Mars 'impossible" to terraform

[Green Baron]

Silicates themselves not. Large areas on earth are covered with them, we call them sands. That's because sands are at the end of the weathering process, SiO2 (Quartz) is hard and lasts a long time.

The dust gets blown around, frequently here on the Canaries we have Sahara dust in the then hot and dry air. The dust shields the sun, light is dull and yellow/orange and some people have respiratory problems from the dryness and temperature, less from the dust.

Cars must be washed afterwards ...

[Cunjo Carl]

1 hour ago, KG3 said:

Nitrogen isn't just a diluent gas.  It's impossible to make amino acids, proteins and life as we know it without it.

Oh, good point that's true. Rereading my post I'm missing a few things! For the case of Nitrogen, it's fairly ironic given how necessary it is, pretty much only bacteria can utilize it (and maybe that one fungus). It really highlights how interwoven our biosphere is!

 

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

Isn't Mars Duna?
They should make GMO earthworms eating perchlorates and producing Spice instead.

Btw is Duna considered as terraformed?
Are stilsuits OK?

Edited August 2, 2018 by kerbiloid

[K^2]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Btw is Duna considered as terraformed?
Are stilsuits OK?

I don't think there is a strict definition. Duna locals were trying to improve it, and hoping to turn it into a green world over the generations. So clearly, they thought it needed terraforming. But if we're starting with a dead world like Mars, I have a fairly low plank for where I'd call it terraformed.

1. Can grow plants that produce food and oxygen without pressurized domes, airlocks, or other environment processing beyond basic air filtering. Greenhouse is ok. GMO ok.
2. Can breathe the air without significant ill effects, again, minimal filtering is fine. Passive protection for warmth or moisture conservation is also fine.

In other words, if we can get the entire world to something similar to Sahara or Antarctic, where humans can survive with the right equipment pretty much indefinitely, relying only on minimal imports of building materials and water, I'd call it a success. By that standard, getting Mars to state of Duna would certainly be considered terraformed.

[KerikBalm]

Its possible, but really hard, and it won't last nearly as long as Earth, due to the fact that its about 1/10th the mass of Earth, so its not going to hold on to lighter elements well... although an artificial magnetic field would help a lot

[Cheif Operations Director]

People are delusional sometimes with dreams of grandeur. Sure it can be terriformed after we import

enough nitrogen magically. Elon is a smart person but he is an inventor more than a CEO importing the resources will be insane let alone the amount of time required and for what? "another home" its too temperamental.

On 8/1/2018 at 9:36 PM, Spaceception said:

Even if Mars doesn't have enough CO2, or other substances, the Asteroid belt and/or Venus does. The project would take several thousand years at least, what's another couple hundred or less to get the resources to Mars? I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say the only way Mars can't be Terraformed is if we decide not to altogether.

More like a million. I assure you an asteroid will hit before then

[mk1980]

i don't think it's possible in practice.

maybe in theory if we are very very optimistic about the future of our species.

if (and only if) we can solve the many problems we are facing on our planet right now (and the many more problems that will likely pop up in the not so distant future), mankind may actually become a mature species that can look "outward" in earnest.

i'm not optimistic that this will happen.

[Confused Scientist]

I think with modified plant life or algae this project could be doable, although I'm wondering if it would be more trouble than it's worth to redirect comets to a Martian impact. Also, I seem to recall a plan once that would melt the Martian ice caps with nuclear weapons, which would really be beneficial to the greenhouse gas situation. Of course, landscaping with nukes is never* a good idea, but an even worse one was a '60s-era plan to create an artificial volcano in Tierra del Fuego to produce iron ore. Actually, now that I think about it, if Mars didn't have a solid core then a volcano might be another good way to bump up greenhouse gases. Then again, looking at that last sentence reminds me that Mars has no magnetic field, so forget it. That's the deal-breaker. Also, everything I just described sounds way harder than artificial shelters, which are definitely the way to go.

 

*Unless you want to give your mortal enemy a new inland ocean, in which case, go ahead. Pretend you're doing Russia/North Korea/India/Pakistan/France/America a favor.

[magnemoe]

On 8/3/2018 at 7:56 AM, Cheif Operations Director said:

People are delusional sometimes with dreams of grandeur. Sure it can be terriformed after we import

enough nitrogen magically. Elon is a smart person but he is an inventor more than a CEO importing the resources will be insane let alone the amount of time required and for what? "another home" its too temperamental.

More like a million. I assure you an asteroid will hit before then

a million year to long, doable on far shorter time as in say 30K year, assuming exponential growth in capabilities, and that is more than an magnitude longer than any civilization has last. 
And you will drop an lot of asteroids on Mars. On earth, asteroids is mostly about detecting them early. in 50 years, knowledge about asteroids passing close to earth is likely to have significant commercial value as they would be easy to bag, Stupid Russian astroid poachers  

Terraforming Mars is a bit harder, still nice training before Venus

Orbital habitats is likely to be easier but an planet is still more real 

[Bill Phil]

Terraforming Mars will be an effort requiring a colonized solar system, or at least an industrialized one. 

Massive climate engineering and a massive logistics system are necessary. Probably more stuff. This would be an immense effort, likely lasting millennia.

Not to say we shouldn't, but it'll have to wait until we have the ability to terraform it before choosing to do so.

[kerbiloid]

Teleports - that's what they need.

Not those false, fictional teleports braking conservation laws, but the true, scientific teleports subjecting to them.
A pair of big two-sided portal rings, through which a wind is blowing.

Say, one - on Mars, another one on Venus (both have more or less same atmosphere, so no problem).
Transferring the same momentum and energy to keep balance. 1 t of hot CO2 from Venus replaced with 1 t of cold CO2 from Mars.
Mars is a radiator, Venus is a heater.
After a while Mars gets normal pressure, while Venus cools down a little (though, very little).

If put more rings on, say, Titan, Enceladus, and so, they can redistribute all four elements (HCON) more uniformly, cool down Venus and heat various Tritons-Plutos, turn ice moons into organic moons, and so on.
Oceans on Mars/Venus and organic continents on Enceladus will appear automatically.

Fiction? Compared to a handmade comet bombardment?
Not a fiction, but just an FFF - far future fizzix.

Edited August 7, 2018 by kerbiloid

[ARS]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Teleports - that's what they need.

Not those false, fictional teleports braking conservation laws, but the true, scientific teleports subjecting to them.
A pair of big two-sided portal rings, through which a wind is blowing.

Say, one - on Mars, another one on Venus (both have more or less same atmosphere, so no problem).
Transferring the same momentum and energy to keep balance. 1 t of hot CO2 from Venus replaced with 1 t of cold CO2 from Mars.
Mars is a radiator, Venus is a heater.
After a while Mars gets normal pressure, while Venus cools down a little (though, very little).

If put more rings on, say, Titan, Enceladus, and so, they can redistribute all four elements (HCON) more uniformly, cool down Venus and heat various Tritons-Plutos, turn ice moons into organic moons, and so on.
Oceans on Mars/Venus and organic continents on Enceladus will appear automatically.

Fiction? Compared to a handmade comet bombardment?
Not a fiction, but just an FFF - far future fizzix.

But Venus has 90 times more pressure than earth, while Mars has even lower pressure than earth, about 0.6. If 2 portals (ignoring if the portal could survive inside Venus pressure cooker) allows wind blowing through, the result would be a high pressure hot gas expelled on Martian portal with explosive result (reverse decompression), essentially it's only Venus > Mars, not an exchange of Venus = Mars

[kerbiloid]

8 minutes ago, ARS said:

But Venus has 90 times more pressure than earth

Of course. So:
1) Make the teleport holes small, to keep pressure changing rate appropriate, And don't stay in front of.
2) Use more celestial bodies to uniformly redistribute the Venus atmosphere. Say, boil Enceladus and Triton with hot Venusian dioxide, while pouring oceans of melted ice onto Venus.
You have a lot of useless comets and icy moons, btw. Why not spend them on Mars & Venus terraforming.

8 minutes ago, ARS said:

(ignoring if the portal could survive inside Venus pressure cooker

Just 500°C and 90 atm? Nothing to compare to many chemical plants.

P.S.
Btw lightspeed and so on don't matter here. A several hours delay is appropriate.

Edited August 7, 2018 by kerbiloid

[StarStreak2109]

Bit late to the party, but here are my 2 cents:

Can it be terraformed? We don't know really! No, we don't! We do not even understand our own climate here on mother Earth. And we surely are on the way of f*ing it up. But we do not fully understand yet how the global climate on Earth works. And there are so many variables for a completely foreign world like Mars, so how should we know? If it works, then it will not be started by Elon Musk or any person we do know today, but rather by some distant relative in the 24th/25th century. If mankind hasn't bombed itself to oblivion by then.

Should it be terraformed? This question was not put forth by the OP. But IMHO this is the more important question! We still do not know if there is a biosphere on Mars or not. If there is one, terraforming IMHO is definitely off the books. And even if there is none, do we even have the right to mess with another world on this scale?

Will it be terraformed? I believe - and I have stated this elsewhere - that by the time we have the technology to transform Mars into a new home for mankind, we will have the technology to send spaceships to other stars with potentially habitable worlds. By that time, we will probably have understood that it just is not worth it, because face it, Mars will maybe a barely habitable world but it will never be able to replace Earth.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

do we even have the right to mess with another world on this scale?

We can declare a tender. If anybody except humans is ready to join, why not.

P.S.
If presume that we can deliver (teleport or not) water from outside,
probably those nice volumetric maps of terraformed Mars should be based not on Martian native water amount,
but on total amount of water required to dissolve all Martian perchlorates and make an ocean with like-on-Earth salinity.

As we can, say, teleport water from outside, but very unlikely teleport salts from the underground.
(Even if we could, this would just relocate the problem, not solve it)

Also we should keep in memory that amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the Earth ocean is 140 times greater than in air, so if making a Mars ocean we should teleport enough CO2 from, say, Venus, to make a balanced Martian air.
The same about Venus.

Edited August 7, 2018 by kerbiloid

[StarStreak2109]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

We can declare a tender. If anybody except humans is ready to join, why not.

Because we managed to mess up our own Earth, and now we want to do it to yet another world?!?

[ARS]

Terraforming itself is an actual area of study right now, as scientists try to design methods to create both self-contained environments (Bio-Domes being famous examples) and species that can survive in a hostile environment and improve it until it has a self-sustaining biosphere that can sustain humans. Easier said than done. Literally, because sci-fi writers (which popularize the concept in the first place) tend to sneeze out terraforming efforts and planets like Martians with a cold. Still, at this point a terraforming project (at least on Mars) is theoretically possible using current technology, albeit ludicrously expensive and time-consuming. Mars is a popular target for any terraforming operation. It has one of the shortest travel distances (second only to Venus), and is solid. Venus is also a popular candidate, being almost completely similar to Earth in terms of size and gravity, but it's second to Mars because warming something up is a lot easier than cooling it down, and there'd be a lot of cooling to do; Venus has a surface temperature of a whopping 462°C (864°F), over 100°C hotter than the melting point of lead.

The Earth, in its long existence, has had three atmospheres. The first, composed of hydrogen and helium, is believed to have been blown by the solar wind. The second, believed to have been formed by volcanic outgassing, was around 100 times as dense as our current atmosphere, and composed mostly of carbon dioxide with some nitrogen. This was converted into our current atmosphere by two processes. One, the carbon dioxide was scrubbed by chemical interaction with minerals dissolved in the oceans, forming carbonate rocks. Second, the development of photosynthetic bacteria started producing oxygen, which eventually built up in the atmosphere. Venus is basically stuck with a stage two atmosphere, because it lacks liquid water. Possibly something to do with being too close to the sun, and thus outside the habitable zone. Earth had, literally, oceans of water even early in its existence. Where the water came from is still a subject of debate. But water is necessary for the carbon sequestration that removed most of the carbon dioxide from the stage two atmosphere.

Terraforming planets, by current human technology standards, is possible, but scientists theorize that any such process to turn a completely uninhabitable planet into a habitable one would take centuries, perhaps even millennia. Planets that are closer to Earth standard might be capable of terraformation in as little as 300 years, so don't count on it. (As a point of interest, many scientists did theorize that Venus would be a better candidate for terraformation, instead of Mars, due to the fact that Venus is tectonically active, while Mars isn't. Despite being infamous as a planet-sized pressure cooker, this is limited only on Venus' upper cloud layer, which is currently the only place in solar system that's the closest that we can get to be earth-like (based from atmospheric pressure, gravity and temperature))

Back then, NASA's even done studies on the idea of terraforming the Moon into an Earth-like world. While the lunar gravity's too weak to hold a permanent atmosphere, it'd take thousands of years for a newly created one to dissipate, and in the meantime the Moon could conceivably have blue skies, oceans and forests. It seems like a colossal waste of resources by today's standards, but the possibility does exist for any future civilization that really wants to go sunbathing on the Moon.

One of the problems with terraforming is an ethical one. If, hypothetically, microbes exist on Mars (which is possible), Terraforming would likely lead to their extinction. This may seem insignificant until you realize that humanity has also evolved out of microbial life, so we would potentially be exterminating intelligent life before it is even able to evolve to that point. This is the subject of a lot of debate within the scientific community with some in favor (Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, for one) and others opposed (such as the late Carl Sagan). It doesn't help that the quickest way to terraform is to explode nuclear bombs all over the surface. Another issue is that microbes or chemicals may have been brought to Earth from Mars via asteroid strikes. A twist on this was raised up late in the nineteenth century. If Mars does have microbes then the situation could turn into something out of H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds. At the very least, both the Earth life and the Mars life would have a long drawn out battle with unpredictable results.

An added difficulty of any theoretical terraforming that real life scientists have seriously discussed is also the issue of maintenance of the terraforming. It would be pointless to expend so much time and effort to terraform a planet only to have it undone. This is one of the reasons why some consider Mars a poor candidate. Mars's core has long since hardened, which means it has no magnetic field to protect life from solar radiation and from solar winds blasting away its atmosphere. The atmosphere Mars now retains is a mere wisp compared to what scientists theorize it may have once had. Due to Mars' weak gravity, it's possible for several atmospheric terraforming facility to initiate the terraforming process by generating atmospheric gases at a rate that outpace the rate of Mars' atmospheric dissipation. But then again, this would take centuries or even millenia

5 minutes ago, StarStreak2109 said:

Because we managed to mess up our own Earth, and now we want to do it to yet another world?!?

"The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands."

- Havelock Ellis

Edited August 7, 2018 by ARS

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

24 minutes ago, ARS said:

NASA's even done studies on the idea of terraforming the Moon into an Earth-like world

Astronomers also need to eat. And astrology is already occupied and fortified by other people.
It was a great mistake of the astronomers when they were laughing at such superstitions and let this money slip down through the fingers.
Now they have to invent various strange (for publics) things like terraforming to get funded, while they could be publishing daily radiohoroscopes and xrayhoroscopes in some "Daily Quazar" journal and collect money.
At least this tax on fools would be being spent on proper things. Snobbery is evil, Kepler would tell this.

Spoiler

41 minutes ago, ARS said:

within the scientific community with some in favor (Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, for one) and others opposed (such as the late Carl Sagan). It doesn't help that the quickest way to terraform is to explode nuclear bombs

The thing I like in real scientists. 

36 minutes ago, ARS said:

This may seem insignificant until you realize that humanity has also evolved out of microbial life, so we would potentially be exterminating intelligent life before it is even able to evolve to that point.

1. Once we have found another life, the life will lose her uniqueness. With every next life discovered - more and more.
2. A billion years later this life will be fried by Sun which is getting hotter and hotter. So no intelligent life will be harmed by us anyway.
3. Instead of waiting until this life gets intelligent, we can inhabit Mars with intelligent life right now. As even potato is currently more intelligent than that life.

[Bill Phil]

9 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

do we even have the right to mess with another world on this scale?

Do we have the right to mess with anything on any scale?

I say we do. 

But terraforming is woefully impractical. If you have the necessary industrial base and technology, coupled with the required understanding of climate, biosphere, and more, you would likely be better off building O'Neill cylinders, or, if you have the ability, McKendree cylinders.

[sevenperforce]

12 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

Will it be terraformed? I believe - and I have stated this elsewhere - that by the time we have the technology to transform Mars into a new home for mankind, we will have the technology to send spaceships to other stars with potentially habitable worlds. By that time, we will probably have understood that it just is not worth it, because face it, Mars will maybe a barely habitable world but it will never be able to replace Earth.

Lightspeed is a hard stop. We will have the technology to terraform Mars trivially before the first manned generation ship reaches Alpha Centauri (and, most likely, finds another Venus or another Mars).

RE the OP topic:

If we can get Mars to the point that we can move from building to building with no more danger than, say, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, and if we can get Mars to the point that we can grow life-sustaining crops in the open air...well, that's terraformed.

[Spaceception]

3 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Do we have the right to mess with anything on any scale?

I say we do. 

But terraforming is woefully impractical. If you have the necessary industrial base and technology, coupled with the required understanding of climate, biosphere, and more, you would likely be better off building O'Neill cylinders, or, if you have the ability, McKendree cylinders.

I think terraforming would still be on the table for many. We already see today, how many people would rather live on Earth than in space. And in the future that may morph into people preferring to live on planets rather than habitats long-term.
It might start out as small; but in an industrialized solar system with billions upon billions of people or more, that could easily mean millions to hundreds of millions of people (At least), willing to dedicate resources to create Earth analogs in favor of orbital habitats. But not just willing. They would probably be able to allocate the resources and everything for it too.

Edited August 7, 2018 by Spaceception

[Cheif Operations Director]

2 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Lightspeed is a hard stop. We will have the technology to terraform Mars trivially before the first manned generation ship reaches Alpha Centauri (and, most likely, finds another Venus or another Mars).

RE the OP topic:

If we can get Mars to the point that we can move from building to building with no more danger than, say, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, and if we can get Mars to the point that we can grow life-sustaining crops in the open air...well, that's terraformed.

Terraforming mars is insane

1 minute ago, Spaceception said:

I think terraforming would still be on the table for many. We already see today, how many people would rather live on Earth than in space. And in the future that may morph into people preferring to live on planets rather than habitats long-term.
It might start out as small; but in an industrialized solar system with billions upon billions of people or more, that could easily mean millions to hundreds of millions of people (At least), willing to dedicate resources to create Earth analogs in favor of orbital habitats. And they probably would be able to allocate the resources and everything for it too.

It's also insane to terraform all the planets 

[Spaceception]

20 hours ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

Terraforming mars is insane

It's also insane to terraform all the planets 

Whose talking about all of them? At most, I'm guessing it'll probably be Mars and Venus. Maybe the Moon if we're feeling cheeky. This is (simply, but not really simply) the more extreme side of geoengineering. If nature can do it, why can't we figure it out?

And what's insane about it? The time it'll take? The resources required? Sure, that's all pretty wild, but not a reason for why we shouldn't if we could. Because if we could terraform Mars, we probably will do it, or try it somewhere else.

 

Also, regarding your comment on taking a million years to terraform, and how an asteroid would hit before then; one proposed part of terraforming is redirecting asteroids to hit the intended planet to increase its water volume (Among other things). Redirecting a single asteroid away from Earth at that point would be laughable. Heck, we're close to being able to do it now. We would probably just send it to Mars instead.
And a few thousand years might be on the low side, but who knows what our industrial capabilities will be after a few hundred years of working in space. I'm not talking about "advanced technology is magic" either. If we span the solar system, have massive mining bases on most major bodies, and various colonies/habitats all over the solar system; nothing short of a nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst could stop us.

Edited August 8, 2018 by Spaceception

[Superfluous J]

10 hours ago, StarStreak2109 said:

Because we managed to mess up our own Earth, and now we want to do it to yet another world?!?

The Earth is doing just fine. We've only messed up the tiny portion of it we require to survive.

[Bill Phil]

57 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

I think terraforming would still be on the table for many. We already see today, how many people would rather live on Earth than in space. And in the future that may morph into people preferring to live on planets rather than habitats long-term.
It might start out as small; but in an industrialized solar system with billions upon billions of people or more, that could easily mean millions to hundreds of millions of people (At least), willing to dedicate resources to create Earth analogs in favor of orbital habitats. But not just willing. They would probably be able to allocate the resources and everything for it too.

Yeah. It's not that it wouldn't happen, just that it isn't practical. Of course, humans do countless impractical things, so it's still possible.

If the Solar System gets colonized, people may live on Mars. Perhaps underground in excavated caves (like the Genesis cave in Wrath of Khan) or something like that. Eventually the populace may want Mars terraformed, and, by then, we might have a much greater knowledge of everything required, thus allowing it to be done. Might still take a while, but by that time, I don't think it'd be unreasonable to have lifespans in the hundreds of years, if not thousands. So some of the people first organizing the project may be alive by the time it's finished. Still, that's all likely to be far in the future.