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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."
If you warm up Mars, how long before all the atmosphere cooks off because the gravity is lower? To me it seems like trying to blow up a balloon that already has a small hole in it.
Well we already know the cosmic rays will kill us eventually. So why don't we first think of a way to block these rays better than current methods THEN figure out about making the planet inhabitable by life? Why would we try to start life on Mars if life is unable to survive? Seems kind of retarded to me
Have they also figured out how to jumpstart the planet's magnetic field so that Cosmic Rays don't just strip the planet of it's atmosphere again?
While we're on the topic of Greenpeace and the Sierra, they're two examples of a good thing gone wrong. Between Greenpeace protesting Oil tankers and in doing so potentially causing the disasters by positioning their boats in front of tankers, forcing them to take drastic measures to avoid a collision... AND the Sierra club prohibitting old growth clearing, which led to the destruction of thousands of Yellowstone forest.. both of them have lost site of their mission.
And so that we have a base of operations when the time comes to terraform Earth.
I despite the general "far fetchedness" of this article. I think the wackiest part is that somehow we might revive organisms on Mars. Mars has been the way it is for a pretty long time now. Any organisms that might live there would be very specially adapted to their (probably very hostile) environment. Mostl ikely we would just kill anything that was living there.
It would pretty much be like going down to the geothermal vents under the ocean and plugging them with concrete to make it more habitable down there, then expecting that to "revive" the organisms living down there.
Smallpox evolved to use humans as a host, and those humans who were long exposed to it (europeans) had, in turn, evolved a resistance to it. When smallpox was introduced to North America, it was still able to use the humans there as a host, however those humans had not developed the resistance, which is what made it so deadly to them. Martain bacteria, on the other hand, never evolved to use humans, or anything remotely like humans as a host and would thus most likely be completely harmless to us.
``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."''
Or, by so drastically changing the environment, we might kill the life that's there. For all I know, life on other planets may function according to very different mechanisms than life on Earth. Most of what we know is about lifeforms that do their magic with oxygen, water, and carbohydrates. Is it so hard to imagine there would be other combinations that work?
There are many interactions between molecules in terran lifeforms that we barely understand. We don't know what the bulk of our DNA is good for, and I think the same goes for large parts of the human brain. With such a poor understanding of terrestial life, what makes us think we can make informed decissions about possible life on other planets?
Oh, I get it. _We_ want to populate Mars with _our_ kind of life, so that someday _we_ might live there, after _we_ have ruined our own planet. The blurb about reviving Martian organisms is just to pretend we care for their survival, rather than just our own comfort.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
pardon me, but you never read about the British Empire did you?
How about the Spanish colonization of the Americas? Conquistadors (sp?) anybody?
Don't blame the inherent corrupting ability of power on a specific nationality without looking back at history, and how almost every set of people is guilty of it at one point or another.
while you may not be self centered, you certainly are ignorant...
Error 407 - No creative sig found
``It just seems to me that the world of science has recently turned more into a smorgishboard of unfulfilled promises and reluctance to realize that we cannot even figure out 90% of the problems with our own people''
I've identified a number of negative developments in recent times, but this isn't one of them. I think science has always been about unfulfilled promises. That's the whole thrill of it. I can be the first to prove the 3n+1 conjecture! That is, of course, assuming there is a proof to be found.
I read that, by the end of the 19th century, scientists thought they had pretty much figured it all out. But then Einstein turned the (scientific) world on its head with the relativity theory, and now we have quantum mechanics, which gives a much weaker sense of having it all figured out.
In a broader meaning, science can be taken to be the search for the workings of nature, and that would probably include certain religions. The fact that many people view any religion as a bunch of unfulfilled promises is telling. As is the fact that I see people who have "lost faith" in science and turned to some other framework to explain the world to them.
Science really is just another belief system, which has enough things reasonably explained so people think it's going to lead them to the whole truth. It isn't. Science can only explain what can be measured, and perfectly accurate measurements just don't exist. Any theory we have can only ever be falsified, never proven. So we use it, until a counterexample comes along.
What separates science from traditional religions is that the falsification principle is deeply encoded in it, and finding counterexamples is seen as a greater sign of progress than is finding confirmations. That said, many scientists believe their beliefs to be right in favor of any contradictory ones, which is perhaps more dogmatic than typical religious people, who would claim that what they believe is true in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.
Hmm, writing this post felt strangely good.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``It's survival of the fittest.''
Yes, but what exactly constitutes "fittest" is hard to define. Surely money-grabbing corporatist leaders are more fit than poor people who spend all the energy they use on staying alive, in the sense that the former's offspring will be far more likely to survive. But in the long term, they are poisoning the planet to the extent that it basically can't harbor them anymore. Sure, they'll be the last to go; the poor will suffocate before they do, but, as a wise man once said, "then you will find that money cannot be eaten".
I, personally, care more about being kind to others than about having a long and luxurious life for myself. The idea that I'm making somebody else's life a little better is worth more to me than showing off with a new car or wearing the latest fashion. I may die young, but at least I'll die in the knowledge that I've made some people happy.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
I recently started marking days & things heard of stupdendous stupidity on my calendar in a way to track just how much stupidity is around me. I went back and checked my calendar and it is official, I have not heard or read of anything as stooopid as this in 89 days.
Wow.
I wonder how long I will have to go to top this?
On another bend on this same idea, how come people want to work on problems in the universe when we are killing and starving each other to death here on this forgotten mudball hurtling through space right this second. These people, in my (not so ) humble opinion ought to be ashamed of themselves for wasting the money it took to hatch this idiocy was not sent to Niger.
IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but I do work for NASA. Although it may dissapoint you, these ideas which keep showing up on papers and slashdot are just that, ideas. Of the thousands of ideas for the Apollo project, only one (the cheapest and most rational) made it. Therefore, you should expect these things to either never happen, or take 50+ years.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
That is all.
might be quicker and easier to "precipitate" out the atmosphere, somehow
i'm not saying i know how, but what i am saying is that mars doesn't make as good a candidate for colonization than venus does for a number of reasons no one is bringing up: gravity for one: venus's gravity is much like earths, mars i think is 1/3
i mean say what you want about how hard it would be to "precipitate" the venutian atmosphere... but then you have to admit to what you are saying about doing to mars is a lot longer in time spent, and just as hard
it seems to me it is always easier to "destroy": make components of the atmosphere precipate out into something dense, than it would be to "create": put density where there initially is none
with such a weak atmosphere and gravity, what atmosphere can one hope to build on mars?
meanwhile, you can suck a lot out of the venutian atmosphere chemically, in the right series of manipulation, that would merely become liquid water, sulfur compounds, carbon compounds... do it the right way and you could terraform an atmosphere a lot more similar to earths in a lot less time
of course what i am proposing is hard... and mars isn't?
also no one brings up that they both don't have a magnetic field: yikes, cancer from irradiation... but the colonies can be protected somehow
but venus has always seemed to be a better terraforming candidate to me than mars, but mars has this hype machine surrounding it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Naw, just alter the trajectory of an icy comet and bingo, instant big pond. You would probably want to do this before setting up a mars base, unless someone else beat you to a prime spot already.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
There's only really one technical problem with terraforming Mars: it's mass.
It has a thin atmosphere for a reason. It's low mass results in two things, a shallow gravity well, and a lack of a global magnetic field.
Over time, interaction with the solar wind has stripped off the upper portions of the atmosphere. We see this happening with Venus as it lacks a global magnetic field. The reason that it's atmosphere is so dense to this day, is that it has a relatively deep gravity well. Earth has both. Mars has niether. It is believed that most of the nitrogen that was initially present in it's atmosphere was the largest casualty of this intereaction.
While it's true that the things being proposed would have some short ter, bennefit, in the long run, anything we put into the Martian atmosphere will be lost to space eventually unless Mars either gains enough mass to get a deeper gravity well (possible, but not with current technology, or within reasonable timeframes), or has it's globabl magnetic field reactivate (again possible, but not with any technology we can currently concieve).
Still, it has the resources that could potentially support a population of billions, and certainly millions, and is a good choice for colonization as many other of its charateristics are similar enough to those of the Earth, that Earth life could adapt to at least enclosed environments (24 hour day, allowing for modern plants to live there, likely enough gravity to prevent atrophy of muscle and bone, etc.).
Polonium Halo FAQs: "Professional geologist Tom Bailleul takes a second look at Gentry's claimed polonium haloes, arguing that there is no good evidence they are the result of polonium decay as opposed to any other radioactive isotope, or even that they are caused by radioactivity at all. Gentry is taken to task for selective use of evidence, faulty experiment design, mistakes in geology and physics, and unscientific principles of investigation and argument style."
You should watch his videos,
As a rule of thumb, any "scientist" who presents his theories on videos is almost certainly full of shit.