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Warming a Tiny Piece of Mars For Terraforming
dptalia writes "It's been a dream of science fiction writers everywhere that we would eventually terraform Mars. Now an engineering student has proposed a way to terraform only a kilometer of Mars. By building an array of space based mirrors to focus the sun's light, a small area of Mars could be warmed to about 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) which would make it easier for explorers to work and live there. Since Mars' atmosphere is thin, the mirrors would have to be carefully designed to prevent them from reflecting harmful radiation as well as light and warmth."
Wouldn't the melted ice boil away at 68 some odd degress on Mars? Or do they plan on heating up a kilometer sized pressurized dome?
Maybe not "heavily insulated", but certainly pressurized. Working "more easily" is still not easy.
I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere? Am I confused? Should we be thinking about how to warm up the core a la 'Total Recall'?
Best regards.
Now, if we're talking about a square kilometer of Mars, that'd be a different matter...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
One of them will get the blame when there is a slight miscalculation in the adjustment the aim of the solar concentrators and Cleveland is burnt off the map (leaving the rest of the country east of it to be brought the accompanying odor, not unlike burnt armpit hair).
Where were you when the voynix came?
good luck trying to get a kilometer sizes beam of light in the SAME place from space
The article erroneously claims ASU is in Tucson. The University of Arizona is in Tucson.
so our intrepid martian pioneers would have two suns to look at...that could be interesting. quite a throwback to old asimov stories.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Didn't Wornstrom try this in a Futurama episode? Lessons learned I guess.
To filter out UV and higher frequency things, like our ozone layer does, just use a prizm, or better, a diffraction grating (like a cd), but then you'd end up with a rainbow down on the surface - in some parts everything would be bright red, in some others, bright blue, etc. You'd have to rehomogenize it by sending it through a second prism or diffraction grating, which makes things complicated, especially if a meteor hits and things get misaligned. I guess they should just use TiO2 coatings on mirrors that are transparent in visible but very dark in UV (don't know xray region), to act like a mirror coating ozone layer. But because a lot of UV would be absorbed where rutile coatings are black, it would heat the mirrors a lot, as opposed to purely reflecting mirrors.
Instead if trying to comeback to life a dead planet save ours first.
> Woida points out another potential problem. If not carefully designed, the mirrors could focus harmful high-frequency radiation like gamma rays onto the surface.
Woida, if you've got a way to make mylar balloons capable of reflecting gamma rays onto a single focal point, there are some guys in the DoE and the DoD who would like to talk to you, and they pay way better than NASA.
Won't this hinder the war on terra?
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
"To filter out UV and higher frequency things, like our ozone layer does, just use a prizm, or better, a diffraction grating (like a cd), but then you'd end up with a rainbow down on the surface"
Always looking for a way to make real that Martian rave you've always been planning, eh?
Where were you when the voynix came?
I'd be curious how hot the ground would need to be to warm the tenuous atmosphere continuously blowing over it to a comfortable temperature. And wouldn't you risk creating a huge localized dust storm from the strong convection currents? Maybe you could heat a ring of land around the point you are interested in and just wait until all the dust is blown away ... but I doubt it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Paul Birch has published (in the Journal of the British interplanetary Society) a way to "quickly" terraform all of Mars quickly. (Don't get too mad at me if that article has long since become obsolete.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Combine this with Kim Stanley Robinson's* deep hole, and you might have a comparatively easily maintained environment on Mars: dig a big, deep hole for much of the atmosphere to fall into, thereby increasing atmospheric pressure; use this array of mirrors suggestion to heat it up, and you've "solved" a couple of the more pressing problems with trying to live on Mars. With sufficient "natural" pressure, heat, and light, building structures in which to grow things becomes easier. This doesn't really address the lack of water, of course...
*I call this Robinson's idea only because Red Mars is where I encountered it - I have no idea who actually came up with it.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
How does this 300-sphere reflective mirror keep the reflection targeted on the surface, while accounting for Mars' rotation?
Why not just put a giant fresnel lens on stilts?
Aside from the difficulties with terraforming Mars mentioned in other comments, I sometimes wonder why there isn't a little more effort put into doing terraforming experiments where land and resources are a little more accessible: earth.
There's plenty of pretty hostile environments here we could start to practice on, but I rarely see anything indicating we're doing much beyond putting good air conditioning units in new houses in Lancaster so we can build layer 60 of suburbia around LA....
Tweet, tweet.
I know Mars' atmosphere is thin. But wouldn't having a patch of dirt heated 120 deg C warmer than the rest of the planet force the air to rise over that spot, basically forming a permanent tornado?
That'd make one heck of an updraft.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
You mean like the Genesis Effect?
Like suppose we had this array that could heat up a Martian neighborhood from -80C to 20C.
Imagine what it could do if we pointed it at Earth city which were already at 30-35C!
Green Zone here we come!
That's not a problem! We'll just use our phasers to drill through the crust, then we can send Data down to set up plasma injection units. It should keep the core molten for centuries!
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
Heating up a small area will result in a horrible, permanent wind storm. Probably not a good idea.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
even on Mars, might teach us plenty about how to control temperature on Earth. Such information could be invaluable in averting the upcoming global warming. Can we, for example, reflect light away from our planet to reduce temperature?
-Oh the mirrors? They were fine until some fucker started playing baseball near one of them and crooked one. Now I've got a freaking mutant baby guy named Kuato glued to my side. On the plus side, we've got three breasted hookers now.
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Yes, of course we should start terraforming Mars before we've even really begun to look for existing life there that we'd destroy. Why worry about exterminating an entire planet when there's condos to be built?
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make install -not war
There's at least one scientific error in the article, which is that it talks about the risk of inadvertently focusing gamma rays with a mirror. You can't focus gamma rays with a mirror. A typical gamma, with an energy of 1 MeV, interacts with matter mainly via Compton scattering. At the low-energy end of the gamma spectrum (say 10 keV) it's mostly the photoelectric effect, while at the high end (10 MeV) it's pair production. None of these process obey the law of specular reflection. This would be a more legitimate concern with UV.
I also wondered about the idea of melting water to form lakes on the surface. Mars's atmosphere is so thin that it would be considered a pretty decent vacuum by Earth standards. Won't the water boil off pretty rapidly in a near-vacuum at 30 degrees C?
Find free books.
..terraforming day on slashdot? I didn't get the memo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
Right idea, wrong phenomenon. Tornadoes are powered by mezocyclones found in supercells. Hurricanes are powered by a rising column of warm air centered in the eye (warm ocean water is the heat source).
science is a religion
So in essence, these are just giant space heaters?
We need somewhere for the great and good to hide when the nukes start flying.
They'd better make sure no wily Asian men stow away on the rocket. That will lead to a separatist movement among the colonists.
I know people can live at higher pressures if given time for their bodies to adjust. Does anyone know how much of a low pressure environment a human body can acclimate to?
I've actually been wanting to explore this idea for warming winter temperatures for those of us who live in the Northern Latitudes.
:-)
In addition to the general comfort provided by more warmth and sunlight, there is actually a huge environmental benefit. A 20 degree increase in temperatures for a large metro area would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve plenty of fuel that would have been used for heating.
The money spent heating homes and businesses in the north are not insignificant, the last numbers I saw for Ohio indicated that statewide yearly natural gas expenses are about $1.5-$2 billion. (To be fair, you can reduce those costs in other ways as well, but using a solar array to redistribute/magnify solar light during winter has secondary benefits that geothermal heating do not.
Keep in mind, I'd only propose this for the urban areas, and not the rural areas, where I understand agricultural fields might need time to chill during winter.
Given the low pressure, a visitor will still need a space suit. Keeping warm in a space suit is not a problem. It's getting rid of the heat produced by the person. This is typically done with a sublimator that uses a water to ice transition to remove heat. This only works well if there is a hard vacuum. The alternative of a closed loop refrigerant system adds weight. This presents interesting design problems given the probable weakened state of an astronaut after a trip to Mars.
Upgrades are complete on the geothermic reactor at the Mars colony. Increased energy demands from quantum mechanics research now being met. Thanks, Union Aerospace Corporation
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
Seems like an easier idea.
I wish they could warm New England to 68 degrees instead.
> I thought the problem with Mars was the geodynamic thing with the molten core that forms
> a magneosphere that would prevent solar winds from blowing away an atmosphere?
There are several problems. Mars does not have enough mass to hold an Earth-like atmosphere, for one thing. The article title is misleading, because it's not really talking about terraforming in the traditional "you can take off your helmet and breathe freely" sense. It's just talking about a measure that would make exploration of the surface, by astronauts in pressure suits, a bit easier.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Now, you can plant various plants. It will be a small selection, but if you can keep the temp above freezing, some plants may accept the lower pressure. Of course, the question is, what happens during the winter? Besides, this may be a lot cheaper than doing a nuke approach. As it is, it could be used to sublimate some of the CO2 at the poles and restart the warming. Of course, it would be better to send a few metorites into the planet.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Another reason why Arnold should become president.
We need to set off some nukes in the planets core to try to get that liquid iron in it flowing.
The nukes will add a tiny bit of heat, and the magnetic field the flowing iron generates will both shield colonists from deadly solar radiation, as well as protect the atmosphere from being blown away by the solar wind. Basically, the movie 'The Core'.
Woida, if you've got a way to make mylar balloons capable of reflecting gamma rays onto a single focal point, there are some guys in the DoE and the DoD who would like to talk to you, and they pay way better than NASA.
That's what makes me wonder why anyone took this guy seriously in the first place. Fortunately, NASA is only giving him a token amount:
He received $9000 to study the idea from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, US. [...] In his concept study, Woida will work out the structural details of the balloons and study how much extra light from the reflectors reaches the Martian surface.
Nine thousand bucks would buy a lot of ramen, but in this case, it's probably worth it to get the guy to quick knocking on the door at NIAC saying "Hey, look at my space mirror thingie... on MARS!!!!11!!one!`1~~"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Like ants under a magnafying glass
"It's been a dream of science fiction writers everywhere"
Not really. Unless by "dream" you mean "surreal nightmare." (Or, to be fair, unless by "science fiction writers everywhere" you mean "some science fiction writers in some places.")
Not being a scientist, I've always found Kim Stanley Robinson a bit, um, stupifyingly dull. Doesn't anyone remember Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles? The man had a healthy respect for / terror of these ideas.
With the amount of stuff we keep losing over mars this isn't the brightest idea.
For those rough nights.
This seems like a cool idea (obvious now, in retrospect). The green house effect is valid nearly anywhere you can create an enclosed environment. It's harder on Mars, since there isn't that much light to begin with to heat up your 1km radius greenhouse. But if ya got your solar collectors, etc., it could work.
Mars seems very likely never to be able to be self sustaining for very long. Which isn't to say it isn't worth a try, but I think Venus would have a much longer payback period for the effort and could see a sustainable biosphere developed to take advantage of Venus's plentiful Oxygen and Carbon.
With all its CO2 all it requires is a bit of Hydrogen to start making water. The best way to get sustainable hydrogen is to get the planet spinning so that it can form its own magnetic field which would start trapping hydrogen from solar winds. I bet if we started nudging comets towards Venus, hitting it just right and seeded the atmosphere with wee beasties, then we could accelerate the process and have a second planet to call home in a matter of centuries not millennium.
The mirror idea has been discussed before and is nothing new...however, what about doing the opposite for other planets? Say you want to cool down Venus. Just stick a giant coin in an orbit somewhere between the sun and Venus. Voila, instant permanent eclipse. Might not be a bad idea to start looking into similar technology for earth. Say, manufacture a variable opacity lens, or even just some controllable slats which could be turned to different angles in order to let more or less sunlight through. That way if Global Warming really does get as bad as is being predicted, we can give ourselves a couple decades of twilight to try and sort out the environment.
Transfer the extra warmth from Earth to Mars. Bye Bye global warming.
Why only a square kilometer? Again, some idiot had missed the forest for hte trees.
The polar caps on Mars are composed almost ENTIRELY out of carbon dioxide, with a little bit of water mixed in. Why don't they focus the mirrors onto the polar caps and vaporize the solid CO2? Not only will they be able to build up the atmosphere, but the CO2 will create a "greenhouse effect" and WARM THE ENTIRE PLANET. Possibly, this CO2atmosphere may be able to help absorb some of the massive amounts of radiation that bombards Mars. Further more, they could set aside a small area and use more mirrors to super-heat the ground and try to free some of the oxygen that is trapped in the iron oxide 'soil' and possibly create a (somewhat) breathable atmosphere.
So:
Mirrors on the polar caps would vaporize CO2 to create a 'greenhouse'-type atmosphere.
Mirrors on designated areas would super-heat iron oxide in the ground for oxygen (possibly).
Theoretically, you could create weather 'patterns' on Mars so that the cold polar areas and super-hot areas would interact with each other to produce wind patterns that would behave much the same way as on Earth. The continued addition of C02 to the atmosphere would be helped in part to warming of Mars by the release of CO2. The outside acceleration of CO2 vaporization by the mirrors could be stopped when the planet becomes warm enough to cause the release of CO2 to be self-sustaining. Outside intervention could be eliminated when the deposition of CO2 at the polar areas become equal to the vaporization by climatic action.
End Result: AN ENTIRE PLANET WARMED, instead of one lousy square kilometer.
Cost Comparison:
Multply the article's cost of warming 1 square kilometer by the number of square kilometers of surface area that Mars has. You get the idea.
Now, you would most likely probably need (for basic terraforming), say, 5 square kilometers for polar cap vaporization and 5 square kilometers for oxygen evaporization/atmospheric warming to get proces started. The speed of terraforming would depend on how may mirros are allotted to polar cap vaporization and surface heating. But it would happen eventually.
(INSERT FUTURAMA QUOTE HERE)
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Another half-baked engineering student on his way to getting a 'degree'. Hopefully, the other half of his brain will come into being and he will finally be (remotely) worthy of the title "Engineer". If you are going to propose an idea to the mass media, THINK IT THROUGH FIRST!
Keep in mind, I am only throwing this out there as a rough idea, so don't think it has been thought out for months or anything.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Luckily, that process has began some time ago and is, due to the many positive feedback loops, unstoppable.
When I was a kid, I didn't think I'll see the surface of Venus in my lifetime, so, of course, I'm overjoyed.
S.A.D., of course. Without sunlight, all the colonists will kill themselves.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
We terraform Earth all the time. New Orleans is probably an example of a failed attempt; Holland is certainly sucessful. One of the most interesting "terraform" landscapes I've seen is the Aran Islands of the coast of Ireland. These are giant limestone (I think) slabs in the middle of the ocean. Prevailing winds and rain stripped any top soil away, leaving bare rock. The wind cut the rock into strange sort of brick shapes, leaving loose rock tens of feet deep. Then 4000 years ago some Celt gets the bright idea that it'd be a nice place to live. He takes all the natural bricks, builds thousands of kilometers of walls. These form natural wind breaks. Then he mixes seaweed with what passes for sand out out there and invents artificial soil and covers the island. Suddenly what used to be a barran lump of rock is capable of supporting human life. very cool.
Because it uses mirrors!
Seems like the heated atmosphere would rise out and cold air would rush in making kinda like a air geiser. Eventually changing the temp of the whole planet. Or the atmosphere would just ignite.
Who in the world is worried about thin inflatable mirrors reflecting Gamma Rays!? If there were easy and cheap ways to reflect gamma rays, it would be a lot easier to build antimatter fueled photon rockets. Unfortunately, it's quite hard to reflect high energy photons except at very shallow angles of indicence. Either the person being interviewed is half-clued or the writer got something seriously wrong.
It's been a while since I read the * Mars books, but one of my favourite bits was the colony at low point (might be what you were talking about). Since it was at the lowest point, it was the first to have a decent atmospheric pressure when they started terraforming. Hooray!
Then, whey they terraformed in some seas, it was right a the bottom of the deepest one...
.evom ton seod gis eht
Your comment about mass I don't believe is correct. Titan has one tenth the mass of Mars and has a thick nitrogen atmosphere. It could be this is possible because Titan is so much colder than Mars, but I'm not sure that explains it either.
you get a giant umbrella in orbit between mars and the sun.
Use a tranlucent yellow material and it will focus energy towards mars.
because it is domed, and it's diameter will be larger then the diameter of mars, you will gt more light per Sq. Meter.
You also have the added effect of a layer of protect from harmfull energies coming from the sun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The main problem is that they have to be launched first. Although I understand that we are not talking about 5 years here but more like 50 or even 100, but there is this huge anti-nuclear-whatever trend in the world (and I am talking power-plants, research(!), etc.) so that launching any nuclear device into space may be put between the fairy tales at the moment...
However, they definitely used to do it - look at Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 satellites for example - they were equipped with RTG generators. And I think some fairly recent NASA mission too (Cassini?).
I don't get it. Why use mirrors that have to be transported to Mars and then would only reflect the weak Martian sunlight? Why not collect sunlight here on Earth, or in Earth orbit, store it in some sort of container, and take it directly to the Martian surface where it's needed?
Any physicist will point out that light has no mass (or the photon, to be precise, which is like light, but is a particle the size and shape of a small pea, whereas light is a wave and slightly different in that it undulates around rather than travelling in a straight line, like the photon). Since light weighs nothing you can store an tremendous amount of light - all that's needed - in your container, and the cost of transporting it is next to nothing! Just the cost of transporting the container - which can be made quite small.
The added benenfit of using Earth light is that the sun is so much stronger here (centrafugal force spins light away from the sun faster here, since the Earth orbits the sun faster, according to the inverse-square law) so the light has more energy than an equivalent volume of light collected near Mars.
That post should be modded sky high for the confusion it will cause. What's next, water in powder form?
Priceless - you made my day..
Insert
Ivan, Ivan, Ivan... sad, very sad.
This is absurd. First, open atmo heating of a selected section will not increase pressure of that section as you have pressure "radiating" out to the lower pressure atmo at a constant and rapid rate. Seriously. High pressure flows to low pressure at the maximum potential it is allowed.
Second, how is this any better than a pressurized dome? It would certainly cost more and take more effort.
A Geodesic dome has a distinct advantage in that the larger the dome the smaller the apparent structures. In other words the supports get small enough that you don't see them any more from the ground. If you have a power outage, your pressurized dome won't suddenly collapse to a vaccum (assuming you could sustain an open-atmo "high pressure zone". A series of large domes (say 200 meters diameter) would provide a redundant system and thus greater safety.
Do the math on how much that "balloon mirror" will weigh. 300 150m diameter balloons. That is what, 283,000 square meters per ballon? At about 175g/m^2, each ballon's skin alone would weigh about 49,525,000 grams, or nearly 50,000 Kg,m or about 55 tons. That's for the skin of ONE ballon. He wants 300 of those! Even if you could get reflective material to weigh in at about 50g/m^2 that is able to do what you want and survive Mars' orbital environment, you are still looking at about 15.5 tons per ballon, for just the skin. Three hundred of these would bring the skin-only total to about 4,670 tons. You still have other issues. If you make the skin "too light" it gets pushed around by the Sun (think solar sail). You've got issues with micrometeorites puncturing and deflating your ballon. You've got thermal variances from dark side to light side. You've also got to get all this moved into place, assembled, and then perform station keeping control. Most likely he would not get below 100g/m^2 - in which case you should substitute the 5,000 tons comments below to 10,000 tons.
Even IF the idea of an open atmo high pressure zone that did not deplete faster than you can replenish somehow worked, exactly how feasible is putting 5,000 tons of ballons into space? Compare that to a pressurized dome city. Particularly since you need only the machinery and a hydrogen feedstock to produce plastics on Mars from native materials. The combination of this native material manufacturing and Mars' light gravity means the construction of kilometer diameter domes is feasible. And without sending 5,000 tons of material from Earth.
Better for solar power on Mars? yeah, because shipping 5,000 tons to focus some light on some solar cells is a good idea anywhere. Solar cells aren't light anyway, and are unable to provide the power a Mars station would require. If you managed to success somehow in creating a square kilometer of "Earthlike" open area on Mars you would also have the same problem solar cells here have. Thicker atmo cuts down on available light. Any gain you might hope to get from this would be eaten up by the atmo heating. Much better power would be a few small nuke plants. 7 Tons will get you a good nuke plant able to crank out 400kW(electric), or 2MW(thermal), or some combination thereof for 25 years at max sustainable burn. Where is the benefit?
Oh you dont' want nukes? Fine, solar concentrators on the surface, running to solar thermal generators working of a low atmo steam system. This requires less thermal energy and thus amplifies the thermal energy you do get. Still less mass than you'd get from the combination of over 5,000 tons of ballonage plus the hundreds of tons of solar cells you'd require.
Better than ballons in space, take the material mass for that 1.5 kilometer group of spheres, cut each sphere in two (to make a dome), and cover 3 square kilometers. But of course that would be ridiculous too considering you can manufacture the material for solid domes on Mars on Mars.
This is seriously unworthy. Looks to me like an attempt to capitalize on the recent Space trend and grab some free money to play around. I just answered his "question", can I have the $9,000?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Doesn't anyone remember Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles?
I remember them all too well. With loathing.
Bradbury doesn't write science fiction. He writes mainstream fiction using science fiction idioms.
The primary distinction is the central message:
Science fiction is the art of technologists. The central message is "You can always fix or improve things if you think about them clearly and carefully. That's what you're SUPPOSED to do. And that's what will make you happy and your life good." Dystopias are permitted, but only of the form: "Here's something you can break SO badly that it CAN'T be fixed afterward - so watch it. (And here's where the fragile point is so you can avoid it - or stop the avalanche before it gets out of hand.)
Mainstream fiction is the art of social control - the "circuses" of "bread-and-...". The central message is: "Your life might be bad now, and getting worse, but anything you do to improve it will bring disaster. Only properly-constituted authorities are able to even retard the slide. The best you can do is shut up, sit down, and follow orders. (And hope your part of the herd isn't slated for slaughter in the near term.)"
And that's why, when the government schools are force-feeding you "literature" as they train you for your place in the machine, they dump on Science Fiction generally (since it would make you less tractable) but turn around and shove a handfull of allegedly-science-fiction "exceptions" down your throat: "The Machine Stops", "1984", "Brave New World", and, of course, anything by Bradbury.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
shouldn't we be exploring and studying the natural environment of Mars and its (possible) indigenous life forms before we start terraforming and introducing alien life forms that could destroy any ecology that may already exist there??
Since the willy-willies are electrically powered (that's why they shine, and leave black footprints), I'm wondering if running a large one of those over your habitation is a really good idea.
I think Larry Niven might have a claim on it.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Howdy. I'm studying electromagnetic waves in physics this semester, so I'm curious how someone would reflect only visible light onto an area. Would there be some kind of coating on the reflecting surface that would refract the higher frequency energy away from the area? Are there existing examples of this technology? H.
On this planet, a rapidly rising column of hot moist air creates a dangerous storm. Mars has a thinner atmosphere, but this would create a larger temperature difference to drive the process.
Sounds like someone came up with a $10^10 solution to a $~10^7 problem...
Greenhouses are "localized terraforming" in the same sense as this proposal, would not require giant orbital mirrors to be precisely aligned, and would be far more efficient because the environment would be more contained against losses of heat and atmosphere into the ambient surroundings.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This idea of terraforming on mars seems to be an alternative for using when our earth might lose essential life conditions for humans...
atmospheric pressure is only slightly lower than Earth's pressure (0.6-0.9 kPa versus 1.01 kPa for earth, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars). The biggest hurdle is the large temperature swings between night and day. So in this case the mirror will probably help a lot, especially if the intent is to grow plants (remember that Mars' atmosphere is almost completely carbon dioxide).
The demo model in Germany, which was huge and had the benefit of our very thick (relative to the Martian) atmosphere only produced 50 kW, or 67 bhp, about a third of a normal car engine. It doesn't sound viable to me.
Best Slashdot comment ever
There's a substantial element of Slashdot readers that are confused about the difference between reality and fantasy. It's just about barely possible that NASA might manage to mount a successful Apollo-like Mars mission in 20 or 30 years' time. (By which I mean, bounce around in a rover, collect some rocks, dig a couple of holes here & there to look at bedrock.) This will all be scientifically useful and interesting stuff. But it's no more going to lead to terraforming and mass colonisation than the Amundensen Base at the South Pole means humans are going to "colonise the Antartic". In fact, the south pole is a lot more hospitable and conducive to human life than Mars is - by a factor of a thousand or so.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Please pick up the nearest biology textbook and review the chapter about photosynthesis.
If there is no biology textbook nearby, here's the simplified version:
water + carbon dioxide + energy (light) -> oxygen + sugar
First, how the mirror could not be geostationary if you want to warm a fixed area? And if it's geostationary, how do you keep the right angle with the sunlight to reflect that fixed area? You choose to warm one of the pole ? But you can't be geostationary at the poles....Oh! you constently move the balloon!Yeah right! I should have miss something because this whole idea seems ridiculous to me. And even if you could make it work, consider this: if a 1.5 km wide mirror is used to direct light on a 1 km wide patch of earth the gain in radiating power cannot be greater than 150% of what you would get right under the sun. Does it worth it? It definitly sounds like a summer student project. 9000$...
You don't need to combine the mirror and the mole holes from Red Mars. The mole holes were designed to heat the atmosphere of Mars using the internal heat of the planet:
Step 1: Dig a hole a kilometer wide and 20 kilometers deep.
Step 2: Release internal heat into the Martian Atmosphere.
Step 3: Profit!
For an added bonus, you could build colonies into the walls of the mole hole, that way you have heat and protection from nasty radiation. Now all we need to do is figure out how to build automated construction robots that could dig a 20 kilometer hole all by themselves, and then a rocket to get them to Mars safely...
According to this tin foil hat article, NASA is already planning on igniting Saturn to create a second star in the Sol system, potentially heating Titan up enough to make it inhabitable...
Brilliant stuff...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Assuming one could build a shading device (or cluster of devices) at the L1 point (with adjustments for solar pressure on the orbit of the device itself), how long would it take to spin up Venus if the shade provided was in the form of a semi-permanent partial eclipse? In other words, allowing Venus to receive sunlight on only one hemisphere semi-permanently (until the mission is accomplished). This would both cool the planet and provide rotational pressure.
My question is really "How much pressure?" Would such a scheme require thousands or millions of years to spin up the planet to a more reasonable rotation? Anyone willing to take up the math? How, exactly, do you calculate motive force from sunlight? What percentage of the imparted energy from solar winds and full-spectrum sun-light would contribute to motive, rotational force? Or would all of it simply spin the atmosphere, imparting little or no motive force to the planetary body itself?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving