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.

Comments

Well, yeah.

[RyanFenton]

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

Re:Well, yeah.

[Punchcardz]

Titan gets to poach off the magnetosphere of a little thing called Saturn. Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure. Mars is a shitty place to live, and has fundamental attributes that will continue to make it a shitty place to live. If you have self-sufficient, hermetically sealed habs for a Mars settlement, you are much better off sticking them in Barstow CA. At least then you can still get Amazon Prime.

CO2 only

[JoshuaZ]

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).

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