What conditions would be necessary for plant life to grow essentially untended on Mars?
I would think what would be needed is water, mainly. Suppose massive amounts of water were introduced to the atmosphere/surface. This in itself changes the atmosphere as well, assuming it’s feasible.
Are there any species that would survive in the amount of light available? Are radiation exposure and temperature extremes too much to bear?
Are CO[sub]2[/sub] levels in the atmosphere too high, or is the thinness of the gasses a bigger problem?
If assistance is needed (like temporary greenhouses), how long before a livable atmosphere (for the plants) is formed, or would it ever?
I dont think anything could really survive the amount of radiation from the sun that Mars gets, at least not typical plants. I’d suspect they’d have to be bio engineered to withstand the UV radiation. Alpine plants get probably the highest amount of radiation of any, but they tend to be small, and slow growing. A lot of mechanisms to cope with radiation (as do certain plants from drier regions), like silvery hairs on leaves to reflect radiation.
Anywhoo…i think nitrogen is lacking in martian soil. Nitrogen is what builds new parts to the plant. Generally nitrogen deficiency in plants shows up as yellowed leaves, and slowed growth. If mars is lacking in zinc, plants would show what’s called little leaf syndrome (it apparently is a malady of palms) where the leaves start to become pregressively smaller as the disease worsens.
Some very hardy Antarctic lichens could probably survive there right now. I say probably, but it would be touch and go. The main obstacle wouldn’t be lack of water (there’s water vapor in the atmosphere), but the extreme cold, which is often like the South Pole on a bad day.
There’s plenty of light. Mars is farther from the Sun, but there’s less atmosphere to block its rays. There’s plenty of light for growing plants up there.
Too high? No, certainly not; CO[sub]2[/sub] is what plants breathe. In fact, to light off the runaway greenhouse effect and grow ever lusher, greener plants, we’d want to increase the CO[sub]2[/sub] levels substantially.
If every suggested mechanism were employed (blackening the polar caps, building hydrocarbon factories) to warm Mars and thicken its atmosphere, it’s thought the fourth rock could have a warm, 2 bar (twice the thickness of Earth’s sea level atmosphere) CO[sub]2[/sub] atmosphere within 60 years. The plants would be happy, our capillaries wouldn’t burst from low pressure, we could go outside in shirtsleeves without suffering frostbite. The only disadvantage would be we’d have to wear masks for breathing and our cats’n’dogs’n’livestock would have to stay inside the domes.
As long as we’re discussing this, I have a few question that someone here may be able to answer:
I heard that the lack of a noteworthy magnetic field would be a major hurdle in any terraforming process on Mars. Supposedly, some kinds of solar radiation would destroy and atmosphere of a planet with no magnetic field. Is there any truth to this?
If we wanted to heat up Mars quickly, would nuking the icecaps be an option? After all, the U.S. has more nukes than it really needs, and nukes are very good at releasing massive quantities of energy very quickly. Would it be feasable to transport some of the american warheads to Mars for this purpose? Would lingering radiation be an issue?
This is oversimplified, plants take in CO2 and convert it to O2 during part of the day and breath O2 and release CO2 during the other part (night). Plants need O2 but they take in more CO2 then O2
Brute force terraforming. Hopefully, we devise something more elegant. Genetically engineered plants for example*. Transporting the nukes would be feasible, but expensive. I think lingering radiation would be present (there is still lingering radiation in Earth’s atmosphere from all the past nuke tests here) but I don’t know if it would be at a dangerous level or not.
Something that would warm the surface, go to work on the atmosphere, and improve soil conditions. It would just be slow. But hopefully, we’re all still good here on Earth for at least the next 1,000 years.
Another problem I’ll just mention. The Viking lander (1970s) found that the Martian soil oxidizes (breaks down) organic material. We’d need to send tough plants. Of course, the lander only examined one location. Maybe there are better spots to start terraforming (such as the ice caps to get the planet wetter again).
Smashing Europa into Mars would not be a good idea. Europa is one of the more massive bodies in the solar system (in the top 20 at least) and it’s not made of ice: it’s a rocky planetoid covered in ice. It would make a mess of Mars if you crashed it into it. Just look at Hellas and Argyre on any map of Mars, then multiply the scale to see what would happen.
Besides which, Europa is a unique, interesting world in its own right and we shouldn’t destroy things that are unique and interesting.
It has been seriously proposed that comets (which are mostly water ice) could be redirected into shallow entry trajectories to hydrate Mars’s atmosphere. I can see this being useful in later decades of the terraforming process, but in the early days using Mars’s own inventory of water and CO[sub]2[/sub] seems more practical to me.
Phobos, we’ve gotta stop meeting like this. Have there been any threads about Mars where we haven’t both come out to play?
Sure, you can get CO[sub]2[/sub], O[sub]2[/sub], and other gases generated on Mars, but they’d all bleed away into space. The real problem is that Mars lacks the gravity to hold an atmosphere dense enough to be Earth-like.
There’s just one big problem with any effort to terraform Mars.
Oh, what’s that, you want to know what the problem is? Unfortunately, I don’t know. You see, Mars once did have a thicker atmosphere than it does today, as evidenced by all the water-shaped landforms. Given its mass and distance from the Sun, it should be able to support a stable atmosphere as thick as Earth’s current one (Earth’s could be a lot thicker, and it’s unknown exactly why it isn’t). Then, though, at some point in Mars’ history, something happened, and the atmosphere became a lot thinner. We don’t know what happened, so we have no way of knowing if it could ever happen again, and wouldn’t it be a bummer if you had a nice, thriving colony of a few billion people, and all of the air suddenly disappeared?
By the way, we humans are not, as Max the Immortal claims, good at releasing large amounts of energy quickly. A good-sized nuclear bomb produces what, about 10[sup]16[/sup] Joules? The ice caps would hardly even notice that.
According to http://www.msnbc.com/news/555414.asp, we are not quite so sure any more that those big ocean-basin-looking flatlands on Mars’s northern hemisphere really are ocean basins. They may be simple volcanic formations.
True, we have other markings on the surface of Mars that look like there was once running water there, but these would not require nearly as much air pressure as a stable liquid water ocean would. The water would only need to remain liquid for a short time as it rushed downstream and then boiled away under the low Martian air-pressure. Furthermore, since the water would have been continuously bubbling into a gas as it flowed, the bubbles would have scoured the landscape a lot more thoroughly than a flood would here on Earth – a much smaller amount of water would be needed to gouge out a flood-basin on Mars to the same depth as a flood basin on Earth.
I’m guessing it happened when Venus, ejected from Jupiter, rocketed past and vacuumed up most of it to convert into manna to rain down on one of its extreme low-orbit passes splitting the Red Sea.
No, wait, I’m not guessing that. I get those confused.
Out of more serious curiosity, do you have some links as to the atmospheres-should-be-thicker bit? Never heard of that before, and I dig running across such things.
