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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."
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.
We can't seem to get our outdated shuttles off the ground safely, or keep a permanent space staion running effectively.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.
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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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.
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.
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?
"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."
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
I've heard of it, but I haven't seen any proof.
Yet again, correlation is not causation.
http://stat.tamu.edu/stat30x/notes/node42.html
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Crazy and pointless, maybe ,but not stupid.
All the key ingredients for the warming media (Fluorine based gas, according to the article) exists on Mars.
And yes, the warming agent will evaporate away in a long run. As Martian air warms it up, the rate of the evaporation would increase. This is easy to understand if you know Maxwellian distribution. If not, look it up. Basically each particles in the gas at a certain temperature doesn't all have the same kinetic energy (== mean speed); some particles have slower than the average speed, while others move much faster. And those particles that are moving faster -- especially faster than the escape velocity of Mars -- have a chance to escape (i.e., evaporate out).
But for those heavy molecular compound, the timescale of evaporation is long, and the article implies that the scale time is about 2 billion years.
It's not hard to derive these conclusions by reading the article. The Gurdian is generally better at it than any other news source in the U.S.
Wouldn't the gravitational spin of Mars which causes high temperature fluctuations be a big constraint? How would that be addressed?
Since nobody owns Mars, and what happens on Mars has no bearing at all on what happens on Earth, then the people who have both the technology and the money to make it happen have the final say. Namely, NASA and ESA (and maybe China and India in the reasonably near future?)
Even if the whole world was a democracy (which it's not), the world at large does not have the means to get there first and claim it... and the certaintly wouldn't contribute to the effort even if they did support it. So nyah nyah to them.
=Smidge=
Is that your best reason, that it might go wrong?
Sorry but that's dumb. Everything might go wrong. Your house might burn to the ground because of an electrical fault. Does that mean you shouldn't use electricity or that you try to minimise the risk through safety standards and certification? You might hit a wall in your car. Does that mean you don't ride in a vehicle or that you should learn to drive properly and buy a car with various safety features? You might get attacked by a dog (while walking). Does that mean we should kill all dogs or enact laws that make owners responsible for their animals? Your computer might be compromised and be used to store kiddy porn. Does that mean you should unplug all the jacks from the wall and lock the PC in a metal box, or does it mean you should be diligent and use appropriate firewall / antivirus software?
I'm not advocating any crazy experiment on Mars - but if there is a carefully reached and reasonable expectation that something will work and the rewards outweigh the risks, then it should be taken. The alternative is for mankind to collectively cower under the table waiting for the next global catastrophe to wipe us all out.
Besides, who knows what kind of fossel record would be being destroyed by exposing the planet to natural weather forces again.
Yeah right. But to apply your own risk aversion argument, how would we ever know about the "fossel" record? After all, there is a very real chance of mission failure when going to Mars. How can we possibly send people or robots to Mars if the probe could blow up? The same goes for any other human endeavour past, present or future.
Hanging around for something - anything - to be 100% certain (except death & tax) is to piss away any future that humanity might have at all.
I don't oppose people smoking because it's a health risk to me. I oppose people smoking because it smells like shit, and because (a significant number of) smokers feel that the Earth is an ashtray. I'm tired of seeing cigarrette butts everywhere. What the hell is it about smoking that makes you feel like it is okay to just throw it on the ground when you're done? Is it because the cigarrette is small or something? You'd probably be better off throwing an entire ream of paper on the ground than a cigarette butt with all those chemicals.
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.
I mean, they have to find them, they've spent $80,000,000,000 extra taxpayers money on that, more than 1000 US lives (roughly worth one extra WTC tower I guess), a top-secret number of 100,000s Iraqi lives, the US's international reputation, and they've been reelected : it must mean they've been somewhat successful, right?
Michael Crichton has a Ph.D from Harvard Medical School. The hardcover copy of State of Fear has around 21 pages of bibliography and each page has footnotes and citations for every fact. The author spent three years researching his topics before writing a book.
Um...but yeah...don't believe him, he's just a liberal hippie who doesn't know anything.
I believed in global warming (and that DDT is dangerous, among other things) before I read the book.
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Before you read too far into this disussion, be forewarned that people are taking this way too seriously. It will never happen. Oh yeah, it may take a few thousand years. That's a pretty good weather forecast consider we can't even accurate forecast the weather on our own planet more that 7 day's out!! Come on!! Get real!! Besides, everyone knows that life exists on Mars, and that we just haven't built the proper technology to find it yet. Who is going to take responsibilty for fucking up the entire Martian ecosystem?
I'm sure he did his "research". I've read Cato Institute studies too that are backed by citations and other studies, and usually the studies are either dumb, contradicted by other studies, or simply do not draw the conclusions the Cato Institute wants you to think. Cato, of course, has the excuse that it's not a scientific body, it's an economic body, and it's trying to find ways to fit the world around economics.
Crichton doesn't have the luxury. He's essentially yelling "You're all wrong" to an audience where the experts continue to disagree with him after he's made his case. If you've spent any time on Usenet, you'll be familiar with lots of people who do this.
There are some consensus's at the moment:
1. The Earth is under a relatively recent spell of disproportionate warming. Whatever else it might be, cyclical seems a tad unlikely.
2. The amount of CO2 in the air is increasing as a result of human activity. (It may be for other reasons too, but right now, human beings are definitely responsible for a massive amount of CO2 generation.) This is self-evident, you can't burn carbon stocks like coal and oil without expecting it to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
3. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The experiments have been done.
Beyond that, we don't know. Most of the economists arguing against the notion there's any threat usually come down to making one of four arguments: That the first is false (no, it's true, ask NASA.) That the second is false (No, that's true too, it's self-evident.) That the third is false (erm, no, do the experiments.) Or all three might be true but we don't know if human activities are enough to make a major change to the climate, and as we don't know, we should pretend we're not and carry on business as usual.
Anyone can make use of the fourth argument because it essentially requires no proof. "They can't predict for sure that GW is caused by humans". Crichton appears to be ignoring what's going on and hoping the fuzziness and FUD inherent in the final GW-kook argument will carry the day. That's probably why there's no avalanch of scientists in existance saying "Wow, Michael, we never thought of that" (mass slapping of foreheads) "We were wrong all along."
Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide because that gas, too, is easily ionized. Nitrogen and oxygen, on the other hand, will leave without the magnetic field. The magnetic field argument is valid.
I'm in favor of trying the experiment. We need to learn how to modify the climate of a planet so we have some chance of fixing what we've done to Earth. Eventually we're going to have a price to pay for our actions, and we need to be ready to do that. Mars could teach us how, and right now it's worthless for anything else.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
Michael Crichton has a Ph.D from Harvard Medical School
Making him supremely qualified to... uh... be a climatologist?
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.
If you screw up and make Mars atmosphere unsuitable for life... well, damn, it already *is*, so what have you lost?
That's the problem you can't. There isn't enough data.
You're looking at 150 or so years of decent climate data for the Earth. Then you've got ice cores and geological data which can fill in more data but with longer time rates for their measurements.
Its not that theres a X year cycle and we should be able to see that, its that there are cycles on top of cycles and large drops and increases in temperatrure of the Earth over its history. You have to deal with cycles on a geologic timeframe, on a solar timeframe, and with many many other factors affecting everything.
It is an absolute certainty that we don't have enough data to prove anything definitively in the climate arena.
That why it makes such a fun political topic for so many people!!
...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!
We know periods of high global temperature correlate closely with periods of high atmospheric CO2 concentration. We know that CO2 concentration has been stable since around 1000AD all the way up to when we started burning fossil fuels as a primary source of energy, at which point the levels began to increase, and ever since then the rate of change has been increasing. However, we don't know whether CO2 concentration causes global warming, or the other way around; there is no causal link implied by the data, only a correlation, and when all you have is a correlation, it is easy to get cause and effect confused.
What global warming alarmists fail to address is the very real possibility that a natural warm climate phase evaporates CO2 from seawater and spurs tectonic activity, which would raise atmospheric CO2 concentration as an effect - meaning that our contributions to CO2 concentration really have no effect at all on global climate. What global warming "debunkers" like to do, however, is ignore data and attempt to perform ad hominem attacks on climate scientists.
Granted, there are a lot of people who refer to themselves as "scientists", but are really nothing more than pundits and theoreticians/philosophers; they do not apply the scientific method and/or they are unconcerned with either having evidence to prove their position, or ignore evidence that contradicts their position. Just as there are many politicians who prefer a faith-based approach to public policy, instead of placing trust in sound science as our best tool to understand our situation.
What we should do is look at the facts. The fundamental debate here is between cause and effect of CO2 concentration and global climate. Ignore the zealots and misguided attempts at global legislation for now. We are trying to answer a question so that we can make sound judgement based on the answer - assuming the answer to support one's judgement would be a mistake.
Now, it's not to say that we shouldn't attempt to limit our use of fossil fuels. This would be a wise move as insurance, and for USians. would additionally unsnare us from the quandary of trade with the Middle East. But a panicking approach instead of one gauged for the best long-term benefit is wrong, until the evidence shows that we do indeed have an acute problem on our hands.
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