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NASA Is Offerring $1 Million To Turn CO2 Into Sugar (space.com)
NASA is challenging people in the United States to come up with an efficient method to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, a simple sugar. The atmosphere of Mars consists predominantly of CO2 (95%), and glucose is a great fuel for microbe-milking "bioreactors" that could manufacture a variety of items for future settlers of the Red Planet, NASA officials said. Space.com reports: The new competition consists of two phases. During Phase 1, applicants submit a detailed description of their CO2-to-glucose conversion system. Interested parties must register by Jan. 24, 2019 and submit their proposals by Feb. 28, 2019. In April, NASA will announce the selection of up to five finalists from this initial crop, each of whom will receive $50,000. Phase 2 will involve the construction and demonstration of a conversion system. Winning this round is worth $750,000, bringing the competition's total purse to $1 million (assuming five finalists are indeed selected from Phase 1). You don't have to win, or even participate in, Phase 1 to compete in Phase 2. The challenge is open to citizens and permanent residents of the United States; foreign nationals can compete if they're part of a U.S.-based team. To register or learn more, go to the CO2 Conversion Challenge website.
(1) Mars atmosphere is thinner, meaning it cannot retain as much heat as Earth
(2) Mars is farther away from the Sun
If there was a reasonably accessible way to do this more efficiently, plants would use that instead of photosynthesis.
Not necessarily. There is a lot of interesting electrochemistry you can do, if you have access to 12V from photovoltaic panels. Plants do none of that, they never developed any kind of electronics. Generally, you can create energy-rich chemicals, some of which may be useful precursors to sugar synthesis. Also, chemistry may use steps nature avoids - because something too extreme (poisonous, temperature, pressure) is involved. Plants have a narrow temperature range compared to a factory - and do everything at normal atmospheric pressure.
The clorophyll process is likely optimal as-is though.
I'll agree it's many years away. If you choose an optimal path, it will take 15 years to build a complete self-sustaining environment. It won't be cheap, but if you spend what it takes, that's what it will take.
That's arguably many.
Fixing the Earth requires fossil fuels to be abandoned by 2030 at the latest and around 1960s level by the end of this decade. Otherwise, even with geoengineering, it can't be done.
It also requires that, by 2050, the global population is down to 1 billion on the surface (and no more than an additional 3 billion subsurface). Again, if you can't do that, it doesn't matter what you engineer.
I don't think these constraints will be met.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Were it easy to convert CO2 (plus Water incidentally) to sugar ( 6CO2 + 6H2O --> C6H12O6 + 6O2)), plants would probably do it more efficiently already. Really, what else do they have to do?
BTW, plants don't have to create glucose per. se.. Starch (Potatoes, Casava, Taro, etc) is easily broken down to glucose by adding a bit of hydrochloric acid.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You need to actually put in some effort to learn the subject, instead of just picking random factoids out of the aether (assuming that this is a serious post, and not just being disingenuous).
Mars gets only 40% of the solar energy that Earth gets, so to get Mars to the same temperature as Earth far more heat trapping is needed. Carbon dioxide on Earth traps heat as part of system that is 160 time thicker than Mars, including a lot of water vapor, which provides most of the trapping effect. Carbon dioxide is not warming Earth all by its lonesome. There is more water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, on average, than Mars has atmosphere, period. The atmosphere of Mars is bone dry.
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