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Mars: Reborn, 3 'Simple' Steps to Make Mars Like Earth
RealClearScience ^ | September 9, 2014

Posted on 09/13/2014 2:14:24 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

A jump, hop, and a rocket ride away lies Earth's blushing sister: Mars. While apparently lifeless today, some 4 billion years ago, Mars featured rivers, oceans, and potentially even microbial life. The good times obviously didn't last.

On Earth, we fear asteroid impacts as harbingers of destruction, but to early Mars, they were cascading gifts of life. The energy and gas they provided helped keep the planet hot and wet. But as the solar system settled down after its turbulent birth, those impacts grew to be few and far between.

At the same time, Mars' core was cooling, quieting the planet's volcanoes, including the gargantuan Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. Volcanic eruptions served as a recycling system, cooking elements like nitrogen and carbon dioxide and spewing them into the atmosphere. Without the actions of these geologic giants, the planet grew cold. A cooler core also debased Mars' magnetic field, which before had protected the atmosphere from being whisked away by the solar wind.

Today, Mars has little atmosphere to speak of, sports an average temperature of -76 degrees Fahrenheit around the equator...

(Excerpt) Read more at realclearscience.com ...


TOPICS: Science; Travel; Weather
KEYWORDS: mars; nasa; nonsense; pieinthesky; space; spaceexploration; spacetravel; terraforming

1 posted on 09/13/2014 2:14:24 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

First: smash it in to another planet.
Second: combine the cores of the two planets in the bigger fragment.
Three: Spin most of the less dense materials into a ring.
Four: coalesce the ring into a giant moon.
Five: simmer for one billion years.


2 posted on 09/13/2014 2:59:37 AM PDT by Born to Conserve
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

The suggestions are pretty impractical.

You might as well just wait for a tech level that looks like magic first since this already talks about letting things simmer for 1000 years before you have a breathable atmosphere (which will bleed away into space at that).


3 posted on 09/13/2014 6:03:44 AM PDT by drbuzzard (All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Here are three easy steps to terraform Mars and make it habitable for humans.

Where?

4 posted on 09/13/2014 8:06:05 AM PDT by arthurus (Read Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson ONLINE http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/)
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To: arthurus

You have to click on the arrows at the link.


5 posted on 09/13/2014 8:08:25 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet (I will raise $2Million USD for Cruz and/or Palin's next run, what will you do?)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Does it mean we can leave the liberal moonbats staring at the moon on earth?

If so I am all for it!


6 posted on 09/13/2014 8:27:40 AM PDT by GraceG (No, My Initials are not A.B.)
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> While apparently lifeless today, some 4 billion years ago, Mars featured rivers, oceans, and potentially even microbial life.

No, it didn’t have rivers and oceans, or even much of an atmosphere. The Lewin experiment (Viking lander) detected microbial life though.

That said, Mars has 1/8 the mass of the Earth. It could be settled, under large (sapphire?) domes fabricated in space from asteroidal material, but it won’t ever have much of an atmosphere. Even if introduced, it would require special equipment to breathe outside the domes.


7 posted on 09/13/2014 1:14:53 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

8 posted on 09/13/2014 1:23:39 PM PDT by workerbee (The President of the United States is PUBLIC ENEMY #1)
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