Mars does not have a magnetosphere
You might as well unpack your suitcase for that trip to Mars.
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
OK, so you still want to talk about Mars. Fine. Let’s imagine that Mars’s lack of a magnetic field somehow is not an issue. Would you like to try to simulate what life on Mars would be like? Step one is to clear out your freezer. Step two is to lock yourself inside of it. (You can bring your phone, if you like!) When you get desperately hungry, your loved ones on the outside may deliver some food to you no sooner than nine months after you ask for it. This nine-month wait will also apply when you start banging on the inside of the freezer, begging to be let out.
Congratulations: You have now simulated—you have now died, horribly, within a day or two, while simulating—what life on Mars might be like, once you solve the problem of it not having even one gasp worth of breathable air, anywhere on the entire planet. We will never live on Mars.
But surely we can pack enough breathable air in that suitcase? Can’t we?
Some people have the idea that making Mars’s atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea “terraforming.”
At this point in our discussion I must acquaint you with two dear friends of mine. Their names are The South Pole, and The Summit Of Mount Everest.
The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None.
Well…maybe they just haven’t tried hard enough. The people who go to Mars will try harder.
One thing he alludes to, but doesn’t really get into, is the fact that life as know it could not have existed on earth for most of its existence. There just wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere, or sometimes too much, for any kind of animal form of life. Animals have been around for less than a billion years; land animals about half a billion years. Vertebrates didn’t make it to land till about 400 million years ago. If you traveled back in time to earth more than a few hundred million years ago, you’d probably suffocate.
We happen to be living in a time and place which is perfectly suited to our form of life, which of course is no surprise. But we’re actively working to destroy the conditions that make our form of life possible. And even if we manage to stop and to some extent reverse the damage that we’ve done, at some point the conditions that make humanity possible will change, and we’ll die out, even if life finds new ways to continue.
Sooner or later, we’re doomed.
I highly recommend the book “A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?“, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. It is a delightful and detailed investigation of many issues involved in space colonization, with a lot of “This is never going to work, but let’s ignore that and see if this next thing dependent on it might work”. Among the biggest issues that I had never considered are the legal and diplomatic problems, things that Elon Musk just handwaves away, because he’s rich and thinks he can do anything he wants. The authors more or less come down on the side that there are so many technical and biological and procedural problems that this is almost certainly never going to happen, appealing as it may be. But the devil is in the details, and the book is about exploring the problems, not defending a position.
That article is similar to the lecture I gave my students during our section on solutions to the problems. They didn’t like to hear it, but they accepted it. Perhaps if Musk ever took my class…
I doubt he’d listen to me, though. I am not a billionaire, or even a millionaire.
One would think at that level of wealth, one could afford to be less stupid.
Nope.
I’d like to see more articles like this. Maybe some of Musk’s groupies are still teachable.
Mars is ~ 1.5x the distance to the sun as earth, so right off the top it gets less than 1/4 the sunlight. It has a little over 1/4 the earth’s surface area, but–bonus!–it’s all land (no oceans).
No air…no water…it really doesn’t have much to offer us.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (red, blue, and green) is worth a read. He sets the base criteria to enable viable colonisation by assuming that the countries and corporations of Earth unite for decades to massively support the effort. He also assumes significant technological breakthroughs on an ongoing basis.
That aside, he does a good job in each of the books of explaining the difficulties and complexities of achieving the outcome of survival, let alone terraforming. The enormous amounts of heat (moholes, nuclear reactors, and solar reflectors) and volatiles (ice caps and comets) that must be added to the ecosystem over decades to create a poisonous atmosphere. The decades of using generations of heavily modified plants, algae, and bacteria to increase oxygen. The need to remove peroxide from martian dirt to enable anything to grow in it. The difficulty of bootstrapping stable ecosystems from scratch. And more than anything, the need to keep people mentally healthy and functional, and a united Earth destroying itself to support them.
KSR is an optimist in those books. Even if we had/developed the technology (much is possible given will and time), try uniting every significant economic and political unit on the planet for decades for the benefit of others rather than self. I don’t have that much faith in humanity.
That Defector article by Albert Burneko is a good read. Thanks for that, OB.
Musk through all his enriching activities, (nb: strictly in the economic sense) including his plans for Mars and space, is doing his level best to increase the entropy of the Earth, ie to move it towards being a huge junk yard and garbage tip. Only by getting all the elements necessary for life into cycles (as in the well-known carbon, nitrogen and water cycles) can this be possibly avoided. Peak phosphorus will likely be first, even sooner than Peak oil.
My money, however, is on Peak Musk.
And yet he’s backing a movement inimical to his futurism; MAGA can’t set-up a Martian outpost, let alone get you there. It’s hostile to knowledge and expertise, stuck on burning exceedingly rare carbon compounds (you need life plus tectonics, and that exists nowhere else in the solar system) that are essential to manufacturing, and envisions a future of doing things the same way some imagined pre-internet ancestors did. If the Martian thing is important to him then he’s going in the exact wrong direction to achieve it.
Calling him a eugenicist isn’t the slam dunk insult the article writer thinks it is though.
In a world in which good news are becoming few and far between, it’s good to read a really happy story for a change. The rest of the universe should be safe from human stupidity and evil :)
In what sense can balls of rock and gasses be “safe” from humanity’s evil? They can hardly be expected to care one way or the other. If other life exists it’ll have been shaped by the same forces that shaped us and will likely be similarly nasty and stupid if it’s sufficiently sentient.
No, can’t see that as much of a silver lining.
That is a very enjoyable piece. I’ve ranted before here about the concrete and gravel slab left after the tram works about 15 years ago has now been colonised with buddleia, birches and cotoneasters, and is now a thicket. No outside interference, no elaborate construction with domes and seeding – simply nature doing, what nature does. I spent a few minutes this morning watching a thick spider web in the corner of my bedroom – a fly was landing on it, but not on the sticky bit, while the spider waited for it to make a mistake. That’s a tiny invasion of the biosphere making a habitat against a plastered and painted wall.
Actually I wish Musk would concentrate on his Mars dreams rather than his historically ignorant utterances and funding Trump. If Trump does get in, and Musk thinks he will be grateful and give him what he wants, Musk will soon find out how the arch-narcissist soon treats his most loyal sycophants.
I think Musk should collect all that fabulous business acumen his sycophants crow about, and all his fabulous wealth to (get others to) create in short order a special rocket so that he can bugger off to Mars with the whole of the narrower Trump family (not nephews and nieces) and their hangers-on and favourite creeps like Stephen Miller, and they can all rule there until kingdom come (which it will very shortly, on Mars). He could take X along, too.
BK @ 10 – I think you’ll find if you read Bjarte’s comment carefully that he wasn’t being 100% literal.
Musk and the other tech billionaires became rich in an environment that was chaotic and lacked regulation. Now that their businesses are mature and in many cases quasi-monopolies, they are attracting regulatory scrutiny in the US and elsewhere. To say they are chafing at that is I think an understatement. I think the reason so many are supporting Trump (or at least being publicly neutral about him) is because they know he will create conditions of chaos. They see that as creating the opportunity to do whatever the hell they like with effective impunity. They don’t care what happens to the rest of us, or even the planet on the longer scale. They only care about their own wealth and power. They want to recreate the gilded era of the 1920’s when the mighty industrialists and financiers of the world ruled practically unconstrained – but with themselves in the driving seat.
Quibble:
It’s puzzled me why anyone makes a big deal about a planet having or not having a magnetosphere.
Venus has no magnetosphere, but it has a thicker atmosphere than Earth does. (Not at all breathable, so not helpful for having humans live there). I would think the thinness of Mars’ atmosphere is because the escape speed for air molecules is lower than for earth. Ie: lack of gravity not lack of magnetism is the problem.
Even if other problems are solved, we know from astronauts in the ISS that living at zero gee is *bad* for your health. We have yet to find out if Martian (or Lunar) gravity is good enough.
Jim, see explanation here.
https://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics/focus-areas/magnetosphere-ionosphere/
Rob #14
Well said – I am now about three-quarters through (it arrived yesterday) an extraordinary book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity & Poverty” by Daron Acemoglu, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, and James A. Robinson. It argues very convincingly and with much evidence that (if we did not know it already) economic growth depends, and has depended historically, not on those libertarian, Randian fantasies peddled by those with childish minds, but upon the existence of pluralistic societies, what the authors call “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and a strong, centralised state — by which is meant not, of course, an authoritarian state, whether of the right or the left; nor a state that has succumbed to hysterical calls for a ‘bonfire of regulations’.
Ever since Reagan & Thatcher, and the ‘neo-liberal’ dogmas they gobbled down uncritically from such as Hayek, Rand, and Milton Friedman, the constant call has been for less and less regulation, which will eventually lead us towards the kind of utopia that is described in the book co-authored by James Dale Davidson & and “Lord” William Rees-Mogg (the father of the pathetic and stupid Jacob Rees-Mogg), where the vastly rich swan around in their yachts from tax-haven to tax-haven, and it’s immiseration for everyone else – who, of course, deserve everything that is inflicted upon them, since they have congenitally low IQs.
I would also recommend ‘The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neo-Liberalism (& How It Came To Control Your Life)’, by George Monbiot. For, despite the protestations of those who are largely ignorant of history and its complexity and who prefer brutally simple ideas, there is a bundle of doctrines & dogmas that may rightly be categorised as ‘Neo-liberalism’.
#16 Rob
Thanks for the link.
Interesting but it doesn’t answer my question about why people claim a strong magnetic field is helpful for holding in a planet’s atmosphere, while we see Venus has no magnetic field and a very thick atmosphere.
That’s because its function is radiation shielding, not holding in the atmosphere.
I seem to run across both holding in atmosphere & radiation shielding as claimed effects of a planet’s magnetosphere.
The radiation shielding effect exists. The radiation levels in Low Earth Orbit are lower than outside the earth’s magnetosphere, though higher than on earth’s surface.