space association speech

Sydney Space Association
Terraforming Mars - How Soon?
3500 words, 25 - 30 mins.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and thank you very much for having me as your guest tonight.
This is my second visit to the Sydney Space Association and the reception on both occasions has been very friendly.
It's a pleasure for me to be talking to you on the subject of Mars and the possibilities for terraforming it - turning it into a world capable of supporting human life.
Tonight I'd like to start by telling you a little bit about myself and then move onto the history of Mars exploration.
I'd then like to look at how soon we can expect to get humans on Mars and finally look at the options for terraforming the planet.
My background is in journalism, rather than space science.
I have been a journalist now for 15 years and I've worked on The Sun-Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald and for a number of trade, regional and suburban papers.
For the past two years I've had the pleasure of editing the science page - or Discovery page - for The Sun-Herald.
I say the pleasure because science and space have been interests of mine since I was child. As a boy and in my teens I used to devour science fiction from Isaac Asimov to John Wyndam.
And I loved all the great space programs of the era, Star Trek, Space 1999, UFO, the Carl Sagan specials and Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of...
I'm still a big science fiction fan and recently I've been re-reading some classics - HG Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle as well as a collection of 1940s sci fi works.
The past two years have been a good time to be writing about science and space.
I've had the opportunity to use my column to write about the Deep Impact comet mission; the Cassini probe to Saturn's moon Titan; the Ansari X-prize for commerical space flights and the ill-fated Genesis sample return mission.
We've also had the, again ill-fated, launch of a solar sail trial and plans by American billionaire Robert Bigelow for a space hotel.
I have been priviledged to speak extensively on a couple of occasions to Australian astronaut Dr Andy Thomas, both before the flight of Discovery and on his return.
On the non-space side I've written about shark-shaped submarines, cloning neanderthal man and the science of winning a football tipping competitions.
In March of this year I reported on plans by a NASA academic published in the Journal of Geophysical Research to create a habitable atmosphere for Mars, using greenhouse gases
I'll come back to that later.
I know I'm speaking to a group that's very knowlegable on the subject of space, but please allow me to recap a little bit about what we know about Mars.
The planet was named after the Roman god of war and has intrigued human beings since the dawn of civilisation and beyond.
It is the fourth planet from the Sun with a surface area about one quarter that of Earth's and about one tenth the mass. It has two moons Phobios and Deimos and the Martian day is roughly as long as the Earth's - a little over 24 hours.
Mars has a relatively thin atmosphere, made up mostly of carbon dioxide with a little argon, nitrogen and oxygen. Air pressure is roughly one per cent that on earth, gravity is roughly one third that on earth.
Mars receives about 43 per cent of the sunshine earth gets orbits the sun at a distance of 228 million kilometres.
There are no oceans, but there is evidence of frozen water. Surface temperatures don't get much above about 20 degrees celcius and can plunge as low as -120 degrees. The average temperature is about minus 63 C.
In the Winter months when temperatures fall, up to 25 per cent of the atmospheric CO2 freezes around the poles into sheets metres thick.
It's not the sort of place you'd want to take your Christmas vacation. And not, at first glance, the sort of place you'd suspect could host human life.
In the early days of modern astronomy there were several misconceptions about the planet.
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli declared at the end of 19th century that Mars was covered with a series of channels or canals, a idea which an American colleague Percival Lowell picked up and ran with. Lowell supposed the shapes he saw were the work of an advanced civilisation, far beyond that on earth.
We know now they were both wrong and the canals were the result of an ocular aberation
It was also supposed changes in the colour of the planet were the result of plant life and harvests. We know now they are the result of normal atmospheric changes related to the seasons.
Our understanding of Mars really exploded in the 1960s with the advent of space probes which allowed us a close up look at the planet.
However, as many of you will know, getting a craft to Mars is no easy feat and about two thirds of all probes sent to the planet either didn't make it or malfunctioned on arrival.
The East-West space race drove early Mars exploration at a frantic rate.
The Soviets were the first to give it a shot, sending two probes towards Mars in 1960. Both failed to arrive.
They tried again in 1962 with three probes, again without success.
In 1964 the Americans tried with two Mariner spacecraft.
The first failed, but the second Mariner 4 made the eight-month journey to the red planet, flying by in 1965 and giving us our first close-up view of another planet.
Subsequent probes, when they didn't break down or miss the planet altogether, managed to attain orbit around the planet.
In 1971 the Soviets managed to put a lander, Mars 3, on the surface of the planet, although it only functioned for a few seconds.
The American Viking program was the breakthrough in terms of exploring the surface of Mars.
In 1976 two Viking lander modules made soft landings on Mars, returning the first colour images and detailed scientific information.
I still remember as a young boy in the 1970s seeing the images of strikingly red, barren landscape and being filled with wonder.
More recently we've had a host of successful missions filling in gaps in our knowlege about Mars.
The Mars Global Surveyor has studied the entire Martian surface; Mars Pathfinder deployed a ground-breaking rover; the European space agency's Mars Express confirmed the presence of water ice and carbon dioxide at the north pole; the Mars exploration Rovers have proved resounding successes finding evidence suggesting the presence of liquid water in Mars' past.
But where are we headed with Mars in the future? And how long before man touches down on the planet in person?
A number of nations and organisations are eyeing off the red planet with the thought of further exploration, including a possible manned mission.
I'm sure all of you will be aware of George W. Bush's landmark Vision for Space Exploration address last year.
In it the president re-asserted America's intention for manned exploration of the universe, indicating NASA would return to the moon sometime between 2015 and 2020. We now have the firmer date of 2018 for the moon mission.
While President Bush spoke of travelling to Mars, he did not give a timetable for starting the mission.
But NASA officials indicated to journalists at the time of the President's speech such a mission could take place some time after 2030.
In the meantime NASA will be launching another lander mission to Mars in 2007.
The Americans expect to launch their first sample return mission - collecting samples from the surface of the planet and returning them to earth - in 2014, a little under a decade.
Of course, the plans may change along with governments and the economic position of the United States. It is feared, for example, funding the rebuilding of areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina may eat into funds for space.
The European Space Agency has been a little more bold in nominating its time frame for a manned mission to Mars.
Under the Aurora exploration program the agency hopes to carry out a manned mission to the moon in 2024 to demonstrate life support and habitation technologies.
It hopes to send an automatic mission to Mars in 2026 to test the phases of its planned human mission.
This will unfold in two phases starting in 2030 and 2033.
Bolder and faster still are the plans adocated by the Mars Society.
Founded in 1998 by aerospace engineeer and author Dr Robert Zubrin, the society advocates an economical and fast-tracked Mars landing.
It believes a manned Mars mission could be achieved in 10 years and at a cost in today's Australian dollars of about $45 billion.
While it's unlikely the plan called Mars Direct will happen any time soon it gives us a pretty good idea of how a Mars mission may unfold.
The proposal involves sending an unmanned earth return vehicle to Mars using a standard launch rocket. On board would be hydrogen a chemical plant and a small nuclear reactor.
After eight months the craft would land on the planet's surface and begin work, using the hydrogen it carried in combination with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to produce methane and oxygen propellants. These would be used to return the craft to earth at the end of its mission.
26 months after the launch of the first mission a second vehicle incorporating a Mars Habitation unit would be launched carrying a crew of four.
After a six-month voyage, in which artificial gravity was maintained, the crew would touch down on the planet surface close to the ERV.
The crew would then undertake 18 months of scientific research using fuel supplies generated by the first vehicle before using it for the return journey to earth.
After analysing the Mars Direct plan, NASA formulated a possible mission scenario of its own which it called the Mars Reference Mission, or affectionately Mars Semi Direct. It alters the Mars Society plan in that it involves sending a crew of six instead of four and parks the earth return vehicle in orbit over Mars rather than on its surface, but in many respects it is similar.
Whatever the model is eventually used and whichever space agency achieves the feat, I think you'll agree it will be an amazing day when man finally steps foot on the Mars. I was born in October 1969 and so I missed the moon landing. But I imagine humans will experience a similar feeling of awe some time after 2030 when we touch down on this foreign world, millions of kilometres from our own.
Where we go from the first landing will depend on a range of factors: economic, political, ethical.
I personally believe we should go onto establish a colony on the planet for several reason.
Many of these were beautifully expressed by leading scientists, including Freeman Dyson, when approached by Space.com in 2001.
Firstly we have an obligation as human beings to ensure the survival of our species. Life on earth is balanced precariously and anything from a comet strike to nuclear conflict could extinguish life here. Establishing life on other planets ensures such an event will not be the end of the human species.
Secondly we have the potential to spread life and beauty throughout the universe. Colonising Mars could also have economic benefits.
With overcrowding a constant worry on earth, finding alternate homes for mankind could reduce stresses on our environment.
Finally to aspire to colonise the solar system provides entertainment, inspiration and hope to the people of earth.
If we do decide to maintain our presence on Mars its likely that we would initially build up a small base, linking together various habitats sent up on successive missions to create a human-safe haven.
Over time our presence on Mars would become more self sufficient, relying less on supplies carried from earth and more on provisions grown or created on the planet.
Greenhouses could be established to produce food from the Martian soil using specially-bred crops.
Greater self-sustainability could allow greater numbers of people.
Some visions for increasingly larger human bases on Mars include using inflatable habitats.
Others propose using existing structures for human environments such as sealing off lava tubes. Because Martian gravity is lower than that on earth these tubes are sizable and capable of housing communities. Other plans still propose capping craters to create a pressurised, oygenated environment.
Eventually, if colonisation proves successful and we wish to extend our presence on Mars we may some very significant decisions to make.
Firstly whether we should terraform mars - turn it into a planet that better suits our needs and can better support a human population.
And if we decide to go ahead with terraforming what method we will use.
Advocates of terraforming say it is human kind's right to alter the world to make it more suitable to us, as we have done on earth.
Terraforming would make Mars a more receptive environment to our kind and allow us to breed in greater numbers.
But critics say we have no right to drastically alter another pristine environment.
The debate will become more heated if it turns out there is even microbial life on Mars.
In turning Mars into a planet that better suits us we may make it a toxic environment for its native life forms. Do we have that right?
For me it would depend somewhat on the sophistication of the life.
A simple bacteria, which we could preserve, catalogue and maintain for posterity, might be a life form we would consider pushing aside for the greater good of mankind.
The more complex the life we potentially find on Mars the harder it is to make a case for altering the environment.
But in the case of a threat to the earth, I imagine most of us would agree humans should come first.
One alternative is terraforming is parraterraforming - the creation of massive enclosed artificial spaces across the surface of mars.
Much like in Canada where cities are built underground to allow humans to survive the harsh winter months, enormous human spaces could be built to shelter us from the Martian conditions. The film Total Recall portrayed this.
Another could be to genetically alter humans rather than the martian environment.
It may be easier in the future to change our make up so we don't require conditions currently found on earth.
If we do decide to go down the terraforming route, there are several hurdles to overcome
The temperature must be raised; the atmosphere needs to be thickened; liquid water needs to be made available; cosmic radiation needs to be reduced; and oxygen must be increased in the atmosphere .
The two most important steps are thickening the atmosphere and increasing the temperature on Mars.
Almost all modern terraforming methods propose doing this through something called the runaway greenhouse effect. It's linked to the problems we're having on earth with global warming.
For Mars the runaway greenhouse effect means increasing the amount of greenhouse gases - such as carbon dioxide and chloroflurocarbons - in the atmosphere.
These gases trap the heat of the sun, which in turn heats up the atmopshere.
On Mars a warmer atmosphere would melt frozen carbon dioxide which would then become a gas.
This gas would be taken up into the atmosphere in turn producing more heat. And so the process feeds off itself and the atmosphere becomes thicker and warmer.
Five of the main methods for kick-starting the effect are:
1. Placing orbital mirrors in space near Mars;
2. Setting up factories of the surface to produce chloroflurocarbons
3. Importing ammonida rich objects onto Mars
4. Darkening the reflective martina surface with organisms such as algae
5. Detonating nuclear weapons on the poles
The mirror method would see future scientists take an ultra light reflective material - such the Mylar being used by NASA in experiments- and create a massive mirror or array of mirrors some 200,000 kilometres from Mars. The mirror, which would be hundreds of kilometres across - would reflect the light from the sun back towards Mars, raising of its surface by several degrees. This would release frozen carbon dioxide which would kickstart the greenhouse effect.
Supporters of this plan say the mirror could be made from materials found in space or on Mars' moons.
The second major method would be to establish massive greenhouse gas factories on the surface of Mars.
Supporters of this plan say the factories could be constructed on Mars and would pump out the most powerful greenhouse gases - chloroflurocarbons. Again this would kickstart the runaway greenhouse effect, thickening the atmosphere and warming the surface.
The downside of the plan would be the ozone layer above Mars would be destroyed by the gases, as it is on earth. Further engineering may be neccessary to remedy this problem.
Robert Zubrin from the Mars Society has advocated a third method of starting the greenhouse effect.
Ammonia is a powerful greenhouse gas and it is likely large amounts of it have been stockpiled on asteroid sized objects orbiting the solar system.
Zubrin proposes attaching nuclear thermal rocket engines to these asteroids and directing them to Mars.
There they would either be impacted onto the planet surface or aerobraked to allow them to release their ammonia into the atmosphere.
The asteroids would also add to the mass of the planet. Again the additional gases would stimulate the greenhouse effect.
Another option is to change the albedo or reflectiveness of the martian surface using living organisms.
Dark microbial lichens for example, capable of living on Mars, could potentially be introduced to blacken the planet's surface. Bcause dark colours absorb more heat, the temperature of the planet could be raised.
A final extreme solution is to bombard Mars with nuclear weapons.
If the detonated on the polar regions, these could melt vast quantities of water and frozen carbon dioxide. The gases produced would thicken the atmosphere and the dust generated would cover the Martian surface, decreasing it reflectivity.
The detonation of additional nuclear weapons underneath the surface would heat the crust and help release further supplies of carbon dioxide.
Advocates of the nuclear plan say it could help rid earth of its ageing stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
But critics are against the contamination of mars with nuclear waste and the destruction of its environment.
In theory any of these options could progress towards becoming a planet far more like earth.
However atmospheric fine tuning would be neccessary to increase oxygen levels.
Whatever option we ultimately chose, if we do indeed chose to go ahead with terraforming, the process of change will take thousands, probably tens of thousands of years.
Our grandchildren and their grandchildren will never see a terraformed Mars.
But it's amazing thought to consider how the planet may one day look millennia from now.
Instead of a sterile, airless cold world, imagine a place capable of sustaining life, with cities and lakes and human activity.
Imagine fields growing Martian crops to sustain the population and whole generations of human beings born on a planet other than earth.
It's an exciting concept and if we chose to continue terraforming as a way of colonising the solar system there are other options.
Venus, the second planet from the sun, could be made suitable for human life under plans proposed by some scientists.
The main issues on that planet are the extreme heat generated by the intensity of the sun and the denseness of the venetian atmosphere.
Advocates of Venus colonisation say huge solar shades could constructed to reduce the amount of sunlight the planet receives.
By reducing the heat of the planet, the shades could also reverse the density of the atmosphere in a sort of reverse greenhouse effect.
Other options for terraforming include Saturn's moon Titan, Mercury, Jupiter's moon Europa and earth's moon.
And so in conclusion, if we keep heading down the track we are heading with the world's space programs, it's possible we could see our first manned mission to Mars as early 2030.
By the middle of the century and into the second half we could see increasingly sophisticated outposts on Mars, perhaps leading to a simple, but growing colony.
It's much harder to put a timeframe on if and when terraforming will occur.
But given the thought that is going into the concept today, it's likely that more sophisticated techniques for adapting Mars for our purposes will emerge over the next decade.
I envy our descendents who one day may be able to breathe in a lungful of Martian air, stroll beneath a Martian sky and raise kids on the red planet.
Thank you.