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But can they reproduce in the soil at the same range of air pressure found in habitats, with the same gravity / gas mixture? Can they still reproduce after 50 y
by robinduckett 9y ago
But can they reproduce in the soil at the same range of air pressure found in habitats, with the same gravity / gas mixture? Can they still reproduce after 50 years?
- NegativeLatency 9y agoYou could make pressurized greenhouses on mars to simulate earth conditions.
- QAPereo 9y agoInflatable, radiation shielding, light emitting? How. Edit: Plants and non-human animals wouldn’t appreciate Martian rads either.
- aetherson 9y agoThey don't really need to be radiation shielding or light emitting. People don't need to live there, just plants and animals. And insolation on Mars is sufficient for light.
- marrone12 9y agoExcessive radiation can also kill plants and animals
- QAPereo 9y agoEven before it kills them, it definitely ruins their reproductive capacity, which is going to be critical offworld.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoWe could have a breeding population in an expensive shielded environment, and take most of their young to grow in a cheap, more radioactive environment.
- QAPereo 9y agoNow that’s a really interesting idea! Add in a bank of shielded frozen embryos and sperm and yes, I can see your point.
- adrianN 9y agoIs the radiation on Mars excessive? Quick googling suggests 10-20 rem per year, or about half that of the ISS. As far as I know plants do grow on the ISS.
- gozur88 9y agoPlants are pretty tolerant of solar radiation. Far more so than humans. In any event, what you'd probably do is use reflected light to filter out high energy particles.
- aetherson 9y agoBackground radiation in Mars is way lower than would be necessary to kill plants and, like, it might increase cancer rates in animals, but the kind of animals we'd want to breed there have short lifespans and we don't care if they get a few tumors.
- adrianN 9y agoUnderground, LEDs, hydroponics?
- QAPereo 9y agoSure, but now you’re spending the Dv to get all of that to Mars.
- ethbro 9y agoStill much cheaper than shipping dirt to Mars.
- vkou 9y agoIt's even cheaper to construct and use all that stuff on Earth.
- ethbro 9y agoNot risk adjusted.
- QAPereo 9y agoCompared to the risk of Mars? I take your point, but let’s be realistic about our odds on Mars without Earth backing it all up.
- ethbro 9y agoGranted. And initially, sure, but aiming long term for a single-planetary culture that took 3.8 billion years to develop seems shortsighted. The risk of that life snuffing out may be small, but the time cost of replacement should that happen is huge.
- adrianN 9y agoThat doesn't help a establish a Mars colony, which pretty much rules out that option if you want to establish a Mars colony.
- azernik 9y agoNeed to run that experiment on the ISS in a Mars-gravity centrifuge. Despite a lifetime of 6-9 years, though, their generation length is only a few months; if they reproduce in that radiation environment for a year or three and there aren't serious mutations, they'll probably be okay in the long run.
- pen2l 9y agoAnd in a few generations probably evolve to build further resiliency for the subject radiation/gravity/air pressure conditions.
- Johnny555 9y agoIf these habitats are also housing people, then the atmosphere will likely be very close to Earth pressure and composition. The atmospheric pressure on the ISS is very close to 1 atmosphere, and it's an oxygen-nitrogen mix close to earth's atmosphere.
- Dylan16807 9y agoA mars mission won't be getting frequent short-hop trips from earth. I would expect the habitats to use reduced-pressure atmospheres with less to no nitrogen.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoThen everything needs to be made of fire-retardant materials. Reducing the nitrogen content of the atmosphere has little deleterious effects for people, but makes fires easier to start, hotter, and harder to put out.
- Dylan16807 9y agoIf you reduce the amount of nitrogen, and don't replace it with oxygen, it doesn't have all that big of an effect on fires. And in trade it becomes vastly easier to contain the pressure.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoYes, it really does. The issue is that the inert nitrogen has a really important role in carrying away heat from the flame. Fire is a dynamic reaction where temperature and speed is determined basically by how much heat a set of reagents produce/how much heat is carried away in the waste products. Nitrogen doesn't participate in the chemical reaction, but it gets heated alongside the waste gases, and so it reduces the temperature of the fire. In a pure 0.2bar oxygen atmosphere, anything that would smoulder or burn slowly in standard atmosphere burn rapidly with a bright flame instead, and some things that you'd normally not consider flammable can sustain flame. This is the reason the space station maintains a normal atmosphere instead of a thin pure oxygen one. Conversely, if you double the amount of nitrogen (without reducing the amount of oxygen) in the air, almost nothing burns anymore.
- c3534l 9y agoIf not, maybe we can engineer a breed of worms that can.