So how much mass would we lose each year from the atmosphere? I guess the Kim Stanley Robison scenario is that life will find a way.... (as in, Mankind will keep generating atmosphere to compensate for what is lost).
Earth has
lots of atmosphere.... so I'm imagining that generating this would take a long time? However, Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR from now on) seems to imagine that we can do it from introducing various life forms, from mining, from "concentrated solar guns" (like giant magnifying glasses) floating across Mars burning up regolith, to robot controlled asteroids being broken up in the atmosphere, to subsurface water being released.
If we can miraculously
create an atmosphere on Mars to support life in the first place, then surely it is no great feat to maintain that atmosphere even if it is losing a good fraction each year?
Sure, Earth has
lots of atmosphere.... Making a comparable amount means making (or releasing) 5 million billion tons of atmosphere...
Quote:
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The average mass of the atmosphere is about 5 quadrillion metric tons or 1/1,200,000 the mass of Earth. According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "The total mean mass of the atmosphere is 5.1480 × 1018 kg with an annual range due to water vapor of 1.2 or 1.5 × 1015 kg depending on whether surface pressure or water vapor data are used; somewhat smaller than the previous estimate. The mean mass of water vapor is estimated as 1.27 × 1016 kg and the dry air mass as 5.1352 ±0.0003 × 1018 kg."
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Yet you seem to be suggesting Mars would be
losing the water molecules that we had released back into the atmosphere? That's a
problem for long term maintenance! Could automated robot asteroid ships constantly aerobraking bring in the ice asteroid atmospheric mass we needed? Or would we have fusion reactors that would artificially generate a field? (Heck, if we could do that surely we'd be sucking mass out of the sun and generating our own planets from scratch as in the Peter F Hamilton "Night's Dawn" trilogy where some alien species made their own planets. Or as in Stephen Baxter's "Time Ships" where the Morlocks drew material from the sun to make a Dyson sphere!)
