OT: Carbon Dioxide races -> known vs unknown -> terraforming mars -> is or is not

[dogscoff]

Follow this link for an extensive treaty on the nitrogen cycle and how it is important to life on Earth.

Thanks. Most of that article goes over my head, but I get the basics and it has some pretty pictures ;-)

That is dangerously close to a lethal atmosphere. Your colonists would suffer greatly, and casualties would be high.
Drop that CO2 concentration by at least an order or two of magnitude.

OK... the exact proportions don't really matter, just as long as a breathable atmosphere could be produced from local materials. Next question: How much variation in these proportions of gasses could we withstand? a few percent? A few fractions of a percent?

If realy, why bother with mars? I've never understood it. Whats special about it? is it the closest planet to earth's conditions or what.

Here are some reasons to go to Mars:

1> The first is the distance from the sun, which has already been mentioned. It's close enough to gain trap some of the suns energy. Solar panels would be viable there, and plants could probably get enough sunlight to survive (if they were kept under glass)

2> Mars is interesting. I want to go there to check out the possibility of martian (ex-)life and the amazing terrain: Olympus Mons is the largest "mountain" in the solar system, making Everest look like a molehill. There are some other cool geographical features that ppl would like to see. We could also settle all that cydonia nonsense once and for all.

3> Although Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere, it *does* have an atmosphere, which would offer at least some protection against meteor strikes and the sun's radiation.

4> As we've already discussed, Mars has some good raw materials to work with: A thin CO2 atmosphere, some ice (probably) lots of iron (that's why the landscape is all red), a couple of small moons that may come in handy one day and no doubt lots of other useful things.

5>Although Mars is much smaller and less dense than Earth, it's bigger and denser than the moon and the Jovian satellites. That means gravity there would be closer to that of Earth. The effects of living long-term in low gravity are as yet unknown. Some of them probably would be good- because the reduced gravity means less energy spent and less "wear and tear" on the body. however there are bound to be negative effects as well. All these effects are likely to be multiplied for children born and raised on low-grav worlds, so to start with it would be best to colonise the most Earth-like gravity available.

6>Mars has a 25-hour day, which would be easy for colonists to adjust to.

Of course, the other likely candidates for colonisation are the asteroids. Plenty of raw materials to work with, and maybe even export. They're further out than Mars, but still closer than Jupiter, and the low-gravity problem could probably be overcome by messing with an asteroid's rotation or something. (?) Mars' moons (Phobos and Deimos- Fear and Panic=-) are nothing more than asteroids, really, so they might be a good place to start.

Looks like Nitrogen is fifth behind Hydrogen...

I did find an interesting and relevant link.
(click on the quote to go to the source)

i cant name the source but i remember reading that Mars has some nitrogen - in frozen state however, i think on the poles.

Thanks.

Einstein was not right about everything.

I know, I was just being facetious. I don't really know enough about science to discuss it in more than vague terms. I was mostly right about all that atomic makeup stuff though, wasn't I?