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We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.

by WalterBright 1y ago

schwartzworld 1y ago
The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.
- glenstein 1y ago
  To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water. In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
  - pfannkuchen 1y ago
    Or we cycle through them and forget every time.
    - lavelganzu 1y ago
      It's a fun idea to explore in fiction, but it certainly didn't happen. The evolution of our species is too recent.
      - pfannkuchen 1y ago
        I’m only 1% serious, but how do we know for sure which direction evolution went in within the ape family? It seems not entirely unplausible that we have at some point in the scientific chain of custody assumed the “lesser” apes “evolved into” the “more advanced” human. But a species could easily branch and have the branch lose its geographic portability features (e.g.ability to manipulate environment, most exogenous behavior learning-based) if they are no longer selected for in a particular environment, and I’m not aware of anything in the fossil record that firmly establishes directionality. Am I wrong?
  - ASalazarMX 1y ago
    Probably because the period where the three (or even Earth and another) of them were inhabitable enough to sustain a technological civilization was very small, if it happened at all.
- weregiraffe 1y ago
  The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.
  - randallsquared 1y ago
    What's better, and on what metric(s)?
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    No. Sci-fi ideas from the 1930s beat the myopic doomerism of 2020s, and it's not even a contest.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
  > The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. For context, it took an estimated three-quarters of a billion years to oxygenate Earth's atmosphere. Even a speed-run of that is ... considerably longer than a few centuries. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event (to be fair, Mars is quite rusty already, it has a head start on the Early Earth in that regard)
firefax 1y ago
What if we are the bag of organisms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
ChuckMcM 1y ago
Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-) I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.
- rekenaut 1y ago
  Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus. Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason. That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it. Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.
fsmv 1y ago
Then we will never know if mars once had life that's different from earth life
- WalterBright 1y ago
  We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.
  - 317070 1y ago
    But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars. It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      We won't have a place among the stars if we refuse to leave the Earth due to fear of "contaminating" the universe.
jojobas 1y ago
Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.
- lavelganzu 1y ago
  Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere could lead gradually to a much thicker atmosphere, and even surface liquid.
nkrisc 1y ago
If we did that then we may never be able to know if life previously existed on Mars or not.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Then we'll never know if we never visit Mars, because visiting Mars will contaminate it.
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    Which is why sample return missions are important. Better to risk contaminating a sample than the whole planet.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
I’m really curious about fungi that can survive in these conditions, because fungi many times break down inorganic matter into organic. It sounds natural to just drop some all over and check what’s up a couple of centuries later.

We should be dropping bags of extremophile organisms into the Martian atmosphere to get a start on terraforming it.

schwartzworld 1y ago

The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. The second best time is now.

glenstein 1y ago
To your point, one of the most remarkable things I've read about both Mars and Venus, is that there was a time billions of years ago when they had more moderate temperatures and liquid water. In a way, it's a tragedy that human civilization has only emerged at a time when both Mars and Venus have become much more uninhabitable than they used to be.
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  Or we cycle through them and forget every time.
  - lavelganzu 1y ago
    It's a fun idea to explore in fiction, but it certainly didn't happen. The evolution of our species is too recent.
    - pfannkuchen 1y ago
      I’m only 1% serious, but how do we know for sure which direction evolution went in within the ape family? It seems not entirely unplausible that we have at some point in the scientific chain of custody assumed the “lesser” apes “evolved into” the “more advanced” human. But a species could easily branch and have the branch lose its geographic portability features (e.g.ability to manipulate environment, most exogenous behavior learning-based) if they are no longer selected for in a particular environment, and I’m not aware of anything in the fossil record that firmly establishes directionality. Am I wrong?
- ASalazarMX 1y ago
  Probably because the period where the three (or even Earth and another) of them were inhabitable enough to sustain a technological civilization was very small, if it happened at all.
weregiraffe 1y ago
The best time to start terraforming a planet is never. The idea is as absurd as a Dyson sphere/swarm. People should really grow beyond sci-fi ideas that were last fresh in the 1930's.
- randallsquared 1y ago
  What's better, and on what metric(s)?
- ACCount37 1y ago
  No. Sci-fi ideas from the 1930s beat the myopic doomerism of 2020s, and it's not even a contest.
SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
> The best time to start terraforming a planet is 500 years ago. For context, it took an estimated three-quarters of a billion years to oxygenate Earth's atmosphere. Even a speed-run of that is ... considerably longer than a few centuries. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event (to be fair, Mars is quite rusty already, it has a head start on the Early Earth in that regard)

firefax 1y ago

What if we are the bag of organisms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

ChuckMcM 1y ago

Yeah, and you want to explain to future generations why we could have had a happy relationship with Mars but no, we gave it a really bad yeast infection and now it never wants us anywhere near it? Hmmm? :-) I heard an interesting speculative talk about why we should be putting hard microbes on every planet and moon in our solar system because we'll probably cause an extinction event and perhaps the other celestial body could get a head start on evolving a better form of intelligence.

rekenaut 1y ago
Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  Well in the talk the presenter was talking things like tardigrades which are multicellular. The challenge with tardigrades (and any multicellular life) is that you want it to be reproducing (and hence evolving) so it has to be able to do so under conditions on the body you drop it on too. Again, since the talk was speculative there were various speculative ideas such as ice penetrators to put them into the liquid under the ice of moons like Enceladus. Evolvable being the key of course. Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Many, if not most, folks I've met in the scientific community are intensely opposed to this sort of open ended experimentation. NASA has a whole team that insures things we send to other bodies are not carrying any organisms (single cell or otherwise) for this very reason. That's the scientific community being parochial and self-interested, though. Their priority is writing more papers, and if that means holding the rest of us back, they're fine with it. Didn't Carl Sagan (in Cosmos?) or someone propose leaving all of Mars as a nature preserve for the benefit of any microbes that happen to live there? That's just wasting the closest, best off-planet colonization opportunity.

fsmv 1y ago

Then we will never know if mars once had life that's different from earth life

WalterBright 1y ago
We still find evidence of life on earth from billions of years ago that was not erased by billions of years of their successors. I doubt you have anything to worry about.
- 317070 1y ago
  But imagine the value of finding _any_ living RNA based life which is clearly not from earth before we travel to other stars. It's one thing to know there was once life, and to know basically nothing about it. But being able to date it in the tree of life (or forest of life?) is monumentally more relevant to understand our place among the stars.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    We won't have a place among the stars if we refuse to leave the Earth due to fear of "contaminating" the universe.

jojobas 1y ago

Mars is super short of hydrogen (and lacks the magnetic field to guard it). We'd need to crash a bunch of ice asteroids into it to get in the water and heat it up, then there could be a stab at terraforming it. So far we seem to be more likely to marsaform Earth.

lavelganzu 1y ago
Another option is to fake a planetary magnetic field by placing a large electromagnetic satellite in mars-stationary orbit. Merely reducing the effect of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere could lead gradually to a much thicker atmosphere, and even surface liquid.

nkrisc 1y ago

If we did that then we may never be able to know if life previously existed on Mars or not.

WalterBright 1y ago
Then we'll never know if we never visit Mars, because visiting Mars will contaminate it.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  Which is why sample return missions are important. Better to risk contaminating a sample than the whole planet.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

I’m really curious about fungi that can survive in these conditions, because fungi many times break down inorganic matter into organic. It sounds natural to just drop some all over and check what’s up a couple of centuries later.