Yet another install of our ongoing rendition of Feldstein's '50 Girls 50.' More to come, like it or not!
Also, I have a serious question: Okay, people do still buy DVDs I guess. I still see shelves of them at all the electronics stores, and the department stores and all over Amazon. So why is it so hard to find a DVD tower?! I went to like six different stores and nobody sells the damned things anymore! I asked the salesdude at Best Buy where they keep the DVD towers and he scowled and flinched away from me like I punched him in the throat! Where they heck do people store their DVDs if nobody sells towers anymore?!!
Okay, rant done. And now a blurb.
You've probably heard about Space-X billionaire Elon Musk's bold idea to rapidly terraform Mars by detonating fusion bombs over the Martian poles. It's a brilliant plan… except it isn't. I thought I might take a few moments here to explain why this is really not such a great idea. First off, just to nitpick, you wouldn't want to try this with nuclear weapons. Nukes would leave the entire planet a radioactive wasteland, but they're also not very efficient compared to other methods, like smashing asteroids into it. A comet impact, for instance, releases as much energy as 625,000 of our most powerful nukes. But that's not really the problem. Even if you could find a way to melt the Martian polar caps, it would not magically transform Mars into a second Earth.
The idea, in a nutshell, is that melting the polar caps would release a bunch of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that would warm Mars up to a comfortable temperature we can live in, with liquid water and livable atmospheric pressure. The biggest problem with that – besides, everything – is that there just isn't enough frozen carbon dioxide on Mars to do even close to what Musk wants to accomplish. They'd need about eight times more than what's there… and even if they could somehow find or bring in that amount of carbon dioxide, the atmospheric pressure would still much too low for humans to survive in it. And you would still be in desperate need of nitrogen and oxygen, except the little bit that's locked up in water molecules, but you sort of need the water in water form, don't you!
Even if you could somehow create an atmosphere on Mars just like Earth's, that would leave you with a planet with an average temperature of -55 degrees Celsius, compared to Earth's average temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. But all of that isn't even the worst of it. Since Mars has no magnetosphere to protect it from the solar wind, any atmosphere you create would be gradually eroded away. In time, the atmosphere would be gone and the liquid water will have been broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, which will all be lost to space and you'd be left again with a dead, lifeless planet, only now it wouldn't have any water left behind either. Mars would be worse off now than when you started.
The sad truth of the matter is that Mars right now is in its most stable natural equilibrium state. It's a small dead world with no plate tectonics and no magnetic field which cannot hold an atmosphere or protect you from incoming cosmic radiation. It may very well be possible, with a tremendous expenditure of time and resources, to make it into an Earthlike planet, but without a continuous input of resources to maintain that it will eventually revert back to its natural state.
Humans certainly *can* live on Mars, but they'll likely need to do so in enclosed controlled environments (“paraterraforming”). There may not be enough oxygen or other gases on Mars to give the entire planet a breathable atmosphere, but there's plenty there to create habitable pockets throughout the inhospitable landscape. We would need to find ways to adapt to our new environment, rather than trying to change Mars to better suit us. In time, we could even engineer plants and microbes capable of surviving on the surface, but we wouldn't be doing so under the illusion that they will one day transform the place into a human-habitable world; rather we'd be doing it to beautify our new home and fulfill our role as ambassadors of life to the cosmos.
Dr. Chris McKay is one of the world's most preeminent experts on exobiology and terraforming. He's skeptical on the idea that we can ever make Mars a place where humans can live like we do on Earth, but he's a big advocate for 'Mars-forming,' or “ecogenesis” as he terms it in its generic sense. What he suggests is that, if we do find life on Mars, we may be able to restore the environment there at least back to a level where the native life can once again thrive. Or, if we find there was life there once but it's now extinct, but it turns out to be DNA based, we can introduce microbes from Earth to replicate their functions in a new Mars-centric ecosystem and then see what happens. In any case, a native Martian ecosystem will likely be anaerobic (that means not oxygen-breathing), so it wouldn't be a place where people can go and frolic without a spacesuit. But it would be an interesting place to visit and to study, and there's no reason humans couldn't establish enclosed colonies to coexist alongside this new native Martian ecosystem.
Personally, I find McKay's ideas the most intriguing. Why bother going all the way to some distant world just to turn it into a place like Earth? My vote is for Mars-forming!
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