People to become Martians this century?
Date: Thursday, June 28th, 2007 (CST )
Topic: Cosmology & Astronomy
 Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary facelift of Mars — a technique called "terraforming" — has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time visiting rellow of the Hoover Institution.
Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at flight school, held here June 20 to June 22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on."
Humans: a terraforming species
"I suggest that the
near-term outlook is that Mars will be terraformed," Wood said, and
seriously underway by the middle of this century and essentially
complete by the end of the 21st century.
Wood defined terraforming
as "the purposeful alteration of the physical environment to increase
its habitability for humans." He noted that we homo sapiens are a
terraforming species, pointing to our own planet's alteration over time.
"We're currently in the
tenth millennium of the terraforming era," Wood said. Similarly, Mars
will be terraformed...as will every other piece of the solar system
that we can get to...if-and-as humanity becomes truly space-faring, he
explained.
"The terraforming impulse
in humankind will be quenched only by massive adverse selective
pressure," Wood reported. Terraforming nay-sayers seem to ignore the
fundamentals of population genetics, sociobiology and human history, he
argued.
Mars is far easier to
terraform than the moon, Wood advised. "It's kids' stuff as far as
rendering it (Mars) into something that's human habitable quickly and
easily. The moon is a good bit tougher."
Thermal depression
Wood said that Mars
currently is "stuck" in a semi-permanent "thermal depression." But
there is a multiplicity of design solutions, he foresees, such as
engineering an artificial greenhouse effect at the planet that warms
the world and makes it "a more preferred planet."
Overall, Wood said that a
workable plan can be scripted to raise the average temperature of Mars,
rid the world of excess carbon dioxide, as well as generate soil to
support agriculture.
After roughly one to three
decades of such warming, Wood continued, the "Great Spring" literally
erupts all over Mars. It's all a matter of trimming-and-tailoring a
thawed Mars to the "biospheric optimum," he concluded.
Responded Esther Dyson,
Chairman of EDventure and host of the Flight School: "This is not a
project that would fit the time horizon of any venture capitalist."
But Wood said that the effort is doable, but with a caveat.
"I believe it's roughly a
50-50 chance that young children now alive will walk on martian
meadows...will swim in martian lakes," Wood said. It is not technology,
nor money, he said, the pacing ingredient is marshaled will.
Copyright: MSNBC
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