Re: Enough liquid water on Mars to cover the surface to a depth of 1 mile

On 20-Aug-24 20:13, RonO wrote:

On 8/20/2024 3:22 PM, William Hyde wrote:

RonO wrote:

On 8/13/2024 1:27 PM, RonO wrote:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/12/science/mars-crust-water-reservoir- insight/index.html
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If this is true could we colonize Mars?  The article claims that evidence is that deep in the martian crust water saturates cracks and crevices.  A whole lot of water.  Mars lost it's atmosphere, but apparently since there is no plate tectonics on Mars and the entire crust is just shrinking and cracking as it cools, a layer of cracked up crust exists 11 to 20 km below the surface that contains liquid water.
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Since the mantle is still molten wouldn't you expect geothermal geysers to reach the surface as this water came into contact with the hot sections of the crust and mantle as crust continues to shrink and crack up?  Would you need active volcanos on the surface to have geothermal geysers?
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We have found living bacteria that apparently only replicate infrequently in water staturated deep rocks on earth, so would life be expected to have survived if it ever existed on Mars?
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If the water exists we might make it available to colonists by crashing an asteroid or a piece of one of Mars' moons into the surface of the planet.  My guess is that would generate volcanic activity and some of the water would be forced back into the atmosphere or at least to the surface.  The Chicxulub impact was for a 6.6 km diameter asteroid and fractured the Earth's crust down to 20 km.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240812160244.htm
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Science Daily has an article on the proposed Mars water, but they claim that it is too deep to tap into.  My suggestion of crashing an asteroid or piece of one of the moons could initiate vulcanic activity and bring the water to the surface.

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Decades ago I was sent a short paper by the British Interplanetary Society which proposed various ways of making mars eventually habitable.
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One that I recall was the setting off of ten thousand ten-megaton bombs in  the regolith.
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I ran a short climate simulation on the effect of the estimated resulting atmosphere but, alas, it did not contain enough greenhouse gases to keep the surface above freezing.
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In fact, if CO2 is the main greenhouse gas, the amount require to make Mars habitable also makes it uninhabitable. Nor can any such atmosphere hold enough H2O to matter.  Vast amounts of some neutral, stable, GHG are required. ArNe2 would be perfect, if only it existed. CFCs possibly, though they do eventually break down.

 The goal would not be to create an atmosphere, just make the available water more accessible to anyone that would want to colonize the planet. People might live on the surface for a while, but my guess is that the largest habitats would eventually be constructed underground.  It would be like living in a space habitat, but you have all the raw materials you need.  We are talking about settlers that really want to leave earth behind, and be independent.  They probably will not have any support from any major earth political entities because Mars has nothing that we want except space to live away from earth.  There isn't anything worth trading over that distance unless the Martians invented new technologies that Earth would be interested in.
 The population bomb never went off.  The dooms day prophecies have kept declining over the last half century, and there may only be around 9 billion people around by 2050, and some projections are predicting that the population may start to decline around that time.  As the standard of living increases people have fewer children.  China wants to start a program to get their citizens to have more kids because their work force will be declining in numbers.  Japan and Europe are having trouble maintaining their workforce population.  Pretty soon the only people that will want to colonize Mars would want to do it for political or religious reasons.  Right now Mars has nothing that anyone wants.  The low UN population estimates have our population lower than it is now by 2100.  We aren't worried about running out of oil, we are more worried about burning too much of it.
 This could be an answer to the Fermi paradox.  Civilizations either destroy themselves or become self contained, and can happily live in their own system.  There is no driving need to travel to other stars when it would take so long, and promises so little.
 https://populationmatters.org/news/2024/04/the-world-of-population- projections/

These days Mars colonization seems to be of interest mostly to those who deal with unpleasant problems by imagining different but more exciting problems. You know, the dingdongs who think Bitcoin is the solution to widespread poverty and high-tech agricultural drones are the solution to widespread hunger.
Admittedly, "Let's move to Mars!" is a more romantic challenge than finding a way to live sustainably on our own planet, but it's not really an answer. It's a much thornier problem than just "Build a big enough rocket, load 500 people inside, head for Mars." We'd need far more research and development to create sustainable human habitation on Mars than we would here on Earth. (Assuming we can at all. Whether humanity can survive indefinitely in one-third Earth gravity is an open question.)
Unless, of course, you think the richest 1% of 1% of 1% of the population leaving the rest of us to perish is a feature and not a bug. No wonder the technofascists are so hot for Mars colonization — they expect the rest of us to drown in their waste so they can have their nerdbro oligarchic ethnostate in space.
I'm still a space exploration enthusiast. We can learn a lot Up There... but for the foreseeable future, we also need to survive Down Here.
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Kestrel Clayton
I used to have a Kipling quote here,
but I'm not so fond of him any more.