Mars, a red hellscape of ionizing radiation toxic soil and the recent target for invasion by a sadistic-
nigh, unstoppable evil demonic overlord in the game
that's the topic of today's video.
Surviving Mars, and it's me. I'm the sadistic evil overlord.
Make way from my army of Bionic colonists. Bionic colonists who never die and never cause food shortages.
Anyway, I've just been informed that Surviving Mars is a game about
Presumably colonizing Mars and not actually creating a bionic utopia built upon the bulging corpses of dead
strangulated organic humans and with the expansion being about
scaling this occupation up from merely living in fish bowls to actually
terraforming the entire freakin' planet for human occupancy
Paradox Interactive came to me and was like, "hey, would you like to do a video on this?"
"We will pay you" to which I said "You've seen my show right? This one, this show, right here" and they weren't dissuaded somehow fools
Hahaha, so anyway, I was like, yeah sure. I'll check your game out, I guess. What's that, it's like Dwarf Fortress but in space? Oh sh-
You guys, stop having so many babies. I can only build so fast.
So yeah, about 150 hours in, 150 hours that I definitely needed to research this episode.
I can quit micromanaging designing and maintaining a colony that entirely uses oxygen provided by plant life anytime I want.
I'm not addicted. You can't prove anything. Please press F to pay respects for my wife,
the Surviving Mars Widow. In any case with the world the way it is, what with global warming, the super volcano underneath Yellowstone,
the over 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and thousands of other
Potential threats, one might be tempted to head off into the stars in search of a home far from this
so to that end, we're going to give you a step by step guide to
successfully terraforming Mars for human occupation, just like you can do in
Surviving Mars: Green Planet. And it's gonna involve addressing three main concerns
building up the atmosphere, raising the temperature and closing the portal to Hell (This isn't Doom Austin)
Frickin wrong game again. Ok, I meant and make the atmosphere breathable. (There you go)
Step 1: Blot out the sun
Okay, no, not really
But some of you may know that it's been theorized that Mars used to look a lot like Earth before it looked like well
This what happened solar wind blew away the atmosphere
It's possible that millions of years ago Mars had oceans and clouds and colors other than this rusty red
But then the core of the planet cooled and solidified
an electron stopped moving around
freely
and bam the magnetosphere just up and left you see magnetism is created by electric currents the moving of
electrons our own
magnetosphere is believed to be created by electric currents in the core of our own planet created by the
Motion of molten iron in the outer core our core is you know, very hot believe it or not
This is actually all left over kinetic energy from one our planet first formed created when all those molecules
squished together to form this ball
We live on Mars two had one of these but being about a tenth the mass of Earth had way less energy to spare
So it's core cooled millions of years ago that iron seized up and bingo Bongo
no more magnetic sphere
This is bad news because the magnetic field generated by planets
deflects and suppresses the pressures induced by charged particles
Leaving the Sun particles that otherwise slam into a planet going one and a half
Million miles per hour or over two and a half kilometers per hour for you filthy
Okay, actually everyone else us
Before we can go about dealing with any of the other
challenges replacing the atmosphere cleaning the toxic soil warming up the planet we have to deal with this issue because
otherwise any atmosphere we try to make is just
Gonna get blown away by solar wind the instant
We create it like the Sun is the biggest toddler in the universe and Mars's atmosphere is an unmolested
dandelion in the grass now replacing a planetary scale
magnetosphere sounds like a monumental task and yeah, it is,
but there are actually many proposed solutions one involves installing two supercooled
electromagnets one at each pole to basically
artificially recreate the magnetosphere which is
actually a solution mimicked in surviving Mars with placeable magnetic field generators on the ground
I couldn't think of any specific reason why the magnets would necessarily have to be at the poles
So that checks out there is however a way more interesting
Solution my favorite solution is one that was devised at the planetary science vision 2050 workshop in
2017 and hey also exists in Green Planet. It's one that involves basically creating a freakin'
Electromagnetic shield in space this would be achieved by placing a giant electromagnet at what's known as the L1 Lagrangian Point
between Mars and the Sun which is-
hey do we have time to explain Lagrange points?
No, I haven't. I've been talking about magnets to on you don't you know?
but to really cool to see they're like this thing where you can like park a satellite in the spot where the gravitational pull of
One body and another cancel out
so like it remains stationary there where ordinarily something that's 1 billion meters closer to the Sun than Mars would have to like have a
faster orbit, but it actually it it actually like stays in place because because it because of physics
No, I I can't explain that. All right. Well, who's that? It's us out
Yeah
The magnet would remain parked between Mars in the Sun and its magnetic field would deflect incoming
Solar wind without having to envelop the entire planet. That's pretty neat, huh, the
LeGrande is actually a million kilometres away
Which for?
Context is almost three times the distance
The moon is from Earth here articles heading straight for Mars would have to be deflected merely .179
Degrees in order to miss the planet entirely. That's not too bad
Unfortunately magnetic fields created by electromagnets like the one you can launch in Green Planet diminish and strength
exponentially, not linearly
Meaning that while you can deflect quite a few charged
Particles coming straight at the center of Mars
If your field doesn't extend high enough not really accomplishing much the work done by the planetary science vision 2050 workshop
estimated that the strengths would have to be measured at about
50,000 nano Tesla's a whole earth radius away from its origin point and well pretty honest here giant cosmic
magnetism mathematics is
Complicated I burned an entire day trying to learn it and got basically nowhere. So I'm gonna do something
I don't ordinarily do and I'm gonna rely on the math done by someone else Stack Exchange
user has FEX AAS defects as defects math done by Stack Exchange user as
defects to estimate the power and material
requirements necessary to build a magnet that accomplishes this task as defects after running the math figures a
Magnet would have to be built using a coil. That's only
12,000 kilometers long in order to create a magnetic field
We have to run electricity through this wire
Simple enough a wire one meter thick would require only about 10
megawatts of electricity to create our magnetic field BAM
Unfortunately this would require
3.3 billion tons of copper which is the equivalent of over 187 years of our current max
For production to complete the one I can make and surviving Mars only requires 80 metal though. What's that about?
I guess we can reduce the size of the wire needed. But therefore we need to increase the power we pump through it
Proportionally in order to create the field if we shrink the wire all the way down to 10
Centimeters just short of 4 inches wide it would only take two years worth of our total copper production to create
way
more achievable still not 80 metals small unless each unit of metal is actually short for a
422 metric tons in which case the guns on those drones are epic
I'll let that slide though because I've been playing the game for about 150 hours and across like 50 in-game
generations and still
I only have like 30 thousand tons of metal shrinking the wires
raises our power requirement from 10 megawatts to 1
Gigawatt which we could maybe use solar panels for but since the intensity of sunlight
Diminishes according to the inverse square law even though Mars is only one and a half times further from the Sun than Earth
sunlight here is half as powerful less than that even just
43% the strength and even with impossibly efficient solar panels you would need over
600 football fields worth of solar panel surface area to collect enough sunlight energy
But all is not lost if we just built two
relatively tiny nuclear reactors the size of the Palo Verde plant and run them at full capacity
25 hours a day, then we can do it. We can finally protect Mars using the powers of science
WOO! I've been talking a lot
about magnets, but honestly, this is the
biggest problem hands down with terraforming Mars
If we can solve this one issue then everything else becomes a relative cakewalk
And since our own core is cooling at a rate of about a hundred Celsius every billion years
This may be something we want to keep in our back pockets. Okay, so one major challenge down build a giant
electromagnet in space with 33 million tons of Capri EV laying around check
Alright, what's next you got to raise the temperature with solar wind out of the way, we can actually start
impacting the atmosphere Mars's atmosphere is
Absolute crap. It's why you've got to live in bubbles like in surviving Mars. If you want to colonize it the old-fashioned way
it's composed of
95.3 2% carbon dioxide 1.9 percent nitrogen
1.6 percent argon and point 1 3
percent oxygen and it's just point 5 percent as dense as Earth and if you're like me your first thought is: Oh, CO2
Plants like that. I learned that in school and plants make oxygen using
photosynthesis, and you're right!
However, they tend to not like it when it gets down to 82 below freezing every night
we gotta warm this planet up somehow if we're gonna have any hope of
Letting a human walk around in something other than a fully sealed spacesuit
Thankfully as you may or may not know warning planets is our speciality. We just got a bum Bart and I mean
Bombard the planet with greenhouse gases. How are gonna be really freaking hard it turns out
Greenhouse gases worked by absorbing radiation from the Sun and then remitting it as infrared light
Which is more likely to stay trapped within our atmosphere
We have a couple of things in our favor here
Thankfully one of which being at the polar icecaps on Mars,
actually have a bunch of co2 in them, which as you know, is a greenhouse gas
So the act of just warming up the atmosphere will actually encourage more co2
To sublimate into the atmosphere which will create a self-reinforcing cycle. That'll work for us. There's over
2.8 billion tons of CO2 locked in the ice caps, and if we were able to heat the planet enough to melt them
Which wouldn't necessarily be impossible if we redirected asteroids and comets and oh, hey
That's not a thing paradox ought of and if they're filled with nitrogen and argon and we introduced them into Mars's atmosphere
This could raise the atmospheric pressure all the way up to 60% earths
Meaning you could step outside as long as you had a sealed helmet and the water in your body wouldn't immediately boil away
Combine this with throwing away our modern clean air policy plans with factories in Green Planet that generate greenhouse
gasses from waste rocks fuel and carbon sources on the planet and
FedExing gases from Earth something you can do if you eat those steep shipping rates. This might actually be doable
Alternatively, you can also literally nuke the ice caps from orbit like in surviving Mars
Which would probably actually work to release a bunch of water and CO2 as long as you don't mind picking out
Radioactive fallout from your salad. I'm gonna be honest with you. I am NOT a terraforming expert
Most people aren't because we've never done it before so exact numbers are really hard to come by
but if we could get Mars to this point, we could finally
Finally start on the hardest part making the atmosphere breathable
Okay, and it's here that you might think it's time to plant trees because CO2!
Trees love it, and maybe it's warm enough to plant some Christmas trees!
But no we spent five years constructing a giant magnet to shield the planet another what twenty to thirty finding asteroids and comets
Redirecting them in order to heat up the planet enough to melt the carbon out of the ice cap
And we still can't plant trees yet? No, because trees still require oxygen. Stupid trees, what are they even good for?
but you know, what does not require oxygen in order to engage in photosynthesis? Cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria where the bacteria that were probably responsible for the original rush of oxygen into our own atmosphere
You see prior to this point the earth?
It looked like a half terraform Mars kind of cold and full of CO2 and then BAM! photosynthesis!
simple organisms like bacteria
Don't have all the complex moving parts of trees so they can quite literally just make oxygen out of CO2
Using just water, which hopefully we can find some and sunlight. These
incredibly resilient little buggers flooded the earth with oxygen so quickly that it's literally called "The Oxygen Catastrophe" by scientist
because hey turns out on a planet where life didn't evolve using oxygen to breathe being flooded with oxygen can be
incredibly deadly oxygen loves to react with stuff which is chemistry speak for bond to other molecules and
Fundamentally change how they operate which can be kind of bad for organisms that are made of only a few molecules
Hey, I needed that up. Nope. I'm dead. Now, I could not find estimates for cyanobacteria
Oxygen production but we'd need a lot, *A LOT* of them. Photosynthetic algae similar to cyanobacteria produce
conservatively, 70% of all oxygen on earth and it took like freakin' half a billion years to produce our current atmosphere
atmosphere surviving Mars deals with this bike growing lichen
Which is actually a happy marriage between algae, cyanobacteria, and fungus
cohabitating in one giant, kind of gross clump.
This is actually pretty brilliant because, well, not only does lichen have cyano bacteria and algae already
But fungus is more resilient to radiation and could help shield algae and cyanobacteria
From deadly cosmic rays while we wait for enough
oxygen to build up an ozone layer. An imported colony of, I don't know, just a few hundred tons of lichen
biomass could probably produce enough oxygen on the planet and only like
I don't know a hundred years and then we'd be good to go.
Well, sort of. Honestly, we don't need that much oxygen to breathe, but we need
dramatically low CO2 levels to breath.
That's right, the very stuff keeping our planet warm
is fatal to us at percentages as low as two percent
So even if we could raise the oxygen levels to 22% we'd have to like, eventually, get rid of all that CO2
If we ever wanted to live comfortably on Mars and can we sacrifice it with Mars as lower surface gravity?
Can we maintain the pressure and heat required to keep us alive? Who the hell knows? This is all
Ignoring the toxic soil filled with frickin' chlorine and the possibility that a surface gravity as low as Mars' would have terrible
Consequences to human biology all said and done giving us every benefit of the doubt and concerted efforts and it take us at least
200, maybe 500 years
to come close to making Mars habitable in a light jacket without a mask and probably
Thousands to hundreds of thousands to be an actual safe place to be and to allow for human evolution to accommodate the different
Environment. It's not impossible...
probably, but it turns out it's not a viable escape from the issues
We're currently facing. The timescales of things like global warming and nuclear annihilation are decades not hundreds of years
It turns out we'll just have to, like, deal with our problems first, like, like grown-ups doesn't mean we can't fantasize though
and I guess some things are best kept in fiction like in "Surviving Mars"
Which does, in fact, deal with a lot of these things in its expansion green planet even stuff that I didn't get into cuz hey
Guess what?
Terraforming is freakin complicated. You have to balance atmospheric temperature by bring out greenhouse gases. You have to evaporate water and fertilize the soil
So you can go trees which can produce oxygen and maybe, maybe someday your colonist
They're not dead like mine and get to walk around in the open air. Sounds nice.
That is until I'd somehow screw it up by lighting the atmosphere on fire causing my own runaway global warming problem
Check out the link to buy the game in the description
And send me updates on your colony on Twitter so I can judge you from on high
sincerely, Austin
(Outro)