Can humans alter Mars’ environment to make it more suitable for human habitation? How?
Answers
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.
Answer:
To successfully terraform Mars, the atmosphere would need to be raised enough so that humans could walk around without spacesuits. But although tripling the Red Planet's atmospheric pressure might sound like a lot, it's only one-fiftieth of the CO2 necessary to make the atmosphere habitable to Earth creatures.
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