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Space

NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable? 284

Posted by timothy from the mmmmmm-oxygen dept.
spiralx writes: "Scientists at NASA have successfully tested a solar-powered machine that takes carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and produces pure oxygen. It will be tested for real on the next lander to go to Mars, planned for 2003. The article is here at Line One News." Mars will start seeming a little closer as news like this continues.
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NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable? More

NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable?

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  • The main problem with making Mars livable for humans is nothing to do with chemistry but rotational dynamics. Allow me to explain. On Earth the moon reduces wobble during the Earth's rotational cycle. Therefore the rotational axis of the Earth remains perpendicular to the Sun rays. However Mars lacks a sufficiently large moon, this allows axial wobble of up to 90 degrees! Image being in equatral weather conditions when the axis is perpendicalar and in polar weather conditions when the axis is parallel to the Suns output.

    Secondly, probably the best way to terraform a planet would be to use a genitically engineered bacteria which would transform the atmosphere using a fermentation like process. Ie. the waste product of the bacteria (the new earth-like atmosphere) would be poisonous to the bacteria so by forming the atmosphere the bacteria kills itself off (therefore we would have no problems getting rid of the bacteria when it had done it's job). The problem here is that the bacteria my mutate (a process which would be accelerate by the high UV radiation levels in the martian atmosphere) and form some nasty bacteria which could be harmful to humans - could a termination after N reproductions gene be manufactured to solve this problem?
  • There are already tiny little "machines" that produce oxygen from carbon dioxide; they are called photosynthetic bacteria. Their genetic make-up is fairly well known and easy to re-engineer; they are cheap to produce in large quantities (they happily take care of that themselves). Why not use bacteria instead?
    --

  • I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself.

    I agree with this. Given that the time span over which life arose on Earth is far too short for purely random processes, it does seem like there are organising principles that come into play very early on in a planet's development. This would tend to point to life being relatively common on worlds with the conditions required to support it.

    And given some of the places we find life on Earth today - hydrothermal vents, arctic wastes, miles below the Earth's surface and so on - the range of conditions under which life of some description could arise would also seem to be fairly broad, again supporting the theory that life might be fairly common.

    OTOH intelligent life is a totally different question. Out of all of Earth's species it only seems to have arisen once - as a surivival adaption it seems that there are a lot better routes which living creatures have followed. After all, look at sharks and crocodiles, animals which have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years. There's no need for intelligence to produce an animal capable of surviving for huge spans of time.

    So I think colonising Mars is a good thing. Eggs and baskets, you know :) Sure it's not going to solve the population crisis - if you had a thousand spaceships each taking a thousand people to Mars each year that's still only a million people every year - currently only 1/5000 of the Earth's population.

    But it gives us a better foothold in space, and Mars' gravity well is much easier to get out of than Earth's is, allowing it to be used as a base to reach the asteroids and beyond.

  • Ozone from fossil-fueled engines? that's a new one on me. Last I heard, they were mostly CO. When I think of O3, I usually think of *electric* motors (electric sparks produce ozone) and the wonderful smell they produce when they're old and arcing.

    Which brings up the thought that a way to start an ozone layer on Mars is via setting up weather patterns. I remember hearing somewhere that lightning is our big ozone producer here on Earth. Of course, us making weather implies atmosphere, water, and some fscking clue on how weather works.

  • Nor am I saying you're wrong, but if Helium eventually drifts out of the atmosphere into space, how is it that any is left on Earth? It's inert, so it won't be trapped in other compounds (unlike Hydrogen), meaning it must exist in the atmosphere, right? Or do we get all the He for our kids balloons from gas pockets in rocks?
  • Uh...no. The Earth has a diameter of 12,753 km, a mass of 6.5e21 tons, and a density of 5.5. Mars has a diameter of 6,794 km, a density of 3.9, and its mass is only 7.15e20 tons. Last time I checked, that means the Earth is almost twice as big as Mars :)
  • We still have helium on earth because it is continuously generated by subterranean nuclear decay. There is also a tiny amount in the atmosphere, because like all mixtures of different-density components, it takes a while for the lightest parts to drift to the top. I think most of the helium we get is in fact from holes in (radioactive) rocks, though I don't exactly know the details.
  • I don't think you would want to be on Mars unprotected, I know they will use suits or something

    Would some bikinis do? :)~
    __

  • Wrong. (Score:3)

    by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @04:43AM (#1034499) Homepage
    I think there is no essential defference between Nevada and Mars.

    Yes there is: fewer billboards.

  • Tropical paradise? Get real. Global warming will melt the polar ice caps and cause widespread flooding, areas of land will turn into desert, and winter will be perpetually overcast skies and rain.

    Hot weather sucks anyway. I get uncomfortable if it goes above 25C :P

  • I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm wondering where you get you information/calculation.

    If you do a simple ideal gas calculation of the average velocity of an oxygen atom at 300K the velocity is much lower than the escape velocity of Mars (.7km/s compared to ~5km/s).

    I know this isn't the best way to calculate this but its not a bad first approximation, so I was wondering what calculation you're using.
  • If there were complex life forms on the planet, I would agree with you in that we should leave it alone. However, there are not.

    Under the assumption that all affects are limited in scope to Mars, this *might* be true. Maybe they are and maybe they're not. Who's to say us destroying a unique microbe species on Mars won't start a chain of events that cause Jupiter to blow up or something? Contrived and improbable, yes. But all actions have consequences, and we as humans aren't omniscient enough to know them.

    To argue that humanity's extinction would be good is just plain silly.

    Likewise, to argue that humanity's extinction would be bad is equally silly. Just because we're sentient doesn't make us any more or less important than the hypothetical microbes on Mars.

    This all reminds me of the episode of ST:TNG where a planet had a colony of microbes living under the soil. The individual microbes weren't sentient, but the colony as a whole was.

  • I don't think the idea here is so much terraforming, but as a method for getting O for astronauts/dwellings. The CO2 and O3 produced by our combustion processes would be vented, meaning we wouldn't be eating up the supply.

  • Interesting you should have qualms about this, considering that making the atmosphere breathable is only the least of the things we would do to it.

    Before that, most theories say that you would pump the atmosphere so full of greenhouse gases that the planet would increase in temperature by over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This would make it possible to cultivate plants which would exchange CO2 for O2. How does that strike you for ecological rape?

    This theory would seem to bypass that by using solar-powered machines, but be honest: you're not going to fill the atmosphere of an entire planet with oxygen via machines (except in Total Recall, that is). The only way for this to be even remotely possible is with large-scale agriculture over a sustained period of years, even decades (I don't know).

    --
  • "Is it right or wrong? I don't know, but eventually it will happen."

    "Let use redefine progress to mean that just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean that we MUST do that thing."

    There is no reason why we couldn't just live on mars without trying to turn it into another Earth. At some point I would like to see us accept a planet for what it is and try to live there without bending it to our will. I think it would be nice to know that Mars will always be red and never be green or blue. To think that someday, we might have technology and not feel obligated to use it to destroy something that is pretty beautiful to begin with is a nice dream. Wouldn't that be a more difficult thing to do that teraforming? To NOT mess it up?


    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • ... will crashing a few of these into Mars make much of a difference? ;-)

    (sorry, couldn't resist).
  • Aigh! And here I was thinking Kim Stanley Robinson was Spider Robinson's wife!!!

    *sound of paradigm collapsing*


    --Fesh

  • The sad things is that with NASA's budget cuts and other problems I am beginning to doubt I will see a manned mission to mars in my lifetime.

    The Director of NASA was on CNN last week and was asked about Mars. He stated that "There will be a man on Mars in no less than 10 years and no greater than 20 years."

  • "If there is sentient life on Mars and we kill it off trying to terraform/colonize Mars, we'll probably end up feeling as bad as we did four hundred years ago when we killed off indigenous populations with smallpox, influenza and VD."

    In other words, not at all?

    Anyway . .

    I do think this is the next step, though. There is no right and wrong. This is uncharted territory, and unlike selling organs or patenting human chromosome patterns, this one probably has no potential victim.

    I think we should get started right away, honestly though. The universe is out there, the whole thing, and it's all there for anyone who wants to go.

    It's not like there isn't enough room out there. Now, on Earth . . .

    I think slashing and burning once we can leave any given planet should be avoided, of course.
  • A plant. We've created an artifical algae substitute. Kinda cool eh?
  • Who the hell said anything about environmentalism? It must suck going through life with a such a big chip on your shoulder that you find a target to push your agenda on, even where there is no target. Just because you have a hammer in your hand doesn't make everything you see a nail.

    Blowing up the moon would wreak ecological havoc on this planet, but that doesn't have anything to do with environmentalism. When you change things, there are effects. You can't just change the entire ecology of a several billion-year-old planet and expect there to be absolutely no side-effect. And if your narrow field of view only takes into account environmental possibilities in the sense of happy little squirrels and blooming flowers, you're missing an entire field of potential. As another poster pointed out, with the very imperfect spin of Mars, it would be difficult to successfully terraform, and even if we accomplished some manner of change, there's no telling what the actual result would be. Your small farming and research community in the desert one day could be flooded the next, or swept away in a massive storm.

    Maybe you'd like to live there. In fact, I'd like you to live there, too. But I'll happily stay here where I know that Portland is going to be rainy, San Jose is going to be dry and hot, and there's a McDonald's on the corner of every street in both cities.
    ---
    icq:2057699
    seumas.com

  • Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations

    Scientists recently genetically engineered plants to grow faster. [excite.com] It's all coming to a head -- I love the idea of "singularity", it scares the heck out of people, getting them to donate to Foresight [foresight.org]. ;-)

    --
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • There are already this kind of device. It is called plants...

    Haven't seen anyone planting a lot of begonias in a room and waiting for the place to blow up. A lot of greenhouses would have exploded this way. Most likely the device produces enough oxygen to breathe. That's like 20% of the atmosphere and well below any dangerous levels.

    If you want to make oxygen just take a tub of water and stick unshielded wires and run a few thousand volts through there. Electrolysis will make oxygen for you. Making oxygen on earth is no problem. The trick is to do it in space (or on other planets) with what you have there.

  • This sounds very cool, but I'm a bit concerned after NASA's mistakes on two previous missions (the lost polar probe, and the whole metric-english conversion fiasco). This machine could be a fundamental step in the colinization of Mars in the future, but another blunder and NASA might lose too much funding.
  • we'll probably end up feeling as bad as we did four hundred years ago when we killed off indigenous populations with smallpox, influenza and VD.

    Biological warfare, 15th century style. Put a bunch of dirty smelly pirates on a ship for three months, let simmer, serve on unsuspecting native populations.
    --
  • Mabye we can use something like this on Earth so that we can still keep hurtling around in dead dinosour powered tin cans and wiping our butts with Amazon, Indonesian and Malay rainforest?
  • This is my opinion also. I'm a sci-fi buff (as you might surmise from my nick) and I've read some of the most brilliant science fiction authors of our time; the kind who live on the cutting edge of science and who have fresh ideas and a new take on current technology. Greg Egan is one of my favourites (look him up on the internet, he has a homepage he writes himself).

    In some of his books (and also in the works of Stephen Baxter) he deals with this issue.

    My view is that we can't really bet on life evolving anywhere else. Until we have proof we have to consider the chance that we are indeed alone. I think it is our responsibility to see to it that life continues even if something happens to us. Just sending out rockets with bacteria inside into the depths of space would be a start. Then when we have the technology, perhaps to send humans or human genes into space as well. We can't assume that space is full of life.

    To this end, populating Mars would also increase the likelyhood of the continuation of life. If we can terraform it, we should. If nothing else then just because it is the first step before going deeper into space.

  • Hey, cool off! Losing a few NASA missions is a high price but the outcome is that the IQ's of half the population rise because their parents and teachers will expect more from them. They will try harder. They will have more to hope for. I think in the long run this will make for more successful NASA missions.

    There is no reason to continue maintaining the Old Boys Club. If you want to keep women, jews and non-whites in their place, just join the KKK.

    Really you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by trying to stop affirmative action. Eventually the IQ gaps that you are talking about will narrow, and that's when the payoff comes. All the pain that you're experiencing now will seem worth it because you'll have more than twice the problem-solving power that you have now. Giving people the chance to develop their skills for the future is every bit as important as pioneering the exploration of space.

  • On a big scale? (Score:5)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:00PM (#1034520) Journal
    I think there is a big question here. While I do see the merits of this on a small scale (ie. for a habitat of astronauts on a mission, etc.), there are serious questions about possibly doing this on a large scale.

    Eventually, people are going to want to do this to the entire atmosphere of Mars to make it breathable. What will happen then? Should an undertaking like that be considered? Should we totally alter a foreign planet and bring it away from its natural state? What would the result be?

    While today this may seem like science fiction (Aliens, Total Recall, etc.), it won't be all that long before this kind of thing becomes a real possibility.

    It is a curious but worrysome proposition.

  • Amusing writing (Score:3)

    by Goldberg's Pants ( 139800 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:00PM (#1034522) Journal
    "Scientists at NASA have successfully tested a solar-powered machine that takes carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and produces pure oxygen."

    So this means NASA went all the way to Mars then? Or did they just set up a really long tube from Mars and syphon the air to Earth?

  • You don't seem to get my drift. I don't care about what we've done or not done to Earth. Why do we have to terraform Mars to live there? It's a waste of effort and time and (in my opinion) a perfectly good planet.

    "I think terraforming Mars is a GOOD first step in our interplanetary expansions."

    If we can't live on Mars without terraforming it, what makes you think we can terraform it? The science and knowledge required to terraform a planet are barely within our grasp. It's a much better concept to make Mars a home before we begin to re-decorate.

    It's quite possible teraforming Mars could be the most dangerous thing we can do with Mars. Getting there and living there will do many positive things without us having to re-arrange Mars. We can learn about Mars. We can learn about new technologies that will help us be self sufficient on a new world. Then, and only then, should we start to think about teraforming. Here we are sureying a new entire branch of technology and seeing no drawbacks. Well, we also thought anti-bacterial soap was a good idea. Now we're over-run with bacteria that's resistant. Just because teraforming LOOKS like a sure thing, or APPEARS to be harmless doesn't mean it won't come back to bite us.

    Sure, I may sound too much like some raving luddite, but when Mars is sitting in a super dense, poison filled, CO2 atmosphere because we made some mistake, don't say I didn't warn you.

    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • My exteremely intelligent professors (one has 3 phds, the other has only one but he worked at Lawrence Livermore back in the 80's) are working on some pie-in-the-sky project like this that was some system to get rid of greenhouse gasses. The way they had it set up was to actually burn fossil fuels to power it. I think they actually got the equations to get rid of more CO2 than it burned. They were still working on getting a real device last time I checked. They were pretty secretive about it even though we (my awesomely intelligent 6-person chem class) were pretty tight with them.
    Yes... Another unsubstantiated claim from me.. :)
    The important point: If global warming really exists (subject of some debate) on Earth, can we use it to eat greenhouse gasses?
  • A lot of people tend to forget the temperature of Mars when talking about colonizing/terraforming it. A balmy day on Mars is equivalent to a cold day in Antartica or therabouts, so Johnny Appleseed isn't going to be planting trees all over Mars anytime soon. Some sort of greenhouse effect will be needed to warm the planet before you plant a rain forest there, not to mention you've got to water all those plants as well!

    We're gonna need machinery here, not plants folks.
    ---
  • Maybe a large artificial satellite to re-heat the core via tidal-flexing.

    Or maybe just pirate Mars bit by bit as land-fill for our Dyson spheres!
  • Mars is approximately the same diameter as the Earth's iron cores (i.e. take away the crust and the mantle) and is very iron-rich.

    This has long fuelled speculation that mars used to be about Earth-sized but that a collision with something ripped the top off (and with it the atmosphere) a loooooong time ago.

    Venus is closer to the Earth in mass and size.

    Hohum

    troc

  • Heh, Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter are two of my favourite authors, if not my favourites :) I've read all of their stuff. They are probably the best at coming up with truly interesting ideas that are actually based on bizarre but plausible parts of science, especially some of the stuff in Vacuum Diagrams - a lifeform made from mathematical hypotheses?

    My view is that we can't really bet on life evolving anywhere else. Until we have proof we have to consider the chance that we are indeed alone.

    Whilst it is my opinion that there is life elsewhere, I agree that we cannot assume that at all - there are too many unknown factors at this point in time. Anyone making a definite statement is jumping the gun by a long shot.

    And assuming we don't develop FTL travel within a reasonable timescale, then Mars is the ideal stepping stone to the rest of the Solar System - lower gravity, closer to the asteroid belt and its vast store of useful resources. I think colonising it is worthwhile for many reasons.

    OTOH, given past history, it will be done at some point no matter how good the objections. It's better to plan now while there's still some time to go :)

    P.S. Do you have his web page address?

  • Would you mind explaining what might be wrong about terraforming Mars? It's not like destroying anything other than a dead planet, anyway. Nothing lives there, and spectacular claims to the contrary notwithstanding it doesn't seem like anything ever did live there.

    However, I don't think we have the resources to terraform it anyway, so the issue is moot.

  • http://www.spacedaily.com/spacecast/news/mars-insi tu-99c.html

    yummy.

  • Re:I don't think Terraforming is the issue here... (Score:3)

    by Bad Mojo ( 12210 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @02:36AM (#1034554)
    Does anyone else think (like myself) that maybe we shouldn't teraform Mars?


    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • This may not be flying on the 2003 mission as was reported.

    Well, according to SPACE NEWS vol.11 no.21 May 29, 2000 pg2
    "An experiment to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere is among three payloads left in limbo following NASA's directive to halt work on a Mars lander originally slated to fly in 2001...
    ...NASA issued a stop work order on the lander May 12 in a move that coincided with an announcement of two new mission concepts as the front runner for the 2003 mission

  • They're actually using heated "zirconia" -> "A wafer-thin, solid-oxide ceramic disk made of zirconia, about the size of a small cookie, is sandwiched between two platinum electrodes and heated to 1,380 degrees Fahrenheit (750 degrees Centigrade). When carbon dioxide is fed to this unit, the zirconia cell "cracks" the carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. Only the oxygen can penetrate through to the other side of the disk; the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gases are stopped in their tracks." from SpaceDaily [spacedaily.com]

  • Sorry, you're a bit naïve there.

    First of all, as another poster pointed out, it's not the proportion of oxygen that counts but the partial pressure. The oxygen partial pressure in the Earth's atmosphere is around 200hPa (hPa = hectopascal: sorry, I use SI units not p.s.i) and it's that figure which matters. Same for burning (even assuming there's anything to burn on Mars, which is dubious).

    As for making water out of oxygen and hydrogen, that is not, I repeat emphatically not the way you want to do it. You don't want to use up all your hard-won oxygen to burn hydrogen: reflect upon the fact that a liter of oxygen at the abovementioned 200hPa pressure will, when used to transform the stoichiometric quantity of hydrogen, produce only (scribble, scribble) 0.16 grams of water. A ratio of over 6000 in volume: imagine how much oxygen you'd need to make an ocean of...

    Actually, water is probably abundant enough on Mars, even igoring the ice caps. Extracting it might be much more delicate, however. Of course, there's no question of making an ocean either. There's no way you could have an ocean (again?) on Mars.

    Even if water were very abundant, you couldn't use it the other way around, either, to produce oxygen. Electrolysis of large enough quantities to fill a whole atmosphere? Calculate the free enthalpy you'd need, and then forget it.

  • The way I heard it, the main problem was the absence of plate tectonics on Mars. If it certainly had an active core (as shown by the presence of the large volcanoes), this is no longer the case. Plate tectonics is an essential factor in renewing the atmosphere.

    This is about having a dense atmosphere. But even then I doubt that Mars ever had a breathable atmosphere. Remember that the primitive Earth's atmosphere was not at all made of oxygen: it was reducing and not oxidizing. It changed from reducing to oxidizing billions of years ago under the action of certain bacteriæ. Unless you positively assume that Mars also had similar bacteriæ, something I find dubious at best, it was probably reducing all along.

    As for the part about "keeping it there", please keep the time scale in mind: if all of a sudden Mars had an atmosphere of pure oxygen, 200hPa in pressure, it would take longer than the continued existence of the human species for that atmosphere to disappear (the human species has existed for around 3 million years: this is next to nothing compared to a planet that exists for billions of years).

    Finally, the point you make about the balloon is misleading at best: helium rises because it is lighter than dioxygen, and that doesn't depend on the magnitude of the grav pull of the planet.

  • Hey, go find a post about environmentalism and post there instead of trying to read your inane views into a discussion on wether we should alter another planet's current state.


    Bad Mojo [rps.net]
  • Have they forgotten all the trace gasses that will kill regular people? have they seen mission to mars and total recall one too many times?

    There are elements of sulfur, ammonia, and carbon monooxide in way too great of quanities present in the atmosphere. True, all of these elements can be converted to a non-issue, except the sulfur. Not sure how they are going to get rid of that.

    Secondly, how are they going to get a breathable atmosphere when the pressure there is nearly negligible. the atmosphere is only half a mile high, we have 14 miles of atmosphere on earth. The reduced biosphere is going to be hard pressed to remove all the cosmic rays.

    It takes a lot more than a little oxygen to teraform a planet though.

    --
    Gonzo Granzeau

  • How did you get 20 Hydrogen atoms into one molecule?

    Ah yes, the patent that is pending on hydrocarbons. Its so innovative, it doesn't require common manufacturing techniques to make this fossil fuel. Using proprietary techniques, it is pressure formed in the deep safety well below the ground. Guaranteed to produce billions of barrels of such fuel for the entire earth.

    You can bet when the patent office grants my patent, the world will be my oyster.
  • Whether he meant it or not, Mental got the issue just right.

    Colonization of space may be inevitable to ensure the species' survival, but "leave things better than you found them" must also be learned -- and sooner!

  • How it all happened here (Score:4)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @03:39AM (#1034598) Homepage Journal
    The further stated points will state that in order for a planet to have its own atmosphere, the escape velocity of the planet MUST be 10x higher than the average speed of any gas (a single molecule) that constitutes the atmosphere. This statements also insist that our own atmosphere underwent through multiple processes of evolution (it is also evolving right now) and that life on this planet is one of the reasons that out atmosphere is what it is today.

    The Evolution of Earth's Atmosphere
    • Earth's early atmosphere might have originated from the capture of gases in the solar nebula before dissipation of the latter by the Sun
    • the above theory is no longer the accepted one
    • rather, we feel that the Earth's early atmosphere was formed from the vapourization of incident comets
    • in the accretive atmospheric theory, the early atmosphere would have been rich in hydrogen - H and H2
    • in the cometary atmosphere theory, the atmosphere would have been poor in hydrogen
    • in either case, the atmosphere would have had water vapour (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), carbon dioxide (CO2) and carbon monoxide (CO)
    • these molecules are still found in the gas giants
    • the evolution of the atmosphere is a result of these processes:
      1. gravitational retention
      2. volcanic outgassing
      3. solar ultraviolet radiation
      4. processing by early life
    Gravitational retention
    • molecules in the atmosphere move about using thermal energy
    • energy of motion is called kinetic energy
    • we define temperature as being the average kinetic energy of the particles (atoms, molecules) of a substance
    • the kinetic energy of a molecule with mass "m" and velocity "v" is a familiar result:
      • K.E. = 1/2 mv2
    • the average amount of thermal energy for a molecule in a gas is:
      • K.E. = 3/2 kBT
      • here kB is Boltzmann's constant
    • these two expressions represent the same quantity, hence:
      • 1/2 mv2 = 3/2 kBT
      • solve for v: v=(3 kBT/m)1/2 (1)
    • equation (1) tells us the average speed of a given particle with a given mass and given temperature
    • hotter particles move more quickly
    • lighter particles move more quickly
    • example: oxygen gas (O2) at room temperature
      • mass= 5.3 10-26 kg
      • T = 295 kelvin (= 22 celcius)
      • kB = 1.38 10-23 J/K
      • implies velocity v = 4800 metres per second
    • pretty fast!!!
    • molecular speeds in the atmosphere can be compared with the escape velocity for the Earth
    • the escape velocity is the velocity required by an object to permanently leave a planet and escape into space
    • it is
      • vescape = (2GM/R)1/2
      • M = mass of the planet
      • R = radius of the planet
      • G = gravitational constant
    Planet --- Escape velocity

    Mercury --- 4,300 m/s
    Venus --- 10,300 m/s
    Earth --- 11,200 m/s
    Mars --- 5,000 m/s
    Jupiter --- 59,500 m/s
    Saturn --- 35,500 m/s
    Earth's Moon --- 2,400 m/s

    • to a first approximation, if the speed of an atmospheric molecule exceeds the planet's escape velocity, then that gas will not be retained in the atmosphere
    • i.e., escape if vparticle &gt vescape
    • in practice, this equation gives a false result, because for a given temperature gas particles have a range of speeds, from very fast to very slow
    • the distribution of particle speeds is given by the Boltzmann distribution
    • to retain a given gas in an atmosphere, a planet must have
      • vescape &gt 10 vparticle
    • therefore, the Earth lost all of its hydrogen and helium gases early in its history, but kept the heavier gases
    Outgassing from volcanic activity
    • the interior of the Earth is heated by the decay of radioactive elements
    • 4.5 billion years ago the surface of the Earth was a few thousand degrees kelvin and was more liquid than solid
    • volcanic activity released gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen (N2), plus more methane and ammonia
    • also released were gases from radioactive decay - argon and helium
    • once the Earth had cooled down, heavy rains filled the oceans to their present depth
    • water quickly dissolved the atmospheric CO2, where it forms bicarbonate (HCO3-)
    • bicarbonate can form solids with calcium, notably limestone and chalk
    • the atmosphere went from 80% carbon dioxide 4.5 billion years ago to 10% carbon dioxide 3.5 billion years ago (% by mass)
    • at this time, H-C compounds (CH4) formed 80% and nitrogen formed 10%
    Solar UV radiation
    • there was no oxygen (O2) or ozone (O3), so UV light easily penetrated the atmosphere and broke up CH4, NH3 and H2O into their constituent atoms
    • hydrogen escapes, and oxygen combines with methane to produce carbon dioxide and water
    • nitrogen became the dominant gas roughly 2.5 billion years ago
    • in the absence of hydrogen, oxygen and ozone could exist in trace amounts thereby stopping most of the UV light from penetrating deeply into the atmosphere
    Processing by early life
    • oxygen is a non-equilibrium gas in Earth's atmosphere, i.e., it reacts so readily with other substances that it must be produced rapidly and constantly in order to remain abundant
    • early lifeforms, such as blue-green bacteria, convert CO2 to O2 using sunlight, a process called photosynthesis
    • the oldest fossils found on Earth, from 2.3 to 2 billion years old, coincide with the appearance of oxygen-bearing rock about 2.5 billion years ago (evidence of life-processing)
    • actually, there are fossils that are 3.5 billion years old, but they are rare
    • fossils become wide-spread in rocks that are ~2.3 billion years old
    • some conclusions:
      • life arose some 3.5 billion years ago, when the Earth's atmosphere was composed of elements common in teh solar nebula, slightly modified by volcanic outgassing
      • it is no surprise that, in terms of elemental abundances, life more resembles the Sun than the Earth
      • however, the atmosphere is so changed from 4 billion years ago that, should life end on earth, it would not begin again

  • Remember the Mutants! (Score:3)

    by Cheshire Cat ( 105171 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:02PM (#1034603) Homepage
    This is the first link in a long chain of events that will eventually result in Douglas Quaid having to free the slowly suffocating mutants.
  • I believe this is not for terraforming..
    The mars reference mission includes sending unmanned craft ahead, including craft that will land and, using solar power & a few stored chemicals, turn carbon dioxide from mars atmosphere and turn it into both oxyjen and some kind of alcohol (rocket fuel). It will store these in large tanks. The idea is that this is much less costly than shipping the required oxygen ahead, as the mass is much lower.
  • Toss up. They did at the end, but all they did was heat big chunks of ice. I guess technically that's a machine.

    --
  • I wonder if we could use a few billion of these to scrub Earth's atmosphere of excess CO2, so that this planet doesn't end up like Mars...


  • Zubrin (Score:3)

    by Kyobu ( 12511 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:05PM (#1034614) Homepage
    Is this the same kind of machine described in Robert Zubrin's The Case for mars? I remember that book being kind of interesting and pretty convincing when I read it a couple years ago.
  • Those in the know all say that it would take an awful long time, though.



    Hah! Drop a bucket of Kudzu on the surface of mars, waite 3 weeks, instant terraforming!
    Everyone knows Kudzu will live anywhere, in anything, and obscenely fast. Of course, it's impossible to get rid of after it finishes terraforming the place.... Hrmm....

    Kintanon
  • ...but don't we need a few other components to make usable air? Doesn't seem as exciting if we still have to haul Nitrogen along.
  • Hey, ya think maybe after we clean up the atmosphere of Mars, we could, I dunno, maybe clean up our OWN damn planet?
  • This device is not on the scale to change a planetary atmosphere. This is mainly something designed for either exploration missions or bases.

    Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations, although mass water supplies would be likely required for this type of operation. If machinery was used, it would most likely have to be constructed from local materials and have a vastly larger scale power source than sunlight (which is weaker there.)
  • No - I just chose not to :) What do you think would be easier to do? a.) Warm the planet and find plants that can survive in Martian soil and then just let nature take its course, or b.) essentially reinvent the entire wheel, create machines that do the exact same thing that plants have been doing for billions of years, and at the same time litter a pristine Martian environment with junk and sap it of its resources. The answer is obvious. We are far, far away from having machines that reproduce, much less convert minerals in soil into usable ores for construction. That, right now, is the stuff of science fiction. On the other hand, we've been doing just a marvelous job at warming our own planet, and that's with large scale movements occuring to prevent us from doing exactly that, to boot. Oh yeah, and we've been farming for the last 20,000 years or so, so I'd say that isn't a problem either.

    --
  • Crashing it is not the worst they can do. They can deliberately bury and misinterpret their own data.

    I've never said this before, but please consider modding this up so it make it to 'hot links'. This thread is getting 'old', and few will see this information otherwise

    I wish I'd seen this article before, because it seems that *everyone has forgotten the truth about the Viking I [nasa.gov] and II [nasa.gov] findings regarding the life on Mars experiments [nasa.gov]:

    In short strokes: Most of the tests were positive as NASA fully admits (but sometimes buries) several researchers associated with the experiments have reported the horror at NASA when the results came in -- "We can't publish this! We'll look like fools." Please remember this was a billion dollar mission planned at a time (70's) when a billion dollars was a lot mpore money than it is today, andthat these experiments were widely peer-reviewed around the world, and considered solid until they yielded positive results

    I wish I could provide you with links to why the individual results were disqualified, but the NASA website containing most of my old links is gone or merged. (It shouldn't take more than 10-15 of poking around to find new ones, but if I don't post this comment fast, it will die unseen.) However, here's what Jame s E. Tillman [washington.edu] , who was
    on the Viking Meteorology Science Team and was Director of the Viking Computer
    Facility (at the University of Washington in Seattle) said at a national Prime
    Computer Users Group meeting in Orlando FL, 1984:


    "As to specific results, the consensus is that no evidence for life was
    found even though the biology experiments reacted in a strongly
    positive way. The reason for the reaction is that the Martian soils
    contain compounds that liberate oxygen in the presence of water."


    "The soils will liberate oxygen"? What is the justification for this assumption. None, except for post-facto guesswork. In fact, you'll find the specific chemistry cited to 'dismiss' the experiments is inconsitent with more moderns estimates of Martian soil composition and surface dynamics. Further each of the three positive experiments (deliberately designed to complement one another and prevent error) is dismissed for a very different reason.

    Finally, I think that the 'atypical' kinetics that was used to discredit one experiment (positive results as a little water was added, but later tailing off) is *exactly* what we should have expected. Water may be a limiting factor for life on mars (or it may not) but after tens of millions of years, we should expect that microscopic life in a dry part of the surface would find water toxic in excess anounts. Hence - early rapid positive results, followed by a die off.

    It is also possible that there are other limiting factors to growth, so the microbes reponded positively until they hit 'the wall' on another substance... like stored short term high energy compound (e.g. ATP in earth life) or even food (quick energy foods like sugars)

    I urge you to go to NASA's websites and read for yourself. This is no great 'cover-up' the info is all there for you to consider. The 'embarrassing parts' are harder to find (broken links, disappearing archives, etc,) but they are not conscientiously buried.
  • Only the oxygen can penetrate through to the other side of the disk; the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gases are stopped in their tracks.

    Great. Carbon Monoxide. Even worse than CO2. (I didn't believe the methane equation, anyway - it takes too much energy to create methane from its combustion products.)

    For terraforming purposes, it does matter what is done with the carbon. Here on Earth, the carbon goes into making more CO2 respirators: plants. If this device releases even half as much CO as it does O2 (as the balanced equation 2 CO2 - O2 + 2 CO suggests) then it can't be used to terraform Mars. What you need is something that either creates bricks of pure carbon (a la KSR's gigantic mass spectrometer sieves... or was that Greg Bear?) or binds the carbon into a mineral like limestone (a la marine diatoms).

    CO is highly poisonous to animals, even in low concentrations, and plants don't handle it well, either. This device is OK for creating an isolated pocket of O2, like a pressurized Martian habitat, but you can't Terraform the planet with it... not for human habitation anyway. And I doubt this was ever proposed, except by underinformed laymen. (Sorry Greenpeace. Find another contrived issue to protest.)

  • Well, people tend to forget a lot of things -- esp. considering most people know next to nothing about "rocket science".

    Allow me to summarize: Mars is not Earth.

    Mars is much further away from the sun than we are here on Earth. Mars is smaller and less massive than Earth. The surface conditions are vastly different from Earth -- lower atmospheric pressure, much lower average temperature, very little water, an atmosphere composed of mostly carbon dioxide, oh and vast sand storms than can last years...

    Granted, I'm no physicist, but you don't need a PhD to know O2 is lighter than CO2. Translation: Mars doesn't have the gravity to keep an oxygen atmosphere. One must also observe the laws of thermodynamics. Thus, unless this device is based in alchemy, all you'll end up with is an equally thin oxygen atmosphere (which will slowly get thinner and bleed into space) + a huge pile of carbon. As a side effect of removing the CO2, the average surface temperature will decrease as less solar radiation is trapped by the now gone CO2.

    SO... let us assume we instantly convert all the CO2 on Mars into O2. You still wouldn't be able to stand out under the stars and breathe easy -- you'd suffocate and "explode".

    Now, let's be reasonable; no one is suggesting terraforming Mars :-) This kind of device is a heavenly gift to the planetary shipping industry. In effect, manned missions to Mars wouldn't require advanced air filtration and recycling technology (large heavy machines) and they certainly wouldn't have to carry a large supply of oxygen with them (read: more room for M&M's and Dr. Pepper.) This also has applications here on Earth in reducing the amount of CO2 we constantly throw into the atmosphere from fossil fuels.

    (Hmm, how long before DeBeers outlaws diamond production on Mars?)

  • Re:What about GRAVITY?!?! (Score:3)

    by teraph ( 147902 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:09PM (#1034641)
    Actually, Mars is substantially smaller than Earth (its gravity is .38 compared to Earth's 1). This is theorized to be why Mars has such a thin atmosphere: it's gravity wasn't great enough to hold an atmosphere. This is also why trying this with the entire planet probably won't work. The way the article reads suggests this is for breathing devices and not terraforming.
  • Actually, Nasa already has a bacterium that produces methane. [nasa.gov]
    Because this special type of bacteria naturally produces methane, it may be used to start a new colony on Mars. It could also be used to produce an environment close to Earth's. Methane is a greenhouse gas, which means it can warm the surface.
    Nasa let us walk on the Moon in bulky, expensive spacesuits in the 60s. Its mission for this millenium should be to make Mars habitable! Terraform Mars!
  • The article shows that it would make breathable air for a few people out of the thin CO2 atmosphere. It would I think have to be compressed after conversion however. I believe that mars has a very thin atmosphere, and even if you were breathing pure O2 at that density, I think you would still pass out and die.

    Some people are posting regarding terraforming and clearly this device is not it. Even if it could convert the entire atmosphere to O2 there would still be a lack of atmospheric pressure. I think that large volumes of surface matter would have to be converted to gas to provide enough pressure to make the surface livable outside of a biodome.

    Heh, never mind the lack of water: Mars --> Arrakis --> Dune, desert planet. Not one drop of rain on Arrakis...

  • This invention has been around forever (Score:4)

    by MicroBerto ( 91055 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:12PM (#1034655)

    And in other news, a young second-grader in Arkansas has learned that trees are able to produce oxygen from taking in carbon dioxide as well! A ground-breaking coincidence? The jury is still out for all of the facts :)

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) -GAIM: MicroBerto

  • Air, water, and fuel. All of these can make use of oxygen. Compressed oxygen takes on a liquid form, which can make a highly volatile propellant. Oxygen combined with hydrogen will create water. Where to get the hydrogen from? Either bring it along, or collect it along the way.

    You don't want to breathe pure oxygen though. One good spark and your whole habitat is gone. Producing the necessary gases to mix with Oxygen (i.e. Nitrogen, some other noble gases) will be much more difficult than the production of oxygen. It may be possible to get nitrogen by mining the regolith (loose sandy topsoil on Mars).

    This strikes me more as a way of producing fuel and water than as a production of breathable air, which could be better done by plants, which would also serve as food source.

    One more thing... what use can be made of the carbon byproduct?

  • This is something that'd be particularly important to get correct and bug-free; the colonization of Mars would involve human lives. Somehow I can't even visualize the PR fiasco if this device fails with people relying on it.
    -aardvarko
    webmaster at aardvarko dot com

  • CO2 + 2 H20 -> 2 O2 + CH4 (Score:3)

    by Alpha State ( 89105 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:14PM (#1034670) Homepage

    This would appear to depend upon getting water from Mars's surface (unless they've come up with some otehr way of doing it). IIRC, this means they have to land near the North pole.

    Of course, if you want to terraform mars you need a huge amount of water - for producing the atmosphere and supporting life. If you have the water, some kind of GM algae would probably be easier than using a massive machine.

    The sad things is that with NASA's budget cuts and other problems I am beginning to doubt I will see a manned mission to mars in my lifetime.

  • I think the significance is that this could lead to a manned mission to Mars with a good surface habitat, and when you think about it, if they didn't have to carry a large quantity of oxygen for the time spent on the surface, that would decrease the payload weight. If you're concerned about some toxins, we're talking about *a* habitat working for at most a few months, the chances that this would "ruin" the atmosphere is negligible. So let's not let those enviro-hippyfreaks stop a mission because it might make some carbon monoxide.

  • What's wrong with it? Potentially lots of things:

    • Who needs population control if we can just move new people to Mars? But then we run out of room there, oops, now what? The problem's just bigger.
    • We don't think saving the earth's environment is as important anymore because hey, we'll just move to mars and leave our trashed planet behind
    • We don't worry about blowing up the planet because hey, there's always Mars
    • Sure nothing may currently live there, by our current definition of life, but what about what we can learn from a planet we haven't altered? What if our idea of what is "alive" changes?
    • If we terraform it who will live there? It could be a divisive thing. For example, either the home for first class citizens who can afford the trip, or for criminals who get sent there. Either way it provides a means of avoiding a problem instead of solving it.

    There are many potential problems, sure some of these are exaggerated but just because we can do it doesn't mean we should.

  • Red Mars Green Mars Blue Mars (Score:4)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:21PM (#1034680)

    Before we get a lot of half-thought out replies, everybody should go out and read the series of books Red Mars [amazon.com], Green Mars [amazon.com], and Blue Mars [amazon.com] by Kim Stanley Robinson [teleport.com]. The series deals, as accurately as possible, with the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Mr. Robinson is a stickler for detail; in fact, it gets a little boring at times (I never thought I would read so much about the geology of Mars). On the other hand, he's a stickler for scientific detail, and addresses some key points, such as:

    "Can we develop a reasonable atmosphere?" It's tricky--Mars's crust and elemental makeup is different, it has a low gravity, and has greater elevation variation than Earth. A good atmosphere at sea level may mean the majority of the world has an atmosphere similar to the top of Everest.

    We've done some nasty stuff to Earth. Is it right to ruin the natural state of ANOTHER planet, too?

    Water. Is there water on mars, anyway, and if there's not, what can we do?

    Surviving in low gravity.

    Lots more. In any case, I'm sure many questions will be raised by people commenting on this story. I'm just as sure that the majority of them are at least mentioned in the RGB Mars books. Go do yourself a favor if you're interested in this story, and check these books out.

  • I seem to remember hearing that most of the ice on the polar caps is CO2 not H2O.
    Now that you mention it, I think I missed a step. I seem to recall that the sunlight absorbed by the algae is actually supposed to melt the frozen CO2, which creates a greenhouse effect, which would eventually warm Mars enough to allow liquid H2O to exist.

  • Let's not get all excited about going out and colonizing Mars now. Even if we could produce enough oxygen to breathe, it wouldn't do anyone any good. The minute you got out in the open the radiation that makes it through Mars's atmosphere would do a number on you.

    Now, if NASA could put something together that would generate a thicker atmosphere for Mars...
  • Long ago, before humans roamed the earth, and certainly before they had big telescopes and long-range rocket-powered probes, mars had a breathable atmosphere. Unfortunately, it all got baked away. The critical issue for a planet holding an atmosphere is whether or not it has strong enough gravity to hold particles moving at the speed that gas particles travel in their kinetic vibrations. Earth, for example, cannot hold hydrogen or helium gases. If you pop a helium balloon, the helium will eventually drift out of the atmosphere and into outer space.

    Fortunately, since O2 molecules are much more massive than He atoms or H2 molecules, the earth can also hold an O2 atmosphere. Mars is also massive enough for this, but there's a problem. Mars is not massive enough to hold oxygen atoms or ions. This is critical because of the UV radiation that the sun emits, which breaks up O2 molecules. On earth, those oxygen ions come together with O2 to form O3 (ozone) which also helps shield the rest of the atmosphere from UV radiation.

    Since Mars isn't massive enough to hold oxygen ions, it can't hold them up in the part of the atmosphere where an ozone layer would likely form. Thus, its atmosphere cannot be protected from more radiation, which further ionizes the O2 molecules. This is precisely what happened to the atmosphere on mars, as well as the surface water, and it is what will eventually happen to Mars's polar ice caps. I don't know exactly what the time scale would be for creating a breathable atmosphere, and I don't know how long it would take for it to dissipate, but I think you'd have to be continually working to keep it there, assuming you had the resources to get a planet-wide breathable atmosphere in the first place.

  • Patent! (Score:5)

    by PhiRatE ( 39645 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:28PM (#1034694)
    They're infringing on my patent. I have a working example in my back yard of a much more efficient machine, it is also solar powered, using multiple redundant flexible green solar panels to absorb solar energy, a self-maintainence system that will repair our adapt to compensate for medium scale damage, a robust, flexible physical structure capable of withstanding considerable force by dissipating the energy throughout the structure and bending, and utilises as fuel a small set of chemicals and H20.

    It has further advantages over the solar machine exhibited, its components are easily recycled into a number of useful objects, various parts are edible and it aids in topsoil stability. It is also capable of self-reproduction given a requisite amount of available fuel.

    It also comes in numerous makes and models suitable for every task, from extremely large to the inconspicuously small.

    I call it The Plant, and I would demand royalties on this inferior implementation except that..well..its obviously so inferior no-one would ever buy it.

  • Actually, the CO2 is poisonous to humans in concentrations of around 15%+, even if *all* the rest of the atmosphere were Oxygen. Mars' atmosphere is around 80%+ CO2, so we'd still have to get rid of a hell of a lot of CO2 to make the atmosphere not fatal.

    You also need a lot of relatively inert, large molecule gas, like Nitrogen, to prevent explosions from getting out of control. Titan has a plentiful supply of Nitrogen, but Mars has practically none.

  • SimEarth (Score:5)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:38PM (#1034700) Homepage
    I remember when I was kid playing the old game SimEarth on my Mac (not the Mac SE or the Mac Classic, but the Mac .. The Mac). Despite the game being very primitive and only in black and white, they had a couple of scenarios that were really interesting. One was to take Mars and make it livable and the other was to take Venus and make it livable. The easiest way to do both was to put in these devices that converted the carbon dioxide to oxygen (the hard way was to crash ice comets into the planet, both cooling it off and releasing oxygen .. don't ask me).

    I wouldn't say it's so worrisome. Making other planets livable for humans is going to become a fact of life if we ever decide to permanently leave this world. Mars is another system, but it's a dead system, and adapting it for human needs is not going to make species extinct or ruin our understanding of Martian phenomena (and even if it were alive, we'd have plenty of time to find out .. these sorts of transformations don't happen overnight).

    But that's beyond the logistical nightmares of actually getting such a thing to work. Look at how long its taken our planet to register the effects of 150 years of industrial revolution, and the environmental change is a blip, an abnormality barely noticeable on the geological scale that scientists are still debating whether or not we are the cause. You can rest assured that by the time human beings are ready to purposefully alter the state of another planet's environment, they'll have the necessary expertise (and computer/robotics/cybernetic systems) to do it much more exactingly than you or I can imagine.

    By the way, in the SimEarth game, the irony of it all is that once you terraform the planet (Mars was easier, Venus was much more difficult), sentient life can rise, become industrialized, and then ruin your environmental masterpiece. Maybe that should be the bigger fear, not what havoc we wreck when we purposefully change the environment, but what terrors we cause when we neglect it.
  • This machine, as described, does the same exact thing as Dr. Robert Zubrin's [marssociety.org] oxygen extracting machine, designed nearly a decade ago while he was working at the Martin Marianetta labs (sp?). The idea here isn't terraforming the planet, but providing the Martian explorers with breathable air, as well as propellant for the return to Earth.

    All of this is described in his book, The Case for Mars, in great detail. If you're interested in the details of the chemistry involved (ie byproducts, etc, it's explained in the aforementioned book).

    Terraforming the planet, by comparison, is much, much grander. As well as a very long way off. First let's concentrate on getting another probe there in one piece, eh?

  • Open Source! Open Source! Open Source! (Score:5)

    by dustpuppy ( 5260 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @08:41PM (#1034702)
    It's so easy to terraform Mars and make it suitable for human habitation. All you got to do is ship a few Open Source fanatics over to Mars.

    That way ...

    • All the rhetoric and hot air generated by GPL/Open Source fanatics could heat the planet.
    • Mentioning the word 'Open Source' or 'Linux' would cause the fanatics to wet themselves thereby providing a source of liquid (you would probably need to process the liquid a bit)
    • You could eat the fanatics when you get hungry - and they would be plump and juicy since they would never have done any work in their lives (who needs to when you can get music for free through Napster).
    • You would never run out of fanatics before there are more jumping on the bandwagon everyday

    *ducks back into the trenches having stirred up a hornets nest of stereotypes* :)

  • Earth is 5.97e24kg Mars is 6.42e23kg, and Titan is 1.25e23kg.

    Titan has the largest atmosphere of any rocky planet in the Solar System - in fact despite the fact that Titan is around a fortieth the mass of Earth, its atmospheric pressure at the surface is 1.5 bars - that is, 1.5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.

    Since Titan is about a quarter of the mass of Mars, it is well within the realms of possibility for Mars to have an atmosphere with equivalent pressure to Earth, it just has to be a much larger atmosphere than Earth's.

  • I wonder if we could use a few billion of these to scrub Earth's atmosphere of excess CO2, so that this planet doesn't end up like Mars...

    The reason for all the excess CO2 is the burning of fossil fuels. It would take a billion of these devices with solar panels covering the planet to make a dent into this CO2 production, with costs going into the trillions of dollars.

    Why not save a few trillion dollars and reduce the delta of total entropy in the universe by using more alternative power sources in the first place? Solar panels, ocean thermal transfer, hydroelectric, wind and other alternative sources feeding giant flywheels could lower our dependence upon fossil fuels.

  • Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations, although mass water supplies would be likely required for this type of operation. If machinery was used, it would most likely have to be constructed from local materials and have a vastly larger scale power source than sunlight (which is weaker there.)

    Nano-technology could change this for a technological solution. Self-replicating nanorobots which feed upon the martian materials to build more of their kind would engineer the numbers of machines necessary for terraforming.

    Although, this really is the same as the algae solution. In both cases we would have to essentially program the organism (lives, feeds, produces) to do its job.

  • The problem isn't so much gravity, or even the high percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. The biggest problems are the atmospheric pressure, and the temperature. Theoretically, there is a way to fix this along with the problem of all of the superoxides in the soil. If NASA were to decide to terraform Mars, the soil could actually be a key. Using their methane producing bacteria, they could raise the temperature. By raising the temperature, it will eventually be enough to break down the super oxides in the soil -- producing two vital allotropes of Oxygen (O2, or then normal oxyger that we breathe, and O3, or ozone, seeing as UV could be a problem with the current atmosphere). Through all of this, it may just be possible to create a thick enough atmosphere, along with enough Oxygen, and even an Ozone layer.
  • If it makes 'em breathable, or livable, then you *know* we're going to Mars sooner than we thought.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Does anyone remember those inflatable domes that NASA and the RSA were kicking out a few years back? Rather than terraforming Mars, it might be more economical to put a massive semi-spherical balloon over a land mass, and then just build inside of it.

    B.C. Place in Vancouver, B.C. is sort of like this. The roof is inflatable, yet strong enough to walk on. Plus the air pressure inside is greater than outside. (You can actually feel the wind coming out of the doors, it's hard to open them because they have to be so heavy).

    I'm all for the dome thing, except radiation is another huge factor. Perhaps silver up one side?

  • What the fuck are you talking about?

    breathing pure oxygen will kill you
    Give me a source or two in the very least. Ever heard of a hyperbaric chamber? Breathing pure oxygen is great for you if respiratory problems, and certainly won't harm you if you don't. Although the room may be just a little flammable at concentrations above ~30%. Oxygen only is harmful at extremely high pressures (ie, while scuba diving). Everything is dangerous at high pressure, though.

    ------
  • Although we're dealing specifically with making breathable air, the topic of terraforming has been brought up. This article is a step toward it, of course.

    It seems to me that altering an entire ecosystem (even a likely dead one like Mars) could have dire consequences that we may not be foresee. Maybe there would be no detrimental effect of doing such a thing, but plopping some people on a big planet and turning it from a poisonous atmosphere into Yellowstone Park is just too great an alteration to pass without somehow negatively affecting things.

    Anyway, if anyone has ideas on how that could be, I'd be interested in reading them. Sure, it's a planet out in space and changing it shouldn't have any effect because, well, it's sort of in a bubble, but I'm still curious...
    ---
    icq:2057699
    seumas.com

  • actually, at pressures that low, you wouldn't pass out: instead, your blood would literally boil, even at such low temperatures, so the amount of Oxygen is, for now, a moot point, which is why some type of protective clothing would be required, not just to keep warm, but also to keep you in a suitable atmospheric pressure.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I really liked the series, but couldn't finish it because the politics disgusted me. Does anyone pick up a book about terraforming Mars to listen to people argue for hundreds of pages that it shouldn't be terraformed, because it should be preserved in it's natural state? About half way through Blue Mars, I gave up. If I wanted to be pissed off at politicians, I'd go watch CSPAN. When I pick up a science fiction book about colonizing Mars, I want to be inspired.
  • Some sort of genetically engineered plant or algae would be more realistic for planetary alterations, although mass water supplies would be likely required for this type of operation.
    I'm not sure where I heard this, but I believe that the solution to the water problem is to plant algae right on Mars' ice caps. The algae is dark, so it absorbs more sunlight, which melts the ice, which provides water, which feeds more algae, which absorb more sunlight, etc.

    Those in the know all say that it would take an awful long time, though.
  • The conquest of new frontiers has always cost human lives. History has shown that this cost is worth paying.

    We need Mars in order to fuel our medical and techonological development for the next 250 years.
    (or should I say 'direct' or 'focus' instead of fuel?)

    After that I have no doubt that other, newer frontiers will be open for human exploration.
  • Am I the only one who see's this? Breathing pure O2 in itself isn't a problem. The astronauts did it (don't bother replying that it was a 60/40 mix of O2 + N2, because that was just on the ground. once they got into space, the pressure was only 5 psi, and they had to use pure O2. So a spark won't be a problem in itself, as long as the pressure is low enough. At high pressure, however, you have a different problem. If you breathe in too much O2 at a high enough pressure, it can destroy tissues. Oh, and one more thing.... Nitrogen is NOT a noble gas. The noble gases consist of Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon.
  • It was downgraded to Flamebait, but obviously other moderators have a sense of humour and don't take their Open Source to *fanatical* levels. Cool- nice to see the moderation system works :) (to my favour anyway :)

  • My title when I submitted it was a lot less sensational - "NASA machine extracts oxygen on Mars". Theirs was definitely more of an eye-grabber though. And as for the issue of terraforming, algae or bacteria would probably do the trick as long as you set them up to feed off of native material.

  • Re:pleeeeease DON'T terraform Mars (Score:4)

    by legoboy ( 39651 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @11:18PM (#1034763)

    The universe being as large as it is, if life exists on Mars, our closest neighbour, life almost certainly exists on billions of planets. (This is of course accepting the fact that recent astronomical discoveries tell us planets are by no means rare. That gas giants are common suggests rocky worlds/moons are common as well. The reason I qualify certainly with almost is because within one solar system, the planets may be able to contaminate each other - remember that Mars meteorite found in Antarctica with bacteria inside.)

    I personally believe life is ubiquitous. Intelligent life is another question. It I believe to be common, but nowhere near as much so as life itself. Regardless of the frequency of intelligent life, if life in any form exists on Mars, that life isn't important as it is not the least bit unique. We see nothing on Mars but the possibility for single and possibly multicellular microscopic life. This viewpoint seems to be where we disagree. If there were complex life forms on the planet, I would agree with you in that we should leave it alone. However, there are not.

    If extraterrestrial life is everywhere, it doesn't strike me as that great of a loss to perhaps exterminate or at the very least dramatically change the habitat of one planet's native bacteria. Is it that great a price to pay in order to forever alter the current situation of the human species? Right now, we have all our eggs in one basket. One catastrophe of great enough proportions, whether it be accidental or deliberate, could wipe out our entire species. I would like to alleviate that risk in as short a time as possible, whatever the cost.

    Once that is done, we can pick and choose as much as the more cautious people desire. Until then though, all it takes is one mistake, one fluke chance, one random event, and we're no longer a living species. We didn't survive this long as a species by taking chances that great.

    (To argue that humanity's extinction would be good is just plain silly. We're just as natural and only a couple steps up from monkeys and gorillas. If you believe that human beings are a plague on the universe, help fix the problem and kill yourself. After all... the people with the time and money to spend considering such a thing are almost always among the world's biggest consumers/polluters. When you're starving to death, you have a few more pressing concerns. Note that I don't claim to have ever been in that situation, since some like to jump on things like that.)

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  • Does anyone pick up a book about terraforming Mars to listen to people argue for hundreds of pages that it shouldn't be terraformed, because it should be preserved in it's natural state?

    I pick up a book for a good story, and the Mars series provided such a story. Do you think that colonizing Mars for real is going to be some kind of fairytale where everything goes according to plan and people live happily ever after?

    No, personally I found the books realism was an added bonus. They wouldn't have been as enjoyable if everything went perfectly, human nature will be a huge part of the way that Mars is colonised. It's not often that I find a book that seems to cover both the scientific and the personal areas of the future in as much detail.

  • Go to bottomquark [bottomquark.com] to get the stories I've been submitting. It's another Slash site for science stories, lots of interesting stories there even if there's precious little people.

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