Slashdot Mirror
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."
Send CmdrTaco to Mars after he eats a burrito.
I remember the game SimEarth had you do something like this in order to make it livable. Of course, I nuked everything that moved, but that was a different story. Why are we trying to terraform mars?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
1 planet down, 9x10^10000 to go!
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.
50 degrees? Damn that's chilly!
(Surely you mean celsius, try to be clear. Next time the number might not be so obvious. You could end up crashing a space probe or something.)
One has to assume you're there, quite the feat; and, let me be the first to say, I welcome our grass growing, and smoking, Martian Overlords.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You could just put two or three of those 7gHz Pentum 4's on there without any cooling. That should warm everything up in a few hours.
"...planet several thousand miles away"
I might agree with spending a little more money on education.
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
Wait a minute here... You're telling me some of the water the life guards have been nagging me about not getting in my lungs can actually be used for swimming? Bwaaaahahaha - CPR-wimps, Eat Crow!
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.
So, what took our planet (loosely theoretically) a couple billion of years to do, could be (again loosely theoretically) done there in a matter of hundereds? (I realize that theoretically the larger portion of the time it took for life to develop here had more to do with variable chances than it did with the atmosphere, although atmosphere is included in those variables)
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, on our own planet, so why should we be trying to conquer others?
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.
Here is a better article on the subject:0 4115304.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502
-Ariel
If anything has taught me well, it was DOOM and DOOMII that we need not wake up the zombies of marz.
They will surely frag us to death.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
ok, mars has one third the gravity of earth, and no magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind. exactly how thick of an atmosphere or air pressure at ground level can mars support?
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Brilliant! Man, I bet my name will go down in history for having given a title to this new concept.
I'd be surprised, you posted as "Anonymous Coward". Bad luck...
....250 years ago Bwizopp Gnis'uen, a famous martian scientist came up with an idea how to colonize that cold blue planet.
"This great plan will allow us to finally colonize that pesky blue planet and in the meantime allows us to get rid of that ape infestation over there.
It would be hugely expensive to invade, so the brilliance of the plan is to let those apes do it for us. They will never suspect a thing.
All we have to do is to tell them about the huge reserves of so called "oil" in the ground. The timing is crucial, because if we would tell them too late, they would discover a much easier way to generate energy. That would be a disaster, but it won't happen. When they realise what's going on it will be too late already."
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
once the reaction starts, it'll spread to all the turbinium in the planet. Mars will go into global meltdown. That's why the aliens never turned it on.
as campy as that movie was, I still like it.
``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.
Do we really want to wake up the Martian Organisms?
In all likelyhood, if Mars has microscopic life, the Earth has probably already been infected with it. Calculations show that spores can survive certain meteor impacts and be transported to Earth in the process. Our life may have even originated on Mars. Earth was too valcanic for stable life formation early on, but due to its smaller size Mars may have been mild and wet at that time. Thus, life may have formed on Mars while Earth was still bubbling, but the roles switched later on and Earth did "more" with the stolen life when Mars cooled and dried out.
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
That would be a long pipe, shit-for-brains.
Offer yourself to the lions. After all, they're natural and wouldn't dream of hurting another living creature would they?
Guess what. It's survival of the fittest.
Deleted
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.
Maybe the key to making that story seem plausible lies in using quite a different kind of "grass"? ;-)
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.
Inexorably, Mars' atmosphere is being lapped away by the constant barraging of the solar wind. If we thicken it up, by whatever means, it will simply thin down again because the gravity on the planet isn't strong enough to compensate for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I don't mean this to be shameless advertising(, because we don't make money off of this, the pennies we make from cafepress is put towards server expenses).
http://www.redcolony.com/ We accept articles from people and have a active forum with 16yros up discussing this very topic on scientific grounds. The site is about sharing ideas and getting the public excited about colonizing and sxploring (and terraforming) the Red Planet. I hope any visitors enjoy their stay.
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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.
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.
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
It was on CBS News, so undoubtedly they were using American units. In this traditional system, used by all popular media when translating scientific stories for the unwashed, the unit of area is the "football field" (also of length, depending on context), "Rhode Island" or "Texas"; the unit of weight is "the Volkswagen", unit of money is "mile-high stack of dollar bills", unit of data is "New York phonebook", or "Library of Congress", etc. Though for 50F, the official American equivalent is, I believe, slightly warmer than a witch's tit.
Here is a page with thorough refutations: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/
This attack from Gentry is amusing in its unconscious self-reference: "What is most revealing about Wise's attempts to cast doubt on the primordial nature of these halos is that he repeatedly ignores the published scientific evidence which contradicts what he is attempting to establish."
Te simple fact is, Gentry starts with what he "knows" must be true and bends all facts to support his cranky thesis. If you read his explanation of the cosmic microwave backround as being due to a supposed shell of hot Hydrogen over 3 billion light-years away with the Earth at the precise center, his discredibility should be obvious.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Oh no... We're ruining *another* planet??!
And then you all complain when martians, or any other extraterrestial species, come to exterminate us...
jeez.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
"Mining the Oort" by Poul Anderson
Deflect comets and crash them into Mars. He even goes into a fair amount of detail about the orbital herding needed, and how to make the crashes as "non-catastrophic" as possible. In the book there were already settlements on Mars that had to be avoided, as well as keeping the crashes from ejecting much of the freshly delivered comet.
In another similar book, they allowed the comet crashes to create a fairly large, deep valley. Easier to get a usably dense atmosphere much sooner in a limited space than on an entire planet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.