New Mars Forums

There's been the recent hullabaloo about MAVEN data suggesting that terraforming Mars is now an impossibility.

There were two posts on Crowlspace that suggest otherwise, in addition to one "out-there" concept I'll post about as well. I'll post a few bits from the Crowlspace posts first

The newer post: Mars Atmosphere Loss Rates – Truth vs Truism names MAVEN upfront early on in the post:

The older post: On the (Im)Possibility of Terraforming Mars addresses the "current technology can't terraform Mars" cycle from last year, but might still be of import:

Regarding mirrors, an old NextBigFuture post mentioned "tessellation foams" of reflective bubbles that could be "in between the size of Neptune or Saturn" in deep space. So the pyrolysis beam lens wouldn't have an annular mirror at L-1, but could have a much larger tessellation mirror at a different Lagrange point. So a constant beam to the surface might not be viable, but you could still get a lot of oxygen out of the soil.

Of course this assumes that we must solely use space-based infrastructure to achieve successful terraformation. But what if we looked in the opposite direction... underground?

There was a bit in the novel Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter with a device called a "Paulis mine" used to terraform Earth's Moon - rather than Mars.

The idea is that there's a large amount of volatiles including -not just water- but also nitrogen, various hydrocarbons, etc. But there's a catch: these materials are buried within the mantle, so a very deep hole must be bored out to get to them.

Is this at all realistic? While we can't say for Mars, it's certainly true for Earth. The discovery of naturally occurring ringwoodite from the Earth's mantle suggests that there could be at least as much water in Earth's mantle as there is in its oceans, if not more.

Could something similar hold true for Mars? I'm not an expert at this, but I don't see why not.

So there are still a few cards we might be able to play in regards to terraforming Mars. They might be way out-there, or require a deep dive, but they're plausible nonetheless!

I believe this is pertinent to our interests.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/27142 … n-research

I looked at a recent article published by Discover Magazine called "How Mushrooms Can Save the World". It talked about a variety of potential applications for mushrooms, including bioremediation uses.

One diagram in the article showed a type of symbiosis between mushrooms and trees. What happens is that a mushroom can give a tree nitrogen and mineral salts in exchange for sugars from the tree.

I also looked at a book talked about in the article called "Mycelium Running" which goes into depth about how mushrooms can do very important things such as filter water through their mycelia (the fungal equivalent of roots) which leads to a removal of fecal bacteria from wastewater.

I don't remember the full article very well, but there was talk about how the uses of mushrooms, combined with their radiation resistance, could be used to help terraform other planets. I think this is something that should be looked at. Your guys' thoughts?

There's been some recent news about DARPA (a United States military research and development organization for those of you who don't know) looking into mitigating the effects of ionizing radiation on people.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/darpa- … t-and.html

From the link:

I have no doubts that such research would be very valuable to a future manned Mars mission. Your thoughts?

I take it many of the people here are skeptical of the low energy nuclear reaction based designs (which may or may not work).

Here's a promising piece of news about conventional fusion.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/new-go … kheed.html

Much smaller than tokamak reactors and a projected commercialization date of 2023.