DARPA Study on how to Terraform Mars

Throughout history, resources become more commercially viable as the technology to extract, process and transport them make costs lower. Development of rail was a prime factor for the Industrial Age. Exploitation of intraplanetary resources is just not possible with todays's space technology. Far too weak and slow. Colonization is very difficult because you need a fast, reliable method to get supplies to those fully dependent facilities.

A form of terraforming Mars is exploitation of local water and gases frozen or trapped in the ground. If enough can be extracted, you could have agriculture areas. Domes could be a good choice for access to free solar energy. Your next problem in terraforming , however, is soil. Mars doesn't have nutrients meaning a LOT of that needs to be transported, very costly. Even aquaculture will need imports. The soil may also contain toxins such as heavy metals.

With all that, Mars' first outpost/colony mission could research into developing local food.
 
There are 40 microorganisms that thrive on perchlorates and produce oxygen as a waste gas. Clean the soil and make a component of breathable air.
 
Reynard said:
There are 40 microorganisms that thrive on perchlorates and produce oxygen as a waste gas. Clean the soil and make a component of breathable air.

All the soil on an entire planet? It should be possible to process batches of soil for sealed agricultural units, just about an order of magnitude more costly to do so than previously thought which by itself would make many of the currently conceived colonization efforts non-viable, but it pretty much kills open-environment terraforming stone dead.

This is why Kim Stanley Robinson and Elon Musk have said that if the perchlorate findings are confirmed they now don't see any realistic possibility of terraforming Mars.

Simon Hibbs
 
So for now perhaps the best use is to find a way to anchor a permanent space station in orbit of either Mars or one of its moons if not inside (barring Doom's premise) and establish a routine flight to and from that station replenishing supplies and research until its possible for a team to remain on station during those regular flights perhaps even station a means to return should it become unviable.

I guess treating it the same as they did for the Moon barring they don't seem to be in a contest with another nation to get there first...

Well maybe the Pluto expedition might reinvigorate interest in space, although if NASA really cut off a transmission of a suspected UFO sighting on a live feed I guess it won't be too informative...
 
Hopeless said:
So for now perhaps the best use is to find a way to anchor a permanent space station in orbit of either Mars or one of its moons if not inside (barring Doom's premise) and establish a routine flight to and from that station replenishing supplies and research until its possible for a team to remain on station during those regular flights perhaps even station a means to return should it become unviable.

What we really need are re-useable rockets. If SpaceX can crack that problem, all of a sudden a lot of projects that are borderline viable now become very affordable and achievable.

Well maybe the Pluto expedition might reinvigorate interest in space, although if NASA really cut off a transmission of a suspected UFO sighting on a live feed I guess it won't be too informative...

Personaly I find Ceres more interesting, and Rosetta was a revelation, but it's quite possible Pluto will surprise us.

Simon Hibbs
 
If an organic removal of perchlorates is too big an operation, there's the chemical procedure. Perchlorates aren't difficult to remove. I didn't mean an entire planet but in sections that will be immediately used. Expand as needed. Nobody is dropping a Total Recall city there.
 
Give up already! The juice isn't worth the squeeze!

Mars will not support mass human colonisation. The cost at present of shipping everything needed to support people is just too high. We might get a science station there but robots are a better way of exploring for the next X years.
 
Reynard said:
If an organic removal of perchlorates is too big an operation, there's the chemical procedure. Perchlorates aren't difficult to remove. I didn't mean an entire planet but in sections that will be immediately used. Expand as needed. Nobody is dropping a Total Recall city there.

If you don't use sealed environments the dust storms will regularly sprinkle your crops with poison dust. Perchlorates are easily soluble and circulate freely in groundwater so unless you dig down and thoroughly detoxify the soil stock right down to bedrock, across the entire local aquifer, it will always seep into your groundwater base.

Simon Hibbs
 
Didn't realize anyone assumed I meant surface agriculture. With everything we've been discussing this is a sealed environment operation. Area is cleared, soil is cleaned with byproducts used elsewhere. Protective structures established and what soil is needed is placed. Agriculture and botanical soil is treated with nutrients, bacteria and maybe earthworms. Soil surrounding the facility might be processed for a safety zone depending on weather conditions such as sand storm frequency or likelihood. Life will be the domes allowing access to the planet surface.

De[ending on need, colonies would expand outward and down like road and neighborhoods in a city.
 
If transport costs are cheap enough, you could turn Mars into the workshop of the solar system, since habitats are under sealed domes, it doesn't matter what you pump into the atmosphere, which will apparently disperse into stardust anyway.
 
simonh said:
They are not infinite, but they are recyclable. Hydrocarbons expended on earth do not dissappear, they are simply transformed into waste products. Oil, gas and coal burned here are turned into gasses in the atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide. Sugar cane absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turns it into sugars, which are very cheaply convertible into ethanol, and from there into more complex long chain molecules. Unless we actualy blast them off into space, all the resources we use here on earth are actualy still here, and it's just a matter of economics before it becomes viable to recycle them.

You are actually cycling them, as agro-products still use Hc's for production and processing. Agro is a dead end, as it's finite as well. Getting things into useable shape again runs back into the negative sum energy cycle.

The idea that somehow we can make up the difference here, and not somewhere else, while that lifting and transportation there but not here, would not be affordable, is contradictory.

I'm not sure what that means.

If getting resources to your largest market isn't viable, it won't be viable anywhere.

As well as nowhere else, foreseeably would have the usage volume of the Earth. Manufacture of chemicals, even as simple as electrolysis, generally cost more in energy than the energy return. Why do the work when nature has already done it.
Fair point, making things costs more energy than consuming them. That's basic thermodynamics. The question is though, would it cost more to make hydrocarbons on earth than to transport them from Titan. We have vast quantities of hydrocarbons and their constituent elemnts on earth, far more than we are ever likely to need if we recycle them, and I find it hard to believe that recycling a ton of hydrocarbon raw materials (mainly, growing sugar cane or other biologicals), a process that costs cents per kilogram even today, will ever cost more in terms of energy and resources than transporting a ton of them from the outer solar system. The only way that would be viable is if we actually ran short of carbon and hydrogen. The form those elements are in is just a detail at this sort of level of analysis.

It's not just a detail, it's a plan for tomorrow's tomorrow. You are figuring recycling as lossless system which it is not. Agriculture is a dead end in that we already use it for food, and that the we use Hc's in production, and that the prime agricultural space is in competition for urban space. There are front loaded development costs, but I think you are over estimating how much it would cost to throw a balloon filled with Hc's around the solar system would be, as well as underestimating the costs of agriculture. Just that elements exist, doesn't mean they are in useable form, nor that they will ever be economically accessible. We practice artificial scarcity now, for economic reasons, but that is not how it will be in the future. As we, or if we; expand into the solar system, as well as the Earth's rate of consumption increases (which it will), the development of other resources is key to success. Barring some collapse, it will be done, it is just a question of who.
 
dragoner said:
You are actually cycling them, as agro-products still use Hc's for production and processing. Agro is a dead end, as it's finite as well. Getting things into useable shape again runs back into the negative sum energy cycle.

Earth's ecosystem has managed reasonably well on in-situ resources, modulo large quantities of solar energy, for the last few billion years. Or at least it was until we came along.

If getting resources to your largest market isn't viable, it won't be viable anywhere.

Even if your largest market is far away, and also utterly saturated in vast quantities of your product, while the smaller markets are nearer and lack it completely?

It's not just a detail, it's a plan for tomorrow's tomorrow. You are figuring recycling as lossless system which it is not. Agriculture is a dead end in that we already use it for food, and that the we use Hc's in production, and that the prime agricultural space is in competition for urban space.

If that is true, all mining Titan does is buy us time. As soon as we've exhausted it's resources, and the few other sources in the solar system, we'll have nothing left to consume and will die of resource starvation. I don't think it has to be this way. As I said above, the Earth has managed fine for billions of years and I don't see why we can't as well.

Simon Hibbs
 
Reynard said:
Didn't realize anyone assumed I meant surface agriculture. With everything we've been discussing this is a sealed environment operation. Area is cleared, soil is cleaned with byproducts used elsewhere. Protective structures established and what soil is needed is placed. Agriculture and botanical soil is treated with nutrients, bacteria and maybe earthworms. Soil surrounding the facility might be processed for a safety zone depending on weather conditions such as sand storm frequency or likelihood. Life will be the domes allowing access to the planet surface.

De[ending on need, colonies would expand outward and down like road and neighborhoods in a city.
If Mars has silicates and metals that can be accessed, then most of what is needed is already there in raw form - robot factories could be dropped on Mars to process raw materials into useable products which then could be assembled into structures.
 
simonh said:
Or at least it was until we came along.

Without us, the whole convo is pointless.

Even if your largest market is far away, and also utterly saturated in vast quantities of your product, while the smaller markets are nearer and lack it completely?

The simplest answer is: yes. The volume in an economy of scale outweighs developing new markets in this case.

If that is true, all mining Titan does is buy us time.

It's all anything ever does, time until the next time then you figure something else out. Ultimately we go extinct, but there is, or can be if we don't screw up, a big chunk of time before that event.
 
Reynard said:
Didn't realize anyone assumed I meant surface agriculture. With everything we've been discussing this is a sealed environment operation. Area is cleared, soil is cleaned with byproducts used elsewhere. Protective structures established and what soil is needed is placed. Agriculture and botanical soil is treated with nutrients, bacteria and maybe earthworms. Soil surrounding the facility might be processed for a safety zone depending on weather conditions such as sand storm frequency or likelihood. Life will be the domes allowing access to the planet surface.

De[ending on need, colonies would expand outward and down like road and neighborhoods in a city.

Exactly. The hope was that Mars might be terraformed though. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red->Green->Blue Mars series the first phases of settlement are in sealed habitats, but ultimately the planet is terraformed to support life on the exposed surface and eventually human life. Each stage of development would need to be economically sustainable while laying the groundwork for the next phase.

That doesn't appear to be an option now. The current perchlorate content is the result of billions of years of chemical action across the planet's surface, plus continuous churning of the pedolith (new word for me, but apparently that's the name for a planet's soil layer in the broadest sense, from surface to rock layer) over the same timescale. This process is still continuing, it's just run out of the chlorides that feed it. By converting the perchlorate to chlorides we'd just be providing the process with it's feedstock. To eliminate the perchlorate, we would have to process it at a rate significantly faster than the rate at which it is generated, at planetary scale and for geological timescales.

Simon Hibbs
 
I think we would ultimately use nanotechnology and not sustain any effort over geologic time scales, because technology would advance too fast to justify sticking with any single method. My feeling is that Mars would be terraformed within a century of the first human settlments. So if the first human settlements are in 2030, then we would be able to walk on its surface and breathe unaided in 2130, of course it won't be humans doing the terraformong, and it won't be done with neat little tricks such as producing super-greenhouse gases but with massive engineering and brute force. Venus would then be tackled shortly thereafter for more brute force terraforming using nanotechnology, the process directed by minds superior to humans. At about the time the teraforming projects are completed, the first colonists would be arriving at extra solar planets orbiting Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti, to begin terraforming those with brute force methods involving nanotechnology.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
I think we would ultimately use nanotechnology and not sustain any effort over geologic time scales, because technology would advance too fast to justify sticking with any single method. My feeling is that Mars would be terraformed within a century of the first human settlments...

I would expect nothing less of you, ever the technological optimist. Maybe we should practice by turning the Sahara desert into a golf course. That should be easy, it's 14 times smaller than Mars ;)

Simon Hibbs
 
simonh said:
Tom Kalbfus said:
I think we would ultimately use nanotechnology and not sustain any effort over geologic time scales, because technology would advance too fast to justify sticking with any single method. My feeling is that Mars would be terraformed within a century of the first human settlments...

I would expect nothing less of you, ever the technological optimist. Maybe we should practice by turning the Sahara desert into a golf course. That should be easy, it's 14 times smaller than Mars ;)

Simon Hibbs
Parts of it already have been turned into golf courses, with oil money, the Saudis have a few.
 
Turn off the oil money and you could almost watch the golf courses turn back to sand.

One important aspect to terraforming is sustained terraforming. It can't be a high maintenance project but rather exist on its own once the systems are in place. Doesn't help if a new Earth standard Martian atmosphere bleeds off relatively quickly or the treated soil decontaminates from the lands beyond.
 
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