Terraforming of Mars - Vaporizing Caps

Terraforming of Mars - Vaporizing Caps

The general concept is called terraforming: the changing of an alien landscape into one more suitable for human beings. In thousands of years humans have managed to perturb the global temperature of the Earth by only about one degree through greenhouse and albedo changes, although at the present rate of burning fossil fuels and destroying grasslands and forests we can now change the global temperature by another degree in only a century or two.

These and other considerations suggest that a time scale for a significant terraforming of Mars is probably hundreds to thousands of years. In a future time of greatly advanced technology we might wish not only to increase the total atmospheric pressure and make liquid water on Mars possible but also to carry liquid water from the melting polar caps to the warmer equatorial regions of the planet. There is of course a way to do it: we would built canals.

In fact, the power of Lowell’s idea may, just possibly, make it a kind of premonition. His canal network was built by Martians. Even this might be an accurate prophecy If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us.

Sphère noire. In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order (Carl Jung). Photo : © Elena

To vaporise the caps of Mars we must heat them. Perhaps we could dust them with a dark powder, heating them by absorbing more sunlight, the opposite of what we do to the Earth when we destroy grasslands and forests. But the surface area of the caps is very large. The necessary dust would require 1,200 Saturn 5 rocket boosters to be transported from Earth to Mars; even then the winds might blow the dust off the polar caps.

A better way would be to devise some dark material able to make copies of itself, a little dusky machine which we deliver to Mars and which then goes about reproducing itself from indigenous materials all over the polar caps. There is a category of such machines. We call them plants, and some are very resilient and hardy.

Terraforming: Could we in some sense make Mars inhabitable? Illustration: © Elena

We know as well than at least some terrestrial microbes can survive on Mars. What is necessary, is a program of artificial selection and genetic engineering of dark plants – perhaps lichen – that could survive the much more severe Martian environment. If such plants could be bred, we might imagine them being seeded on the vast expanse of the Martian polar ice caps, taking root, spreading, blackening the ice caps, absorbing sunlight, heating the ice, and releasing the ancient Martian atmosphere from its long captivity.

We might even imagine a kind of Martian Johnny Appleseed, robot or human, roaming the frozen polar wastes in an endeavor that benefits only the generations of humans to come.

If we terraform Mars, it will look like this. Photo : Elena