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This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the oxygen we introduce?
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It took about a billion years of photosynthesis on earth before all the ferrous iron dissolved in the oceans was oxidized and atmospheric oxygen concentration began to take off.
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Terraforming is an exceptionally energetic endeavor. Even if you had the perfect combination of icy asteroids with just the right amount of water, nitrogen, oxigen etc. and the means to hurl them towards Mars, this kinetic event would be so energetic that it would take centuries to millennia before the surface would cool to habitable temperatures. it's not physically possible to do it ex in the span of a human lifetime.

Ar the scale terraforming entails, the crust reactions with the new atmosphere are closer to a rounding error.

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great questionprobably not poison it directly, but you'd lose a significant chunk to oxidation reactions before reaching any stable equilibrium. the surface is essentially a massive reactive sink. mars has a similar problem, the perchlorate in the soil would react badly with a lot of things we'd want to introduce. the optimistic read is that oxidation reactions release energy and eventually reach stability. the pessimistic read is the timescale is geological.
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Isn't Mars red due to oxygenation of the rocks? Is that ancient oxygenation or is there some quantity of oxygen in Mars atmosphere today? Does the atmospheric CO2 sometimes break down (maybe under sunlight) and release some small quantity of O2 or might there be another source? Might something underground be respirating atmospheric CO2?
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