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NASA Proposes Warming Mars
hotsauce writes "The Guardian reports a NASA scientist has proposed releasing a gas on Mars to start a global warming of the planet in order to make it more hospitable for life. No word on how much traction this has amongst geophysicists. I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet."
Everyone knows that protomatter is unstable.
Shouldn't be that hard considering how good us humans are at causing global warming!
It's a virgin soil and it has to remain so : we have to much to learn about it instead of polluting it : When Mankind can prove it can live in equilibrium oni Earth, then it can spread elsewhere.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Ohh, just a few more decades and we'll have a viable test bed right here on earth.
BTW, Edgar Rice Burroughs would approve as the author of the John Carter of Mars series of books which talked about life on the Red Planet.
Ahh, just do it.
I'm sure it'll all work out.
If not - let the martians care for it - in 3005.
It's been speculated for many years to reproduce gas emissions on Mars as we do on this planet. The atmosphere was thicker on Mars then it is now; yet you have to go back to the problem that caused the atmosphere to thin in the first place. As it turns out, the core of the planet slowed down or event stop spinning causing the magnetic field to disappear.
Unless the core spins to shield the planet from the solar winds then anything done will only be temporary. The sun will simply blow off any thick atmosphere. Alas a pipe dream to teraform the whole planet unless you take some ideas from the movie Space Balls.
We're affecting this planet already, so no testing is necessary, we can screw up another one just as well.
Maybe we could ship all of them to Mars? Well worth the cost if you ask me.
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With all that methane being generated, it should warm the place up quickly
This guy is thinking big -- planet building!
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
We can't seem to get our outdated shuttles off the ground safely, or keep a permanent space staion running effectively. Is now a good time to tinker with another planet's atmosphere?
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Its likely already a dead planet... we can use it to test these new processes. What's the worst that can happen? It gets deader? Can't prove any method that complex without actual trials, I would think.
Apparently none, since we are modifying the earth in bad ways every day. Having another planet we can live on sounds like a great idea to me, since this one is becoming less habitable every day.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I guess NASA's scienticians have determined there is no life on Mars then? I can't see them killing Martian bacteria just for a little elbow room.
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Global warming the key to life on Mars
Tim Radford, science editor
Monday February 7, 2005
The Guardian
US scientists have thought up a new way to create a second home - by warming up the atmosphere of Mars.
Mars - which used to be warm and wet - has an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. But because the red planet's atmosphere is so thin, the planet is now freezing cold.
But Margarita Marinova, of Nasa Ames research centre in California, and colleagues report in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets that artificially created greenhouse gases could set the Martian climate simmering. "Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapts and proliferate on other worlds," Dr Marinova said.
"Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived."
She and her colleagues created a computer model of the Martian atmosphere, and tested it with a series of fluorine-based gases. They found that a gas called octafluoropropane could begin a process of global warming on Mars.
This would take hundreds or even thousands of years. But since the raw materials already exist there, some future space mission could start to turn up the heat in a world frozen for at least 2bn years.
#include sig.h
It's still debatable whether or not global warming can even happen with the amount of gas we are putting into the air.
And so how would you expect that to make any difference on mars? You would be have to be sure of the results to start. Until we know we are global warming here I say we hold off and not try experiments over a whole planet.
"I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet." - This is pretty ironic when you think about the way we are borking OUR planet.
And if anybody comes back with a big spidery thing attached to their faces, for ged's sake, DO NOT LET THEM INTO THE HABITAT!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?
How are we supposed to get it to stay there on Mars? If Mars could successfully hold an atmosphere, wouldn't it still have one? I was under the impression that Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field allowed radiation to strip away any gases on Mars' surface.
http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/cfm/terrabib.ht ml contains references to nearly 100 books, articles, papers, etc., on terraforming.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Yeah that too. But my initial reaction was: how much gas is needed to affect an entire planet in that way?
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I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet. We've been affecting Earth for quite some time. Hell, we're experts in global warming. Bring on Mars!
Anyone see Mars attacks? I think we shoud stay clear of that planet
"I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet." Apparently none. *coughs and points to Earth.
Excellent!
We cannot control the effects and cost of global warming on our own planet, so let's try it somewhere else and in the long run, reduce costs for earth inhabitants.
Fortunately enough, nobody yet figured out how to make PROFIT with this
Is it not just a little arrogant that we feel we can affect the entire global enviroment of a planet?
I mean as the article states , the process would take thousands of years, and even then, any simulation of the effect it would have on the planet would be sorely lacking in the kind of detail needed to make an accurate prediaction over such a timescale.
I mean let's face it, we are still not totally sure of the impact human kind is having on the enviroment here, especially in comparison to sun spots etc.
We should spread mankind to Mars. If some catastrophic event destroys Earth then should have a backup. We should first build cities on the moon, however. And perhaps let women become astronauts. I don't know about the latter though.
Uh, warming Mars up will not change its orbit.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
None, apparently, if you're one of those who thinks that the uncertain economic effects of the Kyoto accord are more significant than the uncertain environmental effects of dumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Or does conservation only apply to other planets?
I'm sure if we need it, we can get an abundant supply of gas from Uranus!
"This would take hundreds or even thousands of years. But since the raw materials already exist there, some future space mission could start to turn up the heat in a world frozen for at least 2bn years."
is this a native gas? how would they activate it?
"You get all the fun of sitting still, being quiet, writing down numbers, paying attention...science has it all."
Sounds like a job for Fat Bastard! But really... give me a break...we can barely get a rover there let alone 100 million tons of CO2
Unless the core spins to shield the planet from the solar winds then anything done will only be temporary. The sun will simply blow off any thick atmosphere.
If you're willing to wait a few million years, sure.
Blaze a trail to the New World
We already are affecting an entire planet.
And we need another one, because we kind of sort of trashed the one we have.
The New Scientist also has an article on the subject.
Isn't the gravity on Mars only something like 1/3 that of earth? Is that enough to support a breathable atmosphere? Our air here on earth is 21% oxygen, so to obtain the same partial pressure I assume we would need something like a 60% oxygen atmosphere. Wouldn't everything (including us?) be really dangerously flammable?
It's a nice idea, but it just won't work. According to the Bush administration, there is no such thing as global warming, thus we would be unable to raise the temps on Mars. ;-)
Todd
Nasa is actually considering multiple methods for heating Mars. These include: nuclear dust over the south pole (dark dust attracts sun energy which melts south pole), Methanogens (can survive Mars and produce methane), Space mirror (heating the southpole to melt), Drilling into Mars to use it's geothermal energy, and a few other even crazier ideas.
There is a lot of theories out there and some are experimental. We can't expect success on the first try so sending multiple attempts at once will most likely be NASA's approach.
Why is NASA so gung-ho about going to mars so quickly? Why not return to the moon so we can learn how to sustain our peeps closer to home?
Last one to open a burger restaurant on Mars is a sissy!
Really, I feel that Mars has _no_ life on it. We should use it to our fullest ability. Crap man, if there were LGM, they wuld have stopped by already, and for Christsakes, micro-biological life I couldn't give a rats ass about. BTW - save thing goes for eating meat, WE FUCKING WON.
Question: *Geo*Physicists? Wouldn't that be Areophysicists?
Answer: Yes, if you want to be really, really annoying...
Now, back to Terra with you, before I go all John Carter on yer ass...
Two weeks.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Somehow I suspect that whether it's right or wrong we'll feel just fine about affecting an entire planet with a minimum amount of "simulation and testing". We haven't been shy about affecting the one we live on so what makes anyone think we'll hesitate to start monkeying around with another one.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I'll laugh my ass off if we try everything we can to warm Mars up and it all fails, proving that our arrogant belief that we can really fuck the Earth up beyond its ability to flush us off its surface and recover, bringing rise to a much more humble species that doesn't try shit like that or think that it can, is flat-out wrong.
I sure hope Khan doesn't find out about this plan. Although, maybe if he does, we can send the dead scripts from Enterprise to the budding planet and resurrect a franchise ...
This is totally irresponsible work by NASA. Climate scientists should know better than anyone the lesson of our imminent climate change crisis. Human meddling with astoundingly complex systems like planetary climate is arrogant well beyond our competence, and predictable only by the law of unintended consequences. Screwing with Mars' atmosphere when we're just beginning to admit that we've already screwed up ours will nearly certainly make that planet harder to "manage" as it becomes more necessary to our human evolution. Humans thrive only in a very narrow band of climate parameters, out of a vast range of possible climates. When they spend a century shifting Mars unexpectedly into a less mutable climate stasis, that is just as inhospitable to human life as it is now, but a different configuration, it will take even more centuries to undo the damage, if even possible. We're just not ready for this kind of work, if we ever will be in the foreseeable future - and the stakes are too high to fool with.
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I don't really understand where this so called "scientists" get their mad ideas from... Moral issues aside, just in case you'd like to try, do you realize how much gas would you need? Well a lot. That means: ;) ) means defeating the planet own gravity field, then there's the trip and there's the release... mmmh... But let's go to number two
1) collecting, transporting, releasing the gas into martian atmosphere would take an incredible amount of energy. It should be debated if such energy is at our own disposal in the first place. Keep in mind: taking the gas from one planet (as we don't have nebuale in here
2) One of the reasons mars has lost most of its atmosphere is that it hasn't got enough gravity pull to withstand solar wind. Atmosphere gets (slowly that's for sure) drained away every minute. So you don't want all of your work to go wasted in space do you?
3) last but not least. Where to take the "gas"... I really hope you're not talking earth right? We already did a lot of bad things to this planet, taking away it's atmosphere is just the worst of many bad ideas. And to those thinking "hey we'll just take pollution away" let me remind you that we're talking about phisical matter. transporting mass to one object to the other.. What would that do to our planet? less gravity pull?
Anyway, why am I talking about this? it's pure nonsense. Not even science fiction.
That is impossible.
Global warming is nothing more than a fantasy cooked up by left wing kooks..
This post is definitely meant as more of a question than a statement, as I am pretty ignorant of geophysics and the like.
But could someone explain to me why scientists even consider the idea of trying to artificially create a new atmosphere around another planet, and why they think it could work?
The thing I am not understanding is that if Mars is thought/known to have had an atmosphere in the past, and doesn't anymore, clearly there are factors beyond our control that would just cause a new atmosphere to eventually disppear too, right?
The original atmosphere on Mars must have disappeared due to factors such as boiling away, not enough mass to create a strong enough gravitation field to retain it, or perhaps being blown away by solar wind because Mars does have a magnetic field like we do here to deflect it, etc. (By the way, I don't even know if these are real situations that could occur, I am just making them up as examples of things beyond our control that seem to me that logically could maybe have caused the previous atmosphere to disappear.)
So again, this is not a statement but an honest question from someone who doesn't get it- what is different about mars now than a hundred million years ago that makes scientists think it would work now?
4 out of 3 people have trouble with fractions
It's a long way from here :)
There's a huge difference between NASA proposing warming Mars and a NASA scientist making the same proposal. While I'm on the topic of this stupid title, it's "NASA", not "Nasa".
A Kim Stanley Robinson (SF writer) short story which he later expanded into 3 novels (Red/Green/Blue Mars).
Covers this is a believeable and seemingly plausible way...
One of my all-time favorite SF series, right next to the Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson and the original Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I can't see them killing Martian bacteria just for a little elbow room.
Have you thought of the possibility that warming up the planet would save whatever lifeforms might be left on Mars from complete extinction.
This was reported in the movie Total Recall years ago! We just need to get Arnold there to turn on the alien machinery under the surface to melt the ice and produce breathable air in minutes!
so.. we start global warming on Mars.. next thing we know, the Martians attack!
I bet yeh they haven't thought about that yet..
If Mars can be made to look anything like Frank Cho's vision, I'm all for it.
NSFW
(scroll down for Dejah Thoris drawings)
I drank what? -- Socrates
Why is something "virgin" and untouched by man so intrinsically superior to something that humanity has made use of somehow?
If you can't answer these questions on your own you're nothing more than an uninformed sock puppet for someone else's viewpoint.
So whens the global vote on this gonna be? There _is_ going to be a global vote on this right? Ya know democracy and stuff?
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Get your Ass to Mars!
Whether the sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars series: Red Mars,Green Mars, and Blue Mars) was right.
His prediction: terraforming Mars can lead to widespread civil war on Mars. His series, both gripping and amazingly well researched and thought out, appears more and more prescient as NASA's Mars plans begin shaping up. His timeline is pretty close to what's developing, too.
If you're interested in this stuff, these are a good read, btw.
send up some cows
I say the heck with it and fire up the Tera forming equipment. No body lives there so I say we plant an earth flag on it and call it ours. In a couple of hundreds years we'd have a nifty second home. Besides if there were any intelligent life there and they couldn't stop our Tera forming equipment..... well they must not be to intelligent.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
"I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet."
None, for sufficiently small values of "we"
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
Total Recall...
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this ... Any discussion on terraforming Mars should begin with the ideas in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Reasonably good fiction (not great though) but his scientific background to the story is very carefully thought out and, as far as I can tell, pretty accurate. The account of what happens when a space elevator falls down is amazing...
I say "LET 'ER RIP!"
Planets hospitable to humans is a good thing.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
You're speaking in ignorance.
Solar output correlates better with global climate change than does CO2.
Do a little googling. One example: stanford.edu
Don't bother giving my what ever phony story you have. I've heard them all and I've seen the real data.
Translation: poster's belief is not scientific and fact-based, but ideological and faith-based, therefore additional facts will NOT be considered. Any data that disagrees with poster's preformulated conslusions will be denied as a Papist Plot ...er.... anti-Muslism heresy ...wait... Communist propaganda...got it! ... "right wing lies".
So, Anonymous Coward, if you've seen all the "real data", please give your cutting one sentence rebuttal of the Stanford reference above.
Not much, apparently, judging by what we have done and are doing to this planet.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Does this mean the galactic recession is over? Or are they just building Earth Mark II for the mice?
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
And for some more backround I recommend reading How Stuff Works' How Terraforming Mars Will Work
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Clearly, none at all. We have done no simulation and testing prior to affecting our own planet; why would we for any other?
www.wavefront-av.com
When are you people going to learn that we should invariably modify and control the places that we discover as soon as it is technically feasible to do so, resulting in an eventual conflict with a vastly superior race of aliens who then take it upon themselves to erradicate mankind, most notably for our retention of nuclear weapons. Come on... I've seen enough science fiction movies to know that this is just the way that things work.
Getting back to what really should be done, this might not be a bad way to go about things once we have harvested what information we can from the planet in its current virgin state. We're eventually going to set out to do this to planets that we encounter as we colonize space, so why not start close to home?
As much as I hate to admit it, science may end up merely serving as a tool for the propagation of our species and financial interests. Being given time to explore Mars before someone else takes the initiative to begin modifying it is quite a luxury. When a fiscally sound argument can be made for colonizing Mars, regardless of the destruction involved, keeping people from it will be a nearly impossible task.
What are the consequences if we fuck it up?
It's only irresponsible if we fuck something up that leads to some harm. The only thing we can harm is the "virginity" of the planet.
If we need to inhabitate Mars at some point in the future, it may very well make more sense to start now than to wait until we're good and truly fucked.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
are you serious? Of course it matters even if there isn't life on Mars - if any mistake was made, then the planet would turn into a Venus or like Hosk in Star Wars. It might take thousands of years to undo that kind of damage.
Besides, who knows what kind of fossel record would be being destroyed by exposing the planet to natural weather forces again.
Oh, apparently the earth isn't habitable any more and nobody bothered to tell me. Give me a break. There is no life-ending catastrophe even on the most distant horizon. Even if global warming were true for example (which it's not) there would be consequences but the planet would not be rendered uninhabitable for many hundreds or thousands of years.
The Earth is a much more resilient place than people give it credit for. I'll believe the sky is falling when I see it.
uh... correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to get it down into the martian atmosphere, we'd have to lift it up through ours.... on a flaming roman candle...
Assuming that stuff is as powerfull as they say, that it can raise Mars's temp imagine what it could do to ours...
can you say "oops"?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
This is a wonderful idea. At some point, we will need to look for other places to live as resources are needed. Additionally, if we have a second planet, we may be able to afford to have a huge growth in population.
The fact is, it is dangerous to have all of mankind located on only one planet. What if this planet is destroyed with a meteor? The race ends!
Ad Astara!
has proposed releasing a gas on Mars.
And thus I propse Capricorn Two: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. With such pompous windbags wandering the surface of Mars, honest-to-goodness, intelligent life might eventually come into being.
GM shares went up when it revealed its plan to rename the Hummer SUV as the Hummer TFV, or TerraForming Vehicle.
"We've been warming up the Earth with this thing since it came out. We're sure it's up to the task of warming up Mars.".
The Hummer range is formed of the H1, for gas giants, H2 for M-class planets and H3 for "smaller, neighbourhood-style planets".
You just need to activate the alien device and the whole atmosphere will change in like two seconds! (Total Recall... gotta love bad Sci Fi movies)
It's still debatable that the Bible is literal truth, stories meant to guide morality or fabricated entirely, just to placate and control the populace.
You just can't test those statements because it ain't science, it's theology and philosophy.
The proposed idea for attempting to 'Turn up the Heat' on Mars is called a scientific theory, based upon our existing knowledge and is something that could be tested, even if the results of the test won't be known in our lifetime. Do we know what will happen? Scientists have a good idea about what would happen, but we won't know for sure until someone gives a go at it.
Just like all other scientific advances, until it was done succesfully the first time, there is no way to know whether or not something that was never done before will work or fail. If everything science was performed simply because scientists were 'sure' of the results, our society wouldn't exist.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than microbes' and yet as mortal as our own; that as microbes busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a microbe with a really small microscope might scrutinise the really really small transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a speck of permafrost. With infinite complacency microbes went to and fro over this globe about their really little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the really really small microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of microbe danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most Mars-estrial microbes fancied there might be other microbes upon Earth, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the rocks that pretty much just sit there, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Mars with envious photophilic sensors of some kind, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
When Mankind can prove it can live in equilibrium oni Earth, then it can spread elsewhere.
Huh? That's suicidal. How about: until we prove we can live in equilibrium on a planet, we must spread elsewhere.
By the way, living on a planet for geolocially long periods of time will require geologic action, not misguided, pristine inaction.
There has been no evidence of existing life on Mars. There is probable evidence of previously existing life on Mars.
If the former is incorrect, then we will in effect, improve the survival of an obviously endangered species.
If the latter is incorrect, then we will do no actual harm to the planet.
Before anyone goes into PETA/Greenpeace "Humans bad, nature good!" mode, consider this: At least 1/3 of the animals humans have cultivated as livestock and pets would probably have gone extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, if we didn't come up with a convenient excuse to carry them around with us. Therefore it's very likely that humans have, in fact, preserved more species than driven into extinction.
Hell, just keeping housecats around a hundred years longer kept most of Europe from completely dying off from the bubonic plage, and those are descended from the African wildcat (a relatively endangered species, but close relative).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I see we've found Ann Claybourne - anyone willing to play the role of Sax ??
Explain to me how STUDIES are irresponsible? It's not like they are on their way right now with their greenhouse gas factories.
What is irresponsible is not to think about it until it's too late.
Thanks for the ERB link. I loved those books!
That will get global warming going in a hurry.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Yeah, because if we screw it up, we might turns mars into an inhospitable desert!
Oh wait.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
No problem, ship over a couple of old Ford LTD's, a few Monte Carlo's, Detroit will have Mars choking on air pollution in no time
hack a day
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Absolutely none. I feel perfectly safe with anything we can possibly do to Mars as far into the foreseeable future as possible.
You know why?
I don't live there.
That gives you a lot of room for experimentation.
Mars' only value to me, other than scientific curiosity, at this point in time is as a future liveable planet. Which value can only be realized by terraforming. Therefore any terraforming plan which seems at all likely is not only "safe" from my perspective, but "valuable" as well.
My only caution is one I tell my project manager when we're moving code into production; have a rollback plan, just in case.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
A good time to tinker with another planet's atmosphere is when you know what you're doing. Think ahead: what if we tinker and blow it so badly that the planet isn't useable for when we really need the room?
Anyways, the point is moot. We can't afford to remediate polluted areas here on earth. Where would we get the resources to fix up another planet?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
which is how he came to warn us about global warming in the first place?
Send republicans. They are doing a great job ensuring that Earth stays roasty-toasty, imagine what they can do with a planet that doesn't have a liberal media.
We need a backup Earth for the eventual asteriod/alien invasion/global Tsunami/killer solar eruption that will eventually happen.
Then begin boaring through the suraface looking for ancient ruins. Then lay soil for plantation and plant. Mars as far as I know has a more stable crust so Earthquakes and tsunamis would be far less of a problem. Of course trees will grow differently with different gravity so we might have to genetically engineer them to grow against smaller gravitational force.
But then again, our prime directive is profit at any cost.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Perhaps someone should let the person who came up with idea, the person who wrote the article, and the person who submitted the article, that the idea of terraforming has been kicked around in one form or another by plenty of people. Heck, did none of these people even watch Arnold Schwarzenager do it in Total Recall? We could also probably save the "scientist" who came up the idea a little embarrassment if we let him know right now that flourine compounds aren't breathable.
Someone should also let the multitude of people out there who refuse to click on the article before crying "global warming is bad" that this isn't something NASA is planning on putting in their next budget and would take centuries anyways.
Is that if some huge comet or asteroid containing billions and billions of tons of water, oxygen and CO2 suddenly crashes on Mars, generating enough heat to start a chain reaction that would terraform it in less than a few decades.
But that ain't happening, so I guess we'll have to stick to the good ol' city domes.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet
It's funny how they're talking about radically changing another world but thing that astonished me the most was the proper use of "affected" instead of "effected" in a Slashdot post.
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on venus?
i'm not joking, it seems to me that it would be energetically MORE feasible to cool things down in venus's atmosphere than it would be to heat things up in mars, and probably take less time too
to heat mars up, you would need a significantly denser atmosphere... where is that coming from?
while on venus, you just need to precipitate certain things out of the already dense atmosphere
it is easier to remove something already there than to introduce something that isn't there
of course, cooling down venus or heating up mars are both huge undertakings
it just seems to me that the thermodynamics of cooling down venus presents an easier challenge in comparison
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Install cell phone towers everywhere. We've already proven we can cover every d@mn square meter of this planet with them!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
A much more difficult task than terraforming Mars, conceptually, is terraforming Venus.
Sci-fi authors have often implemented plot devices such as impacting ice-laden comets or moons into Venus to cool it, supply water, and spin it up; however this is fundamentally flawed, as the problem the amount of CO2. Furthermore, impacting a comet or moon will impart more energy than it would soak up. Now, perhaps with a large enough impact you could blast away part of Venus's atmosphere; however, this would need to be a very significant impact. Hypothetically, a large near-impacting body that skims Venus's atmosphere repeatedly might be able to take some atmosphere with it on each pass; however, it seems unlikely that you could ablate enough atmosphere in this manner while using a body small enough to control.
Sagan proposed the use of microbes in the atmosphere to absorb the CO2 and precipitate it out, but this suffers from one big fundamental problem: life as we know it requires CHONP, and there's no significant quantities of phosphorus in Venus's atmosphere. Perhaps a simpler form of "life" or nanomachine - even if not self-replicating, but simply mass produced on Earth - could use solar energy to convert CO2 to solid compounds.
In theory, if Venus could be driven into a very elliptical orbit (causing close passes to the sun), the sun would blow off most of its atmosphere. Or, if Venus could be given an extremely fast rate of rotation, the atmosphere could be made to expand to the point where the solar wind can blow it off easily. However, apart from the length of time for the sun to remove the atmosphere, both of these require imparting incredible amounts of energy to the planet.
Another concept has been to use gigantic sunshades to block sunlight approaching the planet; however, planet-sized shades seem a bit far-fetched to build. An alternative that I've seen would be to use gigantic mirrors to focus solar energy on a small part of the upper atmosphere and use the light pressure to encourage particles to reach escape velocity; whether or not this is realistic, I don't know.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
That'll warm it up!
Has anyone ever noticed that the human experience is much like human evolution?
(1)Birth (of course)
(2)Growth, nurturing, education.
(3)Attempt to change living environment to suit.
(4)Success or failure, learning from experience or not, adapting accordingly.
(5)Depending on (4), continue living, and eventually die, or die horribly on failure.
On a planetary basis, it reads as the following:
(1)Earth
(2)Mars
(3)Venus
(4)Io
(5)Europa
Each of these celestial bodies present the same challenge our evolutionary ancestors had to adapt to.
Earth: This is where we learn, dealing with our mistakes, learning how to break or fix the system.
Mars: Too thin in the air and water department.
Venus: Too toxic an environment and pressure, but damnned it if ain't like Earth otherwise.
Io: The moon that provides a good excuse for interplanetary industry.
Europa: The real terraforming objective, one that could teach way more than expected.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Wouldn't the gravitational spin of Mars which causes high temperature fluctuations be a big constraint? How would that be addressed?
Uh, and the risk would be what? That Mars would become uninhabitable?
So... how do they propose doing this? Opening a bunch of Mexican restaurants on Mars?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
This should be a raving success. I mean, look at how successful we are at warming up the Earth!
Troll? Hell yeah!
if they didn't have political clout.
It is the nature and calling of mankind to make the desert bloom.
But one scientist does a study on one way to terraform Mars, to make it more like it is every 83,000 years or so, and instantly the Luddites who hypocritically use computers and the internet, jump up and shout 'No', as if they were unable to understand that this is one paper, not a mission facing budget allocations in Congress.
There are a number of other astounding misconceptions in this thread. Ever been to western Kansas? I thought not.
We can't live on it now, if we scre up, we've lost nothing.
Anyway, why does anyone care about mars so much? What about cooling down venus? Same size and gravity as earth (almost) it would make a much better second planet.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
When you consider that using the nuclear bomb on humans(!) required only one test, doing "something" to MARS is a no brainer!
We are told that the Earth's magnetic field shields us from cosmic radiation. Even if we could give Mars a thicker atmosphere and warm it up, we'd still have to wear factor 3000 sun cream to go for a walk.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
So why isn't the US bringing democracy to Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Nepal, or North Korea?
There are two answers:
Except China, of course. I don't think we really want them to have democracy, because then they wouldn't work for slave wages to build all the cheap crap we buy, or let us sell them a bunch of our crap either. But the rest of those are fair game, probably Iran first, then Saudi Arabia. I bet "they" would hate us a lot less in the Middle East if we quit propping up tyrants like the Saudi royal family.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
There is no "crisis". There are cyclic variations in climate, with or without human influence. Human activity may have some amplifing effect on those cycles, but not to the degree that you are hysterical about.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
the best bet would be to just send a bunch of our factories over to mars and in a few decades mars will be as hot as hell.
An earlier plan was published by the AAS.
See:
Terraforming Mars With Four War-Surplus Bombs (AAS 97-384), Robert Alan Mole p.231 of (Volume 92, AAS Science and Technology Series, Part II: Base Building, Colonization and Terraformation, 1997)
This assumed the polar caps were mostly CO2 rather than H2O (Don't know if that is still the thinking) and that by setting the bombs off under the caps it would put enough dust and sublimated CO2 into the atmosphere to start a runaway greenhouse effect.
I don't understand the objections that worry about the health effects on Mars.
The martians aren't Americans and probably aren't even christians.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
"I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet."
Exactly how much attention has been paid to affecting OUR ENTIRE PLANET!!!!! Simulation and testing indicate that we need to shape up now and we are effectively stonewalling the entire mess.
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Easy answers: Simulation, between little to none. Testing: exactly none.
After all, when humans go about releases gases that effect THIS entire planet, they hardly ever simulate the results beforehand. And, redundant experimental planets being somewhat pricey to acquire, they never test the changes beforehand either.
Haven't we been testing on this planet for years?
--QTone
Perhaps if we hone our methods of pollution here we can use them for the good of man kind, a line every oil tycoon can use.
"We aren't in the oil business, we are in the business of testing pollutants in efforts to terraform inhospitable planets!"
Yeah right. I think it would be easier to find a way to reduce emissions on Venus and also will teach us something about reducing them on Earth, after all one day Earth will probably resemble Venus, except nobody will be around to take pictures and discuss the searing temperatures and lack of life as we understand it. And furthermore just because we view Mars as inhospitable, there may be life such as there is in the Challenger Deep in forms of single celled organisms measured in microns rather than cms.
It's not our given right to ruin one planet, much less two just for our own greed and so we have a place to run when we screw up Earth.
If we ruin the Earth's atmosphere, there's no way we'll ever be able to create a liveable atmosphere on a seperate planet, when we can't even manage a currently existing liveable atmosphere.
Any Mars atmosphere change should be put on hold until we can control the Earth's atmosphere, it's fun to speculate and create a fairy tell of warming Mars, but we need to find a way to control the atmosphere of Earth that is already reaching higher temperatures. How are we going to lower Mars' temperature if it gets too hot? It is NASA, hopefully they don't get celsius and fahrenheit mixed up in their experiments.
[cx]
I have no problem with that,
There is (other) life on this planet and we have no problem altering this planets atmosphere,
but...
I would not mind to study the subject further as I am not convinced of human intelligence/intentions/capabilaties
And why are people moaning about "precious life" in mars?
Life in Iraq isn't much precious according to Amerikans, so why care about life on mars;
Make it a habitable world so Amerikans can leave and rule a world in peace!
This is a good comment. Much better than the parent's overrated comment.
Of course this is going to raise the pro- vs. anti-development arguments to try to claim we should do such-and-such for the good of mankind and animals and plants and life, or not do it.
But, like genetic engineering, it is inevitable: humans will become increasingly engineered on the genetic level, that the living space of man will expand to every corner of the earth and beyond..this is our destiny.
But politics will control WHICH humans will do it, who will be the perfect beings, who will conquer Mars, and at what point will a war with Earth break out?
Being anti-genetic engineering or anti-Mars-colonization is like being anti-gun or anti-drug: forces bound to lose because of the great advantages that a sole user of the technology will have, and their power as a group will be unstoppable, whether they are an organized force or not.
I'd really like to expound on this and probably correct some of my wording, but Slashdot isn't generally a place for well-though-out arguments.
The warming temperatures will revive the hibernating eggs of a 40-foot tall, superintelligent species that will enslave Earth.
Arnold Schwarzenegger will get his butt kicked by Sharon Stone. THAT'S HAWT!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
More hospitable for human life, but what about forms of life that need the colder atmosphere? Doesn't it seem likely that the conditions of life on Earth are just right for the type of life that exists on Earth?
"Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived."
And will more than likely destroy any life that has managed to survive undiscovered for the past "2bn years". But hey, who am Ito argue with progress...gotta build that new interestellar highway.
You gas my planet and I'll gas yours with Cyclone-B.
Stay off my turf.
-- Nuggets: Your free SMS search engine for the UK
Earth to Hemos! What do you mean, "I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet."? We're already doing it on THIS planet.
as the next gen of Mars Rovers. Hummer would get great pub and the Hums would definitely help warm the atmosphere.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
Poof! Who needs Florida?
Im putting my reservation in at the Gustev Hilton first thing tommorow. http://foxcheck.org/story/2005/2/6/205459/0835 (posted 14 hours ago) :)
Mars is likely still volcanically active, and there are regions of Mars with very significant magnetic fields. The atmosphere was probably mainly lost due to the major Hellas impact, as well as the numerous other large, atmosphere-expelling impacts.
Mars is also presently in an ice age. There are several Milankovich type cycles in the Martian orbit and axial tilt, every so often, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of geophysical years, Mars get like what terraforming would make it into. Martian life, should it exist, probably subsists in spore form between these springs when one pole is continually pointed at the Sun, and the ice melts and snows on the equatorial highlands, forming glaciers and lakes. Then as the equator starts getting more sun, they melt, providing streams and rivers, perhaps under a covering of ice.
The Martian core is probably not the main issue, certainly not a show-stopper.
Seems to me that people will generally come in 3 categories.
1) Will always be afraid to mess with it.
2) Will always be gungho about messing with it.
3) Will form an opinion based on a detailed analysis of evidence.
I would guess that less than 1% of people will be in category 3 (for anything really, when was the last time YOU read an academic paper or two before forming an opinion on something not directly related to your job), and probably a lot less than 1%.
So, for public opinion you should ask: Which category is more populous and vocal, 1 or 2.
And for govt. policy you should ask, will the cat 3 people be able to be heard over 1 and 2.
Same old problem really.
If Mars were terraformed and settled, wouldn't that lead to political strife? Talk about an 'us' and a 'them'. Who gets to settle Mars? Who decides on immigration policy, the US? The UN? Who is the police? What are the police powers derived from?
I think we need to get affairs on Earth straightened out first.
Best regards.
After Sundays Super Bowl chili, Im releasing enough gas to alter any climate.
How do you get funding for man-made climate change from a congress that doesn't believe in man-made climate change?
Nobody is really going to terraform Mars with greenhouse gases. But if you get people to accept the argument that greenhouse gases can cause global climate change, you win the political argument that it can, or does happen here. It forces the question quite handily.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
As seems to be increasingly the case, I already submitted (rejected) variants of this story twice over the past week. I've pasted one of those variants below, which has links to sources far more information than the freakin' Guardian:
Greenhouse gases could breathe life into Mars
MSNBC, New Scientist and PhysOrg report on research by Margarita Marinova and others on using synthetic greenhouse gases to warm the Martian atmosphere and create the conditions for life to thrive. The study focused on fluorine-based gases (dubbed "super-greenhouse gases"), which would be non-toxic, nearly 10,000 times as effective at capturing heat as CO2, and could be made from Martian resources. The research concluded that adding 300 parts per million of these gases would lead to a feedback effect by unfreezing CO2 and water on the surface. According to Marinova, 'Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further.' The feasibility and consequences of such terraforming have been debated in the past.
Also, note that contrary to the accepted submission's title, NASA hasn't done any sort of proposal of actually doing this. This is simply cool research exploring a very interesting "What-if".
We should test this out on Earth first!
We only have to modify Mars enough to support the genetically modified verions of ourselves in the future.
Every massive gas release I've attempted has increased the temperature of the environment, but damned if I'd want to live there...
To warm Barsoom, all we have to do is locate the Atmosphere Plant and fix whatever has been damaged. (There's a few regions which had their own local plants, so maybe if we locate all of them, we can MacGyver something out of all the parts.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've studied this extensively and can tell you that Governator Arnold can set up an atmosphere on Mars in just a few minutes. I totally recall watching this happen.
Can we please send more probes and people there first? Give the scientists fifty years or so, build a picture of the original Mars so we understand it all first.
Then go wild. Creating a new Earth would be a huge achievement, but it'd be a shame to destroy the place before we knew the first thing about it.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
This one.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
REAL geeks use more effective means :).
I just can't grok what the point of that would be!
Does the good ol US of A have the authority to terraform Mars? Don't other countries have a right to object ?
This article is reporting about a paper published in the "Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets". That means it's just an academic paper, not a proposal for NASA funding. These are two totally different things.
Whenever people publish papers about new drilling technology, you don't see people getting all "Drilling Mars is a BAD idea!"
Margarita Marinova (who is apparently a recent MIT graduate) is simply discussing this as an academic paper.
related googled stuff.
The quote was from a British newspaper, and in the UK that's how you write acronyms: Qango, Nasa, Nato; but BBC, EU as you spell those out so they retain the caps.
Margarita Marinova (the primary researcher) isn't a "Dr.", she's a (first-year?) graduate student at Caltech. Part of what's impressive about this work is that she primarily did it when she was still an undergraduate. I think I heard from someone else that she even started doing this when she was in high school.
Yeah, that's right, you're a LIAR. The Bush admin has never denied the existence of global warming.
Has the Bush admin ever acknowledged the existence of global warming?
>>It is the nature and calling of mankind to make the desert bloom.
Unfortunately, some of mankind seems to want to burn up the planet without any thought for its future or for the welfare of other humans or other species.
Ah: there's no global warming here on Earth, but NASA is proposing we cause it on Mars. Now I get it!
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Since Mars doesn't have a spinning molten core, it has no magnetic field, which helps to block out cosmic radiation. Terraforming the atmosphere isn't quite enough.
http://www.useu.be/Categories/ClimateChange/Climat eChangeBush11June01.html
Date : June 11, 2001
Bush Speech on Global Climate Change
President Bush, emphasizing that climate change has the potential to impact every corner of the world, has called for the establishment of national initiatives to study the causes of global warming and to develop technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In a speech delivered in Washington June 11 before departing on a six-day trip for talks with European leaders, Bush said that his administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change, and that the United States will continue to work with nations around the world to find an effective and science-based response to global warming.
What if the rocket has a bad launch and it crashes and earth gets all that warming gas. we all gonna get fried!
At a given temperature, a gas has a certain pressure and root mean speed (norm of velocity from its kinetic energy). (A bit of calculation can show it to be (3kT/m)^(1/2), where k is Boltzmann's constant, T is temp in Kelvin, and m the gas molecule's mass.)
If the root mean square of the gas is comparable to the escape velocity (2GM/R)^(1/2), the the majority of the gas will only stick around for a few days (if v_{esc} / v_{rms} is around 1), or maybe a few years. In fact, for the majority of the gas to be retained by the planet for several billion years, we need v_{esc} / v_{rms} around 10 or more.
It turns out that v_{esc} / v_{rms} for Mars for most gases is too low. Water, ammonia, and methane, as well as helium and hydrogen are too light to be retained for long. (Although it turns out that water is just a bit too light, so it might stick around for thousands or millions or years.) However, it does appear oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide might be just heavy enough to be retained.
This means that if there had ever been a significant amount of liquid water on Mars, it would not have stuck around long. CO2, and O2, on the other hand, have a shot. (So I guess we could design a breathable atmosphere, but water would be a problem.)
Interestingly enough, these figures change (for the worse) if temperature increases on Mars (increases the kinetic energy of the gases), so making Mars more hospitable, temperature-wise, may make it less long-term hospitable, desirable molecule-wise.
I got a lot of this info from my undergrad astronomy/astrophysics text: Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics, 4th ed, by Zeilik and Gregory. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Probably not much, since there is pretty much nothing we can do to Mars that would be unsafe, unless it turns out that there are intelligent, technologically advanced Martians who get really pissed off at us for mucking with their planet. :-)
Here are some thing wrong with this story, and the way /. handled it:
/. called it, or even a proposal by the scientists involved. It's a study; no one is proposing to terraform Mars.
1. The notion of terraforming Mars isn't exactly new.
2. This short and incomplete report would be comfortable in a tabloid, not in the broadsheet Guardian, a left-wing UK paper funded by a left-wing UK foundation to promote left-wing ideology. (Nothing wrong with being left-wing, or right-wing, but it helps to know who's paying for the news you're reading.)
3. This is not a NASA proposal, as
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
We don't consider that "natural" today because we have a value system that says that (in very general terms) genetically different human life is equal to our own.
To return to the central point - it is "natural" that we breed and consume to the very edges of our planet's - or any other planet's - capacity. But, as Kim Stanley Robinson would point out, even if there is no life on Mars (and the search for life would have to be extremely thorough before we attempted any large-scale climate change there) there is still value in Mars' natural geography, just as there is granduer in the Grand Canyon that would be spoiled by the "natural" addition of a hydroelectric dam.
So lets nuke the bitch!
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
the question: What right do we have to do this? Are we saying that we have right to all celestial bodies in the solar system?
I am starting the People Unified to Stop Science In Extraterrestrial Settings. Join today to help us stop this senseless disregard for possible microbial life on Mars! Life is life and we must preserve it to the end!
We have the opportunity to inspect Mars as it is now, and to study its evolution. Why should we try to cover Mars's real history with our planned activity?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Where is Star Trek II when you need it? We just fire a Genesis device in a torpedo at Mars. Yes, yes, eventually the planet will explode due to the instability of the design, but its a lot more plausable than releasing gases on Mars. Its going to take more than a few farts on Mars to produce enough gas to effect anything.
We can make Mars like Earth when we're done making Earth like Venus.
Let's try to focus here, people.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I wonder how much simulation and testing you need before we feel safe about affecting an entire planet.
Probably Lots
I suggest we try it on a planet where nobody lives - like MARS for instance...
One of the moons of Mars is spiralling inward to eventually crash into the planet. They should just hasten it. For 2 reasons, the black minerals will increase the absorbed sunlight. 2ndly, when people do inhabit the planet, no one will want a doomsday moon crashing in on them!
We found it. It didn't have anyone's name on it.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Caring, Loving Individuals Trying to Take Over Rocks In Space
only downside is the acronym...
(idea stolen from Red Dwarf)
Why not expend a fraction of that energy and build a large space platform. Large enough to accomodate teeming billions, with a climate that is built from the ground up to be hospitiable for human life.
I like the idea of a massive ring with an air dam.
Run out of room? Build another.
If solar activity is getting you down, apply a massive impulse and take a ride to another solar system. You wouldn't care if the trip took 100,000 years if civilization came along for the ride.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Rush Limbaugh is broadcasting on Mars?
Some settling may occur during posting.
Klingon: I want the genesis!
Kirk: The Genesis is min! I saw the other day "The day after tomorrow" and we need another planet to live!
ajf
Up till that point we lived in harmony with Mother Nature! ;)
Anyway, it always amuses me when the lunatic fringe of the East Coast greens start ranting about dams. Before Europeans came to North America, the streams on the fall line were all heavily impounded by beavers.
When the settlers hunted the beaver to extinction all the way to the Rockies to cash in on the beaver hat craze (I kid you not - look it up) the millers moved in, and built dams and mills like mad for about 300 years.
Now the loonies are on an "all dams are bad" crusade, ignoring the fact that the local flora and fauna are adapted to water impoundment, and turning all our streams into water accelerators aimed at the ocean would clearly be a worse evil.
Modern impoundments with coanda wedge-wired intakes leading to small-scale hydro generators would be a boon to the local ecology.
Considering we don't have any efficient means to even get to Mars, and there were many issues just getting a small space craft there, shouldn't we not even consider this until we have a way to get there?!
Given the chance they'd kill all of us for our wine, water and women. I say wipe them out now before it's too late!
...were so, we are not gods. And before anyone jumps on my back and says that we need to experiment with this stuff before we get it right, keep in mind that the same could have been said about the experiments that the Nazis did on humans in the hopes of finding cures to various ills as well. I think we would do better to simulate this for the next few centuries in software until we're almost 99.999% sure that our plan would work correctly without negatively impacting the rest of the universe.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Meanwhile the aliens are waiting until we colonize another planet before initiating First Contact... "don't they realize that planet is dead?...they've had that rover there a year...they're so good at wiping out species on Earth, why worry about Mars..."
For an entertaining discussion of methods of terraforming Mars and the politics that go with them, see Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996) Kim Stanley Robinson, which scored a Nebula and two Hugos.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Octafluoropropane is an odorless halocarbon that meets all requirements of a greenhouse gas: unreactive to OH and ozone, does not photodissociate from either UV or visible light, is insoluble in water, and absorbs in the infrared spectrum.
If the compound does not photodissociate, then will it not form a perpetual cover of green house gases. While this is exactly what the scientists which to achieve in the initial stages, once the planet returns to a habitable temperature, this will raise the temperature further which may result into the temperature becoming way to hot and thus unsuitable for creatures like humans. In other words only chemosynthetic microbes and low level organisms would be able to survive.
From the same Post article about the August report:
Bush in 2001 was still repeating the conservative mantra on this topic: we don't know how much change is due to natural fluctuations, etc. Now the administration says that we've got evidence it's happening, and that we need to study it. Now THERE is the sort of moral courage that gets a man re-elected by turning on vulnerable minorities...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Why does Mars lack phosphorus? Could it be added?
On a slightly related note, why not fight global warming by creating a eutrophic situation in the earth's oceans. Seed it with a little bit of iron, maybe some other nutrients. You'd just need only trace amounts of certain nutrients to get a huge algal bloom. It would suck CO2 from the air, and probably do wonders for Atlantic fishermen as well.
The rewards for fishermen would probably be even greater in an enclosed body of water like the Mediterranian.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Three hurricane paths intersect in single season. Never happened before.
South Atlantic's first hurricane? Probably never happened before.
1977 U.N. treaty banning military created earthquakes and tsunamis. Isn't that interesting.
However, I know from experience that disagreeing with the premises of a Slashdot story means this comment will remain at 1 or below. Yeah, reframing the argument is probably off topic on the post-911/idiotized Slashdot.
You can't argue against terraforming Mars even on a religious basis. Here's what Genesis says:
27So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
29And God said, "See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. 30Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food"; and it was so.
God said "Fill the earth and subdue it". We have dominion over everything. I think we can expand that idea to other planets without too much angst.
Of course, it would be nice if we didn't pollute everything and/or blow it up in the process, but what the hey.
I think we should just go ahead and do it. I mean, nobody lives there. It's got to be a better idea then testing nuclear devices in the middle of the ocean, or other things which destroy our own planet. Maybe they can even use their findings to make earths air breathable after we destroy it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
it won't work. in order to heat mars, you need a denser atmosphere with water vapor. Mars doesn't have enough gravity (it's big, but it ain't dense) to hold on to a dense atmosphere. Mars had an atmosphere like earth's early on in it's lifetime, but the atmosphere evaporated off the planet (warmer air molecules reach escape velocity much easier during thermal collisions). the more the atmosphere evaporated, the lower the pressure, causing water on the surface to evaporate into the air, making it warmer, making it easier for the lighter air molecules (N2, O2, mostly) to escape the planets gravity by getting warm enough to reach escape velocity, lowering the pressure again in an endless cycle that lead to mar's present condition
That's truly funny. If I only had mod points!
Great observation. Where's the Galactic Bypass?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
One should simply hit Mars with a comet. It would make the planet warmer, and assuming that comets are infact made of frozen water and other liquids, it would add water to the atmosphere, so that it would become more ideal for life. Now keeping that atmosphere on the planet.. big magnets?
I don't think mars has enough gravity to hold molecular oxygen.
On a related note, the Earth doesn't have the gravity to hold Hydrogen or Helium. I've always imagined that the stuff probably boils off at a rate that varies with the amount of water in the upper atmosphere.
And there seems to be a good amount of water entering due to mini comets (see Dr. Frankl's mini comet theory, which received support a few years back from some NASA studies. We may be constantly getting new water added, mostly to our upper atmosphere.) If some of this water were broken apart, with the Hydrogen escaping and the oxygen remaining, this would be another argument in favor of early earth having an oxidizing atmosphere, an issue currently under some debate.
BTW, does anyone know if there any planets that actually have been confirmed to have a reducing atmosphere? Does Venus?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bas tedo&r=d
OH Yeah!
Also, the gigantic sun shade might not be so crazy, and so long as it's only a few atoms thick, it might not even need to be so massive - more like a round piece of spinning foil at the Venus/Sun liberation point. I wonder how long it would be able to survive all that solar wind... maybe it would need some holes... still, it would help a lot! Also, if we could cover sections of it with solar cells, or some other way of generating power from sunlight, it could actually be useful!
It will happen during the third term of Bush - Although not to save the planet, but to continue with his God-complex and rush to create the conditions of the Apocalypse.
:) )
As it says in Revelations - the seas will turn to blood.
A great algal bloom is red (due to the iron) rather than it's normal green, thus giving the seas the look of blood. It also, will cause massive sealife death due depletion of free oxygen in the water, and the heavy intake of C02 from the air)
Eventually, we'll return to the old Testament and be commanded by a burning Bush.
(My distopian conspiracy theory for the day, enjoy!
Kind of funny there are NASA headlines, when the biggest news in the Southeastern Virginia NASA commnuity is one of budget cuts in NASA's Earth Science budgets.
, 3448760.story
http://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-61304sy0feb05,0
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
That's an easy one! We became un-natural with the invention of the game of Golf!
When Mankind can prove it can live in equilibrium oni Earth, then it can spread elsewhere.
Not going to happen. All primates make a mess and move on...
you're asking every person not to have any weaknesses even when primates never had to do that in the past.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I now I'm not educated in the matter, but if you release a gas on mars from earth, wouldn't you risk running out og gas on earth? do we not need this gas?
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
Lets build a big space pipeline, to mars, that would pump all the pollution from our industry and cars into the martian atmosphere :-p
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Since this project should take thousands of years, couldn't we just increase the mass of mars before we warm it up? Maybe we could go to the asteroid belt and nudge them into mars?! How much more mass would mars need?
Venus is probably "more dead" than Mars, and it's looking like we need practice at *removing* greenhouse gasses from an atmosphere, not adding them! It's also closer to Earth's gravity. Does anyone want to calculate the relative energy costs and time to get to Venus as opposed to Mars?
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
You're seriously scaring me.
But here's somthing I've never quite understood. I can understand how eutrophic ponds become anoxic when you have a sudden die-off and decomposition. But with the ocean, the surface should remain oxygenated (since it has living plantlife) but the depths would be anoxic. You can only suck so much oxygen from the water. Not all the plantlife would decay since you can only take so much oxygen out of the water and most of the organic matter would be buried under sediment.
The surface and depths should be separated by several thermoclines so the water won't mix like it would in a lake.
And oceans don't 'turn over' the same way that lakes do (though they do cycle, but that happens slowly over several centuries). So would an algal bloom really cause anoxyic conditions in water that was several miles deep the same way that it would in a shallow pond?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ill admit, I didnt RTFA. But the general thing Im reading here is based on an AWEFUL lot of assumptions, most of which arent true.
Terraforming another plante, sounds good on paper. But can we please pick a planet that is shielded from the solar wind so all the 'efforts' arent wasted away, or in this case blown away into outer space.
Without an active magnetic field, the upper atmosphere of mars would be directly exposed to solar flares, radiation storms, etc. Which is why there is no atmosphere there now. Nothing to do with water on the surface, it just sublimates and gets ejected off the planet anyway if there was water.
So until someone figures out a way to start a regenerating dynamo half the size of the planet mars INSIDE the planet mars, can we stop with the mental masturbation?
first, namely; "can life sustain itself elsewhere but earth?"
Seems to me, some of our extreme temp. plants could exist on mars right now near the polar regions where there is water.
How about a little test garden?
Blogging because I can...
No, seriously that was funny.
I feel quite safe to use untested things on Mars.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It is a fine idea to lower the tempurature, but there is one small problem and that is the air pressure. Since the surface level air pressure is about 90 atmoshperes (1324 lbs per sq inch compared to 14.7 on earth) if you lower the temp you won't cook to death, you'll only be crushed to death.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
With all the people complaining about global warming on Earth, and how man's interference with nature destroys the natural planetary process. I'm surprised that these same groups aren't up in arms about people mentioning radically changing the environment of Mars!
The worst that could happen is that we find microbes on mars... and aren't sure if we put them there or not.
To date, we've sterilized any craft going to another planet.
It's a purely academic reason, but still...
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Yikes! I have a feeling we'll find out we need to spread Freedom (TM) and Liberty (R) to yet another region - Mars!
Think of all the inspirational stories about how we brought drinking water to a place that had none, and how people are now free to fly kites on Mars.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
We go out and set up these big atmosphere processors. There's got to be 50 families down there now.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
In 5 billion years we're going to have to move to Mars anyway to live out the last 10 million years of the Sun's life (as a red giant), as we would otherwise be engulfed into it.
Mars has plenty of phosphorus. The atmosphere of Venus doesn't.
An artificial at-sea algal bloom is an interesting idea to lower CO2 levels, but you have to be careful. As an algal bloom decays, it sucks oxygen from the water. So, you would have to both seed the ocean *and* oxygenate the water on a large scale, or you'll end up killing fish (not making more)
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
We, humans, are the first species on Earth capable of spreading our biosphere into space. It is not alarmist to say that continent and planet cleansing events happen on a periodic basis. The recent tsunami and asteroid 2004MN's ever-changing error ellipse are evidence of dynamic, destructive processes that affect both humanity and the larger biosphere. It is our duty, as the first space-goers, to create bio-redundancy, to explore and develop.
A project as large as terraforming Mars (or an asteroid) by it's very nature will require massive biological systems for completion. I predict that living creatures will be adapted both to vaccuum and various atmospheres, if we don't find life already there - giant tree cities on comets, kelp ponds in Mars craters, post-human cyborgs, etc.
Creating new biospheres and offworld industries will greatly improve both standards of living and our ecological footprint on Earth. Enough colonization will mean the ability to protect the home world better. Making Mars bloom is our duty and destiny.
Support private spaceflight, it's the only way this can happen. And fire up the florine pumps. 8)
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I say go for it.... we've been doing it here for hundreds of years and we are still alive.
There's also a huge difference between NASA proposing warming Mars and the Department of Defense proposing warming Mars. (Sorry)
Even if there is life on Mars, it is probably going to be bacterial in nature. While I would put myself down as a left leaning conservationist in nature, saying that people shouldn't alter 'Untouched virgin environments' is silly romantic hokum.
It just comes down to the question: How important it the potential discovery of extra-terrestrial bacteria vs. some practice terraforming. I think that there is plenty of time to do both, actually. We can be looking for martian microbes at the same time we are setting up the needed systems. I don't think that Mars can be globally altered in just seven days...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In Total Recall Arnold and friends terraform Mars in a few hours using ancient alien technology.
Well, a balace point related to pressure from the sun could indeed be found; of course, the "block out solar radiation" solution still doesn't make Venus livable unless you get it cold enough to have the atmosphere precipitate out as dry ice. In such a case, you can establish enclosed colonies/mining colonies on the planet, but not open-air colonies like actually precipitating or ablating the atmosphere could allow.
:P
As for the moderation, I have no clue. One minite I check and my post was +3 Interesting, and then the next minute it's 0, Offtopic - and I even lost my initial +1 karma bonus for some reason. I certainly thought terraforming was on the topic of terraforming
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Martian1 "Did you read Slashdot this morning.?"
Martian2 "Yea, those stupid, stupid earthlings...Time to send another smallpox, plague and cholera space probe to them again so they don't have time to think about screwing with other worlds."
Martian1 "How about having it hit that big house in Washington, where the agressive leader lives. That would also likely end his idea of a mission to mars."
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
What we need to do is send away our greenhouse gasses, CO2 emissions, and other 'harmfuls', hence cleaning up earth in the process. While we're at it, we can ship our garbage out there too...
[sarcasm]
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
None. We seem to have this self destructive penchant for driving toward goals without the slightest worry for what we do to get there. Testing? Hah.
Of the abilities man has developed over the years, contributions to global warming should be an indicator of why we need to spend some time fixing our species so we aren't such f.wads.
Don't get me wrong, I love my species to a pretty high degree, but for crying out loud! We can't get along, manage our waste, feed ourselves, communicate effectively, or live in harmony with any enviroment we touch. You want to bring that action to mars? screw you over-breeding shameful critters and the suv's you rode in on.
The gas is actually to fuel all the SUV's that are planned to ship over there. Within a few years all the martians will be doing their local commute in Suburbans, one to a car, thus contributing to global martian warming.
legal. fun. profitable. pick two.
This isn't new. Readers of Scientific American will recall a special edition which proposed warming Mars with greenhouse gases *years* ago. Ah, here we go. From 1999: The Future of Space Exploration. This is not new by any stretch of the imagination.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
What we need of course is to ship the world's largest gasbag to Mars and let it release its contents upon arrival.
I'm thinking Ted Kennedy with a month-long supply of beenie weenies ought to do it.
Huh? That's suicidal.
....
Action you refer to should be more along the lines of us learning how to live first. Do you think that us going around and screwing up other planets the same as we do ours is progress?
Seriously.
We wont be doing more than prolonging the enivitable. So we go to mars wipe our brow because earth is nolonger inhabiable. Now we do the same thing to mars because
.... drum roll
We still have our heads up our ass
Then we turn to you being the great and fearce leader that you are and what do you reply? Ummm I fucked up sorry. Then you die a painful death and take the whole race with you.
Way to go buddy!!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Michael Crichton's latest novel, State of Fear, revolves around an eco-terrorist group trying to dupe the world into believing Global Warming is happening by creating disasters themselves. Provided the book sells well (it's #17 on Amazon as I type this), it could help spread belief that global warming is junk science. Having global warming happen on Mars, even just discussing it, will fight the nascent meme that g.w. is "as phony as them Apollo landings" :^)
Is there anything stopping me from sending a container packed with organisms to Mars? Is there anything preventing me from sending my own terraforming device to Mars? Aside from the money and technology... who is going to stop me? Who owns Mars? Who's stopping me from sending my own sterilized equipment to Mars that ooops! isn't so sterilized. GreasyBloater
OFF TOPIC???
Considering that the song is about the WARMING and colonization of MARS, I would say that you are a fucking IDIOT!
I have to agree with everything you said, however there is NOTHING remotely natural about 'American Idol'.
It however, is proof the Bible is just crazy ramblings by demented primitives. If it was the word of an omniscient god, 'American Idol' would be mentioned in Revelations...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If you screw up and make Mars atmosphere unsuitable for life... well, damn, it already *is*, so what have you lost?
Does that work on oceans as well as ponds? As I posted elsewhere, the anoxic and oxygenated zones in the deep ocean are separated by numereous thermoclines. Lakes 'turn over' and the water at the bottom becomes the water at the top, killing the fish. Oceans have cycles, but they take much longer, and there's time for the undecayed matter to be buried under sediment in the anoxic deep waters.
It's not my field of expertise, but I think if oceas are deep enough, the upper levels might remain oxygenated. The lower levels in some places might already be anoxic. I'm not sure.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The problem with that idea is "conservation of energy".
Take two inert rocks the size of mars, and suppose they are distant enough initially that they can be treated as point masses w.r.t. each other. Compute the amount of potential energy in the system. (Equality of mass is for convenience.)
Next, distribute that energy evenly amoungst the rest of the mass to find the temperature rise that would convert to.
Finally, compute how long it would take that energy to radiate into space so we could actually stand on this body.
I won't do the math (no time, but props to anyone who posts it), but I suspect it'd be at a minimum thousands of years before we could use Mars. Plus, we stripped the atmosphere during this operation, as would any other attempt to bulk up the mass in any non-astronomical time.
It's not a bad idea per se, but you have remember all of your physics, in particular conservation of energy. (This is all "high school-if-you-were-paying-attention physics, though.) No matter how you slice it, you're going to beat the hell out of the planet and it's going to be a long time before it is usable.
How about getting there first, eh?
If Venus has less gravity than Earth, why is its atmosphere so damn thick?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I say that, as with all things, they do some research on it, and if it seems like a good chance that it'll work, they should go for it!
Not that there's anything bad with speculating about negative consequences... but come on now. It's not like it'll be the end of the world, even in the worst case scenario. Well, our world at least. ;)
-Vendal Thornheart
Venus despite greater difficulty in creating a stable environment suitable for terran life to adapt will ultimately prove more hospitable to humans.
The most crucial factor is that Venus' gravity is close to earth's, I'm not sure if it is close enough for human comfort, but is much closer than mars'.
Venus has an extremely dense mostly CO2 Atomosphere and if cooled could probably begin supporting green organisms immediately. Cooling Venus is in fact easier than warming mars. All it requires is an artificial satellite (albeit a large one) between venus and the sun to control the amount of sunlight reaching venus.
I do not wish to join in the debate on the ethics of space colonisaztion, as I consider it a moot point. And am clearly in the minority on this thread because I wholeheartedly support it.
I also think efforts at Terraforming both Mars and Venus could be a huge impetus for international cooperation.
That's a movie! You're reading the script for Red Planet
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'm in the US, I have ready access to all the pertinent information available because nobody is here to stop me from getting my hands on anything I want to read, and, I have arrived at the conclusion that global warming is a farce.
... it's the truth.
On a related topic: nobody here cares what the rest of the world thinks. In general, most Americans feel that way. You may not like that, but, it's true. We simply don't care, and your very existence is irrelevant to most of us. You have little to offer us, except perhaps sites for military bases, raw materials, or cheap labor.
Again, I don't expect foreigners to like this, I wouldn't if the roles were reversed, but
Someone reverted to form and got it wrong in a +5 post (although it may just have been subtle parody):
>Re:Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
>by I_Love_Pocky! (751171) on Monday February 07, @01:22PM (#11598678)
>(http://tfp.rajohnston.com/ | Last Journal:
>Saturday March 06, @01:00AM)
>Please, it is common knowledge amongst conservatives that humanity's ability to affect
>climate change on a global scale is a fairy tale. A fairy tale put forth by the liberal media to
>hurt American industry, leaving us ripe for communist invasion. Clearly we would have no
>chance of changing Mars's atmosphere either. Liberal wackos.
The asteroid belt has a mass of about 1/10 earth. One alternative to dropping them directly on the surface, is that the asteroids could be accreted into a moon, perhaps using one of the existing moons as a starting point, or joining the existing moons together (by manipulating the velocities of the asteroids. The merged moons, plus asteroidal mass would form a large moon. Lunar tidal effects would heat the planet just as the lunar tides on earth cause friction and release some kinetic energy.
This kinetic heating would be a slower effect, but would not have the "instant heat and violence" of just hitting Mt. Olympus with the rocks. Of course the difficulty level is still pegged at "essentially impossible".
One approach to get this asteroid-pinball started would be to attach solar sails to asteroids -- a small CPU should be enough to control the sails to "brake" the asteroids and spiral their orbit toward mars. (But it would still take an enormous amount of time.)
The results could also be split - use some asteroids to hammer the surface (for heat and to release gasses) and others for moon building.
We've already screwed our planet up, we shouldn't have any qualms about doing it to other planets (ast least once we confirm no life forms.)
This almost sounds like a ST:TNG episode I saw once.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Every time one of these terraforming thought experiments comes up, I have to wonder: why don't we try terraforming a desert here first? Seeing what we can do in Earth's extreme environments, from the Sahara to Antarctica. It'd be good practice, and we could probably figure out something useful to do with the space....
Tweet, tweet.
Leaving aside the probably decisive issue of the radiation hazard posed by Mars's lack of a magnetosphere, the biggest joykiller in the terraformers' box of goodies is the length of time (as much as 100s of Ks of years) that it would take for the planet to "cook" as it were.
At what point is it proposed to insert "mankind" into the environment?
Unless the human (or posthuman) colonizers are allowed somehow to co-evolve with the new planetary atmosphere, flora, and fauna, isn't it possible (if not probable) that what emerges at the far end of the pipe will be some sort of planet that while it is in some sense "living" is nevertheless profoundly toxic to us, or to which we ourselves are profoundly toxic (just as we are to the Terran envioronment)?
And what are the odds in any case that we won't just go extinct as a "native" martian biosphere establishes itself?
That is, supposing h. sapiens sapiens still exists on Earth in 100K years (a daring assumption)....
Hmm. On the other hand, what a perfect place Mars would be in which to dispose of the families who will otherwise starve among us in the wake of welfare reform and so forth. Let them evolve or die!
By Jove, I think we've got it! And just think of the lucrative contracts for shipping all that human mulch to our big NASA garden in the sky!
Who says compassionate conservatism is dead?
... Planitia and put up a parking lot.
Launch a fresnel lens the size of Australia at the sun adjustable to keep its focus on the red planet. then videotape all the little green guys as they crawl out of the ground with their heads on fire.
Give us something to look forward to...
cause I've definitely had it with the crap we're serving over here.
Hey, it may not be the eastern spiral arm yet, but it's closer.
I believe this is usually called teraforming - and it's been discussed about mars previously (and not just by a certain Jean Luke Picard).
In the words of someone who commented previously on this issue- "We're not halfway through screwing up one planet, and we're already talking about screwing up another"
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Could we just get 1000 brits lagered up after a curry, and let them rip?
Just a thought..
I say terraform it and send all the treehuggin' hypocrits to Mars and let them start the "perfect world".
Leave good ole plastic using, cancer-causing item-of-the-week creating, too lazy for recycling, forest destroying, SUPER-SUV driving, cigarette smoking, beer-bong chugging, generally too lazy to do anything but web surfing earth to us....er me!!!
Seriously, we could use the Earth as a prototype for this idea. Wait a sec... We already are!
Everyone seems so confident that this experiment will work as expected. What if the green-house warming goes out of control and a now hospitibal mars (although a little chilly) becomes a roaring furnace that immediately melts anything that isn't metal.
I personally think that its better to do lots and lots and lots of testing before completing experiments that change the habitability of Mars. As it is right now, you need pressure sealed homes, some O2 from water and a way to keep yourself warm. Its about the same as living under the ocean, which is pretty decent for colonizing an entirely different planet.
"I'm a loner Dottie, a rebel."
- Pee Wee Herman
Haven't we heard for years about terraforming! What's so ground braking about this? woopee.
...its easy to do when you've been testing it on your own planet.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - books by Kim Stanley Robinson about terraforming and occupying mars. The movie is based on his book, and will probably suck, as usual.
Personally I found all threee books really fascinating and pretty much read the series stright through, only really pausing after number two because I didn't have the last one - I went looking for it right after I finished two though.
Not only was it interesting for covering the debate on terraforming other planets, but I really liked the whole treatment of greatly increased longevity and the problems that might arise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This worked really good when Arnold did it (in the movie "Total Recall" for the sci-fi impaired.). Transformed the whole planet to earthlike in seconds!
We do it on this planet all the time without any warning or regulation
err, wait a sec...
In New Jersey, why do they hire people to hand out tickets when machines in Pennsylvania do just as good of a job (or maybe even better)?
Any moderators with available points should mod this post back up. Even though it's discussing Venusian terraforming instead of Martian terraforming, it's still quite informative and relevant to the general topic of terraforming.
This is all top-of-the-head stuff, but I remember reading once that a planet's escape velocity should exceed the RMS velocity of a gas by about six to retain that gas at that temperature. Mars's escape velocity is about 5 kms-1, and the RMS velocity of O2 molecules at room temperature according to this website is about 500 ms-1. No problem so far, but water molecules weigh just over half what oxygen molecules weigh, the RMS velocity of water vapour will be about sqrt(2) higher, putting it in the borderline bracket.
Since water evaporation takes a great deal of heat from liquid water, I imagine the continuous loss of water vapour from the Martian atmosphere would tend to cool the planet, reversing any terraforming effort, while leaching away the natural water resources which are thought to exist and which would be necessary to sustain life in a terraformed settlement -- leaving Mars drier and more wintry than ever ...
... I'm pretty sure every single step of that argument is seriously flawed, but frankly I doubt we have enough energy to terraform Mars anyway.
love: @echo "Not war?"
Great. It's not enough to fiddle with the VISA process. And it's not enough to export jobs all over the developing third world. Wait! Let's create a whole new biosphere and wait for exploitable contract workers to evolve from the primordial goo! Wait until the MBAs get a hold of this!
On second thought, maybe this isn't such a new idea...
For even more "meaty" information, check out this research paper by McKay and Marinova from 2001, titled "The Physics, Biology, and Environmental Ethics of Making Mars Habitable".
Unfortunately, I don't think Marinova's latest paper on this is publically available on the internet.
> Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?
;-)
Simple. Carry enough baked beens with you and you'll get more than enough gas.
What do we have to loose?
I mean if it is a life less rock the we can mess with it to our hearts content.
We had just better make very sure it is lifeless before we start mucking about with it. I would hate to loose examples of life that evolved independent of earth.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No need to do that either. Before too long, we'll have kick-ass combat robots with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence. Because they will have even less empathy and wisdom than either of you two twits, they will just cleanly pop a few rounds through this guy's skull, along with yours and the rest of the other slow and stupid humans on the planet.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
Good thing I bought that spot of land on Mars from that dude in the infomercial on TV. I think the value just appreciated!
Little-known fact (at least among non sci-fi fans): Kim Stanley Robinson is a guy!
On at least two occasions I've heard people say "Oh, I haven't read her books..." and had to suppress a chuckle.
Some millions years before an ancient civilization was forced to leave their planet and move to earth because of a ecological catastrophe which they have generated.
Now, a civilization will be forced to move back because of Bush.
I say just do it, even if we screw it up, we will learn much from that mistake, and then we can fix it the right way.
...
What you do is take the first half of the mass and put it into retrograde orbits around the planet, then you take the second half, in slightly larger chunks, and put them in prograde orbits. Then you perturb the orbits. This should result in lots of small chunks raining down all over Mars in a slightly prograde direction (so the rotation isn't much affected).
Now just how much mass would be required.... I don't think the asteroids are enough, depending on how much you want to increase the gravity by. And remember that many of the asteroids further out ARE gaseous as reasonable temperatures. Lots of water, too.
You might, however, want to install a sunshade over Mars while this is in process. To keep the small chunks from melting in orbit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
let's change the trajectory of carbon dioxide and water containing asteroids to hit at a glancing blow to the martian surface. Add co2 eating microbes to this hot gassy mess. incubate and colonize.
A good point. In fact, thinking about it, I came up with two potential ways to take advantage of this, both involving diatoms: harvested and unharvested. Diatoms are interesting for two reasons: one, they store energy for long-term use in small petroleum globules; additionally, their shells often sequester all carbon inside until they're safely deposited (much of the earth's petroleum is of diatomaceous origin).
So, in an unharvested version, you would provide silanols (a vital nutrient for their shells) and other nutrients to encourage a bloom, balancing your nutrient distribution to try and benefit large, thick-shelled diatoms the most.
In a harvested version, you would use a huge floating segmented "pool" in which you can culture vast quantities of genetically engineered or selectively-bred diatoms designed to maximize oil production and have thin shells (some species already produce almost 50% by weight). At harvest time, you filter the water a segment at a time, crush or etch the diatoms, dissolve the carbon, and extract out the long chains for refining. You'd have a nice low-sulphur oil which would contribute a net of zero carbon to the atmosphere.
I suppose you could combine the two.... if you can encourage high petroleum diatom growth just through selective application of nutrients, you could do large-scale farming without use of pools and filter them out before they descend and possibly break up.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Now, I have always wondered about something like
this. If you take a gas, lets say CO2, and spray
it into another planets atmosphere, you are
taking mass from our planet, and putting it on
the target planet. Will this cause our orbit to
enlarge, while the target planet's orbit decays?
Its very small amounts of mass, but the balance
we sit on as far as gravity and orbit around the
sun are quite small I would assume.
This is just me thinking out loud
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
So am I right to assume the next mars rover will be equipped with hairspray and cheeze-in-a-can?
Ughnnnnerrrrahhhhh.
He has a plan that will release enough hot air to warm the planet
(sorry about trolling, just want to get it off my chest)
Presumably there's nobody on Mars to organize protest marches if we change it's climate and make it like some inhospitable hell-place like Holland, MI. Anything one might do to the climate of Mars would only complicate cleanup if we later found a better way to terraform it.
There is a side benefit of changing Mars' climate. It would provide an existence proof that it is indeed possible for humans to accomplish climate change and it would gauge how much human effort it takes to effect how much change. It would validate the atmospheric/climate models that predict global warming here on earth.
If you believe that only ninnies disbelieve in global warming, at least recognize a lot of those ninnies could not deny a "green Mars."
It is unfortunate that global warming FAITH is associated with one political party and global warming UNBELIEF is associated with its opponent. As fine as faith and skepticism are as ways of thinking of things like life-after-death, science works better when it is disinterested in politics and follows the data. (Google Lysenko.)
Mucking about with the Martian atmosphere would provide a plethora of data. That data could make the global warming debate here on earth a lot more "reality-based."
Right on, the USA has already screwed over one planet already.
Also, if there are life forms anywhere on Mars that depend on the current conditions, they'd be in some danger. Considering how curious a lot of NASA scientists are about the possibility of life forms, I doubt the proposal will go over.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
What you do is take the first half of the mass and put it into retrograde orbits around the planet, then you take the second half, in slightly larger chunks, and put them in prograde orbits. Then you perturb the orbits. This should result in lots of small chunks raining down all over Mars in a slightly prograde direction (so the rotation isn't much affected).
That's a great plan, but thanks to conservation of energy, it doesn't affect the problem I outlined one bit. (I'm assuming by the fact you replied you think it affects it somehow, if not ignore.) Drop the matter fast, drop the matter slow (by human standards), it doesn't change the number of joules the system needs to radiate away. (Throw them together really fast and you add kinetic energy to the mix, but in the interests of fairness we can just ignore that.)
All of the gravitational potential energy goes somewhere. All of it. There is no gaming the system, there is no getting around it, there are no loopholes, there is no (significant in any way unless you want to completely throw away physics) room for me to be in error on this point; the only question is what the exact numbers are. Any mass that would noticably alter the gravity of Mars would impart an unbelievable amount of energy to Mars as heat.
Conservation of energy is the first thing people forget when they become budding celestial mechanics, mostly because it works in ways people are not used to thinking of. Mars isn't at all like a ball of clay you can hold in your hand. Adding mass to Mars is nothing at all like smooshing a bit more clay onto your ball. Your Earthy instincts and imagination are of no use in understanding what happens when significant planetary bodies collide. (Fortunately, the science at this level is fairly simple, Newton could have figured it out.) You can't grow Mars by any significant amount in any reasonable amount of time without also rendering it completely uninhabitable for a long time.
And after all, it would be a red state, right?
Before anyone starts terraforming Mars, let's make sure the place is completely dead. Given its past, there may be life (bacterial....?) UNDER the surface (200 meters? Deeper?).....near warm, maybe wet, spots in the crust. Perhaps as relics of a by-gone era where the surface was more suitable for life.
Only boring people are ever bored.
> I wonder how much simulation and testing you need
> before we feel safe about affecting an entire
> planet.
Who cares? Let's do it anyway!
Assuming we could warm the planet, and assuming there is enough water for the place to be habitable, how do we get around other factors. There's no big moon so Mars wobbles a lot. Too much to be habitable? Enough to cause major problems I would think. Then there's the whole general lack of a magnetic field thing. Last I heard, there were only small pockets of magnetic fields left. So what happens when the Sun fires a huge flare right at you? Death? Radiation sickness? Planetary SPF-45 day? You sure won't be getting the pretty light show we get here on Earth. Studying terraforming is fine, but making the place warm looks like one of many problems to overcome before habitation would be possible.
That's true, but much of the velocity is dissipated in space, where it's free to radiate. And I did recommend a sunshade which would tend to cool Mars rather quickly (as well as keep the frozen ices from melting). So if the mass drops in small bundles widely dispersed over the planet over a long period of time, the temperature would never get all that high (and might even get cooler than it currently is).
Of course that sunshade is rather large. It would probably need to sit in the Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun to minimize station keeping requirements, and to be spinning (slowly) to keep itself unfurled. Rather like a very large light sail. Which means that there WOULD be continual station keeping requirements. (But probably an ion rocket could handle it.)
My guess is that what one would need would be an series of aluminum ribbons that reflected around 50-75% of the infalling light over the whole planet. Pretty big, but tenuous. Not something we'd want to try building today, but not unreasonable for replicating nanobots. How slowly you could spin it would be the real question, because the more slowly you could spin, the thinner each individual ribbon could be. And you don't want much of the mass that you're dealing with to be eaten up maintaining a sunshade. (That's supposed to be a minor auxillary element.)
How many pounds dropping from Mars orbit to the surface / day equals half the insolation? I don't know the answer, but it shouldn't be too hard to calculate. And I'm rather certain that enough mass could be added in rather less than 1000 years. If you had a good source for the mass...and there's a sticking point, unless you want to start dismanetling Europa...and that's probably more useful right where it is. Pluto and Charon and Nereid would help, but the energetic considerations are a triffle...steep.
Besides, I think this is the wrong way to do things anyway. Use the asteroids directly as habitats, spinning them for gravity. Mars might be most useful when disassembled, once we have the technology to do it right. Broken up into habitats Mars would easily and comfortably house thousands of times the current world population. How to do it right, though, is something that we're going to need to learn by practicing, but I suspect that we'll have that figured out in much less than 1000 years. Perhaps we'll convert everything into computronium and move into a virtual reality. We don't yet know what choices we'll see even a decade from now.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Go ahead, but don't complain when your taxes increase.
After making Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq habitable by humans, now it's the turn of Mars to get "gassed" !
How would the wobble cause problems? /.'ers at least don't need regular periods of light and dark. /puzzled/
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Why not just target all those spare russian nukes on it, that should warm it up a bit quicker and reduce a few of our security problems.. I'm sure any martian microbes wont mind and it'll make great TV! The only real problem is spacesuit will need to be a bit thicker when someone eventually lands and the microbes might have mutated into giant man eating cockroaches! .. Speculate to accumulate !!
All this talk of climate and greenhouse gases and the effect of humans on the ozone layer have forced me to remember what I believe to be a particularly funny bit by Lewis Black.
"The weather in this country is completely out of control and nobody seems to care about it. I knew we were in trouble 12 years ago when I was in Boston, MA and in 4 days in February, I experienced 5 seasons. It was 30, it was 60, it was 90 and it was 12. And on the last day, there was thunder, lightning and snow together. And I had not done drugs."
"Cause when you're lying in bed, you hear thunder outside, and you get up to look, you have an expectation. And it's not snow with lightning behind it. That's not right."
"They don't even write about that kind of weather in the bible. And I imagine if a prophet had seen that kind of weather, after he wiped the poop out of his pants, he'd have told us about it. I was supposed to work that night, I said I'm not coming in. I'm scared to death, cause I know what the next season's going to be....locusts."
Actually, he does several bits about weather. For those of you that haven't heard of Lewis Black, he is an actor turned political comedian, and let me tell you I've never laughed so hard in my life. In fact I will not listen to him while I drive for fear of killing myself or others. But it's like everything I guess, his humor isn't for everybody.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Everybody knows that Humans, can't effect the temperature of the planet? Haven't you heard from all the scientists who have said that global warming isn't happening? You know, the ones who use to work for the tobacco industry.
You people just don't get the news...
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
there's a war going on don't you know? Independent thinking like "how much testing . . .etc." is the enemy of democracy.
If our government agencies want to mess with the solar system, who are we to question it? Stand aside and let halliburton get the Martian-warming contracts they deserve.
Jeez
That's true, but much of the velocity is dissipated in space, where it's free to radiate.
LOL. Literally. That's just unphysical gibberish. Do you write for Star Trek?
Besides, I think this is the wrong way to do things anyway. Use the asteroids directly as habitats, spinning them for gravity.
From the mouths of babes...
"Velocity radiation"... *chuckle*
When asteroids rotating in contrary orbits collide, the velocity is translated into:
1) Heat (the primary stuff I was talking about)
2) Rupturing the crystal bonds
Secondarily, any matter that ends up with a higher than orbital velocity leaves, and takes it's energy with it, so that there is cooling analogous to the way that steaming cools hot water. After the collision most of the matter will be moving much below orbital velocity in a wide variety of directions. This will impact all over the planet in small pieces. (Which will create lots of localized hot spots. Which will be more effective than average at radiating away heat.)
If you want more details, I could provide them. It's been too long, so I couldn't calculate it out precisely without more effort than this warrants.
(And you might work on improving your reading skills. I wasn't *that* hard to understand. OTOH, I did sort of toss the sunshade in as an afterthought, and it was crucial to making the scenario work.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The Prime Directive. First we must assess that there are no life-forms on the planet before we begin the terraforming procedure (which interestingly enough is done by nothing more than sending a multi-color ray down into the planet's core). In order to do this we need to send an away team to the planet's surface. Commander Riker will lead the away team and he will take Data, Geordi and expendable-crewman #4 with him. Keep us apprised of the progress #1.
Particulate pollution has a confirmed, explicable cooling effect, due to the way it increases the planet's albedo, reflecting more of the Sun's energy back into space.
Greenhouse-gas pollution has a confirmed, explicable warming effect, as these gases reduce the radiation coming from the planet out into space.
Two seperate, competing pollution problems. Thirty years ago, the particulate pollution was thought to be more of a worry. As we've significantly decreased particulate emissions though the cleaning up of heavy industry, and the move from coal to gas-fired power stations, the warming effect of CO2 appears even more significant that scientists first feared.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
No one is saying he's a "liberal hippie" - to the contrary. He's quite smart, but so are lots of other people supporting the petrochemical industry with denial propaganda. Crichton (many of whose books, some autobiographical, I have read) is a fear merchant. He's especially talented in spinning tales of "the scientists are wrong, this is really a threat". He quit the doctor track because he didn't like handling sick (and, notoriously, dead) patients - but was so fascinated by the science and technology that he's pursued it. Completely consistent with his Greenhouse denial: he's a rich guy who likes science better than people, and lives off their fear. He's not a scientist, but an author. All that makes his brief foray into Greenhouse science much less convincing than the vast research that shows we're probably looking at a 35 foot sealevel rise in the next 200 years or less, among other catastrophes. Crichton's writing is a better read, but he's the one playing with fear, not real science.
--
make install -not war
I think this idea belongs to the writters of a movie called Total Recall!