Terraforming of Mars and Venus

[Gormanmod]

Life is awesome, how it adapts to anything.

 

[Cheomesh]

Yep. Let things naturally adapt. Not synthetically.

 

[Saturos]

I don't know how you can **** up a rusty desert planet with no atmosphere or a hellish world with daily forecasts of raining sulfphuric acid and 900 degree highs.

Venus would be impossible to terraform anyways. You'd have better luck terraforming a gas giant like Jupiter imo.:| Off topic, but how tall is Mt. Everest? like two and a half miles or something? The tallest mountains on Venus are somewhere around 13 miles tall. Does anyone really want to live in such deep valleys? Oh and...

New from teh future



How likely is this you think.

The Mars colonists would be f***ed. There wouldn't be any "army" left to launch a counter-offensive. Earthlings wouldn't care anyways as "Earthling Americans" and "Martian Americans" would probably be segregated.

 

[Vegeta897]

-- We have to defeat the Terra-ists in this War on Terra!

Oh my god that's hilarious.

@thread: really awesome, too bad we won't live to see it.

 

[Gormanmod]

or will we? IMO all you need to do is create 2 things genetically engineered.

1) super-fast growing grass that is highly cold resistant.
2) floater photosynthesizing bacteria that floats in the air.

1 would make the planet green and create o2

2 would build up more air. we could also change it to create o3 ozone and give mars an atmosphere.


total time? me thinks 15 years, but I'm an optimist.

 

[xombine]

or will we? IMO all you need to do is create 2 things genetically engineered.

1) super-fast growing grass that is highly cold resistant.
2) floater photosynthesizing bacteria that floats in the air.

1 would make the planet green and create o2

2 would build up more air. we could also change it to create o3 ozone and give mars an atmosphere.


total time? me thinks 15 years, but I'm an optimist.

No. We won't.

 

[Dan]

I think it would be easiest to simply start bombing these planets with organic material. Mostly a wide variety of bacteria, molds, funguses, spores, and see what sticks. A few hundred million years should be able to establish an atmosphere.

 

[Gormanmod]

all of you people are so sad with your slow terraforming progress. guess I'm an optimist, but I remain faithful it is possible to terraform a planet in 50 years at most.

Hey, if global warming shows anything...

 

[Cheomesh]

Sounds good till the first solar flare coming along blasts the surface clean again.

 

[Gormanmod]

hence what i said earlier. genetically engineer plants to make 03 rather then O2.

fixed.

 

[Dan]

hence what i said earlier. genetically engineer plants to make 03 rather then O2.

fixed.

Your idea is based on a naively simplistic understanding of the powers of genetic engineering. How does a plant produce 03?? and how would O3 prevent solar winds from blowing away the atmosphere? On Earth, the Ozone layer only serves to absorb and deflect short wave radiation, it doesn't negate solar pressure. Look a bit into biology, and chemistry, and physics maybe and then come up with an actual plan for what physical actions are taken to convert the entire carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars into oxygen, and also how to add a buffer gas such as nitrogen (73% of our atmosphere) or argon and thicken the entire mixture by about 100 times it's current pressure.

 

[Gormanmod]

plants can be engineered for anything imo. Just a thought, but it could work. Just add a gene telling the plant to create o3 along with 02. I think the do it already anyway. In any case, bacteria is another way. eat co2, spit out o2, then use giganorumous ionizers to make 03 out of the o2. nitrogen can be made through fission right? well that will be around in a decade or so.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

Genetic engineering has limits you know.

 

[Dan]

plants can be engineered for anything imo. Just a thought, but it could work. Just add a gene telling the plant to create o3 along with 02. I think the do it already anyway. In any case, bacteria is another way. eat co2, spit out o2, then use giganorumous ionizers to make 03 out of the o2. nitrogen can be made through fission right? well that will be around in a decade or so.

Oh god. Neutrinos are a product of fission. Fission exists today. It is powering about 20% of the US grid. Nitrogen could only be created by fusion, but not in our Sun. Genetic engineering isn't just a matter of telling plants and animals what to do. There are methods to use viruses to splice existing genes into places that they don't belong. One, that means that you need to have the gene for producing O3 to begin with, something that no terrestrial animal does. Two, you have to know what a gene does and how it is activated. We still don't know what the vast majority of the genetic code does. And O3 is produced mostly by lightning, never plants, and you still haven't addressed the matter that O3 doesn't solve any problems so it is irrelevant whether or not a plant could produce it (they can't).

 

[Eejit]

1) requires the research to make those microbes, and also rockets or colonists to send those microbes to mars. It would cost several hundred billion dollars.

2) requires extreme amounts of energy. Either you detonate precisely the right amounts of nukes in the right places, or you find a way to successfully land several thousand ion thrusters on an asteroid. This would also cost trillions of dollars.

Ah I was talking in relative terms. Cheap compared to any other method.


Dan is right, you can't engineer plants to create O3 unless you first find the gene in another organism which does that. Afaik nothing does.

As for nitrogen, you might be able to liberate it from some martian soils or rocks with chemolithic bacteria, but I'm not sure exactly what the minerology is like there.

 

[The Monkey]

Like one planet isn't enough for us. I dunno, I suppose we'd be improving the environment there by making it hospitable, but where would it stop? We've already seen that humans will live pretty much anywhere they can, wherever there's enough food etc, just like any other animal. Once we've seen that we can terraform Mars, will we then move on to Jupiter's moons? I just don't like the idea of every decent sized rock in our solar system being covered in humans. I'm all for terraforming Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable, but in the meantime I'd rather leave the planets as they are. Come on, you know we'd just **** them up anyway.

Why should contain ourselves to the earth? Why should we let some arbitrary moral obligations towards some ****ing rock be more important than the well-being and progress of the human race?

 

[Parrot of doom]

Venus doesn't have a magnetosphere.

It still has an atmosphere though.

So does Titan for that matter.

 

[Gormanmod]

erm, then fusion i mean then. :face palm:

 

[Godron]

Why should contain ourselves to the earth? Why should we let some arbitrary moral obligations towards some ****ing rock be more important than the well-being and progress of the human race?

I dunno, maybe I'm more worried about us than the planets themselves. It just seems to me that humans tend to breed until there are as many of them as the environment can support, or more, which leads to mass starvation. I just don't equate population size with well-being or progress, and the idea that we'll always need more space doesn't appeal to me.

 

[Gormanmod]

He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.

By his breath the skies became fair

Job 26:13

Must do what bible says. TO THE MOON!

 

[Asuka]

-- We have to defeat the Terra-ists in this War on Terra!

LMFAO! Love how stupid our human race is. We can only hope the smart are the leaders.

 

[Eejit]

I dunno, maybe I'm more worried about us than the planets themselves. It just seems to me that humans tend to breed until there are as many of them as the environment can support, or more, which leads to mass starvation. I just don't equate population size with well-being or progress, and the idea that we'll always need more space doesn't appeal to me.

If we don't get a sizeable, self-sustaining off-planet population we could become extinct far more easily. Being a member of this species, I don't want that to happen.

 

[Dan]

In most first world nations the population is not self sustaining. It's only the poor places where the population continues to boom. Even India and China have drastically lowered their birth rates.

 

[theotherguy]

or will we? IMO all you need to do is create 2 things genetically engineered.

1) super-fast growing grass that is highly cold resistant.
2) floater photosynthesizing bacteria that floats in the air.

1 would make the planet green and create o2

2 would build up more air. we could also change it to create o3 ozone and give mars an atmosphere.


total time? me thinks 15 years, but I'm an optimist.

1) plants would use what nutrients? How will they get water? How would they be resistant to cold air? The plants would also be killed by the cosmic radiation present on the Martian surface.

2) In order for bacteria to "float", especially in a thin atmosphere like mars, they would need some sort of buoyant gas. How will they produce a buoyant gas when all of Mars' light materials have been burned into space by the solar winds? Also, bacteria need water to survive. There is not enough trace H20 in the atmosphere to sustain them.

Even if you somehow managed to do this, the time for the atmosphere to become thick enough and the soil to become arable would be on the orders of millions, if not billions of years.

A much better solution is to somehow collide an icy asteroid with mars, or to somehow melt the poles to produce water. Then, colonists could mine the soil for elements from which to produce O2, more CO2, and Nitrogen. Water vapor, plus these outgassed materials, might be enough to make the atmosphere habitable for small lichens. After lichens have broken down the material on the surface, hardy plants can be placed in the soil. Once the atmosphere is thick enough, then trees and various animals can start to appear on the surface.

Total time (conservatively speaking): 3-5 thousand years.

But I have not taken into account new technologies. It might be that nanotechnology or robotics advances to such a state that we can build a self-sustaining ecosphere of robots and nanoprobes on the surface, allowing us to manufacture things like H20 and oxygen at a much faster rate. However, I find these advances unlikely.

 

[Cheomesh]

When I was younger, I had an idea on how to colonize Mars. It made sense at the time, so I'll post it here for lulzing.

Build a box-like structure in space, with all of the life support stuff.

Basically, make the segments of a hab on earth and truck them up to the box.

Truck up a bunch of pre-fabricated pieces of tarmac.

Truck up two shuttles and a disposable lander.

Get the thing to Mars orbit. Maybe that nuclear propulsion would work?

Drop down the supply pods with the tarmac and hab modules over a pre-decided flat area. Drop the lander around there as well.

Gather the supplies, and set up the hab. Then set up the landing strip for the shuttles to land. These shuttles take advantage of Mars' lower gravity to bring themselves back up to orbit. These shuttles drop supplies.



I had too much time as a kid.

 

[theotherguy]

When I was younger, I had an idea on how to colonize Mars. It made sense at the time, so I'll post it here for lulzing.

Build a box-like structure in space, with all of the life support stuff.

Basically, make the segments of a hab on earth and truck them up to the box.

Truck up a bunch of pre-fabricated pieces of tarmac.

Truck up two shuttles and a disposable lander.

Get the thing to Mars orbit. Maybe that nuclear propulsion would work?

Drop down the supply pods with the tarmac and hab modules over a pre-decided flat area. Drop the lander around there as well.

Gather the supplies, and set up the hab. Then set up the landing strip for the shuttles to land. These shuttles take advantage of Mars' lower gravity to bring themselves back up to orbit. These shuttles drop supplies.



I had too much time as a kid.

That's not quite too far off how NASA actually plans mars colonization.

Two robotic cargo ships will go to mars first, and will drop off automated mining equipment and habitation construction equipment. While we wait for mars to come back around a third time, they will build up sufficient materials for the colonists to arrive. The colonists (4-10), will land at the surface, stay for 500 days in the prefabricated (possibly inflatable) structures, and then return on a liftoff vehicle very similar to the one used for the lunar missions.

 

[Gormanmod]

Theotherguy, look up one day. all those contrails, yes? their filled with carbon-based gases. their always falling everywhere, in fact here's a pic. It basically creates an entire layer of atmosphere. just do the same on mars

also, Bacteria doesn't need byont gas to float, they do it on their own already.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16328625/

so basically, just genetically engineer them to eat the co2 and do photosynthesis and mass reproduce. then to make the planet hotter, you (purely hypothetically) use microwaving satellites to super-heat mars and reactivate it's core. A few nuclear blasts should get the 'ol baby turning. then you got your radioactive protection, and walah, you rebirth a planet.

ok, I'm a mentally deranged optimist.

 

[theotherguy]

also, Bacteria doesn't need byont gas to float, they do it on their own already.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16328625/

so basically, just genetically engineer them to eat the co2 and do photosynthesis and mass reproduce. then to make the planet hotter, you (purely hypothetically) use microwaving satellites to super-heat mars and reactivate it's core. A few nuclear blasts should get the 'ol baby turning. then you got your radioactive protection, and walah, you rebirth a planet.

ok, I'm a mentally deranged optimist.

Those contrails are made of water vapor. They're created when the thrust of the jet engine condenses the water vapor already in the air. There is almost no water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, and the atmosphere itself is so thin and devoid of oxygen that jet engines simply would not work.

And as for the bacteria... small particles like bacteria can float on earth because of our dense, nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. While you could get bacteria to be airborne on Mars, especially with its low gravity, it would be difficult to keep them up there. I do concede though, that one could lace bacteria in the atmosphere during a dust storm.

But really the floating is not the issue, its the fact that the bacteria will have no water, will freeze during the cold temperatures, and would be instantly killed by solar radiation. It doesn't matter how much genetic engineering you do, there is simply no bacteria on earth, or within the reach of genetic engineering which could possibly survive in the Martian atmosphere. Bacteria could survive on Mars only if they were buried several feet into the soil, to protect against the radiation, and they could use the ice there as water.

 

[Dan]

Those contrails are made of water vapor. They're created when the thrust of the jet engine condenses the water vapor already in the air. There is almost no water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, and the atmosphere itself is so thin and devoid of oxygen that jet engines simply would not work.

And as for the bacteria... small particles like bacteria can float on earth because of our dense, nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. While you could get bacteria to be airborne on Mars, especially with its low gravity, it would be difficult to keep them up there. I do concede though, that one could lace bacteria in the atmosphere during a dust storm.

But really the floating is not the issue, its the fact that the bacteria will have no water, will freeze during the cold temperatures, and would be instantly killed by solar radiation. It doesn't matter how much genetic engineering you do, there is simply no bacteria on earth, or within the reach of genetic engineering which could possibly survive in the Martian atmosphere. Bacteria could survive on Mars only if they were buried several feet into the soil, to protect against the radiation, and they could use the ice there as water.

You are right. Contrails are just streams of water condensation because of the supersonic speeds inside a jet turbine. Thus the abbreviated name, condensation trails.

But the rest of what you say about bacteria and such sounds very certain for someone who has never been to Mars or studied microbiology. The statement that bacteria could ONLY survive on mars if they were buied is just heresay.

There are some bacteria which can survive very extreme conditions. I would suggest that rather than fruitlessly trying to genetic engineer bacteria, we just take a large volume of existing bacteria and bombard Mars with them to see what sticks. Genetic engineering isn't the magic tool that many of you seem to think it is. If it was, bacon would grow from trees already, and be good for you.

 

[Cheomesh]

That's not quite too far off how NASA actually plans mars colonization.

Two robotic cargo ships will go to mars first, and will drop off automated mining equipment and habitation construction equipment. While we wait for mars to come back around a third time, they will build up sufficient materials for the colonists to arrive. The colonists (4-10), will land at the surface, stay for 500 days in the prefabricated (possibly inflatable) structures, and then return on a liftoff vehicle very similar to the one used for the lunar missions.

So...I'm not have the dumb?

 

[Eejit]

But really the floating is not the issue, its the fact that the bacteria will have no water,

Xerophiles.

will freeze during the cold temperatures,

Psychrophiles

and would be instantly killed by solar radiation.

Radioresistant microbes.

It doesn't matter how much genetic engineering you do, there is simply no bacteria on earth, or within the reach of genetic engineering which could possibly survive in the Martian atmosphere.

Some bacteria, but Archaea.

Deinococcus radiodurans wins.

 

[Druckles]

Holy shit, that's awesome. Imagine in 1000 years time, there may be not one, but no "earths" left in the solar system.

5char

 

[Cheomesh]

There will always be one earth. It wont be our only home, though.

 

[theotherguy]

Xerophiles.

Psychrophiles


Radioresistant microbes.


Some bacteria, but Archaea.

Deinococcus radiodurans wins.

Okay, so we would still need to genetically engineer existing bacteria with the features of xerophiles, psychrophiles, and Deinococcus radiodurans.

Something tells me that the genes for resistance to radiation, cold or lack of water would not react very well together. For instance, deinococcus radiodurans might use water in their radioresistant behavior, or xerophiles might depend on other substances, like methane, which are not available in the atmosphere of mars.

And as for the other comments, I have studied microbiology. I just genetically engineered a colony of bacteria to be flourescent and resistant to ampicillin.

I think that we could, eventually, figure out how to engineer such a bacteria, but would this even solve anything? Bacteria might fix carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen via photosynthesis, but how fast can this reaction occur? How viable are genetically engineered bacteria when they have to spend so much of their resources on defending against cosmic radiation, existing with little water, and avoiding extreme temperatures?

 

[Gormanmod]

I think that we could, eventually, figure out how to engineer such a bacteria, but would this even solve anything? Bacteria might fix carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen via photosynthesis, but how fast can this reaction occur? How viable are genetically engineered bacteria when they have to spend so much of their resources on defending against cosmic radiation, existing with little water, and avoiding extreme temperatures?

don't know but it seems their doing alright, despite the deathly conditions around them.

anyways, genetcally engineering bacteria to rapid-produce shouldn't be that bad. just splice some algae genes in or something else that grows fast.

 

[Dan]

There is still the problem that the atmosphere of Mars is something like 1% the atmosphere of Earth. So even if you convert all of the carbon dioxide to oxygen, it is still too thin. You can't breathe pure oxygen anyways.

 

[Gormanmod]

no. in actuality, when it comes to thickness, mars is just earth's atmosphere, minus the nitrogen.

it's got around 1/3 our atmosphere's size. it's in proportion to it's 1/3 size of our world.\

http://www.christa.org/marsearth.htm

it's alot less dense, but it's layers are about 1/3 ours

 

[Dan]

no. in actuality, when it comes to thickness, mars is just earth's atmosphere, minus the nitrogen.

it's got around 1/3 our atmosphere's size. it's in proportion to it's 1/3 size of our world.\

http://www.christa.org/marsearth.htm

it's alot less dense, but it's layers are about 1/3 ours

I meant thickness in density and pressure, not height

 

[Gormanmod]

ok then, ignore what i said.

BUT, it's been proven bacteria multiplies bat shit crazy in low gravity

 

[Cheomesh]

Terraforming is stupid.

Unless you make the planet physically bigger, or more dense, the gravity is going to give you issues on RETAINING your beloved atmosphere.

Easier, more profitable, and faster to just make shelters.

We didn't drain the oceans to see what was under there, did we?