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What's more, the dirtiest of coal plants relesae large amounts of sulphur dioxide and dust into the atmosphere, which actively reduce global heating.

Can being the operative word, since these will still have a heating effect if they remain in the lower atmosphere. Ozone can also become a greenhouse gas when it's released from industrial processes and lingers in the lower atmosphere. Combined with its toxicity to organic systems, we generally consider it a pollutant when it's close to the ground.

Plus, y'know, mining coal has a whole bunch of environmental problems too. Mining natural gas is easy in comparison.

Hi m1omg,
  Thanks for your posts.  Altho, would it be possible to eliminate the second of your 2 posts by editing the first one?

  Mars has only 1.777 time the radiation as the Earth?  According to "The Case for Mars" a person would get 14.7 rem from the 500 day stay on Mars with much of their time spent in the habitat with a couple layers of sand bags on top, (to lower radiation dosage).
  See page 119 of that book, where 10.6 rem come from cosmic rays and 4.1 rem come from solar flares.

  On Earth, at sea level, in 500 days, people would get 0.205 rem (or ~0.40 rem if they live in Denver since it has less atmosphere to protect it from cosmic rays). 

  (This assumes an average yearly does of 150 milli rem per year, page 114 Case for Mars.)

  When you were talking about dangerous nuclitides, were you refering to Fogg's plan of using pipes of deterium fusion and no fission bomb to start it?  In that case, what nuclitides are you talking about?  (The ones produced by D-D and D-T fusion are both rare and generally have very short half lifes.)

  I am not a big fan of Fogg's bombs, I pointed it out as an alternative to the fission bombs others have been talking about.

  As for Nuclear Winter, much of the science on it is very weak, but in any case, since Fogg's bombs go off underground, there is very little dust that reaches the atmosphere.  (Which also cuts down on radiation.)

  See chapter 6 of "Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments" especially pages 277 to 283.

  By the way, when stating facts, please give references to where you get your numbers.  If in the last couple years they have learned that Mars gets only 1.777 times the radiation that someone on Earth gets, this is very good news.  However, I follow research on Mars quite closely and this is the first I've heard of it.

  Warm regards, Rick.

That 300 years figure is AFAIK not true, because in Celestia ED it was shown that Moon had a thin atmosphere for a few billion years from volcanic primordeal gases.
The Moon's lack of atmosphere is mainly because the Moon was poor in gas and all volatiles from the beggining and because that thin atmosphere wasn't sufficient to entabilish ionosphere that will protect it - contrary to popular belief, the magnetic field is not required - as long there is a charged particle radiation blocking ionosphere.

The 300 year figure is just for thermal escape, it doesn't even take into account stripping by the solar wind

According to this calculator ; http://www.transhuman.talktalk.net/iw/Geosync.htm ;

The Moon is capable of retaing CO2 up to a temperature of 7 degress Celsius and oxygen up to -70 deg. Celsius so there will be a slight leak but neglible in the time of the human's civilization existence from it's beggining.

-70 Celsius doesn't meet the usual criteria of terraforming, and I'm sure you can appreciate how quickly billions of years would become hundreds since thermal escape is governed by a power law.

Crash some CO2 and water rich comets to it, seed it with Ceredian ice (it was recently shown to have more frozen water than is all supply of fresh water on Earth!), bring some microbes and you will have a paradise Moon.

I think you're being a little optimistic here, but I hope we both get to walk in lunar forests one day 

Rather than crash comets into Mars, outgass they into atmosphere.

The nice thing about crashing them is that you get all that heat as well - but of course it isn't really an option if there are already settlers there at the time.  Also, not crashing them is a challenge - just shattering them doesn't help, you have to slow them down into Martian orbit.

Most birds wouldn't be able to fly on Mars- the air pressure is to small, and those that use the planets magnetic field for navigation wouldn't know where to go.

So, nothing but ostrich's and penguins for Mars!

If we're serious about transplanting species to Mars though, and releasing them into the wild, I would imagine that some form of genetic manipulation is going to take place. More than likely, we will need to modify any species to "hibernate" during the long winters, or the cold nights. This goes for the plants too.

And of course, doing this leads to a new potential "first" for any Martian... "First person to be eaten by an animal on Mars".

A dubious distinction to say the least.  :laugh:

Anyone knows how much watts/m^2 the sun delivers on the surface of Mars?

Tom Kalbfus,

Lots of heat for sure.

I wonder what would happen to the atmosphere of titan with wide scale files from introduced o2?

Might be a good thing that the water ice stays in frozen state on Titan.

Titan is an awesome place for a colony, with frozen water split as 02 and hydrogen, methane rain as inexhaustible fuel source and a thick atmosphere for radiation protection.
I would expect Titan to be a city like enclosed colony that is self sufficient almost immediately as its established.

Well any of the frozen satellites will have an atmosphere if heated, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and Titan. The first three would have atmospheres that consisted of water vapor. Some of that water vapor would leak into space only to be replaced by water vapor further evaporated from the liquid ocean below.

First thing that would happen over the airless icy Gallileans is that the icy surface would sublimate away, but the Moon's gravity would retain some of that water vapor for a time, the pressure would build up to the point where the icy surface can then melt rather than sublime. You'd have a moon with a liquid ocean under a water vapor atmosphere, probably surrounded by a perpetual layer of water clouds that are constantly raining toward the surface while water constantly evaporates from the ocean below.

In Titan's case, it has a largely nitrogen atmosphere. The nitrogen would escape to be gradually replace by water vapor and other gasses that were previously locked in the ice. What you'd have eventually is a "boiling moon". These moons can boil for quite some time, if they boil too much, the the atmosphere of water vapor would buld up and cease the ocean's boiling, if it rains too much or water escapes into space, the the pressure would drop and the oceans would begin boiling again.