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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
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
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.
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.
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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.