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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."
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.
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.
The New Scientist also has an article on the subject.
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!
Where the hell are we supposed to get that much of ANY gas?
From the article in the New Scientist: "The study found four fluorine-based gases that could be made of elements abundant on the Martian surface."
I believe the theory is with the gravitational force of Mars as it is we could achieve a "sealevel" air pressure equivalent to that of the pressure at about 10,000 ft on earth -- plenty for humans and most plant/animal life to exist.
This exact debate was played out in the Red Mars Trilogy of books. One faction wanted to leave Mars in its "pristine" state, while another wanted to make it habitable by humans. An interesting read, to say the least.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Mars, on the other hand, has an atmosphere that can block most of the bad radiation, frozen water on the surface that we can harvest, and about a 24-hour sol. Heck, the atmosphere is almost pure CO2, which plants grow very well in. And there have been successful experiments in growing plants in Martian soil in the Martian atmosphere, but at terrestrial pressures and temperatures.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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".
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.
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
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"
Mars has 1.86E32 J of KE. Altering that KE is the only way of changing it's orbit. Assuming we wish to change it's velocity by 1%, we would need 1.86E30 J of energy to do so. This equates to 3.9E17 metric tons of TNT.
On October 30, 1961, Soviet physicists detonated a 50-megaton bomb, which remains unsurpassed in terms of its yield. You would need 8.9E12 of these bombs to produce that '1%' effect, and that's assuming perfect efficiency in converting explosive energy to orbital velocity.
The Earth's average distance from the Sun is governed by it's orbital velocity and nothing else, for the same reason that the period of a pendulum depends soley upon it's length and the prevailing gravitational field, it's mass having no relevance.
Short answer - We couldn't affect the orbit of Mars, and it would have no effect on that of Earth if we could.
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.
Even if Venus were somehow cooled, the magnetic field of the planet is not strong enough to protect us from solar radiation. The rotation of the planet would have to be sped up as well.
Also, diverting big asteroids into a planet may have some bad effects on the planet's orbit. We probably don't want that.
Mars is a better candidate.
They are? Wait.. oh wait.
They have been since 1970, at about 0.01 inch per year. The caps are not increasing their melting any, in fact, all signs point to "cyclical".
After all, the only way for the caps to grow in size is for precipitation to fall on the poles, and that's hard to come by when the area surrounding is made up of ice.
The article states everything needed is available ON MARS. You'd send robotic factories to Mars to mine, process, and distribute the materials automatically. Nothing but the originial equipment would need to be sent. No chemicals would need be made here. No human interaction, except for some remote input, would be required.
Every child of six knows that GW Bush is one of the lizard people. Ask David Icke, he knows...
That was classic intercourse!
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.
He's an MD, not a PhD (much less a PhD in climatology), and the fact that you would change your mind about any scientific issue after reading a novel (no matter how well referenced) is pretty scary. You might like to read this for some informed criticism of Crichton's book.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.