3 ms·

would this be enough to create an viable atmosphere or should a dome be put over it?

• nacnud 8y ago
  Given that any previous water in the atmosphere has mostly escaped over time, the dome seems like a better bet.
  • ryanmercer 8y ago
    Mars lost its atmosphere on a geological time scale. You just need to raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect (and that gas release from the polar regions would far outpace the solar winds stripping atmosphere away and once it leveled off would take millions of years to get back to the state it is in now). The very thin atmosphere it has now, will take another 2 billion years or so to be stripped away entirely.
    • jlebrech 8y ago
      maybe we should let Elon Musk nuke mars https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear-bomb-colbert-feat/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/11/us/elon-musk-mars-nuclear...
  • adrianN 8y ago
    Water escapes from Mars' atmosphere over periods of millions of years. It's unlikely that domes would help very much. They'd crumble long before they protected any meaningful amounts of water.
• ryanmercer 8y ago
  Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, and 0.03% carbon dioxide, so no. If you want to create an atmospheric pressure that humans could survive without a suit, the dry ice in the polar regions is more than enough, the trick with Mars is raising the average temperature 5C at which point you'd create a runaway greenhouse. As for just water needs, the polar regions are lousy with water ice (the northern cap alone has more than 800k cubic kilometers of water ice and a cubic meter of ice is about 917L so yeah, a LOT of water). There's also suspected to be considerable amounts in the regolith all around the planet and given there might be this underground lake there could possibly be many more.
  • zip1234 8y ago
    I thought part of the problem was the lack of a magnetic field? I'm not sure if that has anything to do with keeping an atmosphere or just the ability to survive on the surface with radiation protection though...
    • ryanmercer 8y ago
      The magnetic field keeps the solar winds from stripping away atmosphere, that happens in appreciable amounts on a geological time scale. It does offer some radiation protection too but it would take centuries with current technological means to raise the temperature enough on Mars to start a runaway greenhouse effect... as it stands now you'd basically have to go set up power plants on Mars then start producing greenhouse gasses from local materials, releasing them into the atmosphere, until you got that estimated 5C average temperature increase which would then start melting the polar caps' dry ice and water ice (as well as what is in the regolith all over the planet) and go runaway. At that point you'd be outpacing what the solar winds are peeling off the atmosphere (IIRC it's something like 100 grams a second which sounds like a lot but not on a planetary scale).
• mozumder 8y ago
  No, you also need an ancient alien race to have created a reactor that can free the air which can be activated after pressing the button at the top of the elevator platform, but only if you can get past Cohaagen's goons, perhaps using holographic trickery.