Why Nothing Can Grow on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Why Nothing Can Grow on Mars

asimov.press

71 pointsmailyk40 comments

Too cold, not enough oxygen, too much radiation, poor soil conditions, not enough water --- pick one, or all the above.

It ain't happening for a very, very long time --- if ever.

What about the clouds of Venus? https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030022668/downloads/20...

Not enough water, 0.0020% says Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus

Though I guess that's more a reason against there being life there at the moment, than a reason against us going: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=93+bar+*+surface+area+v...

There’s a lot of barren desert across the globe where nothing grows—-why not start there?

Do we have technology to manufacture a microbe or bacterium to given specifications? Can they assemble fragments of DNA from different living things to achieve one thing that might live on Mars?

Or how do they plan to "make an organism that could grow outside on Mars"? The mentioning of existing organisms that can do or whistand various things is cool, but how would they use that?

If we tried? Probably. Nobody will let you seriously try, on Earth at least.

You can do genetic engineering in your kitchen these days. It wouldn't be easy to build a mars-worthy microbe, but it's not other people that's going to stop you.

https://youtu.be/F0_q-fD_lyU?si=7-z0gH2yxu4Ejdx3

The author of the article is at an organization that is working on engineering organisms that can survive on Mars, so the list of difficulties is their map of hurdles to overcome.

See https://www.pioneer-labs.org/

Can it be done? Probably. But it would take geological timescale to significantly change it this way.

It might be done like this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi...

It would indeed take a very long time, millions of years at least. So better get started now.

Isnt terraforming a waste? After all, there's no need for open lakes and breathable air over the entire planet, even if it was feasible given the available water, which it isn't. Much better to concentrate resources to make human livable sealed communities with something like hydroponics for food.

If we wanted a population of, say 100 million people, which of the following two projects would require more resources?

A.) Habitats and sealed communities along with all the heating, radiation mitigation, life support systems, etc. along with the infrastructure to support farming and all other necessary activities hardened for the harsh environment.

B.) Putting the correct mixture of gases into the atmosphere to warm the planet, protect against radiation, CO2 for plants to breathe and make the air pressure high enough to allow for liquid water.

I genuinely don't know. It seems to me like at a certain population it would be cheaper to do B rather than have an enormous population along with all the farms and whatnot they need in large steel and glass domes. For what it's worth Mars seems to have all the necessary raw ingredients for terraforming except for nitrogen or some other filler gas for the atmosphere.

Terraforming (B) would require more resources, probably by several orders of magnitude. It would be badass, though.

In terms of the physical weight/volume of resources terraforming probably would be order of magnitudes more. But if terraforming involves mostly releasing frozen and underground stores of gasses, well that's potentially cheaper than building giant vacuum-sealed dome cities. And as a result you get the whole surface as a habitat (in the long run).

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of radiation and how hard it would be to build a colony that is protected enough and is "self sustaining".

Nice kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w

If we manage to terraform mostly using robots and bacteria that would be so much easier.

And I think you vastly underestimate how big a planet is. "Put the correct mixture of gases in the atmosphere"? Where from? At least if you're building small enclaves on a planet surface, you can repurpose mass that's already there.

A is the only thing we'll be able to do in the next 500 years, if that helps.

No matter how much we conspire to destroy the environment on earth, by burning fuel or nuclear war or otherwise, the earth (or parts of it) will likely be more hospitable to humans than any other alternative. We can shoot some vials of DNA towards Alpha Centauri etc, but so much for the interplanetary humanistic escapists.

700 years ago, a lot of people didn't knew America existed... 200 years ago, a smartphone would sound pretty sci-fi

what if we manage to head out of the solar system after 5 million of years? we are here for 300,000 so far

S-curves only look exponential at the beginning.

The number of things we know are increasing, and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities.

We can watch as much "Star Trek" as we like, but we ain't going nowhere.

"and the more information we have, the more likely we are to be able to extrapolate our capabilities"

I don't believe that. Major progress usually comes from entirely new technologies, not from continuous development of the already known ones.

You wouldn't be able to extrapolate current IT sector from the state of things in 1924, because the transistor, the crucial building block for really heavy computation, wasn't around.

Same with people in 1824 trying to predict current civil aviation from their state-of-the-art balloons.

There's a lot of extrapolation going on already. It's like if you speculated an evil demon as running a VR simulation in the year 1900, more powerful than current computers. No knowledge of transistors needed. On the level of math and physics, there are new discoveries, but they don't come that often for the kind of thing big enough to help in this case.

You could have used that line about extrapolating our future at any point in history, and it would have been wrong each time. So I don't think it will be right now.

Well, [checks watch] it's 2024 so I'll just jetpack over and up to the parking lot, and drive my flying car home, and catch the 2nd week of the Moon Olympics.

It'd be nice, but you know what, let's look after what we have, and if we get to Star Trek, that's fine, but if we don't we still have somewhere to live.

This comment is really sad! Humans are destined to explore.

Some people have spent so much of their lives staring down at their shoes that they've never seen the stars above.

I love how the author points out repeatedly that the chance of achieving the goal are abysmal and then goes on about how they try anyway.

It is very informative.

I noticed that the opinion on mars colonization tend to look like the bell curve/IQ meme, with the one thinking we can colonize mars in the middle. The simple fact that we are quickly making earth unlivable although we have 4.5 billions years of coevolution behind us shows that we are very far from being able to terraform any planet

When they were talking about developing microbes that could excrete insulating materials, they said existing biofilms are sugar-based and wouldn't be able to hold in enough/heat water. So I started thinking about what if they could excrete minerals or metals.

Then I was thinking about the challenges of expanding a protected inside area without exposing it to the outside. And about how much material would be needed.

Which led me to thinking of covering individual microbes with metal. And now I have this picture in my head of a little microbe walking around in a armor.

Your friend is probably a retard if he invites you for a coffee and tells you to engineer a plant to terraform Mars.

There will be no terraforming of it for multiple reasons. This was already obvious.

Human habitation of Mars will proceed nonetheless in closed habitats above or underground.

It require bringing vast amounts of starter resources from Earth, and then prospecting for water while scavenging atmospheric nitrogen and carbon. It would be difficult to sustain settlements on Mars if native resources cannot be extracted economically, or if bidirectional trade between Earth and Mars was unable to be established.

Bidirectional trade would require Mars to have something Earth wants to pay for. Given the costs of sending stuff, it would have to be something that’s very valuable per kg.

What is there that could conceivably fit that bill?

Potential candidates might include rare minerals or isotopes that are scarce on Earth. Another possibility could be revolutionary scientific data or biological samples unique to Mars, which could be invaluable for research. Oh, and media, we love us some media and it travels light ;)

So…. Martian super kink porn? How insane would it have to be to cover the costs of that sort of expedition and not be more affordable to make on earth and just pretend it was made on Mars?

We don’t currently know of any unique rare minerals or isotopes on Mars (except for stuff unique just because it was picked up on Mars).

There are plenty of valuable stuff we need on the asteroid belt. Going straight there from Earth would be much more difficult and expensive than launching from Mars. A self sustaining Martian colony would serve as a trade and resupply post for asteroid miners.

With current technology, none of that checks out from an energy cost perspective.

And why would someone go down the gravity belt to mars when building a station on one of those asteroids is cheaper and easier? They have the materials right there, after all. Even water, usually.

Not like mars can grow food any easier, anyway, with all the soil being full of perchlorate and the like.

It has just enough atmosphere and gravity to be annoying, without it really helping with things like shielding either.

Manufactured goods can hit arbitrary cost/kg ratios. It's also easier to launch for Mars than it is from Earth. (The Moon would probably be even better.)

Holiday homes. If you can sell the rich super yachts you can sell them Mars bases.

Rich people can get to their super yachts within a day using luxury transport, and only do so when the weather is very nice.

I don’t see them buying a mars home if it takes weeks to get there and I doubt the ‘weather’ will compete with that on a yacht in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, even ignoring that you’ll have to wear a spacesuit while sipping your martini, getting a tan in the sun.

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