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Date Posted: 14/04/2015
 
Blog Heading: New Horizons
 
Message:

 

New horizons (Ed style!): this has been on my mind the last few months or so ...

I've been studying this planet Earth for the last ten years, also getting practical experience in photosynthesis (growing plants) and photovoltaics (harnessing the sun for electricity), and also permaculture (designing systems which combine these and other elements to provide food, power and other needs in a sustainable way). This has come together in the launch of PIRN (the Permaculture International Research Network), which is a peer-to-peer structure for exchanging data and developing knowledge, an internet-enabled, global, non-hierarchical approach to doing science, what is known as a social learning organisation.

What are the implications of this knowledge that I have been cultivating? Where else could it be applied? So I have been noticing the current interest in Mars. There are rovers exploring it and people wanting to travel to it. But it's a desert, right? James Lovelock pointed out about fifty years ago that if the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere is inert and unchanging (which it was), then there cannot be life there. NASA and others have been trying to contradict that view ever since. So it is interesting to hear of plumes of methane detected near the surface, and more recently, calcium perchlorate, which is a salt which absorbs water and can keep it liquid as a brine down to -70C. Martian temperatures range from 20C in daytime/summer to -125C (shiver!!) in nighttime/winter, so it is feasible that there is liquid water near the surface, at least temporarily.

So when (and if) people set foot on Mars, what they will need to do is modify the climate in a controlled setting (a greenhouse) and start developing a bit of photosynthesis (growing plants) and power their activities by the sun (photovoltaics), designing systems which harvest their energy from sunlight and sustain life (permaculture), and if they want to restore the atmosphere and return running liquid water to the surface (it used to be there, there are pebbles and erosion patterns and layers of sediment), they will need an understanding of planetary science and the relationship between the biosphere and the atmosphere. And as they will be a long way from home, they will need a quick and effective way of exchanging knowledge on solutions to desert regeneration and sustainable living strategies, basically a social learning organisation.

I wondered if it was just me thinking this, but I paid a trip to Exeter, and met with Tim Lenton, my supervisor at the university there. He has been talking to astrophysicists who are actively exploring for new planets around other stars (around 1,000 have been discovered over the last decade). The astrophysicists are interested in all types of planets, but Tim is focusing on the potentially habitable ones, looking to broaden Earth System Science into a planetary system science. If anybody did ever make it to one of the potentially habitable planets (basically rocky planets, not too large, not too small so the gravity is okay, not so far from the star that water is frozen, and not so close that runaway greenhouse effects kick in - the so-called Goldilocks zone), what skills and capabilities would they need? The same ones that Mars pioneers would be drawing on - see last paragraph.

You could call it Terraforming, but I think that is inaccurate - there's no reason to believe that what would emerge from life colonising a new planet would be anything like Earth. So like I said, new horizons ....

The photo is of Earth, taken from Mars by the mars rover Curiosity (look about 2/3 of the way to the left, 2/3 of the way to the top).

 

 
 
 
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