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,
00:14to tell us about how this might take place.
00:17Stick around and find out.
00:20So, 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.
01:39You know, where would the water vapor go, stuff 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, you have to simulate new effects.
02:10So, yeah, some of that is happening, which is very cool.
02:14Very neat.
02:16So, 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,
02:34but usually on the scale of centuries to millennia.
02:38You talk about ways of going after this in decades, which is, I think, the revolutionary
02:44part of this.
02:45So, could you kind of walk us through how you would do it?
02:48Yeah, 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.
03:05The 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 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 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.
03:47Uh, backing up to 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
04:01cap and 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.
04:41And 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.
04:56And 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.
05:10To grow stuff, you have to warm it up.
05:12And so, you need, you need ways to create either structures, um, that will be warm enough
05:18to, to 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
05:37that area warm.
05:40Oh, 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
06:10where
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 that atmosphere.
06:23But even before you have sort of like planet-wide oxygen, if you dropped a dome down, the plants
06:30could fill just the dome in a year or two with a, with enough atmosphere for you as
06:35a human to, to live in.
06:38So, 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 Earth.
06:45So, it's like the, the endpoint is not identical, right?
06:47But, but certainly something that is more amenable to life and much more amenable to human life.
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