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Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on Mars. Unless we radically adapt our brains and bodies to the harsh Martian environment, the Red Planet will forever remain off limits to humans.
Mars is the closest thing we have to Earth in the entire solar system, and that's not saying much.
The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth's. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun's harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it's only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hartree on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:39PM (20 children)
In other news: If humans were meant to fly we'd have wings! It would take massive alteration of our biology to do so, thus it will never happen.
Never is a very very long time.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:49PM (7 children)
One man's colony is another man's science outpost. Another man's colony is a terraformed megalopolis.
Wait... colony? Man?
The Outdated Language of Space Travel [theatlantic.com]
We need to change the way we talk about space exploration [nationalgeographic.com]
Decolonizing Mars: Are We Thinking About Space Exploration All Wrong? [gizmodo.com]
O-M-F-G. We have to send all the Musky incels to Mars, and then nuke it from orbit until it's radioactive forever.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:05PM (5 children)
As mentioned in an earlier discussion of a similar nature, it would be so much easier to just put the people you want to survive on the rockets, go into orbit, and eradicate the remaining undesirable humans from the surface.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:18PM
They have bunkers for that, though the spaceship/ark story sounds cooler.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:25PM
Hey, I watched that one . . . Still, there were plenty of people that survived the first world ending scenario. So, they decided to destroy it even further, along the way. Was called 100 or something.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:44PM (2 children)
Hugo Drax will be contacting you regarding your theft of his intellectual property...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday August 02 2019, @06:47AM (1 child)
As long as it's not Elon Musk...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @11:52AM
The movie version is a striking resemblance, with more facial hair.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hugo+drax&tbm=isch [google.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:51AM
Exactly. A planet full of incels on musky couches. The headline is correct. Rei will know what to do.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:38PM (6 children)
Around the same time as the space race, undersea colonization was studied. Presently, it is rejected as cost ineffective. Colonization of Mars, on large scale, may actually be more cost effective than the ocean floors, same for the Moon. The pressure differentials are lower and access to solar power is easier. Not sayin' Mars is cheaper than the New Mexico desert, but... it is better insulated from Earthly problems.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:49PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:58PM
So began the great way to make all your base are belong to us!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @12:33AM
Global warming is completely decoupled.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:58AM (2 children)
>The Earthly problems will follow you to Mars.
Well, aside from plague, war, global environemental catastrophes, etc.
Of course, Martians will have their own versions (well, war might take a while), but they'll be largely separate from the Earthly versions.
Right now we're one especially virulent influenza mutation away from potentially wiping out most human life on the planet - we're just too interconnected to have any realistic chance of stopping a really contagious plague from spreading, no matter how lethal it is. Same thing with war - if the nukes actually start flying there won't be any corner of the world unaffected by the fallout. We're all trapped together under the same gravitational dome of sky.
Mars though - nobody is going to bother to nuke Mars in a war on Earth. Mars has no tactical value, and is unlikely to have any real strategic value for a very long time. And the transit times for infected passengers will be more like early sailing ships to America - weeks or months of quarantine, and you let any surviving plague-carriers die in orbit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)
They will likely involve struggling to survive in a habitat utterly hostile to all higher forms of life as we know them. There's also a decent chance that Mars will be highly dependent on Earth for many, many, many years; they'll probably last for quite some time, but ultimately they'll probably starve or suffocate (or perhaps simply be irradiated or freeze) for lack of spare parts or raw materials that can't be made on Mars. As "tough" as they may be, grit is not going to help you when there's no breathable air anywhere on the planet, or in the solar system. They would likely be well aware that they've got a few years left at best, then they all slowly die together. Even if they could survive longer it is highly unlikely they could survive to form a real civilization without utterly massive infrastructure that is likely going to have to be imported from Earth over the course of at least many decades and probably a few centuries. They can't just slap together a lean-to or a mud hut for a habitat and toss on some furs and call it done; they have to put together space suits and habitats which have billions of dollars invested into their supply chains. Each unit produced of either will likely be insanely expensive in Earth terms. Can you afford a space suit? I sure can't, and that's with the benefit of Earth's resources and population behind it, and without the shipping costs associated with extraplanetary travel. Actually making such things on Mars, assuming that the materials are even viable to derive from the planet itself, will take far, far longer.
Mars may be a viable "plan B" for Earthly life one day. That day is probably going to be far further in the future than we are likely to see, even if we are fortunate enough to see man's first steps onto the red planet. I don't like saying any of this, but realistically speaking, it's something that has to be faced. This is probably why there's so much procrastination - it would take so long and an eye-watering sum of money, combined with the potential PR catastrophe attached to the fact that there is a pretty good chance that everyone from the first few attempts will die in the process. People are very sensitive to deaths in the space program and if they don't get it right the first time there... well, good luck getting together the funding to try again.
I'm rather hoping I'm wrong... but I seriously doubt it. If there is ever actual hope for the future of space travel, some realism is going to have to surface somewhere, otherwise we're just going to be seeing more "Mars One" style snake oil bullshit slowly disillusioning those who might actually be able to make meaningful progress here.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:43AM
Mars is unlikely to ever be a realistic "plan B" for anyone but the wealthy - once things go pear-shaped on Earth(and it's only a matter of time - things *always* go pear-shaped eventually) there's unlikely to be enough time or resources to dedicate to transporting billions, or probably even millions, of people across interplanetary distances, even if there was someplace to live waiting for them when they got there.
It would however be a meaningfully isolated society that would be only mildly affected by anything that happened to Earth, except as you point out, for trade. I really don't see bare survival being a big problem so long as at least some settlers approach it from a low-tech/bio-tech angle - which given the available resources early on will be an extremely viable strategy, I think. What do you really *need* to survive indefinitely once you've mastered living in a closed ecosystem?
A radiation shielded habitat for yourself and other complex organisms (a.k.a. air-sealed caves), and large areas of air-and-water-tight low-pressure greenhouses spreading across the surface for your primordial slime to grow in. On Earth all animals combined are outmassed 35:1 by bacteria, which are themselves only outmassed by plants, at well over 6:1. Can you say algae (+etc) farms? It would seem to make sense to start out aiming for a ratio that we know works, especially considering how radiation resilient some microbes can be, and how well they thrive in an environment of benign neglect.
Making those greenhouses from local materials, in a sustainably low-tech way, is going to be the challenge - but if your farms are providing a generous source of energy in the form of fuel and oxygen, that provides a really solid basis for everything else to build on - lowest-tech solar power there is, with arbitrarily high-tech power extraction.
Ideally I think it would be some sort of tough transparent bag made from materials "mined" from the biomass - that would greatly simplify production, deployment, and recycling, as well as providing a versatile material for other purposes. All the way to at least minimally functional pressure suits - a very versatile enabling technology well-worth developing. And as a more immediate, rigid option, nanocellulose has some incredible properties that would be very useful as well - nothing quite like being able to make airtight "transparent aluminum" out of ultra-finely-ground algae
It makes sense to start out in fancy high-tech tin cans and inflatable balloons - because that's what we can have ready made and waiting for us - but we're going to have to get quasi-low-tech really fast if we want to grow an ecosystem capable of supporting us. On the other hand, I imagine microchips will be imported for a long time to come. At least good ones. And that's the big problem with a Mars colony - It's got wonderful potential to be a thriving low-tech oasis in space, but no business case to get it off the ground. What could they possibly provide to Earth to pay for steadily shipping them all the materials they need?
Asteroid mining on the other hand has a hugely profitable business case to exist, what with many of them almost certainly being unbelievably rich in many valuable heavy elements that are virtually nonexistent on Earth, through the simple expediency of having settled deep into the inaccessible core long before the surface solidified. And you're probably going to want to have at least a few humans on-site to deal with the inevitable problems in real time. And hey, if there's enough people out there in the asteroid belt, a garden planet that can ship out food, water, fuel and air a lot more cheaply than Earth might be worth something. Or maybe they do the same thing in giant space habitats, and Mars only later gets in on the action because the technology has gotten cheap and reliable enough that malcontents from Earth that still prefer having a sky overhead can afford to try to build something better for themselves there.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by NPC-131072 on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:17PM
640k is enough for anyone!
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:29PM (3 children)
Let me fix that "never" for you. Humans will cease to exists before colonization of Mars.
This "never" is actually a very very very short time scale prediction compared to the future of Mars.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:26AM (2 children)
How long did it to take modern man to ruin the Earth? Now that we know what we're doing I bet it only takes 1/4 of the time for us to ruin Mars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday August 02 2019, @02:13AM
It's starting out "ruined".
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 02 2019, @02:18AM
Pretty much anything that humans could do to Mars would be an improvement. Including nuking it.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:39PM (29 children)
Never say "never". Will it happen in my lifetime, or even my son's lifetime? Certainly not.
In 1000 years? I can almost guarantee it, provided we don't decide to destroy ourselves before that.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:46PM
I wish that when you died you got to see how everything turns out.
Do you kids grow old and happy. How about your grandkids? What does technology look like in 1000 years? 10,000 years? Etc.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:55PM (6 children)
Feeling of my guts, this is more likely to happen than colonizing Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:59PM (1 child)
I think our modern civilization will be destroyed, but I think that humans will live on. A very few of us anyway.
Not me. If shit hits the fan, my skills won't be useful at all. Most of us desk jockeys will die in the first wave.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @11:56AM
Agreed, but... would you rather live like a desk jockey, or a fringe survivalist waiting your whole life for an apocalypse that never quite materializes?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:53AM (3 children)
Feeling of my nuts, this is more likely to happen than colonizing Mars.
FTYY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:59AM (2 children)
Advice: take you nuts off your keyboard, you'll simply fix nothing, they aren't made for typing.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday August 02 2019, @03:31AM (1 child)
That's nuts!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @09:26AM
"Dem Nutz!" Or, when you add some Meth:
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:08PM
A working SpaceX Starship makes it doable in your son's lifetime, for some values of "colony".
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:30PM (12 children)
Step 1 - send corpses to Mars, to start the circle of life. Get that fungi and micronutrients going.
Step 2 - send 3D "printer" and stacking robots to create AREOFOAM building panels, lets light and heat in, and instalate the interior space.
Step 3 - wait 50 to 60 years, while sneding more corpses and #D "printers" to keep increasing area under the "dome". Allows for the heat to also build up inside so the "quantum-computer" temperatures will not kill the humans and their pets and food and ....
Step 4 - send first colonist.
So 200yrs, we should be there, with a 30 to 40k population.
First, though is the dead. We need to roit so the food cycle can be started. Though shipping shit would be better, but has a higher water, so more costly to ship.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:17PM
But.. I'm not dead [youtube.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:21PM (3 children)
Mars cannot be terraformed without building a dome over the entire planet. This doesn't mean that colonies are impossible, it means that it won't be a "wild west" kind of place. Living there will need to be tightly controlled, because a human engineered "eco-system" is a lot less robust than a natural one. So there will also need to be ways to release the stress.
It's doable, and possible (almost) now. Whether it's worth doing now is another question. A "colony" that keeps collapsing and killing everyone who lives there wouldn't be worth much, and the problems are as much political and social as technical...or perhaps more.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:55AM (2 children)
OMG no teh government rules! Mars needs to be a libraterrian youtopia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:58AM
You need to be sent to a Martian reeducation camp.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @08:15AM
No worries, mate. It will be multi-planetary corporations, I hope you'll like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 02 2019, @02:16AM
Better to upload yourself into a quantum computer and enjoy the native environment.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 02 2019, @05:44AM (2 children)
For slightly more weight, we could send living people to Mars and have someone actively improving the location with onsite resources rather than feeding a bunch of inert matter from Earth. No need to wait 50-60 years either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:59AM
How about some construction robots and a solar oven to bake some glass for the biodome?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @08:47PM
Actually, they'll be corpses by the time they get there (or not long after).
(Score: 2) by Mer on Friday August 02 2019, @10:10AM (2 children)
I think the chokepoint here is the reason there's no atmosphere to begin with. We could make our own atmosphere by pumping the air full of tetrafluoromethane but I'm not sure if it'd stay in the air (I read something about solar winds blowing the atmosphere away due to a weaker planetary magnetic field).
If it did work though, it'd take a long time but we'd eventually reach high enough pressure and temperature to introduce some earth algae to the melting ice caps.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:46AM (1 child)
It would work good enough for us. The solar wind will slowly strip it away, but it's a really slow process, which is why Mars still has an atmosphere (though thin) even after a few billion years. Apparently if you could snap your fingers and magically give Mars an Earth-like atmosphere but did nothing to try to keep it, you'd have at least a million years before the Sun stripped enough of it away for it to start being a problem. And in human terms, a million years is a very long time.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Saturday August 03 2019, @12:28PM
If that's the case, colonists still need to put out more TFM than is getting stripped away. That makes the time frame until you can enter terraformation phase 2 very long, but not impossible I guess.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday August 02 2019, @02:40AM (3 children)
That still depends on what's on there. You can colonise somewhere because (a) it's easy, (b) there's stuff there you want, or preferably both. With Mars we don't have (a), and we currently don't know whether we have (b). Both of which would indicate there'll be no rush to move people there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @08:27PM (2 children)
To play devil's advocate, it might have the same (b) that Australia once did: provide space to dump people you want to get rid of but can't outright slaughter.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:45AM
I was actually thinking of that when I posted, the centre of Australia is a good approximation of Mars, however the colony was self-sustaining, they had air, water, firewood, building material, and pretty soon food as well. Places like Tasmania are actually pretty pleasant, in the sense that if convicts hadn't been dumped there then settlers would probably have gone anyway. It's a long call from Mars, where you'd have to haul everything you need up there with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07 2019, @09:14PM
It's probably cheaper to lock someone up the rest of their lives than send them to Mars. Though if we were willing to spend that sort of money to get rid of undesirables, why not spend the money on educating and rehabilitating them instead so they become useful?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday August 02 2019, @09:08AM (2 children)
TFA is discussing living in CO2 at 0.6% of the atmospheric pressure on earth. Evolution will need to act very fast for us to be doing that by 1000 years' time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 02 2019, @11:58AM (1 child)
Why not 75-100% of one atmosphere on Earth with the usual oxygen-nitrogen mix? It's not like we're going to drop naked people on Mars.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday August 02 2019, @06:07PM
TFA seems to asssume that we will.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:06PM (19 children)
That's an interesting factoid, I guess, but I'm sure it represents an arbitrary point (with error bars) on a curve. Temperature vs. time to hypothermia for an improperly dressed person... Did they choose that point because they wanted "five to seven minutes" or were they more interested in the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius scales cross?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Troll) by takyon on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:10PM (6 children)
When on Mars, live indoors. Like basement dwelling incels already do on Earth all the time.
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(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:01AM (5 children)
You keep bringing them up, almost like it is an issue dear to your heart.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 02 2019, @01:43AM
They are the scourge of our civilization, and they want to go interstellar. They have to be put down.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @06:04AM (3 children)
It is a psychological need to distance himself and I don't even know what it means, but living in a basement without sunlight that sounds like what used to be the stereotype of us nerds until computers became cool.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 02 2019, @01:14PM (2 children)
That is how you will live and die on Mars. As a basement dweller with no hope of escape.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @08:05PM (1 child)
Does mom still have Cheeto's and Mountain Dew?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 02 2019, @08:39PM
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305591/ [imdb.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:11PM (2 children)
Temperature scale intersections? I thought they were going unitless....
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:24PM (1 child)
My favorite hypothermia rule of thumb from a life jacket company: The Stearns Rule of 50 says you have a 50% chance of surviving 50 minutes in 50 deg F water.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:57AM
Ditto for 50 C.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:42PM (4 children)
Here's a factoid, as drilled into us by the Navy. 30-30-30, or, at 30 degrees F, in a 30 mph wind, it only takes 30 minutes for exposed flesh to freeze. So, yeah, as temps drop below zero, you're going to have a lot less time to act before the cold starts killing you.
I'm pretty sure that somewhere, they have these things plotted on charts. I've often read that a person falling into 30 degree water only has about four minutes to save himself. Water leaches heat from your body much faster than moving air.
The lesser known fact about all these survival factoids is that Nazi Germany actually researched a lot of it, using Jewish victims to verify the results.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday August 02 2019, @02:46AM (3 children)
Yeah, that's always been an interesting bit of hypocrisy, let's prosecute the researchers as war criminals, and we'll be keeping all that useful research, thanks. Even worse was Unit 731, where the guys who carried out the human experiments were not only not prosecuted but allowed to keep working because the results of their (utterly unethical) bioweapons research was in demand in the US.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Acabatag on Friday August 02 2019, @03:39AM
I was going to bring up Unit 731, which was Japanese. But what they did was in some ways far worse than the Nazis. They used US Prisoners of War, not just Chinese civilians, for their experiments. Which included a lot of vivisection. But they also did things like air-drop biological warfare vectors on regular Chinese villages.
We wanted the tech they had developed, and the alternative was the scientists going to the Russians, so those bastard scientists got amnesty. The head of Unit 731 in fact became a prestigious professor at a US institution.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 02 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)
So, uhhhhhhmmmm, what would you have done? Bulldoze all that research into the mass graves with the dead Jews? Wouldn't that have been spiteful of the Jews, themselves? Their lives were considered wothless, and thrown away, some of them in the name of research. Then the "liberators" come along, and trash the data gained from the research. That would seem to be less respectful of the dead, than those who murdered the Jews to get the data.
Tough call, isn't it? There's no way to "make things right", but I think preserving the data is more right than destroying the data.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:55AM
A lot of the experiments were carried out on Russian prisoners, particularly the ones the Allies wanted the data from, e.g. exposure to freezing conditions. Others were on German citizens, e.g. a number of experimental programs used Dachau as their source of subjects. I guess in 1945 the Allies were less concerned about data gathered from Russians and Germans...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 02 2019, @06:15AM
Mars just happens to be harder, that is all. Last I checked, impossible didn't merely mean hard.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @11:58AM (2 children)
Hypothemia has more to do with the thermal conductivity of the fluid you are in than even the clothing you are wearing. Churning cold ocean water will take you out hundreds of times faster than dry still cold high mountain air at the same temperature.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday August 02 2019, @07:38PM (1 child)
Do you suppose they adjusted their hypothermia charts for the reduced convection of the Martian atmosphere? I'm guessing no...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @07:44PM
At Martian atmospheric pressure, I think you also get cooling from the liquid in the surface of your skin boiling away...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:29PM (32 children)
How does a 99% CO2 atmosphere fail to maintain heat?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:36PM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:37PM (5 children)
What I call an atmosphere on Mars has 30,000 times more CO2 molecules per cubic meter than in Earth's atmosphere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:03AM (1 child)
Trolly troll troll troll, hoppin' on the trolling trolley with a lolly taken from a baby named Holly
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:09AM
Reality is a mean troll. Downvote!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:29AM (2 children)
But it has almost nothing else in the atmosphere. If you remove everything except for CO2 from Earth's atmosphere heat won't be a problem.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:50AM (1 child)
Yes because the average surface temperature is determined by the air pressure, distance from the sun, rotation rate, and rate at which the system heats/cools.
For well mixed systems like the Venus and Earth atmospheres we need only consider pressure and insolation. Up high in the Venus atmosphere at mid latitude where the pressure is 1000 mbar, the temperature averages about 288*(1/.723^2)^0.25 = 339 K.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:54AM
This requires at least 100 mbar pressure atmosphere, so doesn't work with Mars: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6859 [arxiv.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:38PM
An atmospheric thermal blanket consists of more than CO2, maybe?
And maybe CO2 is the element that we keep producing more and more of, maybe?
Thanks for playing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:39PM (23 children)
What's your question again? Less substance (thin atmosphere) will retain less heat.
Less substance will also make less likely the re-absorbtion of IR emitted by a cooling-down molecule - the radiative heat loss is faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:35PM (22 children)
.95/.0004 * 61/1000= 145x more CO2 in the martian atmosphere than in earths. Mars atmosphere also has only 1/206 the volume of Earths so that means the CO2 is 30,000x denser there. Still, it can't retain heat?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:49PM (21 children)
I don't follow what your numbers mean. More as in net amount or what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:56PM (1 child)
I'm using surface pressure as a proxy for total number of molecules. Earth has 1000 mbar atmosphere with .04% CO2. Mars has a 61 mbar atmosphere of 95% CO2. This works out to 145x more CO2 molecules in the Martain atmosphere.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:09AM
So your science understanding is lacking. c0lo already explained above, so my take is you are trolling in order to make some kind of "gotcha" with CO2 not being the problem here on Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:14AM (18 children)
If we fill one water bottle up with Earth air and another up with Mars air, the latter will contain 30,000x more molecules of CO2.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @01:00AM (17 children)
And your point is?
Homework: list the 3 major specific differences between Earth and Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @01:10AM (16 children)
The point is that IR photons are 30k times more likely to encounter a CO2 molecule on Mars than on earth.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @02:03AM (15 children)
And so...?
(Did you do your homework yet?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:19AM (14 children)
So how is this not trapping the heat?
Homework:
1) Mars has a high CO2 atmosphere
2) Mars has no magnetic field
3) Mars has a thin atmosphere
4) Mars is farther from the sun
5) Mars is cold
1) Venus has a high CO2 atmosphere
2) Venus has no magnetic field
3) Venus has a thick atmosphere
4) Venus is closer to the sun
5) Venus is hot
Conclusion: distance to the sun and atmosphere thickness make it cold/hot.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @02:25AM (10 children)
You mean, how is this not trapping as much heat as Earth does?
Then maybe the next question will help orient you: how come the differential between day and night temperatures are higher in the desert than it is in the jungle?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @03:19AM (9 children)
Because water has a high heat capacity which slows the rate of warming/cooling, ie there is more thermal inertia. Compare to the moon with no atmosphere that quickly gets both much warmer and colder than the Earth and Venus where the difference between day and night temperatures on are nearly zero, despite that one day is about a year long. Even the latitude gradient on Venus is very weak.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @04:32AM (8 children)
Mmmm... on my last visit there, I can't remember to be seeing free water on the surface of Mars; and whatever water exists is closer to the poles (thus low incidence cosine).
Maybe that's one cause for which Mars is colder, in spite of a higher CO2 amount? Could there be others?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:48AM (7 children)
7) No water on Mars
7) No water on Venus
Mars cold, Venus hot. Sorry, lack of water doesn't explain it.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @05:53AM (6 children)
[citation needed]
---
Venus atmosphere [wikipedia.org]
Estimated water in Venus'es atmosphere = 9.6 × 1012 tonnes
(for comparison [wikipedia.org]: "at any given time, about 20 × 1012 tonnes of this is in the form of water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere")
Ummm... you were sayin'?
---
Now, look, this and your initial
I'll ask you to demonstrate first your assertion that "CO2 fails to maintain heat" on Mars. Mind you, "maintain heat" != "maintain temperature"
Even in a simplified model, for an apples-to-apples comparison, assume the Mars temperature is given just by its atmosphere.
Then recall Gay-Lussac's law and assume a pressure equal to that of Earth (to equalize the amount of substance in the unit of volume with that on Earth).
Min temp on Mars = -126C lets say 150K
Pressure: Mars = 6 millibar, Earth = 1000mbarr
You'll get the "temperature on Mars at equiv Earth atm pressue" of 150K/6mbarr*1000mbarr=25000K.
That is, a mol of CO2 on Mars is heated higher (has more energy) than a mol of CO2 on Earth.
(a good thing, then, the atm on Mars is so rarefied, otherwise Mars atmosphere would glow brighter than the Sun @6000K - grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @06:22AM (4 children)
Water that stays evaporated isn't contributing to the thermal inertia other than via increasing the air pressure like adding any other molecule would do. In the jungle its all the water evaporating during the day and condensing at night that stabilizes the temperature.
And your 25,000 K temperature on Mars w 1000 bar atmosphere is nonsense. Venus also has 95% CO2 and has the temperature of ~340 K at 1000 mbar pressure (altitude ~ 40 km). This relationship is given quite easily by Stefan-Boltzmann law.
I give this in a comment above. Using earth surface pressure and temperature we expect: 288*(1/.723^2)^0.25
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 02 2019, @07:37AM (3 children)
Of course it is nonsensical, starting from invalid assumptions (all the energy captured by Mars is done by atmosphere only, soil doen't contribute, ignoring the energy captured in chemical bonds - those perchlorates [wikipedia.org]? Pretty energetic molecules.) one can't get valid results.
But it does demonstrate that the energy captured by one molecule of CO2 on Mars is likely higher than the one on Earth - where the collision with the other molecules will distribute this energy to other components of the system (and, conversely, "store" energy when the transfer happens towards the CO2 molecule).
And your point is?
I didn't see any consideration made by you on the speed of a CO2 molecule in Venus atm (Maxwell distribution - correlates with how a human or contact thermometer "feels" temperature), not the energy of that molecule in the gravitational field (Bolzmann distribution - determines the "thickness" of the atmosphere [wordpress.com] and thus contributes to the distribution of pressure with the altitude), neither the distribution of energy on the vibration modes of a CO2 molecule (IR emission when it emission happens). I haven't seen any considerations of the distribution of energy across other gases that makes up Venus atmosphere, or the interaction of atm with Venusian soil, nor the energy stored due to the separation of charges (which occasionally trigger lightnings and releases some energy in UV/bremsstrahlung), or how much in Venuses winds/storms or in creation/destruction of that sulphuric acid. No consideration whatsoever on day/night or seasonal cycles and the ways the energy is stored or dissipated over these cycles).
All of them and many others happens because the energy pumped by the Sun, yet I don't see any care for you to consider their contribution or to demonstrate that contribution can be ignored.
All I have seen from you is "Why doesn't CO2 retain heat on Mars?" without any proof this assertion is true.
Why the fuck I'm even wasting my time with you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @12:25PM (2 children)
Yep, there is no need to consider any of that stuff. It all cancels out once an atmosphere reaches steady state when averaging over a large enough area and timeframe. Eg, maybe CO2 has some warming effect but in repsonse then the system creates more clouds to block insolation so the equilibrium temperature is maintained. All that matters in the end is pressure and insolation.
Do we need to measure the speed of H20 molecules in your blood to know your average body temperature is about 37.2?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:52PM (1 child)
I'm yet to see the atmosphere of a planet in that "steady state" that you assert.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @05:28PM
Well, that is your problem... Just look at the temperature of Venus is across day and night sides for the same pressure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @06:32AM
Mars temp if it had 1000 mbar atmosphere would be about 288*(1/1.52)^0.5 = 234 K. As Venus shows, 95% CO2 or .04% CO2 makes no net difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @02:42AM (2 children)
You may want to add to your list: Earth radius: 6,371 km Mars radius: 3,389.5 km. Ratio between the cross-sections Mars/Earth: 28%
Consider this with the consequence of different distances to the Sun - solar flux: Earth 1353 W/sqm Mars 586 W/sqm, ratio Mars/Earth: 38%. You'll get a ratio between the total energy received from the Sun, Mars/Earth = 10.5%
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @03:23AM (1 child)
Earth is of similar size to Venus so this doesn't help much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:34AM
Of course Venus being about the same size of Earth doesn't help Mars, did you expect it to?