Just bring one Kudzu plant up there. Mars would be totally green in about 2 years.
If the kudzu doesn’t work, try bindweed. Nothing kills that sucker.
Philodendron will live for years closed up in a closet.
Do you have the capacity to fly at least one billion people from Earth to Mars in an emergency? Not three, not seven, a billion? If not, Mars is pretty useless as a lifeboat. Resources spent on such an endeavour would be better spent on Earth.
An alternative: suppose we were to put Mars into a stable orbit around the Earth? Make it a second moon of the Earth? We might have to get rid of the current moon, mind.
Mars is approx 10% the mass of the Earth so suitably small; the moon is approx 1%, so Mars would have to be a lot farther out.
Why so many? It’s only recently that Earth’s human population exceeded 1 Bn. Even a few thousand would be more than enough. Maybe even a few hundred.
GM doesn’t have a good record with oxidation, I’d go with a Toyota
True, but we’re already pretty good at spotting asteroids that might be coming our way, and by mid-century we’d probably be able to spot any asteroid bigger than a Mini Cooper headed our way in time to blow it up before it got here. And at a price tag several orders of magnitude cheaper than that of terraforming Mars.
If we get to the point where we can move planets around, I prefer JC’s idea of putting Mars and Venus at Earth’s Lagrange points. That way we don’t have to worry about issues with different tides and whatnot. And if we have a way to generate enough force to move planets around (compared to that, terraforming Mars where it is would be an easy lift), the somewhat greater distance from Earth to a relocated Mars would be a pretty trivial local trip.
Ah, yes. The terraforming question thrown around for decades. Fortunately, the fringe technologies we have now and are in active development make a HUGE difference in the answer to this question compared to 10 years ago. Additionally, most people can’t fully comprehend just how much industry the entire world has at its disposal. You said that price is no object, but if it is –really– no object, then this could be done faster than most people could imagine possible. Let’s begin with how we can even get there to do this stuff.
Rocket technology for really fast travel (compared to old run-of-the-mill chemical rockets) has been around for decades, but the problem has been how to power the darn things. Engine technologies like the VASIMR could get you from here to Mars in well under 6 weeks if working at 100% power the whole time (ideally you’d have to slow down as you get there, otherwise there’d be a big splat/kaboom involved). The secret sauce has only come around in the last few years, and is still under a lot of scrutiny by the scientific community: LENR (Low Energy or Lattice-Enabled Nuclear Reactions) power. This stuff uses specially milled Nickel (Cheap, abundant) and Lithium Aluminum Hydride (LiAlH4, already produced industrially) to generate COP heat of 3.0+ (pretty damn good) and can potentially run for weeks or months between fuel replacement.
Thermo-electric generators have been around a long time and coupled with radioactive stuff like Plutonium already power most of our stuff headed out to Jupiter or beyond already, and we can use some of the heat produced directly in getting the engines going. If the highest heat-yield documented to date proves accurate, we could power VASIMR engines and then some without weighing down our spaceships too much. We would need to account for the construction, testing and implementation of these babies, and with groups like SpaceX about ready to create reusable rocket stages, this becomes even easier and faster.
Next would be to address the thin cold atmosphere, because who wants to be caught outside in -60*C and millibar weather? The Earth is already producing Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6) which is 24,000x the greenhouse gas that CO2 is. If we produced more solely to bottle up and ship out, it would very shortly get warm enough to unlock all the CO2 frozen on Mars, helping warm the planet, increase the atmosphere density at the same time, and be a buffer gas at low concentrations similar to Nitrogen. At the same time, our VASIMR rocket spaceships could start harvesting some of the over -abundant CO2 and N2 that Venus is happily holding for us before shipping it out to Mars. We can also be constructing solar mirrors (solettas) to speed warming things up even more. We could be producing all this fun stuff while getting our rockets going in the first place and be testing it all to make sure it’s good to go when our rockets are. Give all of this actively hauling stuff another 20 years with our fast VASIMR ships and we’ve got a decent atmosphere going, but not exactly breathable yet.
With all that great CO2, we’ll want plants that can begin turning it all into the nice O2 we love and enjoy. Genetically engineering lichen and other extremophiles already present on Earth to deal with the harsher climate as we’re warming/thickening our atmospheric soup is becoming trivial with modern bio-science. Make ‘em extra dark to decrease the planetary albedo will help the warming too. Have bio-hacked bacteria to help fix the soil and get all those nasty poisonous perchlorates broken down and release more O2 (and maybe N2) in the atmosphere. If we introduce these 10 years into our active warming phase, spread them all over the areas with higher native water already (ice caps), we’re on our way to having a breath of fresh air without masks 150+ years after they’re introduced. We can hack together the right combo with Mars-atmosphere simulators and start mass producing these for deployment along with the other stuff and have enough to spread over both ice caps in well under 30 years with enough money thrown at it.
But wait, there’s MORE! We didn’t just stop producing rockets when we started moving stuff from Earth and Venus! We kept producing more of these suckers so that we could start snagging water from comets and other (solar system relative to Mars) local sources. The more water we can get down to the surface, the faster and further our extremophile plants can spread and increase the speed we can produce O2 to more like around 50+ (80+ from present day) years (ballpark, with mask from still too much CO2). At first a large amount of the water will be held in the plants themselves, but over time (and if we continue building even more ships) we can start pulling hydrogen from the outer gas giants (Jupiter’s gravity is a bit too hefty for harvesting, Saturn is a stretch unless we go for REALLY big rockets) for reaction with the extra CO2 for additional water. Depending on the speed with which we are continuing to produce spaceships, we could be moving thousands of tons of condensed hydrogen to Mars with more ships produced and hauling as time goes on, each round trip taking about 1+1/2 - 2 years depending on orbits. Hydrogen harvesting from gas giants directly could cut 20 or more years from balancing out the atmosphere and creating seas.
How could we streamline getting stuff down to the surface and keep our spaceships going as fast as we can? Space Elevators™! The idea that has been frustrating engineers for half a century would be much easier with the 40% gravity of Mars. High quality carbon nanotubes could handle the job without too much problem, and you could catch a potato-moon for ballast on the other end after tying some of our fun VASIMR engines to it and moving it out to geostationary orbit.
Now, I know what some of you might be thinking: Aren’t we just going to lose this nice atmosphere from no planetary magnetic field after building it up? Ever heard of MRI machines? Producing magnetic fields isn’t exactly rocket science, and the Earth needs to be doing more than just making SF6, LiAlH4, Mars-plants and rockets. Existing superconductors can produce righteous magnetic fields given enough power (for power, see above), or we could even go with passive neodymium magnets to create an Earthlike magnetic field. All it would take is pretty much all the production of neodymium magnets for the next 75 or so years to produce enough to circle the planet a few times with then distribute them in arcs oriented North-South in orbit around the equator. Sorry if you want some headphones or speakers in the meantime.
So there you have it. When money is no object, Mars is terraformed and atmosphere-stabilized using only present-day and very-near-future tech in under 100 years. Just think how much faster and more efficiently we can do this stuff if we’re still advancing science in the mean time?
Bumped.
Elon Musk favors dropping H-bombs: http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear-bomb-colbert-feat/index.html
Well he said bomb the poles specifically. Have them detonate above the surface and flash release the CO[sub]2[/sub] and water into the atmosphere. You’d need a lot though. If 1 MT bomb could clear out a 10km radius circle you’d need over 2000 to release the northern polar cap.
Since you’re working over a base of ice you could minimize the dust release which would counter the hoped for heating.
Terraforming the whole surface would be a waste of money. Just send a large, nuclear-powered digging machine to dig deep tunnels, and humans can live underground.
Since the thread has been bumped…
There are several problems with even attempting to terraform Mars. The biggest - literally - is that Mars isn’t big enough. It doesn’t have sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere. Fortunately, cost is no object so we can go to the Asteroid belt, the Centaurs and the Kuiper Belt, and use those to bring it up to an Earth-like mass. This also solves the problem of internal heat - which is needed to generate a magnetic field - because the planet will be completely melted by all those asteroid strikes. We also need a moon with which to stabilise the planet: Triton should do, so let’s move it. Now all you have to do is wait until the surface cools sufficiently.
Oh… you wanted it yesterday?
Terraforming has the potential to be fairly easy and self-directing if you set it up right. As the most favorable example: the earth of 4 billion years ago was not habitable to humans, but introducing a simple petri dish with a few key microbes would be sufficient to make it habitable after sufficient time, with no more work on our part.
Mars is probably never going to be that simple because it has more problems to overcome than pre-life Earth, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to explore what we could/might do.
I don’t think it’s a matter of needing a backup planet, either. If we could make Mars habitable, you’d essentially double the amount of habitable real estate in the solar system. Even if we didn’t need it for survival, people are pretty happy to find uses for extra land.
Who is paying for the gas?
That is going to max out my Shell card. :dubious:
Speaking of Musk, here’s a very good (and very long - but worth reading) article about his plans for SpaceX and Mars colonisation.
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
In addition to the obvious problems of attempting to ‘terraform’ the surface of Mars to a habitable condition, i.e. the distance from the Sun, the lack of available oxygen or surface water, the low gravity, lack of a magnetosphere, et cetera, there is one very serious problem with trying to establish plant or cyanobacteria life on Mars sufficient to develop and sustain a habitable oxygen atmosphere: the lack of nitrates in the soil (only trace amounts of nitric oxides have been found) or nitric oxides in the already tenuous atmosphere (diatomic nitrogen comprises less than 2% of the atmosphere by mole fraction; less than argon). Nitrates are critical to any form of life in both providing nitrogen (which provides the nitrogenous base for amino acids and glues together nucleotide sequences to form complex nucleic acids) and delivering other biologically critical metals and metallic compounds formed form phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. Although life (our type of life, at least) is typically referred to as “carbon-based”, nitrogen is equally critical to all life as we know it. In order to “seed” microbial life on Mars to prepared for one day supporting terrestrial multicellular (plant and animal) life, we would literally have to cover the surface of the planet with many billions of tons of nitrates or biologically available nitrogenous compounds, e.g. ammonia, hydrazine, in order to be able to sustain any kind of life processes.
The other thing to consider is that even if we could produce an oxygenic atmosphere, the low surface gravity of Mars (0.38 g) would translate into a lower atmospheric pressure. We require a minimum partial pressure of oxygen of 2.4 psi to sustain human respiration; at 5.6 psi surface pressure that would be a 42% oxygen/58% nitrogen atmosphere by volume. Such an atmosphere would thus be prone to high flammability and oxidation.
There is also the issue of long term physiological response of the human body in a low gravity field. We have essentially no data or experience on adult physiology in low gravity environments but what we’ve learned from Skylab, Mir, and the International Space Station is that the human physiological response to freefall conditions is significantly detrimental even for moderate durations of a few months. We have zero information on developmental physiology (i.e. childhood development) or adaptation or rehabilitation in low gravity fields except for some very small scale and short duration experiments on plants and rodents. We may well find that human adaptation to low gravity creates serious long term medical issues, and given that there is no way to increase gravity on the surface of Mars, it may pose a limitation for long term habitation.
There is really no reason or need to terraform Mars, and if there turns out to be archaic or (unlikely) extant life on Mars, terraforming would be destroying that evidence and habitat. If we actually had the technology, command of energy, and material resources to terraform the surface of Mars (which is many orders of magnitude more difficult than casually estimated by posters in this discussion or Mr. Musk) it would be far easier to build solar orbiting habitats of space-sourced materials (water ice, silica, graphite fiber) which could be spun for simulated gravity up to Earth level acceleration and would provide thermodynamic regulation with only modest ongoing maintenance and consumable requirements.
Stranger
No, no, we are planning for the future. When the sun has grown to a red giant and absorbed the earth. Actually, Mars may not be far enough away. Move Venus into the asteroid belt for a couple billion years to clear the belt.
To be honest, the only reason to be on Mars will to maybe have a research station or maybe a mining colony so their really is no need for large scale terraforming. Really all you’ll need are some cities. People can walk around on the surface in pressure suits.