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Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target
Raver32 writes "Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary face lift of Mars — a technique called "terraforming" — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on.""
Nope, haven't RTFA, but Kim Stanley Robinson laid out what at least one NASA guy has said was more or less a roadmap to terraforming Mars.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Mars doesn't have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Mars doesn't have an anything-rich atmosphere. Yes, what atmosphere Mars has is mostly CO2, but what atmosphere Mars has is actually a pretty decent approximation of vacuum; the thickest parts of it are barely 1% of typical atmospheric pressure on earth.
The whole article doesn't actually include any specifics, it's just handwaving of the "and then a miracle occurs" sort:
Right. We'll get right on that. We only have 93 years to go, according to this article.
If that's so easy, then I expect they'll be applying the same principles on Earth. No need to worry about global warming at home then?
Don't worry, we'll just fight wars for it. If there were native inhabitants, we'd already have a good ol' fashioned genocide underway.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why Mars? Why not Antarctic glaciers, Gobi desert, Kazakh wastelands, Belarus swamps and Alaskan tundra? Hey, the good old Earth has places that model the conditions of pretty much every planet you can imagine [hazardous included], except perhaps gas giants. Now, where do I go to have the illusion of being on the ancient Foth of Avalars...
I was wondering the other day if Mars soil had the nutrients in it to support our plantlife.
Anyone know of any botany research on the subject? I know we analyzed a few samples of Mars soil in the 70s.
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1. a century? maybe 500-1,000 years, even with a massive economic and political commitment and AFTER the miraculous technological breakthroughs
2. why does venus get such short thrift? i'm thinking along the lines of energy investment and simple entropy: in my mind, to precipitate matter out of an atmosphere, and to dissipate heat, seems to be an easier task than accumulating atmospheric mass and stoking atmospheric heat. yes, even with runaway, geometric catalyst-driven processes, i think it is easier to destroy than it is to create. of course, to do this to venus will be excedingly difficult. but why do you think mars would be easier?
but we should terraform mars and venus as soon as we can, regardless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why don't we "terraform" the Sahara desert, the Gobi desert, Antarctica, and the various dust bowls around the world before trying to tackle Mars.
Right now, we can't even keep existing, fertile land from turning into desert right here on earth, with plenty of water and air around.
Yeah, why wait until we've actually surveyed it for an existing ecosystem or other signs of life, when we can ensure there is life on Mars, if that's all we care about?
I mean, what value could learning about extraterrestrial life have, when it's at the closest planet for several light years likely to have some similar to ours? We'll study the next one, even though that means interstellar travel.
We've proven how carefully we protect environments when we don't understand them, right here on Earth, right?
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You really just don't get how hostile Mars actually is. On average, at the summit of Mt. Everest, air pressure is several hundred times what it is on Mars, and it's 60F warmer than on Mars, and nothing grows there. Antarctica is even balmier than Mt. Everest, and still nothing significant grows there. And those places at least have plenty of clean water.
The question is why should we mess up Mars, we're just barely starting on the road to fix the damage we've done to our own planet.
Yes, I'd hate to ruin all that prinstine forest over there on the red planet.
I couldn't care less about "ruining" currently lifeless worlds. Even if we found something similar to bacteria I wouldn't care if we went in there and "ruined" it by putting life on the same planet.
Only worlds like Europa where there's a least the potential for some multi-cellular life as we know it would I proceed with caution.
Life is special and we should put it everywhere we can. While potentially we might be messing with some Martian nano-scale bacteria and the like, the risks are far outweighed by the gains.
Oh, and as far as "ruining" Earth goes. We are a product of the Earth. Humans are natural. We're life and evolved from the same process that gave us sharks and walnuts and horses. We're probably Earth's most precious resource because we're the lone form of life that can get to other planets, that can spread out beyond Earth. The Earth is far from ruined, it still supports trillons and trillons of individual life forms. And one form of life, us, is just getting capable of one of the greatest achievements possible. Spreading life out beyond the planet it formed on.
Are you guys kidding me? You talk about terraforming as if it's just another trick we have in our arsenal, which it isn't. But, the technology aside, there are other issues that will trump that. For example, what about the militant lobby of folks who will undoubtedly make this into 'the evil humans rushing out to screw up another planet after they can't even keep a grip on their own?' You think Eco Terrorism is bad now, wait until someone starts moralizing on the idea of just commandeering a whole planet for experimental purposes. I personally think that it's as good of a laboratory as any, but I really think this would make the alarmist triply so. Think about it, what about property rights, mineral rights, and political philosophy, the interaction of religious idiots, and the mass media distortion... It's all just a huge cluster fsck waiting to happen, which is why I think it will never happen. I'd hope it does, but I don't see anything able to surmount those socio-political issues any time in the next couple of centuries, let alone the next 93 years.
Speak for yourself.
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I'm all for eventually terraforming Mars once we've determined that there's no existing life there, but to do so before then would be a scientific loss on an unimaginable scale.
Given that we're still discovering new species (microscopic ones by the gazillion, and still finding occasional large ones too) on earth, despite a huge exploratory effort that's been underway for hundreds of years, I think it's a bit early (massive understament) to think we've determined that mars is lacking any life at all
What's that old line? Something like "why are we all into terraforming other worlds while we're busy venusforming earth?"
I love the idea of massive engineering projects making useful changes, but also understand that there is going to be a HUGE heap of the law of unintended consequences because these systems are so difficult to model accurately.
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If the whole point of bringing up "Total Recall" here is just to joke about Martian Terraforming, then might not the movie be a better fit anyway?
---GEC
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I'm just wondering that if we REDUCE the CO2 in the atmosphere on Mars, how's that going to make the temperature go UP? Isn't CO2 the deadly greenhouse gas we all know and love?
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
I'm sure that something will develop that we just can't see yet. We've never terraformed a planet before so we're just going off on computer models which are never 100% accurate.
Just say that we send a rocket ship that spews spores or whatever photosynthetic organism. There is a 70% survival rate, they get situated, some martian monsoon rips up a path and sends it up in the upper atmosphere where it rides the current for half a year where it mixes with some native vegetation and grows gangbusters. Density increases within 40 years - not part of the original model.
Mars will never be habitable for us earthlings to live comfortably. Our bone density would suffer too with a year long round trip and 6 month minimum stay, that's 18 months away from Earth's gravity. Not too good for our health but we're smart enough to figure out a solution.
Lets terraform that sucker and see what develops.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Not necessarily. We would just have to make the atmosphere reflect back more heat that bounces off of the surface. Kind of like what we're doing on Earth with greenhouse gases.
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Water vapor is much better at trapping infrared than CO2 is.
Don't tell the folks making hydrogen fuel cells.
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