Mars

<h2 data-rte-spaces-before="1" data-rte-spaces-after="1"> Planetology and Terraforming </h2>
<p data-rte-fromparser="true">Terraforming’s been going on for half an Earth century now, but it’s got a long way to go. Looking at Mars from orbit ain’t too different from the view the first space probes got. Sure, there’s some green, some more clouds, big areas that’ve been blacked to up the albedo, and even a little water sparkling here and there, but the stark red terrain’s still raw enough to show its prehistoric roots. Mars is broadly divided into north and south, with big differences between the terrain of the two. The northern hemisphere is pretty damn flat, or in some places rolling, with the occasional mountain here and there. Go south, and you’ll eventually hit a cliff or scarp, some high as a few kilometers, dividing the northern plains from the south, which is older terrain, rugged, heavily cratered, and usually higher elevation. Just about everywhere you look, though, one thing’s clear: a long time ago, our planet was warmer. You can see the evidence in the deep cuts of old rivers, some of which are coming to life again, and in the chaotic terrain they left behind. And in Hellas early this spring, we got our first real snowfall ever. It was the loveliest damn thing I seen in years.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->Before we really got to exploring Mars, there were those on old Earth who thought we’d be able to come out here and just walk around with a breather mask. Obviously, they were wrong. Atmospheric pressure is still way too low (meaning that aside from problems for morphs that can’t tolerate low pressure, a lot of radiation makes it through), and it gets murderously cold at night. Mars being a desert, the day to night temperature fluctuations are extreme. On a warm day at noon, it can get up to seven or eight degrees, but even on a warm night in Valles Marineris, the temperature goes down to twenty below. Splicers need survival clothing at night, and rusters need heavy winter duds. On the up side, pressure’s a lot higher at low altitudes, and it doesn’t get cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze any more.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->Dust storms’re still common, too, although the huge, planet-covering redouts we once got are rarer and rarer these days. When a big one comes, though, you batten down the hatches. In open country, dust storms can go on for days. Aircraft are grounded, you can’t see a damn thing, and even going anyplace on the ground can be impossible. Likewise, dust devils are still common, up to a klick across and a few klicks high. As the air gets thicker, these actually grow in strength and last longer, and someday they’ll be as bad as old Earth tornadoes, I hear. It’s beautiful sometimes to see three or more of these devils tearin’ up the terrain in the distance at once.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->I could talk your ear off about terraforming and ecostation gear, on account of I’ve been working with it half my life, but I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. Forming activity falls into a few main categories: the big industrial stuff, offworld and orbital megaprojects (what we call “pot-stirring”), and terraculture (the stuff that goes on at ecostations).
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<h3 data-rte-spaces-before="1" data-rte-spaces-after="1" data-rte-empty-lines-before="1"> Offworld </h3>
<p data-rte-fromparser="true">Rubbing shoulders in the areostationary sweet spot with space elevators, swanky habs, shipyards, and such are orbital mirror arrays. Each one’s made up of four or five kilometer-wide discs of rigid foil with station-keeping solar trim tabs. They reflect additional sunlight onto the Martian surface. Individually, they don’t make much of a difference, but there are two hundred of them up there now, enough to raise temperatures just a little along the equatorial belt beneath them. New belts around the poles are planned over the next couple years.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->The flashiest part of the terraforming project, though, is cometary bombardment. In the early years of forming, they were dropping any old asteroid, mainly non-minable carbon-silicate rocks from the outer Belt. The point of it then was to heat up the polar caps enough to melt off all the carbon dioxide and start the water melting, too, and for that all you needed was a helluv big kinetic impact. Now most of the objects coming in are comets. It’s a dicey operation, for sure. You get a crew of ice pushers to live on one of these things for four, five years. They build a propulsion system that uses the mass of the comet itself as propulsion mass, then keep the thing on course while it accelerates in from way outsystem. All of these snowballs have to be a kilometer or less in diameter; anything bigger could fuck the whole planet. In the final months, they do course corrections and steer the ice so that it makes the slowest possible approach to the planet. They payoff is a giant fuck-all cloud of water and ammonia, and another big jolt of kinetic energy to melt more of the polar caps. Nowadays, though, they’re talking about comet impacts farther and farther from the poles, and they’ve even done a few. There was a week of rioting in Noctis after the first one hit, and now it’s a political hot potato for the Tharsis League. The scientists ain’t helping. Some’re arguing in favor, some against, and it’s unclear who’s working off the facts and who’s on the take from the PC.
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<h3 data-rte-spaces-before="1" data-rte-spaces-after="1" data-rte-empty-lines-before="1"> Industrial </h3>
<p data-rte-fromparser="true">The same techs we wrecked old Earth with’re actually great for making Mars a better place to live. Chlorinated fluorocarbon factories are mostly automated plants that use robotic miners to extract minerals rich in fluorine, then manufacture greenhouse gases. CH4 plants use ice and the atmosphere itself to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen, then produce methane and water using the Sabatier reaction. Scumyards are industrial-scale decay beds using agricultural and industrial waste products to nourish bacteria and, in the last few years, Martian termites. Mainly they crank out compost and a whole lot of CO2, which you need to thicken and warm the overall atmosphere. Blackeners are huge, rolling nanobot hives that move over open country, belching smart soot. Smart soot propagates and darkens the landscape, decreasing surface albedo so that the planet holds in more heat. Blackeners mostly operate around the equator, which makes the orbital mirror arrays more efficient. The last major industrial effort involves getting more hydrocarbon-burning vehicles out there. Buggies, flying cars, and a lot of other vehicles now run on methane. This last issue’s created some fights within the Movement. City anarchists are a bunch of bicycle freaks, and air quality inside the domes is one of their favorite things to get pissed about.
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<h3 data-rte-spaces-before="1" data-rte-spaces-after="1" data-rte-empty-lines-before="1"> Terraculture </h3>
<p data-rte-fromparser="true">Rusters and alpiners ain’t the only transgenic life on Mars, and in fact we’re kind of behind the curve. The most successful lifeforms on Mars so far are microbes: extremophile planktons and nitrificating bacteria released in the wake of comet impacts to break down ammonia. Also doing well are water bears: microscopic animals that can survive being frozen solid. We’ve planted a lot of them to get more of an ecosystem going. From the water bears and other extremophiles, the gene designers figured out how to sequence cold-tolerant traits into a whole mess of other animals that ain’t warm-blooded and can’t carry around a lot of insulation: small insects, lizards, and annelid worms.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->We’ve also got some plant life, especially in the Valles-Marineris, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out sweet, sweet O2. There’s been some success with types like conifers, sagebrush, tumbleweeds, some grasses, lichens, succulents, and cacti.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->All these plants and critters’re getting the liquid water they need to live in part from all the work we’ve done on melting the permafrost. You pick a promising patch, plant a field of solar-powered heating rods, and while you’ve still got an ice field at night, during the day you’ll get liquid water—enough for worms, bacteria, and plants to go on with their little lives. Meanwhile, the less-modified plants living in agricultural domes do their part. Life support systems in a well-equipped dome these days’re good enough that there’s often surplus oxygen you can vent directly into the atmosphere.
<!-- RTE::{"spaces":0,"type":"LINE_BREAK"} -->Finally, there are nanoswarms. I talked a little about blackeners, but there’re a host of other robotic crawlies loose out there working on tasks like soil aeration, breaking down rust, and “sorting” desirable minerals toward the surface through the soil and regolith. Using swarms for forming work is controversial, and there’s a law on the books (which gets ignored mostly) prohibiting planting replenishing nanobot hives in forming zones. During the Fall, a lot of swarms got subverted by the TITANs and went from aerating the soil to aerating people. The nanoecology bloc argue the benefits’re greater than the risks, but for my money I’m suspicious of them. You need to lower albedo, seed more lichens and algae. But the nano-ecologists’ve been winning this debate so far.
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