200 Word/Essay Can Man Alter Mars Environment To Make It More Suitable For Human Habitation?How?
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Answer:
To a point, yes. It’s called terraforming, and its been written about extensively for over 50 years. I did an article on it a few years ago - How Do We Terraform Mars? - Universe Today - but it’s long and detailed, so here are the bullet points of it. Basically, if you’re going to alter the Martian environment for the sake of human habitation, you need to do three things.
Warm up the atmosphere
Thicken the atmosphere
Make the atmosphere breathable (i.e. a 70/30 oxygen/nitrogen gas split)
Luckily, all three of these goals are complementary, meaning the more you do to enhance one, the more you do to enhance the other two. And there are lots of ways of going about this, depending upon how much you’re willing to spend and what kind of space infrastructure you got at your disposal.
First, as Carl Sagan proposed, you could darken the surface of Mars around the poles so that they would absorb more solar radiation and melt. These could include dark, powdered minerals (like coal) or dark plants. Elon Musk has also recommended using nuclear devises to melt the polar ice caps, and others have suggested hurling meteors at them.
This would cause the ice caps to melt, releasing tons of vaporized water into the air and frozen carbon dioxide. The release of both would result in a thickening of the atmosphere and causing a Greenhouse Effect, which would warm the planet and allow more ice and permafrost beneath the surface to melt. In time, standing waters would form on the surface, covering much of the northern hemisphere.
Another way would be to hurl ammonia ices and frozen methane (which could be harvested from the outer Solar System) at the Martian surface. The impact would kick up dust and also sublimate the ices and release them into the atmosphere. Dust would allow for more solar radiation to be absorbed, and methane and ammonia are both super-greenhouse gases. Again, this would trigger a Greenhouse Effect and allow for liquid water to once again exist on the surface. And the ammonia could be converted to nitrogen gas, which would act as a buffer gas before oxygen gas could be produced.
The third step, which involves converting the atmosphere would be the longest and trickiest part. The Martian atmosphere is already mostly CO2, and with all the frozen CO2 released from the polar regions, you would be able to convert it to oxygen gas and carbon over time. This could be done by slowly introducing plants and vegetation to the surface, which would take root thanks to the presence of water and some serious nutrient solutions. Atmospheric processing stations could also be set up to slowly convert the CO2, or cyanobacteria could do the job (as it did on primordial Earth).
Another major issue is ensuring that the atmosphere is protected from solar wind, which was how Mars lost its primordial atmosphere billions of years ago. One way to do this would be to try and restart action in the core, which would be very costly and difficult. Another way would be to position a magnetic shield in orbit around Mars L1 Lagrange Point, which would shield its atmosphere from solar wind and also allow it to thicken naturally over time.
There are other means, but the ones listed above cover all the basics. After you’ve done all that, and allowed for a few centuries or even millennia for the process to take hold, Mars would no longer be the Red Planet, it would be a second “Blue Marble”. And with people there to ensure that the atmosphere was monitored and thickened from time to time, it would be able to remain the warmer, wetter environment that it once was.
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Explanation:
Answer:
The first thing we would need to do is increase the planetary temperature. This could be accomplished with the construction of giant orbital mirrors focused on the poles. The focused sunlight would melt the trapped dry ice, thickening the atmosphere by several tens of thousands of pascals. The atmospheric pressure would likely be too low for humans to endure, but it would definitely be thick enough for liquid water to exist. With the thicker atmosphere and subsequent higher temperatures, the ice trapped at the poles would melt, likely covering the majority of the northern hemisphere in a vast ocean.
We could then introduce cyanobacteria to convert the atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen, and eventually nitrogen fixing organisms to convert ammonia into nitrogen. We would likely need to add additional nitrogen to the atmosphere, which could be accomplished with atmospheric chemical engineering. We could also mine nitrogen from the Venusian atmosphere. Venus only has 3.5% atmospheric nitrogen, but the atmosphere in so thick there is over right times as much nitrogen in the Venusian atmosphere as that of Earth.
This process will take centuries. Perhaps even millennia. However, after all this hard work, humanity could walk unaided on the surface of Mars. It would not be perfect. Mars is tectonically dead, so it has no significant global magnetic field. Colonists of Mars would be exposed to significantly more radiation on Mars as Earth, leading to a significantly higher occurrence of cancer and genetic disorders. The colonist would also need to carefully monitor the atmosphere, as the lack of a magnetic field would allow the solar winds to slowly strip it away. This process would be very slow, occurring over thousands of years, but it would require further efforts from atmospheric engineers. The lower gravity would also be a significant change. Someone born on Mars would have great difficulty adjusting to life on Earth, as they would have to adjust to being three times heavier than they once were.
Once colonists adjusted, they would find Mars fairly comfortable. The atmosphere would likely be thinner. However, humans regularly endure pressures under forty kPa. The atmospheric pressure at the summit of Everest is roughly 33,700 Pa, and the Martian atmosphere could likely be thickened to the low 70000 to mid 80000. Temperatures at the equator are tolerable on Mars even now, reaching over 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. With an Earth-like atmosphere, these temperatures would likely be similar. The polar regions would likely be too cold for humans to endure, but much of the planet would be fairly comfortable.
Terraforming Mars will take centuries and an unimaginably large commitment of both resources and manpower, but it is theoretically possible. Since Walmart is destined to buy-out Wayland-Yutani they will likely be leading the way. Walton-Waylon-Yutani - Saving Money, Building Bettet Worlds.
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