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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."
it could take longer than in his books, which, frankly, were interminable.
Just because flight was tougher than strapping a couple wings to our arms or summoning up a magic carpet doesn't mean it wasn't ultimately possible. There are new challenges to leaving earth. That's no reason to give up on it entirely.
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That's why it's called Science Fiction and not Science Nonfiction.
Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
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.
New science has shown it won't be as easy as he once thought. But even newer science could mean it's even easier than he dreamed. For example, if Lockheed-Martin delivers on the promise of compact fusion then all of these so called issues are washed away in a river of free energy.
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You learn in Sci Fi and in dull HS Science that you are a carbon based life form. Now this is a very coal based thing to say; one could also very well say we are nitrogen based beings (or hydrogen/Phosphorus/oxygen etc). There's a whole lot of carbon in the inner solar system in many extractable forms but Nitrogen is the fixer. Why is it that acquiring enough nitrogen from the 78% that is in the air happens to be the one of the rate limiting steps for life? That 0.04% CO2 is not limiting.
The outer solar system is different, fixed nitrogen ammonia is abundant. Titan, Europa, and possibly Ceres?
Mars on the other hand had its Nitrogen blown away by the solar wind and since it is an essential ingredient for you nitrogen based life forms it would not be my first choice to set up shop.
For that matter, why not truck water and ammonia from Ceres to the moon and live in a warm place with a great view?
There is no need to terraform the bulk of Mars until you have enough people there to justify it. Until then it makes much more sense to restrict the terraforming to the space underneath your habitat domes and arches.
Ideas that Mr. Robinson may not have been aware of also make colonizing easier. One is "Seed Factories" - self upgrading automation that grows from a starter kit, the way a tree grows from an acorn. The starter kit includes plans for the sequential addition of new machines, until you have a fully grown industrial capacity. Another is an improved space elevator system. The static ground-to-synchronous orbit elevator is not the lowest mass design by a long shot, and improved designs can be built with today's materials, rather than requiring "unobtainium".
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...
Fix't it fer tha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
[1] Cos if 'e dint like it, 'e could 'appen as mebbe bugger off. An hoo own'd t'hoos 'e liv'd in, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think it's obvious: do the moon first. We are _incredibly lucky_ to have this resource on our backyard.
The more I think of it if the Mars One people are going to make any pretence of being serious then why aren't they trying to colonize the moon? It has to be an order of magnitude cheaper, landing on the moon is something we've actually done before, it's not a one way journey, and it gives you a chance to learn how to build an off-world colony before going all-in on Mars.
It might even be a proposal you could take seriously.
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Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Hang on there a second. How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points? By your analogy, you're saying the Roanoke colonists should have "colonized" the Atlantic on a big floating platform or something. That isn't colonizing. The point in either the moon or mars is to extract and make use of resources to build habitations, create fuel, food, energy, etc. Hanging out in space in a tin can is not "colonizing" anything, no more than sitting in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.
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“Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
- Voltaire, Candide (1759)
One of the worst things you can do to a man is to take away his purpose.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, wouldn't it be easier to try terraforming Venus instead? At least it has 0.9g gravity, instead of Mar's lame 0.3, and it's already close to the sun so it's warm. And it actually does hold a substantial atmosphere; the trick is reducing its pressure and temperature and making it earth-like. Venus is Earth's sister planet; Mars is really too small and far away from the Sun.
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?
It almost makes you think that the fy should actually be fi, like the first two letters of fiction.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We run out of hydrocarbons of all types before this century is out. They become too expensive to be useful long before then. We use up the popular fissionables too. We have some hope of maintaining industrial scale electricity if we start developing thorium generators - like, yesterday. If we don't, you can pretty much kiss industrial civilization at the current scale goodbye before the century is out.
Sure, there are some challenges but you're being way too pessimistic. Even if we had nothing but solar, wind and hydro we could maintain industrial civilization just fine. Sure, we'd have to make some fairly serious changes but it's all quite doable. I'm not recommending that, I'm just saying it's workable.
Hi,
So thankfully you're wrong. Society won't collapse. The prices of solar and wind are falling very rapidly and we have about a century of oil (or two) in the ground left before we'll need to start charging car batteries from the grid or producing fuel cells. Solar and wind can provide for ALL of our energy needs even if you don't take energy storage into account (you'd just have to build more plants to cover the gaps in generation caused by night time/ windless days) but WITH storage (pumped hydro, compressed air, sodium thermal) then they just generate electricity 24/7 a day anyway. Here's the worlds first big Solar Sodium Thermal Power Plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a 150MW plant. Costs for these types of plants are expensive now but will come down over time due to economies of scale and mass production. China already generates more power via wind than they do via Nuclear.
Here is some information on storage methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just wanted to update your information. My money's on the sodium thermal storage. Just giant containers of salt heated up and stored for when sunlight/wind is not available. Then when needed the heat from the sodium is used to boil water to turn a turbine.
Thanks
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Calm down there, Mr. Catastrophe.
Humans (and every other critter on the planet) have been dying off in droves intermittently since the dawn of creation. Local populations and entire civilizations have run out of various resources, crashed and recovered (or morphed to new civilizations and societies) since the dawn of mankind. The Neanderthals and Desmonians got wipe out. Homo Sapiens somehow managed to pull through. There is pretty good evidence (from sequencing data) that we pulled through by the skin of our teeth at least once. So disaster has been our middle name for quite some time.
The 'new' disasters probably won't be global in scope - they will happen in Africa, Bangledesh, India - all those places that we tend to ignore anyway. There will be winners and losers galore. Yes, there will be global changes, but I don't see the complete collapse of Homo Industrialis unless we go full retard and dump every nuclear weapon we have into the planet. Even then there are going to be survivors.
It won't be the world we grew up into, it rarely is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well two or maybe three things really.
Mars, as a larger body, is likely to have the gravity required, as well as other resources to make it more viable for long term habitation than the moon. Mars is still low gravity, but better than the Moon in that respect.
Secondly, and probably decisively, they're trying to push the program forward beyond a place we've already been. They have the thesis that it is possible, at least one way. They want to prove that. So, its a stretch goal.
And... not really on the list but possibly... they want a place that people will go and not have the hope of rescue to hold them back. If you go to the moon one way, there may be some in that colony who earnestly believe they could be saved. After all, they can see the Earth right there every day. On Mars. Earth is a blue dot, and they know there are there to stay, so they may as well get used to it.
I think you may well have a good point, but I think people might feel that a one way trip to a place we've already been there and back, may not feel justified. Been there and done that is less romantic.
Personally, I think it's a space suicide pact and I don't approve. That said, I also wouldn't try to stop anyone from going in any forcible way. If they make it, we could benefit. Hell, even if we were able to drop 20 frozen human corpses on the planet, it would be macabre, but still an achievement, assuming they managed to live most of the way there and sent back telemetry.
I would be more in agreement with starting with the moon. A moon colony could allow us to seriously build a microgravity infrastructure to make Mars travel much more feasible for our first attempt at it. Hopefully a there and back attempt.
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Universally the case?
Try telling Marvin Gaye that.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.'"
I can remember all of those predictions of yours being made in the early 1970s, about the year 2000.
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.
One more for the list: 4) Carbon dioxide doesn't work like that.
Robinson's Mars books cheated on their terraforming. Terraforming Mars is a catch-22. To make it warm enough for humans to survive you need to add a lot of CO2, but adding all that CO2 makes the atmosphere toxic to humans. When I first read the Mars books I was looking forward to see how Robinson dealt with that paradox: I was disappointed to see that he didn't. He just let the plants suck up most of the CO2 to make oxygen while ignoring the cooling that would result, and then, realizing that getting rid of *all* the CO2 would be a problem, he waved a magic wand and genetically engineered all the humans to be CO2-tolerant. "Genetic engineering!" and "Nanobots!" are the science fiction equivalents of "Abracadabra!"
Anyway, CO2-tolerance would be such a massive evolutionary advantage to both predators and prey on Earth, if it were that easy to engineer, don't you think life would have figured out a way to do it by now?
There are ways to terraform Mars for realsies -- very large solar mirrors, or synthetic super-greenhouse gases like CFS -- but those have their own problems, and Robinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
The moon is a trap. There's nothing good there to mine or explore; it takes less rocket fuel to land on Mars than the Moon; and the moon's surface is a horrible horrible place. You propose to solve that problem by living hundreds of feet underground, but if you're going to live that way, why not do it beneath the Earth instead?
Looks like you stopped reading Kim Stanley Robinson and started up on Paolo Bacigalupi. I'm willing to bet our actual future lies somewhere in between.
I don't think you have ever looked at what Venus' atmosphere is made of. It is hot, not because of how close tot he Sun it is, but because of how thick the atmosphere is. More than 100x denser than on Earth. 200mph winds blow across the planet constantly. The average temperature is hot enough to melt lead. The only probe to ever attempt to land on Venus melted in a short amount of time. A day is actually longer than a year on Venus, which just compounds the problems.
Mars is a picnic compared to Venus.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Don't land. Find a buoyant spot in the atmosphere, drop anchor for a heat engine, and crack atmospheric gases for carbon and the eventual arrival of human beings.
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...
There's been talk about seeding the upper atmosphere of Venus with plant life and algae that, if properly developed, could thrive in the upper atmosphere and convert CO2 to O2, lowering the density and the greenhouse effect. And 2 HUGE advantages Venus has for terraforming are that nice thick atmosphere, and a molten core which generates a magnetosphere to protect from solar wind like ours on Earth. Mars has neither so you'd need to get the gas from somewhere (comets probably) and then you'd get to watch it slowly get blown back out into space by solar wind.
The key with Venus is to not land, but build could cities about 50km up. At that altitude, you have an atmospheric pressure of about 1 atm, temperatures are a bit above freezing, you still have the Earth-like gravity, and due to the atmosphere being mostly CO2 (a heavy gas), a balloon filled with breathable air will float. You've also got plenty of solar energy (during the day, at least). It's about as close as earth-like as you're going to get without actually being on Earth. On the downside, you have the 200 MPH+ winds to deal with, the lack of a strong magnetic field, as well as the long day/night cycle.
Venus doesn't have a magnetic field like the Earth does, whether due to lack of a molten core, lack of convection or the more likelihood that it is not spinning is currently unknown. This is one of the main reasons that Venus lost its hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism