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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 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
"...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
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.
Here is a better article on the subject:0 4115304.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502
-Ariel
....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
``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.
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
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.
Happy now? Time to stop the denial then.