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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

phys.org

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Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#31

Post by DoreenMichele »

verelo wrote: post #6
dymk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely terraforming a barren wasteland is going to be easier than terraforming a (relative) oasis of life! But in all seriousness, the point of colonizing Mars is not to be a replacement for Earth (although redundancy is quite motivating). It's because colonization and population growth has been our MO for the last 200,000 years.

But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.

Space exploration is simultaneously a legitimately hard problem to solve with strict and unforgiving parameters, a blank slate socially speaking, and inspiring. It has served for many years to fuel innovation that would not otherwise happen. It is worth pursuing for that reason alone.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#33

Post by Avshalom »

brigade wrote: post #28
ryanSrich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to start somewhere that isn’t earth. Interstellar travel over the next 100-1000 years will be a requirement for the next 5000-10000 years if humans expect to survive that long. Starting development now to understand terraforming and building out the primitives that allow for it in the future is something we owe to generations to come.

If you're arguing species-level survival, really we're going to survive longer than that, short of a meteor strike or maybe nuclear war. Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens. We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion year…

Capitalism is built on the belief that ownership creates value and thus entitles owners to some portion of the value created in perpetuity. In a free market profit should be driven to zero through competition. As a result capitalism requires constant growth.

And so in the same way 'it is easier to imagine the end of civilization than to imagine the end of capitalism' the idea that we could survive for even a year without exploiting the planet beyond steady-state seems so unrealistic as to not be mentionable.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#34

Post by Sniffnoy »

Mightn't this indicate that life on Mars is less, not more, likely than we thought? Respiration is complicated, so I would expect any life that might have existed on Mars to be anaerobic. If there's actually enough oxygen to support aerobic life, that doesn't bode well for any anaerobic life, does it?

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#35

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

jamesrcole wrote: post #12
verelo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.

Because a fresh start allows us to try out different ways of running societies and escape established structures. It's so hard to change things in established systems. I think there's pretty good historical evidence of this. The establishment of the USA is an example. It can be a good way to, over time, enact change within the established societies. A similar argument can be made that the unique technological challen…

I live in the central pacific. Out here, ecological collapse is real and happening now.

>Massive coral die off from ocean acidification.

>Rising sea levels salinating farm lands.

>Rising sea levels causing saltwater contamination of aquifers.

>Falling fish populations due to above factors as well as over fishing and pollution

And then we have the space-people telling us that Terraformed Mars is achievable/desirable/affordable when I'm not even sure my family will be able to grow food on our land in 40 years.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#36

Post by Apocryphon »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #29
rohit2412 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a self sustainable pod in Antarctic or the bottom of the ocean be the starting point? And you'd start a settlement on Mars just because you don't like some of the social systems? just buy yourself an island from a govt somewhere, that would be cheaper and far more manageable.

The difference I think comes down to a few things. - One is that it is a hell of a lot harder to cheat on Mars than it is in the remotes of Earth. Once you establish the outpost, its not like you can just call in a maintenance team and have assistance at your door within a few days. This forces teams to find ways to make it work. This also makes it much harder for changes in leadership to cancel the mission. - The ot…

To echo the previous post, why Mars? Why not the moon? Why not the Lagrange points? Why not the upper atmosphere of Venus? I'm not saying no to Mars, but there's plenty of other frontiers we should be looking into, some of which are better candidates in terms of proximity or more similar gravity.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#37

Post by biffq »

enraged_camel wrote: post #18
dymk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely terraforming a barren wasteland is going to be easier than terraforming a (relative) oasis of life! But in all seriousness, the point of colonizing Mars is not to be a replacement for Earth (although redundancy is quite motivating). It's because colonization and population growth has been our MO for the last 200,000 years.

>> But surely terraforming a barren wasteland is going to be easier than terraforming a (relative) oasis of life! Actually, terraforming a barren wasteland might indeed be easier than preventing the oasis we have from being turned into a barren wasteland.

Bc u guys are pretending not to know that everything we are doing to destroy earth could terraform mars. Thankfully an inviolable astronomical honor code not only preserves the native conditions of another planet, it prevents countries from having a destructive proxy war on the planet to try to invasively experiment and “reform” it to their own ends. Anyway, space junk in the Earth’s orbit was also a very dangerous problem. The explosive substrate starting w/a p or something on the surface of Mars that activates in contact w oxygen or something could make things difficult if I recall correctly. Giant 3d spaceprinters are sweet. There is also the largest known cloud of water vapor floating Out there diamond planets and more inhabitable moons etc

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#38

Post by jamesrcole »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #35
jamesrcole wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a fresh start allows us to try out different ways of running societies and escape established structures. It's so hard to change things in established systems. I think there's pretty good historical evidence of this. The establishment of the USA is an example. It can be a good way to, over time, enact change within the established societies. A similar argument can be made that the unique technological challen…

I live in the central pacific. Out here, ecological collapse is real and happening now. >Massive coral die off from ocean acidification. >Rising sea levels salinating farm lands. >Rising sea levels causing saltwater contamination of aquifers. >Falling fish populations due to above factors as well as over fishing and pollution And then we have the space-people telling us that Terraformed Mars is achievable/desirable/a…

I'm sorry to hear you're going through that. However, the fact that there are pressing problems here and now does not invalidate the argument I gave.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#39

Post by bryanrasmussen »

verelo wrote: post #6
dymk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely terraforming a barren wasteland is going to be easier than terraforming a (relative) oasis of life! But in all seriousness, the point of colonizing Mars is not to be a replacement for Earth (although redundancy is quite motivating). It's because colonization and population growth has been our MO for the last 200,000 years.

But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.

Well people often argue that part of the reason we're making this planet inhabitable is because there are too many people on it, so they have a fanciful notion of moving some of those excess people to another planet. which is sort of nonsensical.

However spreading your species across two self-supporting planets makes a planet ending catastrophe less likely to destroy your species.

The knowledge gained from any large engineering/science project is often applicable in unforeseen ways, although I have to think it should be easy enough to see how doing a trial run making mars habitable might translate into ways to save the Earth from becoming inhabitable.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#40

Post by gnulinux »

coldnose wrote: post #14

AFAIK, the ability to tolerate oxygen is an advanced property of terrestrial life — the simplest, oldest life forms were totally unable to survive in the presence of oxygen.

Not only that but it's possible that life surviving in the presence of oxygen might be a rare occurrence as far as life goes. One of the reasons terrestrial life is mostly aerobic might be because we're all the very few survivers of the Great Oxygenation Event which killed almost all the life on earth. If something like that didn't happen in the history of evolution in other planets, they might not have evolved to ingest oxygen.
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