I’m just home from Hawaii and the West Coast Science Fiction Convention. Bridget Landry, Hugh S. Gregory, and Ctein updated us at a panel discussion: "The Year in Space."
Ctein has a lot to say about Mars and water. I’ve oversimplified his picture, no doubt, but it’s plausible:
Any underground water is kept liquid by overlying pressure and Mars’s internal heat. Where there are openings to the surface, they’re plugged with ice. Growing pressure or tectonic action might cause water to burst through into the near-vacuum. Then we get to guess how far it can run downhill while simultaneously boiling and freezing.
SPACE.com shows
pictures of regions around a crater rim where liquid seems to have flowed. Notice that nobody has actually seen water.
Implications?
Life has been found everywhere on Earth that we find water. Frozen, boiling, fresh or briny, something loves it.
Would this carry over to Mars?
Deuterium ratios suggest that Mars has kept more of its water than was previously thought. The options for evolution look sparse, but if a life-bearing meteor from Earth smacked deep enough through the Martian crust a billion years ago . . . yeah, I could write that.
But it’s fiction.
From the Dean Drive (a reactionless motor) through education-by-ingestion (information transfer through feeding educated flatworms to each other) to plants that talk back (gah!) to cold fusion, we’ve seen too many miracles disappear on close examination.
Still, assume it’s true. What does a wet Mars do for us?
We don’t need motivation. We already wanted Mars. NASA’s budget would go up; they’re willing. To persuade Congress . . . look, these same career politicians were told that the ozone layer was about to break up over the United States, just before a NASA budget decision. They’ve seen decades of this crap. Water on Mars?
Forget motivation. Does this help us colonize Mars?
We can’t count on finding useful water: water for drinking, or reaction mass for a fission rocket, or water to electrolyze for breathing-air, or for oxygen and hydrogen for fuel. The first humans on Mars would be crazy not to bring their own. From that viewpoint, Mars is no closer.
In the intermediate term, drilling for water would make it way easier to found a colony.
In the long term…?
Look, we’ve found marks around a few craters. Water is being surmised; life is wild speculation; civilization on Mars is a daydream given to me by my Uncle Larry, an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. We haven’t found the Mars of our childhood. We won’t.
We need to build it.
To the man who holds a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I’ve been working on terraforming lately.
Terraform: to reshape an extraterrestrial environment to match the Earth. More practically, create a habitable environment starting with…well, Mars. Terraformers all seem to think Mars is their easiest handy target.
They’re probably right, but – let us assume power in huge amounts becomes cheap enough to heat a world. Fusion might do that. Then reaching Mars becomes easy, because heat can become thrust for vehicles, but water becomes the bottleneck. Shall we look again at Titan or Europa?
Tides keep Europa’s deep water liquid. Ganymede is further out from Jupiter: decreased tides, and less infrared radiation too. Ganymede, though largely water, is probably solid. Good for mounting a mucking great rocket motor. What would you get if you dropped Ganymede into Europa?
Or Europa into Mars? With sufficiently powerful motors, this might become as easy as dropping a lesser mass in comets, and much faster. The comets do the job, but it takes centuries longer to find and move them; and though you must whack the planet with the same gigatonnage of water, Europa’s rocky core would bring Mars’s gravity closer to Earth’s.
If we can’t terraform Mars, all else is also beyond our ambitions.
So the second question is, how much water must we add to Mars to get something close enough to the nicer parts of Earth, comfortable enough to live on? How much water is already part of Mars? Don’t worry about whether it’s liquid. It will be when we’re ready to use it, after we finish pounding and heating the planet.
From this viewpoint, whether water on Mars is liquid now doesn’t matter at all.
But the first question is, where are we getting our arrogance?
If the Environmental Protection Agency isn’t screaming at us, it’s because they don’t yet take us seriously. Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of college students trying to impress each other with picket signs:
Mars could still house life. Genocide is a recently invented word, though the crime is much older. We don’t have one yet for exterminating the life of a world. I took bashing Mars with Jovian moons as an extreme case. The other end of that is, dare we dump bacteria-laden mass from our landers before we take off again?
If we flinch at making life difficult for spotted owls and spawning salmon, how can we dare do this?
How long must we study this alien world before we can be sure it doesn’t host life? We might be better off finding life, then demonstrating (via DNA and protein analysis) that it came from Earth. Life on Earth had more room to evolve; Martian life would not have survived us.
If Mars is dead, can we mess it up?
Look: for centuries we’ve studied this world. The canali aren’t there, granted; in time we’ll build them. But now we have the biggest mountain in the universe, with a crater you could house the Hawaiian islands in. We have a canyon that could swallow Earth’s Grand Canyon. A vastness of crescent dunes. Polar ice flow that hasn’t been studied.
Sure we want domed cities on Mars. Yes, it would be nice to walk around on this alien land with just a mouthpiece and goggles. How much will we change Mars before we’re satisfied? Even the most limited terraforming scheme would destroy every mark we ever made on the maps of Mars.
Tell me you didn’t flinch.
I haven’t even memorized most of these features, but I’ve spent daydreaming time on Mars, and written of what I saw. All gone.
But these runnels are a hopeful sign. Water on Mars….
What do you think? Send your comments to the editor.
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