Posted on 06/16/2015 12:54:55 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It wasn’t the Martians’ fault their planet died. If they existed – once – Martians were likely microbes, living in a world much like our own, warmed by an atmosphere and crisscrossed by waterways. But Mars began to lose that atmosphere, perhaps because its gravity wasn’t strong enough to hold onto it after an asteroid impact, or perhaps it was gradually blown away by solar winds. The cause is still mysterious, but the ending is clear: Mars’s liquid water dried up or froze into ice caps, leaving life without its most precious resource. Any Martians would have been victims of a planet-wide natural disaster they could neither foresee nor prevent.
For Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, the moral implications are clear: we should help our neighbours. Earthlings might not have been able to intervene when Martians were dying en masse (we were just microbes ourselves), but now, billions of years later, we could make it up to them. We’ve already figured out an effective way to warm up a planet: pump greenhouse gases into its atmosphere. McKay imagines a not-too-distant future in which we park machinery on Mars that converts carbon and fluorine in the Martian soil into insulating chlorofluorocarbons, and spews them into the planet’s puny atmosphere like a protein shake designed to bulk it up. ‘On Earth, we would call it pollution. On Mars, it’s called medicine,’ McKay told me in an interview. On his calculation, Mars would be warm enough to support water and microbial life within 100 years.
The practice of making a dead world habitable is called terraforming. In science fiction, Earthlings terraform other planets in order to occupy them, usually after trashing Earth. Think of the TV show Firefly (2002), where humans use terraforming technologies...
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
lol
I think I remember either reading or hearing something along the lines of a lack of or too weak of a magnetic shield around Mars makes terraforming possible.
Too much radiation gets through and there’s nothing (or not enough) to keep the solar wind from stripping the atmosphere... or something like that?
There’s a belief that Mars once had an atmosphere and that it was stripped away or wandered off. IMHO it has always been just about the way we see it now, and that the drive to send human missions to Mars is the main reason why some insist Mars used to be more or less Earthlike, or that it used to have seas of liquid water (which would require an atmosphere of some sort).
The microbial activity in the Martian soil does suggest that there used to be more atmosphere, but given that the Earth has microbial life as far down into the crust as anyone has ever looked, could mean that’s where all the action happens. Y’know, from a materialist-reductionist perspective.
The solar wind might indeed strip off the atmosphere, if Mars had much of one, but if we were to introduce an Earthlike mixture (78% nitrogen, 21+% oxygen) from frozen gas chunks in the outer Solar System, granted it would be a big job, and take a while, it would be a really long time before Mars would need a refill as it were. ;’)
Thanks for smartsplaining.
:’) My pleasure, and thanks for the kind remarks.
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