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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.
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).
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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
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.
... 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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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.
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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
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.