Post by RonOPost by William HydePost by RonOPost by RonOhttps://www.cnn.com/2024/08/12/science/mars-crust-water-reservoir-
insight/index.html
If this is true could we colonize Mars? The article claims that
evidence is that deep in the martian crust water saturates cracks
and crevices. A whole lot of water. Mars lost it's atmosphere, but
apparently since there is no plate tectonics on Mars and the entire
crust is just shrinking and cracking as it cools, a layer of cracked
up crust exists 11 to 20 km below the surface that contains liquid water.
Since the mantle is still molten wouldn't you expect geothermal
geysers to reach the surface as this water came into contact with
the hot sections of the crust and mantle as crust continues to
shrink and crack up? Would you need active volcanos on the surface
to have geothermal geysers?
We have found living bacteria that apparently only replicate
infrequently in water staturated deep rocks on earth, so would life
be expected to have survived if it ever existed on Mars?
If the water exists we might make it available to colonists by
crashing an asteroid or a piece of one of Mars' moons into the
surface of the planet. My guess is that would generate volcanic
activity and some of the water would be forced back into the
atmosphere or at least to the surface. The Chicxulub impact was for
a 6.6 km diameter asteroid and fractured the Earth's crust down to
20 km.
Ron Okimoto
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240812160244.htm
Science Daily has an article on the proposed Mars water, but they
claim that it is too deep to tap into. My suggestion of crashing an
asteroid or piece of one of the moons could initiate vulcanic
activity and bring the water to the surface.
Decades ago I was sent a short paper by the British Interplanetary
Society which proposed various ways of making mars eventually habitable.
One that I recall was the setting off of ten thousand ten-megaton
bombs in the regolith.
I ran a short climate simulation on the effect of the estimated
resulting atmosphere but, alas, it did not contain enough greenhouse
gases to keep the surface above freezing.
In fact, if CO2 is the main greenhouse gas, the amount require to make
Mars habitable also makes it uninhabitable. Nor can any such
atmosphere hold enough H2O to matter. Vast amounts of some neutral,
stable, GHG are required. ArNe2 would be perfect, if only it existed.
CFCs possibly, though they do eventually break down.
The goal would not be to create an atmosphere, just make the available
water more accessible to anyone that would want to colonize the planet.
People might live on the surface for a while, but my guess is that the
largest habitats would eventually be constructed underground. It would
be like living in a space habitat, but you have all the raw materials
you need. We are talking about settlers that really want to leave earth
behind, and be independent. They probably will not have any support
from any major earth political entities because Mars has nothing that we
want except space to live away from earth. There isn't anything worth
trading over that distance unless the Martians invented new technologies
that Earth would be interested in.
The population bomb never went off. The dooms day prophecies have kept
declining over the last half century, and there may only be around 9
billion people around by 2050, and some projections are predicting that
the population may start to decline around that time. As the standard
of living increases people have fewer children. China wants to start a
program to get their citizens to have more kids because their work force
will be declining in numbers. Japan and Europe are having trouble
maintaining their workforce population. Pretty soon the only people
that will want to colonize Mars would want to do it for political or
religious reasons. Right now Mars has nothing that anyone wants. The
low UN population estimates have our population lower than it is now by
2100. We aren't worried about running out of oil, we are more worried
about burning too much of it.
This could be an answer to the Fermi paradox. Civilizations either
destroy themselves or become self contained, and can happily live in
their own system. There is no driving need to travel to other stars
when it would take so long, and promises so little.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2024/04/the-world-of-population-
projections/
These days Mars colonization seems to be of interest mostly to those who
deal with unpleasant problems by imagining different but more exciting
problems. You know, the dingdongs who think Bitcoin is the solution to
widespread poverty and high-tech agricultural drones are the solution to
widespread hunger.
Admittedly, "Let's move to Mars!" is a more romantic challenge than
finding a way to live sustainably on our own planet, but it's not really
an answer. It's a much thornier problem than just "Build a big enough
rocket, load 500 people inside, head for Mars." We'd need far more
research and development to create sustainable human habitation on Mars
than we would here on Earth. (Assuming we can at all. Whether humanity
can survive indefinitely in one-third Earth gravity is an open question.)
Unless, of course, you think the richest 1% of 1% of 1% of the
population leaving the rest of us to perish is a feature and not a bug.
No wonder the technofascists are so hot for Mars colonization — they
expect the rest of us to drown in their waste so they can have their
nerdbro oligarchic ethnostate in space.
I'm still a space exploration enthusiast. We can learn a lot Up There...
but for the foreseeable future, we also need to survive Down Here.
--
[The address listed is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.]
Kestrel Clayton
I used to have a Kipling quote here,
but I'm not so fond of him any more.