Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, by Martyn J. Fogg.

SAE International, Warrendale, PA, 1995. ISBN 1-56091-609-5




Review by Geoffrey A. Landis of the NASA-Lewis Research Center.

Terraforming is the concept of altering the environment of a planetary surface to make it suitable for (terrestrial) life.

The scientific literature about terraforming tends to be sparse, not to mention scattered over a number of journals and books. This book, by British planetologist Martyn Fogg, is an exhaustive book-length review of the scientific literature on terraforming, written at a level that's accessible to the casual (but scientifically-literate) reader. His references are quite thorough, and he is quite meticulous to credit the originator of each idea he mentions, so if you need more, you know where to go to look it up.


It's published, oddly enough, by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Why the SAE? In explanation, Martyn says, SAE considers themselves to be first and foremost an engineering organization, and terraforming--planetary engineering-- is engineering on the largest scale. Martyn Fogg is a regular writer of "science fact" articles for Analog, and the book reads quite smoothly. He starts with a review of the development of terraforming in science fiction, particularly crediting Olaf Stapleton with the first lengthy description of terraforming (Venus, in Last and First Men, 1930), Jack Williamson with coining the term in 1942 ("Collision Orbit", in Astounding Science Fiction), and crediting Heinlein with the first use of terraforming as the background for an entire book, complete with a quantitative discussion of the energy required, in Farmer in the Sky (1950). Note that these beat by over a decade the first scientific discussions of terraforming, Sagan's proposal to terraform Venus
in 1961, and the proposals to terraform Mars by Burns and Harwit, and (independently) Sagan, in 1973.


From here, he starts out with a review of how the ecology on a planet works, paying particular attention to how carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and energy cycle through the system; emphasizing that we are the beneficiaries of a huge "gratis" energy flow provided by the sun and by
the Earth's tectonic activity, that keeps the environmental cycles working and acts as an invisible "subsidy" to the human occupation of the Earth. His next chapter discusses environmental modifications of the Earth, both incidental, and deliberate (i.e., solar shields to counter greenhouse
warming.)


Finally, 200 pages into the book, he discusses terraforming other planets. He starts with Mars, discussing the early (1973) models of Mars that suggested that, since Mars was once apparently warmer and wetter than it is now, a small "push" in the right direction might "snap" Mars into an
alternative, warmer equilibrium due to a runaway greenhouse effect. To his credit, after a long discussion of the possibility of "gentle" terraforming of Mars, he then discusses the very likely case that Mars is not in a such metastable state, and discusses "hard" terraforming, with a wide analysis of techniques such as nuclear mining, cometary impact, importing volatiles from icy moons, and enhancing solar radiation. He closes with an example terraforming scenario using all the tools available. Of particular interest is his analysis of time scales. His terraforming example requires roughly 200 years to reach the stage where simple anaerobic microorganisms and algae can survive, and as much as seven thousand years to completely terraform to a human-breathable atmosphere. A
long term project indeed!


In the following chapter he discusses the much more difficult problem of terraforming Venus. His discussion of Venus gives an excellent historical background. When Sagan first proposed terraforming Venus by "seeding" algae into the clouds in 1961, Venus was though to be much more
Earthlike than it is now known to be. We now know that the temperature of Venus is significantly hotter, the atmospheric pressure tremendously higher, and the chemical environment a lot harsher, than was thought in the pre-Pioneer days. Venus has just too damn much atmosphere. He also points
out that, even if it were possible to engineer organisms to sequester the carbon dioxide from the Venus atmosphere, the process would take between eleven thousand and 1.1 million years, depending on how optimistic one is about how efficient photosynthesis could be made to become. Nevertheless, many science journalists (e.g., Adrian Berry) have continued to plug the "easy" terraforming of Venus by "just dropping a handful of algae into the atmosphere", and Fogg rather thoroughly debunks their optimism. Terraforming Venus is hard. His discussion covers most of the
possibilities for dealing with atmosphere of Venus, ranging from ablating it away with myriad asteroidal impacts, to freezing it out with solar shields.


The penultimate chapter is on fringe concepts and ultimate possibilities. He counts terraforming the moon and the larger satellites of the outer planets under fringe concepts, although in many ways these
would be considerably easier than some of the other things he discusses. He then briefly discusses ever further out ideas, including moving planets, turning Jupiter into a star, and even the possibility of moving stars. OK. Now to be critical.


The book is billed as the first textbook on the subject of terraforming. I wouldn't call it a textbook; it reviews the subject, but doesn't attempt to teach the reader the techniques of analysis. In other words, having read the book the readers will be familiar with what has been calculated by others, but will not have the calculational tools to analyze terraforming calculations themselves.


In particular, I found the discussion of the greenhouse effect, critical to an understanding of methods to warm Mars, to be superficial, barely more thorough than what you might find in the newspaper. There was no description of methods used to calculate the amount of greenhouse warming. A description of the greenhouse effect ought to include spectra, show a formula for integrating over the spectrum to compute total heat balance, and discuss the effect of optical depth. The book does not do this, and in fact never even gives a simplified model to calculate the amount of greenhouse warming. He does, however, include a useful empirical equation (unfortunately applicable only to Mars), to calculate the combined effect of water and CO2 greenhouse effect on overall surface temperature.


The book suffers a bit from the fact that the illustrations are a hodgepodge collection of pictures from various articles, with nomenclature and units inconsistent from one to another.


He skims over the discussion of nitrogen. He claims that an oxygen atmosphere, even at a few PSI (say, 3 PSI) partial pressure, requires a nitrogen "buffer" to prevent a fire hazard. His single reference for this statement, though, is a rather dubious one. While he does note that this is "a disputed figure," after this one note he takes the requirement for 75% of any atmosphere to be nitrogen as a canonical fact. This is a pity, since it allows him to avoid asking the tricky question of how little atmospheric nitrogen an ecosystem actually requires. Nitrogen is a tough problem for Mars, which is nearly absent of N, as far as we can tell from all the information we have at the present. Fogg postulates huge reserves in the form of of nitrate deposits, but I must point out that there is as yet no real evidence for such deposits, and it is quite possible that nitrogen on Mars is simply not there.


He has a chapter on planetary engineering of the Earth, which talks about reversing greenhouse warming by a sun-shield. He doesn't note that reducing sunlight would also reduce photosynthesis, and hence enhance the greenhouse effect. (This could, of course, be ameliorated by a dichroic
shield, which selectively passes the wavelengths most useful for photosynthesis). I would have liked the flow better if he had put re-engineering Earth last, with the emphasis that we need to study,
understand, and experiment, and make our mistakes on other planets first before embarking to mess with the one we live on. He could have emphasized how we understand greenhouse effect based on our studies of Venus; how the "nuclear winter" scenario was proposed based on studies of the effects of global dust coverage of Mars.

A small thing that bothered me was that he doesn't very well distinguish between realistic and far-out ideas. One of the proposals he discusses, for example, was to increase the spin of Venus using three
quadrillion objects circulating between Venus and the sun every 2 hours, each traveling at 10% of the speed of light. I would personally have put that into the "fringe concepts" section, myself. However, that's only a minor quibble. Fogg uses the "fringe concepts" pigenhole to discuss the really far-out concepts.


Despite my carping on minor details, it's a good book. At forty-nine bucks for a 544 page hardcover, it's a bargain. I highly recommend it.


Geoffrey A. Landis
Ohio Aerospace Institute at NASA Lewis Research Center
http://www.oai.org/SRA/g_landis.html

In what form would government take if human civilization extended throughout the solar system? Would we again see the colonies revolt for independence and see history repeated in another meaningless cycle, just on a larger scale of distance? Would we see independent warring planets, human migration problems and a vast disparity in living conditions between worlds?

Personally, I believe that there should be a greater allotment of resources toward terraforming within our own solar system then, say, what is currently put into space exploration.

Extremophilic Terraforming
Might bacteria prepare Mars for human habitation?

You'd think it would take a pretty big toolkit to prepare the Martian surface for human life. Not necessarily, at least at the level of a human habitat, according to Robert Richmond of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. In fact, the components may prove to be surprisingly, even microscopically, small in size. And although it is perhaps still too early for would-be planetary travelers to begin packing, the notion of terraforming Mars—altering its environment to allow for human habitation—is one that, for many scientists, has recently evolved from pure science fiction to theoretical possibility.

Polyextremophilic bacterium

One significant reason for the surge in optimism is a series of discoveries suggesting that extremophilic organisms—those that thrive under extreme environmental conditions—may be uniquely equipped to serve as vectors of change on Mars's inhospitable surface. Among the most promising of those organisms is the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, which has been found in many types of soil and such unappealing spots as sewage systems and animal fecal material. Richmond, a radiation biologist at the Space Flight Center, along with Michael Daly of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Rajagopalan Sridhar of Howard University Medical Center, has been testing the limits of D. radiodurans in the hopes of harnessing its unusual characteristics for just such a toolkit (Proceedings, International Society for Optical Engineering, v. 3755, pp. 210–222.)

It is widely accepted that current planetary conditions on the immediate surface of Mars eliminate the possibility of sustaining life as we know it: Low atmospheric pressure and surface temperature combined with relatively high levels of ultraviolet and ionizing radiation would appear effectively to prevent the long-term survival of organic life. In the 1970s, the Viking missions established that Martian soil contains high levels of certain metals and oxidizing species. To survive such a noxious environment, an organism must be highly resistant to oxidizing conditions.

Hence the excitement over D. radiodurans. Not only can this bug withstand extreme amounts of radiation (whence it receives its name), but it has proved quite resistant to the effects of peroxides and other oxidizers as well. And when subjected to desiccation, freeze-drying and exposure to solar-flux ultraviolet radiation, the organism fares extremely well. Its multiple resistances have led Richmond and his colleagues to term the bacterium a "polyextremophile." Although scientists have documented the existence of extremophiles living in isolated environments like deep-sea hot vents or hotsprings for decades, rarely, if ever, has an organism been found to withstand such a wide array of extreme conditions.

What makes the research so thrilling, says Richmond, is the "chance to actually uncover the utilities of the bacterium and not just isolate and classify it."
click for full image and caption
Mars, a likely candidate for human habitation

Those possible utilities have increased dramatically in number since the successful sequencing of the bacterium's genome in November 1999. Sequencing the DNA revealed that many copies of the genome are present in any given bacterial cell in register—all the bases making up the DNA sequence are lined up in the same way, and the sequence itself is full of repetitions. It has since been proposed by Daly and coworkers that D. radiodurans's durability is the product of an efficient and highly accurate repair system: If exposure to radiation damages one strand of DNA, another strand may serve as a template. This hypothesis provides an explanation for each of the microbe's resistances. Thanks to its efficient repair system, D. radiodurans can survive any number of extreme environments.

With a more thorough understanding of what causes D. radiodurans's multiple durabilities, scientists such as Daly are now working to genetically engineer the bacterium to perform work that people cannot. After all, Richmond says, "you must always think of the organism's utility in managing a habitat—you have to put the bug to work for you." Because it could successfully withstand the high levels of oxidants found on the Martian surface, D. radiodurans might be engineered to detoxify the soil. In Daly's lab, for example, he and his colleagues insert genes that code for an enzyme capable of oxidizing organic toluene, thereby rendering this toxic component of organic solvents harmless to humans. It may be possible to engineer a bug capable of reducing iron or manganese ions to their elemental forms, thus reducing the concentrations of noxious substances, and advancing one step closer to the creation of a habitable space.

In fact, NASA is considering launching probes to specific Martian sites. This allows consideration of the use of extremophile organisms such as D. radiodurans to begin microterraforming small surface areas. The bacteria could begin transforming the harsh and uninhabitable Martian terrain in such a future scenario into one capable of sustaining human life. At its most fantastic, terraforming involves the alteration of an entire planet's environment, but, realistically speaking, says Richmond, we can perhaps imagine modifying the oxygen and soil content of a small room, several cubic meters in area, in direct contact with the habitat.

When can we expect microterraforming to occur? Obviously, planetary biologists are still investigating the possibility that life might exist on Mars without human intervention, and they will want to be certain of its sterility before infecting it with engineered bacterial colonies. The notion of interplanetary contamination raises many difficult ethical questions, and although the NASA Planet Protection Committee has developed strict guidelines to prevent the contamination of other planets, it will most likely prove difficult to maintain such regulations if and when humans do land on Mars.

What D. radiodurans can provide is a microscopic (and therefore easily portable) factory—a kind of terraforming toolkit—from which any number of products potentially can be derived. Whether it is engineered to reduce metals, produce drugs for ailing astronauts or simply manufacture the polymers necessary for the production of thread, D. radiodurans, one of the world's oldest bacteria, may provide a means of expanding the limits of the human imagination beyond the written sci-fi page.—Rebecca Sloan Slotnick

There are reports of oxygen rich ‘rock’ deposits on the Moon. The idea is to mine these deposits for their oxygen content in order to provide breathing air for Humans, fuel for the rockets and add hydrogen to it, thus producing water.
~rore

In what form would government take if human civilization extended throughout the solar system? Would we again see the colonies revolt for independence and see history repeated in another meaningless cycle, just on a larger scale of distance? Would we see independent warring planets, human migration problems and a vast disparity in living conditions between worlds?