Mars is a planet located next to Earth, but it is not a suitable environment for humans to live. What would be needed to perform terraforming that transforms Mars into an Earth-like environment?
Mars is dry and has no soil suitable for growing crops. The atmosphere is thin, difficult to breathe and always bombarded with radiation. To turn Mars into a habitable planet, it is necessary to create an Earth-like atmosphere with an average temperature of 14 degrees Celsius and an atmospheric pressure of 1 bar, with 21% oxygen, 79% nitrogen, and a few percent carbon dioxide. In addition, the sea and rivers must be created to provide rich soil for life. Air production or soil formation is quite difficult, but it is said that it can be facilitated using a giant laser. It is said that the Martian subsurface and polar ice caps contain water, and in sufficient quantities to create shallow seas. In igneous minerals, large quantities of oxygen and carbon dioxide are combined.
In order to release this moisture and gas into the air, it is necessary to melt the surface of Mars at a high temperature equal to that of the sun through thermal decomposition. Currently, the most powerful laser on Earth is the ELI-NP, which can irradiate a 10 petawatt output beam in one trillionth of a second.
Melting the surface of Mars requires continuous operation of a laser with twice the power of the ELI-NP, and the ELI-NP lacks power. The simplest method is to form a mirror column 11 times the size of the US in space and collect and irradiate enough sunlight to melt Mars.
In fact, when the laser is irradiated on the surface of Mars, it melts 8m of the surface, generating 750kg of oxygen and 50kg of carbon dioxide per cubic meter. After laser irradiation, elemental materials such as silicon and iron fall as snow, and underground moisture or polar ice caps become water vapor, forming clouds and raining all over the planet. This rain has the effect of removing harmful gases and harmful elements such as chlorine from the atmosphere, resulting in the formation of oceans with a higher salt concentration than Earth.
It is said that it is necessary to continuously irradiate the laser for 50 years to create an atmosphere containing oxygen. However, the atmosphere formed is almost 100% oxygen, making it difficult to breathe and highly flammable, making life difficult for humans. To create an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, nitrogen would have to be transported from Saturn’s moon Titan to Mars, covered with a nearly 100% nitrogen atmosphere.
Transporting nitrogen would require the construction of a large-scale factory that would suck the atmosphere onto Titan, compress it, and send it to Mars. Formation of an Earth-like atmosphere would take over 100 years, starting with terraforming. Even if the atmosphere and the sea are completed in this way, there is no life like the desert, and it is necessary to create a new biosphere.
First, they spread phytoplankton in the sea. Afterwards, it breeds zooplankton and fish to create a marine ecosystem. On the other hand, terrestrial plant propagation is quite difficult. Ground-level nutrients are needed for plant growth, but there are no nutrients on the surface of Mars. Therefore, it is necessary to grow nitrogen-fixing bacteria and make plant nutrition with Martian mud.
It will take hundreds of years for Mars to become a stable environment, and finally an environment in which humans can live. However, unlike Earth, the Mars core has no magnetic field, so it is difficult to protect itself from solar wind or cosmic rays. Therefore, a huge superconducting ring powered by nuclear power must be installed far ahead of Mars to receive and flow the solar wind sideways. Terraforming Mars like this requires vast amounts of work and resources, and can take hundreds to thousands of years.
