NASA Wants to Make Mars Less Toxic with this Clever Idea
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- Mars is full of toxic perchlorates that can be very harmful for future human missions. So, when people go to Mars, they will need to fix it. NASA has awarded a NIAC grant for a project that can help solving this problem. It's called Detoxifying Mars: the biocatalytic elimination of omnipresent perchlorates.
🟣 Guests: Dr. Lynn Rothschild, Dr. Garrett Roberts Kingman
👉 More about the NIAC project:
www.nasa.gov/general/detoxify...
💊 Lynn's other NIAC project interview, On-Demand Pharmacy for Space Missions:
• On-Demand Pharmacy for...
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00:00 Intro
02:31 Perchlorates on Mars
10:48 The NIAC proposal
35:09 What's next
49:18 Current obsessions
53:35 Final thoughts
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![Everything Discovered from Year 2 of JWST. From Closest to Farthest [4K]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/wh4G1Wh79Ck/mqdefault.jpg)
time to watch this until I pass out, then wake up to a long compilation from Anton. unless YT decides I need more startalk or lex fridman
Lex is a hack
Lmao I get the 3 hour Anton montages too 😂
Gotta love Anton. Mind you, I get Isaac Arthur a lot.
@@Grendelmk1 isaac can just get a little too wild for me sometimes
@@teknophyle1 sounds like me most days. . I watch them all as well Thursday is Isaac Arthur day
"We are very watery creatures."
As one silicon based life form once said, we are "ugly bags of mostly water."
As a watery creature I'd say: shut up, you sandbags.
Great reference :)
I'm fixated with the metaphor of humans as "spacesuits" for bacteria.
Which species is silicon based?
Is that from Stanislav Lem, Douglas Adams, Futurama or something I didn´t recognize? I´m curious now, because it sounds so familiar!
Just don't ask Boeing for anything! 😅
Boeing is a joke now. They should have nothing to do with space anything missions.
Careful they might have you suicided 😂
Boeing and a few other corps have done what no bank could ever dream of. They along with a bunch of other weapons corps have written themselves into the Constitution for an ongoing perpetual bailout courtesy of the US taxpayers.
$1 million dollars to ride.....no no I'll pay you $1bill to ride in it
Boeing will find a way to weaponize it.
That's a great philosophy to have perchlorates work FOR us instead of against. Very cool we already have PRBs (Perchlorate Reducing Bacteria) to eat the perchlorate and release the O2.
Lots of potential energy in perchlorates
@@robertcook5201 I wish they'd talked about how the energy could be used if the reducing organisms don't use it.
@@Firebuck Generally the only way to get energy out of bacteria is in chemical form. For instance, they make you some sugar, which is an energy dense molecule. Usually, the idea is to decide on a product (hey, let's make insulin) and then engineer bacteria that make insulin with the energy they make from their environment... and carefully chosen feedstock :P You know, instead of making sugar. Or cellulose. Cos that's how you turn sunlight into trees...
The magnetic shield problem needs to be addressed first. If a new atmosphere could be formed,it will only be stripped away by solar wind.
This is not a terraforming proposal. It is about processing Martian reglolith in a pressurized environment for greenhouse agriculture.
There are options available to make life self-sustaining there without terraforming.
We would do ‘Para-Terraforming’ - which means making local contained habitats - rather than trying to alter the whole planet. Working on a contained local scale is far easier and quicker, although still challenging enough !
Just stick some magnets in orbit.
simple... cover the planet with solar panels and generate a magnetic field emitted from very large copper coils using Nickila Tesla's concepts
If there's one thing I've learned in my delve into regenerative agriculture, it's to never underestimate the detoxification capacity of biological systems.
I've seen Dr. Rothschild as an interviewee on a number of installments of NOVA over the past 10 or 15 years. I tremendously appreciate Frasier's conversation with Dr.'s Rothschild and Kingman in this deeply, richly informational and inspirational discussion of ideas. Thanks!
I worked in a bioinformatics lab in 2011 as an intern and boy does it sound like that field has moved light-years ahead. I spent all summer trying to look for a type of feature in DNA of extremophile bacteria that we found in the rna of extremophile viruses. Minutes with alphafold would have rejected that hypothesis it's really incredible.
This was a fantastic video! Yes, very nerdy and a very specific topic but wow, was it educational and the two experts you had on really did a fantastic job of communicating their field of expertise and the state of play that we are operating from and the areas that we are looking at to find solutions. Absolutely Spot on content. Thank you for doing this video.
The bacteria subtillus is used extensively in the organic weed industry as a spray that outcompetes mold. It’s called Serenade.
Aliens would need to "Clean up" all that Sodium Chloride that in the seas and all over Earth.
Don't forget that they'd have to remove all the Dihydrogen Monoxide as well. That stuff is dangerous, can unalive in minutes once inhaled.
More likely, all that O₂ in our atmosphere.
The only example of life we know of (Earth) has produced a highly reactive, out-of-equilibrium oxidizing environment as a side effect and it isn't a problem for them (us). So seeing a highly reactive environment shouldn't lead us to assume life can't exist (or have existed) there.
@@cartercaden278 lol my martial arts master told me about that about 20 years ago!!! I had forgotten about it, thx!
@@cartercaden278that stuff is everywhere…even in our body…like microplastics ya know?
@@markusroberts2703 It would actually be a biosignature since it would mean some process was setting things out of balance, lol.
Folks interested in this topic would really enjoy the original (1971) "Andromeda Strain", one of the best seriously-scientifically-accurate SF thrillers ever made. (the remake was sensationalist crap, avoid it) CalTech heavily assisted with the script, the story and the sets, and even trained some of the actors to use the equipment shown in the movie.
Let’s give credit where credit was due. The 1971 movie was based on the 1969 book by Michal Crichton. Hollywood may have gotten help to convey the visuals but everything in the movie came from the book nearly verbatim.
One of the all time great films. Had a huge influence on my life.
Great film. I remember seeing it as a youngling. Plus that was back when a movie theatre felt like it was the size of a city block.
Huh I only knew the book, it was great though
Read the book first.
When I was about 7 0r 8 years old I lived near a fellow who made his own fireworks. My first introduction to chlorates and perchlorates was through his demonstrations to the local "kids" of any age what you could do with them. One of his demonstrations was to mix potassium chlorate and sugar to make white gunpowder. There is a LOT of energy in the chlorates!!! I played around with them for years. They will combine easily with almost any carbon compound and produce lots of heat, light, and carbon dioxide (the greenhouse gas). For an enclosed environment I wonder if some form of carbon like charcoal or even methane could be introduced and allowed to react. Results would be CO2, water and heat. Also, a relatively pure form of whatever metal make up the salt. It could be that some kind of reactor could turn these out quickly and in quantity, just to produce "clean" soil and useful byproducts.
yeah interesting, people talk about using CO2 to make methane and oxygen on mars for fuel, but I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to use perchlorates to make O2, lol.
What a great interview - Dr Rothschild is so enthusiastic and charming and that makes for a great guest
Great conversation with interesting projections for future challenges !
Great video! It was insightful to hear their perspective!
reminds me of the Genesis Project from Wrath of Kahn.
Do you suspect banned material? I can convene a council as soon as Fraser admits that warp drive is possible.
🖖
Another great Interview Fraser - thanks to you, Lynn and Garrett for a really interesting, thought provoking and interesting interview. Looking forward to an update at the the end of this NIAC run as I am sure they will get to the next stage.
This biotech is exactly why i have argued that fire on a waterworld is not a requirement for technology and space travel. Yeah i am a zoologist and a computer scientist.
I would love to see a 12 and 36 month update interview here!!!! this is YUUUGE!!! Thanks for bringing this Fraser
Nasa being Nasa try 30+ years time for a mission...
If you know where to look on Mars, water doesn't have to be at all scarce. Noctis Labyrinthus --> 7°S, 93°W, boasts a glacier which contains 8.7 trillion gallons of water. It is located at the west end of Valles Marineris in a feature called Noctis Labyrinthus, which is in the heart of the Tharsus region, and only 258 miles from the equator, so has nice steep walls to mitigate radiation, and a relatively warm climate.
Good, can I book on Expedia ?
And the references from this amazing claim.
Yeah and the perchlorate concentration in that water? Energy to extract and melt???
Yay! Let's go!!! 🎉🤠
Even if there are signs of copious water, if it's in an aquitard, it's going to be difficult to extract.
Um, perchlorates... That can be used as rocket fuel oxidizer?
Not sure anyone wants to set up solid rocket production on Mars. But once the chlorine is removed the oxygen certainly makes a great oxidizer 😉
@@ReinReads if its more cost effective to slap together solid fuel boosters on mars i could see it, at least for mars to mars orbit launches.
I forgot about that 👍
Oxidiser is easy. its the fuel (hydrogen in some form) that is harder.
@@saumyacow4435 ammonium? Ammonia?, I keep forgetting which witch is which...
Although Bacillus stearothermophilus has shown the ability to remove perchlorate under laboratory conditions, it is unclear whether this method would be effective on a large scale on Mars. The harsh conditions of Mars, including high radiation, low temperatures and a thin atmosphere, may affect the survival and activity of bacteria.
This is a process in preparing Martian regolith for use in greenhouse agriculture in a pressurized environment. This is not an organism which can thrive at Martian ambient pressure. The spores can SURVIVE a vacuum (lots of bacterial spores can), but they can't GROW, MULTIPLY, or METABLIZE in vacuum. This is a paraterraforming tool, (greenhouse dome agriculture, etc.) not a general terraforming tool. This is not a terraforming video.
We would need to provide the bacteria with its own environment - a bit like we do when brewing beer or making bread.
Or producing ‘soil’.
Test on contaminated military base artillery ranges
Which would selectively breed them for Mars' current conditions...which is done by "natural selection" anyways...
Very, very interesting show! Another great episode! Thank you!
Awesome content, I'd love to listen to this all day
WOW great talk! I learned a lot.
Great guests thank you for coming. Good job to Fraser at moderating.
Fkn fascinating. Great chat.
🤘😎🤘
Great interview!
Great Episode!
Why not just heat up the soil in a rotary kiln? Perchlorate decomposes easily with even mild heating. The temperature needed to separate water from clay minerals should be sufficient. Get water and destroy the perchlorate all at once. The oxygen May be consumed by free iron but any of that you don't manage to remove is going to be oxidized when added to the habit anyway. Is there something I'm missing?
That would probably still take more energy, and heavy equipment. With this you could just bring a bag of spores and then cultivate things on mars. OTOH if you have a nuclear reactor or something then you'd have a lot of heat.
Thanks Fraser, a really cool interview that is accidentally on one of the topics that I have been working on for the last year or so. Have been nodding a lot, LOL. I guess I need to write an article on it. (Not quite enough info yet for another paper, sadly.)
23:22 Hahaha this part was great, these guys really know how to work together! ;)
Great interview…fascinating! Thanks
What is the biggest star possible? Another way to ask that is, what is the shortest amount of time a star could live for?
Intriguing thoughts. Fingers crossed for success 👍
This was a very fascinating episode regarding exploring solutions to a problem that I didn’t know existed. Thank you for this
24:55 - I didn't have an intuition for how much 50 microliters is, but it's about 1% of a teaspoon
32:15 I think the collective noun for Nobel Prize winners is a "jingle" because their combined medals make that sound.
Awsome interview once again. You are the best.
Great interview
Great episode.. Thank you
I think Fraser had the right idea!
Just wash the dirt!! You then filter the dirt out with coffee-paper or such and are now left with perchlorate-laden water. You then use an ion-exchange filter to remove all the perchlorates from the water!
Sure, ion-exchange filters aren't cheap, but neither is going to Mars. This seems the most economical solution to me (it's also the only solution I know of, at the moment)...
And then you'll need the water !!😂
Yes Frasier, great work. You have psychoanalysed those astro-microbes.
Terrific show!
NASA needs to get rid of that toxic relationship with Boeing
Boeing needs to also get rid of the toxic relationship with local government. Government meddling in hiring, taxes, and even limiting research topics really hurt the company. Not excusing the management failures but it wasn't the only cause of the decline.
This is precisely the same attitude empires had towards the lands they conquered. “We’re doing them a big favor by improving the place” without bothering to ask how this is going to wreck what’s already there. The hubris is disgraceful.
Exactly! We don’t exactly have a good track record for planetary ecological manipulation, do we?
@fraisercain Earth's crust is 0.0145% chlorine by mass. Do we have any theories on why Mars would have ~12.293(if 0.5%) to 24.586(if 1%) times more chlorine in it's crust, just in perchlorates? Note: My numbers are assume that the 0.5% to 1% material being detected as perchlorates are all ClO4 and 35.649% Cl by mass. Also, I noticed you asked this question but it was not really answered. If we understand why this happened, perhaps we can locate very low perchlorate regions.
In the meantime, perhaps Cl could be used as a fuel in a ceramic or carbon(diamond) ion engine or used in the process of printing with silicates; plus, uranium-chloride salts can be used in MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors - the big challenge here is that the heated salt is extremely corrosive to virtually all metals, but to the best of my knowledge no one has tried this with 3D printed ceramics (like alumina) or diamond which are now just beginning to exit the realm of lab science and enter the realm of engineering.
There is so much we dont know about this topic... issue over here is that we dont classidy planetary meteorites... lol
We should consider occupying lava tubes at first. Find a big lava tube and shotcrete the inside of it and consider it a colony. Cut a big skylight for starship to land and launch from the inside of the lava tube. We can work out surface living in the future
You'd need so much water to make that amount of shotcrete though. Love that idea but someone is gonna have to figure out a super low water mix that works with regolith
Defiantly the most f3asable way of minimising cosmic rays. Not sure about launching starship from inside though
Landing inside a lava tube? 😂 Shut up
@@freelifetas1252 Agreed. ... it might suit a catapult-launched vehicle better?
Even with lower gravity (and therefore lower thrust reqs), that is a whole lot of force to repeatedly contain trying to launch indoors.
And at that point, you're probably better off just shielding a transit way to a distant surface launch point, rather than re-designing Starship for a cat launch.
Perhaps Starship would be perfectly functional with a low-grav launch? So, we're really looking at accelerating away from Mars, via catapult of some description, and cold starting once up... which doesn't seem entirrely unfeasible. So long as we can secre a large enough lava tube ion the first place...
We should consider just not colonising Mars at all. No one benefits. Least of all the "colonists".
Another excellent episode, thank you.
Thanks again friend.
An incredible and fascinating topic!!!
Great stuff. Thanks 😊
wonderful solutions paving the way for a brighter future. awesome astrobiology.
What a great interview!
love these interviews very intelligent people
It would be interesting, if we had to make a completely artificial soil (like for a space station, to grow plants), what should that soil be made of? silicium sands, decomposed granite, NPK fertilizers, calcium? Should we add bacteria?
Artic bacteria would be worth looking at too - and understanding their operation of their metabolism and life processes.
I can see that there is scope for ‘designer organisms’ - but they would need to be throughly understood, because any organism for Mars is also going to find its way back to Earth too.
if perchlorates are an oxidizer can u mine it and use it to make like a solid propellant? then use the hdrogen from water as the reducer, and release oxygen that can be used to respire.
Nice...thank you...
Extremophile organics is wild. It would be cool to see that tested on Venus. Although it would be nice to see some geology done there for a while before Changing it
Incredibly exciting stuff, I'm in biotech myself and this is right up in my wheelhouse. Or pretty close at least. I hope they get somewhere with this!
I did a search of the New Yorker archive I could not find a cartoon with Eureka backwards but there is one that asks whats the opposite of Eureka. It's cited as Dana Fradon (1/13/1975)
So if you liberate the oxygen from most of the perchlorate on the surface of Mars planet-wide, how much does it thicken the atmosphere?
Not much. This is a process in preparing Martian regolith for use in greenhouse agriculture in a pressurized environment. This is not an organism which can thrive at Martian ambient pressure. The spores can SURVIVE a vacuum (lots of bacterial spores can), but they can't GROW, MULTIPLY, or METABLIZE in vacuum. This is a paraterraforming tool, (greenhouse dome agriculture, etc.) not a general terraforming tool. This is not a terraforming video.
Congrats to the team that is detoxifing mars! Hope it helps us in earth
It does, the concentrations of perchlorates around any fireworks plant or military base is, uh, astronomical.
the spacesuits, tools, vehicles will need cleaning every time someone goes out, perhaps before the user gets out of the suit if the toxicity is that high
What was Mars like before all these perchorates formed? Besides a lot of O2 there would have been a lot of chlorine available. What kind of life could have gotten started in the presence of all that chlorine?
Silicon based
We obviously have no answer to that, because at no time in the (past) earth history, major concentrations (if any) of elemental chlorine have been formed by microorganisms.
Oxygen caused a major extinction event when it was first released by the first photosynthesizing organisms and chlorine would have done the same, if chlorine had been the outcome of photosysthesis. Besides that, an atmosphere comprizing full percents of chlorine being formed by organizms and organisms breathing chlorine and eating carbon molecules is a totally conciveable ecosystem. If Webb finds a planet with an atmosphere containing 20% Cl2, I would consider this a strong sign of life on that planet.
Also, Chlorine is theoretically less toxic than oxygen, except for organisms that have evolved to deal with oxygen: chlorine is the less strong oxydizing agent and it is not a double radical, as oxygen is. I do not have data on anaerob organisms surviving chlorine however, even though I assume someone sometime has tested for that. Maybe someone else in this chat has?
In gardening, I use bacillus all the time. It's so aggressive, it overpowers other bacteria like E.coli or the one that causes root rot. Some strains I use to control insects incredibly effectively. My concern is, what if life is on mars, bacillus would wipe it out.
Reuse the water. You'll have to have some form of heating, probably RTGs, Distil the water and you're left with perchlorates and fresh water. You're going to have to do this anyway to get the perchlorates out of the water that you're going to harvest from Mars.
None of this is happening.
But listening to it killed some time in my day.
Researchers have found out that green light can distill water without heat. That's why so many plants are green. Reflecting that frequency helps to stop evaporation from leaves and grasses, etc. Other frequencies will also work, but green is the most efficient at directly knocking off clumps of water molecules. This could help distill the water with much less energy needed than heat based distillation. Green lasers work well.
Could it be spun like we separate plasma in blood? Just curious.
RE: Genetic kill switch: Not to go all Dr Malcolm (Jurassic Park) on you buuuuutttt .....life finds a way doesn't it?
So very hopeful and uplifting! Took me back a couple of decades, reading K. Eric Drexler's book.
If a comet added 300 feet of water to Earth, maybe we need to seed Mars with a comet.
Hypithetically, If this bacillus is one our body uses, could the modified form accidentally become part of our gut biome as a human on Mars somewhere down the line. Would that be a good thing, allowing the human to digest the perchlorate, or would it be bad, putting too much oxygen gas in the gut and chlorine in the body?
Fascinating!!!
With the news about nitrogen fixation in a cell would they be helpful on the surface of mars?
Why would you need to purify water (with chlorine) on Mars with no present pathogens?
Also, that’s a tall mountain to climb getting “opposition” to agree to releasing any “alien” life forms into the Martian environment…
Once water is used for human purposes or distilled from recycled wastes, you still need to purify it.
Until we find out their is a silicon based life
@@patrickday4206 I can show it to you if you like silicon based life:D
4:10 “We only learned about humans relatively recently…2007, I believe it was.”
No wonder we can’t understand people well yet!😂❤
Dr. Rothschild is one of the best. Great content. Thank you!
Great ideas, but I think for initial colonization you'd want to get detoxification of habitats, and any regolith based soils they may contain, done. ASAP. So the quickest and most dependable way to do that is heat up the regolith, wash it with water, put the contaminated water through reverse osmosis, rinse, repeat. Sure, you'd have to splurge a large part of your energy budget. But again, it needs to get done.
After that something like this could very well serve as a low energy long term solution, but you'll never get around the energy requirement to keep the conditions under which such processes occur warm enough. And an experimental approach to figure out exactly how do it will take a long time. Worse if you need to do it using automation, remotely, without a human presence. Though of course, Earth based experimentation could go a long way, but then you still want to be sure the process is A for Away before you even get there.
Have the soil tests been conducted by stationary landers, or by rovers, or both?
If it is the former, then their tests have been in soils affected by rocket landing gear, which produce perchlorates.
Here's a question completely unrelated to the video for you;
Have there been any plans to use the Event Horizon Telescope to do a deep field image? Or, is that not a suitable use-case for interferometry?
How can the oxygen be separated from the chlorine?
I suppose a chemical reaction occurs in the bacteria,
Magic
Love this show!!
I wonder if the perchlorates in the regolith could be turned into some sort of battery
48:02 A great example of evolution doing something counterintuitive and convoluted to the point of being nonsensical, yet somehow it works, is coagulation cascades. If you want to watch a former med student experience Vietnam Flashbacks, ask them to recite coagulation cascades.
Is chlorine a sufficiently powerful oxidizer for use in chemical rockets? Can the excess chlorine be used for in-situ refuelling?
If we’re already planning to release microorganisms on Mars, why are we still talking about “planetary protection”?
I wonder what useful chemical process can make use of chlorine ?
One example might be manufacturing PVC plastic, which can be more rigid than polythene. Can both can be useful in some kinds of composite building materials.
They should include some pharmaceutical process design engineers on the team. Scaling up bioreactors is a specialized skill.
The perchlorates might well only be in the top meter or so of soil, if they are formed by interaction between substrate, atmosphere, and radiation -- provided the perchlorates haven't been transported around by water in the distant past.
If it's an oxidizer, can we use it as part of a rocket fuel?
"We only learned about humans relatively recently, it was with the Pheonix lander that landed on mars in 2007."
4:07 Dr Garret, confirmed Marian! 😂
4:10 "we only learned about humans relatively recently".. LMAO
I like that she had to clarify the meaning the REAL meaning of the word organic and not the wrongful use of this word to mean “no insecticide use”.😂
4:07 "We only learned about humans relatively recently"... technically true!
4:07 - "We only learned about humans relatively recently...." 🤨
Definitely got a laugh out of that one. Wouldn't be surprised to see an AI generated news article saying "NASA discovers humans relatively recently"
Although this is a quite cool idea I also think that we should also consider perchlorate as a resource instead of a waste. It is an oxidizer, it is energy rich. It could be solid rocket fuel. It could be a redox flow battery, it could reclaim clean watter and energy from electrolytic oxygen production. Most perchlorate applications would be way more viable if something in a reduced state is found on mars that could be reacted with the perchlorate. I imagine that there must be some reduced stuff in mars but it may require underground mining.