Expert: Jayendra Upadhye - 12/9/2004

Question
I see quite a bit of stuff about this and i was wondering would the gravity of mars be sufficient to   hold an atmosphere sustainable for human life? (and would we even be able to live on mars comfortably because of the gravity.

also would you know of any exotic, theoritcal or outlandish concepts for changeing the gravity of mars?

Answer
Hi Richard,
An interesting question!

No matter how outlandish i may think, there is NO way i can ALTER laws of nature on THAT scale, without suffering consequences of equally vast scale!

No action w/o reaction in the cause and effect world!

So no that cant be done. Unless we both decide to take leave of our senses and descend down the tunnel into alice's wonderland!

Terra forming implicitly presumes presence of vast quantity of water locked away somewhere..(normally in the poles).

That is where all the water on earth gets locked up in the prolonged ice ages! The caps extend all the way to the tropics a mile high! (Pulverising everything underneath and renewing the earth's solid surface as if a gigantic eraser had run its course!

If mars has huge quantities of water that can be unlocked by heating the surface artificially (creating an artificial green house or seeding the poles with heat retaining mixtures).

The liberated water vapour will further enhance the green house effect until a stable "wet and warm" atmoshphere results.

The problem is no such water body has been found.

Also mars has a frozen core, implying no magnetic field.
This will enable ultraviolet from the sun and hard particle radiation from the solar wind to erode the vapour, by attrition, to space! (Its lower gravity however assissted greately in this faster loss!)

That is how mars lost all water it had over the ages!

The earths' van allen belts and magnetic field is SO IMPORTANT!

Refer Cosmos by Sagan. He deals at length with the red planet, and paul visniac.

Once again Richard, there are no concepts of any type that can alter gravity..But wait! I should'v known! The indian yoga system (now come on you asked for it!)..has a method by which one can alter the "weight" of any "body" at will!
That is what yoga-levitation is all about!
But no one ever thought of applying that to planets!

That "siddhi" or "accomplishment" (harry potter would be interested)..is called "GARIMA" or the ability to control ones weight from feather weight to extremely heavy weight.
Interested?
The text book is the "Paatanjal Yoga sutra".
Jayen.