Stuff To Blow Your MindThink of terraforming as a planet-wide renovation project: By creating a more Earth-like atmosphere on Mars, some scientists hope to make more space for Earth's burgeoning population. But could we really do it? Tune in to learn more about terraforming.
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Hey, Julie, have you ever renovated a house? I have. I have to tell you that wallpaper removal is the scourge of all renovators. It's awful, that's gross. I've never had to do that. I had to scrape piles off of hardwood floors, but that's about it. I don't know. I haven't done that actually, so I can't say if it's worse. But I can't say that my own experience, you know, being in a really small room, you know, filled with fumes like fel methyl kind of stuff and trying to just inch my inch and get you know, flowered wallpaper from the nine is a horrible thing. Yellow women running around in them and all that. Yeah, yes, because, uh, I mean it's rough with with renovating because you often you'll come in to a house or space that is in some cases unlivable, and you you have to put all this work into it just to get it up to the standard where you can be comfortable with the fact that you live in this space. Uh, and that's not even you know, discussing the process of getting it where you want it to eventually be exactly and if you will, which can take forever and never happen, that's right, has to become habitable at some point. You've got to get the the pp shot sent out of the floor. Yes, I sometimes there's a meth lab spas the same smell catp meth lab, that's what say. But I tell you a real fixer upper out there that that really it's far rougher than any wallpaper issues you've had, or or tiles on the hardwoods that I've had. And that is the prospect of moving to the planet March. Oh yeah, that is screaming for a redo. Yeah. That place is rough, garish red color. And uh, I mean it's just you couldn't live on March right now. That's kind of an overstatement of the obvious. But but but you could not live in it. You would have to ter a form it, which is the planetary version of renovating a space. Yeah. Yeah, And I at first I used to think about it as as like a terrarium for humans, although there would be no dome. But I like the idea of having this gigantic terrarium on Mars filled with humans. But that's really not what scientists are thinking. Yeah they're they're not thinking as much as of that, but just sort of. But but it does come down to we really wish this place is a little more like Earth, um because we want to be able to potentially live there. What can we do to make it happen? And I go ahead, No, I was gonna say, so, well, why why do it? That's what I keep struggling with with this topic, like why would you tear for Mars? Yeah, that this is a big one because it's hard to make the argument that we need to be on March right now unless I mean some people, if you're Robert Superan, uh yesterday, and then we should have been yesterday years ago. I Mean, one of the big key arguments is that it has to do with the long term survival of the human race, that that eventually we're gonna have to become an interplanetary uh race, We're gonna have to become an interstellar race because we've got six billion of us right now and we're not stopping. We're We're yeah, we're growing. There's a the Earth isn't gonna last forever. And if we have this idea that we're gonna last forever, we're gonna need to expand out diversify our planetary portfolio. Okay, and sort of like the lorax, We've we've done a real number to our own environment, right, so we want to try to maybe escape our atmosphere and go to a new virgin atmosphere. That's all lussion. Pretty Yeah, it seems like you see less of that these days, but it seems like that was a real driving force for a while, Like all right, well, this one's about used up. What's next. But but at a very basic level, if we're gonna becoming an interplanetary interstellar race, you've got to take those baby steps. You So people talk about going to the going to Mars, and then it expands from there. The other side of it, and this is generally touted as more of a secondary argument, is that UM, in the same way that the Age of Discovery propelled scientific innovation, so too would the terraforming and eventual colonization of another world UM stir up a lot of technical innovation that would benefit life on Earth. Yeah. Actually, I even pulled a quote to that effect, because I thought, well, that is interesting, that that's the sort of view I can take on and say, Okay, it might be worth our time because indirectly we would get all this technology. UM. Dr Adrian Brown of SETI, with that Search for Extraterrestrial Life Institute. UM, he had actually said something very similar to that, saying that we wouldn't have invented such precise time keeping and navigational technology if we didn't need it in order to cross huge expanses of ocean to reach frontiers in Asia, Africa, in the New World. So he's using that same analogy for space, yeah, which I thought was interesting. Thy, Yeah, it is. And uh. And then there's the whole argument too that to really understand Mars, we would need to be there now. I'm not sure how well that holds up with our continued advances in the robotic exploration techniques, but there's you definitely run across that argument. We're saying like, if we want to we want to get to the bottom of the possibility of life on Mars now or life in its distant path, and therefore understand the um evolution of life in the cosmos better than we're going to need to be there so well, and see I do understand the argument too, but then I also kind of think, well, if you if you have samples that are collected by robots and sent back, you know, you have the data that you need part of It's kind of like you have to admit it would be just really cool to be on Mars, and that's a reason to go. It's kind of like, um, you know, we're as of recording this, we're planning to go to south By Southwest to record something. It's kind of like if you know, if someone were to say, look, you really need to send us there, and we're we're making the argument because it would also be cool, you know, can be a little different if we just sent like a little hologram of ourselves. Yeah. Yeah, And that was on the table. We were saying, look, let's just been robot explorers to south By Southwest and then we're like, no, because we won't give the full effect and uh, you know, and we'll also have more advanced technology for having to figure out how to send ourselves to it, right, So it's sort of a win win from Yeah, But so I'm also wondering why Mars, Why not Venus well, Mars is ultimately the better prospect. I mean, Venus is. I don't want to get up on Venus. The Venus is fascinating, but Venus is is pretty messed up. I mean it's a hot mess. Yeah, like it's it's a hot, highly pressurized, acid clouded world. And uh and and Mars it's just a little It's like if you're looking at two houses, Mars is the better fix it up property. I think it's worth mentioning, like exactly what Venus is a teardown? Yeah, Venus is more of a teardown. I guess they're our terraforming schemes out there for Venus. But but we're gonna focus on Mars just because it's an easier prospect to understand, um, and to understand what what is what's exactly wrong with Mars? Right? We need to I feel like we need to, we need to look at that. So one of the big things terrible atmosphere, just really bad. Yeah. Then, um, you know, keep in mind that humans are involved to live in a very small atmospheric level of our own world and sort of a special sauce here that ye obviously isn't present on Mars. Yeah, and there are layers of this special sauce where we die. You know, if you got to go up to the top of Everest without any kind of transition, then you you wouldn't survive most people, most people the serpens would do, but they're used to it. Um. So yeah, we wouldn't get enough oxygen we die. Uh. It's it's just just way too thin, it lacks efficient air pressure and contains way too much carbon dioxide. It's freezing to Yeah, it's also really cold. It's the to go back to the Goldilocks idea. Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold. Earth is just tract and if you had just even a speck of water at the moment that it hit the surface, it would just sizzle and evaporate. Yes. Um. There's also an important point to be made about there, the fact that there's no intact electromagnetic field um Earth as one. It's generated by hydrodynamic convection between the liquid outer core and the solid intercore. And without this shielding we to be exposed to a deadly stream of highly charged particles called the solar winds. So uh, for reasons we don't entirely understand yet, Mars lacks the protection of this electromagnetic field if they haven't, thank you lately. Yeah, they have. Mars has like only remnants of a magnetic field around its solar ice caps. So that's that's it's like not having a roof on the working roof and the mouse we'd have to figure out how to replace the roof. Um. So yeah, it's it's that that's pretty rough. But there's some potential in Mars there. You know, there there is water on on the on the Martian surface, there's evidence that there used to be quite a bit right right, there's carbon and oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide, and there's nitrogen. Um. You know. The problem is that it's like the atmosphere there's like ninety point three percent carbon dioxide. It's just as a point as episode was it with like a point zero one or something point on Earth? Yeah, and then yeah, and also on Mars it's like the oxygen there is point two percent, so really really low. So you're gonna have to supplement with oxygen nitrogen obviously, um, if you were to go in terraform. This in earnest also that the rotation rate is on par with the Earth's twenty four hour cycle. Yeah, and it's close enough to the sun to experience seasons, which is always lovely because you want seasons when you live in other worlds. You know, you want to have your winter home on one part in your summer home on the other, so Richard Branson. So, so then this comes to question, what would it take to fix it up, What would it take to get that new roof on it, to bump up the atmosphere, to scrape the horrible wallpaper off the walls of Mars and uh and make it look pretty again. Yeah. And there are actually some some very good ideas about this, right. It's good in the sense that they are solutions. Yeah, and they're based in science. Um. I think for a lot of people like the idea of Like for me, the earliest experience I have with terraforming was seeing I think Aliens and they had the big terraforming stations and I only had a vague idea of what it was doing. That it was like, these giant buildings that are like spitting out smoke are going to somehow transform this world into a place that humans can live on. So the greenhouse gas effect, Yeah, well, a lot of It breaks down to that, like our experience and screwing up our own world crosses over to some of the ideas for making Mars a little more like what we want. Okay, so we want like big coal mining factories, which you're seeing, but basically the yeah, they're one of the ideas, the the Aliens model, if you will, is to create these greenhouse gas producing factories. Um you know, they would be uh, the same heating effect that we have here on Earth with greenhouse gases could be reproduced on Mars by setting up sending up hundreds of these factories across the Martians and releasing cfc CFCs methane, carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, just pump it into the atmosphere, just basically pollution machines on on Mars to try and it's kind of like on Mars it's like the water is a little too hot, so we'll add some some some cold water to cool the bath down, and on Mars it is the reverse. So that's one scheme. Another involves large orbital mirrors to reflect the sunlight and heat the Martian surface. All right, This would giant mirrors kind of like the ones that the Soviets experimented with for the idea of of of of giving sunlight to dark regions during the winter uh, and these would would concentrate light onto the polar caps and melf the ice. This would release carbon oxide believed to be trapped inside the eyes, and the rise in temperatures would over the years would conceivably release greenhouse gases such as these CFCs and the same that you find in your air conditioner, so like melting polar caps, and then this would all lead to photosynthesis at some point, right for years and years and years, and again we're one of the things I think to think about is, you know, you've had some people say it could take centuries, and you have other people saying it could take thousands and thousands of years. Yeah. One of the important things that when you're talking about changing an atmosphere, you're you get into this whole area of fluid dynamics, you get into the into into just the chaos theory itself. Just refreshure the idea that the chaos theory emerged from the attempt to create more reliable computer models of weather, of of how our atmosphere works, and the chaos theories is that you can only figure it out so far and then it just it just breaks down. So we're up against that and trying to figure out how to tinker with another world at fear we don't fully understand how our own works, or we at least the thing we understand the most about it is that it's incredibly complex. So there are a lot of what ifs that end up falling into it in different people's figures. Will you know will say decades and another will say centuries. Well, and then there's the whole dark matter out in space, the fact that we don't really know what exactly it is and how it affects planets, right so, and then when we actually talked about this yesterday about the possibility of smashing ammonia heavy asteroids into the planet to sort of create the same greenhouse gas level effect. And this is another one that's UH that Robert Zubrin UH is really fond of and presented in his book A Case from Mars. And Zubrin is a really interesting guy. I get to interview him for a Discovery News article and I have I don't think I've ever interviewed somebody just so passionate about their thing, and I haven't plenty of people are really passionate about their their topics and their their their life's work. But Zubrin is in He's just like we should be on Mars yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, I listened to the audiophile and at the risk of um, Robert Zubern like reaching out to me and saying, you know, you're the devil incarnate. That dude is a fanatic. But I kind of like that because you need those people, You need that passionate level in order to be like, we gotta do this, you know, yeah, I mean, you got it. You need extremist or and and and and extremely passionate people to push these ideas into the public mindset. Otherwise there's too many people would just not listen, right And and also you know, I know this is a little bit of an aside. I was thinking about him, and I was thinking about his role and if even if this doesn't happen right now, I mean he he very well maybe like the da Vinci in the sense of his time and that you know, da Vinci had all these drawings for flight, but obviously the technology didn't exist until much much later. And you know, who knows people could go down in history be like that super and guy was righteous. He knew it I was talking about and he was he was ahead of his time. We should have in on Mars in the twentieth century. Right that being said, let's talk about the ammonia ridden aster which is a little bit creepy. Well, it's it's one of the another one of these ideas. This is very catastrophic sounding because you're talking messing with the planet's atmosphere. It's it's very reminiscent of some of the the scenarios we look at with things like nuclear winter or or um or you know, asteroids impacting the Earth um And this basically boils down to the belief that if you hurled these large I see asteroids that were just full of ammonia at marks, they would produce tons of greenhouse gases and water. Okay, so you would need nuclear thermal rocket engines and you'd have to somehow attach these to an asteroid from the outer Solar System, and then the rockets would move the asteroids in about four kilometers per second for a period of about a decade before the rockets would shut off and allow the ten billion tons of asteroids to glide unpowered. Towards the Martian surface, and the energy released upon impact would be about a hundred and thirty million mega wats of power. Yeah yeah, and can you imagine the dust settling from that? I mean it would take centuries and centuries. And it's not that you mentioned dust. That's another scheme that's out there is to take material from a sea class asteroid or a Martian moon and spread it over Mars polar caps. So this would be um and another kind of drastic global warming type of scheme coated with dust. The poles would then absorb more solar radiation because remember you have you know, you wear a dark shirt on a sunny day, you're warmer than if you wear a white shirt. It's the same scenario. Yeah, They absorb more sunlight, causing them to heat up, release carbon dioxide, atmospheric atmospheric pressure increases, and you'd have the greenhouse effect, and eventually we get it up to the point where Arnold Schwartzenhager's eyeballs would explode if he took his filmet off. That's the ultimate goal in all things, but but also in terraform, all right, So I mean I guess that that is the point where then people could be supplemented with oxygen and nitrogen to a certain degree, but not like full on like they would need right now. Yeah, any of these schemes you're looking at, it's not you wouldn't be able to turn Mars into Idaho in a decade or center. You know, there would be this long, slow process of where it becomes more Idaho esque. Yeah, And I guess that that sort of plays into the outmoded idea that this would be a population outlet for for Earth. Right, Like, if we reached billion people by the time we actually by the time we reached twenty billion people, you'd have to assume that we would have had some sort of solution in place, because by the time that you can actually have Mars habitable, it would be thousands and thousands and thousands of years from now. Yeah, So that's one of the arguments of like, hey, let's not try to this shouldn't probably be our backup plan for humanity. Right. Plus, I I like to or I don't like to think this, but it seems like if the more we were we moved towards potentially having more world peace, that's just going to get in the way of people needing to leave here, so we do. If we got to the point where we have the technology to go to other worlds and seed them with our people, you might want to make conditions on Earth particularly hellish, and then people would have a reason to flee right right right, same models the early or just a good reason to make tons and tons of money, which is another huge factor. Um you get into like mining on on Mars for healing them three and things like that, then you could conceivably see it being a possibility. Yeah. Yeah, Halliburton's all over this. Um. So this also kind of plays into the ethics, right, there's um and there are there's actually like kind of like a science gang war going on here, and it's like the reds and the Greens. I'm like ketting, like the reds are the are the folks are Like you know what, maybe we should look at Mars and try to keep it intact as much as possible and still study it, but keep the integrity of it because maybe there's something that it's ecosystem can tell us, and if we were to try to tear a format, we would sort of pollute that possibility of learning more out of it. Yeah, it's the idea that there might be some you know, little signs of what life may have been like on Mars, if there was life on Mars at some point in the past, that those those secrets are buried and those secrets are there to be found, provided that we don't completely contaminate the place. It seems like a controlled crime scene. You don't want the bumbling local detectives to go and local police have to come in and touch everything, because the big city detective he needs to get in there with all its high tech gear and figure out what's what. Right, Like, we wouldn't want to introduce an invasive microbial species that would just you know, lay waste to everything, because then we'd be like, oh, we didn't learn anything really about Mars. Now, we're just trying to fit our earthly paradigm, you know, into Mars this other thing which we don't really know about yet. So those are the reds, yes, and then the greens, of which Zubrin is definitely a member. Um. I mean, his whole thing is like this is actually he put it really nicely in the interview I did with him, um and a phrase used to this exact example of many times. But he's like, if you were to make the argument, hey, let's take um, let's take Earth and let's turn it into a barren, lifeless world. Let's do that. Let's let's get started this project right away, you would say, dude, you're crazy. Don't turn don't turn the planet, this living, lush planet into a desert. And his thing is then the reverse is true too, that the argument like, look at Marks. It's dead, it's empty, there's nothing living there. It's a waste land. We have a responsibility to turn it into a green world. See. And that's the problem I have with it because it's like absolutism, right, It's like it's dead. And I was like, well, I don't know, because NASA actually has said, well we you know, there are these methane plumes that keep kind of unfurling in front of us, making us realize that there's methane being released, which kind of points us in the direction that there may be some sort of life form, you know, at least on a microbial level, and so we can't necessarily anounced it dead. Yeah. I guess it's kind of like if there was like a house in a neighborhood and it was like really crappy, and someone was maybe argument, hey, we need to fix this up. There's like there's it's doing nothing. It's just a complete ruin. It's you know, foreclosed on. Let's let's get somebody in there, let's get let's get this thing torn down and rebuild or something. And then you can make the argument, well, I fare all cats are living there those farall cats need to live somewhere, so why not this house or there's something making some argument that that that something natural may be going on that we shouldn't stamp on just yet. Yeah, or they might say there's a tiffany stained window in there. You know, you can't knock that exactly. Okay, that's an even better example. Yeah, yeah, So I don't know if that's I think it's a very fascinating uh topic. And I do really like the idea of technology coming out of the maybe the thought experiment. But obviously it's something that UM that we're at least in the United States, we don't necessarily have the economic power to put a lot of money into UM, particularly since some of these plans, like there's a four hundred fifty billion dollar plan rolled out in the Bush one era that was like, Hey, we can build this orbital platform on Mars and launch this and do this, and Bush was like, yeah, I think so. And there have been subsequent plans and facts you Ben came up with a couple of pretty good ones that are more in like the twenty fifty billion dollar range. Still that's yeah, that's still a lot of money. It's I mean, it's sad to think. I mean, at some point the past, the money made the the argument that that and I forget who was saying, maybe it's just a friend of us talking to me. They were like, we're not gonna We're not going to see a personal land on Mars in our lifetime. Now, whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but just the prospects kind of sad because you grow up watching all the science fiction and and hearing all this science and you know, we've been talking about landing on Mars for well over half a century. I mean, we've been talking about it longer than that, but we've had more concrete plans in that time period, and to think it it's not going to happen is kind of depressing because you you kind of grow up thinking that this is where you're your life is going to go you know, yeah, yeah, And hence zuber In in his his impatience and saying, look, we do have the technology, we could do it. Yeah, I mean it's possible. Yeah. And of course the more we learn, though, you know it, the more the situation comes complicated. Because there's a two thousand ten study from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in the University of Leicester, and they found that double solar radiation waves periodically strip away thirty of the sparse Martian atmosphere, so that these waves occur when one solar wave overtakes another to produce a single like super wave. And uh, and so what little atmosphere remains on the planet is due to comics, comic strikes, and the occasional melting of polar ice. So even if we so, it kind of creates this this horrible situation. It's cut the money pit, like the more you're going to rebuild it and then stuff is just gonna bust it down. So I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but but it it's a little disheartening to have that added bit of information. Well, and I was thinking too that astrobiology, which we've talked about before. Is still such a young field in terms of the new technologies it has at its disposal. You know what, what might it be able to uncover in the next ten years to tell us a little bit more about Mars and how to look at that situation and look at terror forming and new So I don't think that we have all the data in what we're talking about. You know. Yeah, we should definitely not shut the case, shut the lid on the case just yet. I like to think it will happen someday. We'll see, we'll see. Let's bring on the mail. Yes, we do have a couple of bits of mail here from some people who have some experience with doppelgangers calling back to our Defeat Your Doppelgangers podcast. Uh, first we're gonna hear from Matt. Matt says, Hey, guys, love the podcast. Just listen to your show, Defeat Your Doppelgangers. This one really hit home with me because young kid, I always had the impression that there are were multiple copies of myself hanging around my hometown. I never felt there was any malicious intent or an evil clone. I always knew in the back of my mind that around any corner I might bump into a copy of myself. I never found one, but to this day I still have a feeling that they're out there somewhere. Also, as a kid, I always thought that the mirror in my bathroom or any mirror was actually a view into the closest relative neighborhood dimension, that is to say looking that is to say, a looking glass into the closest dimension to ours. The image staring back at me was not a reflection but the other meat from the next dimension looking in his mirror. Uh yeah, so um, Matt, thanks for sharing that. That's uh, that's pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah, my mind is a little bit low there. Um. I also wanted to share it too. There's a comment by Jane on Facebook and she was talking about our Neandertals episode um, and she actually made a really good point that in that episode we kept ferring to Neanderthals is he There's like no mention of any female in Neandertals, which of course we know that existed. Um. In fact, that the mitochondrial DNA, and that tells us so much today about what went on with Neandertals. Um, they the possessors of it. But uh, and she also points out that when we were talking about them making glue and so on and so forth, we kept talking about he knowing it. How about. You know what, that's a really good point to make. Thank you, Jane, thank you for keeping us sharp, because you know it's kind of hard sometimes you fall back on that that old um he pronoun is a catch all. So I just wanted to say, yes, the menatols the ladies, they were definitely a big part of that group. And it was interesting because a lot of the research that I came across, at least and especially the stuff that was produced online, shows this sort of patriarchal paradigm of the men making the glue, and like the women going through the men's hair and grooming them, and the men barked neandertal orders out of them. So anyway, again, thank you, Jane, and I love these comments that you guys give us, you know, the email on Facebook, and you guys really give us some good platforms like stuff for our minds to chew on as well. Indeed, one more quick Doubel ganger Eric writes, and he says, I've never met anyone who could be my twin, but I have had some problems with my name. UM my name doppelganger is in a doppelganger that shares one's name. I moved to Portland, Oregon, in two thousand five from the San Francisco Bay area. When I apply for a library card here, I was surprised to learn that there were unpaid overdue books under my name. Turns out someone with my name please don't read it on the air and gives it gives its full name. UM is also living in It's also living in the suburb of Portland's. The town has a population of a little less than twenty three people. So yeah, that happens probably more frequently we encounter with the individuals to share our exact name, and especially if you end up googling your own name like I do, way too much. You know. It's like when am I gonna overtake The Murder Robert Lamb? When am I going to overtake the The he Man the animated series animator? Yeah? Mine mine? Uh? I think kind of like Julie Douglas has made a triathlete somewhere in Austria or something. I can't remember having googled myself for a long time, but I was like, go Julie Douglas. Yeah, that the Julie douglas Is of the world need to stick together and make it work right. Yeah. Yeah, just still a little fist bump tea cans down there. Julie Douglass is well cool. If you have any little tidbits to add, or just want to interact with us, then head on over to Facebook or Twitter. You'll find us a Blow the Mind on both of those. We keep that updated with all sorts of good stuff, and you can always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at how stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a RYE. Download it today on iTunes. Could you leave it's for me or
