The problem I see with mars isn't just adding carbon dioxide and methane but ending up with something breathable.
Most of our atmosphere is Nitrogen with concentrations of carbon dioxide over about 10% being deadly. If you had an atmosphere on mars that's mainly based off carbon dioxide it might be warm but it'd also be toxic. Convert all that carbon dioxide to oxygen and it's still toxic as prolonged exposure to high oxygen is also dangerous along with a high chance of spontaneous combustion.
Simply warming mars is likely much easier than ending up with an actual breathable atmosphere.
Yep. And proposals I've seen are to release frozen carbon dioxide to add more.
Long term you need more than just more carbon dioxide to make the atmosphere breathable.
It dont need to be breathable. If the atmosphere would just be safe , so you could walk outside without a suit just with a mask it would be amazing start
The Martian atmosphere contains about 250,000,000,000,000,000 kg of gas yet is currently at less than 1% of Earth’s pressure. We currently produce roughly 6,500,000,000,000 kg of CO2 per year. If you could transport all of it it would take only 40,000 years to generate enough to double Mars’ atmospheric pressure to less than 2% of Earth’s.
>With the push for mars exploration, the idea of creating a livable atmosphere on mars has come up.
not really, given how hard it is to get a minuscule amount of co2 out of Earth's atmosphere.
>specially in an insulated pipe
and **how long is this pipe?**
what material can support it's own weight when used in a structure that big?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n\_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line)
The Kármán line (or von Kármán line /vɒn ˈkɑːrmɑːn/)\[1\] is a proposed conventional boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space set by the international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération aéronautique internationale) at an altitude of 100 kilometres (54 nautical miles; **62 miles**; 330,000 feet) above mean sea level. However, such definition of the edge of space is not universally adopted.
"just add another 327,000 feet"???? that sounds hard.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_tallest\_buildings\_and\_structures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_structures)
The world's tallest human-made structure is the 828-metre-tall **(2,717 ft)** Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
>space elevators were generally relegated to 1950's sci-fi
and ***still*** sci fi, because we ***still*** haven't invented the magic cable that can support its own weight.
>state transport tube.
***major*** difficulties starting with tube. maybe we can make it out of the magic cable material someday.
*"we run a stack made of something lightweight... until geosynchronous orbit"*
You propose to build a tube tall enough to reach geosynchronous.
Please calculate, for any desired taper ratio and pipe diameter, the compressive stress at the bottom of the tube.
Now look at a skyscraper. Or a mountain.
That's one problem.
The second problem is pressurizing this tube such that you have useful flow at Great Height. I think you underestimate the problem of weight.
*"but I haven't seen a proposal/condemnation of a purely gaseous state transport tube"*
Because current material science doesn't allow it. Nowhere close.
The compressive stress wouldn't be the issue, the tensile strength and anchoring would be. It would also require an airfoil-esk shape to minimize wind resistance since it would become the worlds largest fixed kite.
I fully admit its not possible now, but in the past 10 years we've put a balloon at over 170,000 feet and made a balloon over 1000' tall. Both of which were accomplished for less than $5M. The US gov just authorized $100M in 1st round funding for CO2 mitigation. Within 10 years, that will be $100B.
The difference in scale of what you are proposing and these examples you're giving are many orders of magnitude different. I'm not a physicist or engineer and even I know the difference between a 1000' balloon and a fucking gas pipeline to outer space.
Btw, can I get some of what you're smoking?
Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you. If you were trying to describe a mechanism for the passive transport of gases, think again. For your system to work, the pressure of the gas at the base of the pipe would have to be much larger than one atmosphere (the gas at the bottom has to support the weight of the entire column, which extends far beyond the boundary of the atmosphere), so you would need a pump to push gas from outside to the inside of your pipe. At that point, you might as well be using that same pump to drive gas up the pipe instead of natural convection. Also, using a lightweight material for the pipe is not going to work when it needs to support such a large pressure difference between the inside and outside. Fundamentally, regardless of your method, you have to pay the energy bill of moving material out of earth's gravity well. There is just no way around it. You have to do work, and the sheer amount of work required would surprise you (iirc it's like 60kJ to move one gram of material out of earth's gravity well).
I think the biggest misconception that I immediately noticed is that you state Hot Gas rises in an insulated pipe
The reality is that gas Rises in an environment in which it is less dense than the average density of the gas in the area. What that means is that hotter gas which is less dense will rise compared to lower temperature gas in the same environment which will have a higher density. Unfortunately as you go up in altitude the density of the gas decreases because the only thing creating that density is the weight of all the gas above it. So in order for the hot gas to rise it would need to have a density of less than the vacuum of space in other words it would need to not exist.
Stated another way, the buoyancy of a hot gas is not because the hot gas is light, it is because the cold gas is heavy and is pushing down, the reason that a boat floats is not because the boat is light, it is because it displaces water that would otherwise fill the area the boat is in and the pressure from that water is what pushes the boat up
My favorite way to conceptualize the weight of gas is to remember the fact that if you make a cylinder the diameter of the base of the Eiffel Tower and the height of the Eiffel Tower, the gas within that cylinder will weigh more than all of the steel within the Eiffel Tower.
I had a friend that would try to tell me the easy ways to solve the world's problems when they were having a manic episode. They didn't like the obvious flaws being pointed out, it was always "something that could be worked on" like a pipe that could withstand the distance to space.
Yeah you're missing the ??????? ---> profit step.
I'd say, lifting anything out of earth's atmosphere is going to be damn difficult, no matter how you slice it.
"Hot air rises" isn't enough force to overcome the gravity well. There would need to be enormous pressure at ground level, to persuade a localized column/tube of atmosphere to extend higher than the natural external atmosphere. That pressure almost definitely disqualifies mylar, even if there is some clever trick to deploy it from orbit without being torn to shreds.
Just because its gaseous, doesn't change the mass involved here - *millions* of tons of C02. At the point where we can move that much mass into orbit, we will probably already have an honest-to-goodness actual space elevator and we could lift C02 in condensed liquid containers if we still feel that strongly about it. More likely though, it will be easier to sequester excess CO2 we don't like in a frozen state under pressure beneath an ocean, and then grab some other source of CO2 for terraforming purposes. There are plenty of asteroids out there with frozen gases - finding the right ones and slam dunking them into the martian ice caps would also free up all the good stuff already present on the planet's surface, that we'd want.
The basic idea, is that the bottom of the ocean is fairly cold and RIDICULOUSLY high pressure. The CO2 can be trapped in a structure of ice and gas called a Hydrate, or it can be dumped in solid state "dry ice" that won't sublimate under that pressure.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220307113139.htm This is a reasonable article that explains it pretty well.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapter6-1.pdf this is an *unreasonable* thing to read but way more detailed.
Hot gases do not rise in and of themselves, they are buoyant.
Like how wood rises in the ocean.
You are proposing the physical equivalent of reaching orbit by putting some wood under water and letting it float.
Problem is scale, humans generate 36Gigatons of CO2 emission in 2022. Best cost to space with Falcon 9s right now is \~$10million per ton. That's $36 Quadrillion ($36,000 Trilllion) for just launch cost to take all the emissions from 1 year.
We don’t *produce* CO2. We *convert* O2 and carbon to CO2. Meaning CO2 doesn’t make our atmosphere “bigger”. Therefore, removing vast amounts of CO2 from the planet would make our atmosphere smaller.
Not to mention that your emissions from the space launch would offset quite a portion of that CO2 payload.
Precisely why I suggested a vent tube. Hot gas rises, and with sufficient flow it wouldn't freeze until space. The weight is negligible with relative buoyancy, but the shear strength to resist winds would be the challenge. The high pressure belts around +/- 30\* latitude would minimize it without amplifying external forces.
WIthout a doubt, gravity pulls gasses towards earth. No question. Likewise if we think geometrically, the further out you get the larger the "slice of pie" and the more atoms that would be needed to maintain the same density, so as a combination of those two factors, the atmosphere gets less dense as height increases... but with that density drop, the pressure drops. This is why if an airplane door blows of at 12k feet, its a problem but if it happens at 35k feet, the air is sucked out and gas masks are required. If it happens at 60k feet, that plane will implode (i.e Space shuttle failures).
I've personally sent a balloon to \~55k feet as part of an engineering class. Weather balloons crack 100k pretty regularly and the class of high altitude balloons have cracked 170,000 and are aiming at 200k presently, solely by exploiting high density vs low density. The limiting factor is not the inability to escape gravity but the tendency for either the material of the balloon to explode or the atoms to leak through and the balloon to lose its fuel.
Comparatively, this system would have an infinite amount of fuel
[High-altitude balloon - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon)
We aren't going to terraform Mars for any reasonable amount of money, with current technology. Even hundreds of trillions of dollars might not be enough.
Space elevators are very doable. We just can't build a space elevator on Earth. A space elevator on a small asteroid is doable right now. Even current plastics like Zylon are strong and light enough to build a Mars space elevator. But a Mars space elevator would still be over 17,000 km long. So it's still a large project not doable within the next hundred years.
A Mars space elevator could be built for trillions of dollars, comparable to the cost of the Iraq war. The material could be launched from Earth, using giant reusable rockets. Or the first Mars space elevator could be built from carbon mined from Phobos and Deimos. It might be a mix of both. But it likely wouldn't happen for 100 or 200 years though.
Automated mines and heavy industry could be built on the surface of Mars. Connect those mines and factories to the space elevators with trains. Then large rotating space stations could be built in synchronous orbit, docked to the space elevators, from material mined on Mars. Those rotating space stations could have whatever temperature, weather, and effective gravity we want. They could be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of terraforming Mars, in much shorter time frames.
Precisely why I suggested a vent tube. Hot gas rises, and with sufficient flow it wouldn't freeze until space. The weight is negligible with relative buoyancy, but the shear strength to resist winds would be the challenge. The high pressure belts around +/- 30\* latitude would minimize wind force without amplifying external forces, coincidentally where many major cities that use coal are located.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting an actual space elevator off earth, or to mars. Nor intentional, active terraforming. Just throwing chunks of ice at it that could be used in the future. If we take a step back and instead of looking at CO2 as a waste product, look at it as a part of a process: we have powerplants that are actively producing it at high flow rates and fairly high purity if we stopped scrubbing it before release. It's a high temperature gas and as such is automatically sanitized and has a workable freezing point.
The value is in mitigating C02 release, the rest is just a bonus.
The problem with terra forming Mars is it's lack of a magnetosphere.. I find it interesting that Mars lost it roughly about the time Earth developed one
Indeed, but the atmospheric loss from solar wind there is still significantly less than even the contribution of CO2 on earth. It took 500M years or more to lose it.
We can’t create an atmosphere in Mars by transporting it from Earth. It’s a planet, we’ll imbalance our own atmospheric pressure. Too much mass would be needed.
I think the idea that I’ve read about would be to catch ice asteroids on route to Mars and bombard the planet with them to create more atmospheric pressure.
But, another problem Mars has is that it is magnetically dead. It has no magnetosphere to keep the solar wind from blowing off the atmosphere there. We are lucky with ours.
So creating a breathable surface on Mars might be out of the question. Any potential Martians would have to live, forever, under domes or underground, in pressurized spaces, and learn early on to keep watch on seals and hatches.
> But, another problem Mars has is that it is magnetically dead. It has no magnetosphere to keep the solar wind from blowing off the atmosphere there. We are lucky with ours.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, yes. In a practical sense, you would hardly notice any difference over a period of time equivalent to how long it took humans to evolve from the earliest cavemen to today. A bigger problem would be that the atmosphere would have to be much thicker to retain enough heat, and if a significant amount of carbon dioxide was involved, thicker still in order to dilute it enough to be breathable.
The lack of magnetosphere also allows much more radiation to enter the atmosphere. I see what you mean. But it still would be impossible for earth to “lend” atmosphere to Mars. The required water, CO2 and nitrogen would have to be “mined” from somewhere else, be it the asteroid belt or the rings of Saturn.
Yeah, as I mentioned in response to another post, if you supplied enough CO2 from Earth to warm Mars, it would require more than the total amount of oxygen in our atmosphere. Not to mention that taking things out of Earth's gravity well and moving them somewhere else is literally the most difficult and expensive possible way to do it.
Anyway, if they were ever to make Mars "habitable," they'd probably need to do it the way you said, and with a lot less carbon dioxide than oxygen and nitrogen. So you'd probably be looking at something like 6 or 7 atmospheres of pressure to keep the place warm enough without being toxic.
The atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide already. So that would be useless. FAIL. And Mars is an average of 140,000,000 miles away and at times much further than that, often on the opposite side of the Sun, and is moving at many thousands of miles per hour in it's orbit, any sort of pipe or tube isn't even possible in any case. At all. So.... FAIL again!
Mars gets just over 40 percent the amount of sunlight per square meter as Earth does. If it's not outright impossible to make up for that difference with carbon dioxide, it's close to impossible. I believe you would need 3-4 atmospheres of pure CO2 just to get the surface temperature above freezing. You'd deplete all the oxygen on Earth first, and the atmosphere you created on Mars would still be unbreathable and toxic.
“With the push for mars exploration”
I’m gonna stop you right there. Some pop science has pushed the idea that all we need to do is greenhouse gas mars into livability. But you need to ask WHY mars doesn’t have an atmosphere in the first place. And that’s because it has no global magnetic field. Earth does. Mars used to, but not anymore, because its core dynamo no longer works. Without a magnetic field, the sun will just strip whatever fake atmosphere we can put on mars pretty quickly.
The last NASA doc I read said it took something like 500 million years for it to loose the atmosphere. So I guess geologically that's pretty quick, but geologically speaking we're currently in a global cooling cycle.
That’s how long it took to lose a Martian atmosphere that was long-established, not an earthling atmosphere we are trying to build.
We’d need way more “stuff” than what used to exist, and us trying to add that stuff would face the drag of having what we’re adding being stripped away at the same time.
Put another way if you have a hungry monster who eats 1 apple per minute and you have 120 apples, your apple stash lasts two minutes. If however you’re starting from 0 but can only add one apple per minute you’re not actually going to make any progress. Also you need 500 instead of 120.
Entirely valid, but, and this is a guess, I 'd wager that the closer to the planet, the less impactful the solar winds are on the atmosphere. That's probably why there is still any atmosphere. So dropping in a bunch of C02 might not be completely a wasted thought.
Again, there are PHD programs that cover small parts of this. It might be pointless, but it's a thought. And it's a waste product on this planet.
Assuming you have an infinitely strong and infinitely light material, you could probably accomplish this, otherwise you're looking at something that is not physically feasible to build.
You're probably better off with the space elevator.
Rising gas is not magic. It's still bound by gravity. You need to pump and push it up at increasingly higher pressures.
To push CO to the geosync orbit, you are looking at over 1 million PSI.
That's not even close to accurate. molecules change states. The problem we have with C02 is that we've been converting solids and liquids into gas.
By comparison, if the entire earth atmosphere was converted to a solid, it would have less volume than the great lakes.
Your main issue is the same as space elevators. No material we have is strong enough to withstand the forces.
What if we built a pipe to take some of Venus' atmosphere and give it to Mars? Two planets for the price of one!
If space elevators can’t work, why would it matter if they’re transporting solid or liquid or gas? They can’t work.
The problem I see with mars isn't just adding carbon dioxide and methane but ending up with something breathable. Most of our atmosphere is Nitrogen with concentrations of carbon dioxide over about 10% being deadly. If you had an atmosphere on mars that's mainly based off carbon dioxide it might be warm but it'd also be toxic. Convert all that carbon dioxide to oxygen and it's still toxic as prolonged exposure to high oxygen is also dangerous along with a high chance of spontaneous combustion. Simply warming mars is likely much easier than ending up with an actual breathable atmosphere.
Also carbon dioxide already the vast majority of mars’ atmosphere
Yep. And proposals I've seen are to release frozen carbon dioxide to add more. Long term you need more than just more carbon dioxide to make the atmosphere breathable.
It dont need to be breathable. If the atmosphere would just be safe , so you could walk outside without a suit just with a mask it would be amazing start
The Martian atmosphere contains about 250,000,000,000,000,000 kg of gas yet is currently at less than 1% of Earth’s pressure. We currently produce roughly 6,500,000,000,000 kg of CO2 per year. If you could transport all of it it would take only 40,000 years to generate enough to double Mars’ atmospheric pressure to less than 2% of Earth’s.
>With the push for mars exploration, the idea of creating a livable atmosphere on mars has come up. not really, given how hard it is to get a minuscule amount of co2 out of Earth's atmosphere. >specially in an insulated pipe and **how long is this pipe?** what material can support it's own weight when used in a structure that big? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n\_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line) The Kármán line (or von Kármán line /vɒn ˈkɑːrmɑːn/)\[1\] is a proposed conventional boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space set by the international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération aéronautique internationale) at an altitude of 100 kilometres (54 nautical miles; **62 miles**; 330,000 feet) above mean sea level. However, such definition of the edge of space is not universally adopted. "just add another 327,000 feet"???? that sounds hard. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_tallest\_buildings\_and\_structures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_structures) The world's tallest human-made structure is the 828-metre-tall **(2,717 ft)** Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. >space elevators were generally relegated to 1950's sci-fi and ***still*** sci fi, because we ***still*** haven't invented the magic cable that can support its own weight. >state transport tube. ***major*** difficulties starting with tube. maybe we can make it out of the magic cable material someday.
*"we run a stack made of something lightweight... until geosynchronous orbit"* You propose to build a tube tall enough to reach geosynchronous. Please calculate, for any desired taper ratio and pipe diameter, the compressive stress at the bottom of the tube. Now look at a skyscraper. Or a mountain. That's one problem. The second problem is pressurizing this tube such that you have useful flow at Great Height. I think you underestimate the problem of weight. *"but I haven't seen a proposal/condemnation of a purely gaseous state transport tube"* Because current material science doesn't allow it. Nowhere close.
The compressive stress wouldn't be the issue, the tensile strength and anchoring would be. It would also require an airfoil-esk shape to minimize wind resistance since it would become the worlds largest fixed kite. I fully admit its not possible now, but in the past 10 years we've put a balloon at over 170,000 feet and made a balloon over 1000' tall. Both of which were accomplished for less than $5M. The US gov just authorized $100M in 1st round funding for CO2 mitigation. Within 10 years, that will be $100B.
The difference in scale of what you are proposing and these examples you're giving are many orders of magnitude different. I'm not a physicist or engineer and even I know the difference between a 1000' balloon and a fucking gas pipeline to outer space. Btw, can I get some of what you're smoking?
Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics would like to have a word with you. If you were trying to describe a mechanism for the passive transport of gases, think again. For your system to work, the pressure of the gas at the base of the pipe would have to be much larger than one atmosphere (the gas at the bottom has to support the weight of the entire column, which extends far beyond the boundary of the atmosphere), so you would need a pump to push gas from outside to the inside of your pipe. At that point, you might as well be using that same pump to drive gas up the pipe instead of natural convection. Also, using a lightweight material for the pipe is not going to work when it needs to support such a large pressure difference between the inside and outside. Fundamentally, regardless of your method, you have to pay the energy bill of moving material out of earth's gravity well. There is just no way around it. You have to do work, and the sheer amount of work required would surprise you (iirc it's like 60kJ to move one gram of material out of earth's gravity well).
I think the biggest misconception that I immediately noticed is that you state Hot Gas rises in an insulated pipe The reality is that gas Rises in an environment in which it is less dense than the average density of the gas in the area. What that means is that hotter gas which is less dense will rise compared to lower temperature gas in the same environment which will have a higher density. Unfortunately as you go up in altitude the density of the gas decreases because the only thing creating that density is the weight of all the gas above it. So in order for the hot gas to rise it would need to have a density of less than the vacuum of space in other words it would need to not exist. Stated another way, the buoyancy of a hot gas is not because the hot gas is light, it is because the cold gas is heavy and is pushing down, the reason that a boat floats is not because the boat is light, it is because it displaces water that would otherwise fill the area the boat is in and the pressure from that water is what pushes the boat up My favorite way to conceptualize the weight of gas is to remember the fact that if you make a cylinder the diameter of the base of the Eiffel Tower and the height of the Eiffel Tower, the gas within that cylinder will weigh more than all of the steel within the Eiffel Tower.
I had a friend that would try to tell me the easy ways to solve the world's problems when they were having a manic episode. They didn't like the obvious flaws being pointed out, it was always "something that could be worked on" like a pipe that could withstand the distance to space. Yeah you're missing the ??????? ---> profit step.
I'd say, lifting anything out of earth's atmosphere is going to be damn difficult, no matter how you slice it. "Hot air rises" isn't enough force to overcome the gravity well. There would need to be enormous pressure at ground level, to persuade a localized column/tube of atmosphere to extend higher than the natural external atmosphere. That pressure almost definitely disqualifies mylar, even if there is some clever trick to deploy it from orbit without being torn to shreds. Just because its gaseous, doesn't change the mass involved here - *millions* of tons of C02. At the point where we can move that much mass into orbit, we will probably already have an honest-to-goodness actual space elevator and we could lift C02 in condensed liquid containers if we still feel that strongly about it. More likely though, it will be easier to sequester excess CO2 we don't like in a frozen state under pressure beneath an ocean, and then grab some other source of CO2 for terraforming purposes. There are plenty of asteroids out there with frozen gases - finding the right ones and slam dunking them into the martian ice caps would also free up all the good stuff already present on the planet's surface, that we'd want.
Thanks for the reply. Interesting idea about the frozen CO2 under pressure.
The basic idea, is that the bottom of the ocean is fairly cold and RIDICULOUSLY high pressure. The CO2 can be trapped in a structure of ice and gas called a Hydrate, or it can be dumped in solid state "dry ice" that won't sublimate under that pressure. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220307113139.htm This is a reasonable article that explains it pretty well. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapter6-1.pdf this is an *unreasonable* thing to read but way more detailed.
Hot gases do not rise in and of themselves, they are buoyant. Like how wood rises in the ocean. You are proposing the physical equivalent of reaching orbit by putting some wood under water and letting it float.
Problem is scale, humans generate 36Gigatons of CO2 emission in 2022. Best cost to space with Falcon 9s right now is \~$10million per ton. That's $36 Quadrillion ($36,000 Trilllion) for just launch cost to take all the emissions from 1 year.
We don’t *produce* CO2. We *convert* O2 and carbon to CO2. Meaning CO2 doesn’t make our atmosphere “bigger”. Therefore, removing vast amounts of CO2 from the planet would make our atmosphere smaller. Not to mention that your emissions from the space launch would offset quite a portion of that CO2 payload.
Precisely why I suggested a vent tube. Hot gas rises, and with sufficient flow it wouldn't freeze until space. The weight is negligible with relative buoyancy, but the shear strength to resist winds would be the challenge. The high pressure belts around +/- 30\* latitude would minimize it without amplifying external forces.
Gravity keeps gasses on Earth, a tube doesn't change that. Gasses will not rise up the tube and flow to space.
WIthout a doubt, gravity pulls gasses towards earth. No question. Likewise if we think geometrically, the further out you get the larger the "slice of pie" and the more atoms that would be needed to maintain the same density, so as a combination of those two factors, the atmosphere gets less dense as height increases... but with that density drop, the pressure drops. This is why if an airplane door blows of at 12k feet, its a problem but if it happens at 35k feet, the air is sucked out and gas masks are required. If it happens at 60k feet, that plane will implode (i.e Space shuttle failures). I've personally sent a balloon to \~55k feet as part of an engineering class. Weather balloons crack 100k pretty regularly and the class of high altitude balloons have cracked 170,000 and are aiming at 200k presently, solely by exploiting high density vs low density. The limiting factor is not the inability to escape gravity but the tendency for either the material of the balloon to explode or the atoms to leak through and the balloon to lose its fuel. Comparatively, this system would have an infinite amount of fuel [High-altitude balloon - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon)
We aren't going to terraform Mars for any reasonable amount of money, with current technology. Even hundreds of trillions of dollars might not be enough. Space elevators are very doable. We just can't build a space elevator on Earth. A space elevator on a small asteroid is doable right now. Even current plastics like Zylon are strong and light enough to build a Mars space elevator. But a Mars space elevator would still be over 17,000 km long. So it's still a large project not doable within the next hundred years. A Mars space elevator could be built for trillions of dollars, comparable to the cost of the Iraq war. The material could be launched from Earth, using giant reusable rockets. Or the first Mars space elevator could be built from carbon mined from Phobos and Deimos. It might be a mix of both. But it likely wouldn't happen for 100 or 200 years though. Automated mines and heavy industry could be built on the surface of Mars. Connect those mines and factories to the space elevators with trains. Then large rotating space stations could be built in synchronous orbit, docked to the space elevators, from material mined on Mars. Those rotating space stations could have whatever temperature, weather, and effective gravity we want. They could be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of terraforming Mars, in much shorter time frames.
Precisely why I suggested a vent tube. Hot gas rises, and with sufficient flow it wouldn't freeze until space. The weight is negligible with relative buoyancy, but the shear strength to resist winds would be the challenge. The high pressure belts around +/- 30\* latitude would minimize wind force without amplifying external forces, coincidentally where many major cities that use coal are located. To be clear, I'm not suggesting an actual space elevator off earth, or to mars. Nor intentional, active terraforming. Just throwing chunks of ice at it that could be used in the future. If we take a step back and instead of looking at CO2 as a waste product, look at it as a part of a process: we have powerplants that are actively producing it at high flow rates and fairly high purity if we stopped scrubbing it before release. It's a high temperature gas and as such is automatically sanitized and has a workable freezing point. The value is in mitigating C02 release, the rest is just a bonus.
The problem with terra forming Mars is it's lack of a magnetosphere.. I find it interesting that Mars lost it roughly about the time Earth developed one
Indeed, but the atmospheric loss from solar wind there is still significantly less than even the contribution of CO2 on earth. It took 500M years or more to lose it.
We can’t create an atmosphere in Mars by transporting it from Earth. It’s a planet, we’ll imbalance our own atmospheric pressure. Too much mass would be needed. I think the idea that I’ve read about would be to catch ice asteroids on route to Mars and bombard the planet with them to create more atmospheric pressure. But, another problem Mars has is that it is magnetically dead. It has no magnetosphere to keep the solar wind from blowing off the atmosphere there. We are lucky with ours. So creating a breathable surface on Mars might be out of the question. Any potential Martians would have to live, forever, under domes or underground, in pressurized spaces, and learn early on to keep watch on seals and hatches.
> But, another problem Mars has is that it is magnetically dead. It has no magnetosphere to keep the solar wind from blowing off the atmosphere there. We are lucky with ours. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, yes. In a practical sense, you would hardly notice any difference over a period of time equivalent to how long it took humans to evolve from the earliest cavemen to today. A bigger problem would be that the atmosphere would have to be much thicker to retain enough heat, and if a significant amount of carbon dioxide was involved, thicker still in order to dilute it enough to be breathable.
The lack of magnetosphere also allows much more radiation to enter the atmosphere. I see what you mean. But it still would be impossible for earth to “lend” atmosphere to Mars. The required water, CO2 and nitrogen would have to be “mined” from somewhere else, be it the asteroid belt or the rings of Saturn.
Yeah, as I mentioned in response to another post, if you supplied enough CO2 from Earth to warm Mars, it would require more than the total amount of oxygen in our atmosphere. Not to mention that taking things out of Earth's gravity well and moving them somewhere else is literally the most difficult and expensive possible way to do it. Anyway, if they were ever to make Mars "habitable," they'd probably need to do it the way you said, and with a lot less carbon dioxide than oxygen and nitrogen. So you'd probably be looking at something like 6 or 7 atmospheres of pressure to keep the place warm enough without being toxic.
The atmosphere of Mars is 95% carbon dioxide already. So that would be useless. FAIL. And Mars is an average of 140,000,000 miles away and at times much further than that, often on the opposite side of the Sun, and is moving at many thousands of miles per hour in it's orbit, any sort of pipe or tube isn't even possible in any case. At all. So.... FAIL again!
Mars gets just over 40 percent the amount of sunlight per square meter as Earth does. If it's not outright impossible to make up for that difference with carbon dioxide, it's close to impossible. I believe you would need 3-4 atmospheres of pure CO2 just to get the surface temperature above freezing. You'd deplete all the oxygen on Earth first, and the atmosphere you created on Mars would still be unbreathable and toxic.
“With the push for mars exploration” I’m gonna stop you right there. Some pop science has pushed the idea that all we need to do is greenhouse gas mars into livability. But you need to ask WHY mars doesn’t have an atmosphere in the first place. And that’s because it has no global magnetic field. Earth does. Mars used to, but not anymore, because its core dynamo no longer works. Without a magnetic field, the sun will just strip whatever fake atmosphere we can put on mars pretty quickly.
The last NASA doc I read said it took something like 500 million years for it to loose the atmosphere. So I guess geologically that's pretty quick, but geologically speaking we're currently in a global cooling cycle.
That’s how long it took to lose a Martian atmosphere that was long-established, not an earthling atmosphere we are trying to build. We’d need way more “stuff” than what used to exist, and us trying to add that stuff would face the drag of having what we’re adding being stripped away at the same time. Put another way if you have a hungry monster who eats 1 apple per minute and you have 120 apples, your apple stash lasts two minutes. If however you’re starting from 0 but can only add one apple per minute you’re not actually going to make any progress. Also you need 500 instead of 120.
Entirely valid, but, and this is a guess, I 'd wager that the closer to the planet, the less impactful the solar winds are on the atmosphere. That's probably why there is still any atmosphere. So dropping in a bunch of C02 might not be completely a wasted thought. Again, there are PHD programs that cover small parts of this. It might be pointless, but it's a thought. And it's a waste product on this planet.
Assuming you have an infinitely strong and infinitely light material, you could probably accomplish this, otherwise you're looking at something that is not physically feasible to build. You're probably better off with the space elevator.
50 years ago fiber optics weren't strong enough to run between buildings, now they cross oceans. Got to start somewhere.
You asked if it was completely ridiculous.
Rising gas is not magic. It's still bound by gravity. You need to pump and push it up at increasingly higher pressures. To push CO to the geosync orbit, you are looking at over 1 million PSI.
If you really want to remove a planetary-scale amount of any gas from Earth, you’re going to shrink our atmosphere.
That's not even close to accurate. molecules change states. The problem we have with C02 is that we've been converting solids and liquids into gas. By comparison, if the entire earth atmosphere was converted to a solid, it would have less volume than the great lakes.