On 24/10/2013 4:33 AM, Luke Nichols wrote:
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We will eventually have the technology to make Mars a more habitable
planet — but for whom? Earthlings, or Martians?

I don't think so, I think Mars is a dead-end total loser cause. It's not
big enough to retain its atmosphere, and it has no magnetic field to
prevent damage to its atmosphere. So two strikes against it. We're only
excited by it because it's so relatively nearby, but we've not seen any
other planets that may be better candidates within our own solar system,
so we're just by default excited by it. At best, you can get Mars bases
under a dome, but that necessarily limits the size of your cities and
population, if you have to fit them under a dome. I think at best, we
can look at inhabiting Mars like we look at inhabiting Antarctica: just
a scientific outpost mission, not real habitation.

Terraforming sounds great philosophically, but engineering a
terraforming mission is going to be impossible on Mars. You need to have
some basic building blocks on the planet to terraform with. Let's say a
proper magnetic field to start with. How do you propose to restart the
magnetic field of Mars? Its core has cooled to the point where there's
no more dynamo action to create a magnetic field.

I think real terraforming won't take place until we're an interstellar
species. And we find an exoplanet with at least a basic magnetic field,
and water (or ice) and land on the surface. Using these building blocks
we can transform that atmosphere.

By definition, Mars terraforming would make it more Earth-like.
Alternatively, Mars renovation would seek to resuscitate any native
life that might have survived in environmental niches for billions of
years. Astrobiologist Chris McKay, of NASA’s Ames Research Center,
favors a non-geocentric term: planetary ecosynthesis, for
establishing a robust biosphere on a planet’s surface.

Chris McKay is always excited about Mars terraforming, because that's
his job at NASA, and that's what he gets paid for. If he was honest
about it, he'd say it's a dead end too.

Before we start debating terraforming vs. "renovating", maybe we should
actually think about whether we want to be there for any particular
reason? As I mentioned, we got an entire continent here on Earth,
Antarctica, which has an area of 1.3x Canada, or 0.75x Russia. But much
like Russia or Canada, most of that land is unoccupied because it's too
cold. The entire surface area of Mars is only approximately 10x that of
Antarctica.

Mars: 1.4×10^8 km^2 (square kilometers)
Russia: 1.70752×10^7 km^2
Antarctica: 1.321×10^7 km^2
Canada: 9.98467×10^6 km^2

Yousuf Khan