Civilization on Mars

[caters]

I have done my research on Mars and it was once temperate and had water on its surface and a magnetosphere. Now pretty much all of that is lost. I mean Mars has a serious temperature gradient. Down on the surface it can feel like summer at your feet but winter at your head. And martian winters go down into the negative triple digits. Yikes, that's cold. I mean yes an Antarctic winter is also in the negative triple digits but only when wind chill is factored in. A martian winter is in the negative triple digits regardless of wind chill. So in order for a civilization to even start off on Mars while it is being terraformed, they would need serious insulation in the winter but not so much in the summer. And at night again they would need serious insulation but not so much in the day unless it is the martian winter. So this basically means they will need to settle underground and deal with the iron dust. But in order to get enough geothermal energy from Mars, they would have to be way down deep. Too deep to see whether it is day or night so they would probably need to send a rover or something near the settlement and find some way to get a clear signal through all that iron oxide in order to not only communicate with people on earth but also to find out if it is day or night on Mars.

So thin atmosphere, serious temperature gradient, both can be avoided in an underground settlement if it is high tech(which any human settlement on Mars would have to be).

Of course if they were making clay out of this iron oxide, it will probably be of no use since when it dried, it would most likely go back to being the iron oxide powder it was before(Making clay out of iron oxide is like using wet sand, while wet is when it is stabilized into the structure that you want it in so water is key. But sand lets go of that water and destabilizes back into a powder. Iron oxide would likely do the same exact thing).

1 problem they would have to solve before everything else is how to melt the iron core so that they form a magnetosphere. My thought on this is possibly putting molten iron through a carbon tube that leads all the way down to the core. Carbon melts at a much higher temperature than iron so it can handle molten iron temperatures without itself melting. The key thing here is that the iron most not solidify before reaching the mantle. If it solidifies before then, the added iron is of no use and will form iron oxide and over time that iron oxide will get to that same sandy consistency as Mars. Of course, this has the issue of super high pressure suddenly being released so there must be another way to get the iron core to melt without dealing with the super high pressure below the crust. But how else could we get enough heat energy to the core to melt it and form a magnetosphere?

The rest of the problems from there are easy to solve(lack of water, just bring water, lack of oxygen, just bring cyanobacteria or plants).

So basically I am wondering these 2 things about Mars and how to live on Mars:

1) How deep would they have to go in order to get enough geothermal energy from Mars that the seasons up on the surface don't bother them(mostly that martian winter I am concerned about)?

2) How could we heat up the iron core enough so that a magnetosphere is formed while not risking solidification of iron or super high pressure suddenly being released? And how could we keep the iron core hot enough so that the magnetosphere is always there?

 

[K.S. Crooks]

Geothermal energy is probably not viable in a real sense. The issue has to do with Mars' mass. Mars being half the mass of the Earth has less internal pressure. This is the reason its core is complete inactivity. The effects is one- lose of heat rising through the planet, and more importantly two- without a strong rotating core there is a lack of a planetary magnetic field. Mars has only pockets of magnetic fields around the planet's surface. Without the magnetic field more radiation reaches the surface and the solar wind is able to strip away most of atmosphere. This is probably what also removed most of the water.

To create a rotating core would really require the planet to have more mass, make it denser or create a device(s) that could be sent to the core to maintain a molten rotation. I just thought that terra forming by sending various asteroids, including the two that are currently Mars' moons, down to the surface to increase the mass might help. Another option is to have a planetoid sized object pass close enough to Mars that thy fall into orbit around each other. This dynamic would cause a pull on Mars' core, more than our moon pulls on the Earth, and could be the reason the core becomes active again. But the "simplest" way may be to create technology that works for your story and is reasonable enough for a reader to believe. Hope this helps in some way.

 

[TheSlovakPatriot]

One problem that any living thing in Mars would have to deal with are dust storms. they can last for two months and cover the entire planet. Any living thing would have to find a way to survive.

 

[TheKillerBs]

You could always go the Trantor route and put everything either underground or under a roof.

 

[Alyssa]

If you want a realistic civ, this guy is pretty important watching: Isaac Arthur - YouTube

Mars does have a magnetosphere, it is simply that it is inadequate given that a the core has a lower ratio of molten:solid iron than on earth. This means that the magnetosphere is inadequate at deflecting the solar winds and results in a depletion of the atmosphere but not almost total elimination as on the moon (where the magnetosphere is generated almost exclusively in the crust, and the magnetic field from a small dynamo effect in the core fades to vanishing from center to surface). Earth has an atmospheric pressure of 101325 pascals, Mars of 600 pascals, the moon of 0.0000000003 pascals. The moon is an example of what happens when you have practically zero magnetosphere.
Dust storms have been mentioned in the comments. Just no. The one thing that was wrong in "The Martian" was that. The worst you will ever get on Mars without altering the atmosphere is a strong gust or gale, occurring maybe once every half decade or so at only 60 mile per hour. The issue is the slight electrostatic charge that means the damn stuff coats any surface it can find making solar panels inefficient. Smaller storms occur more frequently, but they're hardly anything to worry about. Once you have small root systems, a restored atmosphere and a properly working magnetosphere dust is generally not as much of a problem as it is a nuisance which fades with every passing year of terraforming.
Onto the magnetosphere, as said previously the core is slightly molten with small convection currents, combine that with the planets rotation and you have a small dynamo effect. But one that is inadequate. You can go two routes. Drill to the center of Mars and pass a truly monstrous current through the core for about a century until waste heat from the resistance melts it properly (increasing amount of molten iron as well as convection currents due to increased heat). This is what is known colloquially as a bad idea. That deep down things will still be extremely hot (and will remain solid way past their typical sea level melting point due to increased pressure).
Alternatively as has been suggested you can bombard the planet with asteroids which has several effects (if you can find a planet errant willing to be towed across space to orbit around Mars and are able to do so then the technology of resistance heating the core or asteroid bombardment will be far easier and cheaper - adding a large moon would also likely slow planetary rotation, creating even more extreme day/night temperature gradients). It adds atmosphere, rotation and heat. And a greater magnetosphere as corollary. Of course then you need to heat up everything (a few hundred thousand nuclear detonations would do the trick). Introduce basic algae... and work up from there.

Going the non terraforming route and just trying to form a civilisation there:
Geothermal energy is your best bet for energy. Dig down deep. On Mars at 30 km or so down you'll have 1 atm of pressure, but 300 degrees celcius of heat. It's far easier to send a small series of bores down (you don't need to go all the way to 30 km) and shoot steam up to the nearer surface (and power turbines with that) and use the power produced to pressurize your living atmosphere, extract desired elements electrically and chemically etc using geothermal as free juice. You will however need to dig deeper than on earth (where you gain 25 degrees celcius per km) instead going about 3 times deeper for the same results (~8-10 degrees celcius per km). It's not great, but it's the best you've got unless you have an abundance of fusion fuel, in which case the question is "Why on Mars do you want to trap yourself deep in another gravity well again?" (although Mars is better than Earth in that regard) create rotating habitats in space, colonize the skies of Venus (a much better place to colonize than Mars in my opinion - but people, especially Elon Musk, seem to have a little green men fetish).
Your next choice is surface or subterranean. Either works, although at the surface you will need adequate shielding in the form of strong solid thick walls, or a powerful electromagnetic to produce a magnetic field.

1) Live at any depth you want, only bore really deep holes for geothermal to provide power for heating, pressurisation, etc. (alternatively - power from fusion, cannibalise Mercury for a dyson swarm that deflects sunlight to satellites orbitting mars and beam it to a tall structure/balloon above the surface storms where solar arrays convert focused light/heat into energy. (if you can somehow focus 10% of the solar output into a kugelblitz (in space) then congratulations you win the galaxy and might even have enough energy to build an alcubierre drive, the only issue would be starting it and stopping it (and then obliterating your destination as you've essentially built up a space sonic-boom with collected matter at the from))
2) Lots of electricity passed through the core to create heat resistance or asteroid bombardment. The first option requires such a high level of technology that the question to be asked here is "why?" and also takes a long time. The other option requires cooling by conduction and thermal emission for a long time for the surface to be habitable. (you could also use localised surface magnetic fields generated by electromagnets, but in some place you would basically be living in an MRI machine every time you used a cell phone, not to mention Helium requirements for cooling the magnets down to a temperature required for superconductivity - you could however have the magnets in orbit or floating which might at least reduce the effects of NMR you might experience)

 

[Alyssa]

Also read this for the magnetic field potentially "switching back on" all on its own.
Lab study indicates Mars has a molten core | New Scientist

 

[SumnerH]

Dust storms have been mentioned in the comments. Just no. The one thing that was wrong in "The Martian" was that. The worst you will ever get on Mars without altering the atmosphere is a strong gust or gale, occurring maybe once every half decade or so at only 60 mile per hour. The issue is the slight electrostatic charge that means the damn stuff coats any surface it can find making solar panels inefficient. Smaller storms occur more frequently, but they're hardly anything to worry about.

Mars does get huge, weeks-long dust storms on a regular basis, some of them planetary in scope. That's likely to be an issue for anything that needs sunlight (plants, solar panels, etc): even keeping the item/plant itself clean doesn't help if the dust is blocking out a large fraction of the sunlight for several weeks. And in the case of plants, the growing season may be curtailed enough that many crops are stunted or untenable unless you can generate enough artificial light from alternative or stored power sources.

You're 100% right about the wind as a non-factor.

From NASA Goddard:

Mars is infamous for intense dust storms, which sometimes kick up enough dust to be seen by telescopes on Earth.

“Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time,” said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Beyond Mars’ large annual storms are massive storms that occur more rarely but are much larger and more intense.

“Once every three Mars years (about 5 ½ Earth years), on average, normal storms grow into planet-encircling dust storms, and we usually call those ‘global dust storms’ to distinguish them,” Smith said.

It is unlikely that even these dust storms could strand an astronaut on Mars, however. Even the wind in the largest dust storms likely could not tip or rip apart major mechanical equipment. The winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour, less than half the speed of some hurricane-force winds on Earth.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

One more thing about the winds. The Martian atmosphere is only one or two percent as dense as Earth's so even if you got winds laden with dust running at sixty miles an hour, the chances are you'd barely feel it.

I don't think you have a chance with trying to heat and spin the core - that's planetary engineering on a scale far beyond anything we can even plan for. We're not just talking about turning say mountains into lava. Not even mountain ranges. Think thousands of times larger than that. A better bet would be to find a way of creating a smaller scale magnetosphere say over domes - and the one thing Mars does have is iron sands. Extract the iron, creating spinning magnets and away you go.

And geothermal would be a good power source, but I'd also think about beaming sunlight down from giant space mirrors. NASA (I think) has plans / dreams of beaming power to Earth that way one day from memory.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Vaporo]

I don't know that geothermal would be the best on Mars. As I understand it, it takes a lot of complex heavy machinery to set up and has only mediocre returns, especially on a planet relatively a fairly low internal temperature. Your best bet (for starting off at least) would probably be either nuclear fusion or traditional fission nuclear power.

 

[Tholepin]

Suppose you find a La Grange point between the Sun and Mars and erect a solar wind blocking shield. This would allow the planet's existing mechanism to redevelop a magnetosphere. NASA has plans to actually do this.