Can we turn Mars into another Earth?

[MRC_Hans]

What you say is true - but could we breathe such an atmosphere without equipment?

I assume we can compose green-house gasses that won't interfere with our breathing (provided the needed concentration of good old CO2 is too high to do the job).

Hans

 

[zerospeaks]

Responding to Roboramma,

I just had a bang up idea!

We build a hospitable environment on mars for humans, like a dome (like in total recall or whatever) The artificial environment it set to change by computer to slowly become more mars like until it eventually becomes the same as "outside" over say... thousands of years. We could evolve a separate species capable of surviving on mars!!!
OH! I feel like writing a science fiction book right now!!

Is my logic sound? Or would it take more time... like say, hundreds of thousands or millions of years?

 

[Roboramma]

Responding to Roboramma,

I just had a bang up idea!

We build a hospitable environment on mars for humans, like a dome (like in total recall or whatever) The artificial environment it set to change by computer to slowly become more mars like until it eventually becomes the same as "outside" over say... thousands of years. We could evolve a separate species capable of surviving on mars!!!
OH! I feel like writing a science fiction book right now!!

Is my logic sound? Or would it take more time... like say, hundreds of thousands or millions of years?

It would take much more than thousands of years. Our generation times are just too long. It also wouldn't necessarily work. Evolution may happen on a solution to a particular problem, but then, it also may not. You certainly can't count on it.

It's also unnecessary. Just do the genetic engineering yourself. Hell, we'd get better and faster results with ordinary artificial selection, but that still may not be enough.

Some people may have problems with genetic engineering, but I think it likely that we as a species will get over most of those problems in the next hundred years.

Edit: to add to that, even by engineering humans, we still may not be able to make people who can survive on mars as it is now. But if we can change the humans, and change the environment, we might get both to meet somewhere that is survivable. Mars is a rather harsh place, not just because of the thin, unbreathable atmosphere, cold, dry, windstorms, etc. but the radiation is a pretty big deal as well.
One thing to think about is that you'd have to do a pretty serious overhaul of our entire biology for us to run on something other than oxygen. So at the least we'd have to make that oxygen available from somewhere.
(Not necessarily in the air, mind, I can imagine an organ that compresses and stores oxygen in the body, slowly letting it out for metabolism, but even then you can't store all that much and whatever you store has to come from somewhere, maybe from engineered plants that hold on to the oxygen that they produce through photosynthesis, rather than letting it out into the atmosphere...)

 

[MRC_Hans]

The main problem on Mars in energy. A complex creature like Man needs lots of energy (especially when it's so damn cold like on Mars) and with no oxygen in the atmoshpere, you'd need an entirely different kind of metabolism to even survive.

Hans

ETE: Sorry, Roboramma already said essentially that.

 

[zerospeaks]

WOAH! I thought there was some oxygen in the martian atmosphere, just a small bit.

 

[Brian-M]

Why? A planet's orbit isn't determined by its size, but its velocity.

And every time you slam a giant meteor or comet into a planet, you change it's velocity slightly. If these hundreds or thousands of comets and meteorites you're going to send hurtling towards Mars aren't balanced out, you could change the velocity of the planet by a noticeable amount.

On the plus side, it could also increase the period of planetary rotation... I kinda like the idea of a 26 hour day.

(The current 24h 39m 35.244s Martian day is boringly earth-like.)

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

And every time you slam a giant meteor or comet into a planet, you change it's velocity slightly. If these hundreds or thousands of comets and meteorites you're going to send hurtling towards Mars aren't balanced out, you could change the velocity of the planet by a noticeable amount.

Yep, and if we are talking enough material to give Mars an Earth like gravity, you might start to wonder why to even bother with Mars in the first place rather than starting from scratch. Mars is on 10% the mass of Earth, so to turn Mars in to Earth you have to have nearly an Earth mass of material.

I think there will be better ways to support people and life than planets in the future. I also think that by the time we can engineer another planet we'll have a population of trillions living in space already. Spending an entire Earth mass of material building a home for a mere 6 billion people is not going to be a good cost/benefit ratio.

In a sense, planets waste 100 of quintillions of tons of material to do nothing but create gravity, a magnetic field and tectonics. There are cheaper ways to do that (and you can probably do without tectonics).

 

[zerospeaks]

Yep, and if we are talking enough material to give Mars an Earth like gravity, you might start to wonder why to even bother with Mars in the first place rather than starting from scratch. Mars is on 10% the mass of Earth, so to turn Mars in to Earth you have to have nearly an Earth mass of material.

I think there will be better ways to support people and life than planets in the future. I also think that by the time we can engineer another planet we'll have a population of trillions living in space already. Spending an entire Earth mass of material building a home for a mere 6 billion people is not going to be a good cost/benefit ratio.

In a sense, planets waste 100 of quintillions of tons of material to do nothing but create gravity, a magnetic field and tectonics. There are cheaper ways to do that (and you can probably do without tectonics).

Are you suggesting a dyson sphere? And I challenge your "fact" that mars is only 10% the mass of earth. I thought it was 70% or so.

 

[commandlinegamer]

I kinda like the idea of a 26 hour day.[/SIZE]

Don't we work hard enough already?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Are you suggesting a dyson sphere? And I challenge your "fact" that mars is only 10% the mass of earth. I thought it was 70% or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars .107 Earth mass.

Some kind of Dyson sphere is one way to support a lot more people than another Earth.

 

[zerospeaks]

Some kind of Dyson sphere is one way to support a lot more people than another Earth.

The engineering necessary would be way beyond us and the vulcans put together.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Why? We have plausible plans for building colonies now. Besides we're talking of time where the alternative is engineering an entire planet.

 

[zerospeaks]

A dyson sphere would be the equivalent to creating a million (probably more) planets.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

That's the point. More livable surface for less material cost.

BTW if you consider the numbers regarding my post about the mass of Mars and Earth it's not millions of times more effective to build in space. It's much more.

 

[RussDill]

So then the question is, how many years would it take to cool venus?

ETA: And oh, crap, we need to get it spinning right too. That'd be the real rub.

 

[jasonpatterson]

It seems likely that establishing human colonies on portions of Earth that are currently more or less uninhabitable would be a much more reasonable and profitable undertaking first. Making habitable zones in the Sahara or Antarctica (I mean viable, thriving cities, not research outposts or tribal villages) would be a lot cheaper and getting people there to populate them would be a whole lot easier.

 

[GreenLines]

I also think that by the time we can engineer another planet we'll have a population of trillions living in space already.

I HIGHLY doubt that we'll be able to reach a trillion people without planetary engineering. I doubt we'll see 20 billion people on this planet without heavily changing things about.

 

[aggle-rithm]

Mars doesn't have stable seasons like Earth does. Our moon keeps the axis tilted at 23 degrees, whereas Mars tumbles through space end-over-end. Just another problem to overcome.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

I HIGHLY doubt that we'll be able to reach a trillion people without planetary engineering. I doubt we'll see 20 billion people on this planet without heavily changing things about.

The trillion people I was talking about would be people who may never have been on Earth.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Mars doesn't have stable seasons like Earth does. Our moon keeps the axis tilted at 23 degrees, whereas Mars tumbles through space end-over-end. Just another problem to overcome.

Mars' axial tilt can't be too unstable. Conservation of angular momentum applies. It might be less resistant to gravitational perturbations, but still those are over long timeframes.

But, even so, in this conversation putting a moon in to oribt around Mars is no problem. We're already talking about putting 90 times as much mass on to Mars itself.

On the scale we're talking about, building a Moon to orbit Mars prior to terraforming Mars is like complaining that you might need scaffolding to build a building.