Everything is often reduced to a moment or an event. The moment at which everything turned to a different destination, the drop that filled the glass. That is precisely what happens with the possible Terraft of Mars. Here It is not about temperature, water availability or radiation intensity, everything could be reduced to Martian pressure.
The terraft of our neighbor (turning the planet into a habitable site for the human species) has been one of the most persecuted dreams by scientists, writers and lovers of science and fiction. But when you start Understanding real physics of what would be necessary to achieve it, the effort seems increasingly unattainable.
Unless we take ants and assume steps that It will be a matter of time (a long time) and not to create a nursery and plant potatoes. That is the conclusion of A study presented at the 56th Conference of Lunar and Planetary Sciences by Leszek Czechowski. And the key is in the planet’s pressure.
On Mars, water boils at temperatures much lower than on Earth due to significantly lower atmospheric pressure. The average surface pressure in Mars is only 0.6 % of the land, which causes water to boil at temperatures between 0 and 10 degrees Celsius.
The study analyzes what What would be needed in gas terms so that Mars reaches an “acceptable” pressure level. The authors point out that the water within the body of a person would begin to boil immediately to the current pressure of Mars, which means that all the inhabitants of the planet would have to use a pressurized suit.
However, certain places on the planet are closer to reaching the pressure level, estimated in approximately one tenth of the terrestrial atmospheric pressure, where the water would only boil at 50 ° C, slightly above the typical body temperature. It is not much better, but at least it is a possible almost, almost habitable place.
The closest to that pressure currently on Mars is in Hellas planthe “low land”, Martian, where the average pressure is approximately one hundredth of the sea level on earthand only a tenth of the necessary to ensure that a person does not die immediately by boiling if his skin comes into contact with the atmosphere.
While the study mentions other scenarios, such as raising the average atmospheric pressure of the planet at sea level on earth, The total amount of atmosphere that would be necessary to transport is a greater order of magnitudewhich is already extremely expensive in terms of the energy required to achieve that increase.
Where would we get all this material for the atmosphere? The studio response is Kuiper’s belt. The idea is to use the main belt asteroids, which has the advantage of being relatively close to Mars. These objects would be the most appropriate, since they contain a lot of water and, in theory, they could be transported to Mars in the period of decades.
The final conclusion of the Czechowski team is simple: at least in theory, We can obtain enough material to drastically increase the atmospheric pressure of Mars to a tolerable point for humans, or at least to a point where they do not die immediately when exposing themselves to it.
However, for this, it would be necessary to crack against him a considerable ice cream body of the Kuiper belt. For this, engineers would have to design a propulsion system that does not depend on gravity to direct the ice cream.
Given the necessary technological requirements to achieve that vision, it seems that we are far from achieving it. But that will not prevent Mars’s enthusiasts from dreaming of a terrafformed futureeven if it implies hitting the planet with multiple large rocks to achieve it.