Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is Terraforming?

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

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To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeartRadio app, search all the smoke, and listen now. Hey, Daniel, how many times in your life do you think you've moved, like from one house to another? So many times. There was one period

when we actually moved back and forth across the Atlantic, I think it was seven times and four years. That's wild. Yeah. from California to Geneva and back. It was insane. Well, the hard part is when you need to do renovations, right?

Like if you're the home that you're moving into is not quite habitable. That's right. You want to get it just as you like it. You want it to be nice and cozy. You want it to be comfortable a place to live. You want all those things, right? And that's hard enough when the other place you're living is across town or across the country

or even somewhere else on the planet. Yeah, but now imagine if you had to move to a whole other planet. I'm not sure I can get my wife on board for taking the kids to Mars or to the moon or to Jupiter. It's a little further than Geneva. It's a tiny bit further than traveling in Switzerland. And I'm not sure how we'd find a contractor to do that work. Like, who's going to do the renovations of my lunar base?

Elon Musk. He's probably got a company already for it. He'll sell you five different kinds of flooring. It's called House X. The flooring company. The flooring company. Perfect. Hi, I'm Jorge.

And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. I'm a particle physicist, but I like thinking and talking about all sorts of crazy things in science. And I'm a cartoonist, and mostly I'm just crazy. I got nothing to say to that. Oh, no, you're totally a sane and normal person. Yeah, I'm so not saying that.

And this is our podcast in which we take things in the universe and try to explain them to you. Make them understandable. We don't want you to be intimidated by the fancy words in science. We want you to understand them so you can impress people at cocktail parties when they ask you, what is the Higgs boson or how does something actually work? Yeah, we want you to imagine what it's like to travel the universe. and to see all these amazing things out there. Today we're going to talk about

living on other worlds, terraforming. Terraforming. Is that like the ceramic thing that you make statues out of? I think if you want to make a really big planet-sized statue, then you could call that terraforming, yeah. Oh, wait, I think I'm thinking about terracotta.

That's different. Terracotta, that's right. Can you build a planet out of terracotta, right? That'd be the largest pottery wheel in the history of the universe. Yeah, so that's a big question, is can we be an interplanetary species? Can we, can humanity live in multiple planets? That's right. And this is a really important question, because if we want to survive for thousands or millions of years,

we can't keep all of our eggs in just one planetary basket. You know, one comet comes and slams into Earth and kills everything on Earth, poof, we're dead. Yeah. But if we have people living on Mars and the moon and, you know, And somewhere else, then we could survive such cataclysm. As a species, you mean? As a species. Not me or you individually.

Like, I'm not going to jump up there and catch the comet and save the planet or anything like that. But from the point of view of humanity, it seems like a really important project to get off this rock and get living somewhere else. Yeah, or like if we ruin this planet, right? Like if we mess it up somehow and Earth is no longer habitable, what's going to happen to humanity? We have to go somewhere else. You make us sound like we're a bunch of kids making a mess in the living room or something. You don't have faith that we're going to be able to take care of this planet? You think we're on the trajectory to climb a doomsday?

We're more like little kids burning tires inside of the house. You know what I mean? That's an official recommendation, people. Jorge says, do not burn tires inside your house. Just do it in the backyard, right? Generally, that's a bad idea. Yeah. Is that how you start your cozy family evenings?

Let's go burn some tires outside. Yeah, but this is even bigger than that. This is bigger than can we go to another planet? can we establish a base on another planet? This is, can we make another planet habitable so you can live outside? You can breathe the air, you can run around, you can grow crops.

So, meaning we can go to another planet and live there, but we would be in spacesuits and inside of some kind of base the whole time. That wouldn't be a lot of fun. That would not be a lot of fun. I mean, I think if you went to Mars and just built a colony, like, you know, out of ships and domes and stuff like that,

you'd basically be living on Antarctica. You'd be cold and dry and unpleasant and you have to pee in a spacesuit all the time. And it would not be like living on Earth. It would be very hard to imagine millions or billions of people living that way on Mars, right? Or anywhere else. So if you really want to establish non-Earth population centers, you have to figure out a way to make the planet itself habitable without a spacesuit.

Yeah, so that's where the term terraforming comes from. And so we were curious to know how many people out there, including you, maybe, knew this term. Yeah, so I went out in the street and I asked people, have you heard of terraforming? Do you know what it is? What does it mean? Is it possible? Here's what people had to say. I've heard the word before, but I don't actually know anything about it. Okay, best guess. The form, like how the earth got formed.

Okay. No, I haven't heard of terraforming before. No, no, no, no, I haven't, okay. Terraform, I've heard of it. I don't know the meaning of it. Best guess. Okay, um, on another planet, forming the environment, or something like that, something along those lines. All right, great. Is that like where you dig up the planet?

I've heard of the term, but not the definition. What's your best guess? What it might be? How the Earth forms, or how any planet forms? Okay, cool. Yeah, I have heard of terraforming. Terraforming is hopefully something when we can be a step three civilization, or I forget the correct connotation, but you'll maybe get a lot of energy from the sun

and be able to use that to go and colonize another planet and make the human race become a multi-planetary species. Do you think that's realistic? No, I think we have way too much on Earth that we need to take care of still, and that it's a sexy idea, but I think that it's not going to happen for some long amount of time. All right, so a lot of knows. Maybe I was asking the wrong question.

I was asking people, have they heard of terraforming? And most of the people, except for one very smart gentleman who had a lot to say about it, had never even heard of the word, right? They were just not even part of something they think about or talk about or wonder about, right? So that's good. We can explain people what the word means. Nobody thought it was terracotta. Nobody except for you, things that has to do with Potter.

That's right. We're very Chinese soldiers. Except for now, somebody now is going to be listening to this podcast. They're going to come away with it. That's their takeaway, right? That terraforming is making an earth out of terracotta. But maybe a more interesting question to have asked would have been like, do you think it's possible to turn Mars into a habitable planet?

I'm curious what people would have thought about that. But anyway, in another universe, in another multiverse, I asked that different question. Do you think people would have known or thought it was possible or not? I don't know, but I'm always surprised to hear where people think. I would like to know what people think is possible. If that's sort of a feasible project, the humanity could pull off. I mean, massive

planetary engineering. As you'll hear in today's podcast, folks, it's not a small project to undertake. That's a cool word, planetary engineering. The idea that you can change an entire planet, that's amazing, right? Yeah, and you know, it's something people thinking about for Earth, right? Geo

engineering is a study of, like, can we solve our climate problems by doing some crazy engineering? you know, like deflecting the sun's rays or, or, you know, injecting things into the atmosphere or pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, like these massive engineering projects as desperate measures to reverse climate change, it's going to become center stage more and more in the next few years, I think. Wow. Be cool to get that as a degree, you know, in your diploma, Planetary Engineer. Yeah. Well, you know, the more people burn tires outside or in their living room, the more we're going to have to worry about this stuff and counteract it.

So somebody's got to think about it. There's a lot of really fun papers about geoengineering. People have crazy schemes to try to cool off the earth. I mean, a lot of it sounds really risky to me. It's not like we really understand the way the atmosphere works. So trying to tweak it and twiddle with it, like dialing the knobs on the atmosphere, that scares me. Seems tricky. You don't have a lot of faith in engineers, generally, I feel.

Well, you know, sometimes you have to put your faith in the engineers because you have a desperate problem, right? But when it's a system that you know they don't understand, we can't predict the weather very well, right? So how can you predict what happens when you seed clouds or when you put huge mirrors in space? And that's a fine thing to do on another planet where you have a million years to figure it out or a thousand years to figure it out an infinite budget.

But when it comes to Earth, our home, less open to this kind of crazy experimentation. I would be very cautious. I guess we only have one planet. And so, you know, if we mess it up tinkering, It could be bad news. Yeah, exactly. Would you put the whole climate into the hands of engineers and say, hey, tinker away, see what happens.

I think it would be cool just to be called the PE, you know, like a planetary engineer. You just want the title. You don't want the responsibility. I just want the title, yeah. You just want to say a PhD and PE. I'm a planetary engineer. Ph.D. and PE. Yeah, so let's get into it.

So what is terraforming? What is the concept of terraforming? Yeah, so just from the word terror meaning earth, right, and forming meaning forming, it means take another planet like Mars or another planet and make it like the Earth, make it to be able to sustain human life, right? Make it habitable. Yeah, make it habitable. Make it a place that you might want to go, right?

Right. But is it? So it's basically the concept of making it so that you can step outside without a space suit, take a deep breath and enjoy the sun and the sun. the air on Mars. Yeah, or any other planet. I mean, and that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in science fiction stories all the time, right?

They land on some planet, they sit down, they open the door, they take a deep breath, and they go, ah, yeah, yeah, smells pretty sweet on planet X, Y, Z, 487. Yeah, there's nothing toxic or dangerous when I breathe this air, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that strikes me as very unlikely. I mean, that would be wonderful if it happened, but it strikes me as very unlikely. But that's the point is being able to step outside without a sense. space suit and breathe and live. But is that the only motivation kind of to enjoy the outdoors in

another planet? Or is there something more that, you know, we can't physically live that many people inside of a base or inside of a constrained environment? Yeah, I think if you want to, if you want to really spread across a planet, you've got to make the whole thing habitable. I mean, if you're going to build domes and live inside domes, that's not nearly as fun, right? And it's it's constrained. Exactly. So if you want to have agriculture that supports a large population, you need to have plants growing. And so either you have to build a dome the size of the planet or just make the planet into a dome, right? Eventually, having domes is impractical. Interesting. Okay, so let's get into the details then. What does it mean to be habitable

for a planet to be habitable? Like what do we need to change in other planets to make it more like ours? Yeah. So you need an atmosphere. You need non-toxic. atmosphere with oxygen in it. You need to have enough water, right? You need the temperature to be reasonable, right? You can't be a frozen instantly or boiled to a crisp as soon as you step outside. You also, and that's not even enough, right? You might think, well, that's a tall order, and it is, but even that's not enough, you need things like shielding from cosmic rays, right? If you're in a place where the radiation is much higher than it is on Earth, then you need to be protected. Having an atmosphere will do some of that for you, but it might not be enough.

right um so i'd say those are the basics water temperature atmosphere um and shielding from cosmic rays those are the four elements it's a lot of things to get right you know already yeah i mean see it just seems like four things but that's that's a a big list of requests for your um for the flooring company or whatever it is we're going to hire to uh to um renovate the moon for us well it's just four things but it's four things the size of an entire planet right like you it's not like a changing in a little dome. It's an entire gigantic space that you need to have these great. Yeah, exactly. We have that situation on Earth, which is wonderful, but it's not like that happened overnight. This is a billions of years process to get to where we are today. And now we're talking about engineering it

and doing it in hopefully less than a billion years, right? So it's going to be harder to do on another planet or it didn't happen by itself in a shorter amount of time. Yeah, it kind of makes you think how precious it is the conditions that we have here. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we should review roughly how that happened on Earth, how we got to a habitable planet on Earth. Earth was formed, big ball of hot lava, et cetera. It's cooled down a little bit, but then it was dry. And so as we talked about on a podcast episode a while ago, we got water by having comets smashed into the Earth's surface. And comets are basically huge snowballs in space. Yeah, we brought water in from outer space. We ordered it, right, on DoorDash or something. Hey, can you deliver like a thousand comets tomorrow? Hey, Arrowhead, we need a couple of trillion gallons, please. Yeah, exactly.

So that's where we got the water, right, from space comets. And then life started, right? And life and produced some carbon dioxide. This is very, very early life, like microbes that could eat things like metals and rock and all sorts of stuff that existed on the planet and produced some carbon dioxide. And we also got some carbon dioxide by venting from volcanoes. So that's how we got our atmosphere, from microbes and from volcanoes. That gives us an atmosphere that has a lot of carbon dioxide in it, right?

But then we need the oxygen. And the oxygen came when microbes, actually cyanobacteria in particular, and then later algae and plants figured out how to photosynthesize. Photosynthesis essentially is breaking down CO2 into oxygen and carbon, right? And so some of that oxygen is released in the atmosphere. And so you have huge amounts of microbes and algae and plankton in the ocean doing this all the time and the trees now doing this produced enough oxygen to give us an atmosphere that was breathable for animals right so that's how we got water we got pressure we got oxygen yeah and it's all

sort of tied together right the living things are tied together with the things in the rocks and the things that came from out of space and it all sort of mixed together to and that's where we evolve right it's not like these are the ideal conditions for any life it's just that these are the conditions in which we grew up in and so that's what we need right that's right and you're right they're all tied together it's hard to get one without the other you know having enough water helps you with all these cycles and having the right pressure in the atmosphere helps keep the water on the planet and keeps keep the temperature right and so it's a very complicated delicate system and it's very easy to throw out of balance i'm amazed frankly that we haven't screwed it up already you know that it's lasted this

long well we're well on our way i think anyway These expectations are not low enough. That's right. Too many people are burning tires inside. Okay, so let's get into then how you would do it on another planet. Let's get into the details of peeing. Not peeing, but peeing. Planetary engineering.

A whole other planet to be just like our cozy Earth. But first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? that this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always

look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers

or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it. it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts for

wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it.

It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you, you at loveyourmindtay.org. All right, so how do we set up a livable situation on Mars so that we can do cartwheels in

the grass and enjoy and take deep breaths and drink from rivers and raise our children carefree, right? That's the goal. Yeah, how do we change a planet in which we would die if we stepped outside to one in which it'd be nice to go out and take a walk? Right. We basically want to turn Antarctica into Southern California, right? That seems to. How hard could that be, right? Well, we're on our way for that, too. The global warming.

It's the new, is the new Southern California. Yeah. So we're going to start with Mars because that's the nearest planet, right? That's kind of the best candidate we have for maybe moving the entire species to, right? That's right. This is a ridiculous project, possibly

potentially impossible, costing zillions of dollars and maybe taking zillions of years. But, of the impossible destinations we might consider, Mars is sort of the least impossible. So, yeah, that's the one people talk about a lot. The least impossible. That's right. Okay.

So there's a sliver of a chance that we might be able to pull this off. Yeah, exactly. And so to figure out whether this was possible, I actually made a call to an expert. Professor Jim K. Stings at Penn State University, who knows a lot about terraforming and Mars, and he's thought about this. And when I first called him up and I asked him, I said, is terraforming Mars possible? he said, just flatly, no, can't be done. Nope.

I was like, well, that was a short phone call, right? This is it going to be a short podcast. Yeah, but then I said, is there a forming possible? No. No. See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. So he said no.

He said, he's an expert. He's worked with NASA. He's like, no. Yeah, he's thought about a lot. He said, no. But then I said, okay, what if I give you an infinite amount of money? He was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, and

infinite amount of resources, then we can do it. Wow. So there is a sliver of possibility. When you say it's impossible, it's not like it violates any loss of physics. It's just that we, he didn't foresee how we would pull this off with the resources that we have. Yeah, well, as you'll hear when we talk about this, it's going to be expensive, right? So the first problem is Mars has hardly in the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, right?

There's almost no oxygen on Mars. Okay. So problem number one is you need an atmosphere on Mars, right? By an atmosphere, you mean like a layer of gas surrounding the planet, because currently it doesn't have much of that. That's right. So that when you step outside, you take a deep breath, you get a breath instead of like your lungs boiling, which seems less comfortable, right? I don't want to, when we make ads for the resort that we're going to start on Mars, we don't want images of our guests having their lungs going inside out and their blood boiling into space, right? Yeah, like Arnold Trashenegger in Total Recall.

Yeah, that was a documentary, exactly. Yeah, yeah, well, he goes outside of Mars. I mean, like his eyes bug out. It's a fun movie. Yeah, exactly. And so that's one problem, is the atmosphere. And connected to that is the temperature. Currently on Mars, I checked the weather this morning.

It's negative 63 degrees Celsius on the surface of Mars. Chilly. Chilly. Definitely not Southern California standards, right? And those two things are connected. Is it connected to the fact that there is no atmosphere, you know, like a vacuum is by definition kind of cold, right? Well, there's that, I mean, but also there's nothing to store the sun's energy, right? The sun hits Mars and warms it up, but then the energy just floats off into space, right?

It just radiates back out into space. But an atmosphere acts like a blanket, right? And so it keeps the sun's energy on the planet. That's one of the reasons why we have global warming here on Earth is that we're thickening the blanket. we have of carbon dioxide is keeping more and more of the sun's energy. So Mars has almost... It acts like a greenhouse, right?

Yeah, it acts like a greenhouse. Mars has almost no atmosphere and so most of the energy bounces right back into space. So the fact that you don't have an atmosphere and you don't and you're too cold are connected, right? Which is bad.

If you had an atmosphere, it could warm up. Yes, exactly. So one strategy for warming up the planet is to give it an atmosphere, right? So, for example, I asked the professor, I said, you know, what if we use the carbon dioxide that is on Mars, because Mars has a bunch of carbon dioxide and has a bunch of water, but it's mostly frozen in the ice caps, right?

So in the polar caps. So there's these huge amounts of basically dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide, on the surface. And so people have been thinking, what if we could melt that somehow, right? Like what if you stick it in the microwave? If you can build a planet-sized microwave, then I think all these terraforming projects will be easy. But no, say, for example, you sent up a bunch of nukes, right? You nuked the ice caps on Mars. Vaporized all of it, right?

And then you would have some gas in the atmosphere, right? And so that's sort of a step in the right direction. So you proposed that to him. What did he say? The problem with that is that there's not enough, right? Even if you did that, it would be like 150th of the carbon dioxide you need to make enough pressure on the planet so that you could warm it up, right? So you need some other source of carbon dioxide.

carbon dioxide. Now, this is something which is in contention. Some people say, oh, there's a lot of more carbon dioxide that's sort of buried under the ground. And as soon as you start warming it up, that carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere and it sort of be a runaway greenhouse effect. Right. It has to already be on Mars. Like, we can't bring enough CO2. Like, we have, our problem is we have too much CO2. We can't just take it to Mars. No, we could. That's another solution, right? But it's easier to start with the CO2 on Mars. And some people think there's just not enough CO2 on Mars. So then even if you melt the ice caps and warm up all the rocks that you just won't get enough CO2. But that's a point of contention. Nobody's entirely sure. But if there isn't enough CO2 on Mars, as you say, we could bring some in, right? You could find some comets or some, you know, asteroids that are mostly CO2 and just sort of nudge them towards Mars and crash them onto the surface.

Oh, man. Wouldn't that cause other problems? Well, I think you'd want to do that before you build your resort. Oh, I see. Otherwise, I mean, what problems would it cause? I mean, it sounds sort of naive, but like, what's the danger with crashing an asteroid under the surface of Mars? Like, nobody lives there. What's the worst that could happen if we learn to divert asteroids onto other planets?

No, that's a realistic approach. And this is what I meant when I said, like, massive resources. Now you have to build a huge spaceship, and you have to get it out there to the asteroid system, and you have to somehow, like, find an asteroid and nudge it towards Mars. And, like, this is already costing a lot. of money. Now we're talking about asteroid wrangling. Yeah, exactly. That's another cool job description. Yeah, asteroid wrangling. You're going to get a lot of PhDs. You're going to be like Bruce Banner. You're going to have like seven PhDs so you can solve any problem.

Okay, so that's where the cost start adding up. Like to get the atmosphere we need, you just need these huge engineering problems which cost money for people to do and to sign up for them, right? Yeah, but there's more problems. Like, say you could do that. Say you could nuke the ice caps and you can get some CO2 and then you bring in enough asteroids and you get enough CO2 to warm up the planet. Then you have another problem, which is that the atmosphere is then toxic because in order to get enough CO2 to make like a blanket to keep the planet warm enough, you need a lot more CO2 on Mars than you do on Earth. And the reason is just that Mars is further or away from the sun, and it's smaller.

So it doesn't get as much sunlight. So it needs a thicker blanket, right? So you need a lot more CO2 on Mars than you do on Earth to get to the right temperature. The problem is if you put that much CO2 in the atmosphere, it kills humans. So humans cannot breed that atmosphere. Couldn't you just make up for it

by adding more oxygen? More oxygen? Well, you don't want an atmosphere with too much oxygen because then everything just ignites simultaneously. And also, oxygen doesn't have the same properties as CO2 in terms of warming, right? Each of these gases have a very different behavior in terms of planetary warming because they act different in the atmosphere.

So that's just not possible to do just straight CO2. But then the people have some other ideas like maybe we could bring in some ammonia because ammonia is a really good atmospheric warmer. But ammonia doesn't last very long. So then I asked the professor, I said, well, what if you had some other way of warming it, right, instead of just using CO2? What if you brought the CO2 up to a level where humans could breathe it and you had some other. technique for bringing up the temperature like burning tires do you have a lot a lot of extra tires in your life or you're desperate to get rid of is that what I'm hearing here no I mean like couldn't you create heat another way yes yes and so one other way is to just increase the

amount of solar exposure right to get more sunlight onto Mars so build a big mirror in space and just focus a bunch of energy onto the surface of Mars you mean like I know like um like little kids do with the magnifying glass and ants. Yeah, exactly. Just kind of focus more sunlight onto the spot where the planet is. Yeah, or you know like those little camping ovens that are just aluminum foil

and you could put a hot dog in the middle of it and it focuses the sun's rays on and eventually your hot dog warms up. That's the scenario except Mars is the hot dog. Okay, but you'd have to build gigantic mirrors. Yeah. The Mars has about half as much solar radiation as Earth does.

That means the mirror would have to be a the size of Mars, right? Now we're talking about huge planet-sized mirrors in space and you've got to get them right. You know, if you, too much or too little and all of a sudden, all of your guests in your resort are freezing or fried up, right?

So you're really going to be trusting these PhD-PEs to get this right in, to never fail, right? This has to work forever and always, right? So it's a tricky task. And all of this is just to warm up the planet, right? Yeah, exactly. So you've got to bring in an atmosphere. This is just problem number one.

Exactly. Exactly. Are you feeling less enthusiastic now? This is draining your bank account? It's just like turning on the thermostat. That's just the beginning of your problems. Yeah. So you bring in an atmosphere somehow.

You warm up the planet, right? And then what do you have? You have a planet that has the right temperature, has enough CO2 in it. But you also want to be able to grow crops. You want to be able to breathe, right? So you need to produce oxygen. Now, I remember the way that that happened on Earth was that we had basically algae and phytoplankton and all sorts of little green

microbes that are capable of producing oxygen. And that's cool. And we could do that again. We could just like launch a huge tub of plants, you know, of algae into the new lakes on warm Mars. And they could just, we could just wait for them to do

their thing. We could just make Mars moldy. That's right. That's right. Make Mars funky again. Yeah. And that all sounds great. And you might be thinking, that sounds wonderful because then we're using the power of microbes.

They multiply fast and they can spread all over Mars and we can green the planet. So I talked to a microbiologist. One of them is my wife and I also consulted Professor Heather Bean. She's at Arizona State University. And they tell me that a reasonable estimate for how long it would take to produce enough oxygen is about a million years. Oh my goodness. So even if we put giant tubs of algae there, it would take a million years to process. is all that CO2 into oxygen?

It would take a million years. Unless, you know, you want to add another degree and you want to do like plankton engineering and create some new kind of microbe that's better at producing oxygen. But yeah, it take about a million years. And, you know, it took like 10 to the six or so years on Earth. It was not a fast process.

Wait, so what's the factor? Do you just not have enough algae? Or do you, is the algae just, you know, if you max out the number of amount of allergies you could have on Mars, it would still take a million years? So in your mind's eye, you have like the surface of Mars

is covered with 10 feet of algae or something. Yeah, I'm wondering. All right, yeah, let's go in the max algae scenario. Even in that scenario, it still takes about a million years. And the reason is that algae are not in the business of producing oxygen. It's not why they do it. They photosynthesize

and, but in that process, they produce oxygen and they also use some oxygen. So the amount of oxygen that's like produced as spare is not a lot. Yeah. So they're sequestering some carbon, they're producing some oxygen, but it's not an efficient way to make oxygen. I mean, it's nice because it sort of runs itself and it's historical because it's the way we did it on

Earth, so that's nice and cozy. But it's not a very fast way to make a, to make a planet have enough oxygen in it. Wow. And I want to talk about that some more, but first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billie Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief.

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Brought to you by the USDA Force Service, your state forester and the ad council. Okay, so then what can we do? Can we bring oxygen in other ways? Yeah, well, we could bring water, right? We could bring water in and we could split it, make the H2O into H and O, and use that oxygen. That would take a lot of time and a lot of energy, right? Splitting water into oxygen, hydrogen takes a lot of energy.

But hey, if we're building planetary-sized mirrors and shepherding asteroids around the, the solar system, then I'm assuming we have access to a huge amount of energy. So, yeah, we could certainly do that. Meaning maybe grab another comet with water and crash it onto Mars. That's right. Splash it now into your ocean of algae that you have pumping away oxygen into your atmosphere. It's like a cooking project. We have this planet here, just grab some comets from over here, some asteroids over here,

mix it all together. Yeah, it's a cooking project. And even if you do that, even if you accomplish all of those things, you still have another problem, which is that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field. And the magnetic field is really important in shielding from cosmic rays. Remember, cosmic rays are just tiny particles from space, and they're usually charged. And so a magnetic field will bend them. Here on Earth, we have a magnetic field, and it bends a lot of the radiation from space and protects us.

And also protects our atmosphere, right? So let's assume that we heated up the planet, and we created enough oxygen for a system. step outside and breathe, we still have a big problem, which is that it would all just blow away, right? That's right. The magnetic field keeps the atmosphere from getting blown away from the solar wind and from other kinds of cosmic rays. And so we need to create a magnetic field for Mars. The size of a planet. The size of the planet. And as crazy as that sounds, it's maybe the easiest task of all the things we've talked about today. because you don't need to go inside of Mars

and get the core spinning to give you a magnetic field which is how we think we have a magnetic field on Earth you just need to provide a magnetic shield and that might be as simple as putting a huge magnet out in space between the sun and Mars to provide like a bending so that the particles don't hit Mars

and if you can get the magnetic field a little closer to the sun you can create sort of a magnetic envelope or a shadow to protect the planet wait this is the easiest problem that we have in this is creating a planet-sized force field

using a planet-sized magnet. That's right. If you had if you had to pick each of these tasks to solve, that's the one I would recommend picking because that one's the easiest and cheapest also. If you've solved all these crazy problems,

you might be able to make Mars habitable. That's right. So you build an atmosphere, you truck in a bunch of CO2, you warm a planet with some mirrors, You see it with things that produce oxygen, you provide a magnetic field. When you wait a million years, you forgot to wait a million years part. Don't pack your bags yet. You can put your underwear back in your drawer of people.

It's going to take a long time before Mars is habitable, even if we started tomorrow. And, you know, we can get there earlier with various bases. We don't have to complete the terraforming to start living on Mars. But for the deep future, if we want humanity really have a home on Mars, to be comfortable there, to have plants growing and crops and all sorts of things, really healthy ecosystem, then, yeah, we've got to do the terraforming, and it's going to take a long time. So there is a sliver of possibility.

It would just be really, really expensive. Yeah, exactly. It might take a long time. Exactly. It would be expensive. It would take a long time. But it's not impossible. So given infinite time and infinite resources, it is possible. And, you know, on this show, we talk about things that are totally impossible

and things that are just different. and expensive. And I like when things are just difficult and expensive, because then you can just say, well, pass it off to the engineers. I'm sure they'll figure it out, right? You as a physicist can just wash your hands. And be like, it's not my fault anymore that we're dying as a species. Exactly. Physicists, our job is to move something from impossible to possible. The rest is details, right? That's what we have the engineers for. You know, eventually there'll be an app. You know, you could just, you know, terraform my planet with your app or something. It'll take five seconds. And who wrote that app?

Engineers. And they made all the money, okay? And they deserve it, right? A lot more rich engineers out there than rich physicists, if you ask me. Oh, I was going to say something, but I forgot. You were going to say something, but you got distracted by the huge pile of cash you have as an engineer. Sorry, I was counting my gold coins. I forgot what you were saying.

Okay, so that's Mars. That's maybe one of the closest and maybe least sour, impossible tasting of the options. But there are other possibilities within our solar system or maybe outside our solar system, right? That's right. There are some other places that we could consider living. For example, there's the moon, right? The moon is even closer than Mars. And so from the point of view of getting stuff there and doing the engineering, it's even simpler. The problem is that the moon has a lot of the same challenges as Mars, but it's even more. smaller so the gravity is much, much less, which means it'd be really hard to hold onto an atmosphere. Even if you did all the work, you crashed a bunch of comets into the moon, you warmed it up somehow with mirrors and you give it a nice atmosphere. The atmosphere would just leak away,

right? There's not enough gravity to hold onto the atmosphere on the moon. You have to be big enough. There's a size requirement. Yeah, exactly. You have to be big enough so that you have enough gravity to hold onto the atmosphere, right? It's like you don't want to buy somebody a fancy new jacket if they're just going to throw it away. And that's basically what it would be. Like, if we build an atmosphere on the moon, it's just going to float away into space because the moon is not big enough to hold onto it. But at least you would have enough cheese, right?

That's right. It would be a fun party while it lasted, right? But if you're looking for like a thousands and thousands of years kind of solution, like you want to establish a human base there, it's just not really a good idea. I mean, it might last hundreds of years. You might even get a thousand years out of it. But you need to continuously replenish the atmosphere because it'd be constantly running away from you. Because it will just float out into space.

Yeah, exactly. You'll just be constantly farting out your life source into space. So the moon is not a great target. You'd be constantly having to P.E. Your farts back in to your mini planet. All right, so that's the moon. What about other planets in the solar system? Well, Venus is interesting because it has exactly the opposite problem, right?

Venus, Mars we talked about, has almost no atmosphere. The moon is no atmosphere. Venus is the other problem. It has way too much atmosphere. Venus is like we're afraid Earth might be in a million years. It's covered in carbon dioxide, and it's way too dense. It's like 90 times the density of the atmosphere on Earth, right? So you'd be crushed.

It's 96% CO2, right? Yeah. And all that CO2 on that planet for all those years has really heated it up. So it's like 400 and something degrees on the surface of Venus all the time, right? That's not just like during the summer, that's all the time. So the problem with Venus is the opposite. You need to get rid of some of that atmosphere, and that'll help Venus cool down. And so that's hard.

Like, how do you get rid of atmosphere? It's the opposite problem. You need to take out CO2. Yeah. And so people have crazy ideas. They're like, well, you know, some ideas like somehow get that CO2 sequestered, you know, fire bunch of stuff into the atmosphere, Venus, like magnesium or calcium or, you know, bombarded with hydrogen so that it forms water or, you know, with all sorts of, you know, with all sorts

other stuff. They have these strategies to try to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere onto the surface, which has its own problem. And there are other strategies like make huge scoops and scoop off the atmosphere. Right. Like just gather it up and scoop it off. Like that seems crazy to me. Like

you're going to build an enormous spoon and like, you know, dig into the atmosphere. Venus, it sounds crazy. But reasonable people talk about this stuff. You're like, it's physically possible, so get to work, engineers. Yeah. And then I thought, you know, what if we could take some of the CO2 off of Venus and bring it to Mars, right?

We could solve two problems at once, right? What if you could crash Venus into Mars and create the perfect planet? Now you're going too far, okay? We can talk about planet-sized mirrors, but we can't talk about smashing them together. That's just totally impractical. Oh, I see. Yeah, so that's a big problem with Venus. There's a limit to your flavors of impossibility.

That's right. The other problem with Venus is that it rotates really slowly. A day on Venus is 240-something-something-day. on Earth, right? So you have, like, really, really long nights and really, really long days. That's a pretty hard way to live. So to really live on Venus, you'd have to, like, speed up its rotation somehow. Right. And people have talked about how to do that. Be a killer workday. Yeah. Like, if you wanted to get rid of the atmosphere, you could build, like, a huge jet, which punches, which pushes the atmosphere out into space, and that could act like, like,

a nozzle, right, to speed up the rotation of the planet. Now, this is, I mean, it's sounding crazy but like that's a real solution wow okay so that's venus we have the opposite problem where else where else could we go maybe outside of us our solar system yeah one of the most promising things is not engineering a planet that's close by but picking the right one you know it's like don't choose from the cars that are available to you in your neighborhood if none of them work like go drive 30 miles to find the right one you know and so one option is to look for extra solar planets outside our solar system around other stars. And recently we have amazing technology to do this.

We found thousands of them. And just find one that has the right characteristics. It has the right amount of solar radiation, has an atmosphere, maybe even has liquid water. And from that point of view, we'd be starting from a pretty good spot. It's not unlikely we could find one that has carbon dioxide rich atmosphere with the right pressure and the right temperature and liquid water. There's nothing unreasonable about that expectation.

So that's more like terra-finding than terraforming, right? You know what I mean? Like you're looking for one that already looks like ours. Yeah. And even in that scenario, there are some big problems. Like problem number one is it's super duper far away, right? So it's going to take a long time to get there if that's even possible. And you have to figure out that it's a good destination before you get there

because you don't want to travel for a thousand years and then turn around because, oops, you know, we forgot the shopping list or oops, we went to the wrong place. The other problem is what? you do when you get there right you want to establish an ecosystem on the planet and having enough CO2 and you seed it with life and it produces oxygen even that is not enough to make like farmable land right what you need then is soil you need to cover the planet somehow with with dirt that you can use to grow plants and that's complicated right getting those getting dirt to work getting soil to work is hard we don't even understand how it works on earth you know people are studying it's not just dirt dirt dirt is not just dirt you i mean you can't grow

things and just sand, right? Sand and water. You need most of the soil that we have on earth is basically decayed plants, right? It's leaf litter and other stuff that has died. So now you've got to start that process on another planet. You have to somehow seed it. You can bring some soil and you can put it out there and it'll grow and spread. But to get the right balance of all those microbes working in just the right way to support the plants that you need to feed your people, that's not an easy problem to solve. And you can't just like truck in a planet's worth of soil from Earth, right? The people on Earth they're not going to be happy about that, and that's expensive.

So it's a hard problem to solve even when you get there. Can't just go to Home Depot and buy a trillion bags of soil. That's right. It's just not enough soil to fill another planet. And so that's the kind of thing that would take a lot of experimentation and a lot of time. But it is feasible. Okay. So we learned that there are a lot of different flavors of impossible.

That's right. Hoping beyond hope. Yeah, yeah, they're not impossible, right? All these things could be done. And, you know, these are the ideas we have now. And if we're talking about things we're doing over thousands or millions of years, you've got to hope that human ingenuity is going to come up with even better solutions, better strategies, new energy sources, ways to do this kind of engineering.

So give us some time. I think we'll figure it out. Yeah, we might not be desperate now, but we might be more desperate later. Yeah, so throw another tire on the fire and, you know, make some plans to live on Mars. It really makes you think about how fragile our planet is, you know? Like we're so lucky not to be like Mars. And if we're not careful, we're going to end up like Venus, you know, totally uninhabitable in either case. Yeah, you know, it's good to have negative role models, right?

We see some pretty terrible examples around us of what happens when planets go off kilter. Mars lost its atmosphere and Venus overcooked its. So we're pretty lucky to be right in this sweet spot and we better take care of it because it's going to be a long time before we are capable of making another planet be home to a substantial population. So the next time you go outside, take a deep breath. and savor it. That's right. You're not likely to get that anywhere else. That's right.

All right, everyone. Well, thanks for lifting to this upbeat episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. If you have questions about what we said and you want to hear more about it, send us an email at feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Or if you have another suggestion for a topic you'd like to hear us talk about, send it on over. Or if you have a question about physics or philosophy or dating or small mammals or whatever, just send it on over. Yeah. If you have questions about ceramics, like terracotta. Don't ask us.

We don't know anything about it. All right. See you next time. Thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge.

That's one word. or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. I always had to be so good, no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper. The paper ceiling, the limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree.

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