What would It take to make Mars's atmosphere semi habitable?

[Nibb31]

ethics is the thing you really need to get over if you want offworld colonies.

Which is irrelevant because nobody has any intentions of doing offworld colonies.

[Frozen_Heart]

Which is irrelevant because nobody has any intentions of doing offworld colonies.

Plenty of people have the intention of it. Whether they actually succeed is another matter entirely...

[Nibb31]

Plenty of people have the intention of it. Whether they actually succeed is another matter entirely...

Some folks might say that they want to do it, but nobody is *seriously* is in any position to do it.

[Newt]

Spacex, MarsOne, and other people have certainly talked about the possibility and intention to build such a colony, but there is a ton of work that needs to be done before that will be particularly practical. Those ideas are fueled by hype and ignorance, not by any legitimate fuel. There is a long way to go before a permanent space colony anywhere will be practical, let alone on Mars.

Is Mars even the best place to colonize? I really do not think so.

[Tripod27]

Why don't we just take all our greenhouse gasses, and move them somewhere else (Mars)?

Not entirely serious, and it'd all probably end up freezing solid as soon as it gets to the planet anyway, AND I'd sort of like global warming staying here (I live in Canada and it's only snowed once this year instead of for 6 months like in the past)

If there was a way to get Mars' core spinning and starting up plate tectonics again, that'd warm the planet up, but it's not like we can just drill down to the core and stir it with a spoon

[78stonewobble]

I can't say much about human artificial insemination tests, since I don't know much about if they did something like that or not or has plans to do it or not. They did test it with mice embryo in near zero G simulation, however. What they discovered was that gravity is probably needed for development of embryos. The fertilization process works normally, but the embryos have difficulty developing, with cells having trouble dividing and maturing. They were then implanted to female mice, and some survive to a healthy birth, but at much lower rate than the control group in normal gravity.

As for...well, the 250 miles high club, there has been thoughts put into that. Although there are some difficulty in...logistics for some "happy time" in zero G, that hasn't stop people from designing things to assist with it. Though the most limiting factor for now is just because space flight is still stressful for human, and the ISS doesn't give much privacy for such things, along with more personal relationship stuff. People are quite complex, and they can't just get on with it easily like in the movies. (That said, someone should make a sitcom on the ISS).

Ah, thank you for the reply. Actually would be kinda interesting to know, why the embryos have difficulty developing.

Regarding the 250 mile high club. Don't we have an entire profession of people doing it under stressfull cameras and with little to no emotional involvement? *lol* Does give an entirely new meaning to the expression the right stuff... doesn't it?

Yes, the above was meant both seriously and with humor... It is a somewhat hard subject to take seriously without some puns.

- - - Updated - - -

Spacex, MarsOne, and other people have certainly talked about the possibility and intention to build such a colony, but there is a ton of work that needs to be done before that will be particularly practical. Those ideas are fueled by hype and ignorance, not by any legitimate fuel. There is a long way to go before a permanent space colony anywhere will be practical, let alone on Mars.

Is Mars even the best place to colonize? I really do not think so.

I don't think people are saying Mars would be best place, that would probably be some billionaires villa, but more of a discussion on whether it's within the realm of utterly impossible, technically possible, economically impossible and so on.

So far I'm personally leaning towards technically possible.

A more feasible start would probably a, just large enough to simulate gravity and possibly naturally reusing all ressources, spacestation.

Aka. a bigger, actually functioning, biosphere 2 in a rotating spacestation.

[RainDreamer]

Ah, thank you for the reply. Actually would be kinda interesting to know, why the embryos have difficulty developing.

Regarding the 250 mile high club. Don't we have an entire profession of people doing it under stressfull cameras and with little to no emotional involvement? *lol* Does give an entirely new meaning to the expression the right stuff... doesn't it?

Yes, the above was meant both seriously and with humor... It is a somewhat hard subject to take seriously without some puns.

If you are interested in the details about the study with mice embryos, you can read the journal article here.

As for the 250 miles high club, well, while currently the ISS and its crew is the only place possible for such study, but being limited by tight schedules and lack of privacy,stress, along with professional code of conducts(NASA doesn't prohibit people from doing it on the ISS though), in the near future where there are commercial space flight, we will likely see it happen with space tourists.

[Sirrobert]

Thing is, most space tourists won't be up there long enough for it to matter. Gastration takes a few days, and by that time you're back on the surface

[Frozen_Heart]

Spacex, MarsOne, and other people have certainly talked about the possibility and intention to build such a colony, but there is a ton of work that needs to be done before that will be particularly practical. Those ideas are fueled by hype and ignorance, not by any legitimate fuel. There is a long way to go before a permanent space colony anywhere will be practical, let alone on Mars.

Is Mars even the best place to colonize? I really do not think so.

I think technically Mars is the easiest place to set up a permanent colony on. Its the most similar to Earth. The Moon is a lot closer but no colony there could ever be self sufficient and there is even less gravity.

If only Venus and Mars were swapped. :/

As for whether someone will go ahead and do it, I'm content to wait and see. I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand like Nibb but I'm not hopelessly optimistic either.

[Bill Phil]

Mars may be the best planet, but an asteroid that's particularly rich in volatiles would be preferable. Then we can make a Space Habitat. Takes less energy than terraforming but much more potent.

[Nuke]

low gravity bodies would be great for industry. but i think it would need to be fairly large. a base on ceres would work out well. a base on a neo would probibly be better though. you must build a 1km centrifuge with radiation shielding, so an object of several km would be needed to provide the materials for the habitat construction. on top of that you want the base to pay off so you need considerable material left over for mining. so were talking objects several km across as being prime real estate.

[Bill Phil]

Many Apollo asteroids are 10+ kilometers long..

[Newt]

Live in Eros!

[Bill Phil]

Getting off topic here...

Anyways, what it would take is a lot of material, a lot of it. That takes energy. So it's hard to do.

[Frozen_Heart]

Getting off topic here...

Anyways, what it would take is a lot of material, a lot of it. That takes energy. So it's hard to do.

I still think the idea of a CFC factory has the most merit for warming up Mars. Once the ice caps have melted the CO2 will warm the planet further. Then just introduce super hardy plants which over a few hundred millennia will introduce oxygen.

The most difficult challenge is a buffer gas...

Anyway that technique could get Mars semi habitable given a few million years... :/

Edit: There are a lot of metal oxides on Mars. Separating that may be a better way to produce oxygen than letting plants do it.

So no, with current technology you couldn't do it in a reasonable amount of time.

[RainDreamer]

Live in Eros!

I can only imagine what it would be like to live on a planet named after the god of erotic love. Imagine all the pickup lines from colonist over there with earth tourists.

[-Velocity-]

Mars probably doesn't have enough volatiles left to sustain an atmosphere for a long time. Melting the ice caps would get you some, but it would re-freeze. It would be far better to deliver more volatiles by redirecting comets to impact Mars. Siding Springs would have only required a slight nudge a century ago, though it was anomalously close.

Yes, Mars loses its atmosphere much more quickly than Earth, but it still takes hundreds of millions of years, even without a magnetosphere. I'm not sure what the radiation level on the surface would be, but a thick atmosphere would greatly reduce it.

The biggest problem I can see with cometary redirect would be that by the time we'd be ready to do it, there would likely already be people living on Mars. At which point, you obviously can't go smashing big rocks into it anymore. It also begs the question of why you need to terraform it in the first place.

And no, cometary impacts would probably not blast off more atmosphere than they add. If Mars lost some or much of its atmosphere from impacts, they were from impacts with asteroids, which have almost no volatiles, so asteriod impacts can only subtract, not add.

[Bill Phil]

Perhaps some warming and an increase in atmospheric pressure could allow some sort of genetically engineered life to make Mars more oxygenated...

Anyhow... It's out of the question until we can generate enough power to even MOVE the comets...

[Nuke]

you could just dig really deep trenches until the pressure at the bottom is acceptable to habitation. this would also warm the atmosphere significantly. you cant fill it with oxygen because it would float away, so you still need pressurized habitats, but the pressure difference would be miniscule so these could be built out of less robust materials.