The Colonization of Mars

Prothean ruins, of course.

Colonising the oceans is more pointless then colonising Mars, you have to deal with insane water pressure, and the samllest thing breaks and your fucked. Plus theirs no sunlight down their, so no easy power besides geothermal. Theres not a whole lot thats not directly Sceience related that would be worthwhile to do down their anyway.

Tom's right, plate tectonics is rare, vulcanism common, though now they are starting to think that Venus may have limited plate tectonics, and that Mars had plate tectonics in the distance past but since the core has cooled some it has stopped.

Mars has plenty of geothermal heat, however - just because a world isn't hot enough for active vents to form, doesn't mean it has a cold center. Mars actually has the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, and we've detected potential lava tubes. Dig deep enough, and surely you will hit a patch of still-hot rocks, especially in areas like Elysium, which is basically an entire mountain chain of huge volcanoes.

The big problem with undersea colonies is that its pitch black. You are right in that they offer energy and mineral wealth, but there is no way to grow plants without massive use of artificial lightning. Feasible, possibly, but it would be costly energy wise, and still produces inferior crops to natural sunlight (which Mars has, obviously). Also, unlike Mars, underwater colonies would not solve the problem of human activities disrupting the biosphere.

Finally, why do we have to choose between the two? I don't see how, exactly, colonizing Mars means that we can't also colonize the seafloor at the same time.

...isn't the windspeed on Mars fast enough to strip a car in an hour?

I think that's about equally difficult to overcome as water pressure would be.

Plus, you know, the ocean is right there. We'd just need to borrow whatever the fuck it is that Andrew Ryan used to build Rapture, and then bam, underwater cities!

There have been no windspeeds on Mars clocked in as anything anomalous compared to Earth. (Remember, maximum sustained windspeeds on Earth have been clocked in excess of 300 mph before.)

Also, one other factor we should consider when approaching Mars. It is the most likely candidate in this star system beyond Earth to hold life. All the elements and players for life on Mars are there. Most probably, life on Mars is underground and microbial at best if it exists there.

I've heard Io is pretty likely too,if theres lava under the ice. Cross of Mon Calamari/Hoth?

But WHY? Theres not much to haverest, except maybe oil. At Lest Mars has shitloads of easy to reach Iron.

edited 17th Oct '11 7:03:49 PM by Joesolo

I may have been thinking of Venus.

And, well, yeah, but it would still take between 50-100 years before Mars was even on par with the shittiest parts of Africa, let alone lush and pretty like, say, South America or other parts of the tropics...

Even if the windspeeds were that high, they still wouldn't do much damage because there isn't as much of it to do damage. Now if said winds were carrying sand or dust with them, it would be completely different.

edited 17th Oct '11 7:04:02 PM by TheRichSheik

Seeing as Mars HAS sand and dust...

^^^ That has more to do with the long time it takes plants to grow than human engineering efforts to colonize/terraform the planet.

edited 17th Oct '11 7:06:00 PM by MajorTom

Well, I don't know. I just remember watching a show where they said that some planet in the Solar System was so hostile, you could drop an average-sized car on the surface and it would be gone in some ridiculously short amount of time.

I do, however, think it was Venus, not Mars. I dunno for certain.

Doesn't matter why, it just matters that it's going to take a long fucking time.

edited 17th Oct '11 7:08:03 PM by USAF713

I saw a show once that speculated about what would possibly happen if we could get the chemical processes going to get Mars' atmosphere developed and the water untrapped. It got cut in half in the middle by oceans. Something about building factories to produce carbon dioxide or some such. Though a more feasible solution seemed to be just melting the ice caps and letting that run amuck. (It was a while ago, so I am not remembering this as well as I would like.)

After the atmosphere was developed, we'd have to just seed moss or whatever, then the rest of the plants in stages to let it build up.

^^ So? It will take a long fucking time to re-grow the rainforests or any other massive project humans can do on Earth.

Guys, there's been a crapload of human endeavors that took a long ass time. They still thought it was worth doing and went ahead with it. Time should not be a factor in whether or not we do something that would be very, very awesome.

Well, it'd take a long fucking time, and Mars is fucking far away.

Plus, that space elevator may very well be a pipe dream, in which case we'll be stuck with mass drivers, which have their own host of issues to work out.

As for how to terraform Mars, well, melting the ice caps would be a good start, as well as getting some ice comets and smacking the planet with 'em. Maybe the factories could work, but they'd have to be specially-designed to be hard sealed but still be able to vent their shit...

Here's something I'm having trouble understanding; Exactly how are we supposed to build a space elevator and how is it better than just using a shuttle to get stuff into space? How does a space elevator even work?

^^ And that makes such an endeavor pointless? Because it is far away and you can't deliver a paradise on another world by next Tuesday?

^ Space Elevators work by slowing rising things up like a normal elevator. No rocket thrusters or magnetically accelerating mass drivers. In mass to energy expenditure ratios you can't beat a Space Elevator's efficiency. The problem with those is, the ride up takes quite a while compared to mass drivers or rocket thrusters.

edited 17th Oct '11 7:18:26 PM by MajorTom

How does a space elevator work? Beats me. They have yet to figure out if we could even build such a thing.

And, no, it doesn't make it pointless, it means we have to plan out everything in advance and not just go prancing in like it'll be the Apollo program. The '60s Space Race was peanuts compared to what the terraforming of Mars would be.

I think we should colonize the Moon first, then use that as a jumping point for Mars colonization later on. It would be a hell of a lot easier to launch Mars missions from a Moon base than directly from Earth.

True. Luna also has minor deposits of H3 (is that what the fusion fuel is called?) so, yay fuel.

Helium 3, and from what little I know the only Earth based sources of it are decommissioned nuclear weapons. I've heard about some people wanting to strip-mine the Moon for the stuff, since it would revolutionize nuclear power. If that ever happens, I say they should restrict mining to the far side of the Moon, so that we don't have to look at it.

Now if only someone would go up there and get it.

I dunno, maybe while they mine up there they can smooth out the surface and we can have a nice, clean-looking moon.

In the meantime, we can get just enough fuel to create automated fuel outposts on Saturn, and then boom, fusion-powered spaceships made (more) viable.

We will colonize Earth orbit long before we colonize any other place, including the Moon, or even the Ocean floor. To colonize anything, however, depends critically on finding some economically profitable reason to do so. If we thought we could make money by sending humans into space, we would do it, no matter the technological challenges. So the question is what could people do in space that would justify the cost?

Yeah, the way I see it there's no point colonizing an environment as hostile as deep space or a freezing desert with paltry atmosphere when we can't even get a long-term solution out of the relative paradise we're already sitting on.

The nice points about Mars (and why it has such a presence in speculative fiction) is that it has an atmosphere tolerable to plant life (no oxygen so its no good for animals. yet.) and large deposits of water (frozen in ice). The planet even heats up enough during the summer for some of that ice to melt (its the only other world in the solar system with confirmed liquid surface water, but to be fair, said water is likely a brine, and evaporates rapidly due to the low pressure). The highest average temperature on Mars is, in fact, about the same as the coldest temperatures on Earth - it is feasible that some cold-adapted organisms from Earth could survive on Mars (and they have tested this to the point that it is plausible, see below for details). Air pressure wise, you would need a protective suit on the surface, but during terraforming one of the first goals would be to thicken the atmosphere.

Its a good start, at any rate - much better than anywhere else in the solar system.

To overcome these obstacles, several ideas have been proposed:

• Large orbital mirrors could focus sunlight onto the Southern ice cap. Not only would this heat the planet up significantly, but since the southern cap is basically all dry ice, as it vaporized it would thicken Mars' atmosphere with additional carbon dioxide gas. Carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas, this would further heat the planet, and provide additional materials for plants to increase biomass.
• Some plant life CAN survive Martian conditions - they have put arctic lichens into so-called "Martian Hell Jars", vessels with atmospheres set at the same pressure, temperature, and chemistry as Mars, and found that the lichens managed to grow. Now, genetically modify either a bacteria or a lichen to produce black pigment, and you have a "living paint" that could slowly spread across the planet. Since black colors absorb most of the visual spectrum, this would hold heat on the Martian surface, helping to heat the planet.
• Moholes - enormous holes dug into the surface of Mars - could release internal geothermal heat directly into the atmosphere. These holes are easier to build on Mars than on Earth, because Mars gravity isn't very strong by comparison.
• We could also purposefully manufacture greenhouse gases and release them directly into the Martian atmosphere. One good candidate is methane - plenty of bacteria fart methane, and its a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The nice thing about terraforming is that the effects are cumulative - once you reach a certain threshold, temperatures should start to naturally rise rapidly. The reason, again, is all that carbon dioxide that is currently frozen in the southern hemisphere of Mars. As the temperature rises, more of that gas will vaporize, thickening the atmosphere - and as the atmosphere thickens, the planet heats up even more, and more carbon dioxide is released. Its a miraculous feedback loop that should yield significant results in decades.

Now, the long and hard part isn't heating the planet, or even thickening the atmosphere to Earth-pressure levels, but converting all that carbon dioxide gas into breathable air. At this point the atmosphere would already be thick enough that colonists could ditch the pressure suits, but they would still need to wear some sort of re-breather equipment (think what Han Solo wore when he left the Millenium Falcon in the asteroid field), since that atmosphere would be almost pure carbon dioxide. To change it, the process is just what happened here on Earth - let photosynthetic bacteria and algae and lichen have at it. It would take awhile before truly complex plants could colonize the surface without assistance, however, since at night plants need oxygen to breath as well, but the good news is that they can tolerate low levels of oxygen - unlike animals, which would have to wait for the bacteria to do their work. To speed up things, crocodile DNA could be useful - we could splice in the genes responsible for coding certain proteins that crocodiles produce in their blood cells which maximize oxygen uptake, allowing the animals to survive long periods underwater. Doing so would increase animal tolerance for carbon dioxide, but they would still need some oxygen to survive.

The end result, however, is well worth it - a second Earth, with a novel and unique ecosystem. Give it a few million years, and under the low gravity conditions who knows what novel species would emerge!