TWO (to increase the likelihood of taking it out). The end of cold war weapons were finally reaching the goal of winning a nuclear exchange. The US was dangerously close to actually being in the winning seat... i.e. launch a first strike that eliminates the Soviet ability to respond.

That was the scenario that scared the Soviets, not the US having "more". Taking out downtown Manhattan would take 8-12 nuclear missiles... while nuclear weapons are VASTLY more powerful than conventional weapons, they are at their best destroying a reasonable sized target, not "wiping out the world 10 times over" or whatever propoganda we grew up with.

Alex

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, thank the gods it's only ten percent that gets the axe. So it's not really that big a deal. (sarcasm++)

btw. Official projections and realistic projections tend to differ on this,.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[JWSmythe]

Ok, how about this. With just 500 Minuteman III's with MIRV warheads (multiple warheads, one rocket), lots of stuff would blow up in minutes. The survivers would die in the remaining years, due to radiation and other little problems such as a lack of food supply and infrastructure (no food, no power, no supply lines).

Immediately kill 10% of the population, and the damage caused would kill the rest. This isn't a long-term situation, it happens in minutes, 10% of the population dies, the rest die over a longer term.

But hey, if you like using the argument that we could or couldn't kill each other off quickly, as rationalization of why we should or shouldn't expand humanity, that's your own emotional problem.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God for some political sanity. It seems that political moderates are a dying breed. Everyone is either, "Nuke the bastards" or "KILL BUSH".

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[stwrtpj]

Most ICBMs were NOT designed to destory cities (contrary to left wing propoganda) but to hit limited military targets, primarily the other side's ICBM silos

And I'm sure those same missiles were designed not to give off the least little tiny bit of radiation and fallout afterward? That they somehow will not allow prevailing winds to carry the fallout into cities, rivers, and farms? You make these things sound so wonderful and neat and clean. Bullshit. You're purposely ignoring all the secondary effects of a widespread series of groundburst or near-groundburst nuclear explosions. No matter how low yield or how "clean" these things are, in a full scale nuclear war like you're suggesting, you'll have enough going off to send an appreciable amount of fallout into the air. And considering that most of our silos are in the midwest right alongside farmland (what fucking moron conceived that one??), that does not make for a very rosy scenario after the war. Whether or not the secondary effects are intentional is a moot point; the effects are real and are not possible to suppress. You have a fission reaction, you are going to have radioactive materials left over.

The Tomahawk Cruise Missile was designed to deliver a nuclear warhead within 7 feet of its target... That would allow you to hit each silo with ONE missile, instead of TWO

Oh, that makes me feel SO much better.

The end of cold war weapons were finally reaching the goal of winning a nuclear exchange.

That's extremely scary thinking. I sincerely hope this thinking was limited to people like you who are not looking at all the facts and not our government. To think that someone could win -- or would want to win -- a nuclear war is sickening.

Taking out downtown Manhattan would take 8-12 nuclear missiles

This boggles the mind. Where the hell are you getting your facts? Though this does sync with your other false statement that these weapons were not designed to take out cities. Each side has different classes of weapons. While it is true that the bulk of each side's arsenals are counterforce weapons -- i.e. aimed at each others weapons -- each side also has many countervalue weapons -- i.e. aimed at cities. These are indeed specifically designed to level cities, taking industry and economic centers with them, and they are not so inefficiently designed to require "8-12" missiles. These missiles typically have yields in the megaton range, and it takes a far smaller number, either delivered via two or three single-warhead missiles, or one MIRV'ed warhead missile.

not "wiping out the world 10 times over" or whatever propoganda we grew up with.

The exact figure of "10 times over" is subject to debate and is not the point. The main point in this possible hyperbole is that while the pure, physical destructive force of all the world's warheads is not capable of wiping out the entire world in the actual fireballs, shock waves, etc, this does not take into account all the secondary effects, such as radiation, fallout, and possible climatalogical effects of burning materials throwing thousands of tons of soot and other debris into the atmosphere. And yes, I know there is still substantial debate about the "nuclear winter" scenario. But do me a favor and find some other planet to test the theory on, thank you.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[ultranova]

Ok, how about this. With just 500 Minuteman III's with MIRV warheads (multiple warheads, one rocket), lots of stuff would blow up in minutes. The survivers would die in the remaining years, due to radiation and other little problems such as a lack of food supply and infrastructure (no food, no power, no supply lines).

Except that the Third World would likely be excluded from the nuclear war, on the grounds of having no nuclear capability and thus not being a threat, and their infrastructure (what there is of it) would thus be left intact.

And of course even the warring countries would be mostly intact. The big cities, industry, government and military centers would of course be destroyed, but the rural areas would avoid direct hits. Background radiation would rise to a level of causing illnesses, but it most certainly would not wipe out the whole population.

That isn't to say that life in a post-nuclear world would be nice by any measure, but claiming that we have even the ability to kill ourselves, much less all life, is ridicilous.

Most likely even the Western civilization would survive. After all, the Black Death killed a third of Europe's population in a preindustrial era, and civilization survived.

And do you really think that the 90% who survived the initial exchange would simply sit down and die, instead of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure ?

But hey, if you like using the argument that we could or couldn't kill each other off quickly, as rationalization of why we should or shouldn't expand humanity, that's your own emotional problem.

Using untrue facts to argue for or against anything will do more harm than good. That's why such untrue claims should be corrected.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[danbeck]

stwrtpj,

The original poster's post was informative, filled with reasonable information and logical debate. Yours is filled with illogical emotional outbursts, wide ranging, unrealized claims and typical gloom and doom. Your only decent point, littered with sarcasm and cursing, was in regards to the fallout.

H3 pwnz j00 ...

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could provide a reference to the "Official projections" you are referring to. At first blush its pretty obvious an exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact wouldn't kill a big percentage of the people on the planet. Most of the people on the planet live in China and India so they wouldn't be part of that particular sick little scenario.

I'm thinking you should watch the movie "Dr Strangelove or How I Came to love the Bomb" so you could develop an appreciation for how silly you sound waving your dick in the air bragging about your chances for winning a nuclear war.

A likely flaw in your plan is it would have been difficult to take out all of Russia's nuclear subs. If a couple of them were sitting off each coast, undetected, they could pretty much ruin your day with a mix of ballistic and cruise missiles.

I'd be inclined to agree with you that it would be difficult to wipe out life on earth with the weapons currently deployed but if a nut case...oh...lets see....like George W. Bush, were to put all his resources into designing really, really, big hydrogen bombs I bet he could pull it off. As best I recall you can scale them up to really mammoth proportions as long as your a nut case and want to destroy the world. You can also tune them to produce massive, long lived, deadly fallout. Or you can go with designer biological weapons which both the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R were apparently very good at making. There are some nasty natural biological weapons in the world but if you put deviants to work optimizing them using genetic engineering they could develop some that would do real damage. And then there are chemical weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and U.S.S.R so huge it will take years to destroy them, and nanotech weapons are on the horizon.

But I was tending to agree with you its not likely...until of course you come along and start babbling about winning a nuclear war and them I'm amazed we've lasted this long.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you'd like to back up *your* claims with actual quotes from the parent's post? It is not difficult.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[rocker_wannabe]

It only took one bomb a piece to take out Nagasaki and Hiroshima so I don't know why you figure it would necessarily take 8-12 nukes to destroy a city. Also, unless you believe that most of the population has bomb shelters they can stay in for 20+ years, it doesn't make sense to ignore the damage from the nuclear fallout. It will certainly pollute the water and the air and kill many more people over the long term. Wait until you see the total damage a little radiation leakage from Chernobyl will cause.

What kind of propaganda have you been listening to?

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Doubting Thomas]

Ignoring for a moment all those cool tidbits they used to scare us with during the Cold War, about how we had enough nukes to vaporize the entire surface of the planet fifty times over...

Did you forget about the nuclear winter? Sounds to me like that one slipped your mind. It doesn't matter if nobody dropped bombs on your when the air above your country is filled with a very deep column of radioactive dust, blotting out the sun for, what was it? Twenty years?

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[gadget junkie]

As a European in his mid 40s', I must tell you that while ICBM's may have been designed for a "counterforce" strike, soviet IRBM (intermediate range ballistic missile) in the 80s' were not. the SS-20 ( http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/theater/rt-21 m.htm ) had a combination of multiple warhead, CEP and flight time that was unsuitable for counterforce. it made sense for a first strike against air bases and such, or as a countercity weapon.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bioweapons that could kill 99.9-100% of earth's human population, not nukes :-( And it takes a mere USD50-100K of equipment (cost falling every day) and some "dumb luck" to engineer an unstoppable superbug.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[nyseal]

Who's the moron? The poster never mentioned anything about 'clean'. The reasoning behind puting nuclear silos in farmlands was because the US KNEW they would be a military target; hence if hit, would produce less human casualties. Anyone alive for the last fifty years is well aware of fallout and yes, it's scary. The poster's response was from a military viewpoint...not a civilian one, so please stop the pompous responding "verse by verse" crap. Besides, I'd like to test that theory on this planet anyway since there's so much intelligent life here...you included.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[TapeCutter]

Why do we build borders and armies? Why is a large part of the worlds enconomy directed at building arms? Are we just a territorial animal or is this how the powerful manage thier work farm? I think the west desperately needs leaders who can bring the world together not blow it up or rape it.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[macdaddy]

On the contrary, think of it this way. 90% of the population of the world lives in 10% of the populated area (cites, metropolis', etc..). Those 500 well-placed nukes could eliminated 90% of the population. I'm lucky though because I live in the sticks. The last census reported 231 people in this town. Bomb's away.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[macdaddy]

Aim a couple dozen of your nukes at the most volatile volcanos and fill the skies with ash. I wonder what repeated hits on Mt. Renier (sp?) would do.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

And considering that most of our silos are in the midwest right alongside farmland (what fucking moron conceived that one??)

I basically grew up with these things in my backyard. The reason they're in the midwest is because the midwest/great plains (read North Dakota) is because that's the geographical center of the continent. Put your missles in the center of the country and a hostile missile attack has to travel the farthest no matter where the attack is launched from, giving us more time to counterattack.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

It only took one bomb a piece to take out Nagasaki and Hiroshima so I don't know why you figure it would necessarily take 8-12 nukes to destroy a city.

Not that we don't have much more effective tools of destruction today, but you should probably check your facts -- looking, for example, at Hiroshima, that one bomb in fact destroyed about half the buildings and killed about half the population -- both mostly within a little more than a 1mi radius. Nagasaki received a similar amount of damage, somewhat less because of the terrain, even though the bomb was more powerful.

If you move to an NYC scale, certainly it would require more than one or two Little Boys to "take out" a major city.

Of course we have warheads nowadays that are orders of magnitude more powerful than in 1945; but that doesn't excuse the use of incorrect facts to make a correct point.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[arodland]

Regardless, would you feel safer in a world where everyone has nukes, everyone knows the consequences, and everyone's afraid of them, or a world where only one or two organizations control the world's nuclear weapons, and everyone else is afraid of them? Because those are your only real choices. The result of a blanket ban on nuclear weapons (yes, USA, that means you too) would be that the only people with nukes would be terrorists, some of whom would fear no retaliation if they could get their point across.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding, just look at what happened at Chernobyl, and there wasn't even a detonation! Over 300k people dead just from the radiation contamination. What do you think finally made the Soviet government realize that they couldn't win a nuclear exchange? Reagan's hard words? NO, the proof for them was in their graveyards.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[ultranova]

Ignoring for a moment all those cool tidbits they used to scare us with during the Cold War, about how we had enough nukes to vaporize the entire surface of the planet fifty times over...

Did you forget about the nuclear winter? Sounds to me like that one slipped your mind. It doesn't matter if nobody dropped bombs on your when the air above your country is filled with a very deep column of radioactive dust, blotting out the sun for, what was it? Twenty years?

I don't think that Nuclear Winter would actually happen, at least as bad as you make it sound. Imagine the amount of dust neccessary to cover the entire world (or any significantly large part of it) with a truly ligt-stopping layer.

But then again, I'm not an actual metheorologist (or whatever), so I can't say for sure. Let's just hope that no one will decide to test this theory...

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[shobadobs]

Oh, all this doesn't matter anyway - the sun will burn out in a few billion years anyway. And even if by then we've escaped from the solar system, the human race will still eventually die off, when entropy finally wins.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

traitor.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[NichG]

Bioweapons are limited by how quickly they kill whatever they infect. If a bioweapon unfailingly kills its host within 24 hours, then that's only 24 hours it has to spread to other hosts, give or take however long it can survive without a constant source of energy (we're talking airborne here, since anything else won't spread fast enough to be a doomsday scenario). So there's some optimization between time for the host to communicate the disease and the actual effectiveness - something that takes a long time to take effect gives a long time for someone to come up with a treatment, or to just reproduce. Of course, you could just have something that doesn't kill the host, but instead makes them sterile. That wouldn't kill this generation, but it'd have a better chance of eliminating the species as a whole. Still, given 40 years or so and a desperate need, I'd put good odds on someone figuring out a way around the sterility or a way of repairing the damage.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[CaptainAvatar]

I hate to quote from TCS since its a crap site but 300,000 appears to be a totally bogus figure. Please cite some evidence or revise your statement.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[riprjak]

Perhaps you need to study your Game Theory...

The concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" was used to ensure that there were sufficient, redundant and ready weapons capability to ensure that the planet would be unuseable to the survivors, regardless of who started it; this concept was derived with careful thought from game theory mathematics by great men trying VERY hard to ensure that there were additional genrations of humans following the cold war period. This ensured that no "stable" nation-state which actually intended to survive, flourish and propogate its ideals would ever start the exchange of nuclear weapons.

The aim was to ensure that ALL possible engagements resulted in NO winners in the mathematical sense. The only real problem is that for rogue or terrorist states, sometimes destruction of the planet could be considered a victory condition, which changes the playing field today.

Anyway, my point is you are so wrong I dont know why I bothered to comment; some things just annoy me I suppose, complacency moreso than most. For the vast majority of the cold war period, unlimited nuclear exchange would have resulted in the functional destruction of the planet because that was the ONLY safe state which ensured nuclear weapons werent used; furthermore, it was almost impossible to create a limited exchange which did not immediately precipitate an unlimited exchange. Remember that until the late 70's no US minuteman silos had active failsafes, we are very lucky to be here.

err!
jak.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[gujo-odori]

It's very doubtful that much of the population that wasn't killed directly would die off later from radiation. Some people in immediately surrounding areas would, but by no means all. People 1,000 miles or more away from the nearest strike would certainly not be killed or even sickened. You might see elevated cancer rates stemming from fallout for years to come, but that is hardly extermination.

Relevant cases to consider:

1) Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the nuclear attacks, people went back in there and rebuilt. Not years after, but months after. Hiroshima today is bustling city of over a million people, and ground zero is right in the heart of town, just as it was in 1945. Go there and see it sometime. Fatalities from the nuclear attacks were limited to those killed outright, those who died later from injuries or radiation poisoning, and some who died later from cancer. Deaths from the bombings were pretty well limited to those in the cities at the time, and not even all (not even most) of those. I have a childhood friend whose mother was ten year old girl in Hiroshima at the time of the attack, and she suffered from discrimination against hibakusha far more than from any effects of the bombing.

2) Chernobyl. Chernobyl released far more radiation than a bunch of warheads and over a much longer time. Chernobyl was like a nuclear exchange but without explosions. The town and the area around it is heavily poisoned and will be for many years to come. People cannot live there and will not be able to live there for a very long time. Long enough that we might as well call it never. However, even in the case of Chernobyl, people away from the immediate area were not killed. It is even possible to go into the Chernobyl area, at least for short periods of time, and some people (such as Elena: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm) do just that.

As others have posted, the primary targets of both US and Soviet ICBMs were not each other's civilian populations. The primary targets were the other side's ICBMs, including submarine bases. The next top targets were the other side's conventional military installations and command and control systems. In the United States, Cheyenne Mountain would have been hit. Washington D.C. Would have been hit very hard. The entire area of the Whitehouse, the Pentagon, etc., would have ceased to exist. Langley, VA (CIA headquarters) was doubtless in the crosshairs too, ditto for the NSA and any other intelligence agencies. I'm from San Diego, and as a town with a lot of military bases, I always knew that if it happened, San Diego would be hit hard and I would probably die because I lived only a few miles from NAS (now MCAS) Miramar, and only a few miles more from NAS North Island, a carrier base. Toward the southern end of San Diego Bay is another major naval base, so people down there would have been hit hard, too. Would everyone in the San Diego metro area have been killed? Probably not, but most would have. You could probably figure on over a million deaths in San Diego County, if the US and the Soviet Union had had a full-scale nuclear exchange.

Life for survivors in the US and the Soviet Union would have been pretty hard after a nuclear exchange, and many of them would probably later die of starvation or disease. Many might have fled to Canada or Mexico if they could.

If the UK got involved, and they probably would have, things would have been similar there. If the Exchange spilled over into NATO generally, Europe would have been a mess, too.

However, for countries that stayed out of it (which would include South America, probably Australia and New Zealand, b/c they have no nukes), most of Asia (all of it, if China stayed out) and all of Africa and the Middle East, no one would have died as a direct result. If global temperatures dropped in a nuclear winter (something that it is not all certain would occur), there would be some starvation, but even then, most people in the world would still survive.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[A55M0NKEY]

I'm sure they were *capable* of killing much more than 10%, but that plausable war scenarios peaked at 10% destruction.

With all those nukes, if your aim was killing as many humans as possible, I bet you could get to 30-50% without breaking a sweat, and maybe even go as high as 70%. You will have a hard time killing all the very rural, spread out primitive folks. The surface of the earth is pretty big after all. You might be able to leverage your arsenal by targeting food and water producing areas with especially dirty bombs, and by taking prevailing winds/weather conditions into account in order to dust large swathes of only moderately densely populated areas. Of course one would turn all major cities into glass if their aim was pure bodycount.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%

[Cybrr]

I'd like to note that nuclear weapons have become much more powerful since then.

From here:

On August 6, 1945, a uranium fission bombwas detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb, called "Little Boy" was a "gun-type" device which used an explosive charge to force two sub-critical masses of U-235 together. It was 28 inches in diameter and 120 inches long, a relatively small package to deliver an explosive force of some 20,000 tons of TNT by converting about 1 gram of matter into energy. This could be accomplished with a sphere of U-235 about the size of a baseball. This kind of device had never been tested, in contrast to the plutonium bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. No device like this has been used since, making the estimates of radiation exposure at Hiroshima very difficult. Casualties included both direct blast victims plus those who died from radiation-induced cancer in subsequent years.

The bomb was triggered to explode at a height of 550 meters (1800 ft), a height calculated to cause the widest area of damage.

In the detonation of the uranium fission bomb over Hiroshima, about 130,000 people were reported killed, injured, or missing. Another 177,000 were made homeless.

The U.S. exploded a 15 megaton fusion bomb on March 1, 1954. It had a fireball 4.8 km in diameter and created a huge characteristic mushroom-shaped cloud. Analysis of the radioactive fallout from this bomb revealed it to be a fission-fusion-fission weapon, a "hydrogen bomb" with an outer sheath of natural uranium to increase the yield.

Hey, man, really like your ,signature!

[PaulBu]

seriously.... When I came to this country from abroad it took me some time to realize what does THAT thing mean... ;-)

Paul B.

Prime directive for bacteria

[jmorris42]

> Yeah, and in five hundred years people will be ashamed of the
> "barbarians pre-space humans who exterminated bacterial diversity on
> Mars".

Yea, I suspect you are right. And the heart of the movement will be at Mars University. They will be weak kneed mushy headed students lead by a few ivory tower dwelling pseudo intellectuals. But the most anyone else will say is "oh well, I ain't giving it back to the germs." and get on with their comfortable martian life. Or in other words, nothing new. Just a bunch of useless morons with nothing better to do than bitch and moan about how 'evil' their forefathers were once things have progressed to a point where genetic culls like themselves don't get killed off by the harsh pioneer environment.

IF we find life on Mars I'd probably agree with going VERY slow so as not to screw up something before we understand it fully. But if there isn't life there, it belongs to us to use as we see fit. Same goes for the rest of the Solar System.

Re:Prime directive for bacteria

[Drooling Iguana]

Except for Europa. Land no ships there.

Re:Prime directive for bacteria

[blugu64]

...all these worlds are yours....except for...

good book, iffy movie

"Civilizations which are limited by lightspeed..."

[PaulBu]

Check out Ethernet IEEE standards sometime... WE are limited by the lightspeed (at least, the reach of the ethernet cables ;-) ).

The minimum packet size over the ethernet is limited by the fact that you have to be able to detect that someone else is trying to send on a channel DURING the duration of the packet, and the latter one is limited by 'c' and maximum distance.

Paul B.

Re:Maybe we should solve home planet problems firs

[mcasaday]

None of the problems you talk about are new, or any more or less pressing than they always have been. There is nothing wrong with people thinking past the immediate pressures of our times. A little careful foresight is exactly the kind of thing that might allow us to avoid some of the items on that gloomy list of yours in the future. Shutting down our collective imagination until there is no more scarcity is equivalent to shutting it down forever.

bioforming

[nacturation]

Well, since terraforming is altering the land (terra = earth) then the equivalent for people would be bioforming.

Re:bioforming

[Carthag]

I'm pretty sure terraforming means to change something to have the properties of earth. "Forming it after Terra," if you will.

Why not?

[HangingChad]

If there's no life on Mars why can't we colonize it?

Slight error, 10 m = 1 atm

[Llywelyn]

10 meters = 1 atm.

At 130 meters, you have 14 atmospheres exerted on you.

Re:Before http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

[Anonymous Coward]

Here ya go:

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

Distinct, practical steps towards improving this planet and society. Put your money where your mouth is.

>In addition, we shouldn't view Mars as a place
>to run off to if we screw Earth up badly.

We also shouldn't curl up and hide "'cuz we're not ready yet!"

There is not, has not, and never will be an idealistic age when all Earth-bound problems are solved. For better or for worse, Humanity is one big problem after another. We're all just muddling along, doing the best we can with what we have.

_Doing_, of course, being the key word here. What a profound waste of a civilization if we don't try to grow and improve ourselves.

Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[Latent Heat]

I heard this business of blood boiling and popping brains is "bad science fiction."

My blood pressure is 140/90, which used to be OK until they changed the rules about such things, so my doctor had me learn how to use a blood pressure cuff so I could take my own readings and be depressed how my exercise regimine and dietary changes were having little effect.

That lower number of 90 means 90 mm Hg, where one atmosphere is 760 mm Hg. The systolic (higher reading) is the peak of the pressure pulse of the arterial wave, while the diastolic (lower reading) is the baseline pressurization of your arteries relative to the environment. So that suggests that the human body itself is a space suit good to at least a 10th of an atmosphere.

For the Russian crew that was first to visit a space station that died on reentry when their Soyuz lost pressure, I heard that they just passed out and died from lack of oxygen -- they looked like they were just sleeping when the ground crew opened the hatch.

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[WhiteBandit]

Ah, very interesting. Thanks for the clarification. I wonder how many millibars the atmosphere of Mars would increase by adding more oxygen and other gases into the atmosphere? Only 9 more millibars and you are at 1/10th Earth's atmosphere. Then it probably would be possible to walk around in normal clothes, though I think at this level, you might still need an oxygen mask.

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[ultranova]

That lower number of 90 means 90 mm Hg, where one atmosphere is 760 mm Hg. The systolic (higher reading) is the peak of the pressure pulse of the arterial wave, while the diastolic (lower reading) is the baseline pressurization of your arteries relative to the environment. So that suggests that the human body itself is a space suit good to at least a 10th of an atmosphere.

What this means that your blood pressure is 90 mm Hg over atmosphere pressure. If it was 1/10th of atmospheric pressure, your veins would collapse from the external pressure.

Furthermore, if your veins had less than atmospheric pressure in them, the air would be sucked in instead of blood coming out when you're cut.

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[mlyle]

That's the mmHg -OVER- atmospheric pressure. Or "gauge pressure", in other words.

If it was at negative pressure, if you got a cut, your arteries/veins would suck air in. :P

If you go below 60 mmHg or so, you indeed will have the water in the blood boil; the saturated vapor pressure of water will exceed the ambient pressure. Well before then other blood gases will begin to leave solution, blocking arteries and veins (aka the bends, which is well documented in divers).

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[mlyle]

One more thing to check out:

Altitude induced decompression sickness-- a big concern at flight in the flight levels; prevalence is relatively common at 20,000 ft, and that's still about .1 atm.

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[mlyle]

.5 atm. Should preview before I post.

Re:Exposure to vacuum and diastolic blood pressure

[Suidae]

Contrary to sibling posts, you are, in general, correct. Human skin tension provides enough counterpression to prevent any catastrophic sci-fi effects like boiling blood. There were some experiments to this effect a few decades ago where volunteers would subject a forearm to hard vacuum with no ill effects (just a bit of reddening and puffyness that was attributed mostly to the padded cuff around the arm that was used to seal the chamber).

Of course there was also NASA research into space activity suits that used spandex-like material to provide counterpressure suitable for extra-vehicular work. Something similar would probably also work well on Mars. One of the cool (literally) features of that is that one's sweat can still evaporate through the material, simplifing cooling requirements.

Of course there is still the radiation damage issue in space or on Mars. Thin or nonexistant atmosphere means more radiation (cosmic and solar) and more secondary radiation (particle showers from primary radiation interaction with the ground). Spandex would be pretty poor radiation protection, but perhaps a combination of nanotechnology materials that provide better fabrics and drugs or genetic manipulations to improve radiation repair mechanisms can take care of that issue.

Obligatory Allende quotation:

[orzetto]

It is right that Man put his foot on the Moon.
It would be better if it put it on Earth.

Salvador Allende, 1908-1973

Re:Obligatory Allende quotation:

[dvk]

> It is right that Man put his foot on the Moon.
> It would be better if it put it on Earth.
> Salvador Allende, 1908-1973

Ahh, yes... let's all take advice from a quote uttered by a devout Marxist who wanted to turn his country into Cuba/USSR copy.
How about we go to the Source then? Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin?

Yeah, Pinochet sucked. No question. But he killed far less people (by percentages) than socialist regimes worldwide did in their own countries (starting with USSR).
Who are YOU to say that Allende wouldn't have ended up killing far in excess of 3000 people and have ruled for MORE than 17 years while maintaining the same illusion of elections that USSR and Cuba had?

"Allende is seeking the totality of power, which meant Communist tyranny disguised as the dictatorship of the proletariat." -- Statement from the National Assembly of the Chilean Christian Democratic party, May 15, 1973.

-DVK

Diving & Compression

[Anonymous Coward]

Your body is composed of lots of water. Water is generally considered incompressable. When you dive deeply, the compressed air tank that you breath from equalizes the air pressure inside of your body to match the pressure around you under water. But if you hold your breath and go up -- pop. Don't equalize and go down -- squish.

At low pressures, water boils off into vapor. But at normal and even very high pressures, the water in your body remains pretty much the same.

FYI, at the pressures of deep sea diving, there are time limits you must watch at different depths before your blood gets unsafe amounts of nitrogen concentrations that could kill you - it bubbles in your blood vessels causing pain, stroke, etc. Also a reason not to drink and dive, or dive and drink. Easily leads to death that only a pressure chamber can hope to prevent.

How much modification do we need?

[Doubting Thomas]

There are several races of human that are already adapted to high altitude, namely peruvians and tibetans. In the Andes, there is a city at 4 km above sea level, where the air pressure is about 60 kPa. Some of these people could probably live comfortable at about .5 atm, which would make habitat and suit design a good deal simpler. Play some games with partial pressures, and you could have such people living in a -very- thin atmosphere.

Terraforming Earth

[Latent Heat]

I am reading this book titled Oxygen by Nick Lane on how the oxygen got into the Earth's atmosphere.

First off, he argues that the Harold Urey/Stanley Miller experiment idea of the Earth having a reducing atmosphere of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia is a crock because the asteroid bombardment from 4.5 Ga to about 4 Ga stripped the Earth of any atmosphere it had, and the initial atmosphere at the point was largely nitrogen and some CO2 and SO2 that came out of volcanoes.

Secondly, he argues that while oxygen can be created by UV splitting the water molecule, the bulk of our oxygen comes from photosynthesis over the ages, and that process also helped Earth hang on to its water because the photosynthesis oxygen acted as a getter for the hydrogen liberated by UV water splitting, preventing that process from bleeding off all the water as H2 vented into space and O2 chemically combined in the surface rocks (i.e. modern Mars).

Thirdly, he explains that photosynthesis generation of O2 is nearly balanced by respiration consumption of O2, and the only thing that causes buildup of O2 is burial of a tiny fraction of the organic matter each year to cause a small O2 surplus. If we burnt up the entire biosphere and all the known fossil fuel reserves, that would hardly put a dent in the O2 (it would do major things to CO2, which is currently a trace gas) because the amount of buried organics is huge compared to the current biosphere, and what is accessible as fossil fuels is a tiny amount of the total buried organics (most of the organics are sequestered as sandstones that are "very low grade" fossil fuels as it were).

The idea is that volcanoes pumped out all this carbon as CO2, the stuff that got converted to organics and buried reflected on the O2, some of the CO2 converted directly into carbonate rocks (limestone and dolomite) deposited as sediments. I guess volcanoes recycle some of the carbonate rocks back into CO2 output.

Now there is Thomas Gold with his oil and perhaps coal are not fossil fuels deal, and someone has recently posted on Slashdot recently how one can look at coal under a microscope and see how it is made up of plants. But even if all oil is organic, there had to be some primordeal source of carbon in the ground, which had to be the source of the CO2 puked out by volcanoes, which is the source of all of the oxygen once the CO2 got processed by plants and the organic matter got buried so that the plants were one step ahead making O2 compared to the animals and rotting vegetation (bacteria) eating O2.

Gold believes that oil comes from primordeal unoxidized carbon in the upper mantle -- kind of like the composition of carbonaceous carbon meteorites, but current thinking is the Late Heavy Bombardment (thing that formed the main Moon craters and basins and maria) not to mentioned the big smash that formed the Moon must have melted the Earth to quite a ways down.

My question is that even if Gold is wrong, what was the source of the carbon that fed CO2 to the volcanoes (the source of O2 is water?) that fed the plants over eons that gave us the oxygen atmosphere?

How we're doing so far.

[DynaSoar]

So far we're doing a bad job of terraforming Earth -- terra-unforming more correctly. Until we can do a good job of it here, we have no right or reason to try elsewhere.

But...

[reality-bytes]

They're not going to withstand Mars' ambient radiation levels; hence the 'skin like lead' requirement.

Despite the Earth having low pressure/high alt regions, our radiation dosage is fairly consistent due to the layers of the upper atmosphere which protect us. - On Mars there is no such 'natural sunblock'.

Re:But...

[Doubting Thomas]

I've pretty much resigned myself to the idea that protection from the hard radiation will require the normal type of engineering, and not bio-engineering.
Some sci-fi authors, notably Dan Simmons (in the Hyperion series, some post-humans were even adapted to hard vacuum, and possessed wings which they could use to fly on the solar wind), have made no such concessions, but I think at this early stage of a potential galactic empire, wearing radiation suits when outside isn't too big of a punt.

In looking at info about altitude adaptation, I found out a couple more interesting bits. One, some ethiopians also possess a special adaptation to altitude. And two, the adaptations possessed by the three groups (tibetans, peruvians, and ethiopians) are all distinct. Whether that means that interbreeding could result in someone possessing genes for all three traits, and whether this would grant resistance to even thinner atmospheres, is beyond me, but sounds like an interesting avenue of exploration.

Adaptation

[fedux]

What would happen with humans living on a terraformed mars? Would they develop new "features" that make then different to us? As people that lives in Africa are different than people that lives in the nordic region, would they become a new race? And if they do, would it be hard for them to live in earth again?

Re:Adaptation

[Quill_28]

I don't think so and here's why.

Natives to africa have large nostrils to breath more hot air.

The in northern regions have small nostrils to protect from the cold.

Over time, certain genes would dominant.

But in mars tech would take of all this.

But then again, say there is some unknown background radiation that certain have a high resistance to, other people have little or none.

So actually I agree with you there probably would be some differences given enough time.

Kinda like Austrailia

[Anonymous Coward]

Austrailia was a continent inhabited by criminals that were deported from England.

If we're talking about exile to Mars, lets box up all those fucking muslim sand nigger camel jockeys that want to blow themselves up and ship them off to Mars.

Hell, if they die along the way, so what, at least we won't be wasting the lives of humans - and they'll get to meet their 72 virgins (yeah right!)...

Re:Kinda like Austrailia

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

Well, if they can survive 140 degree tempratures living in the desert, they can learn to survive -140 degree temps on Mars.

This way they don't have to worry about converting the entire planet to their false religion that they claim is the "religion of peace". Who the fuck believes that shit anyway?

I'd believe them if there was one, just one imam fucker towel head that comes out and formally denounces terrorism... then I'd say call off the dogs and stop killing the shit skins. Until then, we need to apply the final solution to their barbaric dumbasses.

Re:Kinda like Austrailia

[Sj0]

YEAH! And the same to all them stupid krackers! Nothing but colonialists and warlords in THAT lot!!

This way they don't have to worry about converting the entire planet to their false religion that they claim is the "religion of peace". Who the fuck believes that shit anyway? Who the fuck is Jesus?

I'd believe them if there was one, just one Richard Johnson fucker kracker-head that comes out and formally denounces war and colonialism... then I'd say call off the dogs and stop killing the white skins. Until then, we need to apply the final solution to their barbaric dumbasses.

Re:Kinda like Austrailia

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a camel jockey sand nigger shit skinned towelhead.

We are helping the earth reproduce!

[TheNarrator]

Don't these guys know that we are the reproductive system of the earth? I'm SERIOUS here, think about it! We are how the whole earth's eco system gets transported to other planets. Why did we evolve to where we are today anyway? You think Humans showing up on the earth was some kind of horrible evolutionary accident? NO.. It just part of the natural process of planets developing intelligent life forms and then those lifeforms reproducing the planet's eco-system on other worlds. We are like the seeds of the earth flower getting blown out into outer space via space ships with the DNA and specimens of earth life forms. If we Terraform mars we will see the first real example of a planet re-producing itself!

Re:We are helping the earth reproduce!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point!

Bzzzt, wrong

[Zibblsnrt]

Oh, right, that's exactly it. Because everyone knows someone voluntarily signing up to be purposely modified to suit a different environment is ethically identical to sterilizing single mothers and the mentally handicapped.

I believe the word for that kind of thinking is "incredibly stupid," or maybe "straw man."

Though transhumanism as a concept certainly does exist as a word to describe purposefully altering humans and human physiology. You might want to look at what you're talking about before immediately flying off the handle with "butbutbutgattaca!" style bullshit.

-PS

Re:Bzzzt, wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You really are stupid.

Go ahead. Look at the definition of eugenic and eugenics. It turns out that the amount of what you don't know about the world has just been made all the clearer to everyone else.

I believe the phrase (learn what word means) you're looking for is "Zibblsnrt is an ignorant douche."

Re:Bzzzt, wrong

[No Such Agency]

The AC is right. Eugenics does NOT mean "sterilizing single mothers and the mentally handicapped". The dictionary definition is:

a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

That is all it says.

Re:Bzzzt, wrong

[Zibblsnrt]

I've actually done a significant amount of study into the history of eugenics, including the US and Canadian programs (and the other more obvious ones eleswhere) which continued past the Second World War in places. I'm quite willing to bet that I have a better understanding of it than the average layman out there. I know I have a better understanding of what it is than the average person who believes any kind of genetic engineering is fundamentally equivalent to shoving people into the ovens after the experiments are finished.

Just because people are too stupid to understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary genetic engineering doesn't mean I have to strip off enough brain cells to get to the point. It takes a lot more thought to actually think about a term instead of taking the standard "butbutbutEVIL!" reaction, I know, but it can be refreshing.

-PS

Re:Bzzzt, wrong

[Zibblsnrt]

He is right in the dictionary sense, yes.

He is not right in the sense that the traditional use of the term implies a great deal of involuntary control, is guided by the belief that it is possible to breed culture and ideology, and the fact that the practice was typically through actions such as forced sterilization.

The word has become diluted to mean "bad" rather than "improving the qualities of the species" in much the same way that something like the term "genocide" has come to mean little more than "Nazi Germany-esque concentration camps." Because of the interpretations changing over time, any other possible use for the words have become rejected by people, and as such the words themselves become attacks.

If someone comes out and refers to transhumanist activity or whatever else as "eugenics," they're almost invariably using the term as an attack, as "proof" that the concept being suggested is evil. Look around on the other comments on this story; it comes up as a snarl word over and over. I'm quite aware of the origin of the word, but I'm also aware of what the word has since become.

-PS

Re:they got my respect

[Anonymous Coward]

C.S. Lewis wrote a book called Surprised by Joy about the factors that led him to a conversion to Christianity. One of the "last straws" came when an atheist friend of his went to a lecture one night about the historicity of the resurrection, and returned saying something like, "What a great story, with the dying god and everything. One could almost believe it if it wasn't all nonsense."

Terraforming Is Irrelevant

[Master of Transhuman]

since humans won't be remotely human in 50-100 years anyway.

Re:Let's first fix the world

[dustinbarbour]

Yeah.. We all want things, but if there's anything that Harvard education should have given ya' is an understanding that humans are a territorial, combative and violent species. I would suggest you rethink your priorities.

What if..? What if..?

[dustinbarbour]

What if..? What if..? How about we do a thorough survey and jump in? Where's the exploratory spirit?! Seems to me that humanity, in general, is losing its adventurism and ambition now that the whole of our planet has been visited. Put me on a rocket to Mars. If I die of some crazy Martian disease, I'd die happier than if I died sitting in front of my computer back here on Earth!

Global Magnetic field?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in all this talk of terraforming mars, do none of these people involved ever mention the lack of a global magnetosphere? Mars' atmosphere is literally blowing away due to the solar wind. Make all the co2, oxygen, water vapor you want. It will still be lost to space. Heck, who knows if it would take 50 years or a hundred to a return to current atmospheric pressure.

*note* IANAS, just things I've read in a few journals/heard in a few classes. Pros, please share if this is in some way obviously not the case as the idea intrigues me as much as the next person.

What about the Magnetic Field

[jeephistorian]

Isn't the magnetic field of Mars unstable / not really there?

I was under the impression that the magnetic field was required to prevent the sun's solar rays from stripping the atmosphere away.

Fritz

Re:"Civilizations which are limited by lightspeed.

[ultranova]

Electric field does not propagate at the speed of light in copper cables. Thus the actual limit will be lower.

Of course the limit will be limited by c - the signal cannot go faster than lightspeed.

Whatta title

[Tablizer]

"Planetary Protection Officer". A hell of a title. I wonder if an IRS auditor would get a little suspicious of a title like that. He/she might say something like, "You know, here on Earth, taxes MUST be paid."

Religions

[Tablizer]

Religious groups are often the first settlers of new places, partly because they want to not be bothered by "polluting influences", teasing and harassment, and/or often believe that God wants them to settle far-away places.

The Mormons (LDS) and Jahova's Witness probably have enough money to start settlements, for example. The Mormons lost hundreds of lives traveling through cold winters and deserts to settle out west, so I imagine they would do it again if they thought it was time.

What about using Nano-Technology?

[Tamboekie]

Suppose in a couple of decades we master nano-technology, wouldn't it be straight forward to terraform Mars using nano-bots?

Re:"Civilizations which are limited by lightspeed.

[PaulBu]

If you have a matched cable or a waveguide and send an EM wave down, it will propagat with the speed of light in the medium, which is slower than the speed of light in the vacuum by the factor of epsilon of the insulator used in that line.

You must be thinking about RC constant (which limits the speed of most _normal_ semiconductor chips today), but not of the ethernet (which is really relativistic, as in, dependent on the actual value of 'c').

Paul B.

ethical?

[VanillaCoke420]

Ok, Earth is the only world in this solar system that we know have life, and plenty of it. We pollute the water and the air and make entire species go extinct... and you ask if it's unethical to change a dry cold desert planet so it can sustain life...? It can't very well be any worse than what we're doing here.

dupe

[xyloplax]

Well, the comments will be the same on all terraforming articles. Like this

Focus, NASA, focus

[Animats]

Taxpayers to NASA: before blithering about terraforming Mars, build a new launch vehicle that works.

Quick Solution-----

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the Genesis Device?

Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons... IN SPACE

[Neuticle]

Heck, I'd move to Mars to get away from the Jehovah's Witnesses! Those door-to-doors are tiresome, but occasionally I'll play along, e.g.:

ME: I already believe in God and Jesus: What do you have to offer besides not having any fun on holidays and dieing for lack of readily availible medical treatments?

JW: ...

ME: If God is infinite, it follows that heaven should be too, so why is it full already? (JW heaven Max Cap: 144,000) What if you're a better 'Witness' than some shmuck who died already, how come you don't get his place? Why is getting into heaven based solely on seniority rather than something meaningful like good works, or by faith alone, like Jesus said?

JW: ...

Mormons, by the lot in my experience, tend to be better about pushing their faith on you, but one of my friends once crank-called their 800 number for a free bible (or whatever the mormons use) and talked a lot about witchcraft and develry etc. A few days later, missionaries showed up at her house and hounded her for weeks. She did everything short of a restraining order to get rid of them. Good times

A few corrections and revelations

[Maverick2219]

Taking out downtown Manhattan would not have taken 8-12 missiles. That's what MIRV is for. The delivery of multiple warheads on one missile. Spread several small warheads in overlapping patterns and you do more damage than one very large warhead right in the center. This is the reason why we (USA) tend to use 150-350kt range warheads nowadays.

It's unlikely that cruise missiles would be used to target enemy missile installations. A nuclear war would be very sudden, and naval forces might not have time to be in place. Cruise missiles fill more of a tactical role than a strategic one.

There are many different types of attacks you can launch with nuclear weapons such as counter-industry, counter-population, counter-strategic, counter-energy, etc... The meanings are pretty self explainatory.

A full on counter-strategic attack (one that's meant to take out ICBM silos, SSBN bases, bomber bases, etc..) would in the long run kill more people in the USA than a full on counter-population strike. Why is that? Think method of detonation, and resulting fallout.

When you want to take out a city you're generally going to use several smaller warheads in a pattern airbursted around the target. The fireball touches very little, and therefore very little (comparatively) fallout is created. OTOH, when you go to take out a strategic site, which is hardened you need a rather large groundburst to literally scour it out of the ground. Result is that much debris is sucked into the fireball and irradiated, and then spread downwind.

Where are the bulk of US missile bases? Which direction does the wind blow?

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Mudcathi]

It's unlikely that cruise missiles would be used to target enemy missile installations.

Did you, like, completely not hear about this little skirmish called Gulf War I?

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Maverick2219]

How many nuclear warheads did cruise missiles carry in the Gulf War? Also, how many ICBM silos were destroyed by these cruise missiles?

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's unlikely that cruise missiles would be used to target enemy missile installations. A nuclear war would be very sudden, and naval forces might not have time to be in place. Cruise missiles fill more of a tactical role than a strategic one."

You forget its not uncommon for boomers(subs) to be stationed off the respective coasts of the targets. Cruise missiles fill a strategic role, especially now that the U.S. is actually deploying a missile defense. They can come in from any direction and at low altitude so they render the U.S.'s very expensive ballistic defense impotent, at least against an enemy with cruise missiles and a way to deploy them.

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Maverick2219]

Boomers don't launch cruise missiles. They carry their own submarine launched ballistic missiles, SLBM's. Cruise missiles currently have too short a range to fill much of a strategic role.

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Lost Engineer]

Obligatory Bob Dylan quote: It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

Re:A few corrections and revelations

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't put to much stock on Gulf war I. Plenty of time to prepare and a flight time of less than an hour because Iraq isn't that big. Most US & USSR missile sites have flight times of more than 3 hours and are simply out of range.

All this terraforming is neat...

[innerweb]

... but, how are we going to get enough mass onto Mars so that it can hold onto a viable atmosphere?

InnerWeb

We cannot teraform mars. Give it up already!

[mark-t]

Mars has no magnetic field.

Without a magnetic field to help shield it, the solar wind slowly strips away the upper atmosphere, making the atmosphere thinner and thinner and thinner.

So if we try to thicken the atmosphere as part of a teraforming process, it won't do any good... the solar wind just keeps lapping it up and sending it into space, and would eventually bring it right back down to where it is right now.

It's just not worth the effort for something that wouldn't actually last.

Our duty and responsibility

[Pan T. Hose]

A post on Slashdot:

My own personal belief is that it is our duty and responsibility, not just for us but for future generations to explore and spread our seed where ever it can be sown. [...]
--
Im just a musical geek girl who cant say no.

I was thinking about our duty and responsibility and I can honestly say that I couldn't possibly agree more wholeheartedly. We definitely need more people thinking that way about spreading our seed because this is precisely the world I want to live in.

3rd world

[Donny Smith]

>Except that the Third World would likely be excluded from the nuclear war, on the grounds of having no nuclear capability and thus not being a threat, and their infrastructure (what there is of it) would thus be left intact.

What infrastructure?
Without the first two worlds, the 3rd would die off pretty soon.

Re:3rd world

[TapeCutter]

Actually they might be better off without owing the top 1/3 billions of dollars in economic servitude. Debt that was mainly incured by colonialist and corrupt regimes. Not to mention no one shooting at them for some strange idea that a drug problem requires a war?

Just ask down under...

[UnixRevolution]

If humans colonize, are the colonists on a one-way trip akin to exile?

Seemed to work for the aussies.

Re:Just ask down under...

[SuiteSisterMary]

The concept is 'pantropy,' or 'grow anywhere.'

Yes, it may very well be a one way trip. But, the idea is that the colonists will be much happier and more productive, as they're not beholden to external machines to simply survive.

Even being able to survive, say, five minutes of exposure means that you don't panic when you tear a hole in your suit; this would have, in theory, an incredible positive psychological effect.

Besides, the sort of people you want for colonization wouldn't want to come back anyway.

Of course, you're just setting yourself up for a declaration of independance, a schism between pure strain humans and the gennies, and an eventual war, but hey, what can you do?

Re:So we modify the humans rather than the planet.

[Zibblsnrt]

Its probably not ethical or even remotely possible *yet*.

"This raises ethical questions" is one of the most popular anti-genetic-engineering comments out there. It's usually worded as though the fact of the questions is a condemnation of the idea itself.

Now, I see all sorts of claims that it's not ethical, or it's immoral, or whatnot. I can sort of understand some of these; some consent issues are obvious involving children, of course, and anything else involuntary. On the other hand, if people have to be modified to cope with a certain environment, the modifications will with a very high chance of success permit them to thrive there, and the initial generation going over can give informed consent, then I see nothing wrong with the fact. (That's my primary bias right there on the issue.)

However, a lot of people talk about human genetic engineering in general and simply say "it's unethical" or "it raises ethical questions" and think that leaves it at that.

This leaves me with a mix of dissatisfaction and curiosity; dissatisfaction because people are brushing off things with no real backup behind it, and curiosity as to where these questions are hiding.

So a question, both to the parent poster and to folks in general: Assuming (this is a significant asusmption, I'll grant, but play along) that it's possible to take healthy adult humans and gengineer them into beings fit for a Martian (or whatever other) environment, assuming those adults give informed consent to the process, and assuming the process is safe, what are these ethical questions that somehow make this an idea that people should not be allowed to undergo?

You can probably assume I won't agree with them ;), but I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons. Most people talking about this sort of thing either hold opinions similar to mine or tend to talk either in terms of "eww, Nazis!" or "eww, playing God!", neither of which tend to hold much water with me. Even going so far as to take a few looks (cursory looks, I'll admit) through academic literature have come up with a mix of those and the "different from baseline homo sapiens = not human = subhuman" idea, which I find more despicable than false. What else is out there?

So really, what's the beef? Why, if no one's doing this to you, should they not be permitted to have it done to themselves or even seriously discussed?

-PS

Do you know approximately

[Kickasso]

how much energy is needed to snatch an asteroid from its orbit? Just curious.

Re:Do you know approximately

[jamesshuang]

Ug=GMm/r Gravitational potential energy- depends on the size of the asteroid and what/how far it's revolving around. To figure out the amount of energy required to move your asteroid, take the integral of that equation with the limits set between the current distance from sun and the target distance from sun. Either way, you're talking about energies far beyond the possibilities of reach...

Phillip K. Dick venusforms YOU!

[Anonymous Coward]

in The World Jones Made

(sorry, the description on this page doesn't explain what this novel is really about. summary of novel: group of dwarfs living in bubble wonder about their artificial environment. turns out they are mutants being bred to colonize venus. not one of his better novels in my opinion, but interesting that he wrote about this.)

Gerd Damn Martians Terk Our Jobs!

[Greyfox]

I would think that adding mass for gravity and assorted gasses, h2o, etc would be relatively straight forward. I mean, there's a big freaking asteroid belt right there.

Re:Gerd Damn Martians Terk Our Jobs!

[Shads]

"Well sir, we miscaclculated the trajectory, and we think that miss may hit the moon in turn propeling it into the earth..."

"nothing exceptional about them"

[bani]

I imagine 4 billion years ago there was "nothing exceptional" about the first unicellular life too.

Now imagine if some alien species had decided to terraform the earth, killing it off in the process.

Well, you wouldn't be here today to debate the issue. :-/

If there is even the simplest life on mars, then mars belongs to the martians. Period.

But it is rather likely that mars is sterile now (though it may not have always been!). Mars has no appreciable magnetic field, and because of that most of mars' atmosphere was blown away by solar winds long ago. Mars is a harsh place, even for the most extreme of earth's extremophiles.

Re:"nothing exceptional about them"

[Sj0]

Bah. If someone gave me a million dollars, my children would be billionaires(takes money to make money, and the Google IPO is coming up). If Prussia hadn't been eliminated in the war I'd be a prince right now. If a land bridge hadn't formed thousands of years ago the warlike mongols would never have invaded the americas and destroyed the multicultural civilization that was here.

To dwell on the future as if it was the past is plainly stupid. Human expansion, the spirit of discovery, and that sense of "just what's around that next bend" will never die, so we might as well do what we do best, and expand. While we're at it, take the experience and learn how to terraform the moon, or venus, or a large asteroid. Frankly, the further mankind expands, the greater our chances of survival become as a species, and the greater our chances of ever making it out of our solar system. :)

Re:"nothing exceptional about them"

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, but there would probably be some cool aliens who would be a whole lot more advanced then us, not only that, in a way they would be "earthlings" by now anyway, so, unless your only talking about modern humans, it would kind of be like getting a jump start...

I could not agree more

[SlashDread]

Thats is how life seems to work.. Think about it.. Bacteria form spores when they reach the end of the petri dish. Most bacteria will therefore survive even when the petri dish runs out.

We are running out of petri dish, and our x-prizes are our spores. Coincidence?

I think not!

We are not home save though, The Easter Islanders had a petri dish.. But they used all their wood, and Easter Island Civilization collapsed from 100.000's to a few 100 people.

So now is the question: do we get to eat the dish, before we make spores?

Seems to me there is only two usefull science goals: Earth Preservation, AND Space Exploration.

"/Dread"

Why a planet at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we bother to terraform any planet at all? There is lots of energy and raw materials in the wide spaces of any solar system to build a civilisation without the need to climb out of one and into another gravity well. All we need to do is adapt to life in space and produce shelter from what we can't adapt to. That should be much simpler than terraforming a planet.

And then what?

[XNormal]

Marsiform Jupiter? Joviform Saturn?

Engineer... engineer thy self...

[Genda]

Once we have teased the genome apart, and can say with certainty how the code in a particular part of our DNA builds a brain and how another part grows skin... we will be able to compare our morphology against all the other animals on the planet, and our biochemistry against all the other life on the planet.

Add to that the magic of anthromorphic biohybrid materials, nanotechnology, advanced materials science, DNA based assembly and construction, and the utilization of interesting new synthetic metabolic cycles, and we can pretty much engineer ourselves to live in any kind of environment.

Why change Mars one wit, when we can build human beings with everything they'll need to live and thrive on Mars just the way it currently is. This does presume that we decide that Mars is such a nice place that we should have millions or billions of us there on a long term basis.

Robotics and some level of AI, make the possibility of building human habitats on Mars in the next decade or two absolutely feasible. These habitats will be able to support hundreds or thousands of human beings who will be substantially identical to the folks that walk around on earth today (save gene therapies that protect Mars inhabitants from the rigors and health threats of low G environments.)

The point is that long term endeavors to new worlds and deep space, demand some intrinsic alterations of ourselves. To preserve that which is best in human beings, we may have to sacrafice our past, and create ourselves anew.

Genda

Re:Engineer... engineer thy self...

[sql*kitten]

how the code in a particular part of our DNA builds a brain and how another part grows skin...

DNA doesn't work quite like that. DNA only encode proteins, proteins then combine to form everything else. So, there isn't a "brain gene" that can be modified without affecting anything else, or a "skin gene" - modifying a single gene in any non-trivial way is very likely to affect the system as a whole. Grafting new features on is going to be extremely tricky, and will require massive computation to simulate it so the emergent properties are understood. Right now it can take hours to fully model a microsecond's worth of protein folding.

Re:Engineer... engineer thy self...

[SuiteSisterMary]

Think of DNA as a huge mass of undocumented COBOL spaghetti code, on punchcards. Unlabelled punch cards. Oh, and some of the punchcards are from old programs, different programs, or just happen to be in the pile.

Sure, you can rename some variables, maybe jump to some new subroutines that you mix in from your old programs, but you're still in the 'I wonder what happens if I do *this*' mode of doing it.

DEATH TOLL TOO GREAT

[inertialmatrix]

" Taking out downtown Manhattan would take 8-12 nuclear missiles. "

To say that "taking out" the island of Manhattan would take 12 nuclear missiles is patently wrong; assuming that by missiles you referring to just ONE of the warheads carried by an ICBM missile such as those on the Minuteman III.

Just one warhead from an MX or Minuteman ICBM is in the 400 kiloton range, as opposed to the 12 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan. In the case of Hiroshima, almost every building within a mile in any direction from ground zero had been substantially damaged. Remember to keep in mind that Manhattan is just 12 miles long, and 2.5 miles wide at it's widest. One also has to wonder just how many warheads would be targeted at a population center the size of Manhattan. A study done in the 70's estimating the effects of a an attack on a city such as Detroit figured that 4 soviet warheads would be directed at the city. Further more, the effects of a nuclear explosion are not relegated solely to the blast impact, but also the after affects of radiation, and fire. It is impossible to think that first responders would be at all effective in trying to contain the uncontrolled fires while radioactive ash falls on their heads. I think it is foolish to discount the effects of an all out nuclear exchange and the large cities that would inevitably be targeted... Granted, the entire land surface of the planet may not be turned to glass in an all out war. But surely millions, and millions, and millions of people would perish within the first year. So if by "missiles" you mean the actual ICBM's and their payload.. then you are talking about at least 15 megatons of nuclear hell aimed at an area just 3 miles across and 12 miles long. I highly doubt it would take that even a 10th of that many ICBM's to say that it was taken out

That said I think that your point about the world not being sterilized ten times over is valid.. but one must be careful not to underestimate the loss associated with an attack on a city with a population density that of NYC.

Mars Freaks are coming! And they are us.

[newpath4com]

Send a ark full of fishing worms to Mars. The fish will come. If the water doesn't come up to greet the fish it will be okay. The evolution thing will kick in and pretty soon the fish will breathe, walk, and call us on the phone. Once that is done they will hopefully institute my plan instead of Social Security. www.newpath4.com/marriage.htm . These new evolved beings will be much smarter than us "firsties". They'll build my steam-nitrogen engine and not pollute their planet (www.newpath4.com/steamedheatengine.html) plus they'll be highly intelligent enough to retain some of their gills so their lungs will be much stronger than ours (www.newpath4.com/newpath_newlife.html). We could have a contest to decide what to call them. Perhaps Marfish people; but of course they wouldn't like us calling them names and our first interstellar war would begin. They would design a weapon that would channel solar flare energy, direct it into a bean aimed at us oops beam. Our global warming would escalate out of control, the Marfish raising the ocean level high enough to transform the Earth into a true Marfish Water Planet Paradise (www.newpath4.com/AAINDEX/paget6.htm). End of story. Actually end of our story and beginning of theirs! But hey, so what? All hail Survival of the Fittest and Domination of the Strongest!

Mars... really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't we be learning to control our own native environment first? Try concentrating on the possible massive climactic changes very close at hand... ice age anyone? That's where MY money would be spent, screw Mars ;)

It's a common theme in science fiction.

[mrmeval]

James Blish wrote an excellent novella called "The Seedling Stars"

Body modification isn't perfected yet and still people suffer the pain. Genome modification to be able to live on Mars and be an original land owner would appeal to many.

What about nuclear winter?

[Slinky Saves the Wor]

If you went ahead and did a "full nuclear exchange" between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, the resulting dust from the explosions would create something called "nuclear winter". The dust would block the Sun, the plants would die, the dust would also move the radiating particles all around the Earth.

So for the reason of nuclear winter, the 10% feels quite low. Do you have some reference for that number?

Re:they got my respect

[Sj0]

In other words, you have to commit yourself to ignoring all forms of reality to find it? What a strange phenomenon. I'm not sure I'd LIKE to find it if that's the case!

(besides, the link in question has a whole lot of stuff where the paragraph goes on about the reasons why species evolved in a certain way, then at the end they go "and that's why evolution couldn't work and therefore god created everything you heathen scum" at the end of every paragraph. It was really disconcerting.)

How about we Terraform Earth first?

[Orion Blastar]

Fix all the damage we have done over the ages before we leave for another planet?

Re:How about we Terraform Earth first?

[Sj0]

Because after the colonialists and explorers leave, the pansy environmentalists will have free reign of the planet, and you can do all the hippy crap you want to do without us to get in the way of your crazy talk. :P

Atmosphere

[Mark of THE CITY]

some sort of air curtain that keeps an oxygen atmosphere inside

That would let you breathe, but it woudn't protect you from meteors, as Earth's atmosphere does.

Re:Atmosphere

[fiannaFailMan]

Wouldn't meteors melt on the Martian atmosphere just like they do when falling to Earth?

Forget ethics.

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is life there we shouldn't terraform it for strictly selfish reasons. Do we really want to introduce alien life into the earth environment? Think kudzu. Think gypsy moth catapillers. Think plague. Multiply by a thousand or a million. Yikes.

If there is no life there, we need a laboratory where we can practice our terraforming techniques for when we need to terraform earth. Attempts to terraform earth have mostly been dismal failures (often making problems worse than the ones that the were trying to fix).

Note: terraforming Mars, (and a dozen other planets) will never solve the population problem on earth, just provide a place to get away from it. We would need to get a quarter of a million people off earth EVERY DAY, just to break even.

Thank You Kindly.

Well documented?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the smallpox blankets are well documented... on www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.ht ml

an unbiased source if ever there was one... which after making a totally unconvincing case, at least has enough of a sense of shame to say "Some people have doubted these stories"...

I wonder how "Lord Jeff" trained the smallpox to attack natives and ignore europeans...

Importing Nitrogen

[Anonymous Coward]

Never say never. I'll admit that I haven't read The Case For Mars, but I'll bet you haven't read the Red Mars trilogy by Kim Robinson. In it, he describes how a robot is sent to a moon of Jupiter composed mostly of frozen nitrogen. The robot lands and begins constructing more robots, each of which takes a large chunk of nitrogen with it back to Mars. Sure, this system would have very high latency, but it could have as much bandwidth as we cared to give it, and eventually Mars could have enough atmospheric pressure to support life as we know it.

Mike

Interstellar diplomacy

[Rich Klein]

If we ever run into intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (not just on Mars), I don't think they'd be particularly pleased to find that we'd terraformed Mars to suit our needs. They might be okay with it, but it'd certainly be easier to get relations off on the right foot if we don't change Mars.

just TRY to get something off the list

[darth_zeth]

I read an article about how they wanted to remove the Spotted Owl from the Endangered Species list, since there are plenty of them around these days... but environmentalists threw a fit. I guess its more important to some people that NO animals are EVER harmed then just making sure there is a healthy lot of the animals...

Total Recall

[RamboCalrissian]

Mar's has a device very similar. It's in the underground tunnels in Mars, and it melts the red planet's frozen core, sending oxygen into the atmosphere.
Quatto Lives!

Overpopulation

[jprupp]

Overpopulation and pollution will not an issue in the next century since the human species are starting to balance it's relationship with the rest of the planet again.

Pollution will end through the creation of better and environmentally friendly technology. Current cars produce less emisions than cars two decades ago did. And that's just one example of less pollution through better technology.

Pollution is also a problem in the third world, where companies don't care about the environment because most of them are always in the brink of bankruptcy. Internet and computers are going to help people in the third world to become smarter and more informed and enter the global economy, leveling the playing field. Free Software will play an important role to bring the information age to these countries.

Overpopulation is only important among the poorest, because there is where the high birth rates are. Most middle-class and higher families don't have more than two children. Only poor families tend to reproduce at higher rates. As poor people become lees poor with the advent of the information age, birth rates are going to get lower.

Contrary to what many people think, this planet is becoming a better place. Never this planet has been a better place to live like it is now, and surely tomorrow it's going to be even better.

History can prove that what I'm saying is not nonsense, since we can carefully look at how our society has evolved from the past to what we are today.

James Blish's The Seedling Stars

[fbonnet]

Published in 1957, it depicts colonization of alien planets by adapted men. Sort of reverse terraforming, here called pantropy, ie spreading the human race by adapting man's body to the environment while preserving his deep human nature. Not the best SF book ever, but very interesting nevertheless.

Quote:
"You didn't make an Adapted Man with just a wave of the wand. It involved an elaborate constellation of techniques, known collectively as pantropy, that changed the human pattern in a man's shape and chemistry before he was born. And the pantropists didn't stop there. Education, thoughts, ancestors and the world itself were changed, because the Adapted Men were produced to live and thrive in the alien environments found only in space. They were crucial to a daring plan to colonize the universe."

Re:We cannot teraform mars. Give it up already!

[sploxx]

I recently heard that the power required to generate the earth's magnetic field (i.e. run the "core" dynamo) is only about 1 terawatt (not 100, as it was previously estimated).

1 terawatt is not too much. A decent nuclear plant produces 1.5GW, i.e. 0.0015TW.
So it should be possible to power a mars magnetic field with 100 scaled up reactors?
Ok, that's _expensive_. But not completely unimaginable!

It's Sir Arthur

[Graabein]

> Sir Clarke responded

It's Sir Arthur, not Sir Clarke. Get it right, will ya?

You seem to be under a very mistaken impression

[sam_handelman]

e.g. that genetic engineering is performed on adult organisms.

The course of action you propose - creating a set of genetically altered lungs and then inserting them into an already living person, is certainly ethical, in and of itself.

This assumes of course that you don't grow the genetically modified lungs in a seperate person that you then dispose of. The ethics of that are questionable to monstrous, depending on the details (how much of a person you actually grow, etc.)

However, that's not *really* how genetic engineering works ; nor in the case of something as drastic as adapting someone to live on another planet, is it likely to work that way in the foreseeable future.

Human gengineering is, for anything fairly drastic, is going to be performed on the fetus, which will then produce a child, with no input whatsoever on the genetic engineering.

A certain, probably high, percentage of monstrous birth defects are almost guaranteed. Even if nothing goes wrong with the genetic modification itself, the other effects of the changes you would make are not going to be forseeable.

Well, yes and no

[dave1g]

Yes, to a certain size. But since the atmosphere is thinner, there will be less friction therefore smaller meteors will make it to the ground while a comparable sized meteor would have burned up in Earth's atmosphere.

I still think its dumb to even consider terraforming mars until we bring it's gravity up to earth's level, that means hundreds, if not thousands, of years of asteroid impacts and space dust.

Then mars would support a thicker atmosphere and if you were really ambitious you would hold off until we had the technology to smack mars with something the size of the moon, nearly breaking it in two. Then when the combined gravity pulls the 2 masses back into a sphere ther will be a significant production of heat and mars would once again have an active magma system like earth does.

Re:Well, yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

hrm that sounds familer... isn't that how earth was formed?

Teraforming

[Shadow51]

I think it's important not to make assumptions, specially when it comes to issues like teraforming Mars or something like uninformed guesstimation of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Which is why we should investigate Mars before we try teraforming it. Of course there are limits to how much you can wait and to what extent you should study something before you can make an educated assumption. I personally doubt that there is any life on mars... But that's an uneducated guess.

Of course nothing is stopping us from teraforming some places on earth we already fucked up... Chernobyl? Sudbury?(which looks like the surface of the moon thanks to all the pollution), Bhopal?

Re:We cannot teraform mars. Give it up already!

[SuiteSisterMary]

But at what rate? Mars has an atmosphere now; it's obviously not being stripped away all that quickly. As long as you can replenish faster than it gets blown away, what's the hey hey?

Re:We cannot teraform mars. Give it up already!

[mark-t]

You are correct, it's not happening all that quickly. It's worth pointing out that we aren't going to be able to thicken the atmosphere all that quickly either (although at least initially probably faster than it is being stripped away). The problem with this is that it is like trying to rollerskate uphill. Even if you are actually able to make progress, you still expend far more energy in the process... and in this case, there's no "top of the hill" to ever reach, so you'd have to keep on expending such energy forever (and the resources on Mars that we would be using to thicken the atmosphere would eventually be depleted, so it's not something that we could keep on doing anyways).

Re:We cannot teraform mars. Give it up already!

[Paulrothrock]

What if we made a solar-windbreak that went before mars in its orbit, to block most of the solar wind and keep it from hitting Mars?

A large nuclear reactor could simply run a dynamo that would provide a magnetic field to block most of the charged particles. This would slow the rate of atmospheric leakage to a very tiny amount.

Small Pox Innoculation

[MonkeyCookie]

In the early 1700's there was a method of smallpox innoculation which involved deliberately putting ground-up smallpox scab or pus into an open wound. It usually gave the person a mild case of small pox, resulting in better resistance to the disease. This was highly controversial at the time, and wasn't completely effective. Sometimes people still died from small pox, or they contracted a worse case of small pox from the innoculation.

The first effective innoculation was discovered in 1796 by Edward Jenner, who noticed that people infected with cowpox, a mild smallpox-related disease, became immune to small pox. His cowpox-derived vaccine was far more effective than previous treatments, guaranteeing small pox immunity.

Re:Small Pox Innoculation

[spirality]

The Chinese would snort the puss from Cow Pox up their noses, again centuries before the West figured it out.

Re:Pretty stupid, eh ?

[Suidae]

Simplest and best would be to try to recreate an Earth atmosphere

I think it would be much cooler to put a miniature, electric (or nuclear) powered regenerator into the abdomen and redirect blood headed to the lungs through it. Convert the CO2 back into O2 and simple sugars (or something). Then you can use lungs in the regular atmosphere, and switch to recycling when outside. As a bonus, you could go longer between meals with the recycler, essentially running partially on electric power.

Re:Earth's ICBMs at PEAK could kill 10%...and then

[Scrameustache]

Official projections of a FULL nuclear exchange between the Warsaw Pact and NATO (i.e. all the nukes) was 10% of the world's population destroyed.

In the initial blasts or resulting from the fallout and nuclear winter?
Betting its from the blasts.

Taking out downtown Manhattan would take 8-12 nuclear missiles...

Really? Have you seen how much damage 2 planes can do? Turns out its a lot more than we all expected. The fire departments are not ready to handle the city wide fires that would be started by the heat, and the blast would have blown away all the water towers...

(contrary to left wing propoganda)

Sure, and the "official projections" you're so fond of are 100% pure unalturated truth, with no downplaying bias whatsoever! Doubleplus good!