Today's article from Space.com covers that long-discussed wonder-subject, terraforming Sol iv 'Mars'. I'm being naughty again, but it's certainly a good discussion-starter.
That's the whole article, but here's another link featuring Greg Bear which might be of some interest. I won't quote the lot, but here's a little bit of it with Kim Stanley Robinson talking about the economics of it:Robert Britt
Senior Science Writer
SPACE.com
The best way to make Mars habitable would be to inject synthetic greenhouse gases into its atmosphere, researchers said Thursday.The stuff could be shipped to Mars or manufactured there. Scientists and science-fiction authors have long pondered terraforming Mars, melting the vast stores of ice in its polar caps to create an environment suitable for humans. The topic is highly controversial. Some think earthlings have no right to mess with the climate of another planet. Others see Mars as a refuge for people who might need to flee this world as conditions deteriorate. Another argument holds that Mars was likely warmer and wetter in its distant past, and it might have harbored life, so bringing it back to a previous state makes sense.
Among the ideas for how to warm Mars: sprinkling stuff near the poles that would absorb more sunlight; or placing large mirrors in orbit around the planet to reflect more sunlight onto it. Jumpstart the warming The new research suggests that forcing global warming by injecting greenhouse gases may be the best way to terraform, should governments decide to do so. The conditions warming Earth could be harnessed to transform Mars, the scientists determined.
Jumpstarting global warming in a planet-sized laboratory would be a boon to science in some respects. "Bringing life to Mars and studying its growth would contribute to our understanding of evolution, and the ability of life to adapt and proliferate on other worlds," says Margarita Marinova, at the NASA Ames Research Center when the study was done. "Since warming Mars effectively reverts it to its past, more habitable state, this would give any possibly dormant life on Mars the chance to be revived and develop further."
The research is presented in the February issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, published by the American Geophysical Union. With a very thin atmosphere and being farther from the Sun, Mars is much colder than Earth. There is no evidence for any liquid water presently on the surface. Liquid water is considered essential to life as we know it. The polar regions contain vast stores of water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Theorists have said in the past that melting the poles might thicken the atmosphere, which like a blanket would insulate the surface and eventually create a more Earth-like climate.
Studies suggest Mars had surface water and bouts of rain in its early history. Gas of choice The new research modeled how manmade greenhouse gases would affect Martian temperature and melt water ice and carbon dioxide ice at the poles.
Artificially created gases could be 10,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide in warming up the Red Planet, the study determined. The gases that would work the best are flourines and could be made from elements readily available on Mars, Marinova and her colleagues found.
Adding 300 parts per million of the gas mixture into the Martian air would trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, according to the models. The polar ice sheets that would slowly evaporate. The newly released carbon dioxide would cause further warming and melting. Atmospheric pressure would rise. The process would take hundreds or thousands of years to complete, the scientists report.
Donna Shirley: Let's talk about the economics. If we're going to terraform Mars, what are the economic incentives? Will pharmaceutical companies be able to fly us to Mars to find new medicines? Stan, you had some economic things worked out in the trilogy.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, no, it will never be economic. This is the cool thing about it, and one of the reasons that people all around the world are so interested in Mars, is that it sits outside of the systems of current culture and economics. You can't make a profit from it. You can't make it make sense in religious terms. It's just a kind of a thing that humanity would do as a project for the sake of how interesting it would be. It would be an interesting story. We would go there first the way we go to Antarctica, to do scientific studies, to try to help us understand the world better. And then after that, if it were to be terraformed, people would be doing it for itself, just in the way of gardening or building a cathedral. There is no analogy that really makes sense, because it's such a new and big thing. But I think that people are interested in all these little robotic missions and in everything about Mars, because it's so hard to get outside the economic trap that we're in, in our current culture. So it's best to think of it as being meta-economic, or beyond economics.
I don't exactly know what he means when he says meta-economic. Can somebody enlighten me on this? :)
- Art Neuro
No comments:
Post a Comment