

Darwins artificial ecosystem could be key to colonising Mars - KoZeN
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903

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avar
What exactly about this suggestion for colonizing Mars has been falling on
"deaf" ears, who's been suggesting that we "improve [the] environment by
force" on Mars?

The few plans I've seen involve trying to terraform Mars slowly by introducing
something like genetically modified high-altitude lichen and going from there.
Of course in the process of doing so we'd use the organisms that work, not
"force" the things we wish would work.

The challenges of terraforming Mars will be very different than dropping a few
trees on Ascension Island, which is what the Royal Navy did.

As an aside, I recommend the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson for an
overview of how Mars might be incrementally terraformed through that method.

~~~
arethuza
Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" is pretty good too (I found the chemistry in it
quite fascinating).

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Mars-Robert-
Zubrin/dp/068483550...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Mars-Robert-
Zubrin/dp/0684835509)

However, these days if I ever did end up on Mars (unlikely, I know) I'd
probably me a Red rather than a Green.

~~~
avar
Personally I don't see much reason why we shouldn't aggressively terraform
Mars, including bombarding it with ice-rich asteroids to thicken the
atmosphere.

Having to walk around in space suits indefinitely if you want to go outside
sucks, even just getting the atmosphere to a point where you won't suffer
bruising from decompression if you go out with a face mask would be a huge
improvement.

Why would you want to keep it as it is?

~~~
davidw
> Why would you want to keep it as it is?

To learn as much as possible before you irreversibly change it.

~~~
avar
> To learn as much as possible before you irreversibly change it.

That's valuable too. But Mars's main value to humanity will be as a second
home, not as a geologic curiosity.

We'll be much more secure as a species if we have a second planet where we can
walk outside and breathe the air, even if the temperature will be stuck at
~250K.

~~~
Oxryly
Get a head start ruining a second planet because we're going to finish ruining
our first pretty soon..? ;)

~~~
sigstoat
So... we ruined this planet by making it less habitable, and we'd ruin Mars by
making it more habitable?

I take it we're supposed to leave the entirety of the universe exactly as it
happened to be before we realized that we're capable of rearranging very tiny
little bits of it?

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three14
It's certainly interesting, but the article itself could be better written.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Mountain> implies that it wasn't really
Darwin's efforts, nor is it a true example of an artificial ecosystem.

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mkramlich
Key difference: one is an island on Earth, the other is Mars.

------
probablyrobots
link to google maps
[http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=-7.943126,-14.364...](http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=-7.943126,-14.364624&spn=0.131421,0.219727&t=h&z=13)

~~~
electromagnetic
link to Green Mountain photo: <http://www.panoramio.com/photo/4235237>

(thanks to hitting street view on the google maps link)

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rbanffy
What a wonderful story. Thanks, KoZen.

~~~
KoZeN
Umm, thanks?!

Not exactly hackerish or star-upish I know but I was going along this
guideline:

 _anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

I find it fascinating that as a race we have reached a point where we are
seriously discussing the possibility of making another planet hospitable
enough to maintain human life.

~~~
rbanffy
There are off-topics and off-topics. Yours was one of the good ones. ;-)

------
ithkuil
"to explore .... and boldly go ..."

does this count as split infinitive?

~~~
mbyrne
Yes, but split infinitives are a more powerful and better form of expression.

To not split an infinitive is to create a weaker and less coherent thought
stream.

------
mkramlich
After we bring "climate change" to Mars let's also bring huge government
debts, religion, pollution, dictatorship and WMD's! It will be awesome.

Or, alternately, we could try to fix/solve/eliminate those things before
spreading to other planets.

~~~
electromagnetic
Well detonating a series of thermonuclear warheads under the Martian polar
caps would certainly help distribute CO2 and water ice into the upper
atmosphere and to the equatorial regions where the ices have the potential to
melt. What an excellent suggestion, I'm putting you up for a Nobel Prize!

Please, you have a high enough Karma to know not to make asinine BS posts. We
don't give a crap about religion or politics here except when it's relevant,
and no where in this article was there a discussion on politics, religion or
any of the other topics you noted.

Despite the fact that watching rapid ecological changes on another planet
would give us vast amounts of data on changes in environmental patterns and
countless information on how climate change might affect our planet.
Terraforming Mars is important beyond our species pathetic problems, in that
our expansion to other planets might give our species the longevity to solve
those problems than get hit by a rogue asteroid, comit, or other such object
we've yet to see.

~~~
mkramlich
Some of your remarks are rude. In contrast, my own comment was neither rude,
"disallowed" or inappropriate. It was my honest opinion and expressed both
concisely and impartially. Just because religion wasn't mentioned elsewhere in
the thread does not mean I can't mention it. It's on topic in that it's
related to bringing changes to another planet.

I'm totally down with the idea of getting humans onto other planets, at the
very least to make sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket. I'm just
saying I'd prefer that we resolve these other issues first. Just because you
may disagree with it, doesn't mean my comment deserved to be down-voted into
karma penalization territory. Groupthink, indeed...

