For years and decades now the concept of terraforming Mars has kept researchers and science experts on their feet scratching their heads to find a solution. This enthusiasm came from various fictional novels and movies that have given scientists hope that perhaps they can implement this idea. According to research, Mars has the potential to be humanity’s second home and they are trying to make this concept a reality.
If Mars is ever to be terraformed, it will be a monumental task. Terraforming Mars could take decades or even centuries in its initial stages. Additionally, we do not have the technological capacity to implement this initiative. This sobering realisation highlights the enormous obstacles that stand in our way of realising the aim of altering the Red Planet. NASA needs to reassess the grand dream of Terraforming Mars
The dream or vision of making Mars a planet that can give life to humanity is an interesting one. This concept has been part of scientific language and conversation for decades now and it promises not to just give humanity a different perspective, but, also to serve as plan B as the Earth is changing. Scientists have hypothesised that humanity may establish conditions conducive to human life on Mars by releasing greenhouse gases and altering Martian.
NASA has admitted to this impossible mission stating that It is not possible to terraform Mars with current technology. Mars’ thin atmosphere and deficiency in vital resources such as enough carbon dioxide that would be required to start a greenhouse effect and warm the planet are the main obstacles. The idea of converting Mars into an environment more like Earth is significantly more difficult than first thought due to the harsh reality of the planet’s current status.
Therefore, the issue is not entirely based on technology, but also based on the enormity of the resources needed. Less than 1% of Earth’s atmosphere is found on Mars, and the planet does not have a magnetic field to shield it from cosmic radiation. It is therefore a wise idea for scientists and researchers to discard this idea since reports state that it could take thousands of decades to implement this idea. Unless a new technology advances enough to take on this big idea. Obstacles on the journey to a habitable Mars: Scientific, material, and time
Mars does not have the nature or resources that are similar to Earth that can even give us hope. If it comprises less than 1% of what the Earth attributes, then it could be a waste of time, resources and investments. Due to the abundance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (earth), heat is retained and a rather stable climate is produced. Mars’s sparse atmosphere prevents the planet from efficiently retaining heat.
According to Bonsor (n.d.), NASA is reportedly developing a solar sail propulsion technology that would harness solar energy to power spaceships through the use of enormous reflective mirrors. Placing these massive mirrors a few hundred thousand kilometres away from Mars would be another way to use them: to heat the Martian surface by reflecting solar radiation.
NASA has found that, even in the event that all of Mars’ CO2 could be released, the atmospheric pressure required for human survival without a spacesuit would not be produced. The entire accessible carbon dioxide is insufficient to generate a habitable atmosphere, and transferring more gases from Earth or other celestial planets is currently beyond our technical capabilities.
The lack of a magnetic field on Mars presents another significant difficulty. The Earth’s magnetic field is essential for protecting the world from solar winds and dangerous cosmic radiation, which would otherwise remove our atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere now because billions of years ago, the planet lost its magnetic field. It is just not possible to build an artificial magnetic shield using the technologies available today in order to terraform Mars.
The idea of terraforming may not be fully realised for several millennia, even though humans might visit Mars this century. It took the Earth billions of years to develop into a planet on which plants and animals could flourish. It is not an easy task to change the Martian landscape to resemble Earth. To create a livable environment and introduce life to the icy, arid planet of Mars, generations of human creativity and labour will be required (Bonsor, n.d).
I’m bouncing around this thread calling out all the problems with space colonization as a solution to problems on Earth, and I’d like to give just one example of why terraforming Mars is, for all practical terms, completely impossible. And I’m going off the premise that terraforming is necessary to make Mars actually habitable for large groups of humans - the resource cost of self-contained spaces all over the planet would be far too high to make sense as a solution to living even on a degraded Earth.
Mars’s atmosphere is 1/50th the density of the Earth’s. Its current total mass is 2.5e+16 kg. To get it on par with Earth’s (the reasonable threshold for habitability), we’d need to increase the mass of its atmosphere to 1.25e+18 kg. What’s that number? That’s 1,250,000,000,000,000,000 kg. Typically, the solution for providing Mars an atmosphere is to slam it with carbonaceous asteroids over and over until the endless collisions have formed a carbon-dense atmosphere from which we can start. Let’s assume, generously, that 20% of the mass of an asteroid hitting a planet permanently becomes asteroid (that’s very high but we’re going with it to demonstrate the absurdity of this proposition). That means we’ll need to bombard Mars with 6.25 x 10^18 kg of asteroids. Let’s not worry about how many asteroids and assume we can do it with maximum efficiency. We just need to move asteroids from the closest portion of the belt to Mars. To do so we’re ignoring the issues of: finding the asteroids (they are mostly very small), getting to the asteroids (they are very far apart), halting their momentum (they move very quickly), and developing the technology to move them (we don’t have anything resembling a prototype for this). We’re going to pretend we have a space station in the asteroid belt that keeps pace with Mars’s orbit and always has something to launch. All we’re looking for is the energy needed to transport that much mass that far.
The distance we need to cover in the most generous possible circumstance is 250 million km - about twice the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Converting kg to N will land us roughly around 5,625,000,000,000,000,000 N. To move that our 250M km is going to take 1.41026167125e+30 joules. Wow! That’s a big number. What does it tell us? Well, annual global energy consumption is about 295167599999997700000 joules. That’s 1/4,777,833,580 of the number we require to move suffficient atmospheric mass from the asteroid belt to Mars. So, if we reoriented every single ounce of energy on earth exclusively to building an atmosphere of sufficient mass (NOT COMPOSITION!!!) under impossibly optimistic conditions, it would take 4.7 billion years. Oh, and there would be 0 energy left over for human needs. Oh well!
When I say “terraforming Mars is impossible”, this is what I mean.
(I did all this math myself so hopefully nothing’s off)
Depressing. Earth is clearly already on a death spiral. I consider it only natural for humanity to spread, and stagnation leads to issues like we are dealing with now. Resource shortage, climate change, pollution.
All our eggs in one basket is a bad idea. In a just world, NASA or rather any space agency would have 10x or more the funding they do now. A lot of the data we have on the changing climate comes from these agencies.
And absolutely fuck having any psychopathic CEO use his resources to force humans into Mars before it’s ready in the name of profits or some stupid show of force.
Mars can’t be terraformed now, so we should be focusing on how to mitigate the dangers to earth, get better at going to space with less cost, and getting more people into careers that actually contribute to humanity like engineering, medicine and no more fucking “Business degrees”.
Earth is clearly already on a death spiral.
No matter how bad things get on earth, they will be much, much easier to improve to habitable conditions than Mars. The difference in resource investment required is so many orders of magnitude as to be almost unquantifiable in terms that relate to any real world economic activity. Like, 1000 years of the entire productive capacity of the Earth to even begin to meaningfully change the climate of Mars to something where we could live there.
I consider it only natural for humanity to spread, and stagnation leads to issues like we are dealing with now. Resource shortage, climate change, pollution.
Why is it natural for humanity to spread? All three of those issues on earth are extremely solvable through a different economic system. We don’t even need new technology. Population growth is obviously not going to continue for ever - it’s already declining. Our planet has more than enough resources to live here sustainably until the sun burns out in a few hundred million years. We simply need to stop allowing a parasitic class to destroy things for their own short-term gain. You might scoff at the infeasibility of that task, but I promise you it is far easier than shipping billions of people through space and all the resources necessary to sustain them on a planet where not only are they not evolved to live, but where the conditions for life are worse than literally any spot on Earth. It simply doesn’t make sense.
I know I stole this opinion from a series of sci-fi books, but I like it.
Planets should not be terraformed. It’s vandalism of the natural world. If we are ever at the point where we have the technology to terraform a planet, we’ll just as easily be able to build artificial habitats in space.
It’s vandalism of the natural world.
That can be said about literally any endeavor to increase the productive capacity of a given piece of land though…
This isn’t a Marxist/Materialist position, is what I’m getting at.
This article reads like it was LLM spew. I don’t know why exactly, it just has that vibe.
It’s the repeating information near the end
