Should We Remake Mars in Earth's Image?

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We will eventually have the technology to make Mars a more habitable planet — but for whom? Earthlings, or Martians?

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.

PHOTOS: What We Think Martians Look Like

Mars is certainly a prize for colonization. The Red Planet has as much surface area as all of Earth’s continents combined, making it the focus of several grassroots space pioneering groups.

But this presents a conundrum. McKay asks if a biologically rich and diverse Mars is more valuable than largely preserving the beautiful, but seemingly dead, world we are exploring today.

Regardless of the tenants, the first task at hand is to change the Martian atmosphere to make the Red Planet a warmer and wetter world. Mars’ large flood features indicate there is a lot of water locked in the planet; there was likely even an ocean 4 billion years ago. The world first needs to be thawed out.

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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

On a sunny day (Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:06:20 -0400) it happened Yousuf Khan
wrote in :

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

'terra forming' may be a nono for other reasons.
I expect humans to change when they move to a planet with a different climate and especially different gravity.
Their needs will become different.
And that may happen in just a few generations.

The other thing about living on a planet without an atmosphere is that you want to spread out your colonies\
to improve the chances of survival because of stones raining from heaven so to speak.
So that makes 'big cities' a nono.

We have the technology to live on planets like mars, say nuclear, we only need to shoot or hang all the green idiots,
so we can do decent space travel with nuclear propulsion.

When the need arises (maybe CERN will make a black hole and swallow all of earth LOL),
then we may have to go further out, say mars, and the the hanging of the greens will happen just like the French revolution
happened, for the species to survive, or simply leave the greens behind ;-)


And there are the small satellites, like for example IO, it seems to have active volcanism, Europa seems to have water.
A few generations living in very low gravity may create a totally different 'human'.

But hey, lets go, for the sake of to go when no man has gone before, sky is the limit.

On 25/10/2013 9:40 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:06:20 -0400) it happened Yousuf Khan
wrote in :

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

'terra forming' may be a nono for other reasons.
I expect humans to change when they move to a planet with a different climate and especially different gravity.
Their needs will become different.
And that may happen in just a few generations.

Yes, they'll re-adapt to a lower gravity, for example. Those are
relatively minor changes, but I can't see humans switching from
breathing oxygen, to CO2 or methane for example.

The other thing about living on a planet without an atmosphere is that you want to spread out your colonies\
to improve the chances of survival because of stones raining from heaven so to speak.
So that makes 'big cities' a nono.

Or put the cities underground. I'm actually pretty certain that if Mars
get inhabited, then we're going underground to do it. Only way to
survive the radiation and low pressure atmosphere.

We have the technology to live on planets like mars, say nuclear, we only need to shoot or hang all the green idiots,
so we can do decent space travel with nuclear propulsion.

Getting the power with nuclear won't be a big problem, on Mars. They'll
be given some seed uranium from Earth, and then they can go mine the
rest from Mars itself. If they're underground anyways, then they have
the equipment to mine with.

Still this is all a long way from terraforming Mars. It's just not going
to happen, Mars is our next Antarctica, not our next Americas.

And there are the small satellites, like for example IO, it seems to have active volcanism, Europa seems to have water.
A few generations living in very low gravity may create a totally different 'human'.

But hey, lets go, for the sake of to go when no man has gone before, sky is the limit.

The Jovian or Saturnian satellites do seem to have more potential than
Mars as far as I'm concerned, but only once the Sun has entered its red
giant phase. It'll get warmer on those moons by then, and there will be
another billion years of stability by the Sun in its helium burning
phase. But 1 billion years is a small time frame compared to the Sun's
main sequence stability of 10 billion years, evolution on those moons
will have to go much faster to support us, or we're going to have
artificially interfere in their evolutionary processes. We'll definitely
have to leave the Solar System at some point. We'll be using those moons
as stopovers rather than full-time homes.

Yousuf Khan