Terraforming Mars Could Be Easier Than Scientists Thought (science.org) 77
Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine:
One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests...
Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found "unexpectedly huge effects" in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect.
Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars's climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes...
Still, "Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance," says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars's atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. What's more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature "isn't some kind of magic switch" that would make Mars habitable.
That isn't stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.
Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found "unexpectedly huge effects" in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect.
Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars's climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes...
Still, "Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance," says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars's atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. What's more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature "isn't some kind of magic switch" that would make Mars habitable.
That isn't stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.
Science vs "Journalist" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Science vs "Journalist" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep.
Besides, in order to "terraform", you have to get your "terraforming" ass to Mars first - and get it there alive and in reasonable condition.
And that ain't happening anytime soon.
Good start, but ... (Score:4, Funny)
Hopefully they'll forgo adding any G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate (PAX) to the resultant atmosphere ...
Re: Good start, but ... (Score:2)
Re: Good start, but ... (Score:3)
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You can add all the stuff that doesn't exist to an atmosphere that's not there without any risks.
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Clearly, something stopped the signal.
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Yes, it was so bad, it was cancelled by the broadcaster.
But you got an explainer movie.
Seems problematic (Score:2)
Not like we were going to breathe outside, but that's a lot of crap raining down and coating your pressure suits and airlocks and eventually getting into your habitat volume.
I'm more a fan of tarping off sections of Valles Marineris and pressurizing them to Earth-normal. The materials exist on Mars to synthesize silicon-based plastics, and with the lower g and the internal pressure it would be holding in, suspending a tarp over the width of the valley isn't actually a ridiculous prospect.
Then you just dig
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Until we know how we can create artificial gravity for a whole habitat on Mars, we should not even start to create a permanent one.
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But yes our bodies would adept to the lower gravity of Mars eventually and given enough time we might not be able to interbreed anymore.
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Nobody knows what 0.38g does to human (or any other) biology; we have zero data points. It may actually be enough to keep our bodies humming along normally.
We know about short bursts of high-g, we know about long term 0-g, and we know absolutely nothing about what happens if you try to spend a lot of time between 0 and 1 g.
This one's pretty easy to resolve, though. We need to put some mice in an automated rotating environment into LEO for a year or two and see what happens. We could spin such an environm
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Why waste time on "model organisms"?
What we need is to build the next space station so it can rotate, and do the experiments on the people we were going to expose to the hazards of space already. If it's too hard to dock with a rotating object, then dump the angular momentum into a fly wheel for the duration of the other vessel's docking, then spin the station back up.
Once we've got some experimental data on the minimu
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What we need is to build the next space station so it can rotate, and do the experiments on the people we were going to expose to the hazards of space already. If it's too hard to dock with a rotating object, then dump the angular momentum into a fly wheel for the duration of the other vessel's docking, then spin the station back up.
Generally for a big station, you probably want to have a stationary hub to dock with and a wheel that spins around it. For stability of course, you need something counter-rotating. That flywheel you mentioned, for example. It does not need to be as massive as the ring as long as you spin it faster. Of course, that's still dead weight. It might be better just to have counter-rotating habitat rings and some much smaller flywheels just for stabilization.
That way, you never need to stop it for docking etc. Dock
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Two words :
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bearings
(which allow one object to rotate inside another with controlled, and reduced friction and wear ; NB - "controlled" does not suggest zero, and also implies a mechanism for tear-down, repair and replacement)
There are a number of options there. The simplest mechanical solution is redundant bearings that you can remove, maintain, and replace without slowing the station. For example, train-type wheels on a track between the inner hub and outer hub. The wheels can be retracted into the inner hub and serviced and replaced. To determine if the bearings are good while in operation, monitor for temperature and vibration, like they do in trains. After maintenance, put the wheel back in place and lock back onto the trac
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Has such a system ever been put into service? I've never heard of such in long term use, and the small (~50in passing through the inner race) versions I have seen on temporary equipment are always sent out in pairs in case one of the
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Has such a system ever been put into service?
Not that I'm aware of since you can normally just stop trains to remove the wheelset or even repair wheels in-situ. There's no reason you couldn't implement a system like this though.
Really, it's a complication you'd avoid if at all possible.
Then you avoid it with magnetic bearings or some other system.
as if you think that docking to a rotating station is horrendously difficult. It's not. First align the rotation axes of both vessels. Second, match velocities. If it takes an hour or a shift .. so?
You seem to want to be combative here. So much so that you're ignoring what I have actually written. I did list that as a possibility as well. I pointed out though, that spin matching does introduce some possible extra danger to the docking procedure. The designs I'm
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I hate when that happens. I tend to (although I sometimes forget) keep notepad++ open and compose my reply there before pasting it in when it's a long post. I've been burned too many times before.
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The rotating experiment in LEO is a good idea. However, even with Mice it's going to need to be a very large radius to keep the spin down below about 3 RPM. Faster than that and the nausea and disorientation the subjects will experience will mess up the experiment and cause the subjects to fail to thrive. Not to mention it would be inhumane. This is why it can't be just a box-sized experiment tucked away in the ISS. Still, it does not need to be a giant station either, a small enclosure tethered to a counte
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The reason for limiting RPM is that humans are 2m tall and you get significantly different g loads from head to toe when they stand. Mice are much shorter (citation needed), and so you can get away with a smaller centrifuge and higher RPMs.
As for 'inhumane'... you do NOT want to know what we do to lab mice every day. Giving them their own orbital habitat to live in for a couple of years doesn't seem that bad to me. Far better than giving them cancer or wiring up their brains to see what happens.
Finally,
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The reason for limiting RPM is that humans are 2m tall and you get significantly different g loads from head to toe when they stand. Mice are much shorter (citation needed), and so you can get away with a smaller centrifuge and higher RPMs.
That's one reason, to be sure. A larger radius means less of a differential from top to bottom of the actual habitat area. However, you are incorrect that it is the only reason. Have you ever been inside the Gravitron at a carnival? You aren't just pushed against the sides, you can also feel a cycling motion affecting your whole body. That's the Coriolis effect. The higher the RPMs, the more you feel it. Above about 3 RPMs pretty much everyone feels it. Above about 7, it's pretty much impossible to keep you
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>That's the Coriolis effect.
Which is the differential in acceleration between different distances from the center of rotation. You're saying that's a different reason from my explanation, which was exactly the same reason.
This also invalidates your second count point. And your third, with the additional point that nobody has managed to build a sufficiently precise dynamically balanced centrifuge for the type of use case we are discussion. Currently, your suggestion is impossible.
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Which is the differential in acceleration between different distances from the center of rotation. You're saying that's a different reason from my explanation, which was exactly the same reason.
Oh boy. How to unpack this. Let's start with an article on artificial gravity in space stations [illinois.edu]. From that article: "The strength of the Coriolis "force" is proportional to the rotation rate and doesn't depend on the distance from the axis.". You can say that they're wrong, but I think you're going to have to cite something to prove it.
Or, think about it another way. The part most affected in humans by the Coriolis effect in a rotating system is the inner ear. The inner ear is not 2 meters tall. The semi-ci
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We don't actually know what the effects of the 38% Earth gravity on Mars would actually be. We have examples at 1 G and examples at 0 G, but nothing in between. It might turn out that people living on Mars experience similar atrophy to people on the ISS, or it might turn out that just that fractional gravity is enough, combined with higher activity levels (leaping around like a superhero), to keep us in similar health to on Earth. Or it might turn out that wearing weights is enough to prevent atrophy. Then
So that's a lot like saying (Score:2)
I mean sure it's not technically wrong but you're going from something that's infinity+1 difficult to just regular infinite difficulty.
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I recommend we pick the biggest bags of hot air we can find.
Well, you're on the right website!
Obligatory Futurama (Score:3)
https://youtu.be/Zc4xjDlQS-I?f... [youtu.be]
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https://youtu.be/Zc4xjDlQS-I?f... [youtu.be]
Correct. Mars doesn't have a magnetic field as well.
So no, no scientists that think that terraforming is only temperature, and that that makes it somehow only a matter of months - those scientists are worse than worthless, they are stupid.
The first step has to be creating a magnetosphere. That's the "easy" part.
The steps really are - Magnetosphere, inject CO2 to warm Mars to the point of allowing liquid water to exist on the surface and in clouds. This would probably be by extracting CO2 from the c
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>Mars doesn't have a magnetic field as well.
That's no longer thought to be true. Mars doesn't have a coherent, cohesive magnetic field, but it has plenty of smaller ones (crustal magnetic fields). It's not an easy Internet search, because there are so many articles out there about how Mars DOESN'T have a magnetic field, but if you're persistent you'll find the articles.
>The first step has to be creating a magnetosphere.
It turns out this actually isn't necessary, or even important. First, insolation
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... which magnetic fields extend to less than a planetary radius above the surface.
I remember reading the paper that revealed the tell-tale stripes of a Wilson cycle, on around 1/16 of the Martian surface. Then ... the small (1/10th Earth-mass) planet cooled below the point where either it's core could move enough to generate a magnetic field, or below the
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What we need is to build the next space station so it can rotate, and do the experiments on the people we were going to expose to the hazards of space already. If it's too hard to dock with a rotating object, then dump the angular momentum into a fly wheel for the duration of the other vessel's docking, then spin the station back up.
I think the trick would be to do it without turning the kinetic energy into heat, but keeping it as kinetic energy. For example, using it to drive a momentum exchange skyhook system. Basically setting up a constellation of skyhooks to act as conveyors transferring ice from captured asteroids/comets down to the surface. Still not a quick process, of course, but potentially doable without all that heat.
Of course, we also need to consider what we actually mean by adding an atmosphere to Mars. Are we after an E
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Hmmm, that closing velocity of the asteroid and planet means a lot of energy, and it is going to have to go somewhere. Either into braking the equipment, or heating something up.
An asteroid a million km from Mars, travelling in a certain direction and at a certain speed, so having both a velocity vector and a kinetic energy. Neglecting the velocity vector for the moment, it can have one of three levels of kinetic energy w.r.t. Mars : 1 - e
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I've not looked at the dynamics of a "skyhook" for ages. I never found them either interesting or convincing. But ... if they slow the descent of your putative asteroid (1 kg poo-bag, whatever) to below free fall, then they must be exerting a force downwards, to the planet. Which could be from rockets playing hot gases onto the upper atmosphere or ... well, really, I can't think else how they could work. So instead of the asteroid coming in and heating itself, the ground, and the atmosphere that splattered across it's leading edge, a plume of rocket exhaust plays on the atmosphere instead. And I bet, if you do the calculations, the same net amount of energy goes into the atmosphere.
I think the problem you're having with this is that you're imagining the payloads all coming in on the same vector. This would not involve randomly tossing rocks at Mars and catching them. Basically, in a classic skyhook, the skyhook has a massive orbiting anchor, and it raises payloads from Earth, then you need to balance things out in the anchor. That can be done with rocket propulsion, or solar sails, or electromagnetically, etc. The other way to do it though is through mass transfer. You launch a payloa
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[I'm still unconvinced by "skyhooks". Even less convinced that materials strong enough to make them, or "beanstalks" work could exist.
Skyhook-type mass transfer systems are not "beanstalks" or space elevator cables. While you would make the tethers out of some of the strongest materials you have available, the forces involved are not fantastical like for space elevators. While they may be superficially similar, a comparison between them is complete apples and oranges.
Frictional forces, not tidal (you're still only landing an atmosphere - even if it's a good fraction of the Asteroid Belt, it's still only a fraction of a % of Mars' mass). But meh. You've just landed several trillion kg of water ice, CO2 ice, some ammonia (maybe - that's not strongly indicated in most of the spectroscopy we've got of common asteroids ; but that could just mean it's under the surface dust) ... all at 100~150 K. Please don't forget to budget for warming that stuff up to volatilise it, as well as heating the rocks of Mars' near surface to more comfortable temperatures too, to get the CO2 into the atmosphere - greenhouse gases don't greenhouse gas if they're not gas.
Sorry, I'm confused. Which is it? The atmosphere will get too hot from dissipation of kinetic energy, or too cold from the temperature of the incoming material? Seems like if
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As you go on to imply, if you somehow (still not described) manage to dispose of most of the new atmosphere's kinetic energy before it landed, then it would land icy cold. So, either you need to let some of the atmosphere deliveries arrive "hot", or you can use some other energy source to warm the atmosphere (old and new) and the ground it comes in c
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As you go on to imply, if you somehow (still not described) manage to dispose of most of the new atmosphere's kinetic energy before it landed, then it would land icy cold.
As you clearly understand though, it's just a matter of achieving a balance. Anyway, as it stands, the mean temperature on Mars is about -65 C and it warms up as you go below the surface. So the surface is cold, but not that cold, and there is sub-surface heat. Over the time scales we're talking about to terraform a planet, that's plenty of time for the planet to warm up. Sure, it's a lot of thermal mass, but it's a lot of time as well.
The celestial body's ORBITAL energy
Sure, I was just lumping orbital energy in with the rotation of the plan
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You missed step [2] - increase the mass of Mars atmosphere by about 100-fold, to bring it into a range that terrestrial live can adapt to. Lower end of that range, but within the range.
That task, on it's own, is going to mean moving most of the volatiles inventory of the Asteroid Belt onto Mar's surface.
That task, on it's own, is going to mean attaching some
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If the Martian atmosphere is full of tiny iron and aluminum rod-like particles, does it need an ozone layer? I mean, Iron absorbs UV light and aluminum reflects it. It's not clear exactly how visually dense this dust would be, but I would guess it would provide some UV protection. That said, it hardly overcomes all of the other problems with the Martian environment for humans. Honestly, warming Mars seems pretty meaningless since the atmosphere is so thin. Consider, the Martian atmosphere would be considere
Huh? (Score:2)
Musk needs to look into trapping it and bringing it back to earth. As only he can do.
Don't we have better things to do? (Score:1)
Solution: feed your kids with this money (Score:2)
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some people claim those children are terrorists or at least future terrorists
"some people" here being a convenient placeholder for "the same genocidal motherfuckers and their wealthy friends", yes.
besides, "children of people you are stealing land from, brutalizing, and killing in scores becoming future terrorists" is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. just stop, think of all the money you can save.
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Yes, huge. Somebody paid a grad student $20k / year to teach, oh and do some simulations when they weren't teaching. That grad student (and most of their students) will almost certainly go off and do some skilled job in industry for the rest of their working life.
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We are spending huge amounts of money on "scientific research" that has no use but to satisfy someone curiosity as clickbait. We are paying people to do this while kids are going hungry.
Remind me how much was spent on this simulation? Now remind me how much was spent on, let's say, Hollywood movies last year. I'm going to guess that could have fed a lot of children too. How much do you think people spent on, say, Starbucks coffee and how many children do you think that could have fed if they had just thrown together some instant coffee crystals and water instead and spent the money on hungry kids? Basically, the argument you're making can be made about just about anything anyone spends mon
Terraforming earth (Score:2)
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What Mars needs is a thicker atmosphere, with plenty of greenhouse gasses.
Earth has the opposite problem.
Either we send CO2 to Mars, or we send the things that produce CO2 to Mars.
Along with Musk.
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Jupiter.
Or, if you don't like putting all that energy in to haul it out of the potential well, Saturn. With a freebie that you don't have so much magnetically trapped radiation to deal with.
After a bit of warming, (Score:1)
We move to Kim Stanley Robinson's solution.
Crash some handy comets and add water en masse.
I just LOVE (Score:2)
Pay walled sources
Nothing is *ever* easier that you expect (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially when that something is extremely complex and large.
As we programmers see every day, nobody ever overestimates a project, every project turns out to be several times more expensive than expected. Some people are better estimators than others. But in the end, we all tend to be unreasonably optimistic.
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I'd rather they experiment and break Mars than Earth.
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No doubt! Maybe they can implement some global warming measures there, and make it habitable again.
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>we all tend to be unreasonably optimistic.
Animals that aren't wired that way tend not to be as successful. At some point, despite whatever danger may lurk nearby, you have to be willing to think "I could run out there and get something to drink or eat and NOT get eaten by a predator".
Humans aren't that different, but abstract thought capability gives that wired-in optimism a whole new universe of ways in which to express itself.
Really? (Score:2)
Is it necessary we go to all the effort to put 50,000 Taco Bells on Mars as well?
Solution Not Applicable (Score:2)
If we fix some of the other terraforming issues, like almost no atmosphere, then much of the warming issue will probably be resolved anyway, but note that in that situation this scheme will not work. It is designed for the uninteresting "almost no atmosphere" case.
One terraforming issue frequently cited as an obstacle - salty, chlorate ridden soil - is actually not difficult to deal with (in the big scheme of terraforming) as we will be doing irrigation and can flush the root zone with the water that would
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>If we fix some of the other terraforming issues, like almost no atmosphere,
There is insufficient mass available of the required materials. Mars will never have a global atmosphere suitable for humans to walk freely outdoors.
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There's plenty of oxygen on Mars. If the CO2 is insufficient - which it probably is - oxygen could be extracted from rocks. (How to do this practically, or how to prevent recombination later, I'm not sure, but that's just an engineering problem.)
From my research, it looks like a pure oxygen atmosphere of about 5 bar is safe for humans to live in indefinitely, and probably won't lead to rampant wildfires. (Especially since Mars has practically no nitrogen, making it hard to grow plants there.)
So, yes, the
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Nope. It's a chemistry problem.
I'd like to know the name of the hyperbaric respiratory Consultant (medical term over here - as high as you can get as a saw-bones, and frequently also a professor in the nearest teaching hospital) who told you that, so I can avoid being treate
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I mixed up my bars and PSIs. [wikipedia.org] Good thing I'm just a random Internet commenter and not designing any spacecraft. Though it happens to them too. [everydayastronaut.com]
Extracting oxygen from iron oxide is an engineering problem. I believe they're called iron-air batteries.
How would you grow plants with no nitrogen atoms at all?
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Well, you didn't specify nitrogen atoms, just "nitrogen" - which for most people would mean the element in it's stable form, as an element, at NTP ("Normal Temperature and Pressure" - 20degC and 1 atmosphere). Which is nitrogen gas, sometimes known as "dinitrogen".
All life that we know uses nitrogen atoms - as components of the bases of nucleic acids, and in all amino
Better headline (Score:3)
"Are scientists planning to turn Mars into a giant disco ball?"
Unfortunately, that's impossible b/c physics, math (Score:2)
Tiny rods eh? (Score:2)
9 micrometer rodsâ¦Just perfectly within the range that helps make asbestos so carcinogenic!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Now the entire planet will be a never-ending cloud of carcinogenic fibers, great idea!
A teeny weeny bit less daunting (Score:2)
A couple of hundred nukes... (Score:2)
...and dust you get.
There’s NO PLANET B! (Score:1)
Make Earth Great Again (Score:2)
Maybe we need a project first to terraform Earth.