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DARPA Is Already Working On Designer Organisms To Terraform Mars
MarkWhittington writes: Space visionaries dream of a time when human beings will not only settle Mars, but will terraform the Red Planet into something more Earth-like, with a breathable atmosphere, running water, and a functioning biosphere. Evidence exists that Mars was more or less Earth-like billions of years ago before the atmosphere leached away into space and the water became frozen under the ground and at the poles. Terraforming Mars is decades away from the beginning and probably centuries away from the end. But DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already genetically engineering organisms that will help turn the Red Planet blue, according to a story in Motherboard.
Thought the whole atmosphere issue was due to Mars not having a functioning magnetic field anymore?
Surely if we have the technology to turn a dead worl into a living one, we must have the technology to properly maintain an already living one.
Well yeah, the earth is 97% terraformed, we just need to get it a few degrees cooler. :-)
We can't have a technological solution to global warming, we can't have climate engineering, that doesn't forward the political agendas of centralization of authority and redistribution of wealth. Only political/social solutions to global warming are acceptable. We can't just keep using science and engineering to escape malthusian(-like) catastrophes.
You'll be happy to hear that is part of the plan:
"DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office is working on designer organisms that will not only help to terraform Mars, but will clean up environmentally ravaged areas on Earth. Such organisms would be used to clean up toxic waste and oil spills, for example. Hardy organisms could be tailored to make the deserts bloom. Other organisms could remove carbon dioxide, considered by many to be a greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere more quickly"
Start with caves and bunkers. Terraform and generate anthropogenic atmosphere. See what happens: if we don't get off this orb, we are destined for extinction.
28,000 workers died to bring you the Panama Canal. What is an acceptable human sacrifice for a whole frigging planet?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It seems to me that it would be far easier to adapt ourselves to Mars by modifying our genetics than to change the characteristics of an entire planet.
You do realize, that if you can terraform Mars into Earth 2, then you have all the basic problems licked for figuring out and solving climate change on Earth.
Simple. We'll make our own.
I figure it will take a loop around Mars equator carrying 850 million Amperes to get something similar to Earth's magnetic field strength. Figuring a Niobium-Tin superconductor (200,000 A/cm^2 critical curent density) that would take a superconductor of about 70 cm across.
See how easy an engineering solution is. I'll leave the details to the subcontractors to work out.*
*I used to work for Boeing. How did you guess?
Have gnu, will travel.
As I understand it, while there's oxygen aplenty bound up in the soil, and some carbon dioxide just lying there frozen on the ground, and even water if you look under the surface, there's a serious nitrogen deficiency. 78% of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and it's one of the building blocks of life, not to mention it's what makes it thick enough to breathe, but Mars's atmosphere only has about 2% nitrogen, and that's pretty much a vacuum by earth standards anyway. There's some fossilized fixed nitrogen in the soil, but most of it blew away in the solar wind long ago, and its not coming back unless someone finds a comet of frozen N2 and crashes it into the red planet. WIthout it, you're just not getting a viable biosphere.
What ever dooms us on Earth would likely also doom us on Mars. For example, if a mad invader wanted to take over everything, he/she would come to take Mars also. If run-away AI takes over, it will also likely infect Mars colonies.
I suppose certain mistakes like LHC producing run-away black-holes, or one-off suicidal acts are less likely to spread to Mars, but Mars is so close that most human-created maladies would also put it at risk.
An interstellar or extra-solar colony or ship would have a better chance. Just don't tell The Borg where you are going because they'll probably be able to move faster than us.
Table-ized A.I.
The surface gravity on Mars is 38% of that on Earth. The lower gravity of Mars requires 2.6 times Earth’s column airmass to obtain 100 kPa pressure at the surface. Mars also lacks a magnetosphere, which poses challenges for mitigating solar radiation and retaining atmosphere. The lack of a magnetosphere is thought to be one reason for Mars's thin atmosphere. Solar-wind-induced ejection of Martian atmospheric atoms has been detected by Mars-orbiting probes. Earth abounds with water because its ionosphere is permeated with a magnetosphere. The hydrogen ions present in its ionosphere move very fast due to their small mass, but they cannot escape to outer space because their trajectories are deflected by the magnetic field. Venus has a dense atmosphere, but only traces of water vapor (20 ppm) because it has no magnetic field. The Martian atmosphere also loses water to space. Earth's ozone layer provides additional protection. Ultraviolet light is blocked before it can dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Because little water vapor rises above the troposphere and the ozone layer is in the upper stratosphere, little water is dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Mars presents untold challenges because it's so bloody cold, it's atmosphere is so thin and it's magnetic field is non-existent. We should be FAR more interested in Venus. I'd love to see what would happen if we dumped a canister of extremeophile bacteria into Venus. They could remove the sulfur from the atmosphere in time and actually allow the heat that makes Venus a hell to escape into space. And it would be FAR easier to manipulate Venus into loosing atmosphere than it would be to gain atmosphere on Mars. Venus also has a strong magnetic field like the earth. We'd also have the advantage on Venus of being able to live in the clouds. Normal earth air and earth pressures would float in the Venusian atmosphere. Not only that but if we can learn to slow the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus it would only help us on earth.
We like mars because we can land on it without problems but it's devoid of life for a reason. Venus is far more interesting in my opinion. We have microbes on earth right now that could easily survive on Venus. This isn't true with mars because the UV on mars will kill even microbial life.
That's an interesting point, but it's not necessarily true. We can take bigger risks on a dead world, or even perform actions that poison in one way and improve it in another, and worry about cleaning up the poisoning later. The current world must not go through an intermediate "dead world" state.
The risks can even help us prove concepts for the earth.
Also, the timescale for terraforming Mars is surely much longer than the timescale for improving Earth. It's an interesting idea at least.
You have to shield everything you want to cover with an atmosphere. If you are happy living under a dome, then a much smaller magnetic field will protect against the solar winf impinging on the dome. But if you want to terraform the entire planet, you have to keep the solar wind from 'boiling off' the atmosphere even from the parts you are not living on.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was under the impression that the loss of atmosphere was extremely slow, and that any technology that could terraform the planet could easily keep pace with the loss.
I was just talking about keeping the cosmic rays from mutating people and breaking electronics.