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Why should we terraform Mars? [Rant]


Clockwork13

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Ok, to start off, out of every planet in the solar system that is capable of being terraformed, Mars is literally one of the worst options. Not only is its atmosphere almost nonexistent, but it is lacking a magnetic field, has poisonous soil, and will never be able to sustain life, period. Why people think there could be life on Mars is beyond me, since the atmosphere is most likely too thin and Mars is lacking a lot of what is needed for life. It has water, but isn't very accessible either.

So, to make my case clear, I'm going to walk you through every other body in the solar system that is capable of being terraformed.

Venus

This planet is about the same size as Earth, and although it has toxic clouds and extreme pressure, some people think living above these clouds may be possible and feasible. The clouds supposedly give the planet a kind of magnetosphere as well. So if we could terraform the top of Venus's atmosphere, then we could make it havitable for humans.

Ganymede

This idea is a little bit more ambitious than the other ones here. Ganymede is definitely big enough to support an atmosphere, but if we were to try terraforming it, we'd mostly be starting from scratch. Ganymede has a magnetic field, but is also buried in Jupiter's magnetic field, so solar winds are no problem. It has water, and if we could somehow get all of it onto the surface of the planet, then the moon would have an ocean. All we'd need are some certain kinds of bacteria and some other stuff (all easy to get) to give the planet a breathable atmosphere and life.

Titan

In my opinion, Titan is by far the best candidate to terraform. It already has a pretty earthlike atmosphere and oceans, except with methane instead of water. Titan has no magnetic field, although it is probably within Saturn's magnetic field.

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Honestly I would hit up the Moon first. It's close to Earth, easier to transport supplies and materials, and communications is a snap. Put a whack of solar panel arrays on the polar regions so they get Solar exposure all the time. It's hostile, more so than Mars, but only being 4 days away of Earth has alot of advantages.

Start with habitat modules, maybe getting some digging and tunnelling equipment up there and we could possibly have a underground Lunar Base that has protection from the Sun, some geothermal heating from the Moons core (it's probably barely molten, but probably plenty warm enough to heat up a base).

Expensive? yes. Difficult? yes. Better chances of working than Mars? Probably.

Just my 2¢ of course....

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If mars is incapable of sustaining life, then all of the above are equally unsuitable.

Melting the polar caps on mars could at least theoretically give you at least about a third of Earth's atmospheric surface pressure, but almost entirely CO2. Genetically engineered plants and extremophiles could potentially thrive as well as produce oxygen for colonists and to further increase the atmospheric pressure.

Titan is way too cold. Wiki says the surface temp is 94K, which is basically cryogenic. It just wont be realistic unless you literally move it closer to the Sun.

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I am not for terraforming at all. We should build domes, because we can start to colonize much earlier and do not have to wait for the lengthy process of terraforming, we can then better control the environment and we have less loss of atmosphere to the outside. Furthermore, we do not understand many of the processes involved in terraforming enough. Then I do not see the advantage of terraforming weighing more than these problems.

I admit it is possible this will change or I might be proven wrong here, but this will not happen in the short run.

Then for political reasons: When we say "We need to terraform before colonizing the mars" I strongly doubt it will ever happen. When we say "Just build some domes and live there" the chances strongly increase that it will be done. And when we have a large Mars population it will be up to them whether they try to terraform Mars and not up to the population of Earth.

All in all I find it more likely that we on Earth will start to construct lots of domes to live there than complete terraforming processes on any other planet. Partial processes indeed are plausible, for example I consider it likely that the population of Venus will decide to reduce the radiation transport to the surface to cool Venus down.

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"We choose to...

... Not because it's easy - Because it is hard."

Forget terraforming. Lets be Magratheans !

--------

Joke aside, with anyone's technology there's a very high probability once you can terraform easily, the benefit of having a mobile home will be very apparent - you'll live in space anyway.

Edited by YNM
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We shouldn't Terraform Mars. There's very little in it for us, compared to the massive effort. Martian colonists, in turn, would have a good incentive to do it. It might also create industries in the outer solar system, because they'll need boatloads of Ammonia to do so.

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2 hours ago, Clockwork13 said:

Venus

This planet is about the same size as Earth, and although it has toxic clouds and extreme pressure, some people think living above these clouds may be possible and feasible. The clouds supposedly give the planet a kind of magnetosphere as well. So if we could terraform the top of Venus's atmosphere, then we could make it havitable for humans.

Terraforming means; to change a planet so that resembles Earth and possibly can support life. What you are suggesting for Venus is upper-aerisforming, to change the upper atmosphere.

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As silly as it would be to try and terraform Mars, other suggestions are worse. I'm all for building cloud cities on Venus, but that's not terraforming. There is no terra to form there. And actually terraforming Venus? It might be a little easier than Mars, given enough time, (read, many millennia), but that still doesn't put it within reach. As for Ganymede and Titan, they are tiny little moons. The only reason Titan has atmosphere is because of cryogenic temperatures. Warm it up for human habitation, and all that atmo will be gone within decades. These things cannot be terraformed. Ever.

There are precisely two bodies in the Solar System that can be terraformed. Earth and Venus. Earth is already naturally terraformed, and Venus is just a little too close to the Sun to make terraforming practical. Had Mars been actually the size of Venus, we'd be able to turn it into a lush green world within a few centuries. It would have been properly out-gassed, and actually contained most of the atmosphere we needed. It would be just a matter of heating it up and it'd be good to go. Cooling planets down is nowhere near as simple, though. And I'm using the word "simple" very liberally.

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@K^2 First you mention that Venus might be a little easier than Mars and the latter on you say that cooling planets down is harder.

There are 3 major hurdles to terraforming Venus:
- Removing a large part of the atmosphere.
- Increasing the spin so it resembles an actual Earth day.
- There is basically no water on Venus, the 0.002% in the atmosphere is just not enough.
All these require a huge amount of asteroid(or even comets) with significant mass to be redirected at Venus, which is something we can't do.
Even if we could then it would be cheaper to redirecting them at Mars, because it's closer to the asteroid belt.

Mars transforming relatively easier than Venus, it only requires to overcome 1 major hurdle:
- Increasing the atmosphere.
This can be done by:
- Heating up the Martian soil to releasing CO2, oxygen, water vapor.
- Melting the polar caps

 

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3 hours ago, Albert VDS said:

@K^2 First you mention that Venus might be a little easier than Mars and the latter on you say that cooling planets down is harder.
 

All else being equal, of course cooling is harder. But we don't have an "all else being equal" kind of scenario between Mars and Venus. Mars is barely large enough to support an atmosphere. It'll be even less capable of doing so if we warm it up and fill it with lighter, oxygen-rich air. Mars simply isn't massive enough to hold on to Earth-like atmosphere at Earth-like temperatures even if it had a magnetic field to protect upper atmosphere from Solar Wind.

Yes, terraforming Venus is a Herculean task. But it's the only planet other than Earth on which it wouldn't be a Sisyphean labor. If you think cooling down Venus, importing water, and establishing day-night cycle is hard, what would you say about building a dome around an entire planet to keep in the atmosphere? Because that's what you'd have to do with Mars to call it terraformed. It's not going to happen.

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Why would we need to care about losing the atmosphere on Mars when it takes millions of years? Even if it looses it faster, it's again much easier to import an material from the asteroid belt to replenish it than ship it to Venus.
So you don't need to build a sphere around Mars.

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How to Terraform Venus in 6 simple and easy steps:

1: Build a black sail several thousand km wide (Yes, you read it right), and place it at a Venus-trailing orbit where the sail blocks most of the light coming from the Sun.

2: Use massive "Air tanks" to get the atmospheric pressure from 90 atm to .2 atm.

3: Take away the sail (Hurl it at the Sun or something) and begin bombarding Venus with comets (Mostly at the equator to help it spin faster).

4: Take the "Air tanks" in the Asteroid belt and fill them with Nitrogen to raise the atm pressure from .3 atm to .9 atm.

5: Use genetically modified bacteria to turn the Venusian dirt into something that resembles soil, as well as turning the CO2 into O2.

6: After a couple hundred years, you'll have a beautiful tropical world.

See? I told you it'd be simple and easy, now you can Terraform Venus from a hellhole, to a tropical paradise. :cool:

Edited by Spaceception
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First of all, I don't think the OP did enough research and has no idea what he is talking about.

Secondly, I will vote for terraforming Mars. And there are plenty of reasons to do so.

It is relatively close to Earth, and has a similar rotation speed, and has an atmosphere at least. But that is not the important part. It has water, lots of it. The North polar ice cap alone has enough water in it to cover 1/3 of the planet with an ocean.

Compared to other planets and moons, Mars is not too cold or hot. It can get all the way up to 20 degrees Centigrade during a Martian summer, which is really impressive. While it does get very chilly, yes, it is incomparable to Titan or Ganymede.

The planet itself is rich in elements, making colonization possible and economically sensible in the long term. The atmosphere can be transformed to meet our needs through methods others mentioned earlier over a few decades, it can be thickened substantially also by deflecting asteroids from the asteroid belt and burning them up in the atmosphere slowly via aerobraking.

Mars was similar to Earth before, we can turn it into a garden.

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The simplest to terraform is a small asteroid: But a glass ball around it, stabilize it with struts, put breathable atmosphere inside and it is terraformed.

If we talk about plans that are way beyond what we are able to do: Venus atmosphere has a mass of 10^20 kg. Earth production of Iron is 10^9 kg. Jupiter has a mass of 10^27 kg. So the factor between iron production (which is a really mass produced stuff) and Venus atmosphere is higher than the factor between Venus atmosphere and Jupiter. So I would suggest, if we manage to terraform Venus, we are halfway there in terraforming Jupiter.

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1 hour ago, Albert VDS said:

Why would we need to care about losing the atmosphere on Mars when it takes millions of years? Even if it looses it faster, it's again much easier to import an material from the asteroid belt to replenish it than ship it to Venus.
So you don't need to build a sphere around Mars.

Again, we aren't talking about solar wind chipping away at it little by little. We are talking about thermodynamics. Atmosphere will be evaporating at a rate limited only by heat transfer between layers. In other words, we are talking years, maybe decades at best. Martian gravitational well is simply too shallow to provide a sufficient barrier against kinetic energy of gas under Earth-like conditions. It's that simple.

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2 hours ago, K^2 said:

Again, we aren't talking about solar wind chipping away at it little by little. We are talking about thermodynamics. Atmosphere will be evaporating at a rate limited only by heat transfer between layers. In other words, we are talking years, maybe decades at best. Martian gravitational well is simply too shallow to provide a sufficient barrier against kinetic energy of gas under Earth-like conditions. It's that simple.

According to Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA, it would take 10-100 million years : http://esseacourses.strategies.org/EcosynthesisMcKay2008ReviewAAAS.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/4166892/The_Creation_of_an_Artificial_Dense_Martian_Atmosphere_A_major_Obstacle_to_the_Terraforming_of_Mars

So yeah, that's ample time to recover any lost atmosphere.

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