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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."
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.
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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"
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
How Stuff Works: How Terraforming Mars Will Work
Hivemind harvest in progress..
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.
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...
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.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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
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.
Bet the guy who wrote it never thought it was also relevant to exploring Mars.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?