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Literally. NASA announced early the week of August 11, 2024 that an unimaginably huge volume of water has been found on Mars. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that the water is not actually ON mars, but rather WITHIN the planet, specifically at an estimated depth of 7-12 miles. The water appears to be located around that planet’s equator and NASA stated that it probably got there from lakes and oceans that existed at one time and that this water leaked through cracks and fissures into underground voids. Equatorial surface temperature on Mars is minus 100 Deg. F at night to plus 70 Deg. F at mid-day during their summer. Unless unusual isotopes of Hydrogen and/or Oxygen existed to produce water with unusual freezing characteristics, there is a potential plausibility issue about the source.

There is currently a buzz by Space X founder Elon Musk and NASA about Mars being colonized perhaps as a place to preserve human life should Earth become uninhabitable for a variety of reasons. Having water for human hydration, plant growth and electrolysis splitting for Hydrogen energy and Oxygen breathing will shorten the lead time to making Mars livable. The major obstacle for getting the water will be accessing it at such depths. Placement of deep drilling rigs for reaching the water seems like an insurmountable obstacle because of size, weight and distance from Earth. However, there was recently an engineering article explaining a new tunneling method that uses heat (plasma arc?) to melt sand and rock and use the resulting glass-like material to line the tunnel for support. Hopefully, such a process could be adapted to smaller, vertical bore holes.

If Mars, like Earth, is possibly producing water deep underground, as believed and demonstrated by Stephan Riess in the first half of the 20 th century and documented in the book New Water for a Thirsty World by Michael Salzman. The Mars water could also be under high pressure and rise significantly in the bore hole even to the point of becoming artesian. It would be ironic to have Mr. Riess’ beliefs and technologies prevail on Mars after being unjustly dismissed on earth. The same week the Mars water availability was announced, one of the many US alphabet bureaucracies announced in the San Diego Union Tribune that there would be a cutback in Colorado River water availability in 2025. This water is vitally important to 7 western states in addition to 2 in Mexico and the availability loss could be in the range of 25%. Typically, because of the number of voting farmers being less than the urban population count, agriculture will take the hit which could conceivably result in smaller crop yields and higher food prices. Solving the water issue on Mars could be extremely important in the future, but right now, shouldn’t we be solving the water scarcity issue on Earth by, at a minimum, exploring the validity of the aforementioned technologies on Earth?

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