Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target 575
Raver32 writes "Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary face lift of Mars — a technique called "terraforming" — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on.""
KSR wrote it first (Score:4, Insightful)
"Will"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars doesn't have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Mars doesn't have an anything-rich atmosphere. Yes, what atmosphere Mars has is mostly CO2, but what atmosphere Mars has is actually a pretty decent approximation of vacuum; the thickest parts of it are barely 1% of typical atmospheric pressure on earth.
The whole article doesn't actually include any specifics, it's just handwaving of the "and then a miracle occurs" sort:
Right. We'll get right on that. We only have 93 years to go, according to this article.
Must we Meddle? (Score:1, Insightful)
I understand the urge to better our environment. Technology is my passion, vocation, and hobby. I just have one question... do we need to change everything we set our eyes upon? (Let's not get into some of the more bizarre sides of Quantum Theory here).
Let's face it, some of the more remote — thus, undeveloped — regions of Earth remain the most beautiful. We still can't match nature's own ability to take care of itself — not that Nature doesn't destroy environments, but there's no one species to blame.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I might actually enjoy life on Mars... if I live to see it happen. I'm just wondering if we really need to try to make everything we see "better".
Altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Then who owns Mars? (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Planting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone know of any botany research on the subject? I know we analyzed a few samples of Mars soil in the 70s.
two things (Score:4, Insightful)
2. why does venus get such short thrift? i'm thinking along the lines of energy investment and simple entropy: in my mind, to precipitate matter out of an atmosphere, and to dissipate heat, seems to be an easier task than accumulating atmospheric mass and stoking atmospheric heat. yes, even with runaway, geometric catalyst-driven processes, i think it is easier to destroy than it is to create. of course, to do this to venus will be excedingly difficult. but why do you think mars would be easier?
but we should terraform mars and venus as soon as we can, regardless
here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, we can't even keep existing, fertile land from turning into desert right here on earth, with plenty of water and air around.
Re:Go to Mars Quaid... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, what value could learning about extraterrestrial life have, when it's at the closest planet for several light years likely to have some similar to ours? We'll study the next one, even though that means interstellar travel.
We've proven how carefully we protect environments when we don't understand them, right here on Earth, right?
Re:"Will"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does that mean? Mars doesn't have enough gravity to hold enough gas at its current temperature. If we warm it up, that problem increases. You can't just wish that problem away. Mars doesn't need heat or oxygen to be Earth-like. Mars needs mass.
Re:Then who owns Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
As with anything else, property rights on Mars will go to those with the ability to enforce them. International "nobody owns this place" treaties like those governing Antarctica and the Moon are only useful as long as those places have nothing of value. In the end, if a region is worth occupying, only those with the weapons needed to keep others out will really "own" the land.
Re:Terraforming... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not if we could, but should we (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'd hate to ruin all that prinstine forest over there on the red planet.
I couldn't care less about "ruining" currently lifeless worlds. Even if we found something similar to bacteria I wouldn't care if we went in there and "ruined" it by putting life on the same planet.
Only worlds like Europa where there's a least the potential for some multi-cellular life as we know it would I proceed with caution.
Life is special and we should put it everywhere we can. While potentially we might be messing with some Martian nano-scale bacteria and the like, the risks are far outweighed by the gains.
Oh, and as far as "ruining" Earth goes. We are a product of the Earth. Humans are natural. We're life and evolved from the same process that gave us sharks and walnuts and horses. We're probably Earth's most precious resource because we're the lone form of life that can get to other planets, that can spread out beyond Earth. The Earth is far from ruined, it still supports trillons and trillons of individual life forms. And one form of life, us, is just getting capable of one of the greatest achievements possible. Spreading life out beyond the planet it formed on.
Re:"Will"? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Mars doesn't have the gravity to hold a viable atmosphere, then we'll have to build enclosures that contain their own atmosphere. If we're doing that, then there's no real difference between colonizing Mars vs colonizing the moon.
Re:Erm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fuck up a perfectly good joke! (Score:1, Insightful)
It's wear, dumbass. "Where" refers to location.
Mods, this is a flame. That makes the parent flamebait. Pls mod accordingly. Semiliterate dyslexics should not be posting on a site with "news for nerds" in its masthead!
Go back to fark, kid. Come back when you reach puberty.
Re:Planting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod Parent Up, plz... here's why: (Score:3, Insightful)
We're not even counting the gravity well penalties of getting back and forth that'll be present, at least within the next 100 years.
Personally, I prefer what Parent is suggesting - let's concentrate (for now) on putting large orbital colonies in nearby space within this century, plus a couple on the moon (where the gravity isn't so much of a hassle).
We can explore Mars in the interim, and once we manage to overcome gravity easily enough later, then we can start parking folks there in large numbers.
Re:MARS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Will"? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not to say that these factors necessarily negate the moon's advantages of being rather closer and being easier to land on/take off from. But a Mars base would be a lot cooler.
Destroying Martian life (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that we're still discovering new species (microscopic ones by the gazillion, and still finding occasional large ones too) on earth, despite a huge exploratory effort that's been underway for hundreds of years, I think it's a bit early (massive understament) to think we've determined that mars is lacking any life at all
what's that old line? (Score:4, Insightful)
I love the idea of massive engineering projects making useful changes, but also understand that there is going to be a HUGE heap of the law of unintended consequences because these systems are so difficult to model accurately.
Re:Go to Mars Quaid... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the whole point of bringing up "Total Recall" here is just to joke about Martian Terraforming, then might not the movie be a better fit anyway?
Re:Planting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Planting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just say that we send a rocket ship that spews spores or whatever photosynthetic organism. There is a 70% survival rate, they get situated, some martian monsoon rips up a path and sends it up in the upper atmosphere where it rides the current for half a year where it mixes with some native vegetation and grows gangbusters. Density increases within 40 years - not part of the original model.
Mars will never be habitable for us earthlings to live comfortably. Our bone density would suffer too with a year long round trip and 6 month minimum stay, that's 18 months away from Earth's gravity. Not too good for our health but we're smart enough to figure out a solution.
Lets terraform that sucker and see what develops.
Re:"Will"? (Score:3, Insightful)
The geological scales over which Mars would lose its atmosphere are not that important to humans anyway.
So, wouldn't make Mars a natural planet.
Re:Planting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Then who owns Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
You forgot that part of the adage.
Re:Planting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't tell the folks making hydrogen fuel cells.
Re:You'd almost certainly have to start with (Score:3, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Saturn's rings are a mix of dust and ice. They're more ice-enriched toward the outside and more dust/rock enriched toward the inside. The E-ring, for example, is almost pure ice, largely spewed forth from Enceladus.
I'm more curious about where they expect to get the water.
That is the rub, isn't it? No matter what, any terraforming organisms or other self-replicators are going to have to be very heavily engineered. They'll need to be able to live off ice, not liquid water. Furthermore, it's not normal photosynthesis that we want: we want them to use sunlight to split up minerals -- nitrates, carbonates, oxides, etc -- and release gasses from them. Mars needs more of an atmosphere. The problem gets still worse, though. In the process, they'd be creating a "food" source just waiting to be exploited -- metals that want to be oxidized. This is a tempting target for contamination and even for your terraformers themselves. You'd need to somehow engineer your terraformers to be effectively unable to mutate, and you'd also need either a way to control rogue bacteria or a way to sequester the unoxidized metals out of reach.
A sad fact of Mars is that there just isn't much CO2 there. All of those stories of terraforming involving melting the ice caps are just nonsense [nationalgeographic.com]. The North Pole has one meter of winter dry ice. The South Pole has eight. That's it. There's huge, huge amounts of water ice at the poles, and subsurface in many other parts of Mars. But there's just not much CO2.
Whatever this Lowell Wood was smoking when he said that we need to get rid of *excess* CO2, I want some. Mars needs all the CO2 it can get. CO2 is poisonous to us, sure, but so mildly that people generally die of asphyxiation before CO2 poisoning if trapped in an enclosed space. Mars has enough problems on its own; worrying about reaching EPA guidelines isn't exactly our biggest problem. The worst problem a percent or two CO2 will cause is some acidosis (as for long-term effects, they may be minimized, as the body tends to compensate for respiratory acidosis after a few days). As for Mars' current atmosphere, it's only 0.007 atm CO2. That's richer than ours (0.0004 atm CO2), but still not some huge problem, and even meets EPA guidelines for long-term exposure (0.001 atm). Especially once plants kick in, CO2 simply won't be a problem.
Mars's problem is not what it has. It's what it doesn't have.
Not enough mass to hold a warm O2/N atmosphere. (Score:3, Insightful)
If we took the atmosphere as it is on this planet and actually brought it to Mars, it would have been gone from that planet in the matter of weeks, most of free N and O2 at the molecule speeds that we see on Earth would just jump out of the Mars gravitaty well, and it would happen extremely fast.
Re:Planting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Go to Mars Quaid... (Score:2, Insightful)
The thing is, we may not be looking in the right places. Our understanding of what consistitutes a "habitable environment" has changed dramatically in recent years, with the discovery of organisms living in extreme conditions such as geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, or ten thousand feet below the earth's surface. If Martian microbes do exist, they will probably be hiding out deep underground where liquid water is available, but where it will be difficult for us to find them.
Which raises a moral question. Is it right for us to muck around with an inhabited planet, even if it's inhabitants are microbial slime living in the pores in rocks? Basically, should there be something like the Prime Directive even if we're just talking about slime? We're only talking about microbes, but then again they may be our only neighbors for light years in any direction, so do we really want to take the chance of wiping them out? Then again, if there really are microbes living kilometers below Mars' surface, they will probably outlast our species, regardless of what decisions we do or don't make...
My big concern with Mars is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... getting high speed internet there. Damn, those packets are sure taking a long time.
$cience! (Score:2, Insightful)
Mars is a dry, cold, ugly gravity well. We live on a wet, warm, beautiful gravity well. I think it is a waste of resources, energy and time to escape our gravity well for a less hospitable gravity well. We are better off learning to live in space, which is probably going to be necessary for any Mars terraforming. We should also start cataloging what is already in space, another thing that might be usefull for the greening of Mars. The next step is to turn those resources not at the bottom of a gravity well into self-supporting machinery.
Once we can do those three things, we will probably realize that we don't need a gravity well to be happy. Then, it's wagon train to the stars time, which we can all agree is a good thing.
Re:really not so complicated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Planting? (Score:3, Insightful)
In reality, I'm sure we'll be theorizing forever, and never just try something.
There are serious considerations to if we really SHOULD terraform another planet. The obvious is, we've done a beautiful job maintaining the one we're on now, should we mess up another?
Mars is quite likely rich with artifacts that we haven't even begun to discover. We've explored what, maybe one square mile. Sure, we have satellite imagery, and can see that there are mountains, maybe old river beds and lakes, but we barely have a clue of what we can see. There are traces of methane, which we haven't really found the source for. Theorized, sure, but not positively identified a source. If we actually manage to terraform the planet, there will be plant material across most of the surface, along with large water masses. These easily accessable areas now would be completely unaccessable.
The idea of terraforming might work. From everything I've read, we're not approaching the idea quite correctly though. We'll introduce quantities of select plant material? We'll put massive greenhouse gas manufacturing facilities. We'll blow a few nukes to stir things up?
The way I see it, it would make a lot of sense to not introduce one or two basic organisms (algae? bacteria?) but to introduce a LOT. Literally have multiple entry vehicles scatter spores and seeds for a whole variety of vegetation across a huge area. We have observed what appears to be water. That may be a good place, but maybe it's not. If we scatter seed for virtually every plant material across the surface, maybe something will grow. If it can grow and thrive, it will spread on it's own. At very least, if it spreads a little on it's own, we can send more.
Plenty of people have mentioned the temperature and pressure consideration. I believe that will come with increasing the density and humidity of the atmosphere. If there is detectable water occasionally on the surface, and moist ground just under the surface, drawing that water to the surface through any sort of root bearing plant would humidify the atmosphere. Humid air is heavier than dry air. Dense air and cloud cover create an insulating blanket to trap heat from the sun.
The atmosphere won't change in a day or even the first year, but it will change. If the plants thrive like they could, it could be less than 10 years before there are notable cloud formations. The key would be finding plants that are willing to accept the extremely different environment. If we drop say seed and spore for every species of plant on the Earth there, what if only 0.01% start growing. That proves something could make it.
With a whole lot of evaluation, the odds could be increased, but I believe there would be a whole lot of surprises in the real environment.