How to Terraform Mars for $10b in 10 years
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
To really terraform Mars, it would for instance need an atmosphere with a decent amount of oxygen in it. And there's a slight problem with that: Mars doesn't have a strong magnetic field like Earth does. Which is the reason that Mars' atmosphere was blown away in the first place*. How to solve that? Nobody knows, and this article doesn't even attempt to come up with a solution.
* https://eos.org/research-spotlights/how-marss-magnetic-field...
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
Terraforming would be a very long-term thing, but we better get started now.
It wouldn't be a problem for a species with an active space economy to keep a few satellites at L1. Should the species no longer have active space travel then eventually the planet would be screwed though, but how long is "eventually", and how long would the satellite have to be in place before the goal is met.
As a species we struggle do 5 years projects, let alone 500 or 5000 year projects.
I would see this sci fi movie!
Off topic: My space friends tell me we should first land on Phobos and tele-operate the Mars robots.
But why bother with the landing? Phobos is just 14km, has no atmosphere or gravity. You have to bring a fully shielded habitat anyway. Why not just park in orbit?
According to my napkin math, a sunshade capable of completely obstructing sunlight to Venus would require at least 450 million sails of 1 square kilometre each. Seems doable for a civilisation slightly more advanced than ours.
I don't know the exact math, but eventually humanity would have to find a way to top it off.
Mars loses an atmosphere in about 10 million years, which seems a very reasonable time scale.
While that is happening, create a large shade between the Sun and Venus. This will freeze the planet's atmosphere onto the ground, allowing processing factories to gather up all the chemicals and start creating soil, water, rivers, oceans, etc etc. It would probably take a while for the vulcanism to die down, but the whole process would take millennia.
Like I said, utterly crazy and I'm sure wouldn't work for some flaw I'm not considering. I'd still like to try though!
These schemes are wishful thinking.
Because you have no existing structure to preserve, it's a blank slate.
It is literally impossible for anything we can do to Mars to make it less habitable. There are no moral dimensions, no existing interests, not even any risks due to failure.
Somewhere between 0 and about 1000 ppm CO2, humans can survive comfortably. Probably a good deal more actually: we're acclimatized to the current levels since they are what persist.
Our entire civilization however is built on assumptions and historical patterns of climate and weather, agricultural land distribution, and population density for the current extant weather system. You cannot move millions of people over any less then multi-generational time frame and expect stable and productive society to persist. Economic systems don't know how to handle it: you sell your house for profit, or break even - you don't expect it's end of life to be a dead loss because the land is underwater, or now a desert, or the surrounding town has moved away because the increase in flooding made repairs and insurance in your area too expensive.
Climate change is about the fact that human civilization is not sufficiently flexible at our current population level and structure to reasonably adapt to serious changes over a span of about 100 years. Our ancestors dealt with change, but they dealt with it over thousands of years.
All of which is to say that there is a serious difference between making the sort of broad strokes, giant changes to a planetary atmosphere needed to terraform it where there are no existing occupants, arable land or other systems that need to be preserved - versus making targeted, collective-action based changes to an inhabited biosphere that must keep working.
If Mars was even slightly habitable, and we had people living there...then yeah, the things we can do at relatively low expense we suddenly can't do at all. But Mars is dead. There isn't a historical climate, there's no traditional farmlands, there's no invested human infrastructure. Any change to those things is a good change - we can do giant uncontrolled modifications in roughly the right direction and any outcome is going to be a good one.
On Earth, a giant uncontrolled change means you kill somewhere between millions to billions of people due to starvation.
It is telling though, that the changes Mars needs in the early stages are also just things we already can do on Earth and are doing too much of. Mars needs to be warmed. Earth needs to not be - though as the article notes, the same solar sail technology would work to provide an effective sun-shade to mitigate the CO2 increase.
Also as someone who has seen firsthand the failed attempts at bioengineering a continent, I'm utterly terrified of what geoengineering could do to a planet.
Humans are not good at foresight or the law of unintended consequences.
what is that?
There's honestly not enough talented hunters on Earth to legally eradicate them all as is the current government directive.
One could also use them to increase Earth's albedo by making clouds by heating large bodies of water.
I figure this could be a workable solution to control Earth's climate.
1. The state of the Earth 100 years ago was just a decade before the "dirty 30s" dustbowl years: extended droughts for the whole decade across the USA and Canada. There's no particular reason to aim for that climate!
2. The way CO2 interacts with the climate is too poorly understood to aim for any particular target temperature by adding or removing it. This is true on Earth, at least, but Mars is hardly studied at all. Yes, some climatologists / journalists / politicians claim otherwise but read their papers and you'll find they don't agree on the function that maps CO2 levels to temperature changes: there are lots of different values for the key variable of climate sensitivity used in production models, those models tend to overshoot, observation-based values are lower than the modelling based values they often use and assumed ECS values have been getting wider over time instead of narrower.
So if we don't know how to map CO2 changes to temperature changes on Earth, it seems kinda premature to assume we can predict the effects on Mars. Whilst in some senses the Martian atmosphere and climate is simpler than Earth's we don't really know how removing things like water clouds affects things (because we don't really understand their effects at home either).
I know it's a civilization saving idea, but in the absence of some killer asteroid on it's way, who's going to pay for this.
It just has to get that much on average.
In all seriousness, I do not believe you can achieve the goal in this article with only ten billion dollars, but if you could, the money would be there.
That's what got Mercury, Gemini and the Apollo programs going. Not going to argue that their applications had enormous economic benefits in the end, but that wasn't the original driver.
Ten or a hundred million dollars might be enough for a private ego-driven thing, but 10 billion?
Not "replaced", removed.
That isn't what we've been doing to our atmosphere.
Sign me up. Cash on delivery.