About habitats playing a role in terraforming Mars.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophile"
>
> How about this:
> At some point in the future, whether it's economically viable or not,
> a large group of people decide to terraform Mars. Can they do it
> without High Frontier? I suspect not.

Can they do it WITH High Frontier... I suspect not.
The goals, largely common to space habitats and a terraformed Mars or
Venus, are noble and worthy. As a place to send colonists a
terraformed Mars is farther away than by self replication creating a
similar amount of living space by the equivelent of 'dividing' Model 3
cylinders. Terraforming is frought with scales of unknown difficulties
beyond the most simple objection I could raise: Human societies, and
indeed human civilizations, simply do not have lifetimes consistant
with projects requiring millenia to reach fruition.

I would overlay a scenerio something like what I annotate below as a
glimpse of possible complications of terraforming fantasies. Of course
it is the totally unforseen problems thar REALLY emerge to bite you!

>
> So here we are, terraforming Mars. There are a thousand or so people
> on the planet surface, at first, and maybe five thousand in Mars
> orbit.

A pressurized 'city' lives under the harsh present Martian
conditions. Atomic detonations, directed asteroid impacts, giant
orbiting 'Soletta' mirrors and attempted seeding of micro-organisms
take place in what are hoped will be a sequence effective in
influencing the final composition of the thickening atmosphere toward
habitable conditions. The program clearly will take an immense time,
herein is the fatal flaw in contemplating such lengthly tasks.

'Mars Migration' becomes a new movement once the giant 'O' Neill'
type space terrariums begin to provide confidence that closed
ecosystems are manageable, and predictions are confidently extended to
planetary scale. The atmospheric pressure of mars is by a momentous
effort brought to 10 percent Earthly prerssure a decade after
beginning the effort. As the largest yet mass of colonists are being
moved to position to be landed on Mars hurricane force winds scour the
planet and unforseen chemical reactions create enviornments toxic
enough to require protective suits in itself. Comparisons with
'Greenland' are bitterly made by the colonists arriving at a different
place than advertised.
The year is 2036, and the economy of the United States has undergone
a steady recovery after involvement in another round of redrawing the
maps of the Middle East and the contamination of the primary oil
fields in one of the intense associated wars. This is folded into the
'war of Islamic Aggression' which has cost over a million American
lives in the May 22 2014 atomic terrorist attacks. The subsequent loss
of several U.S. cities in the Third World War, flaring up after the
invasion of Taiwan by China, caused a depression and years of marshall
law but the traditional robustness of American industrial might again
reappeared, especially in the wake of the reshuffling of the world
economy by the sudden loss of the bulk of cheap Chinese imports. The
United States as we knew it is by then a place where invasive law
enforcement is everywhere, where every employer wants full disclosure
on every vice and affliction you may wish to hide, and where everyone
has to wear a locator device such as those on parole must wear today
(which O'Neill foretold).
Despite such draconian measures a rebellous younger generation
forsakes and tries to live outside the 'straight'society model, but
increasing efforts go into avoiding capture and 'reprogramming'.
Despite repressive measures the Central government of the US will have
lost control of much territory bordering Mexico, resulting in much of
the world redrawing maps with readjusted borders or at least with
dotted lines such as now appear between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the
latter gone by then.

>
> A hundred or so years later, -snip-.

Despite efforts to 'shove' the developing Martian enviornment into
something comfortable to humans, a toxic mess is shrouding the
formally red planet. Violent storms cover less of the planet with the
traditional light ochre color as moisture in the atmosphere increases
along with the density. Numerous famous landscape features sag and
collapse along their edges as the CO2 permafrost melts. Perhaps 20
percent atmospheric pressure is achieved, steady but agonizingly slow
progress. Here and there catastrophic episodes of CO2 gas release
scour new 'river channels' here and there, one wiping out a domed city.
In the mean time, on Earth it is 2130, and the US has declined to the
point that its contribution to the space colonization effort has ebbed
to nearly nothing. Like the Russia of old, by then broken up into a
series of near feudal proncipalities, 'rocket scientists' labored
lovingly and with nearly no pay beyond physical sustainence to keep
the Dream alive, but they were mortal and were not replaced. The
standard of living has finally declined enough to make all space
travel seem fantastic to common people. Most of the support for the
Martian colony comes from space habitats by this time.
>
> Another hundred years, and there is nearly as much habital area
> orbiting Mars as there is total surface area on the planet itself.
> There could be more, but a lot of the orbital population's effort
has-snip-

The orbital habitats begin to see the wisdom of a space based as
opposed to planetary based infrastructure. The surviving crowded
sealed Martian settlements have to endure conditions more hostile than
those of the Earths moon, much of the surface having become a slimy
windswept version of the Dry Valleys of Antartica, with surprise
collapse pits causing catastrophic loss of life more than once. The
entire affair is increasingly viewed as a drain to the new vigorous
center of Human affairs, free space.

2230 A.C.E. The government of the US has broken down to the point
only a small region surrounding Washington still flies an abbreviated
version of the 'American Flag', like Constantinople in its role as a
dying flickering flame of classical civilization. The once proud
monuments, reconstructed from fragments with declining workmanship
eash time it is done, are roped off battered edifaces similar looking
to the Acropolis today. The countries of Western Europe are
maintaining a close knit viable but low key political union despite
peripheral damage from the past Middle East conflicts. South American
countries emerge, along with Australia, as the kind of industrial
behemoths the US and Germany were once known as. Space settlement ,
however, is low on the list of priorities for these new power blocs.

>
> OK. Another hundred years, three hundred years from the start of
> terraforming. -snip-

Mars is an inalterably chainged place from its original condition,
something that at least some are not happy with. The once red planet
is now largely gray muck covered morass with a few light orange desert
spots remaining, all partly hidden by broken clouds and greated
amounts of ground fogs. Some salty highly acidic swamps have emerged
in the lowlands but no large bodies of fresh water such as was once
hoped have formed. After centuries of throwing declining resources
into an unmanagably large problem, particularly on the biological
front, most of the attraction for Mars has faded. Indeed most of the
free spacers have a hard time knowing what the fuss was once about.
Mars fumes under the injuries suffered by the in retrospect blind
attempts to rework it, ending up neither the geologic paradise it once
was or the new world for Humanity dreamed of in the days of secular
thought on Earth.
On 2330 A.C.E. a third of the Human race has recently been wiped out
by an epidemic, with only a few colonies succumbing to disease spread
by invasions of fleeing refugees still able to reach orbit. The
standard of living for the survivors on Earth increases dramatically,
as they did for laborers in the wake of the Black Death, with the
ratio of workers to tasks tilting dramatically. China rises from the
radioactive ashes to re-emerges as the dominent World power once
again, persuing yet another inward focused consolidation of interior
bureaocrasies which makes outward reaching efforts unthinkable.
Ironically, a new Chinese canal project is started with time and
unlimited manpower available, demonstrating once again that only a
repressive strong government such as China can accomplish a task
requiring a thousand years, at the cost of a forcibly managed culture.
English becomes a nearly dead language in the northern hemisphere. In
Europe once again literacy declines to levels so low nobody cares
anymore and the churches take advantage of mass ignorance to their own
ends for another few centuries...The very rationale for once wanting
to leave Earth falls outside what the rulers want people to be
thinking about.

Well, I hate to rain on the Terraforming parade, but I believe some
variation of the possibilities presented above are more likely than
assuming familiar civilizations and societies can remain intact long
enough for such tasks to be nurtured through time scales greater than
the civilization that conceives such dreams. Counting on Human Nature
to change in order to get a job done is far more problematical than
tackling an engineering task we don't yet know how to accomplish.

Don Davis