http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/03/16/mars.water.reut/index.html Water deposits on the South Pole of Mars are in ice deposits up to 2.3 miles thick. If melted they'd cover the entire surface of the planet in water up to 36 feet deep.
^So the Martians took their water and ran, when their planet cooled down? Or did they just take their water and moved to a place closer to the Sun.....
Yep, much easier to colonate Mars, and use it as a launch pad. Pity about the news from the moon a month or 2 ago about the likely lack of any water there...
Awesome! We should really send probes to look around in that area. I'd bet if there had been life on Mars we have a better chance finding something there.
The atmosphere could be thickened if the planet could be warmed- more gas in the permafrost would be released to the atmosphere, which would then help with a greenhouse effect which would trap more heat, thereby perpetuating the cycle. Of course, the gas would stillbe primarily carbon dioxide- you'd have to use other methods to 'oxygenate' the atmosphere and make it breathable. One of KSR's ideas was a gigantic lens made of ultra fine material, sort of like a stationary solar sail, that would focus and intensify sunlight on the martian surface, helping to heat it. This would be a decades if not centuries long process, but it could work.
I thought of something similar, only more umbrella-like, to cut down on some of the sunlight reaching Earth (to control global warming)
I'm not so sure we want to control global warming. It seems like our planet likes ice ages, and that our current period (as in the last 10-20 thousand years) is one of high levels of warming. You choke off the heat, and we might see the glaciers coming back a lot sooner than we'd want.
There's still one little problem: Martian soil is such a powerful oxidizer that it will burn organic tissue, including skin, on contact.
Isn't martian gravity too weak to hold a "thick" atmosphere of the sort that humans need to walk around in shirtsleeves?
Atmosphere is a little tricky. Mars' gravity is too low to hold an earth-like atmosphere in the long term, but if an atmosphere identical to earth's were suddenly dropped on Mars, it would take 100k years before you couldn't breathe there again. Titan, however, has an atmosphere made up of much heavier gasses. Nitrogen and ethane won't stick around on earth, but they last a long time in the cold enviironment and low sunlight conditions.
I did read somewhere that if an earthlike atmosphere were dropped around the moon it would take over 10,000 years before the moon was back to its current, airless condition. As for Mars, the problem is less low gravity and more the magnetosphere, or lack of it. Mars has no internal dynamo. It may have had one at some point, but it's quit, probably be cooling and congealing of the core. This has allowed the solar wind to rip at mars's atmosphere and bit by bit, blast it away and blow it off to the outer fringes of the solar system. We know that mars had much higher atmospheric pressure in the past, because there were rivers and lakes, if not seas. Liquid water is impossible at the current atmospheric pressure on mars. Venus on the other hand has far too much atmosphere. Terraforming might be easier in the future if large mega-engineering projects become feasible.. say enormous atmosphere freighters, tanker ships miles and miles and miles long, that settle into orbit over say Venus, drop some hoses into the atmosphere, and start pumping it up. Compressed to liquidity in the tanks of course for maximum efficiency. Then it breaks orbit, transits to Mars, and blows its tanks deep into the martian atmosphere. And it's not only one of these ships. It's dozens, hundreds maybe.
Probably easier to crash big, watery comets into Mars, but there are lots of ideas floating around about how to thicken up and oxygenate the atmo.
Plus, I'm not exactly sure that the type of atmo that Venus has is the type of Atmo you want dumping onto Mars.
Venus and Mars both have a predominantly Co2 atmosphere. Which Earth had too, before photosynthetic life began liberating free oxygen and pumping it into the atmosphere.
According to wikipedia, this is how things started off on Earth: Do we have the capability of introducing a similar chain of events on Mars? Maybe shoot over some photosynthetic microbes to suck up all the CO2?
Once the atmo thickens and the planet warms, you could inject algae into the upper atmo and plant hardy plants on the surface. The problem with the latter is that the chemical makeup of the regolith is so oxidizing that plant life might not survive without massive soil treatments- I'm not a biologist; Cheekeymonkey might be able to answer that one.
[baba post]plants liek teh carbin monoxomide but teyh dont have lesbians on marz so teh plantz wood'nt go microwave lazors FTW![/baba post]
Even with an atmosphere as thick as Earth's, Mars would still be a lot colder, simply because it recieves a lot less solar incidence. It is 140 million miles from the sun, to Earth's 93 million, and that counts for quite a bit.
But thence their name: 1. "Dude... it's fuckin' freezing out here." 2. "We'll be at the bar soon." *hours later* 2. "Um... dude, yer kinda, uh... yer kinda nekkid over there." 1. "Yeah, I'm thinking of starting a religion. Bar-Soon-ity." 2. "Nice!"
