by Elon Musk has big ambitions to colonize Mars by 2050, and a new scientific discovery could make those dreams a reality.
A team of scientists has proposed an “innovative” way to warm the Red Planet by more than -8 degrees Celsius in just a few months, which they believe would be enough to sustain human life.
They proposed injecting large amounts of Martian dust into the atmosphere to improve its ability to retain heat, as water vapor and carbon dioxide do on Earth.
If about 10 liters of iron and aluminum dust were emitted per second over a period of at least a decade, the Earth could warm by -85 °F to 30 °F.
A groundbreaking new discovery suggests that Elon Musk’s dream of terraforming Mars may not be as far-fetched as many think.
Elon Musk dreams of building a Mars city by 2050 that could accommodate a million people.
Musk himself has stated that he wants to use Mars’ natural resources to “terraform” its existing atmosphere and make the planet warmer, wetter and overall more Earth-like.
This study suggests that he is on to something.
“It’s not often that you come up with a really new, innovative idea for terraforming,” Colin McInnes, an aerospace engineer at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the work, told Science Magazine.
“The gap between where Mars is and where Mars could be habitable is smaller than we might think,” he added.
The researchers’ approach is actually based on the same atmospheric mechanism that drives climate change here on Earth: the greenhouse effect.
Currently, Mars’ atmosphere is so thin that the sun’s heat easily escapes through the planet’s surface.
Because of its microscopic size and spherical shape, Martian dust is not particularly good at absorbing radiation or reflecting heat back to the surface.
But the research team is convinced that they could use the iron and aluminum in the dust to create nine-micrometer-long rods.
That’s about twice the size of a Martian dust particle, but smaller than a grain of glitter.
Currently, the surface of Mars is an icy, barren desert. But scientists have found a simple way to warm the Red Planet.
By terraforming the Martian atmosphere, we would have come one step closer to establishing a human colony on the red planet.
When the researchers tested how their particles absorb and reflect thermal radiation onto the planet’s surface, they found “unexpectedly enormous effects,” Samaneh Ansari, a doctoral student at Northwestern University and lead author of the study, told Science Magazine.
This approach would require about two million tons of particles per year, but their production would be relatively simple since the ingredients are available directly on Mars.
This distinguishes this new approach from previous plans to combat global warming on the Red Planet.
In comparison, this method is about 5,000 times more efficient, the researchers claimed.
While this strategy would still take decades, it seems logistically simpler than any other idea proposed so far.
Warming Mars would be a crucial first step toward making this planet a suitable home for humans or other life forms.
This would release what little water is frozen in the polar caps beneath the planet’s surface, making Mars a more suitable place for agriculture and the human body.
Mars’ atmosphere is too thin to trap heat at the surface. Scientists want to introduce artificial dust into the atmosphere to make it more insulating.
This is all great news for Musk, but warming Mars is just one step on a long road he must travel before he can colonize the Red Planet.
But even with this new atmosphere, it would not be possible for humans to breathe the air on Mars because it does not contain enough oxygen.
In addition, the air pressure on Mars is 150 times lower than on Earth, which would make people’s blood boil.
Musk must solve these and other problems before he can build a bustling Martian metropolis, but this new research brings him a step closer to realizing his dream.
