Thermal Terraforming

Terrafoming is the idea of changing a planet to make it habitable for humans and animals. One idea to terraform Mars is heating the planet up.

Heat terraforming has three different technique ideas:

• Greenhouse-gas producing factories on the surface of mars to warm the planet
• Huge mirrors orbiting mars reflecting light onto Mars
• Smashing asteroids full of greenhouse-gas into Mars

The idea of greenhouse gases producing factories is probably the most likely, because the mirrors would have to be larger than Lake Michigan, and truthfully, where are we going to get an asteroid?

The factories would, using greenhouse gases, would warm the planet’s atmosphere. This has happened here, but on mars this would be a good thing.

The idea of huge mirrors seems second most likely. What we would do is focus on the ice caps so we could have water. It would also warm the atmosphere somewhat, about three or four degrees each. But, the mirrors would have to have a diameter of 250 km and weigh about 200,000 tons.

The idea of an asteroid full of greenhouse gases seems unlikely to me. The process would take about 50 years to get water to cover 25% of Mars’ surface, but the asteroids being equivalent to 70 000 1-megaton H-bombs would delay humans from reaching Mars for a long time. Each asteroid would warm the planet about three degrees Celsius each.

Interesting Facts

Many stories/films have accepted the idea of terraforming, some being:

• Star Wars; Expanded Universe

• Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan and Star Trek 3: the Search for Spock

• Aliens

The idea of terraforming was created in a 1930 science fiction novel, First and Last Men, but the term was used in a 1949 novel, Seetee Shock.

One idea that hasn’t really been thought about much is that if we failed to terraform Mars correctly we could actually destroy Mars and we may not get a second chance to terraform anywhere except our own moon.