DailyDirt: Making Mars More Like Earth

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The goal of living on Mars is getting some media attention (because everyone continues to want to save Matt Damon apparently). It's seriously difficult to live on Mars unless we make some major changes to its atmosphere and climate, and somehow turn the clock back to make Mars warmer and more water-friendly. People are thinking about ways to terraform Mars, but it's an enormous project that isn't quite environmentally friendly to our alien neighbors (if they exist).

• Elon Musk made an offhand remark about terraforming Mars quickly -- using nuclear weapons. Musk has elaborated a bit, saying he's talking about exploding nuclear fusion bombs above BOTH the north and south poles of Mars -- every few seconds -- to create artificial suns that would warm up the surface of the red planet. Sure, that'd be a great way to get rid of some nuclear weapons, right? (Hold on. Does Musk have nuclear weapons?!?) [url]
• The microbial colonization of Mars is another way we might make Mars a bit more habitable for us. Terraforming an entire planet with microbes would take a while (an eon?), but the Earth itself is evidence that it can be done. The right microbes to do the job might even already exist here at home. [url]
• Lessons from Biosphere 2 might teach us a few things about how to terraform Mars -- and instead of detonating nuclear weapons over our neighboring planet, we might just want to pollute its atmosphere with perfluorocarbons to get a runaway greenhouse gas effect going. But perhaps we shouldn't be messing with other planets when we have no idea what we're doing to our own. [url]

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Filed Under: biosphere 2, colonization, elon musk, mars, microbes, nuclear weapons, space, space exploration, terraforming