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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.""
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.
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.
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
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