Mars....would it work?

Question

I've always wondered, why haven't NASA send organic life Continuously

and introduce oxygen and other gasses

by always sending tanks of oxygen and other gases, how would the planet react if there was sufficient enough sent?

Answer 1

Impossible! If it happens, i'll probably be in 28th century! But dude, you know that atoms are never created or destroyed? And Mars is about the size of the Earth? So, yeah, it can happen if you move almost all of Oxygen on earth to Mars.....  

Answer 2

You have the right idea but the way to do if we were to try to make Mars more Earth like would be to introduce moss like organisms that could live on the frigid surface and use the atmosphere, then give off oxygen and multiply.  It could take centuries. If you could find or develop such an organism it would also have to be impervious to cosmic radiation because Mars has no magnetic field like Earth's. Living organisms have been found in the most inhospitable places on Earth.  Just sending oxygen there would not work.  

Answer 3

Because of the gigantic scale of a planet.

I find a figure for the mass of Earth's atmosphere as 5.3 × 10^18 kg, or 5300 trillion tons.

[which is to me reasonable as Earth masses around 6 x 10^24 kg].

Getting even a few hundred pounds of something to Mars is rather expensive, but even if you only sent a billion tons, that would cause a significant increase in our taxes.

Not to mention a drop in atmospheric pressure here on earth....

Answer 4

Lol, where would we get all of these gases? That is, enough gas to create another atmosphere? We don't have nearly enough gas on our planet for both us and mars. We can't just magically produce it. Also, we can't constantly send ships to mars. Do you know how frickin' expensive that would be?!

Answer 5

First off, organic life would have to adapt to living in less gravity and dry red soil. And if they kept sending gasses to Mars, what would we use ("we" being all life on Earth). Plus the Mars' thin atmosphere would release most of the gasses out into space. To colonize the planet, we need to do more than just keep on sending probes and rovers up there. We need to VISIT Mars first. Once they've gathered enough data, only than can they be sure of successful colonization on Mars.

Answer 6

First, NASA wants to make sure that if life *is* discovered on Mars, no one suggests that it was introduced as contamination. Second, there is no way to send gases to Mars in the quantities needed to begin the re-creation of an earth-like Martian atmosphere. The volume needed is huge. I leave the calculation of the volume of earth's atmosphere as an exercise to the reader. Mars would need a significant fraction of that volume. Third, there is the problem of keeping the atmosphere. Mars' lesser gravity makes keeping one a hard problem.

You can google for the details: "terraforming mars" should get you started.

HTH

Charles

Answer 7

Attempts at biological methods of terraforming (transforming the Martian environment into an Earth-like one) might work, such as sending bacteria, or algae genetically engineered to survive in ice, or something like that.

However, the amount of oxygen, etc. required to do the job couldn't possibly be sent in a tank on a golf cart-sized probe, which is all we've been able to do so far.

Crashing an asteroid on Mars that's made of frozen oxygen or something like that might work, but that's beyond our capabilities at the moment.

And don't you think we should survey the place thoroughly and determine its natural chemical composition, and whether there's indigenous life there, before we decide whether to start putting other chemicals and life forms there?