Sunday, July 9, 2023
Monday, May 12, 2008
Larry Nivens article - Wet Mars
Larry Niven Talks Terraforming
By Larry Niven
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 12:45 pm ET
10 July 2000
I’m just home from Hawaii and the West Coast Science Fiction Convention. Bridget Landry, Hugh S. Gregory, and Ctein updated us at a panel discussion: "The Year in Space."
Ctein has a lot to say about Mars and water. I’ve oversimplified his picture, no doubt, but it’s plausible:
Any underground water is kept liquid by overlying pressure and Mars’s internal heat. Where there are openings to the surface, they’re plugged with ice. Growing pressure or tectonic action might cause water to burst through into the near-vacuum. Then we get to guess how far it can run downhill while simultaneously boiling and freezing.
SPACE.com shows pictures of regions around a crater rim where liquid seems to have flowed. Notice that nobody has actually seen water.
Implications?
Life has been found everywhere on Earth that we find water. Frozen, boiling, fresh or briny, something loves it. Would this carry over to Mars?
Deuterium ratios suggest that Mars has kept more of its water than was previously thought. The options for evolution look sparse, but if a life-bearing meteor from Earth smacked deep enough through the Martian crust a billion years ago . . . yeah, I could write that.
But it’s fiction.
From the Dean Drive (a reactionless motor) through education-by-ingestion (information transfer through feeding educated flatworms to each other) to plants that talk back (gah!) to cold fusion, we’ve seen too many miracles disappear on close examination.
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Still, assume it’s true. What does a wet Mars do for us?
The rest of Mr. Nivens Article-
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/larryniven/niven_wet_mars_000710.html
By Larry Niven
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 12:45 pm ET
10 July 2000
I’m just home from Hawaii and the West Coast Science Fiction Convention. Bridget Landry, Hugh S. Gregory, and Ctein updated us at a panel discussion: "The Year in Space."
Ctein has a lot to say about Mars and water. I’ve oversimplified his picture, no doubt, but it’s plausible:
Any underground water is kept liquid by overlying pressure and Mars’s internal heat. Where there are openings to the surface, they’re plugged with ice. Growing pressure or tectonic action might cause water to burst through into the near-vacuum. Then we get to guess how far it can run downhill while simultaneously boiling and freezing.
SPACE.com shows pictures of regions around a crater rim where liquid seems to have flowed. Notice that nobody has actually seen water.
Implications?
Life has been found everywhere on Earth that we find water. Frozen, boiling, fresh or briny, something loves it. Would this carry over to Mars?
Deuterium ratios suggest that Mars has kept more of its water than was previously thought. The options for evolution look sparse, but if a life-bearing meteor from Earth smacked deep enough through the Martian crust a billion years ago . . . yeah, I could write that.
But it’s fiction.
From the Dean Drive (a reactionless motor) through education-by-ingestion (information transfer through feeding educated flatworms to each other) to plants that talk back (gah!) to cold fusion, we’ve seen too many miracles disappear on close examination.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still, assume it’s true. What does a wet Mars do for us?
The rest of Mr. Nivens Article-
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/larryniven/niven_wet_mars_000710.html
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