Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
It's like someone saying, "hey I knew your cousin Dan". Nice, I have no idea of their relationship but they're trying to "break the ice" so to speak with an irrelevant tidbit.
In there any species of tree that would be intimately known to a global anglophone audience?
A better analogy would be anything that can be expressed in volumes. For this reason, "4 football stadiums" and "2 school buses" would actually be pretty good.
Anyway, most trees can't.
...it's a rate, it would be bananas/hr.
I ran the calculations, 6 grams an hour seems to be about 15% of a single astronaut's oxygen consumption.
The planned larger machine they talk about, about the size of a chest freezer producing 3 kilograms of oxygen an hour, should be enough for ~85 astronauts. Though I assume that's also needing to produce rocket oxidiser for the return trip.
There will most likely be insects, bacteria, fungi; All which also consume oxygen.
On top of organic things, the Earth2 experiment famously ran into a problem where the concrete they used to build the biosphere kept curing long after construction finished, and kept sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.
And don't forget to take into account that NASA's machine can produce oxygen all day, everyday, where trees stop producing oxygen at night, and over winter (and actually start consuming oxygen)
> Managing CO2 levels was a particular challenge, and a source of controversy regarding the Biosphere 2 project's alleged misrepresentation to the public. [...] The crew worked to manage the CO2 by occasionally turning on a CO2 scrubber [...] In November 1991, investigative reporting in The Village Voice alleged that the crew had secretly installed the CO2 scrubber device, and claimed that this violated Biosphere 2's advertised goal of recycling all materials naturally.
> A mystery accompanied the oxygen decline: the corresponding increase in carbon dioxide did not appear. This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate in a process called carbonatation, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen.
Like maybe they aren't seriously insisting they can believe that "small" tree does refer to a 40+ft tree.
It's not a very good comparison to communicate to a lay audience. A far, far better one would be in terms of "resting oxygen requirement of an average human."
They produce quite a lot of oxygen. The main issue is that they don't produce much surplus oxygen as they consume it too. And make no oxygen when the sun goes down.
> Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
Yes. But then, these are living organisms that need to be cared for and fed. If there's a malfunction that wipes out your oxygen producing organisms, you have a big problem. You need to give them light, control the temperature and keep it in a very narrow range, provide them with water, nutrients, shield them from radiation, avoid contamination by other organisms, etc. Water and nutrients are not easy to come by in Mars, at least not yet. At this point, they aren't very different from a machine, it's just going to be a large bioreactor.
At large scale, they are probably still the best bet. But it will take a while until we have the proper environment for them. The good news is that, once there's such an environment, we don't have to ship tons of them. Let them replicate.
MOXIE is nice as it's a machine. You can store it away, bring more capacity online, etc. It can be added to both bases and vehicles (potentially suits(?)).
Is there anyway we could do that in several orders of magnitude less on Mars?
Even 1 million times faster is still several human life-times.
Any off-Earth population will have to live in cans rotating to simulate gravity.
“A forlorn land covered in crages and stormes, and wholly bereft of life giving aether, this continente of ‘Columbia’ is a kingdom moste unsuitable for a civilised Englishman.”
We have no valid reason to assume a pregnancy could be carried to term in Mars gravity.
Perhaps we could generate a Martian artificial planetary magnetosphere, but I don’t know how.
See [1] from NASA.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a...
The hard part is generating the oceans in which phytoplankton might live.
Saline pools would have multiple benefits. Not only when kept warm could you use them to generate oxygen with phytoplankton, if you have to cut off power for some reason, they'll work as a great thermal heatsink, and they will not freeze as fast so they present less risk of piping damage.
True, but not the whole story. Phytoplankton did not create Earth's oxygen atmosphere but today is the majority producer of oxygen. Earth's oxygen atmosphere was initially created by cyanobacteria up to 3.5Bya and which today still produce about 10% of atmospheric oxygen.
The detail I am unsure of is what produced most of the current volume of Earth's oxygen. While phytoplankton today produces the most, that does not mean that most of Earth's oxygen was created by phytoplankton. My suspicion is that, though today cyanobacteria does not produce the majority of oxygen, that cyanobacteria in fact created most of the oxygen currently in our atmosphere.
Surely someone here knows for certain and can speculate on whether the idea of installing cyanobacteria on Mars is any good.
Trees as a collective do not increase or decrease oxygen to the atmosphere in this era.