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Next question --- what's the plan to keep an atmosphere in place? It's my understanding that evidence suggests that Mars once had an atmosphere that has since
by jqpabc123 3y ago
Next question --- what's the plan to keep an atmosphere in place?
It's my understanding that evidence suggests that Mars once had an atmosphere that has since been lost.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThere are many, many questions between how to produce oxygen to breathe in a settlement, and terraforming the entire planet.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoMars loses atmosphere due to solar winds over the course of billions of years. It's not hard to outrun that. If you could give mars an atmosphere tomorrow the loss of atmosphere won't be a problem on human civilization timescales.
- gessha 3y agoIsn’t it a little wasteful though? The materials for the atmosphere need to come from somewhere, otherwise you’re just throwing out Mars materials. If you import atmospheric material from somewhere else, it feels like other worlds like Jupyter/Saturn moons might be a better call for settlement? Also, Mars doesn’t have a (strong) magnetic field so going outside would be dangerous because you will be bombarded by radiation.
- freedomben 3y agoIf solar energy is powering the devices, the lower amount of sunlight reaching the outer moons might be a big problem.
- adastra22 3y agoAtmosphere blocks radiation, and atmosphere can be made from the rocks themselves. There is an effectively endless supply.
- someplaceguy 3y ago> atmosphere can be made from the rocks themselves. There is an effectively endless supply. Do Martian rocks have significant amounts of nitrogen?
- adastra22 3y agoWhy would you need nitrogen in your atmosphere?
- just_boost_it 3y agoPresumably for whatever reason it worked well for us to develop as we did down here? Stops everything from exploding, dissolves all the other gases quite nicely? What other gas would you use?
- adastra22 3y agoNitrogen does absolutely nothing on Earth. It is inert.
- just_boost_it 3y agoLike, without that inert gas there would have to be something else. Being in a pure oxygen environment for a prolonged period has health impacts to many animals including us. Anything even remotely flammable, like paper, wood, sugar, would burn uncontrollably with the slightest spark. If you didn't have nitrogen you would need another inert gas to make up 80% (or whatever) of the atmosphere you were going to make.
- adastra22 3y agoFor the most part, partial pressure is what matters, not absolute pressures. The only contribution inert nitrogen has to life is raising the boiling point of water. But on a frigid planet like Mars that’s not going to be an issue. Being in a pure oxygen environment does not have a long term impact on animals… if the pure O2 environment is 0.21 atm oxygen. There’s a long history of biological experimentation done by space agencies on this, and the Apollo missions operated on a 0.2 atm pressure for the duration of their missions. Apollo 1 famously had trouble not because it was pure O2, but because it was 1.2atm O2. There is no reason you need backfill inert gasses to have 1.0 atmospheres.
- ben_w 3y agoA synthetic magnetic field is easy compared to adding an atmosphere. Big wire with current, very big by wire standards (one square meter cross section isn't close to enough for reasonable input values if it's on or close to the ground, but it doesn't really need to be) but still small compared to the mass involved in making a dent even compared to the thin Martian atmosphere.
- jwells89 3y agoCompared to Mars the moons of the gas giants have at least three major hurdles for long-term human habitation: their distance, with the trip there being around 6 years, the incredibly harsh planetary radiation belts the moons weave through, and ineffectiveness of solar energy that far away from the sun. I think we should try to overcome these hurdles, but getting humans out there is a much taller order than establishing a human presence on Mars.
- dgacmu 3y agoThe short answer is that it would be underground or in domes for the foreseeable future. The long answer is that people have lots of clever thoughts about how they might achieve it, although none of them are yet practical: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars
- jvm___ 3y agoMusk had the idea of nuking the polar ice caps on Mars, which we could probably technically do today...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 3y agoAnd accomplish nothing. It was a terrible idea that wouldn’t work, rightly ridiculed by people who have been studying this for decades before Musk arrived.
- Terr_ 3y agoYeah, to offer an analogy: "CelebrityDude had the amazing idea of flying around by building a set of robot arms that would reach down and pull really hard on your own shoelaces, which is something we could do today..." It's not clear why we would care about that except as a reason to point and laugh at CelebrityDude.
- just_boost_it 3y agoI'm not Musk's biggest fan by any means, but after decades in existance he made electric cars "a thing", and he drove the costs of getting to space down by so much that it makes the existing players look like idiots. He's clearly not the dummy your portraying him as. I'd definitely listen to his ideas, even if some of them aren't good.
- colechristensen 3y agoThis isn't about putting a whole new atmosphere on Mars. But if we did, it would have to be replenished but it would be lost on geological not human timescales. Think significant amounts of atmosphere lost after 100,000 years. You could do the same with the moon.