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Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from io9:
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy filled us all with hope that we could terraform Mars in the 21st century, with its plausible description of terraforming processes. But now, in the face of what we've learned about Mars in the past 20 years, he no longer thinks it'll be that easy. Talking to SETI's Blog Picture Science podcast, Robinson explains that his ideas about terraforming Mars, back in the 1990s, were based on three assumptions that have been called into question or disproved:
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside; people live indoors, work indoors, shop indoors, and take much of their recreation indoors. So I don't really see the reasoning behind the assumption that we can't colonise another planet without terraforming it. Mars has no magnetic field to divert solar radiation, so even if you did terraform it pretty good, you'd still get fried; KSR solved that in his books by eventually genetically modifying the colonists to be able to self-repair the radiation damage, but who knows when such a solution will be feasible in reality. Build your colony underground as much as possible, and you gain protection from everything that is hostile about the Martian environment; the atmosphere, the temperature, the toxic stuff, and the radiation all become much more controllable. Sure, it's a bit harder building underground, but not nearly as hard as terraforming.
Oh no... it's the future.
The new world? It took the largest and most powerful empires of the times, several centuries, royal decrees, and hundreds of ships to get a handful of explorers to have establish colonies in the new world. When they got there, they found local indigenous populations that helped their efforts.
The same thing could be true for space. The local indigenous populations that help our efforts aren't necessarily beings, but could be as simple along the lines of nitrogen-fixing bacteria helping us on earth, or plants or other things we can eat, or help us with water, air, energy, etc...
Or space could be like Antarctica You never know until you get there.
I'm guessing space is going to be more like Antarctica, which doesn't mean you don't go there, it just means you don't colonize it right away, you just research it and see where it leads you...
Between global warming, tectonic plate movement, improved technology, open land exhaustion, and maybe even some ecological disaster (due to war or perhaps an asteroid collision), maybe we will actually colonize Antarctica someday, which seems like a reason to spend some time to better understand it today...
it could take longer than in his books, which, frankly, were interminable.
I agree. After Red Mars I was so put off that, after previously being something of a fan, I never read another one of his books...
We won't drop that Mars stick easily. But it's a lousy place to live.
We can build millions of times more surface area in free space in rotating habitats everywhere but on gravity-bound terran-analog planets. There are more asteroids and comets than we can use up for centuries - and we just discovered a pool of water on Europa (yesterday I think) bigger than all the Earth's oceans and seas combined, which we can either railgun or pipe out into construction sites everywhere. We've got GREAT building materials waiting for us out there. And a hell of a lot easier than trying to make Mars habitable in a few hundred our thousand years. Mars will be a privately owned park/state/suburb/science station for sure, but it won't be the Big Hope for the human race, nor for the millions of other species we can save by either leaving in large numbers (meh, not for a long time) or transporting them into free space terraria where hard-nosed capitalists can't shoot, drown, poison, or eat them.
Now, with 3D printing tech and maybe some cool new ideas, we can do better than O'Neill and the others in building terraria. Giant blown steel bubbles? Spray metal and ceramic shielding over inflatable molds or gas jets? Magnetic molds? Oragami-like unfolded sections? Molten metal spun into shape like cotton candy? Spun metalic filaments, or ceramic/metal composite filaments 3D printed in place by crawlers or articulated arms on giant scale? Let's shake some dust here - any ideas? I'm serious - we've better tech and construction techniques than we had in the 70's. Building a giant aluminum/titanium bubble or cylinder with ceramic shielding should not be a problem in zero gravity. In the olden days, we pictured guys in construction shacks building it in pieces like the Enterprise in drydock. What can we do now?
I just finished reading an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) of Robinson's latest novel "Aurora", not yet published, which is about a generation starship sent out to colonize a planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Mild spoiler - the colonists find it's much harder than anyone anticipated. I found it a bit of an odd take given Robinson's Mars trilogy (to be honest, I made it to about a third of the way through Blue Mars and gave up) which seemed far more optimistic. Now I know why. Unfortunately, pessimism doesn't sell as well as optimism, so I don't have great hopes for commercial success of Aurora. Oh, and if you weren't transfixed by Red/Green/Blue Mars, you probably won't care for Aurora either.
One of the important ideas expressed in Red Mars was the idea of using bacteria to do much of the work of terraforming. In 2013, bacteria which can live on perchlorates were discovered...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There may be extremophiles living in the rock, but they're nothing that would cause problems for us. There's plenty of the chemical substances we need for survival, just not enough for such an extraordinarily wasteful operation as terraforming the planet. And perchlorates are not "highly toxic"...the LD50 for potassium perchlorate is 2100 mg/kg. Compare to 3000 mg/kg for...table salt. Given a bowl full of pure potassium perchlorate, it would be extremely difficult to eat enough of it to be fatal.
Dealing with perchlorate only requires doing things we'd likely be doing anyway. Process the regolith a bit before turning it into soil for growing stuff in...it's eroded salt flat and sea bed material, you're going to do that anyway. Perchlorates are unstable and easy to decompose, so there's options for further soil treatment if necessary. Test occasionally or use supplements to make sure you're getting enough iodine (perchlorate does substitute for iodine, inhibiting uptake). Problem dealt with.
Aerobraking. The vast majority of your spacecraft's fuel and cost is spent getting out of Earth's gravity well. If you've burnt enough fuel to get into a lunar transfer orbit, it takes just a little bit more to escape Earth entirely and go to Mars. But to *land* on the Moon, you need to spend more fuel to slow down and stop on the surface. To land on Mars, you just need a heat shield, because Mars has an atmosphere you can use to slow down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
So that's reason #1 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Unless you can throw things at 2.4 kilometers per second, no. The Moon's gravity is less than the Earth's, but it's still serious business. You need quite a bit of fuel to take off from the Moon. You need fuel to take off from Mars too, but Mars's atmosphere has carbon dioxide: bring a little hydrogen with you (or use the local water) and a source of energy (solar panels or a reactor) and you can synthesize methane and oxygen fuel while you're there. No need to carry fuel for the trip home!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...
Reason #2 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Oh, but it is. Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to shield radiation about as well as several inches of concrete, reducing radiation exposure by a factor of 2-3. It's also further from the Sun than the Moon, which reduces solar radiation by a factor of 2. Neither of these effects are enough on their own: you're right that Mars habitats will have to be underground too. But going outside is noticeably safer.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/...
Reason #3 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Mars's atmosphere doesn't provide complete radiation shielding, but it does provide complete protection from meteorites up to about 1-2 meters in diameter.
https://janus.astro.umd.edu/as...
Reason #4 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
And finally, the Moon has craters and lava flows and that's all. Mars has those, plus volcanoes and canyons and ice caps and wind and clouds and storms and snow and glaciers and sand dunes and landslides and groundwater and river valleys and maybe an ancient ocean and maybe, once upon a time, life. Why? Because Mars has an atmosphere.
Reason #5 -- the most important one -- why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
It was a rhetorical point, not a serious proposal. I'm saying that if you're going to spend your whole life hiding in a sterile burrow, does it really matter that you're on another planet?
For the record, none of these ideas are my own. I'm quoting chapter and verse from "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin's got his problems -- he's a little too casual about the radiation dangers, for instance -- but IMO it's a good starting point for any serious discussion of colonizing the solar system.
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mar...