Recreating Dune: How We Can Live on Mars

LONDON — The success of the new Dune movie has people speculating about whether humans changing Mars’s surface and atmosphere to be more like Earth’s, known as terraforming, is possible and, according to the BBC, the primary issue is creating a breathable atmosphere to match Earth’s, where currently plants and bacteria give out oxygen through photosynthesis.


For Earth, large-scale oxygenation initially occurred 2.3 billion years ago, when bacteria began releasing oxygen as waste, according to the Nature Communications journal, but the BBC explains the difficulty in artificially introducing bacteria to do the same on Mars is that water which could be used for photosynthesis is currently frozen.


One solution to that problem could be building automated factories on Mars that produce greenhouse gases which warm up the planet and melt the ice.”


However, any additional atmosphere that was generated would still have to deal with an additional problem called ‘spallation,’ where high energy radiation from the sun blasts away a planet’s atmosphere, a process which already afflicted Mars 3.5 billion years ago.


One researcher who spoke to the BBC suggested that once an active biosphere is established on Mars, oxygen production may be able to match losses from spallation.


But in 2017 NASA scientists at NASA’s Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop suggested creating an artificial magnetic field that sits in front of the planet in order to protect it from the sun’s radiation.


The idea is that a structure that generates a magnetic dipole field at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point could allow the Martian atmosphere to become thick enough to melt ice at Mars’ northern pole and, in time, spark a greenhouse gas effect that could restore some of Mars’ oceans.