Cool article but I think they need a huge NASA like chamber for emulating Mars surfaces conditions, with air, pressure, radiation, and soil conditions. Getting anything, even bacteria to live in those emulated conditions would be huge news.
Man, that title. They grew everything in sand. Regolith is filled with concentrated salts, and there's no liquid water that we know of. At best, this experiment shows that if your inedible moss in a flower pot is briefly exposed to actual Martian conditions, it might survive when you bring it back inside.
Now show me that moss growing in perchlorate-salted soil at 6 mbar oxygen-free CO2, say, at Mars equator, and you might have a story.
So, which locations on Mars' surface are the most hospitable for this moss? (considering radiation, temperature and water levels)
Also, is a highly irradiated monoculture going to be a stable O2 producer, or is the species going to experience some mutated spinoffs?
Probably a simpler way would be to just start-the-reactor.
Probably the bottom of the valley marineres, where the air pressure is higher and there's less wind erosion.
I had dessert moss in a fancy pants restaurant once. Once.
Theorists predict that a particular moss can survive on Mars. Scientists await the experimental opportunity to test that prediction.
We'll probably fuck up our own planet badly enough that we'll never actually get the chance to try terraforming Mars
I'd rather beta test on Mars before we go down the path of unintended consequences on Earth.
I heard sometime interesting regarding that recently, if we have the ability to terraform Mars, we'll have the ability to hear on earth. So why not just fix it here where it's millions of times easier than doing it on Mars.
The solution for Earth isn't going to be some pie-in-the-sky terraforming (which, I'd like to note, means "to make Earth-like") project, but changing our psychotic economic system that depends on infinite growth and consistently elevates the worst of us into positions of power.
That's why I think we'll never manage to unfuck ourselves. There's just way too much power invested in keeping things the way they are
We won’t have the ability to terraform Mars until we try to terraform Mars.
Perhaps Mars’s greatest contribution to our civilization wont be that it hosts cities or future life, but rather simply that it gave us a place to experiment so we could test things once before implementing them here.
So why not just fix it here where it's millions of times easier than doing it on Mars
¿Por qué no los dos?
Also, I'm not entirely convinced that the problems are analogous. Mars needs to be warmed up, Earth needs to be cooled down. I think a more appropriate challenge would be terragorming Venus.
I have a feeling we'll learn plenty of applicable lessons from one with the other.
If we can teraform Venus we can teraform the galaxy. The planet is inhospitable in every single way. We can't even land spacecraft that last very long. If materials don't melt from the heat and disintegrate from the atmosphere, then the volcanos ought to do the trick.
It's also harder to get to Venus than it is Mars.
Kurzgesagt did a video on the topic. We just build a planet-sized sunshade to freeze the atmosphere, launch the excess CO2 into space, and import water from the ice moons of the gas giants. Simple, really.
We just build a planet-sized sunshade to freeze the atmosphere
Cost, 100 to 1000 trillion. We can barely fund NASA
Every argument I ever hear against thinking about things in the cool space future boils down to "we couldn't do it this financial quarter so it'll never be possible at all".
I like to think about the spacefaring AI (or cyborgs, if we're lucky) that will inevitably do this stuff in our stead, assuming we don't strangle them in the cradle.
Why not both?
Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It's at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it's still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.
Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.
ancient alien crazy hair guy appears
Okay but what if we lived in the moon
Terraforming Mars will be a first step to terraforming Earth. We’ll attempt to create a new biosphere and that will help us understand how ours works.
The tech needed to terraform mars is thousands of years away. There isn't enough water or O2 on Mars to terraform it. As well as a whole host of other issues that we currently have no idea how to fix. (The lack of a magnetosphere is a huge one)
I think terraforming Mars won't ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.
We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).
Right so we give it a magnetosphere.
That's gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars' dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don't even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.
To get back an earth like dynamo, we'd need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars' insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.
I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars' magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.
Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
Rather than restarting Mars's internal magnetic field, could we build a solar or nuclear powered artificial magnetic field?
Nah man what we need is a solar wind-powered artificial magnetic field. Make the problem pay for its own solution.
Planets are kind of big, that'd require lots of power in a very large area.
We'd probably be able to get more done by putting a few sattelites between Mars and the sun and generating the necessary repelling field there. Still requires a huge amount of energy, but doesn't require it to also be distributed around a planet.
I definitely don't agree with that take.
First of all, "terraforming" means "to make Earth-like"; climate mitigation is one thing, but if we let things here get bad enough that we have to start thinking about terraforming Terra, we've pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch at that point. Ending up with an Earth that is no longer Earth-like would mean that things have gone sideways so badly that I doubt we'd have the industrial capacity or resources to deal with it.
Second, terraforming Mars involves a vastly different process than unfucking our climate and ecosystems. For example, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which on top of being thin is mostly CO^2^ and doesn't have more than trace amounts of oxygen. There's also no magnetosphere to speak of because its "core dynamo" essentially died when its core cooled down and plate tectonics etc stopped being a thing, meaning that any atmosphere you do manage to generate is continuously getting blasted away by radiation.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we've pumped too much energy into the climate system and we'd have to somehow get it "out" again.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we've pumped too much energy into the climate system and we'd have to somehow get it "out" again.
So because one problem is too much X, and the other problem is too little X, those are distinct problems that don’t inform one another?
now they just need a radiation resistant strain and they're set
The strain is already radiation resistant (radiation was observed to promote growth). We still need something that actually grows in Mars' atmosphere rather than something that doesn't die, but not dying is a good start.
may help establish life on the red plane
We should... ya know, make sure there is no life there first. Even a small planet is a big place, and we've looked in very few places. Also even if there is no life there's still a lot Mars could tell us about what a pre-biotic Earth was like.
I just think we need to examine the only other terrestrial planet in the system that won't light you on fire fairly thoroughly before trying to terraform it into a Wish-dot-com version of Earth.
We’re going to have a very tight window for gathering pristine samples of pre-colonized Mars.
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