Category: Where are we in this Universe?

Many scientists think they know a lot, including how it “began.” But the reality is we really know very little about the universe and most of what we think we know is probably wrong.

Colonizing Mars: Why we can’t

Mars is a dying planet

What is living, what is dead? A definition that I find useful for “life” in a non-biological sense is that which tends toward order; non-living things tend toward disorder. Another way of putting it is that changes in non-living things occur only by outside influences. Living things can change and form orderly structures.

In Biology, a living organism grows and forms an ordered structure. When it dies, it decays; other organisms or inorganic processes take it apart. Now, take that definition to non-biological things or systems.

The Moon

The Moon is a dead planetoid. The only changes that occur result from outside influences. The most obvious are meteor impacts. In addition, there is some minor breakdown by the intense heat and cold cycles on a monthly basis. Large meteor impacts may heat up the surrounding rock enough to melt it. That is the source of the lunar maria (so-named because early astronomers thought they were seas). The majority of the lunar surface is primarily made up of anorthosite. The many samples of anorthosite brought back from the Apollo lunar missions crystalized about 4 billion years ago. The Moon has been dead for 4 billion years.

Earth

Earth’s heat sources

The Earth is a living planet – not just because it harbors biological life. The Earth has an internal heat source – the inner and outer core and the mantle have latent heat, leftover from the formation of the planet. Much of that heat was produced by the energy of meteoric impacts and from gravitational compression as the planet grew. There is also heating from radioactive elements, thought to be primarily in crustal rocks, though it is likely that some radioactive elements also exist in the core. In addition, some amount of heating is generated from Earth tides – the change of Earth’s shape due to gravitational interaction with the Sun and Moon. Eventual heat loss and solidification of the core, through convection, conduction, and radiation, is estimated to take tens of billions of years. That is, unless the Earth is totally destroyed when the Sun burns out in an estimated 5 billion years. So, why is this internal heat source important?

The heat within the Earth, along with gravity, is what drives convection in the mantle of the Earth. The rocks of the mantle undergo differentiation with the lighter minerals rising to the top and forming the crust. The lithosphere (crust and uppermost mantle) is broken up into plates that move about atop the mantle. Their interaction with each other, with the mantle below, and the ocean above (plate tectonics) is what keeps mountain building going. If the mantle became totally solid, plate tectonics would cease, and eventually the continents would erode down to sea level. That would make life difficult for land plants and animals. But that alone would not make Earth a dead planet.

Earth’s Magnetic Field

The molten outer core is believed to be responsible for Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field protects the Earth from the effects of the solar wind. If the outer core became solid the magnetic field would be no more, and the solar wind would eventually strip away the Earth’s atmosphere. That would be catastrophic for biologic life on Earth, as the oceans would also evaporate.

What happens when the magnetic field decreases during a reversal (swapping of north and magnetic poles, as happens occasionally – on the order of thousands to tens of millions of years)? Fortunately, it is estimated that it would take several billion years to remove most of the atmosphere. There is the question of genetic damage from increased cosmic radiation during a reversal. Maybe that has caused an increase in the rate of evolution, but life has survived many such reversals.

Mars

The loss of its magnetic field is exactly the predicament in which we find Mars. The magnetism that has been measured is a weak remanent magnetism of crustal rocks. That remanent magnetism was acquired from a past global magnetic field by certain metallic minerals when they were hot, and remained as they cooled.

There is evidence that Mars at one time had oceans, and therefore a much thicker atmosphere. Mars is only about 1/8 the volume of Earth and 1/10 the mass. Its small core would have cooled much more rapidly than Earth’s. Recent measurements of Mars tides1 suggest its core is not completely solid, but it no longer has the internal circulation needed to generate a magnetic field. Because of this, Mars now has little or no global magnetic field, and that has apparently been the case for about 4 billion years.

So, Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, and with the low atmospheric pressure, surface water has evaporated and been lost as well. There is still evidence of moisture seasonally at the polar regions, and there may still be some groundwater. Mars is not dead, but it is dying. When it dies, there is little prospect for sustaining life, certainly not Earthly life.

Can we terraform Mars?

Some have posited the idea that we can terraform and colonize Mars. Mars’ atmosphere is about 95 percent carbon dioxide, with very little oxygen or nitrogen. The Mars Rover Perseverance successfully made breathable oxygen from carbon dioxide. That would allow astronauts to manufacture oxygen for whatever habitats they build to live in on Mars. If there is subsurface water or ice, that could perhaps be filtered to provide for the needs for those limited habitats.

But that doesn’t make Mars habitable on any large scale. To make Mars truly habitable, we would need to create an atmosphere that is comparable to that on Earth. That means keep the existing carbon dioxide, which is at an abundance close to that on Earth (considering that Mars’ total atmosphere is about as much as the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide), and add enough nitrogen and oxygen to get the atmospheric pressure to at least that on high mountains on Earth (~10,000 feet elevation). You cannot manufacture that from Mars’ current atmosphere. If there is a way to create these gases from something in Mars’ crustal rocks (oxygen is abundant in the rocks), it would take thousands (more likely, millions) of years. Meanwhile, the solar wind would be removing them as fast as you make them. In other words, it can’t be done.

Ray Bradbury had it right in 1950 2  – Mars is a dying planet. And there is nothing we can do to change that.

Featured image: Mars Earth composite image from Getty images

References

1. Callaghan JO. InSight Lander Makes Best-Yet Maps of Martian Depths. Scientific American. 2021 July 22 [accessed 2022 June 14]. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insight-lander-makes-best-yet-maps-of-martian-depths/

2. Bradbury R. The Martian Chronicles. Simon & Schuster; 1950. As of 2022 Jun 14, available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Martian-Chronicles-Ray-Bradbury/dp/1451678193

Additional reading

Brann T, Steigerwald B, Jones N. MAVEN Maps Electric Currents around Mars that are Fundamental to Atmospheric Loss. NASA RELEASE 20-011. 2020 May 25 [accessed 2022 Jun 14]. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2020/mars-electric-currents

Goldsmith D, Rees M. Why should we ever send humans to Mars? Slate; Technology. 2022 Apr 19 [accessed 2022 Jun 14]. https://slate.com/technology/2022/04/end-of-astronauts-excerpt-mars-robots-humans.html

Gramling C. Earth’s core may have hardened just in time to save planet’s magnetic field. Science News for Students, 2019 Mar 1 [accessed 2022 Jun 15] https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/earths-core-hardened-just-time-save-magnetic-field

Gough E. We Might Know Why Mars Lost its Magnetic Field: Universe Today, Space and astronomy news. 2022 Feb 11 [accessed 2022 Jun 14]. https://www.universetoday.com/154461/we-might-know-why-mars-lost-its-magnetic-field/

Hand E. Oldest rock crystals point to ancient magnetic shield for Earth. News from Science (AAAS). 2015 Jul 30 [accessed 2022 June 15] https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-rock-crystals-point-ancient-magnetic-shield-earth

McFadden. How much longe until the core of the earth runs out of fuel? Interesting Engineering. 2021 Jan 03 [accessed 2022 Jun 16] https://interestingengineering.com/how-much-longer-until-the-core-of-the-earth-runs-out-of-fuel

O’Callaghan J.  InSight Lander Makes Best-Yet Maps of Martian Depths. Scientific American. 2021 Jul 22 [accessed 2022 Jun 16] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insight-lander-makes-best-yet-maps-of-martian-depths/

Pappas S. Earth’s core is a billion years old. LiveScience. 2020 Aug 26. [accessed 2022 Jun 16] https://www.livescience.com/earth-core-billion-years-old.html

Shekhtman L. With Mars Methane Mystery Unsolved, Curiosity Serves Scientists a New One: Oxygen. NASA 2019 Nov 13 [accessed 2022 Jun 16] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/with-mars-methane-mystery-unsolved-curiosity-serves-scientists-a-new-one-oxygen

 

The Eye of the Snail

Imagine the Worlds Within

Are there submicroscopic worlds within everything we know – and are we submicroscopic within some larger universe?

When I was young, I was enamored with the idea of multiple, or even infinite levels of Universe. I probably got the idea from Disneyland’s Adventure Thru Inner Space. I liked the idea that solar systems or galaxies or maybe whole universes might exist within atoms (See: Conceiving the Inconceivable). But I also allowed that to another larger level, we might be the microscopic universe.

My standard joke was always that maybe we are in the eye of an enormous snail that lives in a larger universe. I used to play with snails, and was fascinated at how if you touched a snail’s eye stalk it would retract, and then extend outward again. The eye and nerve would follow the extension but lag behind a bit (see A snail’s eye).

I thought it was interesting that the writers of Men In Black had a similar idea that they used for the ending of the first movie. Giant alien creatures are playing marbles with galaxies or universes within them, including us.

It turns out that the snail’s eye stalk was a fitting choice. Our “known” part of our universe is expanding.  A part of a universe that is expanding in a more linear shape could be an eye stalk that is extending outward. Considering what we think we know about the movements of atoms and subatomic particles, the time scales could be much different. Something that takes place in seconds or minutes in a larger universe might be millions or billions of years in a much smaller universe. So that eye stalk extension might take place over millions of years for tiny worlds within it.

But there are lots of other phenomena that might fit the bill. Maybe our universe is a bucket of water that was just dumped on the floor of some god-scale house. Maybe we are part of a balloon being inflated. Or, maybe we are something exploding! That might fit with the “Big Bang” theory.

Imagine worlds within the submicroscopic realm, all around and in us. Every atom, maybe every subatomic particle contains its own galaxies.

Now, imagine the worlds within an ice cube in a pan. The molecules and atoms are locked into a crystal structure. That could be seen as a static universe (not expanding). Melt that ice cube and the stars and galaxies are free to move about; the universe can expand outward into the pan. If you further heat it to a gas, the expansion is greater and faster, and 3-dimensional.

What about worlds within electric circuits? As we understand it, electrons are passed from one atom to another at about the speed of a fast ant. So what might that look like from inside? Is it like tiny planets ripped from their sun and sent on a galactic trip from one solar system to another?

What might you do differently if you knew that everything you do affects living things in tiny worlds – every snail or fly we smash, every time we pop a balloon, everything we eat, every time we make a fire or start a car, every time we turn on a faucet or flush a toilet? Now, it’s not like we’re killing the living things or destroying their planets or solar systems or galaxies. Killing or smashing things in our own world does not destroy the atoms that make them up.

Well, maybe there is one exception. What happens to galaxies or universes that might be targets in our atomic colliders? Are they ripped apart? Maybe we need to stop smashing atoms, just in case … in case someone’s watching…

Telescope image of a nebula commonly known as "The Eye of God."
Composite image of Helix Nebula (also known as “The Eye of God”) taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Mosaic II Camera on the 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Comic sequences by Ken Piper using StoryboardThat (storyboardthat.com).

Featured image by Сколько минут at nixette.livejournal.com. Photographer has modified the eyes for humorous effect.