> According to a new NASA study, don’t hold your breath. By the most generous estimate, there isn’t enough material on the Red Planet to even begin to provide it with a minimal atmosphere – much less make it suitable for colonization.
Let’s do a quick calculation. The surface of Mars is largely basalt. Let’s say 50% silica. There’s a lot of oxygen in silica, two atoms of oxygen to every atom of silicon, and a lot of oxygen in the rest of the basalt as well. Let’s say Mars’s surface is 50% oxygen by weight, that won’t be far out. The mass of Earth’s atmosphere is 5*10^18 kg, of which 23% is oxygen. The surface area of Mars is 1.45*10^14 m^2. To get a complete Earth’s mass of atmosphere on Mars requires (5/1.45) = 34 tons of oxygen per square metre. At a typical rock density of 3 tons per cubic metre, that’s a depth of (0.23*34)/(0.5*3) = 5 metres deep. That’s quite deep, approaching impossible. But a minimal atmosphere needs much less oxygen than this, and many bacteria get along quite happily with no atmosphere at all.
Atmosphere thickness is not the problem.
For water, import hydrogen, which is very light weight.
Given hydrogen and heat, cyanobacteria (blue green algae) will start turning Mars’s CO2 atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere.
> turning the ice caps into water vapor would only raise the pressure to 1.2 percent Earth normal. If the surface dust of the planet was all dug up by strip mining and heated to release carbon dioxide, that would provide only another four percent pressure.
It would produce oxygen not carbon dioxide, fool.
So let’s say 5.2% of Earth’s pressure. If that was pure oxygen (with water from ice caps split into hydrogen and oxygen), then that would be 23% of the Earth’s oxygen pressure at sea level. The pressure at the summit of Everest is 33% of the Earth’s at sea level, and people have been known to survive, and work hard, without oxygen at that altitude after acclimatisation. So the similarity of 23% and 33% means that we’re already into the right ballpark, even without the mining of basalt.
With mining of minerals, they claim the limit is 6.9% of Earth normal. As I’ve explained above, that is totally wrong, they’ve ignored the oxygen in silica.
Another thing not mentioned in the summary is that in the deeper parts of the surface have a higher atmospheric pressure than the average. See map below.
Look, no-one would claim that the terraforming of Mars would be easy. But it isn’t impossible, and it doesn’t require unknown technologies, just patience. Start with subsurface habitation, then move into lava caves, then move into Hellas Basin.
Living on Earth is actually tougher than living on Mars. Earth has earthquakes, diseases, parasites, corrosion, bushfires etc.
