मंगल ग्रह का टेराफॉर्मिंग: लाल ग्रह को उपनिवेशित करके नई पृथ्वी बनाना

मंगल की दौड़: 2025 में हम कितने करीब हैं?

With the progress of reusable rockets pioneered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX ), a new space race is heating up. We have discussed the near-term outlook in the dedicated article “To The Moon And Mars—Mapping The New Space Race”.

Reusable rockets have reduced the cost of reaching orbit tenfold and might do so again in the upcoming years.

स्रोत: ARK Research

As SpaceX’s Starship is undergoing tests and will likely soon perform in-orbit refueling, travel to Mars will become a distinct possibility in the upcoming 5-10 years. After enough robotic flights to deliver supplies to the Red Planet, the first manned flight could be considered.

Because it is no longer just a mere theory, how such a first manned mission to Mars should go is hotly debated. Most recently famous astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss called Musk’s plans for Mars exploration “The Mars Vanity Project” sparking an argument between the two men.

“This plan is logistically ludicrous, strategically ill advised, and scientifically and politically divisive and dangerous.”
Lawrence Krauss

At the heart of the debate on how to go to Mars, or even if it wise to try to do so in the first place, is that the planet is very hostile to Earth-born life: radiations, almost no atmosphere, brutally cold temperatures, this is simply not a place able to sustain large settlements as it is.
This is why scientists and science-fiction writers have long dreamed of turning Mars into an Earth-like planet with acceptable temperatures, liquid water, and a breathable atmosphere. Determining if it is possible will likely decide whether any tentative attempt to create a self-sustaining Martian colony is worth the effort.

मंगल मानव जीवन के लिए इतना शत्रुतापूर्ण क्यों है

Mars is the 4^th planet in the solar system, and has a surface area roughly equivalent to all of Earth’s continents combined.

स्रोत: Fourth Millennium

Currently, Mars is more hostile to human life than any place on Earth, including the most remote and uninhabited depths of Antarctica. It can overall be described as a dead planet, with not only no clear sign of life but also no significant geological activity.

This lack of activity in the planet’s core is the first major problem for living on Mars. As there is no strong molten core of iron like on Earth, Mars has essentially no magnetic field to shield it from the solar and interstellar radiation.

The interruption of geothermal activity on Mars is due to its smaller size, with the gravity being only at 1/3^rd of Earth. The combination of lower gravity and no magnetic shield has led the planet to lose most of its atmosphere, with the air pressure on Mars just at 6 millibar, or 166^th of Earth.

The atmosphere is almost entirely made of CO2, with only a small amount of nitrogen and oxygen. The low atmospheric pressure also means that liquid water is currently impossible, and warming ice turns directly into vapor.

Mars is generally considered lifeless, although some recent observations have challenged this assumption, with the possibility of some forms of bacterial life now considered.

Its soils also contain large amounts of perchlorate (ClO4-), a very oxidizing molecule, which might be an issue for any cultivation of plants in Martian soil. So directly growing potatoes like Matt Damon in The Martian is unlikely.

मंगल का टेराफॉर्मिंग क्यों विचार करने योग्य है

Enthusiasts about Martian colonization and terraformation will have a multitude of reasons to justify their plan to expand human civilization into space.

The one most often mentioned by Elon Musk is to have a “backup planet”, that would be far enough from Earth that any catastrophe here would not have consequences on Mars.

Another reason is simply the call for adventure and expansion for its own sake.

And potentially, making it rich by acquiring a whole planet for the nations managing this technological feat can be a good justification in itself, especially as the space race is heating up between the USA and its allies on one side, and Russia and China on the other.

Other reasons that can be mentioned are philosophical or religious goals of “spreading life”, or the pursuit of scientific achievement and the discovery of the Universe.

मंगल के उपनिवेशीकरण और टेराफॉर्मिंग के खिलाफ तर्क

बहुत जल्दी

Probably the strongest argument against going to Mars on Musk’s timeline is that we are seemingly rushing to do it before we have sufficient knowledge about Mars, the technology to do so, and the experience of living off the world that could be acquired on the Moon near Earth.

Associated with this argument is that a manned mission to Mars distracts key resources from more feasible projects, like the first permanently inhabited Moon base.

In the context of tightening the budget, this could just collapse many unmanned scientific missions. And even the Artemis mission, the flagship of American manned space plans, seems to be running into multiple issues and delays.

The Trump administration is essentially proposing to disband NASA’s entire unmanned science program in favor of human space missions.

The astrophysics directorate would be cut by two-thirds, and the overall science budget for the 2026 fiscal year would be cut by nearly half, to US$3.9 billion.

Lawrence Krauss

अंतरिक्ष को स्वच्छ रखना

Scientific study of Mars could require us to keep it as pristine as possible. If there are native life forms, avoiding contamination of the local biosphere or even bringing back Martian microbes to Earth is even more important.
This is a strong argument from a scientific point of view, but it seems to be on the losing side of economic and political arguments for a Martian colony.

टेराफॉर्मिंग मंगल इसे रहने योग्य कैसे बना सकता है

Despite the objection, the temptation of an entirely new world is probably going to be too much to resist. And there is also the counterargument that the very act of trying will move science a lot further. Something hard to fully dismiss as space technology had mostly stagnated until Elon Musk came and proved the impossible was actually feasible.

स्व-स्थायी मंगल कॉलोनी से शुरुआत

The first observation is that for any megaproject as ambitious as transforming an entire planet, some local manpower will be needed, at least as long as AIs have not completely reached the level of human initiative and reactivity to unknown conditions.
So the first step will indeed, as Musk claims, be to set up a self-sustaining Martian colony. How it could be built and, more importantly, be viable economically is something we discussed in detail in “The Future Martian Economy”. The short version would be a mix of:

• अनुसंधान
• अंतरिक्ष पर्यटन
• दुर्लभ सामग्री
• उच्च-मूल्य उद्योग
• रिमोट कार्य

Still, it will be a difficult and likely short life for these first colonists, with just too much work, too much radiation, and a lot of deadly incidents.

मंगल को सुधारना

मंगल को गर्म करके जीवन का समर्थन करना

The first step to make Mars remotely viable is to increase the temperature and the atmospheric pressure, making simple bacterial and plant life viable, while also greatly reducing the difficulties of everyday life for the first colonists. And both air and warmth are tightly linked together.

One option could be to fill the atmosphere with artificial levels of either dust, or metallic nanorods made of aluminum or iron. These would warm up the atmosphere, causing the frozen CO2 trapped in the polar ice caps to be released, creating a runaway greenhouse effect.

स्रोत: SciTechDialy

Another option could be to use a solar mirror in orbit to melt these ice caps and reach the same result. Using nuclear explosions to melt the ice had even been considered at the height of the Cold War, but would likely not be a very popular method today.

Lastly, another option would be to add gas to the atmosphere. Small asteroids could be dropped on Mars’ surface, disintegrating and releasing a lot of gases.

Or maybe industrial-scale production of methane and other high-power greenhouse gases could be the small nudge that tips the equation toward a runaway greenhouse effect.

मंगल पर जल स्रोतों को खोलना

For a long time, changing the comets’ trajectory so they could hit Mars, as they are mostly made of dust and ice, seemed the only way to bring enough water onto the dead planet.

As water is a powerful greenhouse gas, it could also help increase the temperature.

However, gigantic reserves of water have been discovered in Mars’s underground layers, enough to fill oceans on the planet’s surface.

स्रोत: SciTechDialy

Unfortunately, this water is locked under 11-20 km of rocks, so it might be very hard to reach.

But in the long run, it might be the best bet for bringing a massive enough amount of water to the surface to recreate Mars’ oceans. It is also possible that if we missed until now such a vast quantity of water, smaller pockets could be reached at much lower depths.

मंगल को सुरक्षा देने के लिए चुंबकीय क्षेत्र बनाना

Ideally, the last feat of geoengineering required to create a stable and safe environment on Mars is giving it in some form or another a magnetic field to protect its atmosphere from being blown away by solar winds.

It would also drastically reduce the level of radiation at the surface level, which would be the final piece in the puzzle to allow colonists to live normally on the surface, instead of hiding in subterranean buildings for most of the day.

Potentially, this could be done by creating a gigantic orbital infrastructure powered by the sun itself.

स्रोत: Phys.org