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."

Comments

Sustainable?

[Solder Fumes]

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.

Cosmic rays?....

[Piranhaa]

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

Re:Human ingenuity

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:SimEarth

[Drooling Iguana]

And so that we have a base of operations when the time comes to terraform Earth.

Organisms awakened?

[CupBeEmpty]

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.

Life there may not be like life here

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.

From Margarita Marinova herself

[pauljlucas]

I had the same question, so I e-mailed her. Here's my question:

So even if you add more of an atmosphere to Mars, what would prevent it from leaking off into space just like it's already done to get Mars into the state it's in now? Due to Mars' lack of a magnetic field, the solar wind would just strip away the atmosphere.

Within minutes, I got a reply from her:

Hi Paul,

you're right, even if we thicken Mars' atmosphere, it will eventually disappear again. The lack of magnetic field is probably not the biggest problem (it's likely to have been more of a problem in the past when the solar wind was likely stronger), but you would definitely have the formation of Carbonates in the newly formed lakes and rivers that would take sequester the CO2.

The important point here though is timescales. If people really wanted to do it, terraforming (at least the first stages) could definitely be accomplished in about 100 years. That's a reasonable timescale in the life of humans. The disappearance of the Mars atmosphere, on the other hand, would take *at least* millions, and probably tens of millions, of years. That timescale is much longer than human experience and therefore I would argue is not that important. We are going to be so different in a million years, with such totally different capabilities and needs, that the fact that Mars will then again become inhabitable I think is unimportant.

Margarita.

Re:SimEarth

[nizo]

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.