Terraformation of Mars (opinions or ideas)

[Reaper]

Sounds good, but even then the proximity of Venus to the sun is simply going to lend problems. On mars you may have to warm up, but on Venus you will have to cool down, and I don’t know how much cooling you would have to do even if Venus had an atmosphere similar to earth.

 

Yeah, terraforming Venus would pose a much more difficult challenge than terraforming Mars. The surface temperature of Venus is higher than the melting point of Lead, and there probably isn't any water on there to allow any kind of life to thrive in, unlike Mars.

 

Another aspect about using bacteria or microbes to farm the planet is simply an evolutionary one. After X amount of generations any bacteria that could survive in such an environment might start to find ways to become better at that rather then turning the environment into something more hospitable. I mean bacteria in sea vents is nice, but they adapted to survive there, not the other way around. The bacteria would most likely have to have something “programmed” into it killing it in so many generations while we constantly replaced the populations and monitored various mutations or what not.

 

Well, not exactly. Earth's atmosphere was radically different when life first began, and over a period of 2 billion years life forms, mostly photosynthetic ones (such as cyanobacteria), changed the atmosphere by adding more oxygen into it. About 4-5 hundred million years ago, there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow aerobic organisms and more diversity and complexity of life. Here is a link http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/samson/evolution_atm/.

 

While the organisms would (and have to) adapt to the Martian environment, it should be alright as long as their by-products change the atmosphere to become more hospitable for us.

Nuclear technology is a key in all of this in my opinion. As its a good source of energy, and what it uses for such seems to be rather prevalent anywhere you go, and of course this energy can be converted into various forms for use. It posses its own danger, but in all reality the idea of carrying large quantities of various substances for chemical energy just seems a bit odd, more so if you plan to use planets, as I would use them if in control because asteroid belts just sound way to dangerous.

 

In terms of generating power for societies, yes it is a very good source.

 

But it probably wouldn't help us terraform Mars. Since you are trying to change the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere, chemical processes are preferred.

 

for those space habitats you would really need cold fusion like you were saying or else you would really run short of energy. especially since the amount of energy you will need to create your artificial gravity is directly proportional to the amount of people you have living there. for few people it's not really a big deal.. but it would become a huge amount of energy very quickly if we really want to have colonies living there.

 

Not exactly. Solar power would work too. Nuclear and fusion power would be preferred if you are building a colony beyond Jupiter.

 

that can't be good. we should take some of the atmosphere from venus and send it to mars and kill 2 birds with one stone.

 

If only it was that easy *sigh*

[foodchain]

Yeah, terraforming Venus would pose a much more difficult challenge than terraforming Mars. The surface temperature of Venus is higher than the melting point of Lead, and there probably isn't any water on there to allow any kind of life to thrive in, unlike Mars.

 

 

 

Well, not exactly. Earth's atmosphere was radically different when life first began, and over a period of 2 billion years life forms, mostly photosynthetic ones (such as cyanobacteria), changed the atmosphere by adding more oxygen into it. About 4-5 hundred million years ago, there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow aerobic organisms and more diversity and complexity of life. Here is a link http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/samson/evolution_atm/.

 

While the organisms would (and have to) adapt to the Martian environment, it should be alright as long as their by-products change the atmosphere to become more hospitable for us.

 

 

In terms of generating power for societies, yes it is a very good source.

 

But it probably wouldn't help us terraform Mars. Since you are trying to change the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere, chemical processes are preferred.

 

 

On the evolution bit, I don’t know if you can say exactly that it was planned by life per say to "terraform" the earth. Example being an oxygen rich atmosphere for instance, as life in sea vents seems to differ a bit from what a majority of other life survives like. Not to say that life does not require certain parameters, or a certain chemistry, its just that I don’t know if you can say that evolution as its occurred with life on earth via natural selection was the only objective reality to life, I guess we would find out though if we could land and sustain life on Venus. For instance the importance of carbon to life, it seems drastically important, but in all reality we only have the biodiversity of the earth and its history to look at, and another aspect is that life adapts via evolution, not that the environment does. Other life is in the environment, but I doubt bacteria of plant life was aware of what releasing oxygen would lead to. I mean looking at evolution you have from bacteria to a t-rex sized animal, I just don’t know exactly what the limit to life is or how it can function is all. I mean what was the first life that decided to eat other life to sustain?

 

Of course at first the composition and structure of any life we did manage to get to persist on Venus, if such was possible may only be able to do so much at first, but in time bacteria could come about that’s nothing like what we put there, or even did anything we put the original stuff there for in the first place.

 

On nuclear power, well, in another hundred years of research and application the technology could be drastically improved, let along another thousand years. I think combined with nanotechnology and genetics that the future in regards to getting off the earth may become more feasible in many ways. More so if we can get something going on the moon for example.

[someguy]

 

Not exactly. Solar power would work too. Nuclear and fusion power would be preferred if you are building a colony beyond Jupiter.

 

ya i guess so, i guess it would also depend on how many people we would be talking about. but i guess also that would go for any other alternative anywhere else too. i suppose it just seems to me like the energy of matter is so abundant and plentiful that it sort of makes sense to use that for gravity, you can never use it up either the more you use matter as gravity to hold more and more things down the more gravity it has, that's a nice feature. but if you can't use a planet what can you do. other star systems are so far away too, but what's cool about what your talking about would be good for investigating other systems over multiple generations.

[SkepticLance]

Just a comment on the use of micro-organisms to generate an oxygen atmosphere. The fossil record shows that, on Earth, the time from when the first cyanobacteria appeared to when Earth had an atmosphere with substantial, rather than trace, amounts of oxygen, was nearly a thousand million years.

 

You better have some potent bacteria!

[someguy]

what about creating artificial simple organisms like bacteria? something simple that could do all the functions of converting the atmosphere to oxygen but just wouldn't have the capacity to reproduce.

[Sayonara]

Just a comment on the use of micro-organisms to generate an oxygen atmosphere. The fossil record shows that, on Earth, the time from when the first cyanobacteria appeared to when Earth had an atmosphere with substantial, rather than trace, amounts of oxygen, was nearly a thousand million years.

 

You better have some potent bacteria!

 

One certainly hopes that an engineered, task-oriented organism that can be rapidly batch-produced and applied where needed would be more potent.

 

If it isn't, then someone is getting the sack.

[bombus]

Sounds good, but even then the proximity of Venus to the sun is simply going to lend problems. On mars you may have to warm up, but on Venus you will have to cool down, and I don’t know how much cooling you would have to do even if Venus had an atmosphere similar to earth. Another aspect about using bacteria or microbes to farm the planet is simply an evolutionary one. After X amount of generations any bacteria that could survive in such an environment might start to find ways to become better at that rather then turning the environment into something more hospitable. I mean bacteria in sea vents is nice, but they adapted to survive there, not the other way around. The bacteria would most likely have to have something “programmed” into it killing it in so many generations while we constantly replaced the populations and monitored various mutations or what not.

 

Venus isn't close enough to the sun for it to greatly increase temperatures much above Earth.

 

There's plenty of water on Venus in the form of steam. I think the increased pressure is due to te CO2 content of the atmoshpere.

[foodchain]

Venus isn't close enough to the sun for it to greatly increase temperatures much above Earth.

 

There's plenty of water on Venus in the form of steam. I think the increased pressure is due to te CO2 content of the atmoshpere.

 

 

To me its just the energy requirement for humans to change say Venus as a planet. With mars self contained environments are a possibility, and I don’t see such with Venus. Plus how do you really start an operation there?

[SkepticLance]

I pointed out a little earlier the main fallacy in the idea of terroforming Venus. It relies on micro-organisms converting CO2 and other materials to oxygen and water.

 

On Earth, when cyanobacteria evolved, it took 1000 million years. Even if we manage to genetically modify very efficient micro-organisms for the job, it will take many tens of thousands of years. I doubt too many people will be prepared to engage in a project of that time span.

[Sayonara]

The use of micro-organisms was mooted as a possible route for Mars, not Venus. Well, it was by me at least.

[foodchain]

The use of micro-organisms was mooted as a possible route for Mars, not Venus. Well, it was by me at least.

 

The soil chemistry of mars is reactive to organic chemistry, basically it breaks down organic molecules. So any aspect of microbes on mars would have to be engineered to handle this or at least exist in areas not affected by such I guess.

 

 

"We do know that the Martian soil contains "superoxides." In the presence of ultraviolet radiation, superoxides break down organic molecules. While superoxides' effect on astronauts is probably not serious, their impact and that of any other unique chemical aspects of the Martian soil must be assessed before human exploration of Mars can begin."

 

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/science/human/

[Sayonara]

The soil chemistry of mars is reactive to organic chemistry, basically it breaks down organic molecules. So any aspect of microbes on mars would have to be engineered to handle this or at least exist in areas not affected by such I guess.

Yes, that's one of the more interesting and subtle problems for a terraforming project.

 

I don't think I mentioned it in this thread, but in another recent Mars thread I suggest using a "brewing station" which shoots jets of microbes into the atmosphere. It doesn't totally avoid the problem but it does increase the time and space across which the microbes can act.

[question123]

That won't really work as well as you think. Plants use oxygen as well as carbon dioxide.

 

There is also the issue of physically transporting gasses across the solar system, which is going to be prohibitively expensive.

 

 

Would it be possible to compress the gas into a denser form like a liquid? That would allow you to transport more of the substance in one trip.

[Klaynos]

That won't really work as well as you think. Plants use oxygen as well as carbon dioxide.

 

There is also the issue of physically transporting gasses across the solar system' date=' which is going to be prohibitively expensive.

 

 

Would it be possible to compress the gas into a denser form like a liquid? That would allow you to transport more of the substance in one trip.[/quote']

 

Yes but it's dangerouse and they're just as heavy...

[Crooked Mick]

Greetings, Terraformers.

There is no hope of increasing the gravitational field of Mars with any foreseeable technology. However there is the hope of increasing atmospheric density and or quantity. This might mean an approach on several concurrent and maybe even conflicting levels.

 

First there is the old idea of steering a few asteroids into a collision course. Now I'll dismiss right away the idea of a few multi-billion tonne bodies. However a few hundred lumps of water ice in the ten thousand to million tonne range are a possibility. The difficulty is that the orbital velocities of these bodies, being further out than Mars is slower, so they would have to be accelerated to get into the inner solar system, which is energy intensive. Nuclear powered robot spacecraft that use the water ice as a propellant are the idea here, the voyage in to Mars might take decades though. Once in the vicinity, the ices are aerobraked rather than directly slammed into the Martian surface, thus at least partially avoiding Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary type events. In fact the bulk of the material does not actually have to strike the ground and could just head off out of the ecliptic plane. As the atmosphere thickens, the larger the lumps might be. Such collisions will add heat to the atmosphere, though this might not be all that significant.

 

Another at least superficially sensible proposal is to coat some proportion of the polar caps with carbon so as to reduce albedo. The carbon could be locally made from the atmospheric CO2 or could merely be coal dust sent from Earth, at least in an early stage. This would trap more solar heat on the planet, with greater sublimation of the CO2 and water ice already there into gas. A thicker atmosphere with more H2O and CO2 implies a higher temperature and unless my chemistry is way off, a higher soil temperature could lead to outgassing of gases adsorbed by soil minerals. So an even thicker atmosphere develops.

 

I like the idea of cyanobacteria fitted out with suicide genes. This sort of thing is increasingly possible and there is no reason to dismiss the idea of breeding such groobilies in Mars jars right here on Earth. We could start with microorganisms that seem to thrive in Antarctic regions, though that might not be where the ultimate success stories come from.

 

Mars might eventually have low elevation areas with a climate resembling that of high altitude Peru.

 

Just a few words on a Martian base. There is no good reason to try to send everything required on a single space craft. Launch a few Saturn V equivalents loaded with a ground habitat, supplies etc. When that stuff has landed satisfactorily, then send your manned craft. They arrive to find shipping containers full of cans of beans and wheelbarrows ready for use. The habitat can have some radiation shielding, more could be obtained by placing sandbags filled locally on the roof.

 

Crooked Mick of the Speewah

 

Says - Always dry between your toes.

[bombus]

To me its just the energy requirement for humans to change say Venus as a planet. With mars self contained environments are a possibility, and I don’t see such with Venus. Plus how do you really start an operation there?

 

Colonizing mars would be easier, but I think terraforming (via micro orgs) would probably be easier on Venus, although it could take thousands of years.