Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars
nature.com
nature.com
Mars: no oxygen, atmospheric pressure essentially zero
Antarctica: breathable, oxygenated air
Mars: maybe a little salty ice below the surface near the poles
Antarctica: Covered with freshwater ice
Mars: 34 million miles away across empty space
Antarctica: a few hundred miles away by boat
I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of. And I know that various people have suggested that Mars might be a useful second home for humanity in case some event wipes us all out.. but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted, and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible. It just doesn't buy very much insurance. Sorry to be a downer but this is pretty farfetched.
Erm, there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice in the poles that's literally oceans worth, the liquid water below the poles is only of interest for astrobiology.
>I mean, Antarctica, or the bottom of the sea, or the peak of Mount Everest all wipe the floor with Mars on every metric you can think of.
Except Antarctica is on Earth. The point of colonizing an off-world body is so that we can spread ourselves out.
Earth = eggs in one basket. A super volcano like Yellowstone could easily kill 90%+ of our species in the first year after an eruption and most of the other animal (and plant) life. Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Mars isn't about gaining more resources, it's about giving humanity an extra life.
Our eggs are in this one basket for generations to come no matter what we do, so let’s try to unfuck this basket.
You can't make a self-sustaining colony without first making a dependent colony (well you could, it's just a hell of a lot harder, there's a lot we need to learn with a permanently staffed research outpost before we attempt to colonize).
Dealing with radiation in affordable and non-crude ways, homeostasis I’m artificial ecosystems, the impact of varying gravity of human physiology across generations, growing food in a variety of environments, our relationship to the bacteria which live in and around us, and how to replicate those effects in the absence of our biosphere. Dozens of other make-or-break issues before we can even have an outpost on a place like Mars that isn’t a glorified death sentence.
Colonizing Mars is nowhere close to a problem we know how to solve, unless by “colonize” we mean “stick some people there and try to keep them alive for as long as possible, while knowing that if Earth abandons them they’re dead.” We don’t even know if Mars is a good idea compared to other options we might invent or discover over the next century or three. Meanwhile I’d you want to survive a supervolano or asteroid, Earth is still a better bet than Mars. We still need Earth, and will for a long time, with a more likely Martian scenario being centuries of robots terraforming the planet in anticipation of human arrival, not humans arriving first in any serious way.
We should definitely talk one day about radiation, funding, a mass estimation for the equipment, how much it will cost to develop it -no one is selling minifactories for Mars today- and the business model of the whole thing, because if no one is paying for it, it won't even start to happen.
I'd love to see people taking this seriously for once and stop visualizing only a successful outcome there's no reason to expect with the facts we have (or don't) as of today.
It’s also not as if Mars is some kind of lynchpin in a future of humanity in space, and if you focus too much on one target you’re blinded to other options. Keep more of an open mind and be a little less cavalier about killing people and things might turn out better than you’d expect. At least, better than the “build a mountain of smart-people corpses until the problems dissolve” approach can hope to achieve.
Or think of it this way; what you’re saying is equivalent to saying that the problem of humans not being able to fly can be solved by taking a bunch of smart people up in airplanes and pushing them out without parachutes.
I'm no expert but my instinct is a strong no. Earth will still be more habitable than Mars even if 95% of species die off, the planet cools 20 degrees, and the air turns half-toxic.
To me, if you are really concerned about human extinction, bunker tech seems like a better investment than space tech. This may not always be true - but at today's level of technology it seems true to me.
The resulting tensions probably will probably will cause that.
Depending on how far you were from the eruption you could die the first hour within several hundred miles. Outside of that radius you're going to be exposed to the ash/particulate which you DO NOT WANT TO BREATHE as it gets in your lungs and basically becomes a concrete-like sludge that will suffocate/drowned you from hours to days after you inhale enough and some of it will be so fine that even holding a wet towel to your face or using a common commercial respirator won't do a damn thing.
Within a month or two most plant life and animal life would be dead and markedly less sunlight would be reaching the surface of the Earth, the surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing as well.
At this point, while the pressure on the surface is survivable, it would be effectively as deadly as Mars. Some humans might survive on the surface of Earth the first year but conditions would be hellish and miserable, any chance of real survival would be individuals living in government bunkers around the world that have access to fresh water and food storage. If weather co-operated some of these people would survive until the ash had settled out of the atmosphere enough to allow plant life to begin to grow again and once it could it should start spreading relatively quickly as andisols are some of the most fertile soil on earth (andisols are formed from volcanic ash as it breaks down).
hours to days after you inhale enough on Earth vs. unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
markedly less sunlight on Earth vs even less on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
most plant life and animal life would be dead on Earth vs. zero plant or animal life on Mars. (Earth Wins!)
In some areas surface temperatures would quickly get below freezing due to an average 3c drop vs. Much of mars could be warmed by 100c and still be below freezing. (Earth Wins!)
So really, even then the Earth with still be a paradise compared to Mars.
The rest of your comment is... I mean, to seriously believe that, you'd have to believe that there's severe extinction level events every million years or so, and the frequency of those kinds of extinction-level events is closer to every 50 million years.
Mt St Helens dropped from trace amounts to 1/2 inch of ash as far south as most of Colorado and as far east as western Minnesota. Ritzville, more than 250 miles away, had 2-5 inches of ashfall. Mt St Helens was comparable in volume to Vesuvius and was less than 1 cubic kilometer of volume, Oruanui eruption which was a relatively small super volcano eruption was estimated around 1170 cubic kilometers and dumped 7 inches of ash 620 miles away on the Chatham Islands.
Toba released between 2000 and 3000 cubic kilometers of ejecta (800 cubic kilometers being ashfall), killed a significant portion of humans alive at the time, created a genetic bottleneck responsible for the current genetic makeup of billions of people, lowered the temperature as much as 27F in places (5.4-9F globally). They found ash deposit from it in the South China Sea 600-800 miles away. If that happened in the middle of America, keep in mind the U.S. exports an absurd amount of its crops, you're talking bye bye population in North America, considerable cooling for Europe which would likely mean no crops in northern Europe. Then you lose the oil, natural gas and coal exports from North America. Air travel would likely be grounded for months the world around, if we keep assuming it's yellowstone in this scenario then if it happens in the winter here southern hemisphere crops would likely have poor yields depending what part of summer it is, if it happened in the summer here then European and Asian crops would suffer. Massive food shortages, fuel shortages, abnormally cool weather which could further effect crop growth and could get some areas into freezing temperatures during winter consistently instead of extremely rarely. Mt St Helens triggered air quality detectors in the northeastern United States so you'd likely have a deterioration in air quality the world around as well. Of course as most of the population of North America is dying from the ash fall starting in as little as a day or two you now have fewer and fewer people to fight fires when they break out, at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked, ash will have toppled some to many trees allowing fires to spread easier in forests, even if someone was here to launch planes to try and extinguish the planes the ash won't have cleared enough from the air to allow flight. Etc etc, so on and so forth. What the other guy in this thread, and the people downvoting me forget, is that the last time one of these happened... we were living in very very primitive structures and our population was likely under 1 million (at 10,000 BC population estimates are between 1 and 15 million, the last supervolcano eruption happened around 24,000 BC, lake Toba around 74,000 BC).
Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
>The second-coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere since around 1400 was 1816, and the 1810s are the coldest decade on record. That was the consequence of Tambora's 1815 eruption and possibly another VEI-7 eruption in late 1808. The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817, and 1818 were −0.51 °C (−0.92 °F), −0.44 °C (−0.79 °F), and −0.29 °C (−0.52 °F), respectively.[8] Parts of Europe also experienced a stormier winter.
That wasn't even a supervolcano.
The Toba genetic bottleneck theory is generally considered discredited in modern scientific circles. There is evidence of an ash layer as far as Lake Malawi, but there is no evidence of any significant disruption to flora and fauna. It failed to even show a major cooling event in that region.
> at some point you likely have massive fires burning through entire cities adding more smoke and ash to the atmosphere, some of these will move into forests unchecked
At this point in your little rant, I broke down laughing. You're clearly someone who has bought into the nuclear winter theories, and the most outlandishly over-the-top ones at that. We've been able to observe out-of-control boreal forest fires in recent decades (such as the McMurray fire not two years ago), and the effects of such fires are extremely short-lived. Even setting an entire country's oil fields on fire failed to produce any significant regional effect, much to the chagrin of the nuclear winter fear-mongers.
> Toba was 100x more powerful than Tambora that I think I saw mentioned elsewhere in this comment chain. tambora happened in 1815 and cooled global temperatures by 0.95F / 0.53C, per wiki
Tambora is the strongest eruption in recorded history. It is also the strongest link we have to a volcanic winter, the effects of which were so devastating that you have to go read books on Tambora to discover that it happened. The only other eruption posited to have had enough of an impact to cause political repercussions is Huaynaputina in 1600, which may have caused the Russian famine during the Time of Troubles.
There is a significant gap between "measurable drop in global temperature" (which is well-attested) and "significant population drop due to crop failures" (which is not), and an even more significant gap to "extinction of several species as a result of major climactic changes."
To believe that a supervolcano is capable of making the human race extinct, you'd have to believe either that >99% of species are less susceptible to extinction than humans, or that extinction-level events happen every few million years, the latter of which is contradicted by fossil evidence.
Long answer: The effect of volcanic eruptions on climate is somewhat overblown in popular culture. In recorded history, we only have a handful of VEI7 eruptions, and only one within the range of well-recorded history (that one being Tambora). Tambora is known to have been followed by a particularly severe summer, but it was also concurrent with climatic minimums due to the "Little Ice Age" and the solar cycle. Some other VEI7 eruptions are known, but it's highly speculative how severe any sort of climatic was response, both locally and globally.
A supervolcano would be a VEI8 eruption. There are two known VEI8 eruptions in the history of humanity, both well before recorded history. People have claimed that one of these, the Lake Toba eruption, is responsible for a severe bottleneck in human population, but work has shown that a) global ash distribution is identifiable, b) wildlife populations don't seem to have been too affected, and c) even relatively close populations don't seem to have collapsed.
In other words, the largest eruption in the climatic record was incapable of producing an extinction-level event. A Yellowstone caldera eruption wouldn't be all that much larger. For anyone in the ash cloud, it would be problematic for the short term, but that's a relatively short term issue (1-2 years). More serious would be the loss of productive farmland in the US for perhaps a decade or so, but that wouldn't be anywhere near extinction-level for humanity.
I'm not sure about that. Maybe not on the surface, but I could easily see a 40% drop in U.S. agricultural output (number made up) causing massive global turmoil, even potentially leading up to a world war.
Our world is so interconnected that a strong enough shock in one area can arguably start a runaway positive-feedback loop of destruction.
Species can recover even from only a few mating pairs.
It would be catastrophic though.
Ten might as well be zero. 50 people (25 pairs) is necessary with complete control of breeding in order to have sustainable genetic diversity. Without complete control, hundreds are necessary in any given pocket of civilization.
Even if there were tens of millions of humans remaining, there is virtually zero chance of meaningful recovery since all of the low-hanging fruit of industrial-age energy resources have been mined.
It's certainly possible for an astonishingly large proportion of the population to perish, but extinction requires extermination to be nearly complete.
Why? I'd assume that biological warfare could do more, or destroying water/power supplies.
People in farmland might not be that much better off. Masses of starving, potentially-armed people searching for food will not necessarily be the most respectful of people's property rights. We can expect animal wildlife populations to plummet as they're killed for food, and agricultural output to drop precipitously as supply chains for fuel, fertilizer, and non-terminator-gene seeds go to zero, not to mention as it becomes exceedingly difficult to protect large patches of farmland from raids.
You can add the entire nuclear arsenal, super volcanos, meteors, gamma ray burst at will.
If God were going to destroy all of humanity in a Final Judgement, why we wouldn't He include the pocket of humans on Mars as well?
A few hundreds of meters down and the nuke risk is negligible. You can stockpile enough for hundreds of years at ~0 shipping cost. You can set up fortified ducts/purification systems to get oxygen from the surface -- with backup allowing a small population to live long enough for the surface to get tolerable.
Heck, even a full blown self-sustaining underground habitat doesn't seem out of question, since there's water readily available, plenty of perhaps geothermal or nuclear power power, and construction minerals. Destroying the Mars habitat might not be too much more difficult comparing to destroying this colony. If it has less than 10,000 or so colonists the US gov. or similar might even have a chance of keeping its location in secrecy.
Sure it doesn't cover all possible scenarios, but in terms of backup a conflict-resistant habitat here on Earth seems like the best bang for your buck.
Welcome to Zion.
https://www.space.com/41080-alien-life-may-be-rare-today.htm...
I wouldn't pay through the nose for that, either. Especially when we could be putting that time and energy into not losing the PROD deployment, today, with a much better ROI.
We don't need to worry about hypothetical 50-million year meteor strike extinction events. We're in the middle of one, that we could be taking action to deal with - for much less the cost of a self-sufficient Mars base.
You're worried about off-site backups, when the trash can in the data center is on fire, and you cant budget for a fire extinguisher.
There are certain types of disasters you can't protect against though, no matter how much money you spend. The only thing you can do is mitigate.
It's a lot more difficult to launch through a rock ceiling, radioactive atmosphere, and a cloud of Kessler Syndrome fragments, from a gravity well 1G deep, than it is to launch from the surface of a rock with barely any atmosphere, a bare handful of satellites, in a well only 0.38G deep.
Also, bear in mind that you won't just be stockpiling food, but sufficient biodiversity to reassemble a viable ecosystem, and sufficient industry and education to preserve a viable economy. Otherwise, you still die when the nutri-mat and atmo-pure machines finally break down.
It's certainly easier to dig a deep hole and build a bunker in it, but that expense does not advance the end goal. It is merely insurance against a temporary setback. You still need to establish a launch-capable society on another planet, or everything dies anyway when the sun expands.
Then, after that happens, someone will still be around to say, "It would be cheaper and easier to colonize and terraform Venus than to send generation ships every which way."....
But isn't that what colonizing Mars is, anyway? Mars has no biodiversity to speak of and won't be a host to ours without significant evolution or resources, so what's the plan there?
Earth isn't just a convenient place to live. It's the only planet we can live on. Until we get warp drive or are much farther along in making a profit colonizing the solar system, not to mention in building better governments, it's just far too early to discuss colonizing Mars. Dreams are great but let's not get blinded by the hopes here. Let's plan a visit, and plan another visit 50 years after that.
Ugh, don't get me started there. Musk wanting to do all these internet satellites interests me but seriously gives me nightmares too in regards to Kessler syndrome.
Maybe someone launches anti-ballistic-missile missiles, and scores a few hits. Debris is spreading to all kinds of orbits. Kessler Syndrome will be the least of our problems as the bombs fall, but it'll be a pain later, after the fallout clears.
It is, unless the scenario you are hoping to survive is "Hordes of proles at the gates."
https://www.space.com/9683-surface-mars-possibly-shaped-plat...
and
https://www.space.com/17087-mars-surface-marsquakes-plate-te...
So colonising somewhere other then Earth should also be a priority. A big risk are meteors. Just like the dinosaurs.
No they aren't. ~1km wide asteroids impact the Earth on average every 500,000 years and even then, it's too small to be an extinction level event.
Not to mention all NEOs around that size are constantly monitored.
It's estimated we've only found 20-30% of these objects.
Though the direct effects would be mostly local, the systemic effects would reverberate globally since in the modern world things (such as food production, supply chains, etc.) are so meshed together.
Draw a 300 km circle at your chosen impact point, then say bye to everything inside the first 150 km. The rest of the circle would be damaged to a varying degree. You can easily find places for impact points which, although not an ELE, would still turn many, many people's lives nasty.
Even if such a "smallish" 1 km asteroid hits, in general everything will change. For example, the asteroid could still cause enough chaos to weaken a country or countries, opening up for opportunistic wars. Since the long-term effects of a non-ELE would be transient, some countries might want to take advantage of this situation and invade (resource grab or glory for motherland or righting old wrongs or something). And then, what things would be seen next - for this we would be in unknown territory.
Even without an outright war, the number of displaced people could become very large. People would likely not sit still and clean up, but try to move away. Can the receiving end handle that many people, can they move enough help in when the just-in-time supply chains are disrupted to pieces? If not, there will be a collapse into some form of chaos at the receiver. And again, people might move, etc.
For an ELE, an offworld base is the only option for continuity. If that is not in place when an ELE hits, then humankind will be dead.
A Mars/Moon base operating at large enough industrial and R&D capacity (akin to a small to medium sized country) could help restore normalcy even without an ELE.
So, I think an offworld base is required anyway, even if we don't sweat so much about 1 km rocks, but still want to be serious about protection against an ELE.
Sure, an extra backup on Mars helps... but let's keep the backups we can do now, first.
Also: spaceships... and tunnels. Next Elon enterprises should include underwater, Antartica or mountain-top habitats... and good practice for a Mars colony.
A self-sufficient offworld colony is the best bet for normalcy and sounds like an overall faster and workable way for bootstrapping things again. Also, the technology developed as a precursor for offworld colonies would likely aid in things like detecting and diverting asteroids.
Colonizing the difficult places on the Earth, such as seabeds, sea bottoms and places deep underground, would be a good way to practise for the everyday life offworld (can't go out just like that, all food farmed indoors, strict trash recycling regimes, etc.) but I don't think it would be equivalent as a "backup".
A malfunction in life support systems in a Mars colony will wipe out 100% of the people living there within the first week, or day. Are you suggesting this is less likely than a super-volcano, which might never erupt in the next 5-10-20 generations?
> Big rocks have smashed into Earth before and will again. A pandemic could easily spread across the planet in months decimating population and launching us back into the stone age.
Mars being different how?
> as you just lost most of the people that knew how the power plants work, how medicine worked, how making concrete worked, how growing crops in worthwhile quantities worked.
Print books with manuals on how to bootstrap civilization from 0AD to at least 19th century level / electricity. Disperse and distribute said books through libraries, vaults and other methods if necessary. Knowledge is pretty hard to lose (entirely) in our information obsessed society. Imagine if we switched our efforts from serving ads and saving petabytes of cat videos to actually archiving, preserving and distributing useful knowledge.
There will be gaps, but not humanity ending ones.
> Earth = eggs in one basket
A more accurate analogy of the Mars colony would be taking 1 egg out of the basket, putting it on the ground and kicking it toward your destination multiple times, hoping it doesn't break. In reality, it's several magnitudes more risky than that.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why? I mean, I understand why each individual human wants to survive, and I understand wanting to ensure people have a good quality of life. But why is preserving the species in the event of disaster important?
The idea of a mars colony is far fetched. The idea that it would save humanity is a pipe dream.
I think colonizing Antarctica and colonizing Mars are two totally different solutions, colonizing Mars solves problems that happen on geological timescales, I can't think of any problem offhand that colonizing Antarctica solves.
It solves the problem of building a sustainable biosphere in an incredibly inhospitable environment. That's a very similar problem to building a Mars colony, that doesn't require you to actually go to Mars.
And none of those things would affect an antarctic colony.
Given that even with really clever laser-based links the latency between Earth and Mars would be significant (a couple of minutes), not to mention the weeks of space travel to actually move people/tanks/missiles/etc, it's very unlikely that a Mars colony would be significantly embroiled in any on-Earth dispute (political disputes, wars, etc). In that way, even if we do have a MAD kind of scenario, Mars is likely to escape not because we couldn't attack it, but because it's expensive to attack it and nobody would care very much to.
Climbing Everest, exploring Antarctica, going to the moon (admittedly debatable), weren't done for only practical reasons.
Colonizing Mars might be the only reason humanity exists 1000 years from now.
I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy.
This cannot be understated. For the resources we would throw away trying to build a self-sustaining Mars colony, as a lifeline for a few thousand people, after a one-in-fifty-million-years extinction event, we could probably prevent a climate catastrophe on Earth.
Not a hypothetical one-in-a-million-years climate catastrophe - but rather, one that we are right in the middle of.
But we should be working towards tapping the $700 quintillion of wealth in the asteroid belt. The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway and any missions to Mars should be laser-focused on that single goal. Once we achieve it, exploration of the solar system, planet colonization, and everything else becomes possible.
made me giggle incessantly. well done.
Also, few tons of dust is regularly drops on Moon, so it dust layer thickness increases with time, thus old recordings are affected less by radiation.
Technology to recover these recording is not invented yet, but if we will have trails of every high energy particle in the Moon dust and powerful enough computer, we will be able to recover them.
It's the same idea of going into a boat west and then realizing there's a continent West of Europe.
It's the same desire when you're a kid and told in strong words to only walk on the sidewalk and then dash and try to cross the road by yourself because there's something interesting out there.
It doesn't make sense at all to go to Mars and may prove useless to us. Who knows. But humans are driven by more than "practical level"
But let's be honest about it.
It's all relative. Compared to 99.99999%+ of all of reality, Mars is an absolute garden spot.
but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted
Or, it might be some kind of energetic event we can't even see coming or do anything about. Mars is really just an interim step to humanity becoming interstellar.
compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible
Against a Mars civilization with industry and the intent to defend itself? Good freakin luck! It's hard enough to have a credible response when the flight time is only 20 minutes. When your super "rapid response" takes 2 months to get there, and it has to get there through the vacuum of space while announcing its presence with a hot fusion rocket exhaust, good luck! What's the alternative? "Stealthy" craft on Hohman transfer orbits? It's going to take a whole lot to conceal that initial boost.
(Don't get me wrong. Everyone will have stealth, precisely because it is hard and unexpected. But it will be very hard to pull off.)
Antarctica: Chance of global extiction event almost literally 100% correlated with Earth
Mars: Surface gravity 3.7 m/s², escape delta-v 5km/s
Antarctica: Surface gravity 9.8 m/s², escape delta-v 11km/s
> every metric you can think of
I thought of two in under a minute with almost no effort.
200 years forward - Mars is another planet suitable for humans. If by that time we make Antarctica suitable, then the rest of the Earth would become unsuitable and we'd better have another planet to replace the Earth :)
The pressure at the bottom of the sea would probably make buildings safer on Mars than at the bottom of the sea, so there is one metric where Mars wins. On Mars, you've only got to deal with a pressure difference between outside and inside of -1 bar, or smaller if you don't use normal Earth sea level pressure.
At the bottom of the sea, its 1 bar for every 10 meters depth.
A major hull failure on Mars, or even in a vacuum, leading to explosive decompression is not in and of itself fatal. You quickly lose consciousness, but you have up to maybe 30ish seconds of usable consciousness to try to save yourself by getting an oxygen mask on or getting through a working airtight door to a non-breached area. It won't be comfortable, but the skin makes a decent spacesuit. You'll have problems like capillaries bursting in your eyes, but short term these things are annoyances rather than threats to your life.
A major hull failure deep underwater is a lot lot worse. Deep enough, and you'll be killed quickly by the water pressure itself, and if not, by the collapse of the building as it is crushed by the pressure.
> but really, if we get wiped out it's going to be self-inflicted [...]
Are you dismissing things like large asteroid strikes or natural pandemics as too unlikely to bother with, or would you count those as self-inflicted because we didn't put enough resources into defending against them?
> [...] and compared with the difficulty of setting up a viable colony on Mars, the difficulty of sending a few nukes over there is negligible
Or perhaps you are just considering things that we cause? However, even if we just consider things we cause, Mars would be safe from many of them, even many deliberately inflicted. Yes, if we do ourselves in with nuclear war someone might toss a few to Mars, too, especially if there are Mars colonies that are allied with one of the sides in the conflict on Earth.
But what if we do ourselves in by something like a terrorist or doomsday cult release of an engineered virus? The perpetrators probably won't have the resources to load up a rocket with it and send it to Mars.
As far as the asteroid strike topic - I think my point has gone over your head here. Asteroid strikes do happen, naturally. But if you put a lot of humans in space with the ability to push and pull asteroids around, the overall risk goes up by so many orders of magnitude that the risk of a natural strike is a negligible concern. I mean, study human history. A certain percentage of us, even the smart ones, are going to be batshit crazy at any given time, and every once in a while one of the crazy ones gets into power or hijacks a plane. And that's not counting the incidence of honest mistakes! JFK estimated that the probability of nuclear war during the cuban missile crisis was one in 3. As compared to an asteroid strike that happens once every 65 million years.
Friend, the greatest threat to us is ourselves.
Let's start with the biggest: Mars settling is not. about. throwing. away. Earth. Heck, it's not even primarily about a backup for Earth. It's about starting a new civilization to expand the human experience and make the future a more interesting, expansive place. Literally 99.99999999999999999999999998% of the universe is not Earth. Mars would just be our first real step out, the first place we establish life outside of Earth (the point of terraforming, after all, is to cultivate Mars into a garden, a second full biosphere). It's the same kind of argument for why people choose to have children. The idea of it being necessary for the continuation of the species is not the proximal reason for it. It's an adventure.
Second: Antarctica has a few small colonies that have been grandfathered in, but it is actually illegal to build permanent structures on Antarctica. In spite of this, Antarctica sees tens of thousands of visitors every year. The reason people aren't trying to settle Antarctica is that it's effectively illegal to do so.
Third: Mars has a significant atmosphere that at low altitudes shields against all micrometeorites and all the acute biological effects of even the worst solar flares. It can be easily captured to produce both fuel and oxygen and even some water (yup, you can pull fresh water right from the Martian air).
Mars is much better for settlement than the bottom of the sea in essentially every way except transit time.
Fundamentally, should humanity stay confined to a single planet forever or should we venture out? If the former, that's an incredibly dark future and we should thus cancel the entire human space program.
But I think we have a duty to Gaia to spread life throughout the universe while we can.
If we had the tech and infrastructure to colonize Mars, we could just colonize the solar system by building orbital rings and space stations. It would be much cheaper and easier. So much so that it is possible in our lifetime without requiring the currently unatanable technologies that are required to make Mars feasible. (e.g. terraforming)
When you look at the cost/difficulty versus the benefit, colonizing the Moon first and then spreading to the asteroid belt makes way more sense. The only reason to go to Mars is that it is another planet and thus phsychologically closer to being a second Earth than any other location in our solar system. That is not to say that we shouldn't send humans there. Just that a permanent base really shouldn't be our priority when there are so many better places to colonize first.
I don't think the fact that Mars is inhospitable is really an argument against it. I think there is a reasonable question to ask about how much would we be willing to spend to create/support a Mars colony, but I don't think it makes sense to dismiss out of hand just because there's nothing currently there for us.
Annnnnnnnd that's why some plans call for manufacturing far more efficient greenhouse gasses in situ. You can also Free the oxygen locked in the regolith itself with enough energy (so enough time). You could hurl smaller comets and asteroids at the planet to add to the atmosphere.
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/5/2154 for an example of making other greenhouse gasses.
The polar caps alone have more than a million cubic kilometers of dry ice and more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice, the regolith over the entire planet is also lousy with both in varying concentrations which will release as the planet thaws.
When we actually have the technology abilities to influence the Martian atmosphere in any appreciable quantity, eventually getting the atmosphere up to a decent pressure will be more than doable given the interest.
Remember, just few decades ago we didn't even think Mars had water and now we know there's more than a million cubic kilometers of water ice (and there's something like 50,669,625,000,000,000 gallons/191,805,395,565,860,992 liters of water in the caps alone).
The real problem with ever properly terraforming Mars is the nitrogen which still isn't that big of an issue as again you can import it from comets and asteroids or heat silicate to release nitrogen.
Hell we could get to Mars, dig a 5ft hole and go "woah! There's all kinds of organic material down here, this must have been an ancient ocean teeming with life!" and have all sorts of usable stuff for terraforming frozen in thick layers of permafrost.
And Mars has about 38% the surface area of Earth, roughly the surface area of all the dry land on Earth. For Mars that's a hell of a lot of water.
>The CO2 mass in the polar ice caps is 1/5000 of the mass of earth atmosphere
Which is more than enough to sustain above freezing temperatures when melted. Add in what is frozen in the regolith all over the planet as permafrost and you're well on your way to a pressure humans can survive without pressure suits. Which allows you to start bringing in comets/asteroids as well as heating various rocks to release various gasses as energy generation allows.
It makes terraforming quite doable for even our current civilization and if we crack affordable fusion (we almost certainly will, probably in our lifetimes assuming middle age or younger now) energy generation becomes a non-issue and then it's just a matter of setting up shop on Mars, again with largely (if not entirely) automated facilities that start chugging away generating 'designer' greenhouse gasses to start the runaway greenhouse effect to melt the caps.
The CO2 mass in the earth's atmosphere is only 1/2000 of the mass of the earth's atmosphere. That is to say, Mars ice has almost half as much CO2 has the atmosphere of a much larger planet.
Step 2: Build Very Large Railgun™
Step 3: Make Ice Block Harvesting Robots
Step 4: Fire railgun for approximately a crapload of years, changing Ceres' orbit to collide with Mars.
If you get the math Really Quite Spot On, you may be able to slow Ceres while putting the ice projectiles on a highly elliptical orbit that will also hit Mars. Get the final collision right as well, and you could spin up Mars a bit (closer to 24hr days, though I think I'd like 28 better TBH), or slow it's orbit down a bit.
It'd probably take a couple centuries, and the cool down period might take the same, but when you're done you've got loads of water, a touch more mass, and a great little bootstrapped planet.
But - there's a non-zero chance that this collision, whether by railgun or nuke, endangers life on earth. Problematic, but I love the idea otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Magnetic_...
It will. Over MILLIONS of years. That happened on a geological time scale. People clutch to this claiming 'the solar wind will blow it away' but fail to realize how long this process takes.
Not when humans are involved. All you need to do is raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect on Mars. While that's more than we've done on Earth, what we've done here was entirely on accident.
With an actual effort... we could probably do that in a few decades with technology not much more advanced than what we have now. Just doing something like the Russian Znamya project (orbital mirrors), and a little bit of seeding the polar regions with carbon to help absorb sunlight, we could bathe the caps in sunlight 24:37 687 days a year. That combined with creation of 'designer' artificial greenhouse gasses could get you to the runaway process quicker than the natural human lifespan and if you kept generating your own greenhouse gasses/reflecting light to the surface/importing smaller comets (smaller so you're burning the bulk up in the slowly thickening atmosphere instead of impacting and throwing up dust), you could get it there in a few centuries and have the process largely, if not entirely, automated.
[0]https://i1.wp.com/www.inetres.com/gp/anime/bebop/02/bebop_02...
For me, each play-through has taken hours but after finally playing it correctly (first two times I played I misinterpreted some crucial rules), I enjoyed the game quite a bit.
And you wouldn't want to do that, anyway, since it would result in a carbon dioxide concentration too high for an eventually breathable atmosphere. What you really want there is water vapor and perfluorocarbons.
But cranking those out takes time. Mars might be warm in 1000 years.
Still, shorter than the trip to another star.
And there is a seemingly nice paper here on the potential for designer gas mixes: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/98/5/2154.full.pdf
Identifying candidate comets and asteroids is the first step, then coming up with some sort of propulsion system is the next step. You won't need a lot of thrust at once, you'll just need continuous thrust for weeks, months or even years. Nudge the body into an intercept with Mars and wait. Could easily take decades (if not longer) to start impacting depending on where in the system you are shopping.
Good news is, comets and asteroids already come reeeeeallllllly close to the rocky planets so it's just a matter of meeting them far enough out and applying just the right amount of thrust.
Bad news is, if your math isn't right... whoops you just put something on a collision course with Earth BUT you'd detect this WAYYYYYY before it would happen and you'd just apply more thrust, unless of course something happened to your propulsion system so you'd absolutely want something out there that could move fast enough to intercept, land, apply thrust.
Impacting won't do much though to raise temperature or atmosphere, the atmosphere is thin enough you won't burn up much right now so you'd still need to thicken the atmosphere up some another way.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16898/what-would-b...
This conversation is about bringing gas to Mars to thicken its atmosphere.
They’re very different ideas, and the second one is a lot more interesting than the first.
(enter Montgolfier, Lilienthal, Santos-Dumont, the Wright brothers, etc)
Flying faster than the speed of sound is impossible, there is a wall out there which will crush any plane trying to break through it.
(enter Lippisch, those British researchers who realised a moving tail can keep a plane stable across the sound barrier but for some reason were not allowed to test their ideas in practice, Bell Aerospace and Chuck Yeager)
Notice the pattern?
No.
For ages, people have sought to convert lead to gold though alchemy. Some skeptics said that was impossible or uneconomical.
(Enter... no one)
Turns out the skeptics are right and no amount of positive attitude and can-do spirit can change that fact.
Terraforming Mars is a lot closer to alchemy than powered flight, if the literal matter needed does not already exist on Mars. If we have the technology for space-tugs that can transport an atmosphere's worth of matter to it, I doubt we'd still be interested in the project.
Arthur C. Clarke had the following to say on the subject:
1: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
While terraforming Mars is certainly a daunting prospect the single fact that there is not enough CO2 to create enough of a greenhouse effect to warm the planet does not seem enough of a reason for me to give up on the prospect. There are more effective greenhouse gases than CO2, methane comes to mind. What is not readily present on Mars can be 'liberated' from it chemical bonds or deposited there by means of inbound objects rich in the required substance.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
> Transforming lead to gold is possible, it takes a particle accelerator and a lot of energy but it can be done. It has been done in 1980 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California [1] although they started with bismuth instead of lead.
I know that (see emphasis above). The process you cite is utterly uneconomical. It is impossible to transform lead to gold in all practical senses.
> What is not readily present on Mars can be 'liberated' from it chemical bonds or deposited there by means of inbound objects rich in the required substance.
Again, the technology and resources required to transport an atmosphere's worth of matter to Mars likely have far more beneficial uses that a terraforming project, such as the construction and provisioning of large habitable space stations.
This is misleading at best. Elon hasn't endorsed one way of terraforming Mars. He has said it's a question best left to Mars settlers.
The ideas were brought to life in Hideo Kojima's Policenauts, which is an interesting, rather detailed illustration of how the whole thing might work out. Somehow, I find the idea of a space station like that more exciting than the idea of colonizing Mars.
Let's spend those countless billions on improving conditions here.
Sending people to Mars would cost a few times as much as the construction (inflation adjusted) of the US interstate highway system. [1] There is a reason physicists, economists, and engineers, but usually not Linux container experts, are consulted when evaluating megaproject proposals.
> Let's spend those countless billions on improving conditions here.
How do you propose we allocate those billions? Who do you delegate to allocate those billions? Is the marginal benefit of that reallocation greater than the marginal cost of killing off all interplanetary colonization efforts?
I propose we don't collect the billions in the first place.
> Sending people to Mars would cost a few times as much as the construction (inflation adjusted) of the US interstate highway system. [1]
Sending a few people and even establishing some kind of 'base' is not the same as colonizing. That's just the cost of getting 9 crews there and back. If the article is implying Apollo-sized crews, that's not very many people.
Heavy machinery, concrete, steel/aluminum, fuel, everything needed to create structures. The costs will be innumerable, and for what benefit? So potentially a select few people get to fly to Mars and live there?
Without a major shift in energy source, soon, we will never be able to leave our planet. Humanity will end here.
Sun's supposed to explode and consume the planet soon though.
They'll mine the crap out of it, setup horribly polluting industry and makes shit to sell elsewhere.
The biggest problem for mars is not pressure, but nitrogen.
You can make oxygen from CO2, obviously. But where do you get nitrogen?
They speak of CO2 greenhouse effect not being sufficient to cause sufficient warming... But that's kind of obvious, isn't it? Because if it was sufficient with easily accessible reservoirs, that'd imply Mars is in some sort of unequilibrium state that could randomly trigger into a partial runaway greenhouse effect (to terraform the planet, not make it like Venus) without even our intervention.
And another thing, warmth is fairly easy to address. What's critical is pressure. I'm much less interested in the amount of CO2 to heat the whole planet by itself than I am in the amount of CO2 needed to exceed the Armstrong Limit (0.9psi, the minimum pressure you can survive without a pressure suit and only a forced air oxygen mask) at the lowest points on Mars (like Hellas Basin). That's not addressed in the abstract at all, and I'm not about to pay for an article that doesn't even bother to answer such a basic question in the abstract as what mass of CO2 exists in these reservoirs (from which one can easily determine the pressure... Mars needs about 6e16kg of additional volatiles added to its atmosphere to reach the Armstrong Limit in Hellas Basin... Mars' atmosphere is currently 2.5e16kg).
Every terraforming proposal I've seen does something like this:
1) Increase albedo of surface via dust on the poles or black powder.
2) Increase greenhouse effect by industrial production of super greenhouse gases that are far more effective (>20,000?) than CO2.
3) Increase insolation of Mars via giant orbital mirrors (more realistic than you might think, as you can use micron-thick solar sail type material).
4) Adding more volatiles from exterior sources like comets or asteroids or moons.
5) Vaporize very deep reservoirs of volatiles using fission or fusion or geothermal or sunlight or impact energy, reservoirs not considered here.
Many of these require "new" technology, but the principles behind each one are pretty well understood.
...it's simply impossible to have a serious discussion of this paper as it's paywalled and contains no quantitative information in the public abstract. Instead, it serves as just a conversation piece for what people already think about Mars terraforming.