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There are a lot of comets and asteroids. What if we separated the oxygen from them and threw blobs of liquefied oxygen at Mars and simply built up the level of oxygen to the point that it was breathable to humans? Thus skipping over melting the ice caps and introducing life and melting the permafrost and so forth?
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What makes that option any easier Tom?
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What makes that option any easier Tom?
You can separate out the oxygen from asteroid rubble in the Belt, you process it, liquefy it, put in giant LOx tanks, and shade them from the Sun to keep them cold, you them place them all in elliptical orbits to intercept Mars all at once, the thin skins of the LOx tanks burn up in entry into the Martian atmosphere exposing their liquid oxygen contents to the fiery heat of atmospheric entry, and then we have "oxygen bombs!" If we time the intercepts just right, Mars will be hit with a continuing barrage of falling and exploding liquid oxygen tanks the continued friction of entry will heat up the Martian atmosphere and perhaps melt the Martian ice caps as well. We stagger the collisions to heat the atmosphere up to room temperature. People living on Mars would be treated to a spectacular light show as the atmosphere thickens up with oxygen. Don't have to worry about plants creating oxygen from Carbon dioxide. I think the atmosphere would be breathable with it reaches around 0.2 bar of oxygen, once that is accomplished, we can bombard Mars with liquid nitrogen tanks. All the gas separation and liquefaction is done in space in parallel and is only sent Marsward when all of it is processed and liquefied. We build up the atmosphere with liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen tank bombardment until the atmosphere reaches 1 bar on the surface.
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If you want oxygen, why not just focus a giant mirror on Mars and decompose the regolith? Crash some large comets into it to get the Nitrogen up whilst you're at it...
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Not a bad idea. For most manufacturing activities, unit cost declines as production scale increases. In space, without the burden of gravitational fields or environmental problems, we could take that principal to extremes and build chemical plants the size of small worlds. Also, certain devices, such as fusion reactors would be technically much easier to build at bigger scales. It is much easier to meet the Lawson criterion in a fusion reactor 100km across. You could probably do it without superconductors.
For a space faring civilisation, manufacturing terra-tonnes of liquid oxygen from cometary ices may be economically feasible. The capital costs would be huge, but the unit costs may be reasonable due to enormous economy of scale.
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And a planet probably couldn't be terraformed by anything other than a space faring society in any case. The fact is, terraforming would be more akin to gardening, people would do it for pleasure rather than out of need to create some place to live. Most people will probably end up living in space in O'Neill type space settlements, but as society spreads out in space, the vast population will have additional resources to create interplanetary parks, such as Venus and Mars. I think something could be done with Titan as well, I think making it into a World City would make the most sense. Basically we wrap the moon in a freezer to keep it solid, power the freezer with fusion reactors, and use the waste heat to heat the atmosphere surrounding it into something comfortable, and add oxygen for breathing purposes. I think the whole satellite could light up and darken with artificial lighting using the same time zone for the entire World, on a 24-hour cycle. We would create the equivalent of daylight on the artificial surface, and their would be towers, Titan's low gravity would mean we could create ordinary towers that are five times as tall as in Manhattan for instance. A typical apartment complex could be 500 stories tall for instance, and we'd have parks and highways, tunnels for mass transit and so forth.
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