Terraform Mars Using Oasis Greenhouses

An anonymous reader writes "The Director of the Mex-Areohab project, Omar Diaz, is interviewed today on the feasibility of modifying the Martian climate and terraforming with mini-greenhouses. At higher than 5,000 meters above sea level, on the volcano Pico de Orizaba, the Mexican model can be compared to many oases in the desert and contrasts with industrial-scale terraforming by Zubrin and McKay, among others, who use fluorocarbons, orbital mirrors, polar melting and pollution machines. One planet's pollution is another planet's rain machine, but the thrust of the interview seems to maintain that micro-terraforming is just faster and more efficient."

No easy answer

[Grave]

Unlike microwavable dinners, we can't just nuke it to heat it up. Or can we? While massive use of nuclear detonations on Earth would chill the planet ("nuclear winter"), would the immense release of various gasses and energies actually increase the average temperature of Mars? Not that I would seriously suggest we start our first off-planet colonies with an interplanetary nuclear barrage or anything.

Re:Send Me!!

[flewp]

I think it's a great idea too, provided non-americans get their heads out of their asses and stop making stupid posts just to hear themselves sound cool.

Re:Terraforming Mars

[Unordained]

I haven't noticed "terraforming Mars" being proposed because of over-population of species-survival.

We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys ... you don't need that many kids (or any?) Our planet can easily sustain us for a long time to come, at least assuming we take care of it. The damage isn't irreversible -- if we're smart, she'll last us a while.

Species-survival? Our sun's not going anywhere. Based on the usually-suggested timelines for evolution of mankind, we're just getting started, and have plenty of time to figure things out (so long as we don't wipe ourselves out first.) It would be far more in the interest of self-preservation to dismantle our nukes than to find new planets. We're a bigger danger to ourselves than the sun, or likely aliens.

No, I'd say we're thinking of terraforming Mars for other reasons:
- The hell of it. (No, really.)
- Research. (How does life develop? Were we an accident? Necessary?)

There's no reason to feel we need to rush it, just so we can "get down to business" using Mars for ores or habitation. We're comfortable here. We're rushing because we've watched enough sci-fi to have an idea of what might be possible -- and we want to see it happen.

Besides ... the moment we set stuff down on Mars, we've got people sending us rent bills for plots of land they "own" ... maybe we should get that resolved first?

Aren't we forgetting something?

[MachDelta]

Err... correct me if i'm being an idiot here, but I thought the reason Mars' atmosphere was so thin was because it lacks a complete magnetic field. When the planet 'died' (assuming it did) a bazillion years ago, solar wind from the sun hosed the planet and blew away much of its atmosphere, or so i'm told.

So... wouldn't that make terraforming Mars kind of like pouring water into a sieve?

Re:Aren't we forgetting something?

[obeythefist]

Yep, that and the smaller gravitational pull of the planet. The bigger problem is that there's no van-allen belt surrounding Mars either, because the core is dead. Who'd have thunk all those volcanoes were so good for us.

Re:Aren't we forgetting something?

[Tango42]

I think the time scales involved are very large. It would be like pouring water into a sieve with very small holes.

Since terraforming is science fiction anyway...

[dpilot]

An interesting proposal was part of the story, "Mining the Oort" (IIRC, by either Frederick Pohl or Poul Anderson, it's sitting on the shelf at home.)

****SPOILER ALERT******

Eventually they smacked Mars with a series of comets in one locality. The impacts built a long, deep valley. They also released a pile of water vapor. Since the valley was the lowest area of topography around, most of the released vapor settled there. I forget how deep the valleys were, but in the bottoms they were able to achieve some decent partial pressures. Of course it wasn't O2, but water vapor, ammonia, and some other cometary traces. But correcting the gas mix is the 'easy' part of terraforming once you've got the right atoms in the right place.

Going for deep valleys either does away with the dome entirely, or possibly doming over the top of the valley.

Getting inhabitable valleys then looks more like the Mars of C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet."

Re:Terraforming Mars

[pavon]

Responding to you and your parent. First, colonizing Mars would increase the sustainability of our species - it is far more likely that the earth will be hit by a big astroid before the sun runs out. Furthermore, we are fairly certian that we have tons of time before the sun runs out, but cant' predict when the next big astroid will come - could be 5 years from now, or it could be 10,000. So getting all our eggs out of this basket that is Earth is more important in the short-run than getting out of the solar system.

We could take care of over-population-related problems on earth if people would just stop reproducing so much. I mean, really guys ... you don't need that many kids (or any?)

Actually that is a short-sighted solution to the problem. The european birth rate has been dropping for some time now, while universal health care has been increasing life expectancy. They are now realizing that they will be in a real jam in a couple decades when the average age of the population is 64.

Greenhouse gases

[barakn]

Atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, gets removed and is replaced by oxygen, which isn't very reactive in the infrared. The atmosphere is less able to hold heat, and so the planet cools (except the exosphere, which actually heats up and increases the rate at which the atmosphere is escaping). CO2 ice builds up on the ice caps, and so the atmospheric pressure drops. These plastic greenhouses might make the planet worse.

Re:Greenhouse gases

[kippy]

If the atmosphere is increased by 500 fold (high mountain on Earth type pressure) it will have much much more CO2 than it does now. remember that it's only 7 bars on Mars now while it's 1024 bars on Earth. There will be plenty of CO2 to trap heat.

CO2 is really weak too remember. Heating up the atmosphere will need to be done with a coctail of CO2, CFCs PFCs, amonia, water and methane.

See here [globalnet.co.uk]for a NASA study.

Re:No easy answer

[RobertB-DC]

Foo: I'm in favor of detonating lots of nukes on mars, just to see what happens.
Bar: Not sure, but I think seeing Venus's atmosphere sent outwards a few hundred kilometres would look pretty cool.
Baz: Yeah, maybe they could have a pay-per view special to fund the costs.

Interestingly, I just listened to someone discuss the awesome power of a sight that fewer and fewer people have seen: nuking the Earth.

On NPR's Fresh Air [npr.org], former Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Reed talked about his new book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. In addition to his policial role, he was for a while a "consultant to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a well-known center for nuclear weapons research." As such, he helped design nuclear weapons, and was present during their testing.

He pointed out that witnessing an above-ground nuclear detonation was itself a life-changing event, and that the experience colored the decisions of all who saw and felt it. The light, he said of a Christmas Island [nuclearweaponarchive.org] blast, wasn't just bright -- it was all-enveloping, even through the way-beyond-dark goggles. And the instant blast of heat, that made you want to run away, anywhere, just to get away.

But nuke tests are now performed underground, where the awesome power is visible only as instrument ticks and a dimple [nuclearweaponarchive.org] in the ground. As the old scientists die, there are fewer and fewer people who have witnessed a nuclear blast as it would occur in the above-ground world.

The whole concept is so abstract, we can now discuss the idea of blowing one up on another planet, without even breaking into a sweat. Unfortunately, there are plenty of folks in the militaries of the world who can do the same sort of abstract thinking in reference to their own planet.

Damn, that got a lot deeper than I thought it would...