Should we or shouldn't we?
Credit:Getty Images
As the New
Year approached, NASA's Jim Green prepared to depart after four decades with
the agency, including 12 years as the director of NASA's planetary science
division and the past three as its chief scientist.
According
to the New York Times, Green is pushing a proposal to geoengineer Mars into a
human-habitable planet on his way out the door. Green's plan, which was
published in November, relies on a giant magnetic shield between Mars and the
Sun to warm and thicken the Red Planet's atmosphere, bringing temperature and
pressure levels above the point where humans could walk on the surface without
a space suit and without their blood boiling inside their bodies.
Green told
the newspaper, "It's achievable." "If you don't stop stripping,
the pressure will rise. Mars will begin terraforming on its own. That's what we
want: the entire planet to get involved in every manner it can. The temperature
rises as the pressure rises."
That's a
harsh attitude for a top NASA official, to say the least.
Green
claims that his plan will allow humans to start growing plants on Mars, paving
the door for long-term living away from Earth. For years, he's been preoccupied
with discovering life on other planets, and he established the "confidence
of life detection," or CoLD, scale to measure his progress.
However,
one of his roadblocks will be the planetary community, which he claims will be
resistant to his notions about fiddling with the entire world. Given our track
record of hastening climate change and strip mining disasters on Earth, Adler
Planetarium astronomer and cofounder of the JustSpace Alliance advocacy group
Lucianne Walkowicz claimed in Slate in 2018 that we're likely to convert Mars'
surface into an ecological nightmare.
Furthermore,
Walkowicz doubted that terraforming is physically viable.
"Despite
its hold on the popular imagination, terraforming remains firmly in the realm
of fantasy," noted Walkowicz at the time. "For one thing, Mars
appears to lack the carbon dioxide reserves required to pump up and warm its
atmosphere in the first place."
Green, to
his credit, appears to have a level head when it comes to validating life on
other planets, telling the New York Times that he wants to make sure scientists
are serious when they claim to have discovered even the tiniest indications of
it.
Green told
the publication, "A couple of years ago, scientists came out and announced
they'd seen phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus." "They believed
life was one of the major possibilities at the level they perceived it, which
was immense." It's a 'one' on the CoLD scale, where seven means 'we
discovered life.' It didn't even make it to 'two.' Stop crying wolf."
Green
leaves a legacy strewn with a hungry quest for life, but it's unclear whether
his ideas for terraforming Mars will ever be realised. Some of his ideas may
only exist in theory on the papers he publishes, and if that's the case, not
every scientist would be frustrated by a lack of results.
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