In recent years I’ve often seen articles and posts about the possibility of “terraforming” Mars. Terraforming is the attempt to change a planet’s environment to make the planet more habitable by humans. The hope is that some day people could live on that planet without requiring special protective gear.
Many ideas have been put forward. Since it is outside human ability to directly make significant changes, the ideas rely on finding how small changes might cause a sort of “chain reaction” that would result in huge results. One common idea is to use living things to make the changes.
It might be possible, for example, to find a plant that could somehow survive in the harsh Martian conditions and give off oxygen. At the moment this wouldn’t be feasible, because there simply isn’t enough atmosphere for a plant to use Even if the lack of atmosphere didn’t kill the plant, there isn’t enough carbon dioxide for the plant to grow.
Theoretically it might be possible to find some huge deposit of frozen carbon dioxide, which could be heated and cause the atmosphere to become denser. The greenhouse effect might allow the Sun to warm the planet, making it more hospitable to earthly life.
There have been many other ideas of varying degrees of feasibility. None seem to be likely to succeed, but the work continues.
I would like to point out, though, that this idea of terraforming Mars is probably doomed. We already have a very Earth-like planet, which we are quickly making inhospitable to earthly life. If we can’t keep our own planet hospitable, how can we expect to change another planet to make it hospitable?
First let’s terraform Earth back to its original condition. Once we do that, then it makes sense to see whether we can do something similar on Mars.
Terraforming Mars
In recent years I’ve often seen articles and posts about the possibility of “terraforming” Mars. Terraforming is the attempt to change a planet’s environment to make the planet more habitable by humans. The hope is that some day people could live on that planet without requiring special protective gear.
Many ideas have been put forward. Since it is outside human ability to directly make significant changes, the ideas rely on finding how small changes might cause a sort of “chain reaction” that would result in huge results. One common idea is to use living things to make the changes.
It might be possible, for example, to find a plant that could somehow survive in the harsh Martian conditions and give off oxygen. At the moment this wouldn’t be feasible, because there simply isn’t enough atmosphere for a plant to use Even if the lack of atmosphere didn’t kill the plant, there isn’t enough carbon dioxide for the plant to grow.
Theoretically it might be possible to find some huge deposit of frozen carbon dioxide, which could be heated and cause the atmosphere to become denser. The greenhouse effect might allow the Sun to warm the planet, making it more hospitable to earthly life.
There have been many other ideas of varying degrees of feasibility. None seem to be likely to succeed, but the work continues.
I would like to point out, though, that this idea of terraforming Mars is probably doomed. We already have a very Earth-like planet, which we are quickly making inhospitable to earthly life. If we can’t keep our own planet hospitable, how can we expect to change another planet to make it hospitable?
First let’s terraform Earth back to its original condition. Once we do that, then it makes sense to see whether we can do something similar on Mars.