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Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars, New Research Says (discovermagazine.com)
Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home -- even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole. From a report: Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy puts a kibosh on the idea of terraforming Mars. At the heart of the study is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is abundant on Mars -- its thin atmosphere is made of the stuff, and the white stuff we often see on the surface is dry ice, not snow. CO2 is even trapped in the rocks and soil. That abundance has long fueled visions of a fantasy future where all that trapped carbon dioxide is released, creating a thicker atmosphere that warms the planet. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has even proposed nuking Mars to make this happen.
But in this new study, veteran Mars expert Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards of Northern Arizona University, surveyed how much carbon dioxide is available for terraforming the Red Planet. They combined Martian CO2 observations from various missions -- NASA's MAVEN atmospheric probe, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, as well as NASA's Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results throw shade on the dreams of futurists.
But in this new study, veteran Mars expert Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards of Northern Arizona University, surveyed how much carbon dioxide is available for terraforming the Red Planet. They combined Martian CO2 observations from various missions -- NASA's MAVEN atmospheric probe, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, as well as NASA's Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results throw shade on the dreams of futurists.
A few cometary impacts would change their numbers right quick. Equilibrium may be awhile, but still...
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Instead of nuking Mars, send CO2 rich asteroids at it to serve as both the nuke and the additional nutrient.
The simple stupid solutions are sometimes the best solutions. If it doesn't work it doesn't change a thing, if it works it changes a lot.
they need poop!
Yo yo check it ahight. No we don't want them to throw shade... Why that would be counter productive to warming with the CO2s and all... WTF
Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.
You'd have to do something absurd like send a Jovian moon into it, then wait for all that to cool down to get enough mass to start making a long-term environment on it. There's not even enough floating ice/rocks in our system to make it work without something like that.
Mars is not really a backup for earth, at least not if you don't have a large fraction of a million years to get it to that point. If you think that enough technology can get you there quicker - then cool, use that on Earth. There's no almost scenario where it would be easier to fix Mars than fix Earth.
Heck, it would be far easier to fix life to not need Earth than make Mars support our life as-is.
Ryan Fenton
Computers got better, therefore anything is possible. I mean just look at jet travel, in 1969 the Boeing 747 was a primitive metal tube barely able to lift itself off the ground (because of the weak computers of the era) and it took a pokey 6 hours to cross the Atlantic.
These days we have computers with unimaginable power and look how fast we can .... oh.
Blog says Sorry, Musk. What about Sorry, Kim Stanley Robinson?
Anyway I thought it was widely known that the atmosphere on mars was very thin and that a thicker atmosphere doesn't get around the problem of Mars not having a magnetic field.
... for allowing atmospheric breaking for incoming ships replenishing underground bases. Wink!
So this study looks primarily at CO2 naturally available for terraforming. But there are a lot of things we can synthesize which are even more powerful greenhouse gases. Sulfur hexafluoride is a fun example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride with an effective warming potential a little over 20,000 times that of CO2. It is also essentially non-toxic (aside from its annoying density in large quantities). Sulfur hexalfuoride isn't the only such example, so it is still very plausible that we could terraform Mars. What this does mean though is that a simple straight high CO2 atmosphere is very likely going to be insufficient unless there are major undiscovered reserves of CO2 somewhere on Mars (which right now seems unlikely).
We're not even done terraforming Terra. But we're working on it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What makes makes Mars red brown is rust, which is Fe2O3. So if the Iron and Oxygen could be separated, we'd get both building materials and add to the atmosphere. Depending on how much there are we might be able to produce an atmosphere from it, but it'd take a lot of energy.
I see you put the kibosh on RTFA.
Somewhere I read that Mars lost its atmosphere because it didn't have a magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blasting its atmosphere away, and, if we tried to build up an atmosphere again, the same thing would happen.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
We are terraforming Earth, albeit not in a planned way.
We're not even done terraforming Terra. But we're working on it.
Trying to turn it into Venus? Venuforming?
Just when we're done Marsforming the Earth, we'll all just move en masse to Mars, just in time to pick out the kitchen colors for our Mars condos!
Hurray! Huzzah!
Mars, Gityer Asstu
Somewhere I read that Mars lost its atmosphere because it didn't have a magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blasting its atmosphere away, and, if we tried to build up an atmosphere again, the same thing would happen.
Yeah. Because it has been theorized that Mars did have an atmosphere as think as ours at one time.
Mars doesn't have an atmosphere because it can't keep one.
I would rather get ansible supported than Mars
We're not even done terraforming Terra. But we're working on it.
Trying to turn it into Venus? Venuforming?
It doesn't matter anyway. Our sun, a primary sequence star, will one day expand and envelope earth anyway so it will be hotter than Venus then. We THINK it's a few billion years out yet so no need to get upset, unless you just want to...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There's more than enough water and air to set up systems to live there.
You just won't get a Princess of Barsoom situation.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I always wondered in Mars terraforming plans: There seemed to be enough carbon dioxide on Mars. There seemed to be enough water. There still might be enough oxygen if you refine the iron out of all the dust. But what about nitrogen? It's 70% of our atmosphere, but I don't know of any other source of it in the solar system. I guess if you were desperate you could scrape some helium out of Jupiter and send it to Mars, to prevent a near-pure-oxygen atmosphere catching things on fire. But that still wouldn't help plants grow.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
We THINK it's a few billion years out yet so no need to get upset, unless you just want to...
THE SUN still has some 4 billion years. Earth, not so much.
In 500 million years the *stability* of the Sun's output will be gone, so will we.
We're Venusforming Terra, which is why we need to Terraform Mars.
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At the correct altitude in the Venusian atmosphere you can have earth like temperature and pressure. You don't need 5m of concrete to protect you from the solar winds and you have all the ingredients to build everything you want there. You just can't stand on the surface today. If your colony is willing to float in huge balloons though then things are much much easier than Mars.
There are lots of cometary objects, with lighter materials like that, out past the known planets. Only a few come past here, but maybe that is enough.
No, we could never do that, just like you could never have a phone that you could carry out on the beach that would reach the whole world!
On the other hand, maybe we don't want to waste the stuff we will need for the orbital habitats. And maybe later for a Dyson sphere...
These are engineering problems, not scientific ones.
"You can probably do that with todays tech. It goes from there."
You make the claim, you prove it. Talk is cheap.
Everybody in this comment section watches/reads far too much science fiction.
we are not going to terraform mars, idiots
People like you, of course not. The rest of us might, or might not; but, we would like to have a go.
You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.
After some quick googling:
Mars is about 1/10 the mass of Earth.
Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta total about 1% of Mars' mass. Crashing them into the planet wouldn't be enough.
Deimos and Phobos and Halley's comet are each a couple/several orders of magnitude smaller, you would need hundreds or thousands of these to get the same effect as Ceres.
The total mass of Saturn's rings is about 1% of the mass needed.
The mass of Ganymeade, Callisto, Europa, and Io (moons of Jupiter) are about 30% the mass needed.
It looks like there is no reasonable way to increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to get a reasonable atmosphere. You would also need the increase to be iron-rich, to make the needed magnetic field.
Or the ability to drop a comet's worth of mass in there every, uh... let's do the calculation: .1kg/sec lost to solar winds.
10^14 kg per small comet.
So, I guess we'd need to drop a small comet in there every 31 million years. Totally not tenable, you're right.
Seriously, if we are going to terraform, it was never about using just the CO2 at mars.
Instead, we will have to import various elements from asteroids. In particular, there are ice asteroids past Jupiter that contain a great deal of ammonia and methane. Both of these molecules are EXACTLY what are needed. Simply crash these into mars.
Both of these are strong GHG. Interestingly, the Ammonia will break down over time into H2/N2. However, it would break down faster with plants on mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
(paraphrasing Niven/Pournelle/Flynn) ...Thor smiled. "I can't argue with that," he said mildly. "Mighty important, that [martian] ecology."...
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...after using all that energy to leave Earth is the stupidest thang a human could do in space. Mine the Moon, asteroids, Phobos, and Deimos. Mars is for robots! Build a Dyson swarm of O'Neil cylinders.
sigh. .12 atm, which is double what mars is at. That would be around 15,000 m on earth or half again as high as K2. That is still within the armstrong limits (.6 atm), which means that we can be outside with lightweight suits, but, will need simple O2 for breathing. Now, if we do that, how long will it take to strip this back down to .6 atm of today's mars atmosphere?
2000-4000 years. IOW, as far back as when christ was on the planet, or clear back to when egypt was building pyramids. Thank Bronze age. This was all before the times of Greece and Rome.
Lots say that we simply choose to go with CO2 and raise the pressure to
How much did mankind move forward 4000 years? Yeah. HUGE. So, no, we could bring Mars up to 1 atm and it would take longer than mankind has existed. Plenty of time to figure out how to restart the core.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... we have too many terrorists on Earth, supported by poppies and shit.
Why would we set them up on Mars and provide land for terror farming?
Why?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Define "terraforming" exactly? After we place an initial colonial foothold anywhere else in the solar system, we will make whatever short-term modifications of the environment may be feasible to make living there easier. No matter what changes we make, there will be no more interest in totally recreating the Earth environment any more than we made New Jersey an exact copy of Italy.
In the long run, we will change ourselves through genetic engineering to met our new environments - all of them - partway. Mars-folk might be tailored to breathe thinner air, while other colonial communities will find it easier to engineer humans who tolerate low gravity than to simulate gravity on a large scale.
So better kill yourself now, because one day our primary star will expand too far anyway? Is that your logic?
...we should take care to start a planetary magnetic field. Without it, every attempt to colonize Mars is doomed to failure. Radiations will hit the martian soil, damaging living beings, and disturbing the chemistry of the atmosphere in a very unpredictable way. In general, planets with no tectonics activities (i.e. volcanoes, quakes, etc.) are not suited for hosting life on the long run.
None of your examples even involve science. Kinda puts the kibosh on your idea, doesn't it?
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids..
The self-adhesive kind, or the type you have to lick?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Plant some Kudzu. It will be covered inside of a Martian year.
This is the only way to terraform. At least the first time. We need *experience*. No plan will survive first contact with the environment so why have one?
I suggest throwing everything we can think of at the ol' red dustball and see what sticks. We need a foundation of microorganisms, the basic energy economy, over which we can layer and integrate successively higher life forms until we reach "food production." Once we have some little guys processing stuff and some respiration going on we can do some dart tossing with selected introductions and see if any of our predictions are accurate.
In essence all we are trying to do is re-create an evolution story on another planet, albeit with already evolved organisms. Think of all the organisms on this planet as our toolbox. With them we can recapitulate (with some modifications due to the differences in the planets) the story of our own Earth's journey.
I believe in panspermia. It's not an origin story. It's a policy.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
So since the whole slate will be swept clean eventually, lets make a mess! Send every organism we think might kickstart planetary life, no matter how small or insignificant, and then see what happens until the sun wipes us all out.
We're just wasting time right now. The more life the better. Want humans to see aliens? Well, we need to start growing them now! Want to know what it feels like to be responsible for an entirely new species? Want to see what evolution looks like? If you answered yes to any of these you should be in favor of sending Terran life everywhere it might have a chance to get a toehold.
Then we get to sit back and watch what happens!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Have we forgotten that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to shield the solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere that's already there? Trying to terraform it to the point of having a stable atmosphere is a fools errand. It'll be like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Mars is interesting from an exploration standpoint and the fact that it's the most accessible beyond the moon. Titan is way better for a colony and no need for terraforming for it to be a reasonable place to live. The cold is a big but not impossible challenge. Radiation isn't a problem and neither is explosive decompression. Dust is probably a big problem on Mars as well that you wont have on Titan. The surface is made out of water so you have all the water and oxygen you want as long as you have a nuclear power source, or can split water to get oxygen and burn liquid methane with that oxygen as fuel.
The cold actually has a lot of advantages. Heat engines and computing would be super efficient there, plenty of carbon to build things out of. If it wasn't so far away I'd say it's far better than Mars in almost every way and the natural choice for a colony outside Earth.
Have we forgotten that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to shield the solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere that's already there? Trying to terraform it to the point of having a stable atmosphere is a fools errand. It'll be like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
I wasn't actually thinking Mars myself.. I was thinking some of Jupiter's moons might be juicy (literally) places for us to work on., still a bit far out there, but maybe worth it in the long run.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I've heard Venus is actually a better target for human settlement for several reasons, particularly floating colonies full of breathable air since they would float on top of the super dense atmosphere.
Miles above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is actually quite similar to Earth's and has both Earth-like air pressure and an Earth-like atmospheric temperature range (0 to 50 °C) provided you were at the right altitude. This means humans could live there without pressure suits. Additionally, the atmosphere above this point provides shielding against radiation similar to Earth. It's a wonder we've put all our focus on Mars and not our other neighbor.
Terraforming Might Not* Work on Mars, New Research Says
So better kill yourself now, because one day our primary star will expand too far anyway? Is that your logic?
It wasn't, but it makes sense now.
"Either scenario needs plenty of CO2. And there’s just not enough. The polar caps are actually quite shallow deposits of carbon dioxide, and even exhausting all of Mars’ existing CO2 resources still creates just 15 millibars of the atmospheric pressure — on Earth, roughly 1,000 millibars is considered average pressure at sea level."
Not enough CO2 on Mars to warm it, eh? But that's a completely bogus comparison, suggesting Mars could only have as much as 15 millibars, while earth has 1000 millibars. But that's comparing apples (total CO2) to oranges (O2, N2, Argon et al)
Acttuallly, the partial pressure of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere (with 3 times greater gravitational force) is only 0.5 millibars. And we're told that's too much for Earth, because it is causing very dangerous warming.
If you compute the ratio of CO2 mass (not weight) per square meter of surface area of Mars compared to Earth, you'll discover that Mars has roughly 30 times more CO2, over each square meter of surface than Earth does. And if you release those additional resources mentioned in the article it shoots up to 60 times greater than Earth.
So, how much that huge amount of CO2 (compared to Earth) warmed the Martial surface. The current mean temperature at Mars' surface is 210K, which is the same as the expected black-body temperature. So this almost pure CO2 atmosphere causes warming of Mars.
Doesn't this suggest that it is water (in all of its physical forms) that warms and regulates the temperature of Earth's surface, and that the warming effects of CO2 are greatly exaggerated?
Still more numbers pulled from your Windy ass.
Why do you always just make shit up?
You never show where you get all these lies from.
Most of the interesting ones are inside Jupiter's radiation belt, not healthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Nothing will stick, that's the point, quite literally. The two problems with trying to create a thicker atmosphere on Mars is that 1) Mars has only a third of the gravity of Earth and 2) Mars's core has solidified so it doesn't have a magnetosphere to protect a thick atmosphere from solar erosion.
The only way people will ever live on Mars is in colony structures or under ground. The same could be done to make Venus habitable too, except on Venus people would weigh 90% of their Earth weight instead of only 38% of their weight on Mars.
No electromagnetic field. Until we can figure out how to drill down, heat the core, get it moving in a single direction ... no terraforming. Domes.
True but the interesting ones if they have life , it's aquatic , and radiation really ain't a problem once you get a few feet under water. Water as it turns out is a fabulous radiation moderator
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Life on Mars would be underground. Life on Venus would be in the clouds. Life in space would be in a metal tin. Only on Earth can you feel the ground beneath your feet and breathe deep.
What would this cost ?
To Terraform Mars into a home from home, wouldn't it need more mass and also a moon roughly the same as our own ? Why don't we look at the asteroid belt as our building supply depot, Using automated space drones designed to catch and redirect asteroids, and make a start by increasing Mars's size by throwing and crashing them into it. once the mass and gravity of mars is approaching the same as earth we then start to form a moon that will be roughly the same mass and distance as our own. Giving it a similar orbit, would this help give mars a gravity, climate, tidal system, possibly plate tectonic system, molten core producing a magnetic field that is similar to earth. Although this may take 100 years or more to achieve i think it would be worth it ?
i believe we already have the technology to do this and at the very least we certainly we have the computing power to simulate if this is possible and how much this would cost now.
Stripping of the atmosphere by solar wind is a very slow process for Mars. Your analogy is certainly solid, but in this case, the hole would be tiny.
Einstein once insisted that nuclear power was impossible - and he wasn't the only atomic scientist to state it. It wasn't an engineering problem that needed to be solved, but a scientific one.
Ends up that the discovery of the neutron was the solution.
No matter how much we find, it won't be enough. Maybe it's just because I read sf, but if we want to terraform Mars, we need to go to the asteroid belt, and/or Jupiter's ring system, and start shoving ice asteroids into collision orbits with Mars. Large ice asteroids. A few thousand klick-long ones might be a good start.
Have we forgotten that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field to shield the solar winds from stripping away the atmosphere that's already there? Trying to terraform it to the point of having a stable atmosphere is a fools errand. It'll be like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
Not really. Mars needs so much atmosphere compared to what is being stripped away, that if there is any ability to actually give it that atmosphere, making up for the loss would just be a trivial maintenance exercise. For that matter, if we have the ability to move the 10^16 kg of material just to give it the pressure enough that a human could survive (nevermind be Earth-like), we could probably give it a magnetic field. It would just be a mater of figuring out what combination of artificial magnetic field and shipping more atmosphere would be the most efficient.
It'll be EASY to terraform Mars - once space travel is easy enough that we don't NEED to terraform a planet. There are lots of mostly-icy asteroids and comets, and when we're able to push them into Mars-impacting orbits, it'll almost terraform itself. But we'll need lots of comets and asteroids.
And frankly, when we have cheap and reliable space travel, we may find that it's easier to create our own space habitats than it is to re-design a planet in a deep gravity well. It'll happen - but it'll be a LONG time happening.
SInce Mars is too cold, all it needs is 150 years of industrialization to start "global warming".
And in the meantime, the smog in the industrial centers will make it seem "just like earth".
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
We have two planets practically next door to us. One has way WAY too much CO2, the other doesn't have enough.
It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out a solution here.
Just some very rough designs that don't actually break the laws of physics. Not detailed plans. They're a couple of millennia from being necessary.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Ummm, your proposal for giving Mars a magnetic field strong enough to shield the atmosphere from UV/ solar wind stripping is ... ?
Just some very rough designs that don't actually break the laws of physics. Not detailed plans. They're a couple of millennia from being necessary.
Probably the most likely one I've read about would be putting a satellite in Mars' L1 spot or similar orbit between Mars and the Sun (a little leading most likely) that had a magnetic field. All you have to do is deflect solar radiation enough for them to miss Mars. Haven't done the math, but just to terraform Mars' atmosphere to human livable pressures will require energy in units of total output of the sun over time and, like you said, are millennia from being necessary.
Mars Want to Launch a Giant Magnetic Shield to make Mars Habitable The Paper
So, someone has worked out that they need to build a solenoid on the order of 5000km long, with a field of 10-20 thousand Gauss, would provide sufficient shielding that their new atmosphere would be blown away too fast. That's a field strength between that of a high-strength permanent magnet and an MRI machine's coil. And they want a solenoid to support the coils to generate this field that is 5000km long. We don't have materials stiff enough. That's material we could use to build a space elevator. [Slow had clap.]
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"