I’ve been following the news about how scientists have evidence of a whole lot of water on Mars. According to the article, the water would make it much easier to set up a viable community on Mars, as you could use the water for drinking, raising crops, making hydrogen fuel, and making oxygen for breathing.
In all these arguments, however, I never see a workaround for getting much needed nitrogen to Mars. Without nitrogen, the Mars community would be breathing a pure oxygen environment, thereby forever being at risk of turning the habitation into a crematorium at the slightest spark. The only solution is to establish the proper mix of nitrogen to oxygen: 70% to 20% respectivly.
And don’t all plants require nitrogen as well? Isn’t the nitrogen cycle essential to all living organisms?
According to this site, Mars has only 2.7% nitrogen in it’s atmosphere. This means that if we ever want a viable, sustainable community there, we’re going to need a whole lot more nitrogen then is already there.
My question then is could one ever conceive of a future where nitrogen is a precious commodity in the Solar System? I would argue in the affirmative since it is so integral to life, and would appear to be scarce (or it would take a while to transport) in the solar system. The only work around I would see is if Mars and the other planets in the Solar System had by some miraculous coincidence tons of nitrates in the soil, ready for us to farm.
Could the Solar System run on a Nitrogen currency?
PS. I was partly inspired by reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books.
Or to breathe pure oxygen at only 1/5 of an atmosphere pressure. (It wasn’t just the pure oxygen the Apollo 1 astronauts were breathing that torched their capsule – it was also the fact that it was pressurized to over 1 atm. pressure.)
You’re assuming we couldn’t get nitrogen out of the Martian soil.
So let’s say then that after much searching, Mars turns out to have very little nitrogen. There would probably be a mad search in the system for large nitrate deposits. Whoever found those nitrate sources would be very wealthy and powerful in the solar system.
Ooooh, maybe we’ll have powerful nitro-barons!
Hey Duck, could you see a techno-feudal system arising from the scarcity of nitrates and the communcation lags involved with such great distances? I’m thinking “Dune” here!
I see that when salt was used as currency, it was a rare commodity. And most currency seems to be highly valuable in small, easily transportable, amounts.
Prohibitive transport costs would make currency worth more at one end of your journey than at the other end. And that would make it a bad choice for a standard of currency.
Also, we’re talking about releasing it into the Martian atmosphere. Everyone would have free access to it. I don’t think that would work too well.
I think Nitrogen in the atmosphere would have to be a public resource. Like roads built by the government for everybody to use. I wonder if that would have an impact on Martian tax rates?
I think that as a Martian you’d have to pay for most of your essential living utilities. Here on Earth, we pay for water and electricity. On Mars, you’d have to pay for water, electricity, oxygen, and nitrogen. I could forsee a Department of Essential Utilities sending you a bill every month. Of course you still have to pay for transportation and food.
I read somewhere that pigs would be the ideal animal to raise outside of Earth because you can pretty much use up the entire carcass for a great variety of purposes, and they are smaller than cattle, and so easier to transport. I guess their manure would be another upsell.
Of course, they would need to consume nitrogen (in one form or another) from an imported source in order to make those nitrates, now wouldn’t they?
Helium is not unhealthy as a component of a breathable atmosphere; the only problems I know of are from using it under pressure – where it enters and leaves solution in the blood very easily. It would also be even rarer on Mars than on Earth.
Argon works quite as well as nitrogen, and IIRC is a major (~10%) component of the Martian atmosphere.
The problem with helium and argon is that they cannot substitue nitrogen when it comes to the nitrogen cycle, as it is essential when creating amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids. So unless the first Martians decide to not grow anything and not reproduce, they will need a whole lot of nitrogen.
