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Space Science

Active Volcanoes On Mars? 21

Posted by timothy from the magma-like-what-remains-of-my-heart dept.
rm-r writes: "The BBC has a story here saying that two of the largest Martian volcanoes could still be active. The warmth provided by these could have produced conditions fit for life to develop." The article quotes Professor Tracy Gregg of the University of Buffalo, who says: "Of all the volcanoes on Mars, these volcanoes have the largest and greatest numbers of channels associated with them, indicating that there was a lot of water around when they were forming, though there doesn't appear to be any around now."
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Active Volcanoes On Mars? More

Active Volcanoes On Mars?

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  • Why not call it geology or geothermal? Don't tell me whoever thought of these words didn't make them platform independant. What happens when we get to Mercury or Titan? Do we have to make up new words for them too?

  • The Kim Stanley Robinson [sfsite.com] reading list. My fault for not checking more closely the link I posted priot to this.

    Apologies.

  • Heh, I was euphemistically placing this somewhere beyond the "25 years away from having a production fusion power plant." Hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium only need eachother for that reaction. :)

    But you have a good point, assuming fusion reactors maintain their current level of unwieldyness we'd need to have an alternate energy source. We cannot go all the way to Europa and find out that there are no hydrothermal vents for us to hook turbines to. Fissiles are always a good fallback, but I can hear the howls of protests now against the first group that tries to take a reactor to an alien biome ...

    In retrospect I suspect we might be able to do as you suggest and harness some of the energy zapping about the Jovian system to power our machines.

    Does anyone know of a way to produce an electron flow from hard radiation?

  • You've got a point, but I am not certain that even the asteroid belt or the Kuiper belt will draw great crowds. With interplanetary travel the duration of trips between destinations returns to the same spans that existed when the Americas and Australia were first being settled. Being used to relatively instant travel Luna might be as far as the masses are willing to go.

    Even with a cheap method of getting to another world I am not certain most people could be motivated to forgo the security of Terra firma. Changing environment is difficult enough without adjusting for the complete absence of gravity. I suspect for most people born on Earth, what we have here is what we have.

    Barring some sort of material discovery akin to the various mining booms of the 1800's or the oil finds of the 1900's, getting anyone other than those persons with technical or research backgrounds to "colonize" another environment will be considerably more difficult than settling the New World was. Although the Americas were the New World, they were not a "new world" in the sense that Mars, Europa, and Titan will be. :)

    As for minerals on asteroids, the moon is much closer, has most of what we want, and don't forget the tremendously rich sources of high grade materials we have buried for future generations in our land fills.

  • may turn out to be much friendlier than Mars.

    Titan, although very cold and very distant has a surface pressure close to that of Earth's, meaning that structures could be build with little or no reinforcing, and movement about the surface could be easier (easier to change into an insulating wetsuit type garment than a pressure suit.) It definitely has better views. :)

    As for Europa the view from the surface is spectacular, but the radiation is intense. The thing is, melting down 50 to 60 miles (according to theory) you encounter a vast ocean. 60 miles of ice makes a great radiation shield and you don't need to worry about losing atmospheric pressure. Melt a bubble shaped cavity, run an electric current through the local water, use the H2 for fuel, use the O2 for air, and import some nitrogen (or helium.)

    If Europa turns out to be sterile I suspect we'll eventually see vast domes under the ice. Even if it does have life I still suspect it will figure prominently as a second home for h. sapiens.

  • The way I understand it, the Van Allen belts of the Jovian system basically engulf the entire system. I know Jupiter's magnetosphere, if we could see it, would be visible from Earth as a disk the size of our moon.

    The Jupiter/Io interaction produces copious amounts of radiation within Io's orbit, but Jupiter's intense EM field basically bathes anything orbiting Jupiter with harsh EM flux.

    At least that is my understanding of it.

  • Regarding the bubble, you'd need surface access but you wouldn't want anyone living up there. I see robotic landing and fueling stations, and deep, capped shafts staggered with connecting pressure lock tunnels (to contain your atmosphere, your colonists, and a fractional portion of the ocean from squirting out into vaccuum in case of the failure of one of the pressure caps.. :) )

  • It's interesting that people are using KSR's works to justify reaching and terraforming Mars. One of the primary themes of his books, particularly Green and Blue, is that Mars doesn't present a sufficient amount of living space to significantly alter the population levels on the Earth. I think he estimated something like 100-200 million population, tops, even after it was completely terraformed. In the books, Earth continues to suffer from massive and devastating overpopulation problems while and after Mars gets terraformed. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for going to (and terraforming!) Mars - but I hope that people will keep a perspective on the venture while we're doing it. Neither Mars, nor Eurpopa or Titan or any other conceivably livable body in the Solar System, are likely to have a significant impact on Earth's population or resource problems. Now... mining the asteroid and Kupier belts... that's another story. :-)
  • As for Europa the view from the surface is spectacular, but the radiation is intense.

    At what altitude are Jupiter's radiation belts? I know Io is right in the middle of it, but I thought the other Galileans might be high enough to be beyond them. It would be nice if there were the possibility of building an easily accessible base (ie, on the surface) on a Jovian moon large enough to provide decent gravity. A bubble under a couple miles of ice isn't the most accessible base.


    Flamebait != Disagree
  • I seem to remember reading somewhere that NASA's official position on this was that 'geology' would be used for any planet or moon for exactly your reasons.

    The only link I can find is http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/science/selenology.html [nasa.gov]

  • My dad once told me this, and I hold it dear to my heart. It really applies to your theories.
    Don't F*ck with Nature
    Seriously, though, messing with an entire planets environment? We have no idea of the effects it would cause. We are just now starting to understand that things, like bacteria and mold, can, in fact, live in space, and are usually brought about by human means (I'm using the fungus on Mir as an example).
    I'm not saying not to do it, I just want my opinion noted before we bust into that crazy red planet ;-)

    --
  • Assuming that these geothermal heat sources could supply heat and power to colonies, the lack of temperate atmosphere would make long term survival nearly impossible. Without some form of agriculture, food supplies would quickly run out.

    It may turn out that we will need to take our most polluting power generators up there with us just to improve the atmosphere. :-)

    Dancin Santa
  • I saw something on Discovery or Nova a while back, which is why I mentioned it. It certainly is counterintuitive that in order to make a landscape more hospitable, we have to pollute it.

    Dancin Santa
  • It is definitely a matter of perspective. Flooding a street with cow dung is quite a bit more annoying to residents than the spreading of it over a corn field (although the farmer would probably want to know what the hell you were doing). One man's trash is another man's (or planet's, in this case) treasure.

    Dancin Santa
  • Where would they get enough power for the fission (splitting atoms) to occur? (Splitting H20 into two Hydrogen atoms and 1 oxygen atom)

    Heat is out of the question. Perhaps there could be power stations on the surface to somehow use the radiation on the surface to power it up?

  • Actually, Mars is really the only plant who`s name is compatible with words like geology and geothermal. Could you imagine Venu or Aphrothermal(Venus)? Mercthermal or Hermethermal(Mercury)? Titanothermal(Titan)? Linguistics mostly lead to the areo- designations. Besides, its been in science fiction literature for a while.
  • I suppose you could put lots of water into the Sahara desert and make it green again, and then call it "water pollution". Or maybe not. If you change things in an undesirable fashion you'd call it pollution, but changing things in a manner which improves things for humans is, in a human terms, anything but.

    It is speculated that Mars may have little bits of life hanging on at the margins deep underground, because that's where the liquid water and other conditions exist which allow survival and growth. The changes brought on by adding greenhouse gases would make the surface warmer and wetter. If this makes it possible for such indigenous life to return to the surface, it might even be good for the stuff which originated there.
    --
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  • I wonder if this could be used to keep manned bases warm? Geothermal heating is used in several locations here on Earth, it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the technology for Martian use.

    --
    Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
    HAL: Screw you, Dave!

  • It may turn out that we will need to take our most polluting power generators up there with us just to improve the atmosphere. :-)
    Nobody's suggesting sending up coal-burning powerplants (no coal, and the sulfuric acid particles would cool things off) but some researchers have suggested setting up chemical plants on Mars to manufacture and release fluorocarbons (the same things being phased out by the Montreal Protocol, IIRC) into the atmosphere. Fluorocarbons are quite stable and are potent greenhouse gases; a few million tons a year would be enough to affect the climate of Mars significantly. Once you've evaporated the CO2 ice caps you'd have a lot more atmosphere on the Red Planet and you could think about terraforming.
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  • There may be warmth ... (Score:3)

    by JoeGee ( 85189 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @02:58PM (#365822)

    but in my opinion to classify these volcanoes as "active" is to jump the gun. For one thing, we have never been there to label them "extinct".

    There certainly may be the possibility of exploiting Mars' remaining internal heat for heating and energy needs, but first -- let's get there. :)

    We have other resources we can use in the meantime until we determine whether or not areothermal energy (thank you Kim Stanley Robinson [http]) is worth exploiting.

  • How very familiar this is (Score:3)

    by Caid Raspa ( 304283 ) on Tuesday March 13, 2001 @11:40PM (#365823)
    Struggling for financial support, a research group releases preliminary results showing the importance of further investigation. The results are interesting, but the scientists seem to be much less sure about this than the BBC reporter.

    This is more common in medicine. How many times a year you see news like 'Pine needles cure cancer' or 'Cat hair causes strokes'. They are always preliminary, the most important result being 'We need more data'.

    Perhaps the funding of scientific research should be more stable. That would prevent these 'preliminary' news.

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