mars climate change

[soop]

Hey guys. I am currently working on the storyline to what will hopefully be a sucessful science fiction game. Here is the challenge: figure out a way to raise the average surface temperature of mars by 30 degrees farenhiet within 50 years. You are allowed any technology which you think we could have 150 years from the present.

My initial thought was using ion based propulsion to gradually change to course of comets (dozens of them) and put them into a collision course with mars. This would put a good deal of water vapour into the atmosphere, as well as release a large amount of heat.

I know that scientists believe that a large impact on earth would kick up dirt into the atmosphere and actually decrease surface temperatures.

I don't know if the same thing would happen on mars - certainly, a lot of dust would be throw up. But based on my very limited knowledge, having dust in the martian atmosphere seems to increase the amount of solar radiation the atmosphere asbords (based on the fact that atmospheric temps soar during martian dust storms).

So, would the comet idea work, and how about some other methods by which the above climate shift could be orchastrated?

[Espritch]

One idea I’ve heard of involves setting up automated plants on Mars that would release CO2 from the dirt. Weathering on Earth tends to fix CO2. If it does so on Mars, there could be a good bit of CO2 trapped in the soil. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

A idea of my own would be to construct big reflectors made of some very thin but reflective plastic and put those in orbit to reflect more sun light to the surface. Of course they would require a lot of surface area to have much of an effect.

[Kaptain K]

One idea I’ve heard of involves setting up automated plants on Mars that would release CO2 from the dirt. Weathering on Earth tends to fix CO2. If it does so on Mars, there could be a good bit of CO2 trapped in the soil. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

A idea of my own would be to construct big reflectors made of some very thin but reflective plastic and put those in orbit to reflect more sun light to the surface. Of course they would require a lot of surface area to have much of an effect.

Aim them at the poles and you would get both CO2 and water vapor.

[Espritch]

Aim them at the poles and you would get both CO2 and water vapor.

Good point. Water vapor contributes to greenhouse heating while ice tend to cool the planet by reflecting energy back in to space. Heating the polar caps could be helpful in several ways.

[Diamond]

Aim them at the poles and you would get both CO2 and water vapor.

Good point. Water vapor contributes to greenhouse heating while ice tend to cool the planet by reflecting energy back in to space. Heating the polar caps could be helpful in several ways.

As can be witnessed from the current state of Mars, carbon dioxide is a lousy greenhouse gas. Water vapour is far better at trapping heat, and dominates the greenhouse effect on Earth, as well as causing warming of the planet following El Ninos....

[Swift]

I had an old version of SimEarth and one of the things you could do was terraform Mars and Venus. One of the most efficient ways for Mars was what you propose, dropping lots of comets. I'm not sure you can use a 10 year old computer game as a reference. I like the idea of hitting the poles. I suspect it would initially get colder, because of the dust, but Mars routinely has massive dust storms and I don't think they ever last more than a year.

The idea of releasing trapped CO2 from the soil might not work - I don't think we know how much CO2 is in the soil, but it might not be a lot.

I wonder if there was some way to turn the volcanoes back on? It seems Mars is now pretty inert (the small core has probably cooled down too much).

[Amadeus]

how about some kind of geneticly engineered plant life?

[eburacum45]

In the simulation game we are developing at Orion's Arm,
http://www.siderealgames.com/cgi-bin...8,m=1067601719

the comets (actually ice-rich objects from the outer asteroid belt) are dropped on the north and south poles;
this liberates a lot of frozen water and CO2 , both of which are good greenhouse gases;

this brings the atmosphere up to about 300 millibars by the Year 3000; a long term project involves bringing water and nitrogen from Titan and elsewhere to bring the atmosphere up to 1 bar eventually.

however the development of genetically modified organisms and humans becomes more important as time goes by, and the adapted species of humanity vote not to finish the process;
Mars remains a green and red planet, and never really becomes a blue marble.

[daver]

Van Neumann machines to build a glass roof (it'll have to be a pretty thick roof, on the rough order of 1 meter thick to hold down the atmosphere you're presumably going to want to create underneath of it). You don't have to roof over the entire planet.

[eburacum45]

A metre of glass? Seems a bit over the top...
[Basil Brush] Boom,boom![/Basil Brush]

The design for worldroofs we have been considering are flexible, supported by atmospheric pressure inside, and are held together by a net of buckycable; this design has several layers of transparent polymer separated by layers of gas in sealed compartments like bubblewrap;

( the advanced far future designs react to meteor punctures by closing up like a drawstring, but I don't expect such things in the near future)

Because the structure is in tension instead of compression it can be lighter, but the strength of the cable net is the most important factor-

would that not be more do-able than a glass greenhouse?

[daver]

would that not be more do-able than a glass greenhouse?

Umm. I suppose it depends on how cheap sand is. One nice thing about a meter of glass is that it also doubles as a radiation shield (actually, I'm not sure that a meter of glass will be enough). You can go lighter, but if you have to bury your buildings and parks underground anyway you might wonder why you're bothering.

Anyway, the natural shape for a lighter structure would be a slightly flattened bubble. You could put in some tethers to force it into a more oblate spheroid. That could lead to some interesting architecture--there'd be considerable advantage to attaching buildings to these tethers, so you could get mile-high towers (well, as tall as the roof, anyway). If your roof is high enough you might get some weather inside; presumably there will be enough obstructions that you won't get anything like a storm.

[Tuckerfan]

eburacum45, you're right. Bucky himself envisioned such things for use here on Earth, and even though Mars has a lower atmospheric pressure than we've got on Earth, it shouldn't require massively thick panes of glass to hold in the atmosphere. The shuttles, ISS (and presumably Russian and Chinese capsules) all have an atmosphere PSI of 4 lbs. It is admittedly a nearly pure oxygen atmosphere (something difficult to do in a giant Martian dome), but so long as the O2 levels are high enough, then the pressure in the dome can be lower than Earth normal pressure.

Genetically engineered bacteria and plants seems to me to be the best way of getting the level of Martian atmosphere up. Transporting the initial colonies could be done by spacecraft the size of the current Mars rovers (for probably about the same cost) and wouldn't necessarily need the sophisticated electronics necessary for pinpoint landings (good enough to dump the thing on the ice caps would suffice, I think).

Another idea I've thought of which has the benefits of offering a 2 for 1 terraforming deal is as follows:

Venus has an incredibly dense atmosphere which means that even if it were breathable, it'd be so thick that anyone going from it to an Earth normal atmosphere in a relatively short period of time would be at risk for getting the bends. If you can construct giant mirrors to increase the level of sunlight hitting Mars, why not build another set to eliminate the amount of sunlight hitting Venus? Eventually, the atmosphere would freeze. It could then be "mined" and sent hurtling towards Mars. I imagine you could use a propulsion platform that contained a nuclear pile which would get hot enough to squirt the frozen atmospheric gasses from Venus out a nozzle, so the platform could use it's cargo for reaction matter. Once it had placed the frozen atmosphere on a collision course with Mars, it could seperate from the mass, and return for another load.

While this wouldn't give Mars a breathable atmosphere, it would load it up with lots of greenhouse gasses rather quickly, thus sparing you the effort of mucking about the asteroids looking for comets (or other hunks of ice) with the right chemical make up. Using genetically engineered bacteria to split the sulpher dioxide (I think that's what most of Venus's atmosphere is made up of) into oxygen and sulpher, shouldn't be too difficult as there's lots of bacteria here on Earth which makes use of sulpher (most of the ones near the undersea thermal vents and in some hot springs around the world).

Once you got Mars up to a decent atmospheric density, you could simply place the surplus (if any) Venusian atmosphere into orbit around the sun so that if Mars's atmosphere ever got too thin again, you could restart the process. Once you mined enough ice from Venus, you could permenantly collapse the sunshield, and unleash the bacteria you'd engineered for use on Mars on Venus. (Speeding up the planet's rotation is going to be a real toughie. I've seen studies which indicate that if you totalled up all the thrust needed to have asteroids smack into Venus with enough force to cause it's rotation to speed up, you'd be better off just hooking 'em all up to the planet directly and letting 'er rip.)

[JohnOwens]

While this wouldn't give Mars a breathable atmosphere, it would load it up with lots of greenhouse gasses rather quickly, thus sparing you the effort of mucking about the asteroids looking for comets (or other hunks of ice) with the right chemical make up. Using genetically engineered bacteria to split the sulpher dioxide (I think that's what most of Venus's atmosphere is made up of) into oxygen and sulpher, shouldn't be too difficult as there's lots of bacteria here on Earth which makes use of sulpher (most of the ones near the undersea thermal vents and in some hot springs around the world).

Actually, about 96% CO2, a little bit of N2, traces of others. The sulfury stuff is mostly in the clouds themselves.

[Azerelus]

Comets good, Saturn's rings - Better!

Saturn's rings would be ground up and shot as a stream (electro-magnetic propulsion unit) shooting a stream of gravel sized material which would rain down on Mars in an elliptical degenerating orbit.

1. There would be the bright path of ice from Saturn to Mars (Pretty). Enough to write about right there.

2. Mars would have a spiral for a while (Pretty) and a steady rain of ice which would burn up into water and most likely get hot enough to break the H2O bound creating a hydrogen/oxygen atmosphere higher up. Since oxygen is heavier it would settle out while the hydrogen would escape rather rapidly from Mar's low gravity.

The Rain of Saturn's Rings would condense into water vapor and precipitation.

Maybe reflectors of Ice would be made as well, these would be in a la grange orbit to reflect light back to Mars. The material being cheap and easy to mold. However it would burn off slowly from the heat of the sun.

The in-fall of water would collect in craters and low lying areas. Algae from Earth's polar regions could be sowed into the puddles, lakes and growing seas of Mars.

If you are really inventive you could suggest that Asteroid material (or select one of the minor moons of Saturn for this material)(minerals) are also seeded into the ice stream to enhance the mineral level of the water to promote fast growth of the algae.

The equipment already exists, We can launch material in a stead stream using magnetic rails - this has been proposed for a future moon colony.

As for collecting the ice of Saturn's rings, I imagine that a large vessel (a Snow Plow Class, Ion drive Solar Collector for melting) Could set up orbit in the Rings of Saturn.

The Rings are Mostly water ice particles, probably with some rock mixed in. The ice particles range in size from sugar grains to houses. So it is doable.

Far easier to collect the debris from the Rings of Saturn than it is to capture fast moving comets.

Depending on how fast to sling the material, and which trajectory you take, we could assume that no more than a decade would be needed to get the first part of the material to Mars.

As for warming, a stead stream of ice cubed sized material would transfer a good amount of heat through friction. A decent amount of water vapor would form in the upper atmosphere acting like a green house.

Breathable in 50? No - but you could assume an increase of air pressure to where your Martian Colonist could walk outside with oxygen masks.

The algae would of course be converting the CO2 to Oxygen.

Need an inert gas to mix. I can not recall what the nitrogen content of Mar's soil is, we can assume that adding water will release many interesting things like nitrogen into the atmosphere.

The Algae farms of Mars:

These would be everywhere that water collects. In craters, in hollows. The algae (most likely engineered to not only live in the colder temps, but also sped up in its life cycle) Would be harvested nearly every day. That would be piled up and tossed with added bacterias to create compost.

That compost would be added to the native soil for food for the next level of plant life, grasses and hardy varieties of trees. (Nothing that requires a pollinator; ie bee)

Once you get the temperature to remain above freezing at the poles you could have planters planting vast tracts of Fir and Pine from earth's norther regions (Canada?) also seeding with Tundra flora further to the north and south.

Seeding Mars with Bacteria which eat the dead material may be far easier than we think. We find that bacteria has a wide range of life zones on earth.

Genetically engineered earth worms would be introduced once the soil got warm enough - perhaps when the atmosphere is still too high in CO2 for humans, but low enough for a genetically engineered worm.

The worms are the most important soil dwellers, then do a lot of work here on earth.

The Genetically Engineered algae and worms would die off when the CO2 level got lower, thus providing a good natural shut off switch. These would be replaced with more terrestrial versions to maintain the system.

We could assume that 50 years into the project the atmosphere would be dense enough to be comfortable enough for shirt sleeve work. Ok a sweater.

Around that time the CO2 levels should be fixed in the algae you have been growing like crazy, that has been turned into the soil by the earth worms. The atmosphere may be breathable - thin, yes, but breathable.

Most likely the introduction of more plants, insects and perhaps some small mammals (fish would have no problem) would be at this stage.

Some of the key issues may be protesters demonstrating on Earth about the removal and damage to Saturn's Rings. Imagine the outcry over the loss of that natural beauty.

Perhaps another issue would be a limit to the amount of material available, thus a cut off date of finding another source of material to keep Mars replenished.

Of course if you use this information in a book, I do hope you give me a little credit for the idea ;-)

Happy trails

Az

[eburacum45]

As I have pointed out in this forum before, I am afraid the rings will have to go!
They are a danger to shipping, and a valuable resource - too good to waste by just letting them sit there looking pretty.