Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Your main issues are nitrogen and water. Everything living requires nitrogen, and Mars practically has no nitrogen and very little water. In order to create 1 atmospheric pressure, you would require the equivalent of two Earth atmospheres worth of nitrogen (around 10 quadrillion metric tons). The nearest sources of massive quantities of free nitrogen are Earth (~0.8 atmospheric masses), Venus (~4 atmospheric masses), Titan (~4 atmospheric masses).

As for water, you would need a minimum of 10 quadrillion tons of water to make Mars as habitable as the Atacama Desert, and a minimum of 100 quadrillion tons of water to attempt any massive agriculture for local support. Anything less, and the atmosphere will just suck up the water.

So, we are talking about a minimum of 110 quadrillion metric tons of nitrogen and water. Now, you can produce oxygen locally, so you could reduce that to around 21 quadrillion metric tons, but you would need a way to transport the hydrogen (ammonia would be a partial solution, but 10 quadrillion tons of hydrogen can only transport ~2 quadrillion tons of hydrogen).

But wait, there is more. Every kilogram of matter traveling from LMO to Mars surface possesses ~10 MJ of energy, meaning that 21 quadrillion metric tons generates 210 YJ of energy. Mars only receives around 25 PJ/s, so the energy from transporting the necessary materials to Mars would be equal to 8.4 billion seconds of sunlight, around 250 Earth-years. To avoid boiling off everything, you would probably need to spend 1000 Earth-years just dropping stuff onto Mars.

I think some of your math might be wrong. According to this NASA fact sheet, the current mass of Mars' atmosphere is only 25 trillion metric tons. I might be wrong about this, but I thought the relationship between atmosphere mass and atmospheric pressure was linear?