Terraforming
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Here's my newest edition to the site. enjoy!

What is terraforming? Well, terraforming a world means transforming it into a living, habitable planet, with a breathable atmosphere and a bearable temperature. By altering conditions on Mars, we could kill off any 'native' life there which is the major concern. However, the difficulty of killing all the life on Mars is close to impossible. Anything we can do to Mars only scratches the surface – we do not alter the rock down to dozens of kilometres below. We cannot do that, and thus, we cannot kill the life, which is most probably in the form of microbes, since if there are microbes, they will be buried many kilometres below the surface. This, however, is not a perfect scenario since preferably we wouldn't want to kill any microbes at all.

So, how would we terraform Mars? It sounds like a momentous task when you consider it. Mars has an average surface temperature of minus 60ºC, and so to make it viable for plant and human life you would need to raise that to above freezing, to roughly 5ºC. And of course you would need an atmosphere to breathe. This would require heating up the entire planet by 65ºC, and forming an atmosphere consisting of trillions of cubic metres of air. It is nothing short of an incredible task, but we plan ahead, and we've got a lot of time.

Currently, the agreed plan produced by planetary scientist Dr. Chris McKay proposes to manufacture and release large quantities of greenhouse gases on Mars. This would trap light from the sun in the Martian atmosphere, and heat up the surface to an average of 0ºC and beyond through the process of global warming. However, it won't just be these man-made greenhouse gases doing the job.

As the greenhouse gases raise the average temperature to minus 20ºC, carbon dioxide ice at the poles and in the soil would sublime from a solid to a gas, and so increase atmospheric pressure. Since carbon dioxide is also a greenhouse gas, this would have the additional effect of increasing the global warming process.

When the temperature reaches 0ºC, large amounts of water ice at the poles and in aquifers would melt, establishing a hydrological cycle and releasing water as a gas into the atmosphere (water is a greenhouse gas as well). Finally, genetically engineered microbes could be released to establish a biosphere and produce oxygen. And the timeline for this? Fifty years. Only seven times as long as it took to build the Channel Tunnel from Britain to France.

Once the microbes are released, they begin to change the regolith (Martian soil), allowing, around 25 years later, lichens and mosses to become established. After 25 further years, flowering plants would grow.

The concept has been agreed to be scientifically sound, although I won’t pretend that the actual execution will be so easy. There is also understandably a great deal of controversy over exactly how quickly terraformation can be carried out. Since we've never attempted it before we can't make many assumptions. Some, like Chris McKay, believe that the whole process (from start to plants on the surface) would take just 100 years (growing trees and other large plants would of course add several decades to that timescale). Other feel that this estimate is wildly optimistic and say it could take upwards of 1000 years to one million years. After all, we know that it took millions of years for our biosphere to be generated.

While it is generally accepted that it is possible to terraform Mars, it still needs to be proved that we should terraform Mars. There will be some who say that it isn’t our right to change Mars, that we should leave it as it is - after all, we've made a complete mess of the Earth, who are we to think that we can do better with Mars? In addition, there is the question of native Martian life that we raised at the beginning of this section.

Others (the majority) respond by saying that it is for the survival of the human race that we change Mars. We, humanity, have always changed our environments to suit our needs – we build houses, we dam rivers, we create farms. We do this because we have to. As a member of the Mars Society wrote, "We are the custodians of life. This is an awesome power and even greater responsibility. As custodians, we have the responsibility to enhance, preserve, and promote life, and what better way to do it than to revive a dead world."

Mars wasn’t always a dead world, that’s why we talk of reviving it. Recent information from the Mars Pathfinder probe and the Global Surveyor satellite shows evidence that there once was an active hydrosphere on Mars, with signs of weathering and water channels.

By terraforming Mars, we will can ensure the continuation of our species, our expansion and our growth. We would go to Mars for our survival – should anything happen on Earth, there will always be people left on Mars. We won’t be destroying Mars – Mars is being changed as we speak, as meteorites hit it. Should we try to stop all the meteorites from changing Mars? No, because it is natural. Once, billions of years ago, Mars was a planet of water. We can restore Mars back to that state.

That isn't to say that as soon as we set foot on Mars we will begin the terraformation process. Even the most fervent terraformers believe that Mars should be carefully studied for a number of decades so that we can learn about its surface and other properties before they are destroyed forever by terraformation. This 'grace period' could last for decades or centuries, but for as long as humans are on Mars, terraformation will take place whether we like it or not. A human colony will always try to improve conditions for itself and no matter how hard it tries, it will always end up altering the environment around it.

neat
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Name: Mike Kennedy
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