/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5769576]

Assuming ideal conditions, how long would it take to terraform mars to the point where humans could survive outdoors without a spacesuit?

[Anonymous No.5769580]

>>5769576
There's no such thing as "terraforming". And even if that was possible, the lack of magnetosphere in Mars would be deadly to us, since that, to make a magnetoshpere, you have to transform Mars' core, and you can only do that by severing the planet in half.

[Anonymous No.5769582]

>>5769580
What if we built a ship out of unobtainium, drilled to the core of Mars, and restarted it with nuclear bombs?

[Anonymous No.5769584]

>>5769580

Why not put solar-powered electromagnets on the surface of Mars to help create the necessary magnetic field to direct any harmful radiation away?

[Anonymous No.5769585]

even if the atmosphere was somehow like earth's, it would just get blown off into space due to no magnetic feild

[Anonymous No.5769588]

>>5769584
It would be very weak, unable to protect us from the flares of a solar storm.

[Anonymous No.5769614]

>>5769576
Increasing atmospheric pressure on the planet to a sufficient level that you could get away with wearing a thermally insulated suit and a breathing apparatus instead of a fully-pressurized suit.
~100 years

Increasing mean surface temperature to a sufficient level that you could get away with just the breathing apparatus.
~100 years

A fully breathable atmosphere like Earth's
~1000 years.


The first two problems with Mars' climate (lack of atmosphere, too cold) aren't hard to solve... relatively speaking. Seed the planet with dark algae and lichens engineered to survive in the Martian environment and you'll darken the planet's albedo enough to start increasing temperatures and releasing CO2 to trigger a greenhouse effect. Once the majority of CO2 is released you'll have a surface pressure on par with very high altitudes on Earth.

The big problem is the lack of a buffer gas, a nice neutral molecule like Nitrogen or Argon to make up the majority of the air. Mars doesn't have one and it doesn't really have any sources that could produce any in sufficient quantities. You'd have to import it from other sources - comets, other moons or planets... and that kind of effort is centuries beyond what we're capable of doing.


In all likelihood colonization of Mars will be limited (at least for the first few centuries) to pressurized habitats either underground or built into large canyons and craters.

[Anonymous No.5769611]

>>5769585
Which is why we should just cover mars in a inflatable cover and blow it up like a balloon. Gases are trapped, radiation is filtered, people can run around outside naked.

[Anonymous No.5769617]

>>5769611
But we can't never use the sun to dry our clothes, would be unnatural... and that other thing that forbids us to enter and leave the planet...

[Anonymous No.5769628]

>>5769588
Do the math before assuming shit like this.
You could even power the magnet with a dedicated nuclear plant or two.

[Anonymous No.5769636]

>>5769576
fuck yeah space engine

[Anonymous No.5769643]

>>5769585
Which would take a very long time.

[Anonymous No.5769642]

>>5769580
>lack of magnetosphere on mars would be deadly to us

Wouldn't there be, you know, a whole lot of atmosphere in the way? Sure it'd eventually photodisssocate away, but in the meantime you've got an assload of air shielding you.

[Anonymous No.5769648]

>>5769628
>You could even power the magnet with a dedicated nuclear plant or two.
Energy to power a magnetic field scales like
<span class="math">U = \int \int \int \frac{B^2}{2\mu_0} dV[/spoiler]

Earth's magnetic field is about half a gauss so with an object the size of Mars that works out to something like 300 petawatts.

Typical capacity of a current gen nuclear plant is like a hundred thousandth of that.

[Anonymous No.5769650]

>>5769648
>with an object the size of Mars
nigga please
we're talking about shielding a small colony here, not the whole planet

[Anonymous No.5769651]

>>5769648
You're talking about wats, but the important measure in this is the ampère.

[Anonymous No.5769652]

>>5769584
You'd need a massive amount of ultra high powered ones, and even then you could probably only cover a small colony.
That gives me an interesting idea. A dome-based civilization might be possible.

[Anonymous No.5769653]

>>5769652
Yah. It's relatively easy to get Mars's temperature and pressure up to livable levels, but the bit that takes a long time and a lot of resources is getting the atmospheric composition and the magnetic field to respectable levels. You could globally fix the big parameters like pressure and temperature- photodissocation will eventually kill the atmosphere again unless you shield the whole planet, but it'll take so long that it doesn't really matter on human timescales- and then just magnetically shield the colonies and put oxygen-filled domes over them. They don't even have to be pressurized domes, just oxygenated.

[Anonymous No.5769655]

Three words:

Im. Fucking. Possible.

[Anonymous No.5769659]

>>5769652
Use this as a soundtrack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bcRCCg01I

[Anonymous No.5769660]

>>5769576
Without a spacesuit? Well, that depends on what you mean by "spacesuit."

Do you mean one of the big bulky pressurized Apollo-style suits? Given ideal conditions, all you'd need is to raise Mars's temperature by a few degrees and enough of the caps would sublimate to the point where all you'd need is a breathing apparatus and some goggles. It'd be a little easier than that, because once a little big sublimated, you'd get more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate forcing would start to occur. Ideal case- loads of space infrastructure, established bases on Phobos and Deimos and asteroids- maybe 50-100 years.

Getting a breathable atmosphere is really hard, though. You need a lot of bulky buffer gas, like nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere. You'd have to import absurd amounts of it, and that'd take a long time.

[Anonymous No.5769684]

God fucking dammit Venus, all you had to do was have a magnetic field. Why must you be such a slow rotating piece of shit? Now we are stuck with Mars.

[Anonymous No.5769692]

What's the reason Mars doesn't have an atmosphere while Venus has one, again? Or it it's just because of the volcanism, why did Mars stop being active?

[Anonymous No.5769695]

>>5769692
It's that Mars has no magnetic field and low gravity. This means that solar radiation can just slowly blast off Mars's atmosphere. Doesn't happen on Earth because the magnetosphere blocks a lot of the nasty stuff.

[Anonymous No.5769701]

>>5769684
Even if Venus had a magnetic field, it'd still be a shittier place than Mars to live. All that sulfuric acid, runaway greenhouse, stupidly thick atmosphere, and high winds are still problematic.

[Anonymous No.5769708]

>>5769695
Venus doesn't have one either and its atmosphere doesn't get blasted away.

[Anonymous No.5769719]

>>5769708
Venus has more gravity, and its atmospheric components are both heavier and more resistant to photodissocation.

[Anonymous No.5769753]

Define "outdoors."
Define "spacesuit."

With a serious effort and maybe 20 years, you might be able to dig a deep enough hole that the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of it would be high enough to survive with just an oxygen mask.

[Anonymous No.5769755]

>>5769753
Define "define".

[Anonymous No.5769775]

Still waiting for Self replicating robots that can work to autonomously build us an underground martian colony that we can just go to and live easily.
>3d printer with auto assembly line
>'few solar panels
>martian colony in a couple decades

[Anonymous No.5769779]

>>5769580
You could create an artificial one with superconductors around the equator.
Costly but possible.

[Anonymous No.5769783]

>>5769779
Is it even necessary? How much shielding would a thick atmosphere itself provide from solar radiation?

[Anonymous No.5769818]

>>5769708
>>5769719
I don't even remember what the suggestion was, but I've heard some people say that if we could get some kind of chemical scrubber up into the Venus atmosphere and reverse the greenhouse effect, we could do away with all the sulfuric acid and super hot storms.

Wouldn't be livable, but a cool large-scale experiment nonetheless

[Anonymous No.5769832]

>>5769783
The shielding is to stop the atmosphere from being ripped away in the first place.

[Anonymous No.5769843]

Around 100 years is a good bet
Setting up orbital mirrors, dropping down some microbes and perhaps a small import of gass would solve both the vacum and cold that prevents us from using mountain gear on mars.
As others have pointed out, the largest hurdle is to import the massive amount of gas like nitrogen to increase the preasure close to 1 bar.

[Anonymous No.5769873]

>>5769755

definitive

can you define that?

[Anonymous No.5770338]

Ok, here's another question.

Suppose we abandon the idea of living outside without a spacesuit, and confine human life to either domed colonies or underground colonies.

How long would it take to terraform mars to the point where crops could be grown on the surface? Would that be significantly easier?

[Anonymous No.5770344]

>>5770338
depends on the crop. those ancient combinations of algae and mold or something which i cant remember but sound like lich can already grow there.

[Anonymous No.5770347]

>>5770338
One way of creating an atmosphere that could be sustainable to plants is nuking it to create an atmosphere of co2

[Anonymous No.5770349]

>>5770344

Anything that can be harvested for food.

[Anonymous No.5770353]

>>5770338

Is lichen edible?

[Anonymous No.5770355]

>>5770353
im sure we can engineer them to be. or at least to be able to be used in some process to make some kind of edible jelly.

[Anonymous No.5770358]

>>5770353
>Lichens are eaten by many different cultures across the world. Although some lichens are only eaten in times of famine, others are a staple food or even a delicacy. Two obstacles are often encountered when eating lichens: lichen polysaccharides are generally indigestible to humans, and lichens usually contain mildly toxic secondary compounds that should be removed before eating. Very few lichens are poisonous, but those high in vulpinic acid or usnic acid are toxic.[55] Most poisonous lichens are yellow.

In the past Iceland moss (Cetraria islandica) was an important human food in northern Europe, and was cooked as a bread, porridge, pudding, soup, or salad. Wila (Bryoria fremontii) was an important food in parts of North America, where it was usually pitcooked. Northern peoples in North America and Siberia traditionally eat the partially digested reindeer lichen (Cladina spp.) after they remove it from the rumen of caribou or reindeer that have been killed. Rock tripe (Umbilicaria spp. and Lasalia spp.) is a lichen that has frequently been used as an emergency food in North America, and one species, Umbilicaria esculenta, is used in a variety of traditional Korean and Japanese foods.

wiki is your friend

[Anonymous No.5770425]

>>5769653
I'm talking if you could build a big enough dome you could maybe just create an entirely sustainable life within that (it would be difficult as all hell mind you). With periodic supply drops, tillable, fertile soil and some kind of water collection mechanism for crops to grow. The dome shape would be useful to let intense sandstorms and the like to pass over. Probably it should be partially or mostly placed underground.
From that point, once you have a small, stable population, they can manage the terraforming process outside of the bubble and maybe if they're lucky their grand-kids will be able to walk the surface without pressure suits.
There's so many things you'd have to do though, right now it's practically impossible.

[Anonymous No.5770429]

>>5770358
But you can't survive solely off that shit.
Perhaps we can genetic engineer it to have larger and more delicious fruiting bodies of some kind.

[Anonymous No.5770749]

If lichen can already survive on the martian surface, why haven't we already sent any there? We could start the terraformation process very easily right now just by sending a bunch of lichen up there.

[Anonymous No.5770766]

I'd rather see us make something of antarctica first before we try our hand at making another planet habitable.

Just to see if we actually have the "stuff" pull it off.

[Anonymous No.5770786]

It would be more economical to just live in space then to terraform mars.

[Anonymous No.5770804]

>>5770766
This. I always thought it'd be cool to start a new, permanent, self sustaining colony in Antarctica.

>>5769692
>why did Mars stop being active?
My understanding is that Mars cooled faster because it was smaller, and once its core stopped moving its magnetic field died, which allowed the atmosphere to be stripped away.

Although I can't believe nobody ITT has "floated" the idea of floating settlements in the atmosphere of Venus, high above the dangerous surface. There all you've got to worry about are some winds and the sulfuric acid. Fucking Carl Sagan talked about this, I think.

[Anonymous No.5770842]

>>5770804
>Although I can't believe nobody ITT has "floated" the idea of floating settlements in the atmosphere of Venus, high above the dangerous surface. There all you've got to worry about are some winds and the sulfuric acid. Fucking Carl Sagan talked about this, I think.

>mfw a real life cloud city

[Anonymous No.5770846]

I see things like space elevator spurred orbital habitats, and mega domes(spurred by new materials science) on the moon coming before anything on mars or venus.

[Anonymous No.5770849]

>>5769580
>no such thing as terraforming
>mfw

[Carbon No.5770864]

>>5769576
ITT
Faggots who don't understand anything we do on mars would be mostly underground.

[Carbon No.5770878]

>>5770347
How would nuclear weapons affect Mars? Not contesting you, just asking.

[Anonymous No.5771008]

>>5770766
That's a very good point; refine our tech within reach of rescue.
Maybe even play pretend; don't use any air but what you brought with you.

[Anonymous No.5771011]

>>5770749
There is the "red mars" crowd: leave Mars as it is at least till it is studied better.
I'm personally with you in the "Green Mars" party.

[Anonymous No.5771027]

>>5770846

There's nothing more to be accomplished on the moon, and it doesn't have the mineral resources for a self-sustaining colony.

[Anonymous No.5771141]

>>5771027
I thought the moon was a huge deposit of basic rocket fuel components that could be refined. So at least that could be possible on the moon. Obviously no terraform project but a valuable hub for refueling spacecraft nonetheless.

[Anonymous No.5771247]

>>5771141
Spacecraft refueling and in-space aluminum refining (for building rockets In Spess) are pretty much the only good reasons to have a lunar base, industrially speaking- acting as a jump-off point for industry and travel beyond Earth's orbit. (You'd also want to establish something like that on Phobos/Deimos before dealing with Mars). They're incredibly valuable reasons, but you're not likely to see domed moon cities.