Mars Transformation Program

Editor's note: As early as 2015, Musk proposed the "Mars immigration plan", which made many people feel unimaginable. According to his plan, he plans to send the world's top 100000 elites to Mars and establish permanent communities on the surface or underground of Mars, with individual costs controlled within $2 million. Regarding the modification of Mars, Musk said he has an idea on how to make Mars suitable for habitation. According to Musk, it is possible to detonate powerful thermonuclear weapons at the North and South Poles of the Red Planet, which would cause glaciers to melt, water to evaporate, and ultimately form a suitable atmosphere. Is Musk's approach feasible? This article provides a specific analysis, titled 'Should We Terraform Mars?'? Let’s Recap， Author BRIAN GALLAGHER.

It is inevitable that Musk will eventually fall into a debate about whether Mars can be transformed into an Earth network. He said in an interview with Business Week in July 2018, 'When you're online, you're in the' battle zone 'of netizens.'. Therefore, if you attack me, I can also counterattack

Elon Musk is the CEO and Chief Design Officer of SpaceX, and he hopes to "enable life to live on multiple planets," with Mars being the top priority. He once tweeted, "Public support is crucial to achieving the goal of bringing life to Mars. This red planet is relatively close to Earth, and Mars once had oceans and rivers on its surface, as well as ice and subsurface lakes. The climate is also feasible, and the surface temperature scale of Mars (-285 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit) is not much different from that of Earth (-126 to 138 degrees Fahrenheit). The problem is that Mars' atmosphere now has a pressure of 0.006 bar, while 1 bar is the standard atmospheric pressure for Earth's sea level. This not only means that risky cosmic radiation will uncontrollably reach the surface of Mars, but also that humans need at least 0.063 bar of pressure to maintain our body fluids from rising (which). Known as the Armstrong limit.

Regarding terrain modification: altering the climate, terrain, or ecology of a planet to make it more suitable for the development of life. If we can increase the atmospheric pressure on Mars to above the pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (0.337 bar), we can walk on the surface of Mars with just a breathing mask and no need for pressurized spacesuits. This may be referred to as' weak geochemistry ', which prevents plants from growing in soil outside the greenhouse.

Sweet Martian homeland, artist's rendering, how the early Martian environment may compare to today's Mars. Image source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

For this reason, a lot of nitrogen is needed, more than what scientists have discovered on the surface of Mars so far, and this does not allow us to directly breathe Martian air. But Musk believes that at least weakly terraforming modifications are possible. In fact, he told the audience at the World Astronautical Congress held in Mexico in 2016, "If we can warm Mars, it will once again have a thick atmosphere and liquid ocean

But is this true?

Not very likely. According to Bruce Yakowski, the chief investigator of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft and a space scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, he said that with Musk's partial push, the terraforming of Mars is becoming increasingly popular, which convinced him and his partner geologist Christopher Edwards to assess its feasibility. Their answer is: NO, 'It's impossible with today's skills'. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in July 2018, they directly mentioned Musk and rejected his idea of terraforming Mars' polar ice caps through nuclear explosions. They believed that the released amount of frozen carbon dioxide was not enough to cause the uncontrolled greenhouse effect. Shortly thereafter, Discovery magazine @ Musk on a Twitter post. Sorry, Elon. There is no sufficient carbon dioxide to transform Mars.

So Musk launched a counterattack. There is a lot of carbon dioxide adsorbed in the soil on Mars, which will be released when heated, "he replied to Discovery magazine's Twitter. By obtaining sufficient energy through artificial or natural (solar) nuclear fusion, you can terraform almost any large rock mass. "The next day on Twitter, Musk replied twice to Discovery's tweet, commenting. Firstly, he wrote on Twitter that some of the content reads as follows: 'Oh, is that so? I would like to recommend Chris McKay @ NASA to you.'. Three minutes later, I replied again: "Science" followed by an emoji of heart, microscope, meteor, and a link to a paper co authored by McKay in 1993 titled "Skill Requirements for Transforming Mars".

If 75% of the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere has already been lost into space, then there is simply no carbon dioxide stored locally close to the surface that humans can mobilize.

Why does Musk trust planetary scientist McKay at NASA's Ames Research Center, rather than other experts? I asked McKay if he had read the paper "Nature Astronomy" by Yakowski and Edwards. The paper points out that since 2014, MAVEN and Mars Express spacecraft have observed in real-time that Mars has lost some of its atmosphere, while the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecraft have analyzed the abundance of carbon deposits and the presentation of carbon dioxide in polar ice. They said that these new data points indicate that, firstly, most of Mars' ancient thick atmosphere has now been lost to space, rather than being transferred back to shallow carbon dioxide reservoirs beneath the surface that have not yet been detected; Secondly, no matter how much carbon dioxide is left on the ground, it cannot be easily obtained and therefore cannot be easily mobilized into the atmosphere.

I know this paper, "McKay said." They are correct. Indeed, the key issue in terraforming is the amount of CO2, N2, and H2O on Mars. Unfortunately, there is currently nothing new that can solve this problem In McKay's view, the new data referred to by Yakoski and Edwards is not good enough.

McKay asked me to pay attention to a paper he and his two partners Owen Thun and James Hastings wrote in the journal Nature in 1991, titled 'Making Mars habitable'. He told me that his conclusion at the time was that the quantity and distribution of carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen on Mars were unclear, and this is still the case today. We are still very uncertain about the amount of carbon dioxide below the surface. We don't have good data and will need to drill deeper to obtain it, "he said. Yakoski and Edwards' recent rejection of the conclusion of geochemistry is" immature ".

He is not the only one holding this viewpoint. There is also Robert Zubrin, who was a co-author of the 1993 paper on terraforming. Zublin is an aerospace engineer, writer, and founding president of the Mars Society, a non-profit organization advocating for the terraforming of Mars. Zublin told NBC News that establishing a civilization on Mars will "add strength and vitality to human culture on Earth". He thought Mars should be the target of NASA's space program.

I asked Zublin how he viewed Yakoski: he not only pretended to have knowledge he didn't have, but also completely contradicted the known data. For example, Yakowski emphasized in his paper "Nature Astronomy" that at least 75% of the carbon dioxide (0.5 bar of carbon dioxide) in the ancient Martian atmosphere drifted away billions of years ago, perhaps driven away by factors such as solar wind and extreme ultraviolet radiation. If at least 75% of the carbon dioxide in Mars' atmosphere is lost into space, according to Yakowski, this means that there is simply no pre-existing thick atmosphere (equivalent to less than one bar) stored near the surface for humans to mobilize. Obviously, Yakowski wrote, 'Once gas is lost into space, it cannot be mobilized back into the atmosphere.' For them, this leaves only a negligible amount of available carbon dioxide on the Martian surface: 0.020 bar.

Yakowski calculated the 75% loss using the following method: assuming that the solar wind and ultraviolet activity observed today were also present in the past, but with greater intensity (based on observations of the Sun's history from stars similar to the Sun, he believed this to exist). Then, compare the proportion of carbon-13 and carbon-12 in the Martian atmosphere today with the proportion of carbon-13 and carbon-12 on Earth. Due to the tendency of heavier isotopes in the atmosphere to stay around while lighter isotopes fly away, the degree of enrichment of heavier isotopes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be different from that of carbon on the ground. Yakoski and Edwards wrote that this difference indicates that at least three-quarters of the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere has now disappeared, and "loss into space is the main process of ancient carbon dioxide greenhouse atmospheres. This is contrary to the views supported by Zublin and McKay, which suggest that another process may remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but retain it on this planet: either by adsorbing it in the soil and freezing it into carbon dioxide ice, or by locking it in carbon rich mineral deposits.

The Curiosity Mars rover is collecting data.

In the eyes of Zublin and McKay, this is where Yakoski's viewpoint seems to contradict known data. Zublin and McKay informed me that a loss of 0.5 bar of atmospheric carbon dioxide is a fair (even if inaccurate) assessment. McKay said, "There is some controversy over whether they are really measuring carbon dioxide loss or just oxygen loss." Zublin said, "This claim is controversial, but the paper will go through, because at least in this case, Yakoski's proof is based on data. What they disagree with is Yakoski's carbon isotope analysis. Zublin said that a loss of 0.5 bar of atmospheric carbon dioxide could not represent 75% or more of Mars' original atmospheric total, as according to existing data on liquid water on ancient Mars, there must have been at least 2 bar of carbon dioxide enveloping the planet. If that's the case, contrary to Yakoski's statement, there will be far more than 1 bar of carbon dioxide in shallow sediments somewhere. If these carbon dioxide are released, it could trigger an uncontrolled greenhouse effect.

In addition, Zublin pointed out that scientists do not know the proportion of carbon-12 and carbon-13 at the beginning of Mars, which Yakowski more or less acknowledged in his paper. The most important thing is that Yakoski "doesn't know what the carbon 12 and carbon 13 fractions in the underground soil are," Zublin added. It may be very different from the ratio in the atmosphere, because if most of the carbon dioxide had been fixed in the weathered layer (the layer of unfrozen rock material hidden on the bedrock) billions of years ago, when most of the atmosphere disappeared into space, these two reservoirs would have left completely different contents, "McKay agreed.

For example, the ice sheet at the south pole of Mars is an area that harbors isolated mineral deposits. McKay said that none of these have been well understood and their scale has not been fully determined. He pointed out that in a 2016 study, scientists used shallow radar instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to conduct long-distance mapping of the region and found that there was sufficient carbon dioxide ice underground. If vaporized, the atmospheric pressure on Mars could double to 0.012 bar.

Of course, this is far from enough for humans to walk on Mars without a pressurized suit. We must find more carbon dioxide deposits that can be released into the atmosphere. McKay said that the sediments in Antarctica are "relatively young," but older and deeper sediments may exist. For him, the results from MAVEN and Mars Express are a 'bonus point' because 'almost all climate models indicate that early Mars must have had different levels of carbon dioxide in its early history,' he said. 'Therefore, there must have been some remaining in shallow sediments buried for billions of years.'.

Imagine someone estimating the oil reserves on Earth on Mars in 1890, but never drilling a well there.

I informed Yakoski about this issue. He replied that he thought there was simply no carbon dioxide (approximately 0.020 bar) left on the surface or near the surface that could be vaporized. This estimate is based not only on his analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide loss, but also on the fact that humans have detected a depth of 10 centimeters without discovering much CO2. Also not exposed to others: impact craters and huge trenches, such as Valles Marineris on Mars. These two types of surface features display crustal layers at different depths.

Therefore, carbon dioxide must be buried deeper, in hard to reach areas. You must make assumptions about things you cannot see, "Yakoski told me. There may still be many buried "deep carbonate" carbon dioxide on Mars, but they cannot be touched. He and Edwards wrote, "Although there is no formal evaluation of the quantity of carbonate deposits, we can always argue that they may be sealed in places that we do not have or cannot observe, and are difficult or impossible to use for geochemical alteration

McKay's revelation from the same information is not so disappointing, nor is it so conclusive. Unfortunately, in the past 20 years, we have not gained much knowledge about the subsurface of Mars and require more data, "he told me. This planet is as big as Earth's land, and there are significant differences between different regions. Zublin made me imagine someone on Mars in 1890 estimating Earth's oil reserves without drilling. He said, "This is the work done by Yakoski. It's absurd, absurd

If Yakoski is wrong and there are indeed multiple equivalents of buried carbon dioxide on Mars that we can obtain, we may be able to quickly modify Mars. From the rate at which our greenhouse gas emissions are warming the Earth, we can transform Mars into a warm climate condition within 100 years, "McKay explained." The most effective skill would be to produce super greenhouse gases such as chlorofluorocarbons or better perfluorinated compounds, which are non-toxic, do not interfere with the development of the ozone layer, and can resist damage from solar ultraviolet radiation. Curiosity has now proven that fluorine exists in rocks on Mars, so the components are there

In a 2001 paper, McKay and aerospace engineer Margarita Marinova (now a high-end Mars and spacecraft systems development engineer at SpaceX) wrote that a quantity of 4x1020 joules, equivalent to approximately 75 minutes of Martian sunlight, is required to produce sufficient [perfluorocarbons] to raise the temperature of Mars by approximately 9 degrees Fahrenheit. This is equivalent to 250 devices that consume 500 megawatts (the size of a small nuclear reactor) working for 100 years. In addition to providing personnel for other needs of the colony, such as agriculture, there will also be a demand for many people to equip these devices with workers. Zublin believed that 500000 to 1 million people were needed to initiate many terraforming transformations on Mars.

Whether we can terraform Mars or not, it seems that we will soon land on Mars. Musk has a plan to use SpaceX's Starship to take us there. After landing, several of them will form the 'Mars Alpha Base'. In Australia, he presented this plan to the audience and also showed pictures depicting the base growing into a township, followed by a city. He said that ultimately, the new inhabitants of Mars will carry out terrain modification on the planet. Mars will become a 'good place'.