As the astute reader will, by this time, have observed, we Martians view most of the activities and attitudes of the Mars Authority with a certain amount of ambivalence. However, there is one Mars Authority initiative that we all support 100 percent, and that is their “terraforming” program. Yes, I know that the name reeks of Earthling chauvinism, implying as it does that improving our planet and “reforming” it along Terran lines are equivalent concepts, but peace—we’re for it anyway. If they need to be snotty about the program label for reasons of pride, or perhaps to keep selling it to the even worse jerks they report to back on Earth, we can forgive them. Because the terraforming project is the greatest thing that anyone has ever attempted, anywhere, anytime. Period.
Mars was once a warm and wet planet. This fact is obvious to everyone. If you travel around our world, you are beset on all sides by evidence of past water action; dry ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers are to be found everywhere. Take a trip up north, and you can see for yourself the spectacular salt-encrusted shore of what was once our planet’s ancient ocean. But other reminders of the past presence of liquid water, including not only salt deposits but sedimentary and conglomerate rocks, are so common that some of them were even discovered by NASA’s feeble robotic Mars Exploration Rovers way back at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Yet today, not a drop of liquid water is to be found anywhere outside of a dome on the Martian surface. The aqua is still here, of course, oceans of it, frozen in the form of ice or permafrost, but except for hydrothermal subsurface reservoirs, all of it is too cold to flow.
Mars’s water was liquid in the olden days, because at that time, its carbon dioxide atmosphere was much thicker, and this provided our world with the benefits of a powerful global greenhouse effect. So the planet was made warm enough for an active water cycle, complete with rivers, lakes, oceans, and rain. But when the water rained down through the CO2 air, it would capture some of the gas in solution, and then react it with soil to form carbonate minerals. This happens on Earth, too, but that planet is so huge that it has not yet lost most of the molten heat it had at the time of its formation. Thus its vast interior reservoirs of geothermal energy still drive the old world’s continents all over the place through a process known as plate tectonics. This constantly causes their material to be subducted underground where the heat breaks down the carbonates, thereby allowing the CO2 they contain to be recycled back into Earth’s air. On a normal-size planet like Mars, however, this weird (albeit arguably beneficial) process does not occur, and as a result, once atmospheric carbon dioxide is fixed into carbonate minerals, it stays there.
Thus, over hundreds of millions of years, the thick carbon dioxide blanket warming our planet in its youthful years gradually thinned out, causing the global temperature to drop precipitously, just as happened on Earth after implementation of the disastrous Bali anti-global-warming treaty during the last century. But because Mars is farther from the sun, the results were much worse. Instead of a few decades of blizzards, failed harvests, and brief glacier advances, covering at their maximum extent less than a quarter of North America and Eurasia (which regions, for all the overwrought hand-wringing in the Earthside media, had been comparatively lightly populated in any case), our planet experienced a true catastrophe. On Mars, as the atmospheric CO2 thinned out through carbonate fixation, temperatures actually dropped to the point where the soil became an effective sorbent for the gas, sponging it right out of the air. And the colder it got, the stronger the soil sorbent became, resulting in a runaway icebox process that froze the whole planet to death.
But in the 3 billion years since that disaster occurred, the sun has grown in power by some 30 percent, so that now it is believed that a further temperature increase of about 10°C could trigger the reverse process. That is, if we today can somehow artificially induce a certain amount of positive global warming, the increased temperature itself would cause some of the CO2 currently sorbed in the soil to outgas, which would thicken the atmosphere and add to the greenhouse effect. This would warm the planet still more, which would cause yet more CO2 outgassing, and thus still more warming, and so forth, until the whole planet is as balmy as Tahiti.
Think of it! A new Mars, featuring groves of tall coconut palms fronting an azure sea whose slow moving but triple-height waves carry bevies of beautiful near-nude surfer girls and boys lazily to the shore, where they join you to tan by day or relax by night amidst the warm red sand.
OK, so I may have gotten a little carried away there. Although in my defense I should mention that such projections are to be found in the publications of many highly reputable real-estate firms, and who am I to contradict them? But even if you listen to the sourpuss scientists working with the terraforming project, the picture is still pretty exciting. According to these pessimists, if we can kick things off by generating an artificial planetary temperature increase of about 10°C, the positive feedback caused by the release of sorbed CO2 from the soil should continually amplify this, so that within a century, Mars will have a 200-mb-thick CO2 atmosphere and an average global temperature about 50°C higher than what prevails today.
Yes, I know; Mars’s current global temperature is –55°C (or 218 K), so a 50°C temperature rise would still leave us with a planetary average a bit less than the 0°C freezing point of water. But that’s the planetary average; New Plymouth is close to the equator, so the temperature around here (and in near-tropical Tsandergrad and Taikojing, for that matter) would be several degrees above the freezing point year-round—and even as high as 40° latitude, liquid water would be possible in the summertime.
So maybe Tahiti is not a precise analog. Perhaps Alaska might be closer to the mark. Yet still, under these conditions, the vast amounts of water frozen into our planet’s soil would melt. The long-dry streams and riverbeds of Mars would flow once more, to fill again its ancient lakes and oceans. There would be rain, and snow, and water falling and melting everywhere to break down the peroxides in the soil, detoxifying it globally while adding several mb of oxygen to the atmosphere.
Thus, Mars could be transformed from its current dry and frozen state into a warm and wet planet capable of supporting life. We Martians will not be able to breathe the air of the newly remade Mars, but we will no longer require spacesuits and instead will be able to travel freely in the open wearing ordinary clothes and simple breathing masks. In addition, because the outside atmospheric pressure will have been raised to human-tolerable levels, we will be able to make enormous habitable areas for ourselves under huge domelike inflatable tents containing breathable air. The domes could be of unlimited size because, unlike the pressurized domes we need to use today, there would be no pressure difference between their interior and the outside environment.
But even if we might not be able to breathe the outside air straightaway, simple hardy plants could, and in fact would thrive in the carbon dioxide–rich outside environment to spread rapidly across the planet’s surface. In the course of centuries, these plants will introduce oxygen into Mars’s atmosphere in increasingly breathable quantities, opening up the surface to advanced plants and growing numbers of animal types. As this occurs, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will be reduced, which would cause the planet to cool unless greenhouse gases are introduced that are capable of blocking off those sections of the infrared spectrum previously protected by carbon dioxide, but even the Mars Authority is smart enough to deal with a matter like that.
It might take a while, but eventually the day will come when the domed tents will no longer be necessary, and our descendants will be able to throw away their oxygen masks to inhale the glorious scent of the towering evergreen forests of Mars.
This is our magnificent vision, the underlying faith shared passionately by every Martian, from the stodgiest bureaucrat in the Mars Authority to the toughest prospector in the outback or the sharpest operator in the spaceport Sisterhood. We are here for a reason, to bring life to Mars, and Mars to life. To this cause we commit our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and you can bet your last kilo of krill that it is going to happen, because, come what may, we will never give up until we succeed.
That said, the really important question is, how can you score a profit from all this?
The terraforming program is truly wonderful because, putting aside all the obligatory piffle about holy grandeur and so on and so forth, it affords so many terrific ways to make piles of money.
This wasn’t always so. Initially they had this plan created by a bunch of UN boobies who thought they would do the job by dropping the complete arsenal of Terran nuclear weapons on the south polar cap, vaporizing the large amounts of frozen CO2 stored there, and thus kick-starting the warming process. Apparently they thought this might be a good way to achieve disarmament on Earth and didn’t care about the potential damage to real-estate values here caused by all the radioactive fallout. Fortunately, however, the Russo-Iranian nuclear war happened just in time and convinced the practical people in the various Earthside governments that they needed to hold on to their nukes in case they were needed for more appropriate purposes.
Then there was a scatterbrained plan put forth by NASA, who proposed to send some nukey ships out beyond Pluto to the Kuiper Belt to find billion-tonne ammonia-ice asteroids and then give them a shove to destabilize their orbits so that they would come falling into the solar system to collide with Mars, heating it both by impact and via the release of ammonia, which is a strong greenhouse gas. This concept initially seemed attractive to many people, as it offered an excellent potential for sale of impact-bombardment insurance policies. However, market surveys revealed that most of the likely customers who thought their communities might be blasted to smithereens by inaccurately aimed incoming asteroids could not be convinced that insurance policies issued by local providers would be of significant value to them, as the providers would likely be incinerated in the same event. Thus, all the business would go to Terran providers, making the program completely useless to us, especially in view of the facts that NASA didn’t know if there really were ammonia-ice asteroids in the Kuiper Belt anyway, and didn’t have a clue as to how to deorbit one with sufficient accuracy to make sure that it would hit Mars at all, rather than miss, or hit some other nearby planet, such as, for example, Earth (duh). In addition, there was the problem that, while in principle a nukey ship might be able to reach the Kuiper Belt in a decade or two and, with luck, stop itself there rather than fly off into interstellar space, it would take about a century for a deorbited object to fall into the inner solar system and hit any target at all. This unfortunate fact further served to undermine any likelihood of near-term insurance sales. Despite adamant campaigning for the plan by both the Nuclear Spacecraft Development Office and the Outer Solar System Exploration Office of NASA (which continues to this day), the combined factors that it (a) would not work, (b) might cause mass devastation, and most important, (c) did not offer any real profit potential to anyone outside of the NASA contractor community, ultimately caused it to be rejected.
Thus, the plan ultimately adopted was that proposed by the Mars Authority, guided, as always, by late-twentieth-century thinking. At that time, there was a lot of hysteria about atmospheric releases of chlorofluorocarbon gases, or CFCs, which were considered to be an apocalyptic danger because they cause damage to the Earth’s ozone layer, and were thereby threatening to increase the Earth’s surface ultraviolet dose from something like 1 percent Mars normal to 2 percent (gosh). In addition, on a molecule for molecule basis, the CFCs were found to function as extremely powerful greenhouse gases—although because the aggregate released was insignificant in comparison to industrial CO2, that was also immaterial. Nevertheless, since the Terran press of that time were as much a bunch of silly fussbuckets as they are today, this put CFCs in the news and drew them to the attention of the tiny handful of Earthlings who were actually rational, and thus concerned with meaningful issues, like the settlement of Mars, as opposed to the wars, scandals, stage sensations, health plans, tax schemes, corporate swindles, political power struggles, and innumerable other transitory matters that obsessed the rest.
Thus, not long after the Viking probes made clear that Mars had once been warm and wet, and some of these proto-Martian thinkers began to speculate on how it could be made so again, the potential utility of deliberately employing CFC-type gases for such a purpose readily suggested itself. Of course, since Mars, unlike Earth, actually could use some reduction in surface UV levels, ozone-destroying agents wouldn’t do, so CFCs as such were ruled out. But after some research, our wise Forerunners hit on the idea of using simple fluorocarbons (such as CF4, C2F6, and C3F8) instead of CFCs to do the job, the advantage being that fluorocarbons offer beneficial greenhousing power similar to CFCs, without the ozone-damaging side effect.
Why schoolchildren today are taught that this was a huge intellectual breakthrough is incomprehensible. The idea seems utterly obvious to me. But peace, I don’t mean to criticize the Forerunners. I am, after all, a patriot. I guess I am just disgusted that so many people today who claim to admire them actually use their enshrinement as an excuse for failing to effect comparable accomplishments. I mean really, use FCs instead of CFCs; how hard could that have been to think of? Sure, it was something of a step forward in its day, but it’s been over a century. You’d think that in the meantime someone in the well-funded Mars Authority Terraforming Directorate might have found an additional small advance that might speed things up? No, of course not. Only the demigods of the past could be expected to do something like that. Pish!
So that’s the Mars Authority plan; follow scripture and do it just the way the Forerunners said, by setting up factories to manufacture fluorocarbons, and dump them at a rate of a thousand tonnes an hour into the atmosphere. It may be unimaginative, it may be wasteful compared to more modern methods that certainly could have been discovered if anyone in the Mars Authority Terraforming Directorate (MATD) had any brains, but all the scientists agree that it should work.
And now that the program is finally well under way, dishing out big contracts to everyone in sight, you have a chance to use it to make some serious cash. There are many ways to do so. Consistent with our preference for operating with due respect for statute, we’ll start with the legal ones first.
You can, if you provide an appropriate gratuity to the right MATD officials, easily get yourself a substantial contract for the construction or maintenance of one of the many factories being built for producing the fluorocarbon gases that are the centerpiece of the terraforming effort. The problem with construction jobs, however, is that while you can make a lot of money by billing the customer for first-class components while actually using discards, there is too great a chance of being held liable if the place explodes, or even just falls apart due to some relatively benign failure. Maintenance contracts seem like an excellent money train, but you need to realize that the scamp-built factory you will be repairing may well be a death trap.
So rather than get too intimately involved with the MATD industrial facilities themselves, a cleaner way to make a score is to take part in the effort to supply the program with its raw materials. To make fluorocarbon gas, two things are needed: carbon and fluorine. Since CO2 constitutes the majority of our atmosphere, even the Mars Authority knows how to get carbon for itself, but finding and acquiring fluorine requires knowledge, talent, courage, and a lot of good old-fashioned honest hard work, and so, by necessity, they have had to turn to others. That’s where you come in.
Commercially useful fluorine can most readily be found in the fluoride salt deposits that litter the shores of many of the ancient lakes and ponds. In addition, fluorosilicate minerals are sometimes encountered in significant concentrations in the highlands. So, if you are up for a little field exploration, one way to make some serious money is just to go out and find the stuff and stake some claims. This is getting somewhat harder to do than it used to be, since all the really big deposits near New Plymouth have probably already been found, but still, for those daring enough to venture out further than others have so far deemed safe, plenty of treasure still surely awaits. Remember: Fortune favors the brave.
Admittedly, however, engaging in such work is a bit of a gamble, since many of those who go where no one has ever returned from don’t return themselves, either. As an alternative, you could join or form a consortium to buy existing fluoride salt claims and actually mine them, but the profit margins in such complex businesses are narrow, the headaches are many, and you can actually lose money if you have an excessive rate of equipment failure. However, there is a sure bet for easy cash in terraforming, and that is to get into the business of delivering the fluoride salts from the mines to the MATD.
Yes, I know that sounds like a strange recommendation, since the MATD has established audited transport rates of so much chargeable per tonne-kilometer across various types of terrain, and has cleverly set these rates at precisely such a level that the best anyone can hope to make is about 5 percent above costs on each shipment. However, what they don’t necessarily know is where most of your transports actually shipped their goods from. So long as you have a few trucks that you keep deployed near some distant mines so as to register repeated appearances there to take cargo, which can be dumped in the outback, with perhaps an occasional real cross-country delivery done for appearances’ sake, you can use the rest of your fleet to bring in stuff from much closer reserves and charge the premium long-distance shipment rate.
Relatively nearby reserves you might consider accessing could come from one of the old local mines, which, contrary to what the MATD thinks, have certainly not tapped out. But the sharp characters who own those places will know your game, and they’ll want their cut. So my advice is to not mess around, and just get the bulk of your fluoride salt delivery cargo from the most convenient source of all, which is to say the MATD salt-storage bins to the rear of the factory. The materials stored in these facilities can be obtained at very low cost simply by providing an appropriate gratuity to the MATD security personnel. You can then do a nighttime pickup, or, if you prefer the work to be performed professionally, arrange to have one of the Sisterhoods handle it in return for a modest charge. Either way, your profit margins will almost certainly be excellent, and you will be able to acquire capital to continually expand your transport fleet and make yourself an ever more significant player in this sacred effort that promises so much for the future of life, humanity, and Martian civilization.
However, you don’t even have to be directly involved in the terraforming program in order to make money from it. The mere fact that it is ongoing promises to increase real-estate values nearly everywhere on Mars. That said, some places will increase in value much more than others. So all you need to do to make a fortune is to grab the right properties and then resell them to saps who weren’t as quick as you to get in on a good thing.
Please note, the fact that most of the effects of the terraforming effort won’t actually occur for at least another century is irrelevant. Since everyone knows that extraordinary physical improvements are on the way, market values for selected properties are already taking off, and many more can be made to soar, provided things are handled correctly.
As an important example of the above, consider the potential sales value of future beachfront property. On Earth, properties that front bodies of water sell for a high premium, and the same will obviously be true on Mars once the terraforming program brings back into being our planet’s many ancient ponds, lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans.
Now it may be pointed out that on Earth, it is known precisely where the shore of a lake or an ocean actually is, whereas we don’t know exactly how high sea level will rise on Mars, so a property that might be a prime future beachfront value with equal likelihood could end up far from shore—or worse yet, underwater. While this may sound like a problem, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it opens up huge opportunities, since it means that any property on the slope of a basin or valley can be marketed as future beachfront. All that is needed to do so is to obtain an appropriate expert opinion identifying the site in question as being adjacent to the definitive location of the future shoreline. Such opinions, backed up by unquestionable computer calculations, can be readily obtained from many noteworthy and highly credentialed members of the MATD scientific staff, in exchange for a small piece of the action.
Another good opportunity created by the terraforming program lies in the field of hydroelectric power. On Earth, most of the expense involved in building a large hydroelectric dam is a consequence of the huge effort required to divert a flowing river away from the dam site so that the structure can be built, and then divert it back. On Mars, however, we don’t have that problem, as the rivers that will drive our hydroelectric installations do not yet exist. Thus it will be possible to build hydroelectric dams here at much lower cost than was ever possible on Earth. Furthermore, given the extreme variations in topography that Mars affords, with mountains 27 kilometers high and canyons 5 kilometers deep, it is clear that the hydroelectric potential of our planet is immense and the future revenues of our hydroelectric industry will be astronomical.
The terraforming program will transform barren desert land into high-value tropical beachfront property. The time to buy is now. (List of Illustrations 14.1)
So all you need to do to get in on this bonanza is to start your own hydroelectric company by buying up a prime future dam site. Nearly any stretch of old runoff channel will do for this purpose, provided you exercise due diligence to get a sufficiently prestigious endorsement of its critical value from one or more distinguished experts drawn from the hydrogeological research staff of the MATD. (One is generally sufficient, as these people tend to have terrific job titles.) Provided that you show adequate respect for the value of their opinions, this can always be arranged. Once it is, you have a stock offering prepared, and then go public with it on the Rangoon or Lagos exchange, where it is sure to be snatched up by the savvy investors who abound in such locations.
In no time at all, you, your MATD scientific advisor, and the rest of your company marketing staff could all be krillionaires. Not only that, you will earn an immense amount of goodwill for yourself, the MATD, and the Martian community in general, because the Earthside investors who buy your stock will no doubt make terrific profits themselves unloading the paper on others, and those others on still others, for at least a century, as the terraforming program advances and the prospect of actually producing some hydroelectric power becomes ever more tangible, at least in theory. Remember: Property titles are not for using, they’re for buying and selling. Keep that fundamental truth in mind, and you’re certain to make out really well.
I could provide plenty of other examples, but I think you get the idea. Representing as it does humanity’s highest hopes and aspirations, the terraforming program is unmatched by any other project in mankind’s history in terms of the promise it offers to the bottom line of those who choose to embrace its profound vision.
Life to Mars, and Mars to Life. Yeah brother, amen.
Technical Note (WARNING: High Science Content) The Science of Terraforming
While the concept of terraforming Mars may seem fantastic, the concepts supporting the notion are straightforward. Chief among them is that of positive feedback, a phenomenon that occurs when the output of a system enhances what is input to the system. For a Mars greenhouse effect, we find a positive feedback in the relationship between atmospheric pressure—its thickness—and atmospheric temperature. Heating Mars will release carbon dioxide from the polar caps and from Martian regolith. The liberated carbon dioxide thickens the atmosphere and boosts its ability to trap heat. Trapping heat increases the surface temperature and, therefore, the amount of carbon dioxide that can be liberated from the ice caps and Martian regolith. And that is the key to terraforming Mars—the warmer it gets, the thicker the atmosphere becomes; and the thicker the atmosphere becomes, the warmer it gets.
To understand how this works, take a look at the graph on the next page, which shows the dynamics of the Martian regolith/atmosphere CO2 greenhouse system. The curve marked with the little squares shows the average global temperature as a function of the CO2 atmosphere’s pressure. Here we see the predicted results of the greenhouse effect. The thicker the atmosphere, the warmer the planet gets. The line with the diamonds shows the soil vapor pressure as a function of the global temperature. The warmer the planet gets, the more CO2 vaporizes from the poles and outgases from the regolith.
Note the two points, A and B, where the curves cross. Each is an equilibrium point where Mars’s mean atmospheric pressure and average temperature (given in degrees Kelvin—to translate into centigrade, just subtract 273; 273 K = 0°C) given by these two curves are mutually consistent. However, A is a stable equilibrium, while B is unstable. This can be seen by examining the dynamics of the system wherever the two curves do not coincide. Whenever the temperature curve lies above the vapor-pressure curve, the system will move to the right, or toward increased temperature and pressure; this would represent a runaway greenhouse effect. Whenever the temperature curve lies below the pressure curve, the system will move to the left, or toward decreased temperatures and pressure; this would represent a runaway icebox effect. Mars today is at point A, with 6 millibar of pressure and an average global temperature of about 215 K.
To terraform Mars, just lift the temperature curve above the soil vapor pressure line. Once points A and B meet at C, the system will have no stable equilibrium and a runaway greenhouse effect will result. (List of Illustrations 14.2)
Now consider what would happen if someone artificially increased the temperature of the Martian poles by 8 Kelvin. The results of such a change are shown by the dashed curve marked with little triangles. As the temperature is increased, the solid temperature curve would move upward to where the dashed curve is marked, causing points A and B to move toward each other until they meet at point C. It will be observed that the average global temperature at C is 230 K, which is 15 degrees warmer than the 215 K temperature we started with at A, so it is clear that the effect of the original artificial 8 degree temperature rise that was put into the system has been substantially amplified by positive feedback. But more important, the new temperature curve is above the pressure curve everywhere, so point C is an unstable equilibrium. Once this is reached, the result would be a runaway greenhouse effect that would cause the entire available reservoir of polar and regolith CO2 to evaporate and outgas, driving temperatures and pressures upward and outward along the dashed curve. As soon as the pressure has moved out past the current unstable equilibrium location, the roughly 200 mb point B, Mars will be in a runaway greenhouse condition even without artificial heating, so even if we stop the heating activity later, the atmosphere will still remain in place.
With 6 mb of CO2 in the atmosphere now, close to 100 mb frozen at the poles, and perhaps 400 mb in the regolith, there is probably enough available CO2 to create an atmosphere with around half the surface pressure of Earth. Looking at the data on the graph, we can see that under such conditions the average global temperatures might rise to about 275 K, i.e., slightly above the freezing point of water, with tropical equatorial and summertime temperate zone climates being considerably warmer.
That’s good enough to create a living planet.
But how fast could this be done? The stuff obtained from the polar cap will come off quickly, but forcing out adsorbed carbon dioxide from regolith at significant depth might take some time. For terraforming to be of practical interest to investors seeking a high rate of appreciation on their real-estate claims, the rate at which all this occurs is important. After all, if it takes ten million years for a substantial amount of gas to come out of the regolith, and potential land purchasers find out that this is likely to be so, the fact that it comes out eventually would be rather academic.
Fortunately, in this case, there is no need to pay extra premiums to scientific charlatans to improve the facts. The rate at which gas comes out of the regolith will be in direct proportion to the rate at which a temperature increase that we create on the surface of Mars can penetrate into the ground. The thermal conductivity of Martian regolith is a lot like dry soil on Earth, with maybe a little bit of ice mixed in. The rate at which heat will spread through such a medium will be governed by the process of thermal conduction, whose equations predict that the time a temperature rise needs to travel a given distance through a medium is proportional to the square of the distance. The MATD scientists have measured this rate at various places on Mars, and their average works out to about 16 square meters per year. Martian regolith, which has an average density of about 2.5 tonnes per cubic meter, includes a lot of claylike minerals, and the best guess of the top docs at the MATD is that it is saturated with about 5 percent carbon dioxide down to considerable depth. If this is true (and who am I to dispute the conclusions of the well-credentialed scientists of the MATD?), we would have to force out carbon dioxide held in regolith—outgas it—down to a depth of 100 meters to produce a 500 mb (half Earth sea-level) pressure on Mars. So let’s say we induced a sustained artificial temperature rise at the surface of 10 K, good enough to outgas a significant fraction of what is in the regolith. This temperature rise would then travel down into the ground. The rate at which this would occur is shown in the graph on this page.
Rate of Outgasing of Atmosphere from Martian Regolith
After the surface warms, it will take time for the heat to soak into the ground. In 100 years, the warming will reach a depth of 40 meters, releasing 200 mb of CO2 into the atmosphere. (List of Illustrations 14.3)
You can see that while it takes a very long time to reach significant depths, modest depths can be reached rather quickly. So, while it might take 200 years to penetrate 100 meters to get about 300 mb out of the regolith, the first 100 mb can be gotten out in just a few decades.
Once significant regions of Mars rise above the freezing point of water on at least a seasonal basis, the large amounts of water frozen into the regolith as permafrost would begin to melt and eventually flow out into the dry riverbeds of Mars. Water vapor is also a very effective greenhouse gas, and since the vapor pressure of water on Mars would rise enormously under such circumstances, the reappearance of liquid water on the Martian surface would add to the avalanche of self-accelerating effects, all contributing toward the rapid warming of Mars. The seasonal availability of liquid water will also allow us to spread bacteria, which will produce methane and ammonia that will augment the greenhouse effect and also protect the planet against solar ultraviolet radiation, as well as green plants, which will begin the process of oxygenating the atmosphere.
So, in short, the science says that if we can somehow raise the planet’s temperature by 10°C or so, we can make our world come alive. That’s it; all we have to do is induce 10°C of global warming, and nature will take care of the rest. But how do we do that?
The most obvious way to increase the temperature on Mars is simply to set up factories to produce halocarbons, which are the strongest greenhouse gases known to man. In fact, one variety of halocarbon, known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, had to be banned on Earth in the 1990s because of its strong contribution to the greenhouse effect, and because it was blamed for the destruction of the ozone layer. However, by choosing our halocarbon greenhouse gases carefully to employ varieties lacking chlorine (i.e., fluorocarbons or FCs), we can actually build up an ultraviolet-shielding ozone layer in the Martian atmosphere. The easiest such gas to make is perfluoromethane, CF4, which also has the desirable feature of being very long-lived (stable for more than 10,000 years) in our planet’s upper atmosphere. The greenhousing effect of using CF4 can be improved by throwing in smaller amounts of other fluorocarbon gases, such as C2F6 and C3F8, which serve to block up the gaps in the infrared spectrum that an atmospheric blanket of CF4 and CO2 alone might leave open. In table 1 you can see the amount of such a fluorocarbon gas cocktail needed in Mars’s atmosphere to create a given temperature rise, and the power that we would need to generate on the Martian surface to produce the required fluorocarbons over a period of twenty years. If the gases have an atmospheric lifetime of one hundred years, then approximately one-fifth the power levels shown in the table will be needed to maintain the FC concentration after it has been built up. As you can see, we are going to need a pretty substantial industrial effort to pull this off—something like 2 to 4 gigawatts (a gigawatt, GW, is 1,000 megawatts) if we are going to build up a gas blanket in a timely way. This would not be much for Earth, where a gigawatt is wasted just to provide the power to a typical no-name American city in the 1-million population class, but it is nearly the entire amount of power we currently have available planetwide on Mars. So it’s going to take a while before we can build up our power capacity to really put this program into high gear, but that is no reason not to profit by selling high-value land based on its assured future success today.
Table 1: Greenhousing Mars with FCs
As the planet warms, its hydrosphere will be activated. Water will melt out from the ice and permafrost, flow into the streams, rivers, and lakes, evaporate, and come down everywhere as rain and snow. The more rapidly water gets into circulation, the more the action of denitrifying bacteria will break down nitrate beds and increase the atmospheric nitrogen supply, and the spread of plants to produce oxygen will be accelerated. Activating the hydrosphere will also serve to destroy the oxidizing chemicals in the Martian regolith, thereby releasing some additional oxygen into the atmosphere in the process. But releasing enough oxygen into the air to make it breathable for us is going to be challenging. Bacteria and primitive plants can survive in an atmosphere without oxygen, but advanced plants require at least 1 mb and humans need 120 mb. While Mars does have superoxides in its regolith and nitrates that can be heated to release oxygen and nitrogen gas, going about things that way would require enormous amounts of energy, about 2 million gigawatt-years for every millibar produced—and that’s just too expensive to be practical unless somehow we can con the Earthlings into paying for it.
Similar amounts of energy are required for plants to release oxygen from carbon dioxide. Plants, however, offer the advantage that, once established, they can propagate themselves. The production of an oxygen atmosphere on Mars will thus break down into two phases. In the first phase, pioneering cyanobacteria and primitive plants will be employed to produce sufficient oxygen (about 1 mb) to allow advanced plants to propagate across Mars. Once an initial supply of oxygen is available, and with a temperate climate, a thickened carbon dioxide atmosphere to supply pressure and greatly reduce the space radiation dose, and a good deal of water in circulation, plants that have been genetically engineered to tolerate Martian regoliths and to perform photosynthesis at high efficiency will be released together with their bacterial symbiotes. Assuming that global coverage could be achieved in a few decades and that such plants could be engineered to be 1 percent efficient (rather high, but not unheard of among terrestrial plants), then they would represent an equivalent oxygen-producing power source of about 200,000 GW. Using such biological systems, the required 120 mb of oxygen needed to support humans and other advanced animals in the open could be produced in about 1,200 years.
Scientific projection of the future Mars, after terraforming. Note the extensive amount of shoreline property. (List of Illustrations 14.4)
Yes, I know, that’s too slow for most people’s taste. But once we engineer more powerful artificial-energy sources or still more efficient plants (or perhaps truly artificial self-replicating photo-synthetic machines), then we will be able to accelerate this schedule radically.
I know we can do it. With so much money at stake, Martian ingenuity can’t possibly fail. And consider this: the development of thermonuclear fusion power on the scale required for the acceleration of our terraforming project would also create the key technology for enabling piloted interstellar flight. Think about that: we’re not just doing this to make ourselves rich. We’re giving humanity the stars.
Witness this new-made World, another Heav’n
From Heaven Gate not farr, founded in view
On the clear Hyaline, the Glassie Sea;
Of amplitude almost immense, with Starr’s
Numerous, and every Starr perhaps a World
Of destined habitation.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
So there.
Let there be Life!