Greening Mars

Can the Martian environment be changed to the point that it would be fertile for plant life?  On Earth, life exists everywhere, even in the most severe environments.  We also know that organic systems can change a planet’s climate, because the flourishing of humanity has changed the climate of Earth.

The best systems to change a climate are organic systems that are totally absent any reliance on mechanical systems or external management.  Mechanical or managed systems have physical and human limitations (not enough people or machines available, transportation of materials, etc.) and will be prone to failures due to mechanical breakdowns and errors.

In an organic system, plants and organisms (either found or engineered) capable of thriving in the Martian environment are seeded in large scale.  These ‘seeds’ may need to be spread with some other essential elements (a kind of fertilizer), however the best results will be achieved with an organism that requires a minimum of external inputs.  Further, the nature of the organisms must allow for aerial dispersion.  Any organism that requires physical placement deep in the soil would be reliant on mechanical systems, and would therefore be so limited in scale that it could not affect the planet’s ecosystem in an actionable time frame.

As these organisms thrive, they take some elements from the environment and leave others (the way plants take CO2, release O2, and store Carbon).  On a large scale, the flourishing of these organisms will modestly change the Martian environment and soil composition.

The slightly changed environmental composition will permit the introduction of the next organism (or set of organisms) that will thrive in the new modified environment.  This cycle of introductions will be repeated many times.  Each time some of the newly introduced organisms will be more complex than those previously introduced, and their impact more significant.  The process of greening a planet may take hundreds of years to complete, and the practice itself will become a science.

Hundreds of years may seem like a long time, but human civilizations (if you define ‘civilizations’ as the level of human organization that appeared around the bronze age) have existed on Earth now for four thousand years.  People living in Europe and Asia enjoy the benefits of structures constructed hundreds of years ago, in many cases by governments or nations that no longer exist.  If the end is worthy, large projects will continue from generation to generation.

Continuity from a human perspective may not be a problem however.  Mars could be surrounded a set of satellites containing all of the seeds of different type needed for the greening.  The seeds could be released simultaneously one phase at a time until the project was complete with no human intervention required.  To work, this system would require either a perfected process from the beginning, or an artificial intelligence capable of making adjustments based on planetary feedback.

We may even create artificially constructed moons to reduce the volume of meteor strikes, just as our moon has protected us.  Hopefully, long before we master the science of greening other planets, we will be able to save our own.