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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.""
actually, it'd probably start out with photosynthetic bacteria, or plants that not need to be "planted", so much as just allow their seeds sit on the soil for a while.
Still, the article is written by a physicist, I'd rather see a biologists perspective on this one, involving life and all.
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I always wondered if terraforming could just be done my massive planting of hardy fauna. A ton of trees (like a rainforest), should drastically change even weather patterns...I always thought that it would be an interesting experiment for a lander to plant - and tend - some cacti or something and see what would happen over time.
I do think that the time span is a bit idealistic, and doesn't account for the Law of Unintended Consequences, but the idea is sound.
This is an interesting question for property rights theorists. Many people adhere to some sort of Lockean view that by modifying this untouched land, the terraforming organization then owns all of Mars. But then some would say it's a sort of "common heritage" that can't be so privatized. It's also extremely difficult to just terraform "one part" of Mars. (Imagine keeping one part at 1 atm and the rest at Mars's regular atmospheric pressure.)
Regardless, anyone who goes through the expense of terraforming Mars, even a government, is going to want some assurance that the rest of humanity won't leech off their work.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I hate to be the Luddite in the room, but given our track record on this planet, I'm not really sure I want us to be inflicting our particular brand of 'progress' on another world. At least not until we know a little bit more about what we'd be losing in terms of the current Martian environment (such as it is). Until then, maybe we should just stick to the planet we're already monkeying around with.
Which brings us to the question of why we're looking at Mars at all, and instead we don't turn our cameras to Venus.
Venus is nearly the same mass as Earth so it has roughly the same gravity. The surface is a lot hotter and the atmosphere is a lot denser, but it seems to me it'd be much more feasible to scrub an atmosphere than invent a new one, all someone needs to do is come up with a solution (or multitude of solutions) for turning the bulk CO2 of the Venusian atmosphere into something else (perhaps hydrocarbons, carbon nanotubes, hell it could be graphite or diamonds for whatever reason).
Venus doesn't have a magnetosphere either, but it at least maintains its atmosphere and perhaps if it were left at least more dense than our atmosphere it would protect people from the radiation of space (or perhaps with the same machines we invent to do CO2 scrubbing we can make an Ozone layer too?)
Hell, if we were so bold as to do it, we could ship the gasses off Venus and onto Mars and inhabit both. Venus should still have plenty of atmosphere after we've bled off the excess junk within it to remain habitable. (I guess the only real question left is water, which we'd have to convert from whatever trace we could pull out of the atmosphere).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
trace the evolution of the hudson bay company into modern canada: i don't see the mass of canadian citizens as serfs of a corporation. the colonizaiton of mars under corporate provenance would probably have a similar uncontroversial and mundane development arc. in fact, any such corporate colonization of mars under government oversight would probably consult a historical study of the hudson bay company directly as a model for potential pitfalls to avoid
i'm sorry, but in reailty, the balance between individual rights and corporate provenance isn't so difficult or immobile. there is no massive conflicts, and the hudson bay company still exists today: what was once the corporate master of much of north america is now simply a department store. but of course, you read most science fiction, or talk to a paranoid schizophrenic, or even consult certain lowest common denominator youth subcultures, and you get the impression that corporations are these unstoppable sociopathic vampires out to turn you into an unthinking slave. hardly. reality is just not that interesting, sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
anaerobic bacteria, the kinds of things that are used to living in very hostile environments.
I'm more curious about where they expect to get the water. Sure, there may be a lot of it around, but the vapor pressure is going to be so low it would be very hard for bacteria to keep their water inside and not just instantly dry up.
Pity that Saturn's rings turned out to be dust instead of ice bergs. I keep thinking about that old Isaac Asimov story...
Clear, Dark Skies
Terraforming Mars is neither necessary nor desirable. Within perhaps 50 years we could easily have human-level AI and advanced robotics. Such robots could be designed for the Martian environment as it exists now. It will prove much easier to adapt our descendants -- our mind children -- to Mars (and many other environments that are hostile to humans) than it would ever be to adapt Mars to us.
In fact, the more optimistic transhumanists would tend to assume that people alive today may see a time when they can upload or upgrade into an advanced robotic form themselves -- so it wouldn't even necessarily be our remote sort-of-descendants who colonize Mars, it could be us, suitably transformed.
Conventional wisdom is that Mars will be explored by robots, then colonized by humans. I turn that idea on it's head. Humans will explore Mars -- today's robotic probes are too crude and limited, so that a single manned expedition could do scientific work that would take decades, maybe centuries, with robots. The other side of that coin is that 50-100 years from now humans will become obsolete for space travel and colonization. The people who actually live on Mars and build a society there will be synthetic people, not homo sapiens.
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.
Because there are to many riskfactors involved in projects like these. Changing course of water streams that used to go to Sahara could cause other areas that are now fertile and have water to become deserts. This could cause huge amount of starving people in places that are now densily populated.
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.
This is more political and economical than technical problem. The logging, farming and mining industries are destroying those areas for purpose, money. It is agaist free capitalism to stop somebody to do their businis according to local laws. And there are certainly no politicans who would give up their support for tobacco or mining companies just for saving some rainsforest.
Otherhand, directing other peoples tax money to make something big and historical, like space programs, will just give them press time for being ahead of time.
I thought one of the reasons Mars' atmosphere is so thin is thought to be due to it having a much weaker magnetosphere than Earth? (People who know better than me, please chime in.) The idea being that a gaseous atmosphere can be somewhat "blown away" by the solar wind without the protection of a planetary magnetic field.
And isn't it also thought that in the past it may have had a stronger magnetosphere that could attribute for it having once had a thicker, more moist atmosphere in the past more like Earth's?
I watch Nova when I'm half asleep, so I may have dreamt all of this...
But assuming anything I just said is right to some degree, how does terraforming take it into account? Would it be all for naught if the solar wind comes and blows it all into space?
... by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the
This is the point at which I stopped reading TFA.
A physicist talking about chemistry and biology, and a retiree talking about how easy/cheap/fast/simple it would be for you young people to do, if you only had the kind of vision we had back in the day.
Sorry, I've known too many physicists. (and too many retirees...)
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The magnetosphere is the magnetic field generated by the planet. It essentially creates a shield around the planet that protects it from various kinds of solar radiation and the ill effects caused by said radiation.
Mars is, on a planetary scale,.... dead. There is no longer a mechanism within the planet itself to generate the magnetic field needed to protect the atmosphere (even if we could create one).
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I can simplify your process a bit. Why not just use the comets to blast the planets into the appropriate orbit instead of wasting time moving them in the first place.
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Actually, only partially correct. Yes, the solar wind will strip away the atmosphere, but it happens slowly. Over millions of years. If we develop the technology to introduce the atmosphere in the first place, we'll have no difficulty keeping it topped up.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
First, the dry ice comments are out past saturn. But if you are going out there, then skip the CO2. Instead, go to ammonia. It is FAR better of a greenhouse gas. In addition, it breaks down to N2; simple nitrogen gas which is our buffer gas. In addition, is is through that the majority of ammonia asteroids contain a fair amount of water. The last thing Mars needs is more CO2.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have similar thoughts as well, but having gone over the scenarios a few times Venus has a LOT of problems that would be nearly impossible to overcome. Venus seems to have a problem that carbon was never sequestered into solids on the surface. In fact it looks like Venus, Earth, and Mars all started in very similar states, and that by simply being closer to the sun, Venus ended up with significantly more CO2 in it's atmosphere which lead to the runaway greenhouse effect. So unless we manually remove the CO2 (huge undertaking especially considering the atmospheric pressure of Venus) that's not going to change.
:)
The other major problem is that the rotation of Venus is extremely slow, thus leading to virtually no magnetic field. This means that it would be bombarded by extreme amounts of solar radiation on its surface if the atmosphere were cleared.
I read an interesting book on terraforming the solar system, and the author purposed that we could crash a comet (or few) into Venus to supply water, help cool the planet, and jump start its rotation. Of course needless to say I'm not exactly sold on playing intergalactic pool with planets in our solar system
Earth: 78% nitrogen
Mars: 3% nitrogen
Whether or not you can change the CO2 for oxygen is irrelevant if you can't magic up a lot of nitrogen. And remember you're talking about replacing most of a planet's atmosphere with a different element altogether. Its not feasible on a century scale.
So what do you do with it? 95% CO2 on mars, you could put some plants there (they don't seem to need the nitrogen, at least for photosynthesis). But that will only get you the O2 and create a sink for water (which is scarce as is). You might be able to mine the nitrogen there and blow it into the atmosphere, but is there enough? I'm very skeptical, you'd need millions of millions of tons.
Honestly the best plan for using mars for living is to plant some crap outside (but trap the O2 it makes) and live in contained environments. Short of either a)mining nitrogen or b)using fission to make it, it is likely that there's not going to be enough to make "air." We need to establish a presence and figure out if the ingredients are there to do the job, not brag that "it can be done soon!" without even having been there.
Venus has a thick crust and no plate techtonics, so there's no way for carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes to be recycled into the interior; it just builds up. Earth was lucky enough to have most of its crust stripped away four billion years ago in the collision that formed the moon.
Well, our bone density would suffer from the perspective of living on Earth, but it would be fine if you never planned to return and just live on Mars permanently.
Outer Space Treaty
It does explicitly forbid any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet since they are common heritage of humanity. Art. II of the Treaty states, in fact, that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
Can Soviet Russia claim it?
Will start it a new space race again?