It's time once again for another of the seemingly endless series of posts about Spiders from Mars. Though there have been 3 other posts so far (part 1, part 2, and part 3) it seems there's still more to say on the subject! We've already discussed a little bit about how Martian Spiders might be designed, the challenges in making something that would actually survive on Mars and even a touch about why we might want to do it. Today, we're going to go even farther on that by talking about how to make Mars, more like Earth.

Making another planet more like ours is called terraforming. Because Terra is an old name for our planet. Get it? If we called it "Earthforming" people would think we were just making a pile of dirt. Remember that scene in Close Encounters? No? Never mind. As much fun as that can be, it's not the point.

Right now Mars is very unlike Earth. It's smaller. The gravity is lower. It has hardly anything that you could call "air." That's partly, or maybe mostly, because Mars doesn't have something that has been very important to protecting the Earth: A magnetic field. The Earth has a spinning nickle/iron core. The spinning creates a powerful magnetic field that, among other things, deflects solar flares (which we talked about in the last post). If it didn't, they would rip through the atmosphere, peeling them away and irradiating everything on the surface.

A few million years of that, and the Earth would be as dead as Mars is.

Just thought I'd mention that. We'll come back to it in a minute.

Also, Mars doesn't have any free-standing water. No lakes, rivers or oceans. So no fish. The more I describe it, the more you might be asking yourself why anyone would even think of living there?

To begin with, because it's not here. As a species, the human race has walked over pretty much the entire surface of the Earth. Also, we've sailed all the seas, climbed all the mountains and generally made nuisances of ourselves everywhere. Itchy feet are built into us, like eyes and noses and the urge to talk, which some people have all the time. There's nothing we can do to get rid of it.

And there's a LOT of territory to walk over on Mars. But staying alive while doing it could be a problem. Another interesting trait of us humans is that, wherever we go, we tend to build things. Houses. Villages. Pyramids. Families. That's going to be hard to do in a place where you can't breathe. We could dig tunnels. Put plants in them to scrub out the carbon dioxide and add oxygen, they might be quite livable. But who wants to live in a tunnel?

I read a paper a couple years ago¹, that proposed grabbing comets and crashing them into Mars. Many comets are basically made up of water ice. Yes, when you're talking about outer space, you have to specify that the ice is made of water. Otherwise it might be carbon dioxide, or methane, or ammonia or who knows what?

Anyway, where was I? Right. Crash some water-ice comets on Mars to increase both the amount of water and the atmospheric pressure on Mars because of the sheer volume of new water. It's a GREAT idea. And I don't think it would take more than a couple hundred years to get it done! Of course, by the end of the first hundred years, there will be so many people living on Mars that a crashing comet would cause untold damage. But it would also make it snow, so you might think that would be a fine trade off.

Anyway, one thing the comet idea doesn't solve is the lack of a magnetic field. Without that, even if you could make a breathable atmosphere for the place, it would just get blasted away by the Solar Wind. So that's something you want to address early on. There are proposals for that, too, of course. The eventual solution will probably involve putting a lot of satellites around the planet to do the job. The first thing you might think, that those satellites could also be used for communication and stuff, is wrong. They're setting up an intense magnetic field. It will interfere with other functions.

I'm sure the engineers will figure something out (he typed, hopefully).

In the short run, before we can turn Mars into a paradise, we will likely have to work smaller. What do you think of the idea of putting a low-lying valley under a magnetic dome and filling it with plants (and genetically engineered spiders, for things like pollination)? A garden instead of a whole planet. Because maybe terraforming Mars is too big a job to do all at once. Maybe if we do just a little spot, here and there, it will be enough of a start for us to learn what we need and improve the experience of living on Mars, besides. Give people a place to go for a walk that doesn't look like just another tunnel. A place on the surface that isn't relentlessly rocky and dead. A place where things grow and move. Maybe the things that grow will be edible. Apples. Berries.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Maybe these bubbles of life will be a great tourist attraction and the fees will finance making more and bigger bubbles.

If we follow that thought, two things jump out. One is that it will take some serious planning but it can probably be done, even with our current technology. The other is that spiders genetically engineered to live free-range all over Mars are the wrong thing to keep in the bubbles. They'll need to be thought out differently. Engineered differently. They'll need a different mission.

That's going to be the topic of the next edition of this Martian Spiders series which may, or may not, be the next Technoscreed. There's other stuff to talk about, too!

Here's that prompt: "A scene of multiple satellites orbiting Mars, with a large red Martian surface in the background. In the foreground, a spider is watching the satellites through a telescope. Some of the spider's legs are holding a notepad and making notes while it peers through the telescope. The setting is surreal, with a blend of science fiction and whimsical fantasy. The spider has multiple legs and appears intelligent, surrounded by scientific tools and papers. The backdrop features the dark starry space beyond Mars."

I wonder why Mars seems to be orbiting itself in this picture?