Love for Science Series- I, Engineering Life

I love watching shows on TV that feel like a Jules Verne script, a fantastic science fiction in today’s world but one that could well be a reality sooner than one would imagine. Today, scientists on Nat Geo were debating and proposing a way to recreate evolution all over again, but faster and this time on Mars.

The issue involved making Mars’s atmosphere and terrain inhabitable, planting seeds of evolution and whether or not we should even be doing it. I heard all the arguments and being the “safe” person that I am would hate to see mankind taking on such a mammoth of a responsibility without being a 100 percent certain of how it is going to end.

The scientific theories presented below are in no way original and are completely the ideas and deductions of years of research of scientists at various laboratories across the USA. Only the language and opinions are mine.

The first step to cultivate Mars is to increase its average temperature from 80F below zero to 25F below zero. Humans as we all know are experts at heating up a planet up to noticeable consequences. But, to warm up Mars, we need to put in ten times the effort. Massive factories and plants which release greenhouse gases more effective than CO2 can be set up on Mars. As heat is generated, the frozen water on the surface of the planet will slowly evaporate and settle in the atmosphere as water vapor, another potential greenhouse gas. One scientist proposed that simply pouring water on the planet’s surface will also release gases as Mars’s soil is nothing but pulverized frozen acid, and water will activate a reaction. Anyway, as more and more of these gases get released into the atmosphere, the atmosphere will get thicker, making the surface of Mars even hotter, and thereby releasing more gases. This cycle will continue until a balance is reached and the atmospheric pressure is also developed to a reasonable life sustainable value (as low as air pressure at a height of twice that of Mount Everest). This hastened process is expected to take atleast a 100 years.

When the water vapor builds up sufficiently, it will finally rain on Mars. (I do not know for how many hundreds of years it will rain like it did on Earth to fill all cavities and depressions to form our great oceans and some great rivers). When it stops raining, an astronaut in space might well see an Earth look-alike planet, the red planet transformed to blue. Mars will also by this time have enough gases in its atmosphere to scatter light and procure itself a blue sky. The first stage in the transformation would be complete.

But, the key ingredient to make life possible and to sustain it is Nitrogen. This may be the biggest hurdle to developing life on Mars, for until now, scientists have found absolutely no evidence of this element on the Martian surface. Although, they optimistically hope that the signals may be noised by a variety of other elements and complex molecules of nitrogen. I dreamily think that there may be other elements on Mars undiscovered on Earth which may do what nitrogen does or …maybe even better.

The floating suggestion is that we should at this stage seed the soil on Mars with microbes like cyano-bacteria which can break complex molecules and release nutrients into the soil, nitrogen being one of them. As the soil becomes gradually fertilized, they would add organisms like lichens and moss which will do a wonderful job of weathering down rocks and mountains and further fertilize the soil. The idea is to transform a mountain into a garden.

After another hundred years of preparing Mars for its tailored future, the planet would now be suitable for a tundra type of vegetation. At this stage we will be very likely importing pine trees from the Earth and planting them, for we definitely cannot sustain this kind of atmosphere on Mars without setting up a self-balancing mechanism. Remember here that the scientists only hope that nitrogen exists on Mars, they do not have any evidence of it, yet. Trees will bring in the much needed supply of oxygen, consume the carbon dioxide and maintain the atmospheric temperature. The terra-formation is complete. Then what?

At this juncture, researches draw a blank. They are not sure if Mars will take the course of evolution like Earth did and develop into a planet very alike ours, or follow a whole new line of evolution with different kinds of species. Or, will it even evolve and sustain life?

Astro-biologists romanticize the idea of letting life evolve by itself after this point and just study it from Earth for the sake of science. Other hard-core researchers of the Mars society (there really is such a society) think it would be unpardonably stupid to stop here after all this effort and time. It would definitely be time for us to pack our bags and shift base there. The timeline in discussion here is about 100,000 years from today (with today’s technology, but future scientists may find faster techniques). A few conservative scientists say that it is almost impossible to predict the evolution trajectory that Mars will follow at that time and we have no right to tamper with Mars.

A few other evolution geeks maintain that it is the nature of life to fill every available niche and it would be very unlike humans to not do so. Moreover we would have made Earth completely uninhabitable by then, and would have no choice but to move. But, we are less likely to do that to Mars as our time on Earth is a good enough lesson.

At any rate, we cannot take on this massive experiment without being sure that things will not go horribly wrong because of something we do not expect, and also because this is prohibitively expensive as of today!

Who knows, maybe life on Earth itself was engineered with asteroid collisions to warm us up and shake up the surface…

An ode to Engineering - I: Brihadeeswara Temple

It was the first time I changed my ideas on grandeur,colorless beauty and progress in engineering.The jolt came when I had just turned into a civil engineer,cocksure of myself and ready to learn progressive engineering in a country whose noteworthy structures were all built in the 20th century, 1000 years after the construction of this phenomenal tribute to architecture and engineering.A visit to Tanjore,the cultural capital(some say Varnasi) of India is sure to be an invigorating experience of walking through history but on entering the Brihadeeswara temple, one would fail to imagine how this structure came to be.
This timeless piece of Dravidian architecture, declared as one of UNESCO's world heritage sites continues to baffle the enginnering world.What is visible to the eye and available on numerous websites is it's architectural brilliance and I shall glorify that later. I was priveleged to climb restricted areas of the temple(thanks to an influencial aquaintance) along with the maratha prince(who coincidentally happened to be there that day walking a politician) who is the decendant of the kings who ruled the greatest kingdom in southern India. He enlightened us on many mysteries of the tallest temple in the world and the stories that were passed to him through generations.
The temple "vimana" visible from a few kilometres away towers to a whopping 216 ft. This huge temple was built entirely of granite, which is one of the hardest rocks on the surface of the Earth.How did people cut these rocks when they had only soft iron tools a 1000 years ago? The Chola king Raja raja who built this temple in about 20 years moved more stone over more distance than the pharoahs who built the great pyramid of Egypt. How did he accomplish it? The perfectly spherical "shikara" or cupola on top of the vimana weighs 80 tons but nobody is still sure about whether it is a single block or whether two perfectly hemispherical blocks of 40 tons each joined perfectly. Nobody is sure how those massive solid blocks were put up there.

The ingeniousness of bygone engineers is evident from the way they could accomplish these seemingly impossible tasks. Using rudimentary hand tools, men chisseled holes trough the rocks along the required path. Having done this, wooden blocks were hammered into these holes and water was poured continously for a period over these wooden blocks. As water seeped through the wood, the blocks slowly expanded propagating a crack along the path until the pressure was sufficient to break it open! For many decades the presence of the massive cupola at that height baffled engineers until the descendant prince revealed a family story that believed the stones to have been pulled along an inclined ramp from a distance of about 6 miles all the way to the apex of the temple by elephants using a roller arrangement. The legend was immediately put to test and the test revealed more astonishing scientific facts. Firstly, elephants were made to drag 80 tons of stone placed on an arrangement of circular logs. The elephants could not drag them...they did it with ease once every single piece of log was perfectly circular in cross section! And remains of a 1000 year old mud ramp was found exactly in line with the temple vimana on it's western side ,directly oppposite the temple entrance in the east.!Nobody knows why the "shikara" never casts a shadow on the Earth.
Nobody ceases to wonder how this structure stands and will forever continue to stand(say experts, not me)even though there is absolutely no mortar/lime/adhesive that holds one block of stone to the next. Adjacent stones were alternately cut into concave and convex patterns and the sheer simplicity and accuracy of this technique hold the stones together! The central temple is a tribute to all geometric aspects of a structure that would lend it stability. The square base (symbloising Brahma) porgressively narrows to be capped by a regular octagonal storey(representing Vishnu) topped by a sphere, a symbol of perfection , a tribute to the Lord Shiva. I was lucky to have been allowed to walk through a barred passage at the top within the temple. I was lucky because I could see how the octagon was balanced by the square. This passage was created because, at this level of the temple, the structure has two layers of walls sloping symmetrically towards each other and the extra thickness of the inner layer helps balance the additional angles and slopes created by an octagon without any oddities! This vimana was built in the center of a huge rectangular complex. The top of the cupola is off by only 2cms from the center of this plot. This accuracy is remarkable and probably impossible in the 21st century with all modern technology. No wonder, this was the only temple that I have visited that has a separate sanctum for it's engineer...How much has engineering really progressed over the last 1000 years?
The obviously amazing aspects of the temple...The shiva linga is the grandest in existence, 25 ft in circumference and 11 feet high and the nandi, carved from single stone is 13 feet high and 16 feet long. The fresco paintings by the Cholas on the ceilings remain colorful and beautiful to date.

Every inch of granite on the walls, both interior and exterior are carved with pictures and forms stories narrating the king's rule. The name of even the most insignificant donor to the temple's construction is carved on it's walls. This temple is not only a storehouse of Chola architecture, but additions were made by the Pandyas and the Marathas who ruled Tanjore in later centuries. The corridor I walked through portrays on it's walls the oldest and most accurate version of all 108 bharatanatyam poses of the Lord Nataraja. It also contains the only portrait ever made of one of the greatest rulers of Southern India, Raja Raja Chola...his head bowed in submission to his teacher...the engineer.

Note: Pictures were not taken by me. I pulled them off the internet