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Warming Up Mars With Greenhouse Gases
fembots writes "Scientists are thinking of using the same toxic stuff (Octafluoropropane) already blamed for global warming here to put some life back on Mars. It would take hundreds of years but eventually ice sheets would melt, grass would grow here, and temperatures would hit 50 degrees along the equator of the planet. Martian organisms might be revived too - if there are any."
I think if we went to 50C it would be a little too far. 50F is actually very livable with a little extra clothing. Hell, -50F would be a paradise compared to most places in space.
Surely you mean celsius,
No I am pretty sure it is Farenheit 'cause I don't think much plant life could survive at 50 centigrade.
If Europeans had waited until Europe was fixed before exploring and colonizing the rest of the world....things would really suck right now.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
No, that doesn't make sense either. Earth, which is half the distance from Sun and has thousands upon thousands of tons of water vapor in the atmosphere to cause a greenhouse effect can barely hit 50 degree Celsius at the equator (according to NASA the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth (discounting the craters of erupting volcanoes and such, obviously) is 136 Fahrenheit, which, according to Google, is 57.8 degree Celsius, and was measured at Al' Aziziyah, Libya in September of 1922), so there's no way Mars could possibly reach it.
Since this can't be Kelvin either (because that would be colder than it is now - cold enough to liquidate nitrogen, actually), the unit remains unknown.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
From what I've read, the atmosphere should be much thicker then it is now given martian gravity. However, because of a very weak magnetic field, solar wind has slowly erroded away at the atmosphere and blow it out to space. If true, Mars may remain dead forever unless we can reactivate the almost-solidified core.
Note: Please no mention of the movie CORE. It sucked ass.
Life is not for the lazy.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Mars has it's problems not because of it's size or mass, but because it has a weak magnetic field. Because of that, every solar storm that smacks into the planet shears off some of it's atmosphere. Linky.
Saturn's moon Titan has a radius of about 2570km and a mass of about 1.35e23kg and has a thick atmosphere. Linky
Mars's radius is about 3397km and has a mass of about 6.42e23kg and has a thin atmosphere.Linky
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Here is a better article on the subject:0 4115304.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502
-Ariel
Octafluoropropane is not really all that toxic.
f 39cc852569af00702e6f/26e5bede95a1fefb85256ef50045e 0e4?OpenDocument&Highlight=0,76-19-7
According to the MSDS (Material Saftey Data Sheet), the only real toxicity to worry about is asphyxiation, no worse than nitrogen or argon gas.
Greenhouse gases != toxic (at least not implicity).
MSDS link
http://www.scottecatalog.com/msds.nsf/d118573c489
As a practicing chemist, I need to take exception to the characterization of octafluoropropane (perfluoropropane) as "toxic stuff." The very reason that such fluorocarbons hang around for a very long time is due to the strength of the fluorine-carbon bond and the extreme inertness of the molecules.
PFP may be many things, but "toxic stuff" it ain't.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Octafluoropropane is NOT a toxic gas in the sense that it directly damages the health of people, animals, etc when breathed/ingested (its a class 2.2 hazard: non-toxic, non-flammable gas). Like most fluorocarbons (refrigerants, Halons etc.), it is a very inert gas which presents a hazard only in that it can displace oxygen and lead to asphyxiation. But a mixture of 20% O2 and 80% octafluoropropane would probably be quite breathable, although it might feel uncomfortably dense to breath (this mix being about 6 times denser than normal air).
The only real danger of these gases in the atmosphere is that they can breakdown under UV bombardment in the upper atmosphere and generate ozone-destroying chemicals (not a big issue on Mars as it lacks appreciable ozone in the first place). Also, high temperature combustion of fluorocarbons can produce some nasty byproducts, but the inertness of the chemicals makes this very hard to do.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The link you provide, among other things, says that forest area is not decreasing, which is a blatant lie popularised by master jester Bjørn Lomborg (who by the way has no knowledge of climatology nor statistics) in his "skeptical environmentalist". The lie is originated by the plotting of forest area as published by FAO since the end of WW2, without correcting for the fact that countries were continuously joining the FAO and that first estimates were not precise, and had no conventional definiton of "forest area". The myth is well debunked here.
The author is a CS professor, not a climatologist. His credibility is quite low on this issue. The fact that he disagrees with pretty much any climatologist on the planet is also a pointer.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The idea is to initiate a run-away greenhouse effect on Mars using a super-effective Greenhouse gas that is safe and easy to produce on Mars. 10-20*10^9 Kg of C2F8, a greenhouse gas 12,000 more effective than CO2, would seem to do the trick. Assuming that 10% of all sunlight reaching Mars could be trapped, Mars could be warmed enough to reach the triple point of CO2 within 100 years. This would release the CO2 (and hopefully water) frozen within the Martian Regolith into the atmosphere and possibly add enough atmosphere to allow for human exploration with only an oxygen mask a few yars later. At this point martian life, if it does exist, should flourish. If it does not we can start populating the planet with Earth species without nasty Mars life preservation debates.
This is not an easy process. Our CFCs, in the Martian atmosphere, would last for thousands of years, so VERY careful monitoring would be required in order to prevent us from terraforming a Venus.
Mars does not have a magnetosphere so our terraformed atmosphere would only have a life of about ten million years before evaporating.
I have notes of the ongoing Mars Society Conference here if you want more information on the current state of manned Mars exploration.
It is postulated that the only reason cosmic rays don't eradicated us from this planet is due to the magnetic field generated by the molten core of the earth which acts as a giant electric dynamo. Mars has no such protection as any volcanic activity has ceased long ago.
O2 will fly off to space in the course of a few hours. Mars is not massive enough to hold pure O2 in the atmosphere. The velocity of O2 molecules at Marsian temperature and pressure is greater than the escape velocity, so O2 will disappear almost instantly. There is no perspective and this has nothing to do with the Sun.
You can't handle the truth.
Now that's an impressive talking out of one's ass. So:
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Happy now? Time to stop the denial then.
Phobos and Deimos are so small that they would hardly be causing any significant tides.
:)
Phobos is the larger and closer of the moons of Mars, but unless I miscalculated, it has about 6 million times less mass than our Luna. While it orbit has significantly smaller diameter (average of about 9000 kilometers vs. 384000 kilometers), it still has far less gravitational pull (probably hundreds of times less, but I'm too lazy to calculate it as it's time to sleep in order to be functional tomorrow at work
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Mars's atmosphere is primarily CO2. Atmospheric pressure on Mars is approximately 1% of that on Earth. Sorry, but even someone with little knowledge like me knows that trying to fill a planet with a denser sea of air is impossible. Earth has about .03 percent CO2 in the air. We have billions of combustions autos and power planets all over and we haven't even put a dent in that figure.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
Just a brief correction:
s es/gasdata/index.asp?GasID=47
Octafluoropropane is not 'toxic', in the strict sense of the word. The word toxic generally refers to something that causes injury to living organisms "as a result of physicochemical interaction", which Octafluoropropane doesn't. It's possible to suffocate while breathing Octafluoropropane, as it is with any gas mixture that doesn't contain enough Oxygen, but it isn't toxic.
http://www.airliquide.com/en/business/products/ga
Actually, Mars has enough gravity to support a nice atmosphere. Gravity isn't the problem. Solar storms are. Mars lacks a magnetic shield (currently) like Earth has. It's that magnetic shield that stops solar storms from ripping off part of the atmosphere. See also the fourth non-bold paragraph.
Or perhaps you should read the science.
It is known for a fact that asteroid impacts do blast rocks into space from both earth and mars, and that they can and do land on the opposite planet. It is known for a fact that this has happened countless times, and would have been particularly common during the early days of the solar system. It is known for a fact that such a "space launch" can be cool and gentle enough inside some of the rocks that a microorganism could and would survive the launch intact. It is known for a fact that the interior of a meteor can remain cool enough through reentry that bacteria could and would survive. It is known for a fact that inert bacteria have been exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space for over a decade and then cheerfully sprang back to life with no ill effects at all once reexposed to water. Dust-like fragments can slow in the thinnest region of atmosphere and simply drift to the ground.
lottery tickets
Well lets see how many lottery tickets we;re lookign at here. There were probably several tens of thousands of large asteroid impacts over millions of years during the early days of the solar system, each of which would have launched on average many thousands or millions of fragments into space. We're looking at a history of probably billions if not trillions of individual lottery tickets. And guess what? When you're sitting on that many lottery tickets it is not merely a CERTAINTY that you will get a winner, it is a certainty that you will get MULTIPLE winners.
Really the only question here is whether life arose on mars. His point that mars was viable for life *long* before earth was viable for life makes it a very persuasive possibility. It would help explain how life on earth appeared almost the instant the earth cooled enough to have a solid surface. That is much less surprising if you consider life may have taken a few hundred million years to first appear on mars and then landed on earth's brand new skin.
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