Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests New models from recent Martian probe data suggest the fourth planet from the Sun once hosted a fluctuating desert environment with intermittent oases of water. Researchers led by the University of Chicago's Edwin Kite found evidence for carbon dioxide cycling on the Red Planet in data from Curiosity rover. The discovery of …
Did Musk actually claim that Mars could be made habitable? I thought he was talking about living in domes, or more likely underground. If he really has talked about terraforming Mars as if it is possible he's further detached from reality than I thought.
"Did Musk actually claim that Mars could be made habitable? I thought he was talking about living in domes, or more likely underground. If he really has talked about terraforming Mars as if it is possible he's further detached from reality than I thought."
Yes, he thought that nuking Mars from orbit would do it. This is why you will see him wearing a "Nuke Mars" shirt. It won't, BTW, and it didn't take a lot of study to show why. Thousands of nukes have been detonated on Earth and there's no discernible temperature rise from that. Nobody is going to hand Elon tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to try it out on Mars. Just warming up the planet wouldn't be helpful anyway. In all likelihood, it would un-freeze loads of volatiles that would be blow off the planet and reduce the amount of those inventories. I'm no "Red", but nuking Mars would also sterilize the places that are the best locations for searching for life or evidence of past life.
Domes are a fantasy as well. As Mars has lost its magnetic field, it's open to the solar wind and GCRs (Galactic Cosmic Radiation). Domes would not provide enough protection from that radiation for humans to remain healthy unless they were living underground.
If Elon really wants a refuge, he could spend far less money buying up swathes of Greenland and setting up a compound where he can have scores of wives and require others to give up their wives to him as well if he wants. Too cold? How about South America, Africa or someplace else where he'd be under the protection of sovereign government (Dictator) and mostly be untouchable. Many of those places don't seem to have an issue with having one's own standing army. That would give him free air, faster shipping of supplies and more sunlight as well as a magnetic field.
Yes, but most of them have been detonated underground.
Apparently, the official total is just over 2000. So, thousands being technically correct, it's not like Humanity has been blasting ten nukes per day for fifty years.
Still, over 500 atmospheric tests seems quite enough for me.
"Yes, but most of them have been detonated underground."
Fine, but that heat would still be added to the system. Blasting Mars for 50 years with 10 maximum yield devices per day isn't in the cards. There isn't an atmosphere to trap the heat. I'm still convinced that the Nitrogen problem is the biggest stumbling block.
I think the biggest problem is that even if you can find enough oxygen/nitrogen to get a tolerable atmospheric pressure for humans, the amount of CO2 required for enough of a greenhouse effect to keep the planet livable (above freezing enough of the year for stuff to grow) isn't survivable by humans - and well below the CO2 survivability threshold you can live but you will suffer serious effects of CO2 poisoning.
Its just not possible. We'd have better luck REMOVING the CO2 from Venus and making it habitable than making Mars habitable.
Musk needs to realize that a Mars colony is a folly, and the only place it makes sense to live off planet in the next few centuries is the Moon. If you have to live underground anyway you might as well do it where you're close enough rescue is possible if something goes wrong (so long as "wrong" isn't explosive decompression) and the lack of atmosphere can be an advantage since you don't have to worry about months long dust storms killing your solar output.
I think he (and Trump) just want to go to Mars because they can claim credit for the first. Heck even if we didn't end up going to Mars until 2045 and the mission that made it was started under another president, if Trump was somehow still alive he'd still try to take credit for it claim for it saying "nobody ever thought of sending humans to Mars until I proposed it!"
"We'd have better luck REMOVING the CO2 from Venus and making it habitable than making Mars habitable."
The really far out concepts would have people living in floating habitats where their can be a viable atmosphere. With Venus so hot, finding away of binding the carbon in the CO2 and not having it baked back out would be a challenge. The beauty of studies for that might lead to processes usable on Earth.
I'm all for stations being built in the moon. I believe there is enough research that can be done to justify the investment. If there are industrial processes that would be better to do on the moon, that would bring in private investment to expand and maybe one day take over operation of a lunar base with nations renting space for science agencies. Initially, there's needs to be the pure research and that's often State funded.
The biggest stumbling block is gravity.
Let's be veeeery science fictional for a second, and assume we had really large (think: Container Ship-Large), really cheap, really efficient super hyper mega rockets, to ferry mass around the solar system with, then bringing in organic nitrogen compounds in large quantities at least starts sounding kinda sorta doable.
But we cannot increase a planets gravity. Period, end of sentence, that's all she wrote. And while we don't know what would happen, it's a pretty safe bet, backed up by 22 Million years of hominid, not to mention 518 Million years of vertebrate evolution, that our bodies wouldn't like living at 1/3rd Earths gravity for long.
"our bodies wouldn't like living at 1/3rd Earths gravity for long."
The only two data points we have at this point is 1G on Earth and 0G on a space station. This is another reason why the moon is a good stepping stone. What does 1/6G do to humans? There's guesses, but no data. Once there is data, some assumptions might hold water when it comes to humans on Mars. If it turns out that living on the moon is as bad for health as living on a space station, that won't look good for stays on the red planet. The moon being a much cheaper and safer place to find that out.
Organic Nitrogen compounds that plants need is one thing, but humans breathe mostly Nitrogen. Our bodies use Oxygen, but pure Oxygen is dangerous so a mostly inert gas is needed to temper it.
Yeah I don't buy that because we evolved at 1G that we can only tolerate 1G. There are some obvious reasons why zero gravity is a problem, but it doesn't follow that 1/3 or 1/6 gravity would be. Sure you might still lose muscle tone and bone density in lower gravity environments over time, but astronauts were able to recover from a year in zero gravity so it seems likely they could tolerate much longer periods in 1/6th gravity, especially since a Moon base/colony would have more room than ISS so they could have a proper gym.
If instead of squatting 300 pounds on Earth you're squatting 1800 pounds on the Moon you're building/maintaining the same amount of muscle, causing your bones to gain/maintain the same amount of density. Normal day to day activities like walking around and sitting wouldn't put the same load on your muscles and bones but that's what the gym would be for. Maybe you run on a treadmill wearing some sort of weight suit or having elastic straps on your shoes that pull down you down to make it as if you're running at your Earth weight instead of Moon weight, so that you get a comparable cardio workout.
All the issues specific to zero gravity would not exist in 1/6th gravity. That's weaker than Earth gravity but it is still gravity. All those internal body processes that rely on gravity would still be getting the gravity just less of it. Heck for all we know it would be beneficial to our health or lifespan to live in 1/6th gravity. Or alternatively, maybe living at 2G would be better - we just aren't likely to have any way to test that within the lifetime of anyone currently alive.
Maybe you run on a treadmill wearing some sort of weight suit or having elastic straps on your shoes that pull down you down to make it as if you're running at your Earth weight instead of Moon weight
Your proposal of elastic straps probably contravenes my patent on the use of shoelaces for levitation, whereby you can lift yourself off the ground by pulling your own shoelaces hard enough. Don't believe me? Try it.
"There are some obvious reasons why zero gravity is a problem, but it doesn't follow that 1/3 or 1/6 gravity would be."
A really scary experiment that will have to be done is finding out if a fetus will develop normally.
You are right to ask the question if 1/6G is enough. The data needs to be gathered to find out and it's not something that can be done on Earth and horribly expensive to do in space.
I recall reading an article about teraforming Mars where the proposed energy came from using the nukes to deorbit chunks of Phobos. This was in the 90s,where the distribution of trapped carbon dioxide was less well understood so I can understand it not being workable on that front but, from sheer kinetic energy, it is possible to warm the Martian atmosphere appreciably for a time.
If the warming effect only lasts as long as an impact winter (ignoring the significantly thinner Martian atmosphere) then it's a bust anyway. The concept is that the boost to carbon dioxide raises the temperature steadily over decades to centuries, rather than the decade or so that an impact winter would last.
I can see how it's a convenient rebuttal but, if you're starting from a point of total uninhabitability, an impact winter hardly matters unless things get so cold that all the carbon dioxide solidifies again before the greenhouse effect can take over. Not to rule it out completely and there are definitely other issues but it's not as much of a certain show stopper as it might appear.
If Elon really wants a refuge, he could spend far less money buying up swathes of Greenland and setting up a compound...
MachDiamond, why do you hate Greenland?! Or South America, Africa for that matter? Let Musk fsck off to Mars! One way, please.
"MachDiamond, why do you hate Greenland?! Or South America, Africa for that matter? Let Musk fsck off to Mars! One way, please."
It's the age old dodge of dumping toxic waste in out of the way places. It's not that I hate them, but there is a lot of open space. Out of sight, out of mind.
You've got a point there. And if sacrificing Greenland solved this problem, it's a price I'm willing to pay.
Yes, I have no relations with Greenland whatsoever. And maybe we should ask the Greenlanders first. But it's all for the greater good, isn't it...
I don't think Greenland will escape the type of catastrophy he is worried about. But I wonder if it's us not asteroids, more likely IMHO. Maybe those theories about a race living under the ground are true, they went there to escape and got to like it! Must be warm down there though. "Hey Mephistopheles turn the aircon up, it's getting too hot again".
"Thousands of nukes have been detonated on Earth and there's no discernible temperature rise"
But here must be! Al Gore said there was. What about all that dust thrown up, the nuclear winter effect? Are you telling me that the earth and sun's natural processes are more important than us? Can't be true we must stop driving, travelling, having energy, eat insects, stop farming now ... unless it's for AI and the control grid that doesn't produce warming.
Was proposed by Isaac Asimov, published in "The Martian Way".
Warning Spoiler Alert
Get your water from Saturn's rings (nowadays, we know Jupiter has them too). Go their, weld a rocket engine spewing water onto the thing and send them on a collision course with Mars. (Read the book for details)
Not very realistic, but it has the advantage that it actually gets new water to Mars staying within laws of nature. And who knows, Asimov published other wild ideas that proved to be less impossible than initially thought.
"Get your water from Saturn's rings (nowadays, we know Jupiter has them too)"
I expect there is plenty in the asteroid belt as well. Set up a construction shack on Ceres to run the operation. Order to delivery times would be much shorter and mining the asteroid belt for material to build the craft would be cheaper than sending them from Earth.
The problem with the asteroid belt is that by and large there really isn't anything there; It is incredibly sparse. Flying through it one would have to specifically plan ahead to try and find something to hit with no weaving and having to dodge space rocks required. ~39% of the entire mass in the asteroid belt is in Ceres and the next three Vesta, Pallas and Hygiea represent about another ~20% between them. The remaining ~41% of mass is sparsely spread around the entire huge orbital space mostly as rather small rocks and dust. The total mass present is about 3% that of the moon, so not a lot there anyway.
More energy and effort would be spent trying to get to things in the asteroid belt than would be doing anything useful, which is why it's usually suggested going to where the mass is concentrated: in the orbits of the neighbouring planets.
Photosynthesis takes CO2 and gives us O2. Very convenient. Are you aware we were close to plant die off at the recent low point of CO2 a couple of centuries ago. Are you aware of the increased greening resulting from it increasing. Almost as if it is buffering it for us. We're under 0.05% of CO2 in the air. If that doubles we should start to consider doing something. The working safe level is said to be 0.5% but at 0.1% is the max we should contemplate as a constant. I haven't seen a figure for how that relates to our output, it's probably going to be a guess because there are so many complex processes involved that it's certain it's not linear. Then if you get more volcanoes it could go up faster than expected.
So what I'm saying is that our current level is not a problem, we have some headroom but it would be a good thing to experiment with how we could reduce it quickly. That doesn't mean we should actually try to reduce it yet.
Another aspect is as CO2 follows temp rises we have no idea how much of the recent rise comes from us as we had a cool spot a few centuries ago. It might be a very dumb thing to reduce it before it becomes a real threat. Getting ready is always a good - if you trust the psychopaths not to go ahead immediately.
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