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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

Solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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."

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?

[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".

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......

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.

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.

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.

There is a word

[Hershmire]

It's called breeding.

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.

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: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.

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!

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...

[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.

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%

[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.

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.

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?

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!

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.