Terraforming Another Planet - Possible? When?

Factual Questions
81

[QUOTE=Weisshund]
No, not today, never in the foreseeable future of us.
Not in the really real world.
[/QUOTE]

As I said, not today. Good to know that you know the future and know all the permutations of technology so well as to be able to predict it so precisely, though. You must be a very wealthy person, probably win lotteries every week! :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously man…do you understand that the term ‘millions’ does not equal 14 billion years? Unless I said 14,000 million years, no one is going to take my statement to be about billions. What I said was true…if there was, today, a magical atmosphere on Mars, it would take a few million years to dissipate. Literally the first hit on Google backs me up.

The prevailing theory wrt Mars is, with it’s current gravity, it DID have an atmosphere for many hundreds of millions of years…losing it not because of GRAVITY but because it lost it’s magnetic field when it’s core cooled (there was also, perhaps, a rather large planetoid that might have had a touch to do with it as well). I must admit that here, it took until the second link to back me up on this one.

As with terraforming and megastructures, we don’t have anything close to the tech today. But the bones of it are there, or maybe the precursors. Same goes for genetic engineering. We do this today, though obviously we haven’t tried nor have the techniques to do anything like engineering entire organisms to survive in some proto-Martian atmosphere we create via terraforming. I don’t have a cite for this, as it’s very speculative, but I point you at CRISPR/Cas9as a potential tech that could do something like this.

Unlike spinning my point by talking about murdering and raping little children, right? :stuck_out_tongue: I’m glossing over most of the dross of your post, but this struck me as so ridiculous I had to comment, just for my own amusement.

Well, thanks you for not only understanding but making my point for me. Appreciate that.

It’s that reality stuff. It’s also not MY OP, I’m just going with the hypothetical. Sorry if you don’t get that or if it offends because you don’t get it…and not being snide. You really seem worked up over this stuff, and I apologize since it’s clear there is a communications gap between us.

Which is, you know, what I said. Again, generally ‘multiple species’ does not equate to every species or even most species. It really means something like 3 or more…or wherever you think ‘multiple’ generally starts. As with all of humanity, it wouldn’t be physically possible to take very species with us off the planet. Best we could do is probably get the genetic information and perhaps fertilized eggs of most species, and perhaps take a few plant and animal species with the few hundred or thousand humans we could reasonably get off with the parameters of the OP…which I’ll point out again, is not my OP.

82

Yes i do understand millions
and i understand that even billions which is bigger than millions will not help here, its a losing proposition, a perpetual collapse

It has one now, the remnants of one anyways, but not our kind. What it had in the past when it is supposed to have had a magnetosphere was probably not our kind either.
What is does have now though is what it is able to retain

For sake of argument, i will entertain that you have some how managed to very quickly get a bunch of oxygen shoved into mars, faster than it can get lost somehow.

The atmosphere at the peak of everest is the same oxygen ratio as sea level.
Problem at the peak of everest, lack of density, and we do not live up there so well.

We now have a whole planet that is less fun than everest to live on.
And the oxygen doesn’t want to stay there, it’s not the only gaseous thing trying to leave but the only one we are talking about at the moment.

You could do it in a sealed dome, raise the pressure artificially, how you going to do that on an open planet? Specifically one that has only a 3rd of the gravity and none of the shielding either?
It doesn’t want to keep the air, space wants to take the air, solar forces want to steal the air and it doesn’t even want to compress the air into a nice breathable density.

John Carter?

Then you do not understand it for some reason?

Your point was that human beings are sometimes, perhaps a lot of times, terrible awful creatures?

I guess you’re welcome:confused:

Hence i said that would be a topic of its own

83

A terraformed Mars would lose its atmosphere very slowly, taking millions of years in the process; in this respect XT is correct.

However Weisshund does have a point- why should we go to the bother of terraforming Mars if it becomes uninhabitable a few millions of years later? After all, the loss of atmosphere would be gradual and continuous, and a planet that has lost half its atmosphere is considerably less habitable than a planet that has lost none. We’d need to periodically restock the atmosphere with volatiles in the long term, unless we were just expecting to live there for a short period (in cosmological terms). Just how far in advance do we want to plan?

Another consideration is the quality of the atmosphere needed on Mars. I’ve managed to discuss this with a few of the people who have published research on this subject (it’s easier than doing the calculations yourself) and it appears that it would be possible to warm Mars using the greenhouse effect alone, making the surface of the planet as warm as Earth (on average); but (if you used carbon dioxide, the most common and easily available atmospheric greenhouse gas) the atmosphere of Mars would be fatal to humans.

Even if you eliminate the toxic surface chemicals mentioned by Stranger in this post, you would still be left with a toxic planet, with more than 5% CO2.

84

Again, how can terraforming increase the martian atmosphere from the present 0.6% of Earth’s to 100%?

85

Anyone who is an enthusiast for self-replicating technology would do well to read Freitas’ work, basically because he has done the calculations and already thought about most of the capabilities you describe, as well as some of the problems other people on this thread and elsewhere have mentioned.

For instance Freitas has considered the logistics of sending self-replicating systems to another world; his plans involve exactly the same sort of ‘smarter, more flexible versions of existing factory robots’ which you describe. He is basically talking about sending such a system to another star, but the same set of devices would also work on Mars.
His detailed analysis is here

In this estimate, the initial phase of the replication process lasts 500 years; at the end of that time, the planet concerned would have a viable industrial infrastructure.

Even using self-replicating macroscale industrial robots, it would take a long time to build up infrastructure from scratch. If we decided to terraform Mars, we would have the advantage that we are relatively nearby, so we could send dozens of these self-replicating systems every month - this would be possible because Earth already has a self-replicating system on its surface - in fact it has numerous examples of such systems, including the self-replicating and self-perpetuating industrial economy that (almost?) everyone on this discussion board relies upon.

Hopefully our self-replicating and self-perpetuating industrial economy will in due course become efficient enough to allow us to perform such expensive and complex actions as terraforming Mars; but I suspect that by the time we can terraform the Red Planet, we will no longer want or need to.

86

It doesn’t need to be 100%, necessarily - it just (vast oversimplification) needs to have a tolerably high partial pressure of Oxygen - so ‘how’ consists of ‘add lots of oxygen’. In practice, probably other gases are required too (I think the nitrogen in our atmosphere, being heavier, not only contributes to pressure, but also acts to constrain the lighter oxygen from escaping).

It won’t blow away immediately, as others have said.

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If they’re self-replicating, would there even be a need to keep sending them? Exponential growth is going to be the win, not topping up from this end.

88

Yes, you could do the job with one (in theory) although I’d send at least half a dozen - it is possible that some, or many, replicators would fail to replicate because of resource shortages (the seed might ‘fall on stony ground’, to use a biological analogy).

I was, however, suggesting that we could reduce the timescale considerably if we sent numerous replicating probes rather than just the one, in order to reduce Freitas’ calculated lead-in time.

89

That’s right. Simply by heating the planet we could release enough frozen carbon dioxide and water vapour to form a respectable atmosphere - but it would not be breathable, and unless we import nitrogen nothing could make it breathable by humans. That is why Zubrin and others suggest importing ammonia ice from the outer system - the resulting atmosphere would be even more toxic than before, but there is a chance we could finagle it down to something a bit closer to Earth’s.

90

Silly me- I forgot to mention the possibility of a pure oxygen, low pressure atmosphere. There’s plenty of oxygen on Mars, in compound form - that’s the reason it is red, for a start. But NASA has some experience with low pressure, pure oxygen atmospheres, and it isn’t good.

91

I think probably geographic distribution would be the key reason to send many seeds (and redundancy, as you mentioned) - exponential growth will fast overtake any effort on our part to ‘top up’, but exponential growth also makes spreading out increasingly harder, as local availability of resources becomes the limitatio.

So sending dozens of starter packages, aimed at a wide spread of sites across the whole planet would be better than sending dozens to the same general location.

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[QUOTE=Weisshund]
Yes i do understand millions
and i understand that even billions which is bigger than millions will not help here, its a losing proposition, a perpetual collapse
[/QUOTE]

The human species hasn’t even been around for 1 million years thus far. In the last 10,000 years, the rate of technological change for our species has been incredible, and it’s been accelerating, such that in the last 1000 years the rate of change was greater than the 9,000 years before that, and the last 100 greater than the 900 before that…with a few million years more to further develop it’s difficult to even know where we might be. The end goal wouldn’t be to terraform Mars than just stay there, however.

As an aside, if this was your point all along then I’m confused about your discussion about Mars gravity (in all caps) and several of your other statements.

What it had in the past was an atmosphere sufficiently thick to allow liquid water on the planet. Which was the point I was making. What it has now is what it’s able to retain without any sort of change in the 3 billion year status quo. Doesn’t mean it has to remain that way. Heat it up to release CO2 and you will get a similar effect to releasing a lot of CO2 on this planet, i.e. it’s going to create a greenhouse effect. You seem to not understand some of the basics in this discussion. The real challenge is we don’t know HOW to terraform something like Mars, not in any sort of practical sense. But that you could, at least theoretically, isn’t really in question…Mars COULD have a thick atmosphere and be heated up to allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface as it had in the past. It might not be a BREATHABLE atmosphere, to us humans, but even having an atmosphere with sufficient pressure and temperatures we can live in would allow for settlement.

As I said earlier, I don’t think that’s what we would (or even could) do, if we had the timetable the OP is giving…I think megastructure would be the way we would go, since, assuming you could figure out the engineering and cost weren’t an issue they scale better, and they are less challenging in a host of disciplines than trying to terraform an entire planet. Short of that, I’m guessing we’d go the domes/caves route. But since the OP specifically wanted to talk about terraforming we were talking about that.

‘Very quickly’ would be centuries. And you’d almost certainly do it by the vast release of CO2 (and methane, especially since there seems to be some source for it already) into the atmosphere until you had an atmosphere sufficiently dense to allow for the pressures needed for water to exist on the surface. This would also warm the planet as well. After that, you’d want to release genetically altered plants that could work in the soil and could slowly change the atmosphere to something that might be eventually breathable. Even if it took a thousand years, or even ten thousand you’d wind up with a usable planet…eventually.

To me, the timetable and amount of effort would make this less than ideal, but you COULD, at least in theory, do it.

Oh, I understand exactly what you were trying to do. Why you are getting so stressed over this is another matter.

No, my point was that no species wants to go extinct, and that they will do what they have to in order to prevent this. Humans, if the survival of the species was at stake, would do what they had to wrt Mars, and the fact that there were alien microbes on the planet wouldn’t stop us from terraforming it if that was felt to be the only or best way to protect the species.

[QUOTE=eburacum45]
However Weisshund does have a point- why should we go to the bother of terraforming Mars if it becomes uninhabitable a few millions of years later? After all, the loss of atmosphere would be gradual and continuous, and a planet that has lost half its atmosphere is considerably less habitable than a planet that has lost none. We’d need to periodically restock the atmosphere with volatiles in the long term, unless we were just expecting to live there for a short period (in cosmological terms). Just how far in advance do we want to plan?
[/QUOTE]

Well, a few million years buys us time…not sure why people think this is a short time, we haven’t even been around as a species this long yet on THIS planet. As I said originally, I don’t think it’s the optimal solution. However, assuming we could terraform Mars, then what’s to stop us on the timetable of a million or so years from doing it elsewhere? Just doing that would take humanity up to new heights in technology. From knowledge of that, you could figure out how to terraform other planets or moons, probably figure out how to build a starship to take you to other solar systems or figure out how to build large megastructures in THIS solar system to house billions or even trillions of humans.

93

But that is not sufficiently thick for us, it may have enough pressure to have water now since at 0 alt is within the triple point for water, so you can have water in liquid form, at least in like Hellas Planitia or similar low elevation.

It has water ice, and it has water clouds.

Mind you, if you make too much liquid water, due to the terrain and lack of continents jutting up into the air, it supposedly swamps the whole planet in a nice ave 10m deep swimming pool, which puts me in the mind of water world, kind of.
That is from the southern ice cap only, not sure how much for both?
Not remotely sure how much for the rest of the frozen water in other areas, cryosphere etc.

How accurate that is, i am not sure, though its interesting to think of the rusty red desert as a water world at some time before its pre cool down distant past.
Reminds me of Lewis’ vision of the surface of Venus kind of.

It currently does this to some extent now.

Those high winds blowing the dust all over and shoving the wispy clouds around are CO2, most of its atmosphere is CO2 already making its springtime exit from the north pole.

In winter CO2 forms a dry ice cap over the top of the water ice cap.
(Yes virginia! It is a planetary Icee supply depot, just add flavor, now Sak!)

In summer the dry ice cap melts entirely at the north pole so it does go off into the atmosphere, the south pole seems to have one hell of a winter and keeps its dry ice cap seasonally, but it is gradually lessening or so NASA says.
It would only add like 1.6 million cubic km, which sounds like a lot kind of, but the atmosphere tops at nearly 11km off the planet.

Now with the CO2 ice being as it is, it stands to reason that it was there when the planet cooled and was previously a part of the atmosphere.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that it was not enough CO2 the first time around?

Yes Mars does have methane and it actively vents it into the atmosphere, its atmospheric survival rate is terribly poor, so it must actually vent a lot on a regular basis for it to exist in the atmosphere on any level, but it gets chewed up and destroyed fast.

This at least in part i could see you doing.
Mars already has soil plants might like, and it has CO2, and it has sun.
The temp and radiation part though, i’m not sure, but we do have plants that can live in arctic conditions, so while not an edible garden, but maybe lichens or something like that.

94

Do not
Light
The Match
:smiley:

95

[QUOTE=Weisshund]
But that is not sufficiently thick for us, it may have enough pressure to have water now since at 0 alt is within the triple point for water, so you can have water in liquid form, at least in like Hellas Planitia or similar low elevation.

[/QUOTE]

Did you know that if you are standing on the summit of Mt Everest wearing an oxygen mask and a nice fur coat you can live? Seriously, you quibble about the silly stuff. If we could get Mars atmosphere to the point where you could have liquid water on the surface then you could go out without a pressure suit. If it’s still not quite there, you could, you know, wait another couple of years or a few more decades first and just stay in the domed settlements in the mean time.

You could create an atmosphere as thick as you there is CO2 available on the planet (and there is tons, literally, of oxygen in the soil, as well as carbon, so you could make more as well), assuming you could do any at all.

Um, no…where do you get this from? Most of it is locked in the soil and frozen at the poles. There are whole oceans worth of water locked in the soil. Unfreeze it and there would be sufficient to thicken the atmosphere enough for liquid water on the surface. Mars, today is too cold to do this on it’s own…thus, we use our magic terraforming powers to heat up the planet and unlock all that CO2.

I’m not trying to deliberately be contrarian…really. But, Mars soil sucks for plants today. This would be one of the more challenging aspects to a terraforming effort, I think…engineering plants that could live in the soil at all. Maybe once the temperatures start to come up and the atmosphere thickens there would be some magic we could do there too, but from what I recall some of the newest findings kind of shoot down the idea of the Martian just adding poo and water and getting potatoes.

Well, we talked about the radiation…if you have the magic tech to genetically design plants to live in the soil you could make them resistant to radiation as well. As for temp, again, you don’t do this until you have the temperature up to the point where there is liquid water on the surface. That sort of negates arctic conditions, unless you are talking about the artic in the summer. And you probably WOULD start with some sort of lichens or moss.

This would be a long term project, assuming we had the tech to do any of this stuff…and that is definitely something we don’t have, and something you could genuinely take issue with. It’s just odd the things you DO take issue with, instead of, to me at least, the stuff you should or could.

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As far as growing plants on Mars, it’s now well known that Mars has lots of perchlorate chemicals in its soils that would have to be neutralized.

OTOH, ammonium perchlorate is used in rockets as fuel. The perchlorates on Mars are apparently different compounds, but maybe they can be used as fuel anyway. I haven’t seen this suggested, so it’s probably not possible.

97

I can visit, you mean?
I can do the same thing on the moon or on mars now should you wrap me in some tinfoil as well.

I can’t live there like that, unless im to always be fed a bottle of air and wrapped in what ever?
Not a happy existence, though we may have very different ideas on what living is.

Heck to do that you needn’t have gone through the monumental effort to try to change the planet, i could sit on mars now in a sealed habitat, there are plenty of raw materials for me to extract water and oxygen from and a ton of other things.
Should be able to extract nitrogen from the salts along with some other things to get the right amounts so maybe i can grow plants, the soil isn’t terrible per say, it needs some work cause i cant eat soybeans full of heavy metals, and i assume some way of introducing some organics of which mars has 0, and i’m not sure taking a dump in the garden is the answer, as you have already noted.

I got a feeling that is the least of the difficulties

The water on mars was not always frozen, nor was the CO2.
The CO2 is not always frozen now, in spring/summer the north polar overlay of CO2 melts away.

The south, like i said has a crappy climate and apparently does not warm enough to do a full melt.

it does not make CO2 rivers, because as we both agree, there is not nearly enough pressure, so it goes into the atmosphere until winter.
It is obviously not enough for much of a greenhouse effect, because winter returns and it goes back to the ice caps

Maybe that isn’t surprising since mars gets about 40 something percent of the sun that earth gets?

I’m not trying to deliberately be contrarian…really. But, Mars soil sucks for plants today. This would be one of the more challenging aspects to a terraforming effort, I think…engineering plants that could live in the soil at all. Maybe once the temperatures start to come up and the atmosphere thickens there would be some magic we could do there too, but from what I recall some of the newest findings kind of shoot down the idea of the Martian just adding poo and water and getting potatoes.

I’d more envision them grown in some extension to my pod above, not engineered.
Easier, probably, to engineer the soil and shield the radiation.
Producing, synthesising or simulating the proper organic matter is the sticky part.

Strange thought, imagine if the microbes (if there are actually any) were the key to that…

Out of time for today…:frowning:

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[QUOTE=Weisshund]
I can visit, you mean?
I can do the same thing on the moon or on mars now should you wrap me in some tinfoil as well.
[/QUOTE]

Unless by ‘wrap me in some tinfoil’ you mean a pressure suit, no…you can’t. Unless by ‘visit’ you mean ‘for a few minutes at most before you die’.

I think you are missing the point. Have you seen astronauts wearing space suits? They are big and bulky because they have to maintain pressure. If you had an atmosphere thick enough you wouldn’t need a big, bulky pressure suit to move around outside in…just oxygen tanks and probably some lighter protective clothing. It would make a huge difference. Ideally, you’d want to change the atmosphere to eventually be breathable, but that would take a lot longer than just creating a thicker atmosphere of something like CO2.

Which would you prefer? Living in a dome or other pressurized settlement but able to go out and work without a pressure suit, living in the same dome or pressurized settlement but having to put on and take off a pressure suit every time you had to go out, or dead on a dead planet? Any sort of space settlement is going to be pretty rough…but humans have lived in harsh conditions in the past. Since I doubt I’d be one of the chosen selected for such a settlement to try and keep the human race going, I wouldn’t have to worry about it too much.

But, IMHO at least wrt the entire human species, living is better than dying. And it’s not like it will be that way forever. But if we were going to terraform a planet like Mars it would be the work of generations, assuming we could do it at all. It’s not going to be like the old Total Recall where you press a button on an alien machine and you have a thick, breathable atmosphere before the credits roll. :stuck_out_tongue:

No, it’s not. But not all of it outgasses when the spring and summer thaw hits either. In fact, most of it doesn’t. That’s the point.

The biggest reason it doesn’t have a thick atmosphere, however, goes back to its lack of a magnetosphere. That and Mars lost a lot of atmosphere when something really big collided with it 3-4 billion years ago, IIRC.

99

Setting aside all of this hypothetical discussion about the ethics of magically terraforming a planet, the plausibility of self-replicating robots and so forth, the Planetary Society has a podcast series that is quite interesting to anyone interested in the practical details of planetary science and space exploration. The latest episodes cover Humans to Mars Summit which includes brief discussions with Grant Anderson of Paragon Space Development Corporation (one of the leaders in space habitation technology), Marcia Smith (formerly space policy expert for the Congressional Research Service and editor of Space Policy Online), and Buzz Aldrin (discussing the Aldrin Cycler concept and some other stream-of-consciousness notions). There is also their Space Policy Edition series which basically discusses “how the sausage is made” in terms of US planning and funding of space exploration and systems; the current one (“#13 – The 2018 Budget Proposal and Is Mars Exploration in Retrograde?”) addresses the White House proposal which is surprisingly (some would say shockingly) favorable to planetary science but still fails to address the long term planning and funding shortfalls to support ongoing robotic exploration of Mars or laying the groundwork for future missions. Both actually make the point that a failure of long term planning and investing in a communications and transportation infrastructure for expanded interplanetary exploration essentially assures that space exploration will be even more halting and fragmented than it has been, notwithstanding the necessary investments to support any kind of viable crewed interplanetry mission. We would certainly need to do a lot more planetary science and empirically-based climate modeling before we could even make a credible first estimate of what it would take to modify or augment the climate of a planet or establish a self-sustaining colony on a planetismal body.

Stranger

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I mean something to stop me from being ionized to death, on the moon a little pressure would be much appreciated yes, i do want to breath.
On mars any of the 0 alt or lower places i should be good to breath with out a pressurized suit but i still need protection from radiation

No

Yes, i know, i was around when we invented the walking fish bowl fashion suit.

Well, you could enjoy a leisurely stroll around Hellas Impact Crater which is what? 8 or 9 km below 0 alt, sea level just sounds weird.
You may not climb Mons without a pressure suit, but i’m sure someone would try.

I am not 100% positive, but you maybe could probably roam some of the northern plains below the ice shelf, those alts might give you pressures right now that you could survive in with a supply of bottled air.

If i have to pick one, i will pick A, exit habitat city in pressure suit.
Then i have hopefully, made as little detrimental change to “dead” planet as possible.

Not funny

Ok maybe a little

Thanks, now all i can picture is bug eyed arnold
But not all of it outgasses when the spring and summer thaw hits either. In fact, most of it doesn’t. That’s the point.

No, not all but i said that, Mars got gypped when it came to axis positions, south pole there would make Antarctica jealous.
The north outer ice cap is still a lot of CO2 though that it offloads into the atmosphere quickly on a yearly basis, I think if you jettisoned that much that quick on earth it would probably screw things up quite good?

I have no idea how much of the southern CO2 ice is given up to the atmosphere, i find no actual numbers, just that NASA believes it is receding, slowly.
No idea if that means anything at all or is just a normal planetary cycle for it, like an interglacial kind of.

It which may not matter, CO2 might not be able to do the extent that it does on Earth to do a bangup job of greenhousing.
Among other things mars has lost is volcanism which can be an awesome greenhouse factory and probably was once upon a time.

Which presents it’s own problem.
Even now Mars is visibly losing atmosphere to space (by visibly i mean to NASA’s expensive imaging equipment) and the stuff it has is kind of the easier to keep around so to speak, given its situation.

Yes Earth bleeds off into space too, but earth has a giant planetary scale machine to work on limiting and replacing.
We may need to speak to bug eyed arnold again