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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study
- ravron 8y agoBut it may not have enough carbon dioxide: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/files/2018/08/Inventory-of-CO2-available-for-terraforming-Mars.pdf http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/files/2018/08/Inventory-...
- sigstoat 8y agothere are other, significantly more effective, greenhouse gases.
- bobm_kite9 8y agoI thought the absence of a magnetosphere would mean that any atmosphere would be stripped away by solar radiation anyway?
- adrianN 8y agoOver millions of years.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y agoThings I know about Mars: >No oceans >No plants >No phytoplankton >Massive planetwide dust storms lasting several months >Average surface temperatures at or below freezing >Space suit required Things I know about Earth: >Drinking water falls from the sky >Food grows on trees >Breathable atmosphere >Clothing optional in most areas >I can feel actual sunlight on my face every day
- dymk 8y agoBut surely terraforming a barren wasteland is going to be easier than terraforming a (relative) oasis of life! But in all seriousness, the point of colonizing Mars is not to be a replacement for Earth (although redundancy is quite motivating). It's because colonization and population growth has been our MO for the last 200,000 years.
- verelo 8y agoBut, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.
- ioquatix 8y agoOh, I'm pretty sure we will trash Mars too given enough time.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y agoNo need to trash it! It's already trashed!
- blhack 8y agoBecause mars is a dev server. Earth is prod.
- joe_the_user 8y agoYes, When we start on Mars, with a difficult challenge, make a bit of headway and then wipe-it out for some short term benefit on Earth, then it can serve as an object lesson. Surely that will convince us to conserve life on earth when none of the other obvious arguments seem to do that convincing.
- Mankrik 8y agoMars is the remote backup, but it's empty. Now that's a terrifying thought.
- anticensor 8y agosimulation operator issues `delete earth`
- gizmo686 8y ago
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- stevenwoo 8y agoThe radiation on the way and while on Mars is a pretty big obstacle https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/real-martians-how-to-protect-astronauts-from-space-radiation-on-mars https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/real-martians-how-to-pr...
- selimthegrim 8y agoIt looks like Stanford has their top men and women on it - https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03775 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03775
- njarboe 8y agoThings I know about Mars: No established legal or social framework. Things I know about Earth: Probability of finding a place to be left alone with a small group of like minded people. 0 A certain type of person is interested in living a life where they have a large amount of control over the political and social systems they live with. The American frontier was an ideal place for such people to move to. Many took advantage of the opportunity. This frontier is now closed. Off Earth is the only viable place for similar frontier to exist and Mars is the best place. It has a ~24hr day, decent gravity(0.38g), Ok solar radiation, H,C,O,N readily available on the surface, and possible terraforming to a open-air livable planet.
- ElBarto 8y agoThe upper atmosphere of Venus is actually the closest to Earth conditions we have in the solar system. Just float around in an airtight habitat. Gravity is the same as on Earth, pressure is the same, temperature is 25C. You literally only need to be airtight to keep the noxious atmosphere at bay.
- patricklouys 8y agoBut where do you get additional resources?
- TeMPOraL 8y agoLiterally out of thin air.
- coldtea 8y agoBy closed-system agriculture and farming and so on. Why, where would you get them on Mars?
- patricklouys 8y agoFrom the ground. Building materials etc. If you want to build a closed system, it doesn't make sense to put it into a gravity well.
- noncoml 8y agoWe can start with bacteria or other organisms that don’t care for much of what you describe.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoTo be fair, most of your Earth facts don't apply to the more inhospitable areas of Earth, where people live anyway. The Sahara and the Arctic both feature a breathable atmosphere. The Arctic is missing the other four items. The Sahara will let you feel sunlight on your face if you want, but it isn't really recommended. "Breathable atmosphere" is a much bigger deal than everything else.
- sebazzz 8y agoTrue, and heat. We can tolerate heat better than cold, also from a technical perspective. Heat can be used for energy production as well.
- jacobush 8y agoFrom a technical perspective, no. It's easier to heat a dwelling from -100 degrees Celsius than to cool a dwelling from boiling, or above, temperatures.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoTo produce energy you need a temperature gradient.
- wongarsu 8y agoOur comfortable temperature is around 25°C. Let's set that as our baseline. In dry conditions we can bear about 90°C above that for a few minutes and only about 20°C above baseline sustained. In comparison we have many permanent settlements where days 75°C below baseline are a yearly occurrence. If we talk about the more humid climates found in much of Europe and the US, the weaker members of our society start dying on days just 15°C above baseline. I think we handle cold much better than heat.
- hacker_9 8y agoAgree. This whole race to mars is interesting to watch from afar, but it's ultimately just a big rock with 110% less going on that we gratefully have here.
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- coldnose 8y agoAFAIK, the ability to tolerate oxygen is an advanced property of terrestrial life — the simplest, oldest life forms were totally unable to survive in the presence of oxygen.
- gizmo686 8y agoThe Great Oxygenation Event [0]. Arguably the planet's first mass extinction. To say that nothing we have done to the planet is as bad for the environment as the Great Oxygenation Event would be to pat ourselves on the back for not literally poisoning the atmosphere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
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- cbkeller 8y agoGeologist here. Yeah, there are a few places you can find microbial survivors of the GOE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_sulfur_bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_sulfur_bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_sulfur_bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_sulfur_bacteria Obligate anaerobic photoautotrophs: they photosynthesize, and need light to survive, but don't produce (and are killed by) O2. Unfortunately for them, post-GOE, there aren't many habitats that are anoxic but still have much light! There's at least one clade of "green sulfur bacteria" that apparently lives off the basically-invisible glow from a black smoker at a mid-ocean ridge: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1166624/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1166624/ fascinating stuff!
- Balgair 8y agoPBS Eons is a great youtube channel on Earth's biological history. It's very well done stuff. Their 'Purple Earth' video is a good layman's intro to some of the per-oxygenation earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIA-k_bBcL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIA-k_bBcL0 The early biological history of Earth has a few 'Colored Earth' phases: Red-Purple-Green-White-Blue(hypothetically).
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- User23 8y agoThe only reason the Earth has enough oxygen to "support life" is because life produced it as a waste product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
- Sniffnoy 8y agoMightn't this indicate that life on Mars is less, not more, likely than we thought? Respiration is complicated, so I would expect any life that might have existed on Mars to be anaerobic. If there's actually enough oxygen to support aerobic life, that doesn't bode well for any anaerobic life, does it?
- cbkeller 8y agoGeologist here. I would tend to agree, considering that present-day oxidizing conditions on mars are generally thought to be due to photolysis and hydrogen loss, not life/photosynthesis, e.g.: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.0999 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.0999 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103503001702 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001910350... Heck, Mars is so oxidized it has soils that are 0.5% perchorate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars and that stuff's so oxidizing it's not even common on Earth outside of fireworks and rocket propellants
- richardknop 8y agoWhat are the current thoughts on what caused oceans on Mars to disappear (with some remainder concentrating in ice caps)? Was it some impact of a really big meteor/comet? It is accepted that Mars used to have liquid water oceans and rivers in the past, correct? You can see geological remains of rivers and oceans, for example, quite clearly on Mars.
- adrianN 8y agoMars gravitiy is not strong enough causing it to very slowly lose gases to the solar wind. Water vapor included.
- raducu 8y agoI wonder if it's the solar wind or just the escape velocity vs. the termal escape. I'm sure in a couple of centuries humans would be able to build superconducting magnets powerful enough to shield Mars from the solar wind (those would double as energy storage as well), but we can't do anything about the fundamental properties of gases and escape velocity.
- fuscy 8y agoI never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars. Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.
- lmm 8y agoI can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?
- fuscy 8y agoHumans are terribly designed for space exploration: die quickly, require sustenance, can't handle high G forces, can't handle radiation. I always believed that if humanity is to colonize something, it would be through robots that do all the exploring and mining for us.
- wklauss 8y agoHumans were terribly designed to cross the Atlantic by swimming as well, but we designed boats so eventually we did. Yes, robots are a cheaper and more reliable way to explore and extract resources but I doubt mankind will be happy with just that. We like to explore, and expand, and face challenges so I'd bet that no matter the setbacks or price tag, we will eventually prefer to do this things in person. As an alternative: we could even redesign ourselves for space exploration if needed be.
- Retric 8y agoHumans can physically swim from Eurasia to the Americas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox As to your wider point, the ability to breath oxygen and have long term fat stores makes an Atlantic crossing very easy. We moved from one palace with humans to another place with humans, hardly a massive feat of engendering. Meanwhile people in far more primitive craft ended up living in Hawaii (2,200+ miles from the nearest land mass) of all palaces.
- alfiedotwtf 8y agoNobody tell this to Cohagen
- MeteorMarc 8y agoCan anybody explain: the article mentions 0.14% of oxygen in a low pressure atmosphere to be insufficient for aerobic life. Where does the higher oxygen concentration (mole/m3) in subsurface brine come from? Obviously it is not in equilibrium with the atmospheric concentration. Is it non-equilibrium due to historic circumstances? Is it an equilibrium with surrounding rocks? Do rocks outgas oxygen?
- StreamBright 8y agoOxygen yes, magnetic field no. Without magnetic field you can't really live on a planet.
- known 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
- _pRwn_ 8y agothe main problems of mars are not oxygen but the missing magnetosphere and associated high levels of radiation
- onemoresoop 8y agoSetting a moon base would teach us things quite a lot faster than going to Mars because of the distance and close proximity to earth. The moon is different than Mars, i know, but Mars would come up next after this. I think space travel would be much easier if started from a moon base due to the low gravity. A disaster on Mars would delay this project by a few centuries. Let's make small firm steps.