Mars Mars Mars

[anachronistic]

I think the time is long overdue to start making Mars a habitable planet through human intervention

Oh and BTW, the Phoenix recently revealed that there IS water on the Martian surface Cool eh?

I haven't been following up on the whole Mars thing for a while. Link please?

Even though there is H20, what about the ground nutrience? What about the ratio of gases in the air?

I don't know if I am totally for the idea of cultivating Mars for human needs. That seems ridiculous in a way. Take care of this damn planet before we go ruin another one.

I am interested in the development of life on Mars. Maybe we could plant a bunch of trees and observe how the environment changes with this unnatural creation of nature.

[Lipp]

Well, while I think that locust swarm behaviour is unnecessarily risky I don't have a problem with cultivating Mars. Until we know for sure, at the moment Mars is just one of a whole lot of lifeless bodies in space. Is it really that important to preserve it?

The most favorable outcome in my book would be to have earth stabilized and then making other planets habitable to allow for progress. It's either that or slowing down alot, which I find unlikely to be a widely accepted strategy.

[anachronistic]

Well, while I think that locust swarm behaviour is unnecessarily risky I don't have a problem with cultivating Mars. Until we know for sure, at the moment Mars is just one of a whole lot of lifeless bodies in space. Is it really that important to preserve it?

The most favorable outcome in my book would be to have earth stabilized and then making other planets habitable to allow for progress. It's either that or slowing down alot, which I find unlikely to be a widely accepted strategy.

Hmm, I don't necessarily think it's necessary to preserve it, so to speak. Put a ****load of plants on Mars to inject a little oxygen into the atmosphere, and put some creatures on there a few years later. Watch it grow. I think it it would make for a great observation.

Then put me on the planet. I'd love to live in the wild. But watch the government try to rub their regulating ass all over it. Just watch, in a few years, the government will try to ****ing claim Mars as their own; and that just pisses me off. It will be like the civil war all over again, except probably like star wars. Which would be awesome.

Come to think of it, let's ****ing do it. I want a space war!

Also, it would take quite a long time for life to adapt to Mars, with simple things like gravitational force being smaller than on earth. How do you think that would affect you after a few years?

[anachronistic]

[url]http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2008-08-01-voa57.cfm[/url]

It says that there are also nutrients in the soil! I am not sure how accurate the article is, but that means vegetation may be able to exist on Mars!

The next thing that they'll probably be researching, is the chemical makeup of the atmosphere.

Shit like this really makes me want to get my PhD in Earth Science or something and have them ship my ass to Mars.

[anachronistic]

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_mars[/url]

Another interesting read; I really like the artist conception of the process of Mars developing into a life-dwelling planet.

Part of my wants to just garden all kinds of plants on Mars now. Ohhh

[Lipp]

Well, without any factual basis, I wouldn't be surprised if the lower gravity would affect people's skeletal and internal structure (which is why we can have large "bugs" growing in the sea, gravity countered by buoyancy) and they would have difficulty living on earth again.

Speaking of wars on other planets, as a young kid I played the first game of the BattleZone series, truly awesome for being so old. Probably 10 years ago or something.

[boobaa]

This thread made me hungry for Mars.

[Gribble]

Slightly unrelated, but I was reading about some experiments the Cosmonauts carried out in space. Apparently if you hatch a cockroach in a zero-G environment it becomes much bigger and tougher than its terrestrial brethren.

I want to create a legion of gigantic superbugs on Mars and conquer the world.

[Tone]

Not to burst your bubble or anything.. but I remember watching a program on History channel several months ago about how unrealistic it is for us to cultivate Mars, at least in any of our lifetime.

The lack of a proper atmosphere means levels of radiation that would kill humans, there are also the huge dust storms, and I think they even mentioned something about the temperature although I can't remember it all.

But still fun to think about.

[Lipp]

I think that radiation and temperatures are problems that can be dealt with through facilities, but the main problem is probably creating and managing a sufficiently large oxygen supply as a cycle, food production and electricity.

It depends on what you mean by livable. Walk around on the planet's surface wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Not likely in a long long time. Constructing buildings and setting up abovementioned systems to sustain an increasingly larger group of people? More of a possibility.

But I wonder if Mars contains any minerals or anything of use to us. Otherwise it's pretty unnecessary to live there, last time I checked we're not about to cover all of earth with buildings, so I doubt that living space will become an issue before other problems bring our numbers down.

[Aegis]

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" is basically a huge hypothetical about the colonization of Mars. For the subject matter, it's still one of the more practical limit-minded books I've read.

[DoesntMatter]

Not to burst your bubble or anything.. but I remember watching a program on History channel several months ago about how unrealistic it is for us to cultivate Mars, at least in any of our lifetime.

The lack of a proper atmosphere means levels of radiation that would kill humans, there are also the huge dust storms, and I think they even mentioned something about the temperature although I can't remember it all.

But still fun to think about.

That's why we need to start now. The lack of proper atmosphere and temperature are things to be dealt with by human intervention. Earths atmosphere as it is now was a created almost entirely due to the metabolic pathways of some of earths earliest lifeforms. Meaning simple microbes can change an atmosphere

[anachronistic]

Well I also read that Martian soil does contain some metals. I think it was in the terraforming of Mars where I read that to make the soil more suitable for agriculture, factories would be placed on Mars to remove the metals from the ground. This would also help release oxygen.

There are a lot of metal oxides on the surface of Mars, leading scientists to believe that oxygen was a larger part of the atmosphere.

[DoesntMatter]

Apparently if all the ice beneath the south pole of Mars was melted, there would be enough water to cover the entire planet in 11 meters of liquid water

[url]http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-030[/url]

[anachronistic]

I thought much of the ice on Mars was frozen CO2? Did they do a chemical analysis and discover otherwise?