New Mars Forums

Hi Rick,

Yes it's very interesting to see all those new pictures from Mars with what looks like mini canals from small melts.

It's a very hot topic right now and seems like no one has a consences on what the fluid could be.

I wonder if its some strange form of heavily carbonated water ice or geysers is the culprit.
The Martian temperatures work pretty well for heavily carbonated water ice melts and freezes, but how could Mars make such an irregular ice?
Carbonated water should persist long enough to make the channels but evaporate away leaving no pools.

I can't think of what else it could be on Mars unless it's very salty water ice geysers, even that is suspect for the temperature and duration of the events.

Just picturing the first balloon being setup in the Venus atmosphere so work can progress to build the city.

I can't see a willing soul brave enough to be on it until it's a pretty big and safe structure.
You will also need emergency escape vehicles for every colonist just incase of a disaster.(A few Saturn 1B earth to moon sized vehicles)

Might be an idea to include some means of a pretty close to fully machine built  floating city before anyone arrives to it.
That might be the un raveling of the idea as i think it would be a difficult project even on Earth.

My vote is Mars underground also.
Small quantities of lights,seeds, digging equipment, solar cells for heat and 02 separation/water collection and a compressor.
Why terra form Mars surface, go underground 5-10 meters and terra form that part of Mars on a growing eventually global scale.

Mars as a black body is only worth the effort if it contains enough super greenhouse gas components also.

Getting Mars past the C02 melt and past the H20 melt are two very different things unless almost all of the poles are C02.
Data so far doesn't support that.

Interesting though that using a moon destined to crash on the surface of Mars might be a good step forward to a warmer place.

I wonder what Deimos offers?

Rick,

Just had a second look at this....

Had an interesting thought here, it's a bit off topic but wanted to get it in type before i forgot.:)

I bet if we did some math on the co2 earth quantity vs Venus and sunlight differences the co2 isn't warming Venus enough to account for Venus temperature.

Might be an interesting calculation to see what the co2 is really doing for temperature on earth and Venus as we have solid temperature data for both.
With a little rough math in my head with just co2 differences and bar difference and light difference.
Venus should be much warmer if co2 heat retention theory is correct, or the earth should be cooler?
We could probably get data from Mars as well as we know it's co2 and temperature.

Somethings not right in general co2 theory somewhere.
Interesting.

Rick,

Your welcome

Very interesting.
I was expecting only 2 or 3c with a limited possibility of C02 melting.

5c would have a runaway effect on Mars, it should melt enough C02 to contribute quite a bit of weight to the atmosphere.

If the poles are indeed a lot of C02 and especially lots of frozen C02 in the equatorial regions, then just making Mars black this way might start the terra form process rolling.

If we can produce enough super greenhouse gas from Phobos at the same time, we probably have a simple scheme to alter Mars much closer to Earth.

Interesting to see what a black earth would be like also, i think we are doing that without intention

RickSmith,

Thanks for the input on this.
You must be that bigger brain i was talking about.

I think dark Mars has potential, wasn't expecting to need so much of Phobos.
Might be a good and bad thing though about needing more of Phobos.
Having to grind up Phobos will probably allow us to collect the ingredients needed for super greenhouse gas at the same time.

Can't wait to see the Mars temperature difference at near Phobos color.
Any data of how warm the surface of Phobos gets?
That would give us a decent clue, if i can find it.

C M Edwards,

I had a similar idea for Mars a while back, but in involved mining phobos surface for the dark material that is covering phobos a few meters deep.
Pretty easy to deliver it to Mars and let the atmosphere spread it for you.

Not sure even if you cover all of mars with a thin black layer it will warm Mars enough for any melt.
Black surface in conjunction with a small kb ice asteroid impact, then maybe easy partial change of Mars to at least the melt point.

Simple usually works best.

C M Edwards,

I agree that intelligent life will be pretty rare.
Technological intelligent life might never go beyond stone arrowheads on most of those worlds.

Earth is such a unusual place, not many worlds will be able to stay in a safe temperature zone for life for billions of years, as the host sun warms like ours has and is.

A couple other things i wonder about the drake equation.

Animal life? normal or very rare? took a few billion years to start here.
Permanent giant animal life, like on earth, without extinction event they would still be here and we would not.

I believe as you that a scattering of intelligent tech societies exist in each galaxy, but maybe radio communications are for dummies.
They neither send or listen to such primitive methods. and have no interest in primitives.

We are in an unlucky galaxy that has only us as the tech society, we will eventually hear a radio signal,  the closest tech society in Andromeda has just started sending TV signals, we will have to wait a million years to see them.
999 thousand years before they arrive we stop listening to such primitive communications.:)

It's interesting to think that we might be the one freak experiment in all the universe that everything was just right.

I myself doubt we are alone as a tech society in the universe, but the neighbors might be very distant neighbors indeed.

dicktice,

Ah verification of it.
We might need to apply for a grant and co write a paper about it, I'm sure it will take many years for a full study of all the aspects of this new scientific principal.
Or until the grant gets near the end, or someone discovers we are really working from a tropical beach.

Who knows what we will find with enough money, maybe duct tape isn't holding the universe together its toenails and hair, increased C02 could unravel the very fabric of space/time and Red Green.

To funny

RickSmith,

I'm happy to agree that the average ice depth on Greenland is 2.1 km.
If that is what the facts say then 2.1 km average is it.

If we are talking about a realistic time for Greenland to melt even if the earth was an average 2 or 3c warmer than it is now (the worst case man made greenhouse scenario) then we need to multiply the 3 degrees from the 10 degrees or 3/10 my guess at melting speeds.

3/10 - fog temperature light decrease of 1c  or 2c/10c x 1.5 miles x 2ft week melt.
+ addition anal snow cover increase with increased humidity and warmer temperatures and normal snow deposits.

or 7500ft divided by 2.4 inches a week not including increased snow cover due to warmer climate.

5 weeks a foot or 37500 weeks + additional anual snow fall?.

With some pretty simple math we can work out that a melting Greenland even in a greenhouse scenario will take a very long time.

You can see why i question most of the facts that come from the nay sayers of greenhouse doom.

As for frozen methane ice , i agree its one of the biggest potential extinction event potentials, and probably the reason for a few of earths big extinction events.

The last guess for eruptions of it were when the planet was about 6c warmer than current temperatures due to massive volcanic eruptions for eons, when methane ice erupted from the ocean it pushed temperatures up another 4c.

I cannot in any manmade scenario see temperatures rising 6c, or lasting long enough to warm the water a similar temperature to begin eruptions of this nature.

With all the information i have seen on global warming through the epochs the C02 just isn't the reason for warming, it seems to follow the warming by 500 to 600 years.
A very simple reason for might exit i believe, after an extinction event or heavy volcanic activity global plant mass  takes this long or longer to recover.
It might be that simple.

Greenhouse doom sayers also never point out that C02 levels we are increasing are more than canceled out but fine light blocking particles we are introducing into the atmosphere.

When you look at potential C02 heating vs light decrease from fine persistent smog, we are actually cooling the planet a small percentage.

Just my 2 cents though.

Martian Republic,

I like to keep an open mind also and try not to quote to many facts from papers or the latest scientific opinion.

Most of the really interesting ideas come from people that are not worried about career or funding or don't have a science degree at all.

Its a sad realism that openly talking about science that is outside the general opinion usually results in a label of uninformed or troll or worse.

I like to think that if Steven H and Einstein can be wrong, then who of us should dare think they are immovably right even if something looks painfully correct. 

I've been called a troll for discussing my belief that gravity and time are linked,  the reason black holes don't collapse forever is time compression from gravity.
I feel in good company though

RickSmith,

Sometimes the calculator is only as good as the input.
I looked for a useful source on ice sheets melting, i couldn't find anything useful on full melts at hypothetical temperatures.

All of the suns energy calculated in what season? for 5.7 years to prepare for melt.
That does take into account that ice is a poor medium for collecting sunlight i presume?
All of the sunlight on earth hitting Greenland would probably equate to around 1/4 its actual heating abilities.
About the same heat Mars receives.

A very tough calculation indeed as the ice melt itself causes a secondary decrease in sunlight from the release of local fog.

I would think that if all the sunlight that hits earth (with no clouds) hit Greenland, the reflective properties of the ice itself would drag that 5.7 years out to a much longer time scale to about 4x.

My guess at 100 years is because permafrost on days above 10c only melts
around 1cm in depth.

Deep ice being more exposed but less insulated than permafrost wouldn't be much different.
Permafrost isn't exposed to the sun, but the ground is a better heat retainer than ice, so they should be pretty similar.

The ice melt even in Southern Ontario takes weeks to melt a foot or two of winter ice with temperatures well above 10c, the melting quite often causes a fog.
If we guess at a similar process happening in Greenland the 2ft a week isn't improbable.
2 ft  divided by 10,000 ft = 5,000 weeks or about 100 years at 10c 24/7/365.

QUOTE
"Something else occurred to me. As I have made clear in previous posts I am taking the long view. Will the extinction event that is now started, accelerate? Will civilization survive? Will, by 2200, we have large scale H2S eruptions?"

In my opinion we have little to worry about from greenhouse gas or eruptions etc.
In the few 100 thousand years mankind has been here, the climate has changed much more violently than anything we could expect in the near future.

We should be more worried about living in a world that we are the cause of the mass extinctions and we are the cause of polluted water and air.
We will probably endure whatever happens, but (will we want to) might be a better question.:)

John Creighton,

Actually i just took the earths average temperature and subtracted the location lat/long for Greenland to guess at the highest temperature Greenland could sustain.
That is if the earth stopped over Greenland with no clouds and no winter