Slashdot Mirror
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.
we are not going to terraform mars, idiots
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!
Anytime a scientist publishes a BS study that "puts the kibosh" on something I have to laugh.
They had scientists "put the kibosh" on buildings over a certain height - proven to be a lie.
They had scientists "put the kibosh" on going faster than the speed of sounds - proven to be a lie.
They had some top rocket companies "put the kibosh" on re-using rockets as a dumb idea....
Seriously. The idea that you can't put a dome on mars - even a big dome, and get something breathable is total BS. You can probably do that with todays tech. It goes from there.
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).
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.
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)
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
Don't terraform Mars.
Don't pollute Mars.
Don't proliferate to-be-debris on Mars.
Don't trash on Mars.
Don't create a cemetery on Mars.
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)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
Everybody in this comment section watches/reads far too much science fiction.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...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.
...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.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids..
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.