A Scientist Has an Explosive Plan to Terraform Mars. It’s So Wild That It Might Just Work.

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• If humans have any hope of establishing a long-term colony on Mars, we’ll likely need to alter the planet’s atmosphere to make it more hospitable.

• One part of this plan would require increasing the planet’s atmospheric pressure, and one scientist suggests that capturing celestial objects from the Kuiper Belt—which are full of the necessary light elements required for this process—and smashing them into Mars could theoretically work.

• The plan is full of dizzying engineering challenges and scientific uncertainty, chief among them being the unstable nature of these icy bodies as they warm up on their approach to the inner Solar System.

Putting humans on Mars has long been the dream of scientists, sci-fi writers, and (recently) politicians. But the challenge of establishing a long-term colony beyond just a small scientific outpost is extremely daunting. For example, Mars is too cold for us humans, and previous NASA studies suggest that current technology isn’t up to the task of warming it up via terraforming. Elon Musk has considered more evocative solutions—such as nuking the red planet’s ice caps—while other scientists have pondered more subtle approaches, like releasing reflective nanoparticles into the atmosphere.

But temperature is only part of the problem—Mars’ atmosphere is incredibly thin, meaning that it’s also low-pressure. This is a problem for a species that’s roughly 65 percent water, because on Mars, our blood would instantly boil if exposed to the planet’s atmosphere. So, in other words, Mars needs lots of gas to bring up its atmospheric pressure, and the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Leszek Czechowski offered an explosive solution at the 56^th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held this past March in Texas.

As on Earth, where average atmospheric pressure clocks in at around 101.3 kilopascals (kPa), areas of Mars experience differing levels of atmospheric pressure. The peak of Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the Solar System) experiences only 72 pascals (Pa) of pressure. Hellas Planitia (the lowlands of Mars), on the other hand, experiences a full 1.16 kPa, making it the most likely location of a future human colony. But because you need at least 6.25 kPa of pressure for your blood not to boil, a future human-inhabited Mars will need even more atmospheric pressure, and Czechowski has a wild idea about where to get it.

“Creating an atmosphere that would allow human life is possible by importing matter from other celestial bodies,” Czechowski wrote in a short paper submitted for the conference. “We should use Kuiper Belt (KB) bodies for terraforming.”

The idea is that a future, more sophisticated human race could develop thermonuclear reactors and ion engines capable of guiding icy bodies from the Kuiper Belt (which begins just beyond the orbit of Neptune) on a multi-decadal journey to Mars, where their impact on the surface could eventually atmospheric conditions more suitable for humans. In the paper, Czechowski also considered the nearby main asteroid belt, as well as the further afield Oort Cloud, as possible resources. But the former is largely depleted of light elements, and the latter is simply too far away—it’d likely take 15,000 years to get celestial bodies from the Oort Cloud to Mars, whereas collecting Kuiper Belt objects would only take 29 to 63 years, Czechowski estimates.

“Celestial bodies orbiting far from the Sun have large amounts of volatile substances, including water, CO₂, nitrogen, CO, and some organic compounds (e.g.,CH₄),” Czechowski wrote. “Some of these compounds seem harmful to life. In the terraforming plans proposed here, we envision an interim stage in which (after sufficient amounts of the above compounds have been brought to Mars) specially bred (or genetically engineered) organisms will release oxygen from H₂O and CO₂.”

As you can guess, this plan is pretty energy-hungry, and Czechowski admits it’d require the amount of energy that all of humanity currently expends over a six-month to several-year period (depending on the particular iteration of the plan). There are also a few other hang-ups, as these Kuiper Belt bodies can become unstable during their journey toward the inner Solar System, and such a catastrophic impact on Mars could instigate earthquakes and volcanism.

It’s definitely a difficult plan, but then again, no one ever said terraforming Mars would be easy.

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