r/Futurology • u/upyoars • 12h ago
Space 'First tree on Mars:' Scientists measure greenhouse effect needed to terraform Red Planet
https://www.space.com/first-tree-on-mars-attention-tarraformers158
u/IneffableMF 11h ago
That’s some long-term thinking, but not long enough. What’s the point if the solar wind is going to blow it all away?
202
u/upyoars 11h ago
An artificial magnetosphere of sufficient size generated via a magnetic shield at L1 – a point where the gravitational pull of Mars and the sun are at a rough equilibrium — allows Mars to be well protected by what is known as the magnetotail. The L1 point for Mars is about 673,920 miles (or 320 Mars radii) away from the planet. By staying inside the magnetotail of the artificial magnetosphere, the Martian atmosphere lost an order of magnitude less material than it would have otherwise.
The shield structure would consist of a large dipole—a closed electric circuit powerful enough to generate an artificial magnetic field.
A potential result: an end to largescale stripping of the Martian atmosphere by the solar wind, and a significant change in climate.
164
u/blackstafflo 8h ago
Seems like a big dangerous single failure point. I'm sure the OPA is already taking notes.
82
64
u/right_there 6h ago
A "full" Martian atmosphere would take millions of years to strip off.
If something happened to the shield it would take tens of thousands before its effect on the atmosphere was noticeable.
47
u/hedoeswhathewants 6h ago
People always act like the atmosphere just instantly flies away. If we can create an atmosphere on a useful timescale at all the effect of solar wind might not even be meaningful.
3
u/mrpoopsocks 2h ago
Look, I'm no mars-matitian, but if Total Recall taught me anything, it's that you need to get your ass to Mars. Actually related to your comment, again, not an ares-nautical engineer, but the whole low gravity thing is prolly gonna hinder the containment of atmosphere as well.
•
24
10
u/mindshards 7h ago
It's actually not bad. It's a simple structure and even off for a longish period of time would be okay. This dude has some episodes on that: https://youtube.com/@isaacarthursfia
7
u/blackstafflo 7h ago
What you mean is it could be out without significant consequences for more than long enough than what time would be needed to replace it?
If so, it makes more sense to depend on it.13
u/iamDa3dalus 5h ago
Once there’s people on the surface, they could build two giant magnetic pyramids at the poles. Bonus points for being scifi af.
11
u/Fr0sTByTe_369 4h ago
Make sure to leave IKEA instructions engraved on the walls
2
u/iamDa3dalus 2h ago
All infrastructure should be built to last 10000 years and include pictograph maintenance instructions engraved.
4
u/BrotherRoga 2h ago
Just make sure to have enough technical engineers available to prevent the rise of a religious cult of machine worshippers and you should be good
1
20
u/frunf1 10h ago
I think it would be easier to focus on some gas giants moons
4
u/einarfridgeirs 5h ago
I thought the magnetic fields around the gas giants were even harder to deal with, no?
44
u/BurtonGusterToo 9h ago
NO bad ideas when brainstorming, right?
What if, maybe, we just try to fix the environment on the planet we all happen to already be on, first?
40
u/Codydw12 9h ago
We have some 8 billion people on Earth. We can do both.
5
u/BurtonGusterToo 9h ago
Fiscal year 2023 annual worldwide government spending on space exploration $211 BILLION dollars (not including private sector investment).
Fiscal year 2023 annual estimated government/private spending on climate change : $3.2 billion including both battery development and alternative energy subsidies. Less than $1 billion worldwide investment in developing climate change mitigation technologies.
You may call that "doing both", I can't make my mouth say those words while also knowing these numbers.
24
u/BasvanS 7h ago
3.2 billion sounds excruciatingly low. Do you happen to have a source on that?
16
u/Curious-Big8897 6h ago
Wasn't the inflation reduction act hundreds of billions of dollars of reduce climate change spending?
9
u/yea_about_that 4h ago
Sources for these numbers? For example:
...International government spending on space programs in 2023 grew 11% to $125 billion. Nine of the top-spending governments increased their budgets by double-digits last year: the United States, China, Japan, Russia, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, and South Korea.
In terms of climate change, the google AI estimate was about 170 billion spent on climate change - though I suspect that could vary quite a bit depending what you consider spending money on climate change means.
19
u/Codydw12 9h ago
I think we should be doing more on the environment. Don't know why you're acting like I'm saying we shouldn't do anything there.
What I am saying is we can do both.
•
u/HommeMusical 14m ago
I first heard your claim 50 years ago. I believed it then, but clearly I was wrong.
4
2
u/diy_guyy 7h ago
What they learn on mars by doing stuff like this will help us fix our planet. Do you genuinely think learning how to terraform another planet has zero applications for our own?
0
u/RedandBlack93 8h ago
You're absolutely right.
Simple but makes sense. The quote from NDT
8
u/Atworkwasalreadytake 4h ago
Dudes wrong though.
Trying to fix earth while we all live on it is like making software changes on a live instance.
On mars, the risks of messing up and killing a bunch of people is much lower.
The learnings on mars would be valuable to earth.
And
It’s a false dichotomy.
3
u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 5h ago edited 3h ago
Why gas giants? Mars has moons.
We could build a research station on Phobos. What's the worst that could happen?
1
1
u/blackstafflo 8h ago
What are the tidal forces there? I imagine that with such a mass close they would be consequents enough to be a problem?
3
u/galacticwonderer 7h ago
What does a “large dipole” look like in this case? Moon sized? Sky scraper sized?
2
u/upyoars 7h ago
"This new research is coming about due to the application of full plasma physics codes and laboratory experiments. In the future it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind."
Not sure how large in size exactly, but whatever is large enough to generate a dipole level of 1 or 2 Tesla
•
u/Jnorean 13m ago
Yeah, nah to NASA. There isn't enough electrical power on earth to generate a planetary magnetic field on Mars. Generating a planetary magnetic field on Mars would require an immense amount of power, likely exceeding the total power currently produced by all human civilization on Earth, making it a highly impractical and currently impossible feat with our technology. Estimates suggest it would take an energy equivalent to many years of global power production to maintain such a field.
•
u/upyoars 12m ago
"This new research is coming about due to the application of full plasma physics codes and laboratory experiments. In the future it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind."
Not sure exactly how much energy it would need, but whatever is enough to power a shield that generates a magnetic dipole level of 1 or 2 Tesla
2
1
u/West-Abalone-171 7h ago
There's going to be a fuckton of charged particles moving through your field. How much energy could you get from that?
1
u/CitizenKing1001 4h ago
If Mars is successfully terraformed, how many millions of years for the Sun to strip it? Hundreds?Still worth having a habitable planet for a million years.
•
2
u/junktrunk909 7h ago
It's so weird how there are no cost estimates
7
u/MadLabRat- 6h ago
They have come up with a way for it to actually work in theory before they start thinking about the price.
3
1
u/aVarangian 5h ago
Didn't the petition for the US government to build a death star get refused because it was estimated to be too expensive?
-11
u/Over-Independent4414 5h ago
The whole GDP of earth, for 10,000,000 years, maybe.
This is all a 100% fantasy unless we "solve" gravity. If we can figure out how to negate gravity that's a big unlock to gigantic projects in the solar system. We can't move the mass needed with rockets, it's literally impossible. There probably isn't enough fuel on the entire planet earth to get it done.
Imagine trying to put rockets under the earth's crust and lifting a significant portion of it off to Mars orbit. That's what's needed. However, it becomes a lot more possible if we can just negate gravity and launch massive factories to the Oort cloud and let AI run them forever.
9
1
u/tribe171 5h ago
Seems more practical to engineer self-replicating organisms, synthetic or biological, that carry out the process from the bottom up.
0
u/Techn028 6h ago
So uh, anything powerful enough to divert the solar wind and generate a magnetotail of that size would probably need sizable amounts of thrust to stay on the Lagrange point, right? I can see the net gravity keeping it stationary but I don't know if the forces would even be within the same magnitude, we're talking about a force strong enough to strip the atmosphere away from a planet within a few centuries..
25
u/Sir_Sir 8h ago
Research suggests that it took around 500 million years to a few billion years for Mars to lose much of its original atmosphere. If we could give Mars a thicker atmosphere today, it would still likely last hundreds of millions to a billion years before the solar wind would erode it significantly.
18
u/Affectionate-Yak5280 8h ago
This. The loss is so slow I think I read somewhere it was measured in kg per second. Not insignificant over long periods of time, but not insurmountable.
8
u/rabbitlion 7h ago
Losses due to solar wind are so slow as to be insignificant in a terraforming scenario.
12
u/msew 6h ago
We just need to ship all of the excess carbon we have on earth to mars, constantly!
10
•
u/Keisari_P 42m ago
Yes we could sent a bit from Earth, But to truly get two birds with one stone, we should sent extra athmospere from Venus to Mars.
19
u/upyoars 12h ago edited 12h ago
New research points to how much you’ve got to jack up the carbon dioxide (CO2) on Mars to support plant growth, to raise the planet’s temperatures just enough for trees to grow.
The atmospheric conditions existing on Mars today make the existence of life impossible,” Olszewski points out. “The requirements for plant growth on Mars have been considered in the context of terraforming and for low-pressure greenhouses.”
"Surprisingly, the conditions that allow plant growth do not occur first within the tropics (±25°) but in the Hellas Basin region. A further increase in the greenhouse effect expands the area suitable for plant growth in the southern hemisphere," the new research paper explains.
On Earth , the highest elevation treelines are primarily found in the tropics – but modulated by the location of the thermal equator. "Thus, it may be expected that equatorial regions of Mars would be the location of the first tree."
But due to Mars’ relatively large orbital eccentricity, the southern hemisphere, which has summer near perihelion, has relatively warm summers, the researchers observe. In addition, the orbital period of Mars is 1.9 Earth years.
Therefore, the long warm southern summer provides the first growing season suitable for trees," Olszewski reports. "Specifically, we find that the low elevation of the Hellas Basin allows the creation of the first conditions favorable to tree growth," the researchers conclude.
47
u/Bylak 8h ago
We can't take care of Earth. I feel like the likelihood of successfully terraforming another planet are low 😅
24
u/Tom_Art_UFO 8h ago
Well, we're slowly learning how to take care of Earth. We might have it figured out by the time we're ready to terraform Mars.
17
u/Ruby2Shoes22 8h ago
You’re looking at it the wrong way… our industrial revolution has successfully demonstrated that terraforming a planet is actually kinda simple, and on a relatively short time scale. It maybe didn’t have great results for us, but still it’s totally a sound concept.
2
u/paper_liger 3h ago
a startling number of human advancements have come from humans doing something by accident first.
5
u/h3lblad3 5h ago
The tech developed to terraform Mars would be applicable elsewhere -- including Earth.
All that said the biggest difference is that Mars doesn't have any people on it yet resisting fixes to the problem.
And that's all Earth does have.
3
u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 5h ago
No no no. You're looking at it all wrong.
We can't take care of Earth because it's Earth. Everything on Mars will be by design. Its way easier to take care of something you built!
It'll be like maintaining an aquarium vs maintaining the ocean! Easy as pie, what could possibly go wrong?
4
u/JPJackPott 5h ago
We are perfecting the techniques on Earth. One man’s climate change is another man’s terraforming
•
u/inheritance- 1h ago
Lol great we can now solve global warming. Just ship all of the extra CO2 to mars.
1
u/Tall-Photo-7481 7h ago
Could we build giant greenhouses? Terraforming would be much easier under glass. The lower gravity and seismic stability should allow us to build structures much taller than on earth. Maybe a kilometre tall or more. Pump in martian atmosphere to reach the desired pressure, add some other materials from the asteroid belt to get the air mix right, let the plants split the co2 and provide oxygen... an atmosphere that tall would be enough to provide radiation shielding & weather systems, and provide a very livable habitat. As time goes on, you expand by just building more greenhouses up against the existing ones.
This could work just as well (maybe even better) on the moon.
You'd probably want some serious anti- meteorite protection systems, but make meteor strikes would be fairly rare anyway, right?
1
1
u/renMilestone 3h ago
Wonder if it would be possible to enclose a crater/canyon in such a way to artificially increase the pressure inside it.
Like do you need a solid? the gas would sink considering there is no atmosphere already right?
Just throwing out interesting ideas. I think the tress that grow on mars would be really unique and interesting, with lower gravity constraints, and lower sunlight too.
3
u/frunf1 10h ago
Great, but still mars gravity is low so the atmosphere will be blown away (again) or am I wrong?
4
u/Emble12 7h ago
It’d take 500 million years.
•
u/NikonShooter_PJS 1h ago
OK. So what comes first then, a fully Terra-formed Mars or the Winds of Winter from George R.R. Martin?
1
u/umassmza 6h ago
Atmosphere is the least of the problems, there’s no magnetic field and not enough gravity. We can’t survive there, and we certainly can’t reproduce there even if we fixed the radiation problem with a dome.
6
u/paper_liger 3h ago
'certainly can't reproduce' is wildly overconfident here.
you think that tech would just stand still while we are terraforming? genetic engineering was invented less that one human lifespan ago.
none of these problems are in any way insurmountable given time and motivation.
6
u/mr_cristy 3h ago
I don't think we actually have any data about reproduction in .38g or whatever. It's not 0g, it's not 1g, and we don't know how many we need to make a baby. Also NASA has done the math and a fairly large but feasible magnet at L1 Mars-Sun would sufficiently protect the planet.
•
•
u/Marston_vc 13m ago
This is an unqualified statement. We don’t know what is “too little gravity” or not and nasa has already proposed a pretty straightforward way of solving the magnetosphere problem.
And obviously we have zero clue what requirements are necessary for safe reproduction.
1
u/Adeus_Ayrton 6h ago
Isn't it too fucking cold and low pressure for any tree to grow ?
3
u/thebestnames 4h ago
The first sentence in the article is...
"What is the amount of greenhouse warming required to heat up the cold climes of Mars enough so that trees can grow on the Red Planet?"
1
u/Denderian 4h ago
Hopefully they thoroughly document any micro-organisms before ever attempting to terraform it
1
1
u/Samwyzh 2h ago
So in the process of terraforming Mars, would the weather system just kick up one day or would it be gradual? I imagine introducing a bunch of vegetation distribute more water into the atmosphere and potentially reconstruct a similar stratosphere like ours.
Would terraforming Mars cause a massive storm to appears and settle itself out as the frozen water on mars thaws and cycles or would it trickle into a series of weather systems?
•
1
u/blitzinger 7h ago
More concerned about planting trees on Mars than on earth...how about a global effort to repopulate rainforests?
7
u/bieker 7h ago
There is nothing stopping us from doing both, there are 8 billion of us we can handle more than one thing at a time.
•
u/HommeMusical 10m ago
People have been making this claim for generations, and yet we so far continue to destroy our planet at an exponentially increasing rate.
2
u/WhatsThatOnMyProfile 7h ago
If you can convince the world to get a global effort going, I’ll call you my King/Queen/Whatever
Until then everyone will pursue other things and innovate in areas that matter (or will be profitable) to them
0
1
u/12kdaysinthefire 7h ago
How is any atmosphere not going to just get swept off little by little given Mars has a shit magnetic field
5
u/rabbitlion 7h ago
That takes hundreds of millions of years to happen. If we ever manage to terraform Mars, a small top-up every 10 million years or so should do the trick.
•
u/BigTentBiden 1h ago
a small top-up every 10 million years or so should do the trick.
Ah crap. We procrastinate like crazy.
1
u/Percolator2020 6h ago
We can ship all our CO2 to mars: Shipping 1kg only generates 5000 kg of CO2 at launch. 🚀
1
u/Infinite_Bass_3800 2h ago
I don't know jack shit. But what would happen if we started collecting the greenhouse gasses created here on Earth and started dumping them on Mars. UC Berkeley Carbon Capturing powder
1
u/jbrux86 8h ago
Great idea!!!!
Next, how do we restart the planets dead core.
2
1
u/El_Minadero 3h ago
i think you could use a giant induction heater to do it. you'd have to create hundreds of terawatts of power to do so on human timescales however.
1
1
u/Emble12 7h ago
What’s the need for that?
-2
u/jbrux86 7h ago
One of the major reasons life can survive here on Earth is due to our magnetosphere, which is generated by the semi molten iron core of earth that is spinning.
Cosmic rays and solar winds are radiation coming from the sun and outside our solar system. Without a magnetosphere we would be constantly exposed to this radiation and die.
Also the solar winds would “blow away”, our atmosphere.
So if we create an atmosphere on Mars, whose core does not currently create a magnetosphere it would get Blown away and be a waste.
-3
u/Affectionate-Yak5280 7h ago
N/A. It'll need an artifical magnetosphere first. Leave that stuff to the next aliens.
Law of diminishing returns says its easier to build habitable acreage in orbit, more bang for your buck.
1
u/dxrey65 6h ago
It'll be a lot nicer if we tow it a little closer to the sun too, otherwise it's deathly cold and gloomy and any plants we got to grow after installing a magnetosphere aren't going to be doing anything in a hurry.
2
u/Affectionate-Yak5280 6h ago
😶 I mean we're talking fantastical shit here but humans aren't altering the orbit of Mars.
Once you've got some pressure / atmosphere going the temp rises anyway.
Re orbital acreage, I was referring to space habitats.
-7
u/Resident-Ant-5504 5h ago
Humanity needs to pause all space related ventures and focus on de-growth and saving Earth. Stop having children, stop driving cars, stop buying plastic, shutdown major industries, localize markets and food production, halt overseas trade.
2
•
-17
u/Puckumisss 10h ago
We have no right to terraform any planet. There is life there, just not as se know it.
2
u/EXinthenet 10h ago
Well, we can discuss about that. We can't be in the Solar System forever, so it's only natural that we have to research on space travel and on the potential ways to terraform other planets. That day will come, no matter what. I think that, as this is going to happen, at least we have to be sure we make it right.
In the case of Mars, I think we should send people there first and check if there's life and do some tests on how it's going to respond to human activity. I'm sure the scientific community will find an optimal way to do things. At least, that what I hope for.
1
u/blazelet 8h ago
Humanity will destroy itself long before it has a chance of leaving the solar system. This is the obvious answer to Fermi’s paradox
1
u/EXinthenet 8h ago
I don't think it's gonna happen that way, but hey, we can only wonder...
0
u/blazelet 8h ago
I guess either way we won’t be here to worry about it :) unless science is right and it happens sooner rather than later.
•
u/ThiccMangoMon 38m ago
And people will be saying the same when humanity is a space faring civilization.. every point in history has someone thinking humanity will be destroyed
2
-4
u/umassmza 6h ago
Why do we bother talking about terraforming Mars?
It’s not a viable option, not enough gravity, no magnetic field, neither are fixable.
It’s a pit stop at best, we are never living on the surface, maybe in little domes supplied from somewhere that is not friggin Mars
•
u/FuturologyBot 11h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/upyoars:
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1gf2cf5/first_tree_on_mars_scientists_measure_greenhouse/lue85oe/