RickLewis wrote:
This thread was originally about whether it would be right or wrong to terraform Mars. However, if that was literally impossible then discussing whether it was right or not to do it would be purely academic - so this is a relevant question.
From a purely academic perspective, the specific subject doesn't matter, be it Mars, the Moon, or New Jersey. Were it within out capabilities, it might be argued more fiercely. But even now, you could say that we are "terraforming" Mars by having strewn landers and other junk around and driven rovers across the surface digging holes and scuffing up rocks. So we have already modified the natural environment permanently.
But back off topic:
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I'm sure it's true that Mars' lower gravity and the solar wind would make it hard for it to hold onto an Earthlike atmosphere.
Not hard. Physically impossible.
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However, the big question is if Mars was given an Earthlike atmosphere, how long would it take to leak away into space again? If the answer is a million years, or even a hundred thousand years - blinks of the eye in geological time - then terraforming it might still make sense. We simply don't operate on those timescales,
The problem is that with our current technologies (or any chemical, non-catastrophic means), it would take us thousands of years to convert the atmosphere. So we would be on a fools errand of trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
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1) It has enough atmosphere to generate fierce dust storms which actually make it a more hostile environment than it would otherwise be.
Hehe, those "fierce dust storms" would feel like a mild breeze on Earth. They are extremely subtle and only kick up dust because of Mars' weak gravity.
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2) The current, thin Martian atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, whereas in the Earth's atmosphere only a fraction of a percent is carbon dioxide. This means that Mars actually has a greater pressure of carbon dioxide at its surface than the Earth. I'm not totally sure of the significance of that, if any, but thought I'd mention it![/quote]
Not much. One of the reasons Mars has even as much atmosphere as it does is that its mostly thick heavy CO2. If you try to split that into free O2 and find N2 somewhere to try to build a breathable atmosphere, it will leak out all the more faster.
I really hate to keep raining on the parade, but people really have been given some false assumptions by sci-fi books and movies, a few books by people with pretenses, and even NASA to degree, that really downplays just how dead Mars really is.