Global Warming Could Be The Best Way To Terraform Mars
Straight from Shadows Live Under Seashells. Woot!
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You are a Mars nut!
By chance I found this book As It Is on Mars. It's also part of a trilogy. It's out of print and an unknown author. I think if they could slap the name of an author like Ben Bova's name on it, it would be famous.
Anyway, it is strongly pro-capitalism. It's the story of three people stuck on mars, condemned to die. Space agencies of the world can't rescue them, but they gift them the equipment and the area as a gesture. By working round the clock for a year, similar to the story in The Martian they manage to survive and thrive. Astronaunts from a future mission join them. They create an agreement to live by, a Constitution that says rights and property will be respected. Outsiders become envious of their affluent life, thinking by sheer luck they got stuck on Mars and fell into a gravy train. In fact they built everything they have, starting only with their employers' gift of the remaining supplies and equipment.
The way I tell it sounds like preachy parable, but it's not like that. It's just another good Mars colonization story, but pro-capitalism.
I'm glad you liked it. The last book, Blue Mars, was really tough sledding to get through. They do point out that the Ann, who was the leader of the people worried about despoiling Mars, was actually anti-life. She had a bout with depression where she would stand in the path of these landslide events, daring fate to take her life, if the runout should continue longer than normal. She eventually mellowed, beat depression, and had a happy life with Sax, who was in favor of terraforming Mars. There was also some weird stuff about the waring parties just accepting things, and somehow the war went away. There was also some gratuitous sex that seemed out of place.
I thought he went easier on his political message in the third book. I saw him speak three years ago, and he's pretty hardcore socialist. I was disappointed by that. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
You are correct. Planetary atmospheres are extraordinarily complex and poorly understood. The issue really goes back to why planets have atmospheres in the first place. The accretion model is nice philosophically but creates more questions than it answers. Relative atomic and molecular abundances play a roll but so does the presence of a magnetic field, thermal equilibrium, solar wind and so on. I have studied these things for over 50 years and know less now than I did when I got out of school. (That seems to happen a lot). I think the real challenge regarding Mars terraforming is that we don't know what we don't know. We are just now beginning to ask some of the right questions.
You came a bit later than me. I applied to NASA at Ames research around 1964 and was given a GS7 rating in materials science, my one and only life time GS rating, and to Argonne National labs about that time but decide to go to grad school in mathematics. Some of us were spending some time trying to find analytic solutions for the three body problem to no avail.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosph...)
The atmospheric pressure at the surface is less than 0.2 psi. This would require a pressure suit. The abundant CO2 is great for plant life and photosynthesis will produce oxygen. But moving out of underground or domed structures will be a long way off.
Even still, on Mars that co2 is treasure.
Whomever told you that about life and the magnetosphere was probably confusing the genesis and early development of life with a thriving technological civilization moving to different planets. ;)
I wish you well in your scientific journey and look forward to reading your future contributions.
We didnt look at that level of terraforming because we were focused on current and near term technology, and because much of the perceived requirements went away with a more detailed understanding of Mars itself and what it would take to settle it.
The real risk to a Martian settlement is not getting started with a proper supply, of being focused in something other than establishing a food ecosystem and plastics manufacturing.
Other than humans and our ingenuity the primary resource needed for full and lasting settlement of Mars is hydrogen. Mars is essentially the quintessential engineering solution: reduce it to a previously solved problem. In this case the plastic geodesic dome does that beautifully.
On the other side are the rewards. Mars is the economic fulcrum of the solar system. It is the lynchpin for terrestrial orbital buildings and asteroid mining. It is even cheaper and more efficient to launch water to Earth's moon from Mars than from Earth. It is cheaper to get to Mars from Earth than it is the the moon.
Any serious asteroid mining will be dependent on Mars settlement to make it economically viable. And the people who settle Mars will be the next economic power in the system.
Wow, maybe it slipped into a black hole or maybe the Mysterians got it~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHbL8...
or it got Green Slimed~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79_l...
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