Heating up Mars

[All Seeing Eye]

Ok I was thinking about the terraforming of Mars and obviously one of the main obstacles is trying to warm up the surface, this would melt the dry ice (CO2) at the poles increasing the warming effect which would then melt the ice water under the planets surface (if there is any that is) so this got me to thinking how it could be done and I thought up an idea which I think 'could' work and might be more feasible to accomplish than building a huge mirror.
Instead of building one big mirror structure why not make hundreds of thousands of mirror plates and ship them off the Phobos and Deimos and cover the entire surface of the Marsian moons in these mirrors, the mirrors will reflect all the light hitting the moons onto the marsian surface as the moons orbit the planet.

Good idea or what!

Heck, lets throw some more asteroids into orbit around mars and stick mirrors on those too.

 

[K-Star]

Nice, but once Mars is done being heated won't it cool down to it's regular state? Or will the release of the CO2 cause a greenhouse effect?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

The release of the CO2 will indeed cause a greenhouse effect releasing the water to the surface, we can then send plant life to create an oxygen atmosphere.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

I also have an idea for terraforming Venus, we need to cool Venus down and there are two ways of doing it.

1) Drop multiple nuclear warheads on the planet surface, the explosions will cause huge amounts of dust to rise into the atmosphere preventing the sun from reaching the surface and thus stopping the runaway greenhouse effect.

2) Same as option one but instead of using nukes we re-direct a few large asteroids to strike the surface of Venus.

 

[ex nihilo]

Fire said:
I also have an idea for terraforming Venus, we need to cool Venus down and there are two ways of doing it.

1) Drop multiple nuclear warheads on the planet surface, the explosions will cause huge amounts of dust to rise into the atmosphere preventing the sun from reaching the surface and thus stopping the runaway greenhouse effect.

2) Same as option one but instead of using nukes we re-direct a few large asteroids to strike the surface of Venus.

Very little light reaches the surface of Venus; thus, this “solution” is inapplicable. The problem with Venus is the diametric opposite of Mars – too much atmosphere. In order to make Venus habitable would require some sort of method that could lock the carbon content of the atmosphere into the planet’s crust – this is no mean feat, and, more than likely, less feasible than “terraforming” Mars. Even if seeding the atmosphere with some sort of chemical that would draw the carbon out as a fine settling dust, you are left with the daunting task of planetary wide encapsulation. Let’s not even begin to talk about increasing the speed of Venus’s rotation to something closely resembling Earth’s, which a plant or animal could withstand or learn to adapt to.

In the case of Mars, your “great idea” has been discussed before by people with intellects far greater than most folks that post on the TrekBBS (with the exclusion of TGT, of course), but, even so, until there is more concrete data collected on the true nature of Mars all of this theorizing is more akin to science fiction musings than real hard science. In addition, the idea of simply plopping some Earth plant life on a moisturized and warmed Mars is not that easy. There is a bit of a “chicken and egg” issue that anyone with a simple understanding of horticulture could identify in this plan. The plant life that could support the production of oxygen on the scale you are proposing are not baseline or hearty enough to survive without serious modification to the Martian environment or inclusion of imported materials, the most daunting of which is the introduction of both anaerobic and aerobic microorganisms on a planetary scale.

The best bet for introducing an oxygenated atmosphere that could eventually, after hundreds if not thousands of years, support humans in a short sleeved environment would be a marriage of mechanized and biological conversion, using automated atmosphere conversion "factories" and genetically altered plant and animal life that would be introduced in tiers of biological complexity and ability to affect the environment to benefit man.

 

[Bill Morris]

Well, once we have developed technology to produce, store, and use antimatter that would probably be needed to get travel time to and from Mars down to a tolerable level for humans, a lot of the classic ideas about terraforming might become less difficult to implement, such as diverting comets and ammonia asteroids.

 

[Spider]

What's the point to terraforming Mars? The planet is bathed in cosmic radation because it doesn't have a magnetosphere like the Earth. Any terrestrial type organism, be it plant or animal, will require shielding of some sort if you want it to live on the surface.

 

[SamuraiBlue]

Fire said:
Ok I was thinking about the terraforming of Mars and obviously one of the main obstacles is trying to warm up the surface, this would melt the dry ice (CO2) at the poles increasing the warming effect which would then melt the ice water under the planets surface (if there is any that is) so this got me to thinking how it could be done and I thought up an idea which I think 'could' work and might be more feasible to accomplish than building a huge mirror.
Instead of building one big mirror structure why not make hundreds of thousands of mirror plates and ship them off the Phobos and Deimos and cover the entire surface of the Marsian moons in these mirrors, the mirrors will reflect all the light hitting the moons onto the marsian surface as the moons orbit the planet.

Unfortunately this idea would not trap heat within the atmosphere since the light will just bounce off the surface without heat being absorbed.You'll need to direct the light and focus on a sheet of dry ice.
A more interesting way is to release fluorocarbon(CFC) gasses into the atmosphere which is said to have 200 times heat absorbtion capabilities than carbon dioxide.

 

[James Bond]

Fire said:
Heck, lets throw some more asteroids into orbit around mars and stick mirrors on those too.

You want to throw asteroids at the planet? Is that wise?

 

[Bill Morris]

How about scaling it back to having solar-powered robots fill sandbags and build bunkers, with veggies growing inside under solar-powered artificial lighting?