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What would it mean for us if Mars were without water or life?
by jbreckmckye 9y ago
What would it mean for us if Mars were without water or life?
- sillysaurus3 9y agoWe'll bring both.
- donatj 9y agoHow do you propose we relocate any significant volume of water?
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoWith copious amounts of thrust
- mabbo 9y agoScience fiction has proposed a number of possible-if-difficult ways. Comets, to start, are mostly water. If you're patient, you can redirect some very sightly while they're in the far end of the system and have them impact Mars. Takes a while though. Also, big boom when they arrive. Really though, there's plenty of carbon <edit>oxygen, in the form of carbon dioxide</edit> on Mars- you just need hydrogen. Jupiter is mostly that. With a very large fleet of ships, you might be able to bring some to Mars. Solar sails might help keep costs low, and ideally they're fully autonomous. Heck, if that works, you'd probably want to start doing the same trick and pouring hydrogen into Venus while taking away CO2. I'm sure there's other ways too. Plus, we know there is some water on Mars already. If we can use it carefully, reuse exhaustively, it could sustain a large population.
- infinity0 9y agoShai-Hulud
- barrkel 9y agoWithout a decent atmosphere water will just boil / sublimate off and get blown away; Mars would need a magnetosphere to retain anything.
- jon_richards 9y agoI've previously seem ideas such as nuking the poles. It implied there were enough gases stored in the ice to created a sufficient atmosphere. The loss of the atmosphere due to lack of a magnetosphere would take millions of years.
- adrianN 9y agoWater would get blown away over a period of millions of years though. I think that's not much of a problem.
- Reason077 9y agoEven if you could increase the atmospheric density, the lack of magnetosphere is still a problem when it comes to human habitation, however. Any long-term habitats would need to be built underground, or at least heavily shielded against solar radiation.
- eru 9y agoCould people go out at night?
- junkcollector 9y agoA sufficiently large radio system built on Mars or at its solar LaGrange point could provide the shielding effect that is normally the responsibility of the magnetosphere. It was studied for feasibility by NASA and found possible with current technology. Of course, possible doesn't imply practical and the natural formation of Martian atmosphere if we did that would be on geologic timescales.
- ams6110 9y agoYou need oxygen, not carbon, to make water.
- mattferderer 9y agoWe shall no longer call our race mankind, but Galactus, the planet eaters!
- gr3yh47 9y ago>Plus, we know there is some water on Mars already do we know that? what i'm reading with regards to this article and comments is that now we're back to not having any concrete evidence of this
- dragonwriter 9y agoWe are fairly certainly that the ice caps are mostly water ice with a much smaller and more seasonal dry ice layer; what this article means is that the indication of liquid water on the surface seems to have been wrong.
- rpedela 9y agoIsn't there significant amounts of ice at the poles?
- spraak 9y agoA long hose?
- kijin 9y agoA portal from Earth, maybe. https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/
- otabdeveloper2 9y ago'How' is not interesting, the real question is 'why'. There's nothing there on Mars that would ever make human habitation profitable or self-sustaining.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- api 9y agoThis isn't saying Mars has no water. They've found that one particular instance of what they thought was liquid water turns out to not be, but there is tons of evidence for water ice and possibly deep sub-surface briny water. Mars likely does not have life at the surface. Too much cosmic radiation. It may not have life at all but if it does it would be beneath the surface or in deep caves.
- imglorp 9y agoIf there is no subsurface ice anywhere, I think the SpaceX colonizing team might have a challenge. It seems their current plan is to dig tunnels in suspected ice areas, processing the soil to extract water to electrolyze for fuel and air, then using the tunnels and castings for housing. Bringing all the fuel, air, and water from Earth is probably a no-go.
- zipwitch 9y agoWait- SpaceX is planning to tunnel on Mars? That means the Boring Company... Is everything Musk does part of his not-secret secret plan to retire on Mars?
- labster 9y agoYes. It's not like there are fossil fuels on the Red Planet, so we're going to need solar cells and batteries to power our electric rovers.
- imglorp 9y agoYep, (ding!) and solar cells, batteries, compressed gasses, vehicles... all important colonization core tech.
- sn9 9y agoUnderground structures will also be well-shielded from radiation that Mars' lack of a strong magnetic field fails to deflect.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoWe're more likely to become an advanced civilization [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter