The problem is simple. Mars is inhospitable to human life. The only way we can survive on that planet is to live in bubbles or below ground. The journey taken by human colonists will be fraught with danger. Exposure to cosmic rays over the long voyage between Earth and the Red Planet may result in high levels of cancer in those who survive the trip. Then there is the need to create a self-sustaining closed system with enough food, water, essential material resources and infrastructure to allow a colony to establish itself.
Always remember when we are talking about Mars, the environment is harsher than Antarctica with no breathable air.
S. Caninervis is a moss that grows in Tibet and Antarctica. Bringing it to Mars and planting it there would be an interesting terraforming experiment. S. Caninervis is a photoautotroph. It would convert light from the more distant Sun into organic compounds allowing it to reproduce. It has high-stress tolerances and can thrive in high altitudes with similar air pressure conditions to that found on the Martian surface. It can live in an atmosphere composed largely of carbon dioxide. And it can withstand radiation levels equal to that which would occur on the Martian surface.
If there is any living thing on Earth that can make the transition to a Martian environment it is S. Caninervis. In a recent experiment, scientists subjected it to a simulated Mars environment. The moss survived over five years at temperatures of -80 Celsius (-112 Fahrenheit). Nighttime temperatures on Mars drop to as low as -60 Celsius (-76 Fahrenheit) at the equator while daytime temperatures can be as high as 27 Celsius (80 Fahrenheit). In equatorial regions of Mars, therefore, S. Caninervis could handle the planet’s temperature extremes.
But what about at the Martian poles? To simulate those conditions the experiment used liquid nitrogen exposure with temperatures at -195.8 Celsius (-320.44 Fahrenheit). This exceeds the daytime highs of -55 Celsius (-67 Fahrenheit) and lows of -130 Celsius (-202 Fahrenheit) found in the planet’s polar regions. Under extreme liquid nitrogen exposure for a month, the moss survived. Here too, it would handle the Martian environment.
How does S. Caninervis do it? It is called “drying without dying.” When stressed the moss becomes dormant. Its physical structure conserves water and provides photoprotection from ultraviolet radiation. Even when completely dehydrated it maintains large amounts of sucrose and maltose to serve as osmotic agents and help stabilize it over long dormant periods. Then when conditions improve, it awakes and starts to grow again.
Humans could survive on Mars without altering the planet’s ecology should native life exist there. We don’t have to introduce Earth extremophiles if we don’t want to.
The two current active NASA rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, have been sent to Mars to find conditions suitable for life in the past and present. The geological record indicates the planet had a warmer and wetter phase with ample surface water lasting for millions of years. Here on Earth, water is where life began.
The Mars of the present, however, can only briefly support water on its surface in the near vacuum-like atmosphere. If life existed in the past there, its survivors would likely be extremophiles like S. Caninervis.
The suggestion and experiments by scientists looking at terraforming note that by introducing Earth life we may destroy any native surviving Martian extremophiles. If S. Caninervis flourishes it will alter the Martian atmosphere by adding oxygen. It will also sequester carbon in the regolith, changing soil conditions and making it possible to introduce other Earth-candidate species.
Should we be concerned about what this can potentially do to existing Martian life even if only microscopic? Yes. If we are to do the great terraforming experiment, will it be possible to create conservation areas for native Martian species so that they can be studied and continue to exist?
We consider the emergence of life here on Earth to be a rare event in The Universe. If so rare, we should then consider life found elsewhere to be rare and subject to the best protections we can provide.
On Earth today, we are trying to make amends for the widespread environmental destruction of our human past. Let’s not reproduce acts of environmental indifference if and when we colonize Mars or any other place in our Solar System or elsewhere in the Universe.
]]>What About Radiation?
On the face of it, what is being proposed sounds viable. But nothing in the SpaceX presentation deals with a non-logistics challenge, that is the radiation that humans will experience not only in transit from Earth to Mars but also while on the Martian surface. Based on the European Space Agency’s Exomars Trace Gast Orbiter launched in 2016, the six-month journey to Mars will expose a human crew to a 60% lifetime dose of radiation not including the additional exposure while working and exploring on the planet’s surface. Exomars data is similar to the levels detected in the NASA mission to put Curiosity on the Martian surface. And since Curiosity has been roaming about the Gale Crater on Mars it continues to be bombarded by radiation at about 50% the level experienced during its voyage through space.
What’s the amount of radiation in terms of similar life experiences here on Earth? Astrobiologists describe a one-way human journey to Mars as being equivalent to having 24 CAT scans at one time, 15 times greater than the maximum allowable exposure for workers at nuclear power plants. No humans have ever experienced this type of exposure and healthily survived. And as of yet NASA and other space agencies have yet to devise a method of shielding spacecraft to block radiation in space. Radiation is the deal breaker for long-term space exploration and settlement of Mars, the Moon, or any other place in the Solar System and beyond. We are just not cut out for it as we presently are.
That’s why science needs to find a new path for humans to no longer be Earth-bound. To live on the Moon we need to be different. To live on Mars we need to become Martians. And anything we bring along with us to help support our existence has to undergo similar biological re-engineering. This means designing life to fit these new environments.
For example, because Mars gets 43% of the sunlight that falls on Earth, any plants adapted to Mars will need to be able to efficiently use the visible light that falls on them as well as non-visible light such as ultraviolet which is far more abundant on the Martian surface. And that just covers photosynthesis improvements. Plant re-engineering will also have to deal with the colder Martian environment, with a biomass deficient and nutrient deficient soil, and with the extreme dryness that makes Earth’s deserts seem like tropical forests.
For humans planning to become permanent Martians, there are three choices:
Greenhouses on Mars
If we go the first route then we can create hydroponic self-contained greenhouses and an elaborate infrastructure to support them. Current work on the International Space Station is testing just various proposed technologies and how well they can work to give us Earth on Mars.
Creating Martians out of Humans
But if we go the second route then we don’t bring Earth to Mars but rather adapt ourselves to be Martians. That means re-engineering not just the supporting biological infrastructure that keeps us alive here, but also re-engineering ourselves to allow us to acclimate and adapt to a much colder environment, to become a low-gravity species that operates effectively at one-third of the g-forces of Earth, a species capable of dealing with double the length seasonal extremes where a year is almost twice as long as the one on our home world where we evolved, and finally to a life limited to permanently enclosed habitations sealed off from the outside until we are so well re-engineered we can venture largely without supporting technology on the exposed planet’s surface.
Turning Mars into a Second Earth
And if we go the third route, one that Musk has proposed, then we take on a planet-wide project taking many hundreds of years. What are we talking about in such a terraforming project? We would release the greenhouse gases stored on and below the Martian surface to thicken the atmosphere. That would increase the planet’s atmospheric temperature just as greenhouse gases are doing it here on Earth. The water currently stored in the polar ice caps and permanently frozen beneath the surface would give us free-flowing rivers and lakes, and eventually even oceans. Once the atmosphere largely made up of carbon dioxide (CO2) becomes thick enough, and once surface temperatures are warm enough, we could plant trees whose exhalations would produce oxygen. Is there enough CO2 to turn this into a reality? Not native to Mars, but we could redirect asteroids to strike the planet’s surface releasing their contained materials to hasten the process. After centuries there might even be enough breathable air for humans and other animal species to thrive. This Genesis project is far beyond our technological abilities today and likely impossible to achieve.
Life on Mars Today
Finally, there is an important issue we may overlook in all of this effort to get us to Mars, that is the contaminating of a planet where life already exists. When humans arrive on Mars to visit or stay they will not be alone but rather will bring lots of biology along for the ride, most of it unintentionally. Trillions of microbes will accompany us and although many will die, some will find ways to adapt. By this process we will jeopardize any native life on the planet.
For those who argue there is no evidence for Martian life, I would argue the opposite. Whether from Viking lander experiments back in the 1970s, or data collected by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, the Martian rovers and from seasonal observations by a number of Martian orbiters witnessing the seasonal exhalations of methane from the planet’s surface, there is abundant evidence of biology, likely in the form of microorganisms.
If that is the case there is a strong argument that we stay away from colonizing Mars to preserve its native life. Instead we can experience Mars through our technology – rovers and landers, artificial intelligence and augmented reality. We then wouldn’t have to bring Earth to Mars to support humans as we are. We wouldn’t have to reinvent our species and supporting biology to become Martians. And we wouldn’t consider terraforming a place where life already exists.
Musk has argued, as has Stephen Hawking, that Earth and humanity need a backup plan. There is no doubt that at some future point in time Earth will become uninhabitable as the Sun ages and expands. But that is billions of years away. In the meantime, we can do a better job of making Earth inhabitable for us and for the life already here, and use our technology to experience our neighbouring worlds while preserving the native life there.
And should we need a lifeboat for humanity, let’s develop technology to live in Deep Space in engineered environments built from the raw materials at hand. The cost to do this is no less formidable than us attempting to make a home for us on Mars, or to turn us into Martians, or to turn Mars into an inferior Earth.
Because our own human activity here on Earth shows just how hard it is to do. We have been geoengineering Earth over the last 150 years because of the Industrial Revolution. With all that burning of carbon-based materials we have altered Earth but in geological terms, one would not describe it as substantial.
What we humans have done is raise global mean temperatures by nearly 0.8 Celsius (1.44 Fahrenheit) degrees. The consequences of our current carbon consumption mean that temperatures will continue to rise for the foreseeable future (many centuries) with other physical planet-wide effects including sea level rise, changes to ocean and atmospheric temperatures, altered wind and precipitation patterns, and increased extreme weather events. Ultimately the planet’s biology will be stressed, unlike anything we humans have witnessed since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution over 12,000 years ago.
Speaking of that last number, nature’s ability to do geoengineering works on time scales where 12,000 is akin to a nanosecond in geological time. Our planet is more than 4.5 billion years old. During its lifetime it has been re-engineered numerous times from birth as an aggregated mass of proto-planetary materials to being heated to a molten state, to the moment when crustal plates formed moved along by the hot mantle conveyor belt beneath, then to several prolonged ice ages where Earth turned into an ice ball, and now to the present world we know.
So what makes people like Elon Musk believe we humans can do to Mars what geological time has not accomplished? Pure fantasy in my opinion.
Today Mars is a perpetually dry and cold place. It has a tenuous atmosphere that is thinner by a factor of ten than the air at the top of Mount Everest here on Earth. The atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide (CO2). Any water on Mars is either locked up in the ice caps along with dry ice (frozen CO2) at its poles, or in subsurface formations that at best are in a briny liquid state (see the recent findings described in a previous posting at this site) or permanently frozen. To add to this Mars has no planetary magnetic field to shield it from cosmic and solar radiation. So all in all, this is an inhospitable environment except for well designed robotic landers and rovers, or in the future, humans encapsulated in protected habitats largely dug-in beneath the surface.
Geoengineering Mars in what science fiction has called terraforming would require humans to alter the planet to make it suitable for terrestrial life. In an article just published in Nature Astronomy, authors Bruce Jakosky, University of Colorado Boulder, and Christopher Edwards, Northern Arizona University, describe the work of other authors on this subject before stating the whys and wherefores that make the notion of terraforming impossible.
Among the tasks we humans would have to do on Mars includes the following:
Increasing the air pressure is beyond any current technical capability of we humans to do on any large scale. Yes, we could set up a number of highly polluting smokestack-based industrial plants on Mars to churn out tons of greenhouse gases. But we would have to do this for many centuries to begin to increase the air pressure to approximate conditions on Earth at 5,000 meters (over 16,400 feet) above sea level. Even then we would have to continuously run these polluting sites to deal with the fact that Mars would lose a significant amount of these gases to space in the process because of the lack of a magnetic field. We’ve had lots of experience with smokestack pollution on Earth but building such an infrastructure on Mars with little in the way of free oxygen present would be extremely expensive.
Another could involve releasing the water vapour (another greenhouse gas) stored in the subterranean ice found at many locales on the planet. We would want to ensure that a significant amount of water vapour got released at the beginning of the operation. Elon Musk has suggested a thermonuclear detonation as one means of water release. His idea is to set off a big bomb over a large block of subterranean ice and watch it vaporize. But the pressure gained would be only temporary for the same reasons other greenhouse gases, when released through the smokestack option, would over time vanish. And there is no assurance that released water vapour would condense to become stable liquid water on the surface. It would more than likely in a very short time be lost to space because of ultraviolet light bombardment (no magnetic field to stop this) and the exposure of the atmosphere’s edge to the solar wind. The Maven orbiter has been measuring this phenomenon on Mars showing that the current atmosphere continues to lose CO2 and ionized oxygen split from the carbon into space.
Another idea as explored by Jakosky and Edwards would be to release CO2 from the planet’s carbon sinks including the dry ice, water ice fields found at the poles, carbon-bearing minerals at or below the surface. But that means finding those minerals which so far based on orbiters, landers, and rovers, seem to be sparsely spread. Analysis of atmospheric dust holds little hope for finding anything more significant in this regard.
In any terraforming scenario, we humans would have to release enough carbon in the form of CO2 to be of such volume as to increase the current atmosphere’s carbon content by a factor of 167. That’s because today’s Martian atmosphere has an atmospheric pressure on the surface of 6 millibars, equivalent to about 15 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter. Liquid water would need surface pressures to be 1 bar with an atmosphere containing about 2,500 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter.
In Jakosky and Edwards’ paper there is little discussion on methane (CH4) emanations which have been detected seasonally coming from the Martian surface. CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas of higher density than CO2. But it, too, would over time be lost to space or would degrade into carbon and hydrogen isotopes with the hydrogen quickly escaping.
Jakosky and Edwards in their conclusions stated: “there is not enough CO2 left on Mars in any known, readily accessible reservoir, if mobilized and emplaced into the atmosphere, to produce any significant increase in temperature or pressure.” They go on to state that large-scale processing of CO2 from the surface would have to be on a planet-wide scale, well beyond any present human technology. And finally, they have no solution to the outgassing to space of anything we humans would add to the Martian atmosphere that soon wouldn’t be lost.
But Elon Musk disagrees going back to the idea of using a thermonuclear explosion to release massive amounts of CO2 in the Martian soil. Musk believes that Mars, of all the planets in the Solar System, is the best option to terraform. He thinks humans can come up with technical solutions to the lack of a natural magnetic field. He believes that plants would grow on the Martian surface if atmospheric pressures using the trapped CO2 were released. Among Musk’s idea for heating up Mars is the notion of creating artificial pulsing suns above the poles to heat up the planet.
Musk is convinced that Mars must be colonized by humans to give us a multi-planetary foundation in the event that life should end here on Earth. He has and will continue to plan for getting to Mars early in the 2020s, first with two supply ships to land in 2022 followed by four spaceships with humans aboard to arrive in 2024. The Mars they will come to will remain inhospitable for life as we know it. With certainty, life that accompanies us to Mars in the form of bacteria will threaten microbial native life that may already be there. But no one seems to be talking about the implications of Martian colonization in the face of an already living planet. Our arrival would be equated with an extinction event for the Red Planet’s own ecology.
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With CO2 on the rise on Earth the science of re-engineering the planet now resides here, not on a neighbouring planet like Mars. But re-engineering may be not too far in our future.
So let’s begin this discussion with the problem of Earth and rising CO2. What are we facing and what can we do to reverse the process that we refer to as climate change or global warming. And then let’s talk about what it would take to change Mars.
Current CO2 Levels
Want to know the current levels of atmospheric CO2? Go to CO2 Now. For members of 350.org the lobby attempting through civil disobedience to raise the profile of climate change with the public, this site ticker must be disheartening. As of July 2011 we have reached 392.39 parts per million 42 points above what is considered safe by many climatologists. And the number isn’t about to go down in the near future.
At the present rate of carbon emissions we could see CO2 levels between 500 and 700 parts per million by 2100. The consequences of increasing CO2 have been described in a previous blog. In that blog we discussed ways to mitigate and reduce CO2 levels.
Technology, however, can only help us if we recognize the ecological problem we face through uncontrolled rises in greenhouse gases. What kind of social re-engineering is required to change our species behaviour to end and reverse the rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gases?
350 – The Magic Number
When we talk to political and thought leaders about bringing CO2 back to a manageable level they provide a shopping list of behavioural changes usually followed by a cautionary statement about economic sustainability and manageable cost. What are the changes that we seek?
The problem with these solutions is their fuzziness. There is nothing concrete. These are goals without policy, legislation and enforcement. When the world’s nations got together in 1997 to create the first global act focused on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, mechanisms were created to encourage governments and industry to act.
Binding targets were established for controlling and reducing the following greenhouse gases: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, hydroflourocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexaflouride. The 37 industrialized countries and European Union agreed to reductions and a timetable. Whereas some countries have demonstrated a true commitment to Kyoto target reductions, others have done little to meet their obligations. One of these is my country, Canada, where changes in government, changes in industrial priorities and initiatives to back development of bitumen resources, has led to an abandonment of targets. Canada’s example is not isolated. A number of countries fault the process because, they argue, Kyoto wasn’t a global initiative. The United States participated in the process but did not sign the final agreement.
Kyoto left out the Developing World and focused only on established industrial economies. That meant China, India, Brazil and a number of other fast growing economies were not partner to the agreement.
In defence of Kyoto, the countries that were signatories represented the economies that were the worst polluters and generators of greenhouse gases at the time of signing, with the United States the exception. Unfortunately the signatories for the most part plus the United States continue to be the worst polluters on the planet even with the implementation of some policies coming out of Kyoto.
A successor to Kyoto remains elusive. Science fiction writers, however, have imagined feats of engineering that demonstrate the ability to alter a planet in its entirety to make it inhabitable. Yet here we are on Earth doing the very thing, but negatively, through our industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels. Can we as a species learn from altering another world how to rescue ours?
The Science of Terraforming – the Case for Mars and Other Planets
Out of the works of science fiction writers has come terraforming – an idea that uses advanced technology to alter a planet’s atmosphere and surface to allow us to inhabit it without having to rely on pressurized living accommodation and manufactured atmospheres.
Mars is usually the first planet in our Solar System that we think about when we speculate on future human habitations beyond Earth. Mars today is cold and dry although we have discovered lots of sub-surface and polar ice, enough in fact, if it all melted, to form a surface-wide ocean more than 30 meters deep. Like Earth, Mars has abundant amounts of carbon and oxygen (CO2 is 95.3% of the atmosphere), nitrogen and argon. This atmosphere bears a resemblance to what existed here on Earth billions of years ago. Bacterial life altered Earth’s atmosphere creating free oxygen as a byproduct of CO2 and ultimately allowing animals and plants to evolve.
Mars today is also very cold with an average temperature of -63 Celsius (-81 Fahrenheit). In contrast Earth’s average temperature is 14 Celsius (58 Fahrenheit). In the Martian summer temperatures can reach 24 Celsius (75 Fahrenheit) at the equator so it can get reasonably comfortable on a nice day. Mars also experiences seasons and has an axial rotation similar to Earth as well as a day that is about one-half hour longer than ours. So adapting to Mars with its many similarities to Earth sounds possible.
If we were to live on Mars we would have to accommodate to its extremes but we could also change the atmosphere not at a geological pace, but rather quickly. The goal would be to introduce technologies that would create a greenhouse effect, thickening and heating the atmosphere to make it habitable. This could take centuries or as much as a millennia based on our perception of what is doable today. As we get better at the technology of terraforming the time to re-engineer the planet may be considerably less.
What kinds of technology could we deploy that would turn Mars into a habitable place? There is nothing we can imagine today that would give us the capability of altering Mars into an Earth-like habitat in a hundred years. But we do have technology in its formative stages as well as technologies deployed on Earth that can alter Mars over a longer period. These include:
Space Mirrors
Space mirrors are large reflective surfaces made from the same materials used in solar sail technology. Space mirrors have been considered as a means to deflect solar rays from Earth to offset the greenhouse effect on Earth. Whereas a solar mirror deployed in Earth orbit would be used to block sunlight, many deployed in orbit around Mars would reflect solar radiation into the atmosphere. A single large mirror with a diameter of 250 kilometers (155 miles) could be built, using materials found in space, and deployed 350,000 kilometers away from the planet raising surface temperatures in a small area such as a polar ice cap. This would could cause the ice to melt releasing greenhouse gases.
Solar-Powered Gas Generators
Gas generators could be a key way to alter the Martian atmosphere. Today on Earth we have lots of industry experience generating greenhouse gases that burn fossil fuels. This same atmospheric heating effect could be reproduced on Mars by setting up hundreds of factories that use the carbon in CO2 and pump out oxygen. If the factories were largely constructed out of Martian materials it would make this economically more plausible. Such factories would slowly oxygenate the atmosphere over centuries.
Artificial Photosynthesis
Current research on artificial photosynthesis uses nanotechnology to mimic plant leaves. Plants breakdown water molecules using captured sunlight. From this the plant receives carbohydrates as fuel and oxygen as a byproduct. Plants use chlorophyll to achieve this result. Creating an artificial equivalent to chlorophyll for use on Earth is all about creating new energy sources to replace fossil fuels and not about oxygen.
Research focuses on generating liquid hydrogen or methanol from the process with the hydrogen used as a fuel or in fuel cells. On Earth water is plentiful and so is sunlight. And both appear to be plentiful on Mars as well.
Artificial photosynthesis uses a catalyst in place of chlorophyll to split water molecules and generate the energy needed to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. Current research experiments are testing manganese, titanium dioxide and cobalt oxide to mimic what plants do.
Finding these materials on Mars and building industrial-scale artificial photosynthesis generators would be a massive project.
Phototropic Bacteria
Bacteria created Earth’s thick atmosphere with its abundant oxygen and nitrogen. Thriving on CO2, bacteria could prove to be an effective terraforming solution for Mars. Today on Earth we use phototropic or photosynthetic bacteria for all kinds of biotech applications including water and wastewater purification, chemical remediation, fertilizer, aquaculture supplements and animal feed. Phototropic bacteria may prove to be efficient at harvesting energy from light. Adding phototropic bacteria into the terraforming mix on Mars could accelerate the planet’s atmospheric conversion.
Comets and Asteroids – When Worlds Collide
Like the proposals to tow Greenland and Antarctic icebergs to Saudi Arabia, some space scientists have come up with a solution that involves moving objects the size of asteroids and comets near Mars and then making them collide with the surface of the planet. The motive power would be ion propulsion or nuclear powered rocket engines attached to these space bodies. Icy asteroids contain lots of water and greenhouse gases and if allowed to collide with Mars would not only release gases and water, but also massive amounts of energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs.
A single asteroid or small comet collision could raise the atmospheric temperature of Mars several degrees which would accelerate melting of subsurface and polar ice. Such a catastrophic approach to terraforming would make Mars uninhabitable for a period of time but as the planet recovered from each collision it would be closer and closer to becoming much more Earth-like.
What Terraforming Can Teach Us About Restoring Earth’s CO2 Levels
In the 21st century our species will land on Mars and begin to explore that planet. We will master technologies to make it possible for us to survive on its surface, at first by creating a life support system and artificial environment to sustain us. In our Martian lab we will apply Earth technology in new ways to make Mars a more livable environment. The technologies that allow us to terraform our neighbour will be such that adapting them to re-engineer Earth will only be a matter of course. We won’t master planet re-engineering in the 21st century but we will take the first steps along this path. It took billions of years for natural processes on Earth to create a habitable planet. The promise of restoring Earth to a sustainable environment will come as we learn how to transform our neighbour, Mars.
