Terraforming Mars

[Eclipse Now]

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...

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."

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!)

[Moontanman]

As we can see on Venus most of the atmosphere will stay, it's the hydrogen that we would loose. mars with it's weak gravity would loose hydrogen faster than Venus or the Earth. This would still be a long term, many millions of years, problem. I would have to agree that by the time we can do engineering on the scales we are talking about We will be able to do much more than Terra-form Mars, huge orbiting free space colonies than can travel between stars to me seem more likely than terraforming a planet which would take many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years any way you look at it. .

[Eclipse Now]

I've been harping on about the incremental changes in industrial systems brought about by small advances in individual technologies having larger Cascading Adaptive Systems advantages. In simpler terms: progress can have surprising effects.

The figure of hundreds of thousands of years to terraform Mars has been tossed about. What about 100?

From the Mars Society.

Mars Papers — The Mars Society

Terraforming Mars With (Largely) Self Reproducing Robots
In: On To Mars 2, edited by Zubrin, RM, and Crossman, F. Collector's Guide Publishing Inc.

Abstract:
There are various schemes to provide Mars with a CO 2 atmosphere by causing the evaporation of the dry ice at the South Pole and in the regolith. Although no one knows how much is available from these sources, getting it to vaporize may not be too difficult and a reasonably thick atmosphere may be attainable in a hundred years or so. (1,2)

Other terraformers suggest the use of nanobots, tiny self reproducing robots that will rip the CO 2 apart physically. But nanotechnology is so far in the future that no one can really guess its capabilities or limitations. We do not need nanobots, only robots able to reproduce themselves. Presumably such machines will be roughly man-sized, not microscopic. Nor need they be able to reproduce every part of themselves, just the heavy parts. Light parts -- e.g. computer chips -- can easily be brought from earth. Even today a chip weighs half a gram, and two million of them weigh only a ton, so we can transport the brains for a robot army in a small space probe. Once there are many robots on Mars they can make solar panels or reflectors enough to cover the planet, and the power can be used to run cracking plants to split the CO 2

We can today build robots for mining and assembly, and will soon be able to make largely-self-replicating robots that can increase their numbers to any desired level at little cost to us. Cheap robot armies give us a powerful new tool for terraforming whose uses have barely been touched on here. Others should consider the possibilities that this idea opens up. For Mars we should have sufficient capabilities in fifty years, though it could be more or less. But surely we will have macrobots before nanobots, and whether it takes fifty years or a hundred and fifty we will have them, and be able to turn Mars' CO 2 to O 2 in a few decades. We should therefore abandon the idea that it will take a hundred millennia to terraform Mars, and turn our thoughts to a livable O 2 atmosphere in a century or less.

[Eclipse Now]

Sounds like we are going to have to solve this atmosphere leaking thing one day as it's happening here on earth! If hydrogen escape is the means by which water leaves planets, we need to fix this!

Our Planet's Leaky Atmosphere: Scientific American

our earth 3 billion years ago, today, and 3 billion years in the future....

[Eclipse Now]

Check this out... the future may include radiation resistant plants for terraforming Mars?

Slashdot | Radiation-Resistant Plants Could Be Used In Space