Mars Terraforming Within 40 Years for Plants and No Spacesuits

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Terraforming Mars with rapid warming particles or gases could enable plants to start growing within 40 years.

We could raise Mars’s average global temperature by tens of degrees within a few decades. SpaceX Starship combined with proposed new warming techniques, could potentially raise Mars’s temperature by 30 °C to permit liquid water for the first living organisms to grow on the surface. It would only take 1–2 years after deploying some SpaceX Starships with the right supplies and equipment to fill atmosphere in 100-meter-tall domes using photosynthesis or water electrolysis. This could happen in the 2030-2035 timeframe.

In addition to domed habitats suitable for humans without pressure suits, more species could inhabit the surface, albeit at lower pressure. As O2 builds up, more species could live on the surface, and the fraction of (potentially tented or domed) Mars surface area where humans could breathe would increase. An intriguing possibility is self-extending (similar to coral reefs) O2-impermeable membranes produced by life. Organisms or their biofilms might also modu late planetary energy balance through albedo effects and solid-state greenhouse warming.

Although rapid greening of Mars may be possible, establishing a global 0.1-bar atmosphere through photosynthesis alone would take 1000-2000 years. Oxygenation via photosynthesis would involve complex
biogeochemical cycles , including shield formation and organic matter sequestration.

Research priorities include focusing on understanding fundamental physical, chemical and biological constraints that will shape any future decisions about Mars. Such research would drive advances in Mars exploration, bioscience and climate modelling.

Despite Mars’ current hostile environment it possesses sufficient ice reserves and soil nutrients to potentially support life if temperatures rise by at least 30°C. New warming methods—including solar mirrors, engineered aerosols, and surface modifications using materials like silica aerogels—appear more efficient than earlier proposals. These techniques could potentially warm Mars enough to permit liquid water and support the first extremophilic organisms.

It would cost about $10 billion per degree of warming. A $300 billion program could raise the temperature of Mars by 30C.

Led by Erika Alden DeBenedictis at Pioneer Research Labs, a team of scientists points to three recent breakthroughs that could reignite serious research into Mars terraforming.
1. advanced climate models and new engineering tools are offering more realistic ways to warm the planet. 2. we’re learning how extremophiles—organisms that thrive in extreme environments—and synthetic biology could help kick-start Martian ecosystems.
3. SpaceX’s Starship could slash the cost of sending supplies to Mars by a factor of 1,000.

Pioneer Labs, a non-profit research organization, is focused on engineering microbes, specifically extremophiles, to survive and thrive on Mars. The long-term vision is that these microbes could potentially be used in terraforming Mars, a process to make the planet more habitable for humans.

Here’s how these microbes relate to Mars warming:

Pioneer species for Mars: Pioneer Labs is working on engineering microbes to withstand the harsh conditions on Mars, such as extreme temperatures, low pressure, and high radiation levels.

Initiating ecological succession: These engineered microbes, acting as pioneer species, could gradually alter the Martian environment, potentially increasing the planet’s temperature.

Greenhouse effect and oxygen production: These microbes might be designed to produce greenhouse gases or perform photosynthesis, which would help warm the planet and potentially create a breathable atmosphere over time.

20 thoughts on “Mars Terraforming Within 40 Years for Plants and No Spacesuits”

  1. Maybe nano technology, perhaps self-replicating, will enable the terraforming of Venus’ atmosphere. Venus is much closer and has 90 percent the gravity of Earth so inhabitants don’t suffer from the same muscle/bone loss compared to long-term survival on Mars. Also, with Venus, you’re removing and modifying gases, whereas on Mars, you’re trying to manufacture an entire ecosystem.

    On a related note, in the very near-term, I think it makes much more sense to colonize the Moon.

    • Depends on what your goal is. Musk wants a “lifeboat”, and a lifeboat can’t be so close to the main ship that it gets sucked under when the ship goes down. The Moon is close enough to Earth that no Moon colony is likely to be self-sufficient, importing necessities is too economically favorable. Mars or Venus are far enough away that self-sufficiency would be driven by economics, and most of the world ending events that could take out Earth might spare them.

      Years ago I looked at the problem of terraforming Venus, and the big issue there is that there’s just an absolutely crazy amount of CO2 to deal with, about 1,400 pounds of CO2 over every square inch. You can’t just reduce that to graphite and oxygen, either, the resulting pressure of oxygen would be toxic, and render every vaguely flammable object an explosion hazard.

      You’d need to import a vast amount of hydrogen to convert that oxygen to water. Doing so would take insane amounts of energy, and maybe a thousand years just to keep the planet from getting even hotter from the waste heat.

      It would actually be easier to colonize the atmosphere as it is with giant balloons, as many people have proposed. Really, just use to planet as a handy source of material, not colonize the surface.

      A good start on that would be a Venus probe that actually stays up in the atmosphere, rather than descending to the surface. Something we should also do for the gas giants.

      • Actually…aside from your floating colonies I doubt if Venus will ever be terraformed. It makes more sense that it will be used as a source of raw materials (CO2,) for space colonies optimized for agricultural production (rather than direct human habitation) either in orbit around Venus or in Venus’ orbit around the Sun. Thinking high CO2 levels abundant sunlight and said imported water and other nutrients to optimize agricultural production Said colonies (with imported water because Venus is bone-dry) would eventually be the “bread basket” of the inner solar system for off world colonies.

  2. Why not melt some of the water with heat and have that become a quasi-atmosphere as it evaporates? And let that atmosphere trap heat, stabilize the temperature, and melt even more water?

    • Yes.
      A paper was written about the subject a few years ago. There’s a species of Earth bacteria that naturally eats perchlorates and produces oxygen as a byproduct!
      The paper included a proof of concept design for an emergency oxygen system. The astronaut just loads a few kilograms of regolith into a bag that contains either the bacteria or their enzymes (if you don’t want to contaminate Mars) and in 15 minutes, the system produces an hour’s worth of emergency oxygen!
      Win-Win!

    • No it has not, and yes, your right about toxic. Nasty stuff. Makes Love Cannel NY, look like Bondi Beach, Sydney Australia. Been to the later, wonderful. Avoided the first, don’t want to get cancer.

  5. If you can make Mars livable, why not fix the planet we have first? Seems cheaper and way more practical

      • Yes, but your a rational, educated man trying to deal with problems in a logical way. So many people with power act like 2year old’s, who want everything “NOW, NOW NOW!” What I find odd, and tragic, is so many of “those people” go to great expense to try to live forever. They don’t understand the concept of “tomorrow”, which can be abstract. They don’t perceive the concept of the next day, or day after that. They don’t understand, they want to live longer? Start with clean air/water/soil. Everyone wins. No one doesn’t. Some people (a lot actually) think for immediate gratification, who cares of the consequences.

        Drug addicts have this mindset. Others, not on drugs do as well. Perhaps they need medication. Very frustrating.

  6. So getting Mars’ atmospheric pressure up to the Armstrong limit is not doable in reasonable time limits. The severely limits Mars potential as an attractive place to live.

    • You could build a series of factories on Mars using Martian regolith (Florine) and atmospheric gases (N2) to manufacture “super-greenhouse” gases like NF3. NF3 is 17K (17,000) times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The point of “Armstrong limit” could be reached by some calculations in few decades after NF3 caused massive CO2 outgassing on Mars

  7. Covering Mars with greenhouses does seem rather more practical than terraforming the unconstrained atmosphere. Due to Mars’ low gravity, maintaining a breathable atmospheric pressure at Mars surface requires about 3 times as much of a mass of air per square meter as at Earth’s gravity, (Amounting to almost exactly the same total mass of air as Earth!) because the atmosphere extends much higher, pressure dropping off slower.

    While we only actually need the bottom few meters of the atmosphere to be decent pressure!

    Further, Mars’ atmosphere is mostly CO2. Inert gases amount to about 4.5% of the Martian atmosphere. Assuming you were aiming for an atmosphere with a total pressure of 10psi, (About equivalent to 10,000 feet altitude, most people can tolerate that quite easily with acclimation.) 2-3PS of oxygen, you need enough inert gas to provide 7-8 psi of pressure.

    Skipping all the tedious calculations, I estimate there’s enough inert gas in the Martian atmosphere to provide for 8′ high greenhouses over maybe 20% of the surface. You could do the whole planet to much greater depth if you used CO2, of course, but most Earth life would find that high a pressure of CO2 highly toxic. Maybe you could genetically engineer crops to grow under those conditions, and limit the use of inert gas to spaces intended for living, but you’d need to limit yourself to crops that didn’t require pollinators to do that. And even the nitrogen fertilizer requirements would strain Mars’ supply of that element.

    If you want to do better than that, there’s more than enough nitrogen on Titan to recreate Earth’s atmospheric pressure and composition on Mars, but you’d be shipping gigatons of LN, might take generations to accomplish.

    Well, I guess there’s enough N2 on Mars for the next 100 years of population growth, so we’ve got those generations.

    • We don’t need a lot of inert gas. A 300mbar pressure of pure oxygen will produce the same concentration in blood as 1bar air. The question is whether there is sufficient N2 for nitrogen fixation to work. Without fixed N2, there are no amino acids and no life.

      • Fair point, I was trying for a reasonably Earthlike atmosphere.

        I think you would have to use artificial nitrogen fixation, and the total biomass would limit out before you hit my 20% greenhouse coverage, but nitrogen shortage should not be an *early* colonization limit.

        You might plan on a system where incoming colonists had to bring with them a certain quota of nitrogen, to support their share of the life support.

    • Magnetic field isn’t a problem, there have been studies showing that it’s technically feasible to supply an adequate magnetic field using ground level superconducting coils.

      NASA, of course, instead studied a much smaller magnet at the L1 point, but that wouldn’t be stable, the first CME that hit it would launch it right out of the solar system.

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