On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea

by Michael Carroll

  Although ayahuasca is indigenous to the Amazon, psychotropic or hallucinogenic substances are found throughout the plant kingdom globally. Who knows what mass hallucinogens might be waiting in the exotic chemistries of other worlds?

  A Note about Terraforming

  Abigail Marcos was born and raised on Mars. She didn’t grow up in a spacesuit or a metal can. She ran free across farmers’ fields and swam in lakes on the Red Planet. How can this be? The future Mars inhabited by our main character is a planet whose environment has been transformed to resemble that of Earth’s. This global engineering process is called terraforming. It’s a complicated process that makes use of existing resources and brings in others. Some recent estimates project that the planet could be substantially terraformed within several centuries. This optimistic view is the one used in our plot.

  In order to make Mars into an Earthlike world, terraformers face several problems. The atmosphere on Mars is thin. In the low valleys, pressures are equivalent to the pressure on Earth at 100,000 ft altitude. The thin atmosphere comes from a host of factors, but two are the most important. First, Mars has low gravity, just 38 % of the amount that Earth does. This means it has a more difficult time holding onto air. Secondly, Mars has no magnetosphere. A planet’s magnetic field is generated by a molten core and acts as a shield of protection. This magnetic bubble shelters an atmosphere from solar radiation, which it can strip away. The combination of low gravity and lack of magnetosphere have contributed to Mars’ lack of air. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about either of these two factors!

  What can we do? The loss of an atmosphere is a gradual process, and it is likely that if a Martian atmosphere can be built up enough to sustain life, it will be stable for some time. Mars has many resources from which to draw. Recent estimates suggest that there are huge inventories of carbon dioxide ice in the south polar cap and within the Martian subsurface globally. Studies by Mars Odyssey indicate that this CO2 may reach as much as 12,000 km3, equivalent to the water in North America’s Lake Michigan. If this CO2 was heated and sublimated (turned from ice to gas) by warming the climate, the atmospheric pressure of Mars could reach 30 kilopascals (3/10 what it is at sea level on Earth). This is comparable to the pressure at the summit of Mt. Everest, nearly breathable by humans.

  Warming of the Martian climate could be done by several methods. One would be to pepper the polar ices with dark material from meteors. As the polar ices darkened, water and CO2 ices would melt, increasing the pressure. As the pressure increased, so would temperature. This cycle would continue as more and more gases sublimated and water vaporized, increasing and warming the atmosphere.

  Rockets with compressed greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride or chlorofluorocarbons could seed the atmosphere during this warming process. As the atmosphere built up, these gases would dissipate, hopefully leaving a more pristine environment. One study estimated that a steady rain of rockets could get the job done in several decades.

  Orbiting mirrors have also been proposed for melting the polar ices. Built in synchronous equatorial orbits, trains of these giant reflectors would beam sunlight onto the polar caps, freeing CO2 and water into the atmosphere.

  Once a thicker atmosphere is established, terraformers envision genetically engineered plants that could begin the process of transforming the primarily CO2 atmosphere into a breathable one. The Martian soil seems to have a wide variety of minerals, along with some nitrogen. Water is available. Its day/night cycle is just 37 min longer than an Earth day. Seasons on Mars are similar to terrestrial ones, as the axial tilt of the planet (which causes seasons) is very similar to our own. However, the seasons on Mars are nearly twice as long. These differences in natural cycles will have an unknown effect on plants (Fig. 61.8).

  Fig. 61.8The face of Mars would be transformed dramatically as the planet is terraformed into an Earthlike world (Paintings by the author, based on Viking spacecraft global mosaic, NASA/JPL)

  One major problem with the Martian environment is that it is highly acidic. The Phoenix lander confirmed suspicions from earlier Viking experiments in finding perchlorates in the soil. Planting a garden on Mars today would be like planting in soil saturated with hydrogen peroxide (although in subpolar regions, the soil is slightly more alkaline and less hostile to terrestrial plant life). But as the atmospheric conditions change, many of these volatiles will combine with other elements in rock, air and soil to become more stable.

  Mars is half again as far from the Sun as Earth is. Although the thickening of its atmosphere will bring seas and warmth, Mars will never be a tropical paradise. Martian settlers would find themselves at home in places like Alaska or Siberia, but not the Mediterranean or Caribbean. Still, 1 day it just may be possible to sit at the edge of a Martian canyon out under the stars, sipping a cup of coffee and watching a condor riding the updrafts, as two moons rise in a twilight sky.

  Footnotes

  1From there, Dawn departed for its next destination, Ceres, where it arrived in February of 2015. For updates, see the mission home page at dawn.​jpl.​nasa.​gov.

  2Other sites in the Solar System that exhibit dichotomy include Saturn’s two-tone moon Iapetus and Earth’s own Moon, with its maria-covered Earth-facing hemisphere and its rugged far side.

  3See Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Basic Books, 1997).

  4See Lorenz, R. D., 2014. The Flushing of Ligeia : Composition Variations across Titan’s seas in a simple hydrological model, Geophysical Research Letters, 41, doi:10.​1002/​2014GL061133.

  5ESA’s Huygens probe detected acetylene in Titan’s environment.

  6See “Hallucinations from a Cognitive Perspective” by Laroi and Woodward; Harvard Review Psychiatry, Vol 15, #3, May/June 2007.

  7See “Ergotism: The Satan Loose in Salem” by Linda R. Caporael, Science 192, April 1976.

  8See Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes by David Enoch and Hadrian Ball (Hodder Arnold Publications, 2001, p. 181).

  9See “Hallucinogenic Drugs and Plants in Psychotherapy and Shamanism” by Ralph Metzner in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (1998).