Isn't Mars a thin atnosphere planet.

What do you think!

Mars has a VERY thin atmosphere.  But with the tech level you are at in the game, you probably thickened it up a bit.

I agree with Bill, by the time we bump into the Arceans in the mid 2050's (is that right?), we may have started primitive terraforming on it. Some of the techniques desicribed in Kim Stanley's 'Mars' series are pretty easy to implement from out current tech level.

^that's interesting; what are these techniques for example?

 

Genetically engineered moss, mostly; a soletta is used at one point; comet skimming is discussed though I don't think it's used; renewable energy heating mechanisms; and also a fair bit of general industrial stuff to just pump a lot of CO2 into the Atmosphere. Oh, and thermal boreholes. Basically, if it appeared in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, then it was in the Red Mars trilogy at some point.

NASA has recently learned that Solar wind is bleeding off CO2 from Mars. This will make terraforming the planet very difficult if not impossible.

Actually this doesn't matter since the game does not specify the conditions under which the population lives. The residents of Mars could all be living in covered habitats 

The bleed rate is extremely slow. Any terraforming which worked on a human timescale would be unaffected tbh.

The Elephant in the room is the lack of a magnetic shield on Mars. If there were some way humans could restart the (engine) it (absolutely impossible at this time) would easily hold an  atmosphere.

 

We do not know if Mars core is cold solid. Would ever be possible to 'heat it up' and get it spinning like Earth's? Such massive planetary changes would preclude humans even being in the same neighborhood till that got fixed. 

 

I figure a massive direct hit with a slightly smaller planetary body to add mass and heat would do it, BUT it would likely shift the orbit causing no end of hidden problems on Earth. 

The rate of atmosphere loss is something like 100 grams per year.  A goodly sized compressed air tank could take care of years worth of depridation.  Any actual atmosphere production capability could easily account for the loss, on the principle that a leaky bucket still fills up if you keep pouring water in.

For purposes of narrative justification within the game, I assume that Mars has been the subject of centuries long application of primitive technologies just to get it to the minimum planet it is at the start of game.  Using the new generation of technologies, you have the opportunity to do some terraforming at a much more reasonable schedule.  It is an excuse as thin as the Mars atmosphere itself, but it works for me.

 

Its roughly 100 grams per second, not year.  That works out to approximately 3 billion, 155 million, 760 thousand grams/year (or 3.2 million kilograms/year).  The rate of loss would probably increase the more atmosphere Mars had ... so the more you try to thicken it, the faster it would lose it.  Making significant alterations to a planet's atmosphere in terms of thickness takes a long time and a lot of resources.

100 grams a second is about 0.4 tons per hour. That's 9.6 tons a day, or 3,504 tons per year. This is roughly as much as the City of Milan's domestic CO2 emissions from 2005. The Scherer plant, the most pollutant individual power plant in the USA, produced 25.3 million tons of CO2 alone every year.  We're really good at pumping shit into atmospheres, in fact. Just so we can compare the numbers in numbers, Martian air loss looks like this:

 

3504

 

And Scherer's CO2 output per year looks like this:

25,300,000

 

Mars presently has an atmospheric mass of 25 tera tonnes. Earth has one of 5148 tera tonnes. A Teratonne looks like this:

 

1,000,000,000,000

 

Mars is about half the size of Earth, so we'll say we need to go from 25 teratonnes to 2500 teratonnes to get a similar atmopsheric density. In tons, those look like this:

 

Current atmosphere: 25,000,000,000,000

target atmosphere:   2,500,000,000,000,000

Loss rate:                 3504

 

Now look at martian air loss again in comparison to those, but in teratonnes:

Current atmosphere: 25

Target atmosphere:  2,500

Loss rate:                0.000000003504

 

We need to increase the Martian atmosphere by around 10,000%. To do this in a human time scale, were looking at doing that in around 100-200 years. We need to be increasing the atmosphere by something in the region of 12,500,000,000,000 tons a year. Countering that 100 grams of atmospheric loss a second increases that to 12,500,000,003,504 per year. It's a rounding error. A barely-relevant 9th decimal place loss rate. For it to become relevant to our calculations, it would need to increase by billions of percent as the atmosphere thickens.

 

TL;DR:  Merely talking about terraforming Mars requires us to assume a rate of transformation that makes atmospheric erosion irrelevant.

Bad news for terraforming Mars

The CO2 is gone not stored in rocks and soil.

http://www.space.com/31044-mars-terraforming-nasa-maven-mission.html

 

From the link:

 

"For example, Mars' two polar caps harbor some CO2 ice (though they're both composed primarily of water ice), and Martian soils soak up some carbon dioxide as well. "

So yeah, there's some stored in the rocks and soil. Besides, once we're looking at a civilization which can move stuff between planets fairly easily, simply transporting and dumping CO2 from other planets is not problematic and might actually be quite desirable for both participants - shunting a large portion of Venus' atmosphere over to Mars would benefit both planets.

Yes a magnetic field would do it and a collision (Phobos?) would be great.

I think the mass of Mars is not a problem. I read somewhere that if we could create an Earth atmosphere on the Moon it would take over 2000 years to bleed off. With a magnetic field a Mars atmosphere would likely be permanent

Definitely a Type II pubic works project there.

 

Yeah, the magnetic field is the important bit, if anything just because without one any colonists would soak up a lethal dose of rads the first time the sun went through a maximum. Robinson actually hangs a lampshade on that in the trilogy, as one of the characters has taken on a lethal dosage and gotten away with it and is highly aware of the fact.

 

Phobos would be far too small to set the core in motion; both of Mars' moons are basically captured asteroids. Any impact big enough to actually make a difference would reduce the planet's surface to a molten hell anyway, so some kind of asteroid bombardment would be a no-no (though comet-skimming to thicken the atmosphere is a good idea). If you wanted a magnetosphere, you'd need some kind of artificial means of either re-igniting the core (no chance), or producing a giant magnetic field artificially  with the pole at opposite ends of the planet (which should be possible given a suitably advanced means of producing magnetic wormholes; the methodology for this has already been proven in a lab).

 

Not sure how much energy that would take, mind; if we're just spitballing I'm assuming we don't care how many trillions this would cost. Besides, a major carbon-burning power industry would introduce some much-needed global warming.

 

I can't help but think there's actually a Kerbal Space Program-style indie hit waiting to be made about balancing the atmospheres of a set of planets, you know.

 

 

The cost would be immense, though just bombing the planet with icy comets would probably work. Given enough incentive, you could set up tankers running from the water-filled moons of Jupiter or Saturn - once you get the chunk of ice moving along the right path, it's pretty much free.

Manhattan real-estate is valued at $1000 per foot. Since there are 27,878,400 sq ft in a square mile, that comes to 27,878,400,000 per square mile (which seems low). Just to ballpark it, lets set a really low value of maybe $10,000 per square mile as an average for Frontier Mars.

The surface area of Mars is about 55.91 million sq miles. Not all of that is usable, so let's say... half, or about 25 million square miles, at $10,000 per square mile, comes out to around $250,000,000,000. For that kind of potential payoff, you can interest investors - so long as they don't have to invent and pay for the basic infrastructure of rockets, space stations, learning how to keep astronauts healthy in zero-G and so forth. If it's just a case of bringing in ice, comets and asteroids (for the nitrogen and so on) then a $250 billion payout is decent money to get someone interested. Plus, think of all the people who'd like to own their own planet.

 

By the way, I'm just doing BOTE calculations here, so apologies if they're off.

 

You wouldn't bother with tankers. Just strap some engines to a passing comet and gently shift it over a decade or so.

 

IIRC, in the books they consider using junk from the Oort cloud - halfway through the first book, they figure out how to indefinitely extend human life, so they work in a more-or-less 500-year timescale, and don't mind the 300-year turn-around. They eventually come up with better ways - the soletta is a particularly good example of the kind of heavily-invasive methods that will be most effective. Terraforming Mars turns out mostly to be a matter of doing all the stuff we're not supposed to do on Earth; first you accelerate a greenhouse effect as quickly as possible, then you reverse it. Do not be surprised if, 300 years from now, everything has 'Made on Mars' stamped on it, especially if someone manages to build a decent space elevator (there's friggin' loads of them in the books, and effectively zero-cost spaceflight is kind of the most important thing you can learn to do as a species anyway).

 

I like KSR's rigorous hard science (both physical and social), but I do find his writing horribly tedious to read. His characters are completely unrelatable and really poorly written, his dialogue is often painfully stilted, and there's a fair bit of pretentious verbage going on as the author waxes lyrical about the shape of a chunk of regolith or some equally pointless diversion. His vision is both plausible and compelling, but his writing style is honestly dull; I still recommend gritting your teeth and plowing through Red Mars if you're interested in how terraforming is likely to work, and in anarcho-syndicalist social theory.

The main issue is oxygen not carbon dioxide considering earth has less than a half percent carbon dioxide in it's atmosphere that's less than 50 teratons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mars has roughly half that or more. Most of our carbon dioxide is in rocks at the bottom of the ocean. I was suggesting a change in the game since we now have thin atmosphere planets in the game. Oxygen is more of a concern. It would even help to have carbon dioxide mixed with oxygen breathing wise.

Factories on mars would do the trick for carbon dioxide not oxygen.

It wouldn't bleed enough to throw a lick at least for 100 million years.

I would assume artificial habitats until you start terraforming tiles.

An artificial magnetosphere powered by solar energy, or my own design electro magnetic lifter would do the trick. I volunteer if someone would fund me. Crazy isn't he. Planetary body  not likely to work without heating up the crust. I would suggest a flyby either by a really strong magnetic lifter, or one of Jupiter moons. I do know someone who could build one of the magnetic lifters with a lot of money some research or schooling with a lot of help.

True, but this is about half or more of earth. The oxygen is way more of a problem only if you don't want to spend the time growing moss, and exedra. Not quite only 100 million years.

A comet could be used to bring water. Irony a thicker oxygen atmosphere would solve the radiation problem. There may be other gsses involved. Oxygen is turned into ozone from ultra violet light which blocks ultra violet light, the earth actually has  everything every thing that would be needed to block solar radiation without a magnetosphere I guess the problem is we don't have enough of it. But it might work differently than what they say if the earth stopped spinning to block all light but visible light, and infra red on earth, I think the problem without a magnetosphere is we don't have enough, so you would give mars more if it would stay. Even if it wouldn't stay you could keep replenishing it. Like interstellar space travel the only real hinderance is cost which could be waved if we all worked together on this. Electro magnetic lifters would help a lot.

Thanks for the responses. The conversation is nice. If anyone is hiring for this I'm in I just virtually have no practical skills just a lot of theoretical stuff kind of like Leonardo Davinci.

 

 

 

Mars atmosphere is already 96% CO2, adding a bit more is not going to make much of a difference in terms of climate. Besides, you actually want to decrease the CO2 with nitro/oxigen...

The magnetic field might come back if the core crystalizes and releases energy by this. In a very distant future temperature will reach reasonable levels because the sun increases its output. At some point the polar caps might melt, IRRC the southern one holds alot of water.

Still, Mars is not going to be able to hold an atmosphere because he simply lacks sufficient gravity, it only has 10% of earths mass. Which means that normal atmospheric pressure cannot be reached, so without wearing a pressure suit, you'll die ultra fast. Also the solar radiation will become increasingly intense, further exacerbating the blowing away of atmosphere.

Getting enough mass onto Mars to balance this out is nothing we could do in short time. We're not talking here about a few comets (which usually cannot be pushed by engines as their just an amalgam of loose dust & ice - you would have to gravitically influence it by placing a massy object in relation to its flight path and this object could have engines to correct to mutual influence...) but about as much more mass as the planet itself^^

 

 

And about the funding - if I recall correctly all modern states signed a treaty to not claim land in space... I wonder which country is the first to break this^^

I also realized that we can't add more than 2% oxygen in relation to other gases I'm wondering how much more atmospheric pressure we can take before it becomes fatal. As far as losing atmosphere we are still talking about millions of years. That is a long time, I'm also suggesting instead of making it self sustaining just keep replenishing. The problem still remains how do we maintain this.

 

It`s also really cold, but isn`t everything domed in Gal Civ anyway? So it doesn`t really matter.

 

No, no, no. You want to increase CO2 initially, and then after that you worry about adding in N and O. Terraforming is a process, and the initial steps in the process are about thickening the atmosphere and heating the place up rather than stampeding to a breathable mixture at low pressure and temperature.

 

You start out by increasing CO2 to thicken the atmosphere and start up a greenhouse effect. Mars' atmosphere is 96% CO2, but is so thin that the actual tonnage of CO2 is very low. CO2 is heavy, relatively easy to add (most other processes we'd want to be doing will produce it as a by-product anyway), and it is very effective for warming the surface; better still, you can convert it into oxygen just by adding plants, which is again something we're going to be doing anyway.

 

One you have a temperature and pressure that can sustain liquid water, that's when you start thinking about moving to a breathable mix; this is also more or less how it happened on Earth. The very earliest atmosphere on Earth was pretty much made up of CO2, and the Great Oxydization Event is believed to have been a byproduct of anaerobic photosynthesizing life. This can also be done surprisingly quickly - there's estimates that all of Earth's photosynthesizing life today could achieve the same scale of event in as little as 2000 years (the first time round, given the much lower levels of life, it took about quarter of a billion years once the sinks were filled). 

 

The Mass thing is less of a problem than you'd think tbh. Remember, Venus has only about 80% of Earth's mass, yet it's atmosphere is some 9000% as massive as ours; the mass of the planet does not determine atmospheric potential alone. It'd mainly take effect as another increase in loss rate rather than just making it outright impossible to thicken the Martian atmosphere up, but this is again a process that takes billions of years (which is in fact what appears to have happened to Mars, billions of years of very slow processes have stripped it); the difference would again be basically negligible if we're accepting the idea of human-timescale terraforming in the first place.

 

So, to terraform Mars, the first thing you want to do is throw it into a Venus-type hyper-greenhouse effect so that it ends up with an extremely massive atmosphere made up of heat-retention gases. That allows you to bring it to acceptable pressure and temperature levels, so people can work without suits but need breathing apparatus. Finally, you start looking at converting some of that atmosphere into Oxygen-Nitrogen mix, by breaking down the CO2, releasing the oxygen and fixing the carbon, and by breaking down NO3, which is fixed in rocks.

And it would more than pay for itself in real-estate values alone.

 

On the same subject, I'd be interested in being able to terraform Venus. Perhaps a sort of 'floating algae' to eat up the CO2 would work. It could replicate into vast mats that would help block sunlight from reaching the surface, serving as a solar shield.