Jeff Fairman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
>
> How about moving back to science related discussion...
>
> I noticed that there was a two day conference at NASA-Ames on
> terraforming
> Mars recently. Being a molecular biologist, I really don't
> know much about this. How would this be done? What are the issues?
I'll let others detail this. :)
> Do you think there
> will be Reds (as in the red/blue/green Mars series of books)?
Almost certainly. Especially in the light of recent "is there/was there
life on Mars?" discussions - terraforming would potentially kill off any
extant life, and also potentially destroy any remnants of past life.
While walking on Mars is one of the things I want to do in my lifetime,
I'd be loathe to terraform it before we've given it a detailed
once-over.
I found it interesting that the plans detailed at that conference (at
least, as presented through the popular press filters) would give Mars a
dense atmosphere and reasonable temperature within 50-100 years.
Shirtsleeve weather, if mostly CO2 (so you still need a gas mask, but
not a pressure suit). They still predicted an oxygen atmosphere would
still take 100,000 years. I'm skeptical of that - if we could build an
organism (or nanobot) from the genome (or atoms) up that's sole purpose
was to replicate madly and convert CO2 to O2, without any of the usual
overhead organisms have, couldn't we do it faster?
(Personal hope for the future: we acheive "uploading" by 2050 or so and
physical exploration & short-term terraforming becomes moot; if I'm
wrong, I'm dead, so it doesn't much matter.)
Joshua
