NASA Researchers and Elon Musk Differ in Their Views About Mars Habitability

August 2, 2018 – Geoengineering a planet is science fiction that some would have us believe can be done easily and within a relatively short period of time. This is nonsense. Why?

Because our own human activity here on Earth shows just how hard it is to do. We have been geoengineering Earth over the last 150 years because of the Industrial Revolution. With all that burning of carbon-based materials we have altered Earth but in geological terms, one would not describe it as substantial.

What we humans have done is raise global mean temperatures by nearly 0.8 Celsius (1.44 Fahrenheit) degrees. The consequences of our current carbon consumption mean that temperatures will continue to rise for the foreseeable future (many centuries) with other physical planet-wide effects including sea level rise, changes to ocean and atmospheric temperatures, altered wind and precipitation patterns, and increased extreme weather events. Ultimately the planet’s biology will be stressed, unlike anything we humans have witnessed since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution over 12,000 years ago.

Speaking of that last number, nature’s ability to do geoengineering works on time scales where 12,000 is akin to a nanosecond in geological time. Our planet is more than 4.5 billion years old. During its lifetime it has been re-engineered numerous times from birth as an aggregated mass of proto-planetary materials to being heated to a molten state, to the moment when crustal plates formed moved along by the hot mantle conveyor belt beneath, then to several prolonged ice ages where Earth turned into an ice ball, and now to the present world we know.

So what makes people like Elon Musk believe we humans can do to Mars what geological time has not accomplished? Pure fantasy in my opinion.

Today Mars is a perpetually dry and cold place. It has a tenuous atmosphere that is thinner by a factor of ten than the air at the top of Mount Everest here on Earth. The atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide (CO2). Any water on Mars is either locked up in the ice caps along with dry ice (frozen CO2) at its poles, or in subsurface formations that at best are in a briny liquid state (see the recent findings described in a previous posting at this site) or permanently frozen. To add to this Mars has no planetary magnetic field to shield it from cosmic and solar radiation. So all in all, this is an inhospitable environment except for well designed robotic landers and rovers, or in the future, humans encapsulated in protected habitats largely dug-in beneath the surface.

Geoengineering Mars in what science fiction has called terraforming would require humans to alter the planet to make it suitable for terrestrial life. In an article just published in Nature Astronomy, authors Bruce Jakosky, University of Colorado Boulder, and Christopher Edwards, Northern Arizona University, describe the work of other authors on this subject before stating the whys and wherefores that make the notion of terraforming impossible.

Among the tasks we humans would have to do on Mars includes the following:

1. Increase the air pressure so that humans would not have to wear pressure suits when on the surface of the planet.
2. Increase atmospheric greenhouse gases to raise the planet’s temperature to a point where liquid water would be stable on its surface.

Increasing the air pressure is beyond any current technical capability of we humans to do on any large scale. Yes, we could set up a number of highly polluting smokestack-based industrial plants on Mars to churn out tons of greenhouse gases. But we would have to do this for many centuries to begin to increase the air pressure to approximate conditions on Earth at 5,000 meters (over 16,400 feet) above sea level. Even then we would have to continuously run these polluting sites to deal with the fact that Mars would lose a significant amount of these gases to space in the process because of the lack of a magnetic field. We’ve had lots of experience with smokestack pollution on Earth but building such an infrastructure on Mars with little in the way of free oxygen present would be extremely expensive.

Another could involve releasing the water vapour (another greenhouse gas) stored in the subterranean ice found at many locales on the planet. We would want to ensure that a significant amount of water vapour got released at the beginning of the operation. Elon Musk has suggested a thermonuclear detonation as one means of water release. His idea is to set off a big bomb over a large block of subterranean ice and watch it vaporize. But the pressure gained would be only temporary for the same reasons other greenhouse gases, when released through the smokestack option, would over time vanish. And there is no assurance that released water vapour would condense to become stable liquid water on the surface. It would more than likely in a very short time be lost to space because of ultraviolet light bombardment (no magnetic field to stop this) and the exposure of the atmosphere’s edge to the solar wind. The Maven orbiter has been measuring this phenomenon on Mars showing that the current atmosphere continues to lose CO2 and ionized oxygen split from the carbon into space.

Another idea as explored by Jakosky and Edwards would be to release CO2 from the planet’s carbon sinks including the dry ice, water ice fields found at the poles, carbon-bearing minerals at or below the surface. But that means finding those minerals which so far based on orbiters, landers, and rovers, seem to be sparsely spread. Analysis of atmospheric dust holds little hope for finding anything more significant in this regard.

In any terraforming scenario, we humans would have to release enough carbon in the form of CO2 to be of such volume as to increase the current atmosphere’s carbon content by a factor of 167. That’s because today’s Martian atmosphere has an atmospheric pressure on the surface of 6 millibars, equivalent to about 15 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter. Liquid water would need surface pressures to be 1 bar with an atmosphere containing about 2,500 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter.

In Jakosky and Edwards’ paper there is little discussion on methane (CH4) emanations which have been detected seasonally coming from the Martian surface. CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas of higher density than CO2. But it, too, would over time be lost to space or would degrade into carbon and hydrogen isotopes with the hydrogen quickly escaping.

Jakosky and Edwards in their conclusions stated: “there is not enough CO2 left on Mars in any known, readily accessible reservoir, if mobilized and emplaced into the atmosphere, to produce any significant increase in temperature or pressure.” They go on to state that large-scale processing of CO2 from the surface would have to be on a planet-wide scale, well beyond any present human technology. And finally, they have no solution to the outgassing to space of anything we humans would add to the Martian atmosphere that soon wouldn’t be lost.

But Elon Musk disagrees going back to the idea of using a thermonuclear explosion to release massive amounts of CO2 in the Martian soil. Musk believes that Mars, of all the planets in the Solar System, is the best option to terraform. He thinks humans can come up with technical solutions to the lack of a natural magnetic field. He believes that plants would grow on the Martian surface if atmospheric pressures using the trapped CO2 were released. Among Musk’s idea for heating up Mars is the notion of creating artificial pulsing suns above the poles to heat up the planet.

Musk is convinced that Mars must be colonized by humans to give us a multi-planetary foundation in the event that life should end here on Earth. He has and will continue to plan for getting to Mars early in the 2020s, first with two supply ships to land in 2022 followed by four spaceships with humans aboard to arrive in 2024. The Mars they will come to will remain inhospitable for life as we know it. With certainty, life that accompanies us to Mars in the form of bacteria will threaten microbial native life that may already be there. But no one seems to be talking about the implications of Martian colonization in the face of an already living planet. Our arrival would be equated with an extinction event for the Red Planet’s own ecology.