By Tommy Jang
Subheading: Scientists in the space exploration community have proposed various methods of terraforming Mars, i.e., transforming its environment to make it habitable. There have been great controversies, however, regarding the scientific aspects, especially regarding the feasibility of terraforming Mars.
One of the biggest goals of space exploration is to look for a possible new home for humans. The space community has been recently focusing on Mars, from sending rovers to making plans to send astronauts. Some scientists, with ambitions to inhabit Mars in the future, have been pondering ways to terraform the planet, making its environment similar to Earth’s.
The first challenge is heating up the planet. With an average temperature of -80°F (-60°C), Mars is clearly too cold for human beings to live in. Along with the fact that Mars is further from the sun, one of the biggest reasons behind the atmospheric properties of Mars is that the atmosphere is too thin to trap heat; in fact, the atmospheric pressure of Mars is only 0.6% of Earth’s. This fact raises another challenge: trapping the heat after heating the planet. Proponents hope that heating the planet would make the polar ice caps melt, providing tons of liquid water to create oceans on Mars.
There have been several proposed methods to solve these problems. Years ago, scientists from NASA suggested making a gigantic mirror to reflect sunlight. Whether this mirror would be launched from Earth or built from space, the mirror would only be able to heat a small portion of Mars’s surface. Another proposed option is to build factories that generate greenhouse gases. Building these factories would thicken the atmosphere and increase the temperature of Mars in the same way that global warming has been happening. The biggest challenge of this solution is the amount of time it would take. Obviously, building the factories would take a long time, whether we send the necessary materials or use on-site resources. Also, global warming is only significant in our standards– the 0.8°C (1.4°F) increase in global temperature over the past century is a very small amount compared to the Martian temperature of -60°C. One of the most recent (and most controversial) theories is to detonate nuclear bombs over Mars’s surface. Supporters of this theory claim that the heat would vaporize the frozen carbon dioxide and melt the ice caps, achieving both of the main goals while minimizing radiation harms by exploding the bombs in space. Although this method will successfully melt the ice caps, the frozen carbon is not enough to start global warming on Mars, which means that the heat will not last long.
The next goal is making the Martian air breathable. The atmosphere of Mars is 95% CO2 and less than 1% oxygen, compared to 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.04% CO2 on Earth; thus, humans can’t breathe on Mars. To achieve this goal, we would have to convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen. The first challenge comes from the statement itself– removing carbon dioxide directly contradicts the first goal, which is to initiate global warming on Mars. Putting this contradiction aside, there are a few proposed methods to achieve this goal. The first proposed method is by using photosynthesis in microorganisms. When the Earth’s atmosphere was mostly methane 2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, microscopic prokaryotes found in water, started to convert methane into oxygen by going through photosynthesis. To overcome the lack of sunlight on Mars, scientists and researchers suggested the use of special microorganisms that can undergo photosynthesis without much light. Researchers from the International Space Station experimented to find out that microorganisms survived up to 533 days in Martian conditions. If we can successfully bring microorganisms to Mars, conversion through photosynthesis would be possible after conducting further experiments and studies; however, the aforementioned paradox still exists.
There have been many disputing claims from proponents and skeptics of terraforming, all of which have been backed up by scientific evidence. While NASA states that terraforming Mars is impossible with current technology, scientists are constantly developing new technologies and coming up with new solutions to terraform Mars. The space exploration community is open to technological innovations– perhaps the next “giant leap for humanity.”
References
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