Can Mars Be Terraformed In Decades Rather Than Centuries?

Space.com

Dr.  Erika Alden DeBenedictis joins the hosts Rod Pyle and Dr. Rick Jenet  to talk terraforming Mars.

Transcript

00:00Hey space fans, this is Rod Plough from This Week in Space.

00:03How can microbes on Mars make it as nice a place to live as the Hamptons?

00:08Well, we wanted to know, so we asked Dr. Erica DeBenedictus, a pioneer in quick terraforming,

00:15to tell us about how this might take place.

00:17Stick around and find out.

00:19So, Erica, I was looking at your LinkedIn, as you probably guessed in our earlier conversations,

00:25and you kind of touched on this.

00:27You said you're a computational physicist.

00:30So, does that mean that somewhere you have a huge computational model for Mars involving

00:37like lots of cloud resources and all of that kind of stuff, or what's the plan there?

00:43Yeah, so one of actually the cool things about being part of the Astera Institute and the part

00:50of the incubator there is that we actually have physics collaborators who literally study

00:55Mars climate.

00:56So, Astera is funded, it's a philanthropic science org funded by Jed McCaleb, who's also

01:02the founder of Vast, which is one of the private space station companies.

01:06So, Jed is like one of these people who like lives in the future, right?

01:11Like for him, space travel really is happening, and it's like urgent to like figure this stuff

01:16out.

01:16And so, I'm not the only person at Astera that is thinking about Mars.

01:21So, I have a collaborator, Edwin Kite, who is more on the modeling side.

01:28So, he's been working on climate models for Mars, especially to simulate what would happen

01:36if you heat a particular area of Mars, you know, where would the water vapor go?

01:42Stuff like that.

01:44So, there is some of that, and it's an interesting challenge because we have, it's a little bit

01:50beyond our current modeling capabilities because, you know, current climate models for Mars make

01:58assumptions based on facts about how it is today.

02:02And so, you can't, it's not always a simple matter of just adjusting temperature and seeing

02:07what happens.

02:08You have to simulate new effects.

02:10So, yeah, some of that is happening, which is very cool.

02:14Very neat.

02:15So, we would be remiss if we didn't actually get into the core of your paper, which was

02:21fascinating, by the way.

02:23And I don't read that many papers.

02:25So, when I do, I like to have one that's sort of engaging, and that definitely was.

02:29So, you talk in there about not just terraforming Mars, which has been written about plenty, but

02:34usually on the scale of centuries to millennia, you talk about ways of going after this in

02:41decades, which is, I think, the revolutionary part of this.

02:44So, could you kind of walk us through how you would do it?

02:48Yeah.

02:49Maybe, maybe let me do it sort of back to front.

02:52So, the potential target end state for a terraformed Mars that, again, this is all very early, but

03:02I can't find a physics reason why this isn't possible, let's say.

03:06The desired target end state is a Mars that's green.

03:10So, it has a planetary-wide biosphere that's active, metabolically active.

03:16It has a, a thin but breathable atmosphere that is almost entirely just oxygen.

03:23So, it has to be thick enough that if you're a human and you go outside, you can breathe

03:29it and you won't die.

03:31It won't be super comfortable, but it'll be like a hundred millibar.

03:35So, about what, like fighter pilots breathe.

03:37Um, and that amount of atmosphere would protect the surface from, like, most radiation.

03:44So, it wouldn't be a problem that there's no magnetic field.

03:48Uh, backing up to how, how do you get there?

03:50Um, I think one of the main sort of insights is that, again, it used to be thought, and

03:57we've now debunked this idea, it used to be thought that you could just melt the ice cap

04:02and it's just not big enough.

04:03So, where do you get the atmosphere from?

04:05That's like the fundamental question.

04:07And I, I think the thing that changed when sort of, you know, I and a bunch of other

04:14people gathered last year at a workshop, kind of to figure this out, I think the, the new

04:19idea is to do it the way we did it on earth.

04:22So, taking you back some billions of years, um, earth didn't used to be habitable either.

04:28Um, we didn't used to have very much oxygen in the atmosphere.

04:32And what changed was photosynthesis evolved.

04:35And photosynthesis, what it does is it takes water and it splits it into oxygen, which it

04:41throws away.

04:42And then it takes the hydrogens and stores them as sugars, right?

04:45And so the arrival of photosynthetic microbes on earth is what literally split water and

04:53released the oxygen into the atmosphere.

04:55And so that's the idea is to basically take the actually quite plentiful water on Mars and

05:01use it to generate an atmosphere with photosynthesis.

05:04And again, walking one step back from that to get enough photosynthesis going, you have

05:09to grow stuff to grow stuff.

05:11You have to warm it up.

05:12And so you need, you need ways to create either structures, um, that will be warm enough to,

05:19to allow for, for plant growth, um, or other, other ways of warming things.

05:24Uh, again, Edwin, my collaborator, he works on basically like a type of glitter that reflects

05:31heat, like IR radiation specifically.

05:34So you could release it in an area and it would sort of make a little blanket to keep that

05:38area warm.

05:39Oh, and, and on this, this timeline thing, um, yeah, there's, there's, uh, I think it's

05:48again, very early to estimate, but, um, in principle, especially with some of these new warming techniques

05:56like the glitter, um, combined with the fact that we are, we have like quite heavy launch

06:03vehicles for getting to Mars.

06:04If you do the math, um, you could warm Mars quite a lot to the, to the, to the state where

06:10it can grow stuff outside in a couple of decades.

06:13So you could get to green Mars very fast.

06:17Um, it would then take longer to, to give the lifetime to generate the atmosphere.

06:24But even before you have sort of like planet wide oxygen, if you dropped a dome down, the

06:30plants could fill just the dome in a year or two with it, with enough atmosphere for you

06:35as a human to, to live in.

06:37So it's, it's, it's terraforming.

06:40It's not, it's, it like requires that we like recognize that Mars will never quite be

06:45earth.

06:45So it's like the, the end point is not identical.

06:47Right.

06:48But, but certainly something that is more amenable to life and much more amenable to human life.

07:00So.

07:01So.

07:04So.

07:06So.

07:08So.

07:09So.

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