Potatoes on Mars

One goof bit of evidence is how quickly plant life rebounded in the "red forest' next to Chernobyl, in areas where the gamma ray flux resulted in equivalent rad dosages far in excess of what you would find on Mars.

 

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what do you think is it possible to grow food like terraforming on mars now ? Because mars is not habitable to do this that I know. Thanks.

 

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You grow indoors where you can completely control the growing environment. You artificially recreate the same growing environment that exists on earth. Or you do something like bilvon suggested earlier in the thread. Where you take advantage of the Martian atmosphere which is CO2 rich.

 

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And I don't think about to bring our big animals( cows, pigs, chickens and dogs) to live on mars now. We have to make first artificial ecosystem with microbes, plants, trees, insects, honey bees, little animals like lizard, mouse, little birds etc..that I think. But not with big animals because gravitational force of mars is weaker than earth and I'm thinking about the possible problems of physical growth and fitness of big animals on there and I guess medical science can do some special.

 

That is a problem that we haven't discussed. Living in freefall or low g_mars. Science has collected lots of data for humans in freefall which reveals a set of problems. A key factor is how much local proper time you spend living in a freefall environment. Same would be for low g, on Mars, but to a lesser degree [I think]. But that wouldn't come into play until you decide to stay for a lengthy local proper time. I had an idea, pretty simple and most assuredly thought of prior to my epiphany, we could wear a weighted vest and maybe weighted calf vests to assimilate a safe percentage of our weight on earth. Maybe this could be 85% [? To be determined]. Where you get the added advantage of weighing less while working and playing. Maybe living in lower g_mars doesn't pose any real problem beyond adjusting to it. I haven't researched the literature. Maybe you've researched it. BTW your English is improving. I can see it in the phrasing

 

I feel informed. Thanks.

 

Not sure you should as gamma rays are high energy photons, not high energy charged particles. They most likely pass will thru a cell with no energy transfer to it*; but a high energy CHARGED particle passing thru a cell will always drop a lot of energy in it and make lots of damaging "free radicals."

* Some may Compton scatter and deposit part of their energy in the cell, but that is rare for low atomic number atoms, most of the content of the cell. X-rays drop little of their energy in your body, and most of it in the film, which has high atomic number atoms (silver). I think, not certain, this is even more the case with higher energy gamma rays.

Obviously gamma rays are not neutrons, thousands passing thru you now, with no energy loss, but I think gamma rays, not from space but from Chernobyl isotopic decays, mainly do that too. Cosmic rays from space, high energy ionized particles, are much more damaging than isotopic decay gamma rays.


Apples are not oranges.

 

I don't think low gravity is a big issue. I think animals can adapt, and adaptation would be required. Martian gravity is about 38 percent that of Earth. I can't imagine milking a cow in low gravity the old fashioned way (i.e. manually).

The bigger problem as I see it is getting them into space and then caring for them for several months. I'm concerned how larger animals like cows and pigs would survive the challenges associated with space flight. How many cows and pigs have been launched into space? The journey may require artificial gravity (i.e. centrifugal force). Have you ever tried to get a pig or a cow on a treadmill?

My pizza is becoming more expensive by the minute.

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dt_shell = dTau
dt_shell mars / dt_shell earth = (1-2M_mars/r_mars)^1/2 / (1-2M_earth/r_earth)^1/2
= .999999999 / .999999999 = 1
That means the local proper tick rate on Mars is equivalent to the local proper tick rate on earth to within a nanosecond.
The local proper tick rate for the Schwarzschild bookkeeper, at boundary, equals 1. Once again this illustrates just how small the local spacetime curvature is. If you compare the Sun with the Earth you finally find an area inside our solar system where we might need to use GR for more of the experimental analysis. Probably not unless you're building a GPS for use in the near Sun spacetime. LOL.

 

Personally I wouldn't be bringing large animals unless we were making an interstellar journey. Then we would have built a ship which would have several ways to create g_earth environment. Hopefully we would have a constant g_earth acceleration for most the ship and for the biosphere we could do the rotation thing. We could pack all the pizza ingredients to last the entire journey. You would be our historical team leader and keeper of the pizza. Keeper of the Law. Did you read Clarke's Rama books? The whole idea of a relativistic journey fascinates me.

 

Rads correct for this difference. The comparison you are making - "one gamma ray is less damaging than one cosmic ray" is thus unimportant; a rad is a unit of absorbed radiation dose, not a unit of radiated energy.

 

No. I haven't researched the literature. I just guessed about this problem.

Thanks for it. I like it too. I think it is perfect for astronauts. But I'm really thinking about them who will live on mars.

 

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.

Its from wiki and I'm thinking about it because the low g of mars.

 

If we are waiting for natural selection to come long to adapt our bodies and our livestock to Martian living, we are in big, big trouble.

Natural selection works in very large populations, over long periods of time, and does so by wiping out poorly-adapted organisms, letting better-adapted organisms reproduce. A tiny population like an Earth colony will simply go extinct.

True, evolution does not always have to operate via natural selection; it certainly operates by artificial selection, as any horse breeder, dog breeder or Koi breeder can attest. But you still likely wouldn't have enough time.

You'd modify their genes here on Earth, then ship the embryos to Mars.

 

We face environmental challenges here on Earth (like living in Antarctica, a place that would quickly cause any unprotected group of humans to become extinct) and survive. Something similar will happen on Mars if we colonize it. We will create artificial environments to keep us alive while slowly adapting to conditions there.

 

That is a convincing arguments if the rads received by plants in the nearby forest in say the six months it might take to grow a potato were more than the rads the growing potatoes would get from cosmic rays (and their daughters) while growing on the surface of Mars. (That dose will be nearly constant in intensity.)

I have not been able to find quantitative data on either of these 6-month exposures. Do you have it? Or are you just assuming that the cumulative 6-month rad does in "the red forest" was higher than it would be on the surface of Mars?

Presumably the initial rad dose was much higher than a few months later when the new plant life "rebounded."In each successive 6-month interval the cumulative dose would be falling, so just known how many months after the accident the rebound started would be interesting.

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In my post I mentioned high atomic number atoms stop / absorb gamma rays better than the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen the body's cells are mainly made of but I failed to tell why. This is because the gamma ray energy is much more efficiently absorbed if there is a "quasi resonate" structure in the bound electrons to absorb it. I. e. the gamma ray will normally eject one of the two electrons bound in the inter most shell of a high atomic number atom, as that is a better match to the energy it carries. Then an electron from a higher shell will radiatively fall down to replace it. This radiation will have one of a well defined set of energies - it even has a name, but I forget it.

 

If we cannot transport big animals within our solar system, it's a pretty risky deal to jump to interstellar. So I think we have to begin within our own solar system. There are options, though most of them are beyond our technological abilities. Ideally, an artificial womb would the ideal method to transport large animals across vast distances in space, all that would be needed is a fertilized egg and a method to raise the animals once they have been born.

We could create any Earth animal anywhere with such a device. We could even make genetic modifications in order to make the offspring more suitable for the new environment.

 

They are approximately thirty times more. At the hot spots in the Red Forest they are seeing a rad per hour, and plants are growing there. Worst case on Mars they are seeing 30 millirads per hour. (And that's during a solar event.)

 

Thanks. So it seems potatoes growing on Mars is not impossible due to cosmic ray flux.

 

The interstellar thing is one of many reasons I wanted to learn some general relativity. It's a stretch without some kind of a warp drive. Which is a stretch. Still I find it the most interesting. The artificial womb is a great idea. For the interstellar journey you could begin the journey with animals in gestation and once they're 'hatched' they could begin living just as if they were on earth. LOL. I'm talking about a very big ship that could be completely self sustaining and support a very large contingent of folks versed in many useful pursuits. Now I'll check out the artificial womb. Thanks.