What's He Been Smoking?

Elon Musk Wants to Nuke Mars to Trigger Global Warming

Would you trust Musk with hundreds of H-bombs?

Elon Musk Wants to ‘Nuke Mars’ for Humans to Live—But There Is One Problem

Firing nuclear weapons at Mars might have been the last idea on Elon Musk’s mind before going to bed last night. “Nuke Mars!” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted Thursday night a few minutes past midnight, prompting a Twitter frenzy with over 100,000 likes by Friday morning.

 He later clarified that the plan is not to drop nuclear bombs on the surface of Mars, but in the sky above its two poles. Specifically, Musk wants to drop hydrogen bombs (which use fusion) into the atmosphere above the Martian poles every few seconds to release the carbon dioxide trapped inside Mars’ ice caps.
Because CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, the more CO2 Mars can release into the atmosphere, the warmer the planet’s surface will be. The effect is similar to how the fusion process inside the sun produces energy to keep Earth warm. …

Read more: https://observer.com/2019/08/elon-musk-nuke-mars-colonization-plan-spacex

Because no Mars post would be complete
without Dejah Thoris

The article goes on to cite a study which concludes that the plan is not feasible.

We revisit the idea of ‘terraforming’ Mars — changing its environment to be more Earth-like in a way that would allow terrestrial life (possibly including humans) to survive without the need for life-support systems — in the context of what we know about Mars today. We want to answer the question of whether it is possible to mobilize gases present on Mars today in non-atmospheric reservoirs by emplacing them into the atmosphere, and increase the pressure and temperature so that plants or humans could survive at the surface. We ask whether this can be achieved considering realistic estimates of available volatiles, without the use of new technology that is well beyond today’s capability. Recent observations have been made of the loss of Mars’s atmosphere to space by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission probe and the Mars Express spacecraft, along with analyses of the abundance of carbon-bearing minerals and the occurrence of CO2 in polar ice from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. These results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be emplaced into the atmosphere; in addition, most of the CO2 gas in these reservoirs is not accessible and thus cannot be readily mobilized. As a result, we conclude that terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.

Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6

We should at least make sure there's no native ecosystem to screw up first.



The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Katie Williams ready at The Other McCain.

Martian Oceans Making Waves

Artist's conception of Mars with ocean

Mars may have been carved up by massive ancient tsunamis

Today, Mars is either very dry, quite dry or totally dry, depending on who you ask. But while the red planet's contemporary wetness remains to be determined, scientists pretty much agree that it once had quite a bit of water on it. These lakes and rivers — massive oceans, even, according to some researchers — were lost when the planet’s atmosphere, protected by a scant magnetic field nowhere near as powerful as the one surrounding Earth, was bombarded with blistering solar wind. . .

And there was additional losses caused by meteor and asteroid strikes which literally knock the air off the planet. Not to mention that the gases get tied up in rocks on the surface, too. Why not earth? Earth is bigger, and our active plate tectonics keeps a stronger magnetic field which protects the atmosphere from the solar wind. Maybe.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, points to geologic evidence of two tsunamis — each about 3.4 billion years ago, give or take a few million, just as life was first beginning to emerge on Earth.

They believe they've found the shorelines left behind by these massive events, which may have been triggered by asteroid impacts. Waves may have reached from 100 to 400 feet high, according to lead author Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute. The first event would have covered over 300,000 square miles of the planet, and the second — which likely occurred a few million years later — reached nearly 400,000 square miles.

“So, each had roughly the combined areas of California, Nevada and Oregon," Rodriguez said.

Just coincidentally, I am currently reading Larry Niven's "Rainbow Mars", a swashbuckling account of a future earth time traveler who goes back in time to Mars to retrieve ancient Martians for the UN hereditary ruler, and finds the place crawling with Burroughs's and others ancient martians, and being sucked dry by a interstellar "hang tree," a living being(?) that lives in geosynchronous orbit, but anchors to the surface. Good yarn, so far. I recommend it.

 The two tsunamis also tell a tale of a changing climate: In between the two events, the shoreline seemingly shrank back, perhaps because the ocean began to partially freeze. The lobates left behind by the second tsunami actually seem to be waves that froze in place.

“These lobes froze on the land as they reached their maximum extent and the ice never went back to the ocean — which implies the ocean was at least partially frozen at that time,” co-author Alberto Fairén, Cornell visiting scientist in astronomy and principal investigator at the Center of Astrobiology in Madrid, said in a statement. “Our paper provides very solid evidence for the existence of very cold oceans on early Mars. It is difficult to imagine Californian beaches on ancient Mars, but try to picture the Great Lakes on a particularly cold and long winter, and that could be a more accurate image of water forming seas and oceans on ancient Mars.”

The tsunamis, of course, would be generated by asteroid strikes, one of which they believe they've spotted, a crater 19 miles wide.

The Martian Bear

and a whole bunch of other weird pictures from Mars.

Do you see it?

A Great Turn of Phrase

Andrew Klavan, on his way to praising the Matt Damon movie "Martian" as a victory for conservatism (which will no doubt hurt Matt Damon's precious feelings).

One of the toughest parts of selling the conservative message is that so often we’re for what we’re also against. For instance, I oppose racism as being anti-American and anti-God. But I also oppose the abuse of racist accusations to curtail speech and to silence opposition to statist solutions. Like Ronald Reagan, I’m in favor of a government safety net for our citizens who are in financial trouble and need help becoming self-sufficient. But I oppose buying off citizens with entitlements in order to continually increase the power of the government.

And, of course, like every thinking person, I’d like to keep our air and water clean and want all of us to use the earth with conscious care. But I despise the fear-mongering, small-minded primitivism of modern environmentalism and its superstitious juju nonsense about evil oil, “climate change” and diminishing resources.

Read it all. 

Water on Mars!

"IT'S UNAMBIGUOUS EVIDENCE THAT LIQUID WATER IS FLOWING ON MARS​."

In an article published in Nature Geoscience, a team led by Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology confirms that seasonal flows in mountainous regions of the planet correspond with the presence of briny water. The seasonal flows were first noticed in 2010, with water the strongest suspect. Spectral observations of season data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the presence of hydrated salts on the surface, or water mixing with a thick brine of salts.

These dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks called recurring
 slope lineae flowing downhill on Mars are inferred to
 have been formed by contemporary flowing water.

However, the observations don't have a "smoking gun" as to how the flows occur. Some of the hypotheses include an underground aquifer, accumulations of humidity, or possible seasonal melting, though there is a counter for each. (Like an aquifer extending into mountainous regions, possible lack of sufficient humidity, or lack of regional surface ices, respectively.) The team also is working under the idea that it could be a mix of all of these.

Of course, the question will come up: what does this mean for life on Mars? It's an incremental process to find it, first determining whether the conditions are right for it, then determining further if it's present. All Ojha says is that if there is life currently on the surface, these conditions would be the place to look.

I suspect this means that below Mars surface, where it's warmer and at higher pressure than at the surface, liquid water is rather wide spread. This would be moderately good conditions for life to evolve (or persist if introduced). The water is very salty from minerals leached out of the rock, since there's not a hydrological cycle like Earth's to concentrate the salts in the ocean, and allow fresh water to fall on the land. And some of the chemicals would be inimical to most terrestrial life (the perchlorate which apparently quite common on Mar's surface due to extreme oxidizing conditions). But life on Earth manages to get by in boiling sulfuric acid, so there's still a chance. But if we eventually find life there, it won't be Dejah Thoris:

and that's a shame.

Wombat-socho has the big list "Rule 5 Sunday: Time For The Professionals", ready at The Other McCain.

The Solar System is a Really Soggy Place

NASA: We'll find alien life in 10 to 20 years

Are we alone in the universe? Top NASA scientists say the answer is almost certainly “no.”

"I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years," Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for NASA, said at a public panel Tuesday in Washington.

"We know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology," she said.

But we lack a space program capable of delivering the scientists or the machines to the site of where we expect to find them

Jeffery Newmark, interim director of heliophysics at the agency put it this way: "It's definitely not an if, it's a when."

However, if visions of alien invasions are dancing in your head, you can let those go.

"We are not talking about little green men," Stofan said. "We are talking about little microbes."

Germs? Well that's no fun, I was hoping for sexy female aliens.

Over the course of an hourlong presentation, NASA leaders described a flurry of recent discoveries that suggest we are closer than ever to figuring out where we might find life in the solar system and beyond.

For example, Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, cited a study that analyzed the atmosphere above Mars' polar ice caps and suggests that 50% of the planet's northern hemisphere once had oceans up to a mile deep, and that it had that water for a long period of time -- up to 1.2 billion years.

"We think that long period of time is necessary for life to get more complex," Stofan said.  She added that getting human field geologists and astrobiologists on Mars would greatly improve the chances of finding fossils of past life on our nearest planetary neighbor.

I have to say that once I heard that Mars had an ocean that lasted a billion years, I dramatically increased my  estimate of the probability of finding at least fossils of old life on Mars, if not surviving microbes, possibly deep underground, where pressure and residual heat makes water far more likely to be present.

Green also described another recent study that used measurements of aurora on Jupiter's moon Ganymede to prove it has a large liquid ocean beneath its icy crust.

The findings suggest that previous ideas about where to find "habitable zones" may have been too limited. (A body considered to be in a habitable zone is not too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.)

"We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too," Green said. "We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place."

That seems like a good place to end this. Remember, the solar system is a really soggy place.

Wombat-socho of The Other McCain is on board with "Rule 5 Sunday: Not Long Before The End."

In Other World News

Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn't as far out as we used to think, with his rivers and lakes on Mars: NASA finds evidence of a vast ancient ocean on Mars

A massive ancient ocean once covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere of Mars making the planet a more promising place for alien life to have gained a foothold, NASA scientists say.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Still a very small ocean by terrestrial standards; our oceans cover 4/5ths of a larger planet, and average many thousands of meters deeper. Assuming that Earth and Mars derived from the same "star dust", they should have had similar water content to start with; why wouldn't Mars have had more? Were there much faster loss rates to begin with?

Unveiled by NASA on Thursday, the compelling evidence for the primitive ocean adds to an emerging picture of Mars as a warm and wet world in its youth, which trickled with streams, winding river deltas, and long-standing lakes, soon after it formed 4.5bn years ago.

The view of the planet’s ancient history radically re-writes what many scientists believed only a decade ago. Back then, flowing water was widely considered to have been a more erratic presence on Mars, gushing forth only rarely, and never forming long-standing seas and oceans.

But the science was settled. Until it was unsettled.

“Ultimately we can conclude this idea of an ocean covering 20% of the planet which opens the idea of habitability and the evolution of life on the planet,” said Geronimo Villanueva, the first author on the study.

The huge body of water lasted for millions of years. But over time, the Martian atmosphere thinned. The drop in pressure meant more ocean water wafted into space. The planet lost much of its insulation too. No longer warm enough to keep the water liquid, the ocean receded and eventually froze. Today, only 13% of the ocean remains, locked up the Martian polar caps.

We know that Earth and Mars have "swapped spit" via meteorites blasted from one to another; it's not much of a stretch to imagine that primitive microorganisms  living in the rocks could have been transferred from one to another, opening the possibility that we are all descended from martians.

Mystery 'noise' could be an Earth-like world: Strange signals suggest habitable planet exists 22 light years away

Astronomers believe mysterious signals - previously dismissed as stellar bursts - are coming from an Earth-like planet.

The Gliese 581d planet has conditions that could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Signals from the planet were initially discovered in 2010, but last year dismissed as noise from distant stars.Now, a further study claims that the 2014 research was based on 'inadequate analyses of the data' and that Gliese 581d does exist.

 A heavy world would hold more atmosphere, and more water changing the conditions for life significantly.  Lots of aquatic life. Could the whole surface be submerged in water? Smaller wings could life more weight, so maybe more fliers?

The new British research, however, argues the method used by the Pennsylvania team was only suitable for large planets, and that it could miss small ones like GJ 581d.

The study, by Queen Mary University, London and the University of Hertfordshire, claims to use a more accurate model on the existing data.

'The existence (or not) of GJ 581d is significant because it was the first Earth-like planet discovered in the 'Goldilocks'-zone around another star and it is a benchmark case for the Doppler technique,' said lead author, Dr Guillem Anglada-Escudé.

An exciting time to be an extra-terrestrial biologist. Just enough information to be tantalizing, and not enough to rule out much.

Wombat-socho celebrates Miss Palin's impending nuptials with "Rule 5 Sunday: Congratulations, Miss Palin!"

Cheaper to Leave Her?

Earth that is: We can terraform Mars for the same cost as mitigating climate change. Which would you rather?

One frequently quoted study of the global costs of mitigating climate change put them at around $3 trillion by 2100, with the main benefits being felt between 2100 and 2200. Here is alternative way to spend around the same amount of money with around the same timescale of payback: terraforming Mars. A standard estimate is that, for about $2-$3 trillion, in between 100 and 200 years we would be able to get Mars from its current “red planet” (dead planet) status to ” blue planet” (i.e. a dense enough atmosphere and high enough temperature for Martian water in the poles and soil to melt, creating seas) – achievable in about 100 years – and from there to microbes and algae getting us to “green planet” status within 200 to 600 years.

I think if it could have happened, it already would have.

There are two standard objections to such terraforming. First, it is said to be too expensive, altogether, to be plausible. Second, it is said to require too long a timescale to be plausible. Both of these objections appear decisively answered by climate change policies and indeed energy policies in general. Between now and the 2035 alone, global investment in energy and energy efficiency (in many cases with a many-decades payback period) is estimated at about $40 trillion, of which $6 trillion is in renewables and $1 trillion in low-carbon nuclear. We are willing to spend many trillions on projects that could take over a century to come to fruition.

Really?  I have my doubts that either estimate is very good; it seems very likely both suffer from Cheop's Law: Nothing ever gets built on time or within budget. The travel costs to Mars alone would be staggering.

New Hope for Finding Life on Mars?

From behind the Science paywall: Search for Martian Life Clears Another Hurdle

Members of the Curiosity Mars rover's science team have announced a milestone in their search for signs of ancient life on Mars. After carefully checking recent results, the researchers said last week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here, they are now reasonably confident that contaminants brought from Earth cannot entirely explain certain carbon compounds Curiosity spotted in martian rock.

If so, these simple organic compounds—chlorine-carrying methane and the like—either came with the tons of never-alive cosmic debris that sifts onto every planetary body or are something far more exciting: remains of martian life from eons ago, when a habitable lake and a rushing stream graced the rover's now-dry landing site.

The big question is did Mars have enough surface, or near surface water for life to evolve, the way it did on earth? If so, traces are likely to remain somewhere; the question is where.  Even more tantalizingly, if it evolved on the surface, there's some chance that some of it adapted to life deep in the subsurface, the way it has on earth.

To reach that conclusion, scientists had to clear some daunting hurdles. First, they had to account for the effects of perchlorate, a corrosive, oxidizing compound that is pervasive on Mars and, when heated, can chew up any complex organic matter into little bits (Science, 12 April 2013, p. 138). They also had to reckon with known sources of contamination in Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument package (Science, 31 August 2012, p. 1032). A chemical reagent brought along for future analyses of organics had somehow leaked into the system, and gases driven off soil and rock samples were reacting with a polymer used to prepare compounds for identification by mass spectrometry. As a result, the rover was making its own organics, including the small chlorinated methanes and the sizable compound chlorobenzene.

As a practicing analytical chemist, looking at trace metals in some of the most dilute and difficult medium, seawater, I sympathize with the chemists who had to sort out the contributions of an inadvertent leak of the same chemicals that they were trying to measure using a special purpose machine built for the purpose located millions of miles from the workers.

To sort out which of the device's detections are truly martian, the team instructed SAM to run blanks: analyses made with empty sample vials. They flushed both blanks and real samples with inert gas and warmed them to drive off the contaminating reagent. On Earth, they ran samples containing known organics through a SAM apparatus under Mars-like conditions. And on the rover, they tried experiments such as analyzing samples three times as big as normal to see whether the yield of particular organics would triple as well.

At the meeting, Caroline Freissinet and Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a score of fellow SAM team members reported that the latest results are persuasive. The new findings offer "compelling" evidence that some of the carbon-containing compounds SAM recently detected such as chlorinated methane, ethane, and propane came from organic matter in ancient martian rock, not from earthly contamination, Freissinet said. And Glavin said that other results are "a good indication" that some of the chlorobenzene is martian as well. Or as one of his slides pointedly put it: "The detection of reduced organic compounds in Martian near-surface samples is a significant step."

Add caption

Sounds promising; I'm a little curious why they chose the chlorinated organic compounds for study.  Chlorinated organic compounds aren't terribly common in terrestrial (in the planetary sense) organisms, though they certainly exist, but in a strong oxidizing environment with perchlorate present, they can be created from the perchlorate. Shouldn't they be looking for the kinds of compounds left by terrestrial organisms, the melange of compounds we call petroleum?

Some experts outside the 400-strong Curiosity team are more guarded. "The case for a martian source of carbon builds," responded meteoriticist Mark Sephton of Imperial College London by e-mail. He was not at the meeting but read the four pages of abstracts describing the results.

The case could build further if Curiosity strikes a richer vein of organic matter in future samples. Or SAM team members could try a more sophisticated technique to separate out the organic compounds in rock before the pervasive oxidizing agent chews them up. The next opportunity to drill a new sample will come within a few months when Curiosity is likely to pause on its way to its ultimate target, Mount Sharp.

Alas, we're probably not talking about finding Princess Thuvia's and John Carter's descendents.

Wombat-socho has the the long awaited, post tax day, triple stuffed  edition of "Rule 5 Sunday: Ricochet" up at The Other McCain.

Scientists Resent Mars Restrictions

The Overprotection of Mars?

A recent commentary paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience argues that planetary protection policies and practices designed to guard solar system bodies from biological contamination from spacecraft need to be re-evaluated because they are “unnecessarily inhibiting” a more ambitious agenda to search for life on Mars.

Don't you sort of miss the good old days when we all felt pretty sure there was life on Mars, and sorta hoped it was Burroughsian hot chicks like Deja Thoris basking on banks of the canals and not Orsonwellian Martians invading earth in three three legged walkers with laser beams?  Or am I just showing my age again...?

In the paper, called The Overprotection of Mars, co-authors Alberto G. Fairén of the Department of Astronomy, Cornell University and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of the School of the Environment, Washington State University, also argue that, from an astrobiological perspective, the most interesting missions to “Special Regions” - where, in theory, Mars life could exist or Earth life could survive - are rendered “unviable” as a result of onerous Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) planetary protection protocols and the need to comply with “detailed and expensive sterilization requirements.” For Fairén, the key point of the paper is that, if life can be transferred to Mars in our spacecraft, then the transfer can also happen “naturally, with or without our spacecraft” - and that most likely it “has already happened.”

Yes, meteorites have been blasted off Mars and landed on earth, fairly frequently across geologic time and the meteorites have been recovered.  While Earth's gravity well is somewhat deeper, we can presume that pieces of Earth have similarly been transferred to Mars.  4 billion years is a long time, and even unlikely events happen.

"If Earth life cannot thrive on Mars, we don't need any special cleaning protocol for our spacecraft; and if Earth life actually can survive on Mars, it most likely already does, after four billion years of meteoritic transport and four decades of spacecraft investigations not always following sterilization procedures," he says.

"Planetary protection policies are at least partly responsible for the lack of life-hunting Mars missions since Viking, as they impose very stringent requirements for sterilization of the spacecrafts which, in my opinion, are not necessary," he adds.

Space is a pretty rugged environment, and likely to kill all but the toughest of Earth microbes in transit, but there are some weird extremophiles that require a lot of killing, and they would be the ones that might possibly find a suitable home on Mars.

In Fairén's view, one of the main shortcomings of current planetary protection policies is that “no spacecraft is treated entirely” - including, for example, some pieces intended to burn in the Martian atmosphere, as well as the launching system - but the “actual” hardware touching down on the surface of Mars is in contact with these other “dirty” parts for several months.

I'm a little conflicted on this one.  If there is a native microbial flora on Mars, I'd like to find it before we introduce mass amounts of Earth flora.  If there is none?  Why not introduce Earth extremophiles  and see what they make out of the place?

Wombat-socho was on time and within budget on last nights "Rule 5 Sunday."

The River Of Ancient Mars

European Space Agency Discovers 'Striking' Ancient River on Mars 

For this mornings 6 o'clock Eye Opener, we have an article about what appears to be an ancient, dried river bed on the planet Mars, brought to you in real and false color by the European Space Agency.

The European Space Agency announced Thursday that it has taken high-definition pictures of an ancient river nearly 1,000 miles long on Mars.

According to the report, the "striking" river also has "numerous tributaries" and is believed to be more than 4 miles wide and nearly 1,000 feet deep at some points. The agency believes that the river was carved by water between 1.8 and 3.5 billion years ago and went dry due to evaporation.

The agency has named the river Reull Vallis. The photos were taken with the ESA's Mars Express satellite last year.

"The region shows a striking resemblance to the morphology found in regions on Earth affected by glaciation," the ESA said in a statement. The discovery is "giving planetary geologists tantalizing glimpses of a past on the Red Planet not too dissimilar to events on our own world."

In September, NASA announced that its Curiosity Rover had discovered evidence of an "ancient stream" that "once ran vigorously" near the Gale Crater that the rover is exploring. According to that report, the stream may have been several feet deep.

Michael Whelan - Synthetic Men Of Mars

No word on any fish fossils yet.  However, the presence of sufficient water to create this large river, and long lasting enough to carve 1000 ft deep  seems to make the possibility of some kind of life possible at one point.  Salmon?  Probably not.

Mike Hoffman -Mars Moon Maiden

Of course the great American SciFi writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs anticipated the findings of rivers on Mars with his series of Mars books featuring John Carter (which can be obtained rather cheaply on Kindle through Amazon), postulating a Mars drying but still alive, with a rivers, weird and abundant wildlife, some earth like and some not so much, and a number of "sort of human" societies, with striking color differences (green men, red men and black men), and, of course, the omnipresent good looking women of color.



Wombat-Socho has this one in with his great (in more ways than one) list of Rule 5 posts "Neuroengesang" at The Other McCain.

The Oceans of Mars?

Thuvia and John Carter of Mars - Frank Frazetta

ESA's Mars Express radar gives strong evidence for former Mars ocean

ESA's Mars Express has returned strong evidence for an ocean once covering part of Mars. Using radar, it has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor within the boundaries of previously identified, ancient shorelines on Mars.

The MARSIS radar was deployed in 2005 and has been collecting data ever since. Jérémie Mouginot, Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) and the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues have analysed more than two years of data and found that the northern plains are covered in low-density material.

"We interpret these as sedimentary deposits, maybe ice-rich," says Dr Mouginot. "It is a strong new indication that there was once an ocean here."

What a coincindence, just in time for John Carter.... Definitely on the must see list.