Teresita said:
“Even if you terraform Mars and get water to flow on the surface, it won’t do you any good, because any farmer can tell you things don’t grow in crushed rock, only in living soil.”
If that was true then nothing would grow on the
igneous rocks of Hawaii’s Big Island.
To terraform Mars one must first create a pressurized environment. For example, a Martian canyon (an old Martian “river” bed) that has been glazed over and pressurized with Martian atmospheric gas to about 20% of Earth’s sea level atmospheric pressure (high enough pressure to permit liquid water and allow people to work while breathing pure oxygen through masks). Have a creek of heated water running down the bottom of the canyon and recirculate it through a parallel concrete tunnel back up to the top of the canyon. Use the water as a coolant for a nuclear reactor (the canyon essentially acts as a cooling tower for the reactor). The nuclear reactor also provides mechanical energy for pumping Martian atmospheric gas (mostly carbon dioxide) back into the pressurized canyon (there’s no way one could make it “air” tight so one assumes a continuously leaking system such as exists in a typical commerical aircraft flying at 30,000 ft). Initially cover the bottom of the canyon with Martian regolith (“dirt”). The regolith would initially be poisonous due to the presence of oxidants, perchlorates, etc. These toxic substances need to be washed out with liquid water. After the toxic material has been washed out, add to the regolith ammonium nitrate or urea that was created by fixing nitrogen from the Martian atmosphere (2.7% nitrogen by volume). Again, the nuclear reactor would provide energy for fixing the nitrogen. The regolith would be replinished with nitrogen by adding excrement from the colonists and farm animals, However the original nitrogen would come from manufactured ammonium nitrate. What needs to initially come from Earth would be old Pu-239 bomb pits that would provide fuel for the nuclear reactors. Pu-239 bomb pits are the most volume efficient energy source available that works for controlled nuclear power. Of course if we could ever figure out nuclear fusion then we’d burn deuterium harvested from Martian water.
Mars can be terraformed with existing technology.
