Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

Shaun Barrett · 2003-11-30 01:49:33

Hi Robert!
Interesting figures about the mineralogy of martian clays.

I wonder how surface-type 2, which seems to have experienced water, still has 2.9% olivine in it. As Christensen is fond of pointing out (almost gleefully if you ask me), olivine is very susceptible to weathering by water and will even break down in the presence of water-ice.
The only explanation which occurs to me is that aeolian erosion of relatively young olivine deposits in Mars' more recent drier past may have mixed this mineral into the ubiquitous dust and spread it thinly all over the planet (?).
Perhaps this explanation might also account for the olivine detected deep in the canyons of Mariner Valley, where there appears to be ample evidence of abundant water at some stage(s) in martian history.

Any thoughts about any of this, anyone?
???

Josh Cryer · 2003-11-30 06:26:41

I don't really have anything to comment, but I did read what Robert posted yesterday, and I do agree that the findings are very intriguing, if not confusing (or even contridictary). You and I have our disagreements, Shaun, but I think this is one of those places where we're both thinking "WTF?"

Rxke · 2003-11-30 07:44:06

Robert, about the 'no nitrates in Saharan desert... maybe subsurface..."

did you read this recent article?
vast nitrogen reserves hidden beneath desert

So, that *might* be very good news for Mars. This corrobates nicely with the scientist's remarks about desert environment breaking down nitrogen compounds on the surace...

RobertDyck · 2003-12-01 12:16:38

I talked to a local member last night who is a geologist. He said the difference between surface types 1 and 2 could be the degree of weathering; kaolinite tends to be the end of a long chain of weathering steps. I checked Web Mineral to see where illite comes from. It can form from weathering or hydrothermal alteration of muscovite-phengite (surface type 2 was listed as containing 5.7% muscovite), and recrystalization of smectites in marine sediments. So the fact that surface type 2 has 9.2% smectite and 2.2% illite, while surface type 1 has no smectite but 9.9% illite may just be a degree of weathering. Surface type 2 also contained 22.8% obsidian glass so that supports the hypothesis of volcanic activity. Oh, I better post the whole tables.

Surface type 1 Model-derived modes (%)
Microcline1 ..... 5.8 (feldspar)
Andesine ...... 22 (feldspar)
Bytownite ..... 21.5 (feldspar)
Bronzite ......... 5.4
Augite1 ........ 12.4
Augite3 ........ 11.3
Serpentine ..... 4.8
Gypsum ......... 1.8
Calcite ........... 3.7
Dolomite ........ 0.9
Kaolinite ........ 2.4 (clay)
Illite .............. 9.9 (clay)
RMS error (emissivity) = 0.179

Surface type 2

dickbill · 2003-12-01 14:17:13

I wonder how surface-type 2, which seems to have experienced water, still has 2.9% olivine in it. As Christensen is fond of pointing out (almost gleefully if you ask me), olivine is very susceptible to weathering by water and will even break down in the presence of water-ice.

The olivine might have been produced in "recent" volcanic eruption. 'Recent' meaning after the atmospheric conditions did not allow liquid water to persist on Mars for a long time, probably 3 billions years ago.
(note : Rgcarnes supports liquid water on Mars today, this is also supported by the very recent gullies on crater's rims, but we are talking about stable liquid water here, maybe even ocean. It's a different issue)

I post today because in W. Hartmann's Traveller's guide to Mars, the author quotes two independant mesurements in favor of a denser atmosphere or liquid water in the past: First one is the amount of H2 in the atmosphere, that we already discussed on this forum, from it, it can be deduced that a 30 meter deep global ocean has evaporated and that Mars was originally wetter than Earth, all things compared.

The other is the amount of Argon in the atmosphere. I think we never discuss this one. In short, the argon is produce by volcanism, but argon is also an heavy atom which doesn't escape into space, at least not as much as other lighter gas. From the argon left in today's atmosphere, it is derived an early martian atmosphere 10 to 50 times denser than today.

But denser atmosphere doesn't mean warmer atmosphere and direct indications of the early martian temperatures have to be found.

So, how do we know the average temperature on the earth surface, 3.8 to 4 billions years ago ? I say 3.8 byears because after the algea/bacteria introduced O2 in the atmosphere a transient snowball earth has been hypothesized, but that was a life-induced event. To compare fairly with Mars, with should consider the temperature on Earth with the original, supposedly reductive early earth atmosphere. Do we know the early Earth surface temperature from measurements ? Was it warmer than today ?

Palomar · 2003-12-01 16:50:50

Shaun: "Interesting figures about the mineralogy of martian clays."

Josh: "You and I have our disagreements, Shaun, but I think this is one of those places where we're both thinking 'WTF?'"

*Hey Josh, does that mean: Want That (with) Fries? :;):

Well, I'm wondering if the amounts of clay or clay-like substances found on Mars is good news for pro-terraformers? Or not? What difference does it make?

--Cindy

RobertDyck · 2003-12-01 20:08:05

Well, I'm wondering if the amounts of clay or clay-like substances found on Mars is good news for pro-terraformers? Or not? What difference does it make?

Clay means it is ready to convert into soil. All you need is organic matter. I'm sure guys like Terry Kok have an idea for a sequence of archaea, bacteria, fungi, lichens, and plants to grow organic matter. At least we don't have to start with rock.

Shaun Barrett · 2003-12-02 02:52:39

Josh:-

You and I have our disagreements, Shaun ...

Nahhh!! That's just a little bit of healthy diversity of opinion about politics and such.
In a hundred years time, what difference will it make?!
Or, colloquially ... WTF!!

Hazer · 2003-12-08 11:41:44

Ah yes, on the idea of hitting the ice caps of Mars with nukes. Try a fusion bomb instead of a fission bomb. From what I have read, their radioactive substances have a relatively short half-life (5 years) and the explosions are massive enough.
Though I think the best way to introduce large amounts of gasses quickly into the Martian atmosphere would be to induce vulcanism.

Shaun Barrett · 2003-12-09 01:26:16

Hi Hazer!
I'm not convinced about the fusion bombs and I think we may be able to initiate terraforming without such measures.
We don't even know how effective a thermonuclear device would be at vapourising large quantites of ice at temperatures of maybe -70 to -100 deg.C. When you place a drop of water on a hotplate, it can survive for a long period of time because a layer of water vapour immediately forms between the plate and the drop, insulating the main body of the water from the intense heat. Instead of disappearing instantly as steam, the drop rolls around for many seconds, maybe a minute, suspended like a hovercraft.
Although I admit most of the heat from a hydrogen bomb is radiant heat, while much of the hotplate's heat is convection-based, are we sure we would get the result we're looking for? Might not vast clouds of steam near the detonation point prevent much of the radiant heat from vapourising water-ice farther from the blast?
Even if shipped half our inventory of nuclear weapons to Mars, would we have enough energy, and efficient transfer of that energy into the ice caps, to bring about a positive feedback mechanism and a runaway greenhouse effect?
I submit we might not.

Let's do the greenhouse gases routine instead, a la Zubrin!

I regret to report that my dreams of living to see the Tharsis volcanoes fortuitously come to our aid by erupting and spewing massive quantities of CO2 into the martian air, may all have been no more than dreams.

If you have a look at this site, you will see that Olympus Mons, at least, was probably active within the past 10 million years. However, the experts seem to think it may only go through an active stage, lasting a million years or so, every 100 million years!
I MISSED IT !!!

And I may have to wait another 90 million years for the next show!!

Retsyn · 2004-02-20 08:09:22

A thought occurred to me this morning about how one might jump start the terraforming process on Mars. What if we deorbited one or both of Mars' moons? I know this is a radical thought but hear me out.
A collission of that magnitude would in all likelyhood trigger massive volcanism and in all likelyhood free massive quantities of water from the crust. It would also likely thicken the atmosphere quite rapidly. The deorbiting of the moon/moons could probably be accomplished by setting a large enough asteroid on a collision course. Heck if the moons cores are metallic enough, over time the collision might even be able to induce enough rotation in Mars' core to generate a weak magnetic field.

MarsDog · 2004-03-29 04:48:10

Try crashing some Kuiper Belt objects into Mars,
Maybe 2 at a time to nullify the momentum.
Extra mass, lot of water and ammonia
Instant heat and atmosphere ?

~Eternal~ · 2004-03-29 20:53:39

The Quickest way...

*Attach a massive non-propellant fast drive to Mars and put it in Venus orbit.

This way we could heat Mars up, get our chemicals, and give Venus a moon.

MarsDog · 2004-03-31 02:57:27

Earth might have gotten most of its surface water from comets. In addition, comets contain various chemicals such as methane and ammonia. A few large comets could turn Mars into a waterworld.
-
Interesting is [http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/]http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/

SBird · 2004-03-31 14:53:04

Comets are probably the most practical way to beef up Mars' atmosphere quickly.

Of course, if one posit's something like a non-propellant drive capable of moving a planet, I call dibs on a teleportation drive. Teleport Mars and Venus into Earth's orbit. Figure out some sort of stable arranglement, I assume that there's probably some sort of Lagrange type arranglement that ends up being stable for all the planets. Mars basically terraforms itself at that point. Venus still takes some work but you could always just teleport it's atmosphere to Mars/space.

No fuss, no muss, terraform with the new Ronco Insta-elsewhere portal!

kippy · 2004-03-31 16:30:25

I guess you could put Venus and Mars at the Earth/Sun L4 and L5 points. Still, moving the planets is absurd. Teleporting...

Back to comets, does anyone have figures on how many comets it will take to make an atmosphere and some oceans? Unless they are the size of our moon, I'm guessing it will take quite a few. What about a buffer gas? Unless the comets contain a good amount of nitrogen or some noble gas, you still need to get that from somewhere.

MarsDog · 2004-04-01 05:45:05

If Earth had 1.5 times the current solar radiation, then there would be constant rain, at twice, Venus conditions.
-
Moving Earth away from the Sun, via asteroid Jupiter and Earth momentum transfer, was proposed to offset the effect of the Sun's warming, as it gets older.
-
Kuiper belt objects, to be crashed into Mars, might have similar composition to Triton, lot of carbon; Instant broth of life; just
add a few cockroaches.

SBird · 2004-04-01 13:29:56

Absurdity was sort of the point of the whole teleportation drive suggestion. We're not going to move planets through any conventional drive mechanism anytime soon.

chat · 2004-04-01 18:04:01

I say a big hello to all on this forum.

I have been posting in the venus teraform section.
But thought this idea was so unusual and was much better suited to mars, i thought i would post here for input.

A crazy idea that might just work for teraforming planets.

I will need some input on this idea for sure, but it might be a way to alter several planets in our solar system.

Lets take Mars for 1st example.
It receives pretty much all the energy from a solar flare all the way down to the ground, and all the material that the sun belches out in the orbital path hits mars.
Mars simply has no discernable magnetic field to fend this off.

This was when i got the idea.
Cold planet not getting enough energy to stay warm.

How about setting up giant magnets in distant orbits of mars.
Instead of trying to repulse what the sun throws out, we try to attract a much larger quantity?
Trying to do that with light to warm the planet requires huge mirrors and huge tech problems, but with charged particles we simply need a few well placed magnets in distant orbits.?

The sun commonly belches out hydrogen, o2, co2 etc etc etc.
And the extra multiples of charged particles are sure to warm things up.

On Venus we do the exact opposite, we reflect all the charged particles away from Venus.
Probably not as big an effect on Venus, but i bet it would alter the chemistry quite a bit, and it might be all that is needed for venus to set a new balance very different than the current one..

And since the magnets are in distant orbit we can fine tune as a planet warms or cools.
On mars when things are warmed just right, we alter the orbits for the magnets and create a repulsing man made magnetic field.

It's something within our technical abilities now i think?

Any thought on this crazy yet simple idea?
all are welcome to input.

kippy · 2004-04-02 16:52:59

Hey chat

I guess it boils down to how much energy it will take to build and put a magnet constellation at a modified L2 point versus how much heat it will deliver over its lifetime. That applies to any infrastructure proposal to now that I think of it. It would be a matter of running the numbers but it might be better to just spend that energy as waste heat into the atmosphere.

However...

At some point, Mars will need some kind of protection from solar wind. My pet idea is just such a magnet constellation but used as a shield. I guess if it is decided that something like that will be needed in the long run, you might as well use it as a radiation lens at first. Anything coming from the sun is bound to add some heat. It will make going out on the surface even more deadly but you can't exactly go out to tan as it is now.

Any idea on how much heat the planet gets now via solar wind? If we could saw, double it how much would that be?

To insert another pet idea, I’ve been thinking about focusing lenses too. The thing with a lens at Mars’ L2 point is that the sunlight is pretty weak by the time it gets that far. KSR mentioned Mercury “lasering” out power to the gas giants in Blue Mars. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a set of collection mirrors in the inner solar system to gather the sunlight where it’s strongest? If say 100 km^2 were focused and reflected from a point of 1 m^2 and pointed at Mars, it would probably disperse over most of the planet’s surface. That way, you’d get a lot more power per square meter of your mirror.

chat · 2004-04-02 18:32:29

Hey Kippy,

Seems like the magnet lens/shield might have some merit to it.
And like you say after we are done with one job it becomes the shield.

I guess the ideal place to dump the energy is at the poles, but anywhere on mars has got to be pretty good.
Wonder how much extra 24hr a day energy it would take to melt the poles?

People are most likely going to want to live on the equator in canyons anyway.

Good point about the extra radiation it would produce on mars, like you say no sun tanning anyway, or 200 sun block minimum.

We could sure use someone with good knowledge of what amount of energy mars gets from the solar wind.

It would probably give a good calculation of how many magnets to have.
Or if its to small an amount of energy to make a big impact even times 10.

Maybe a good place for a reflecting mirror is at our moons orbit or on the moon, pointing at mars, or just send microwaves and convert on mars.
Closer to the sun is better for collection, but worse for repairs.

I bet those greedy earthlings will want to plug into that though

I guess a good thing about the magnet idea is that the mars colonist could build it all, magnets,solar panels, launchers, fuel etc etc right on mars.

They will need something to do since the beach is closed till further notice anyway

Euler · 2004-04-02 21:02:30

I am not sure exactly how much heat you could get out of the solar wind, but I dont think that it would be enough to make a significant impact on Mars' climate. I do know that the solar wind has a force of only about 1% of solar light pressure. Since the solar wind is much slower than light the energy ratio between wind and light would be even worse, probably around .001-.01% as much energy as the light has.

Putting mirrors closer to the sun is an interesting idea. The problem is getting the reflected light to be concentrated on Mars.

kippy · 2004-04-02 21:43:07

the idea with the mirrors close to the sun is that they would focus it to a small area. If the concentrated light could be redirected from a small point with fiberobtics or something, you could direct it to one place. It would still fan out but you would have a nice little baby star near the sun.

A couple problems with this are that the things would have to be in some kind of orbit which would take it out of the line of site for some time. It also could be used as a weapon if some nut wanted to put the earth through a bad heat wave.

chat · 2004-04-03 05:17:50

Euler,

If the numbers are that low it makes the magnet lens idea useless.
Or at such a giant scale its impractical.

On earth the northern lights suggest a pretty good amount of energy, and that is only a small percent that the earth lets in.

Mars is a ways further out though so less energy.

Kippy,

An awesome weapon of destruction could be made from it.
And for sure a power plant that everyone would want to plug into.

But on the other hand i bet a powerful enough one might be used to eject quite a bit of the atmosphere on Venus?
Could probably use it to make some pretty nasty explosions in the upper atmosphere of Venus.

Mars might require one of those big water asteroids also.
Then the need for extra power to mars goes way down.

It seems to point to the thump and wait idea for both Venus and mars.
And the easiest way to do that is to alter an inner solar system comets trajectory for impact.

kippy · 2004-04-16 10:23:57

So I was thinking some more about harnessing solar power in the inner solar system before it gets all weak out by mars.

Let's say you have an umbrella made from shiny Mylar. It doesn't have to be Texas-sized, just 10 meters across or so. Something we are capable of launching toady. if set to face the sun, it would focus the sunlight to a point on the sunside. Now if you put a collector on the "handle" at that focus point, you could redirect all the sunlight over that 78 m^2 into a small area. If you took that point and fed it to a fiber optic cable, you could direct it anywhere you want, like Mars.

I haven't done the math yet but you could probably strike a balance between its orbital speed of the sun, light pressure and distance so that it orbited the sun at the same angular velocity as Mars, thus, always between Mars and the Sun. Not directly of course but just off to the side to collect and redirect sunlight that would miss Mars. By the time the light from a pinpoint reached mars, it would probably spread out enough to hit the whole surface.

They would have to have a gyroscope to make corrections in their orientation and a little smarts to make sure they are facing Mars and "leading their shots" to compensate for the speed of light delay.

All in all, they don't sound too complicated. The best thing is that they don't rely on asteroid mining or other science fiction stuff (although that would help). We could build and launch them today.

You would have to launch thousands of them but that also allows you to do it little by little. erecting a 500km mirror above Mars is something that people might always put off into "the future" but sending up a couple dozen inner-system-collectors every year sounds doable. Especially if they cost only a few thousand bucks apiece.

I know that you'd spend more on stuff like electronics and fiber optics on these than with a simple huge Mylar sheet but keep in mind that you'd be collecting sunlight closer to the sun where it's brighter. More bang for your buck. Also, it would be harder to take them down by sabotage or accident and turning them into a super weapon would be pretty tough.

Anyone want to go into business?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

#88 2004-03-29 20:53:39

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#89 2004-03-31 02:57:27

Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

#90 2004-03-31 14:53:04

Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

#91 2004-03-31 16:30:25

Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

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Re: Rapid Terraforming... - ...the most ambitious ideas?

#93 2004-04-01 13:29:56

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#94 2004-04-01 18:04:01

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