Could we terraform Mars?

reply to post by earthdude


Did someone sneeze on a rover?

reply to post by Kandinsky


Author by the name of Kim Stanley, a 'hard' science fiction writer, has already produced a trilogy on this....first title, "Red Mars", second is "Green Mars", last is "Blue Mars".

I read all three some years ago.

Rovers, though, are adding more info to our understanding of Mars, and her (or is it 'his') larger geological (aresological??) life, and what has caused it to be a "dead" planet, even though it exists, if on the fringe, but close to the "sweet zone" in terms of distance from the Sun.

Recent documentary concerning OUR Moon, and its stablizing influence on our Earth's rotation shed some light....Mars' axis has, over hundreds of millions of years, been wildly precessing. Due to a lack of a large satellite, to stabilize.

Anyone who has played with a gyroscope can see the effects....even the various pulls, gravitational effects of Jupiter, can wreak havoc on the inner planets.

Point is, over millions of years, Mars has had an unstable axis of rotation, and thus devastating effects on any ecosystem that may have developed, in times past.

Combined with his (her?) lack of a strong magnetic field, due to its lack of a molten iron core, as Earth has, and the cosmic radiation is a factor as well, to make life difficult on the surface (unless it can evolve, given sufficient time, to evolve and adapt).

reply to post by weedwhacker


Sub terrainian life is also not out of the question.

This however doesn't make us able to terraform Mars !

It would be highly probable it would be just another venture ending up in faillure, realising they again acted before they thought it trough.
Learning a bunch of new stuf on the way.

I think it's clear that the first step we would need to take would be to establish a powerful magnetosphere. Without it, not only would any forms of life be subjected to intolerable amounts of radiation, but any atmosphere that we could built up would slowly be blown out of gravitational pull, as is currently happening with Mars' remnants.

How best to restart the core then?

Well, initially I thought this could be a simple process of creating a nuclear fusion chain reaction within the core, in a manner being experimented with in some places on Earth. Basically, massive laser energy gets 'light' elements to fuse, giving off masses of energy.

But unfortunately, as it turns out, this does not really happen to heavy elements as iron, which I'm sure we'd find at the center of mars. Perhaps there is no 'ignition' cure for this problem, and may take persistent heating from lasers, rather than fusion.

If we could drill shafts to the core, which would be easier than on Earth as it is geologically dead, we could build a massive array of nuclear powered laser beam arrays geometrically positioned around the surface of the globe aimed inward, melting the core. This of course would take decades, perhaps even hundreds of years and require a great deal of manned maintenance. Not too easy.

My other idea is a little wild, perhaps pretty dangerous for our own planet, but we could strategically drag Mars toward the Sun, just close enough to melt the thing over, then place it back out behind Earth. If we throw it in just right it right we might be able to sling shot it back into position again.

An atmosphere (and pleasant weather)

As for establishing an atmosphere once we've got a magnetosphere, I would suggest doing something wild like dragging in a small moon from Saturn, such as Phobos, or some other ice moon, and crashing it into Mars. Not only would we deliver a massive quantity of water, but the explosion would certainly kick up a lot of dust, perhaps just enough to clog up the atmosphere, and warm it up enough to get liquid water and rain going. From then on out we just throw down some algae and mycelium and boom! we have planet awesome.


edit: Aaah, I forgot to add, that the mass of the small moon might also ammend our gravity problem.

[edit on 24-2-2010 by The_Modulus]

Well considering earths main greenhouse gas and temperature keeper is water vapour.... maybe some Huge steam factories could be good... but the temperatue outside would probably freeze the water vapour once its released?