Scientists reveal how Mars could turned into a terraformed Dune planet for future colonizers

Researchers may soon pull inspiration from the science-fiction story of Dune to transform Mars into a livable and breathable world for humans.

The fictional desert planet of Arrakis, which serves as the main setting for Dune, was once a desert wasteland, similar to the Red Planet, but then terraformed into a wet, lush world - however, it does not yet happen in the two released films.

Scientists at NASA and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have long been working on plans to make Mars a suitable home for future colonizers.

These plans involve freeing up the water locked in the planet's surface, warming the air so inhabitants don't freeze to death and introducing a bacteria to create oxygen - similar to how sandworm metabolism creates breathable air on Dune.

Mars does not have flowing water on its surface, but its atmosphere does contain small amounts of water ice. Making the planet inhabitable would require humans to unlock the frozen water in the atmosphere and beneath the planet's surface

The sun's radiation has stripped 90 percent of the atmosphere from Mars, zapping the planet of much of its water and locking the rest in ice and minerals. The fictional Arrakis was once a paradise, too, and in Dune, there is a plan to restore it.

In the two installments of the film, with part two hitting theaters on Friday, Arrakis is a notorious for its harsh conditions that destroy mechanical equipment and bake people to death if they wander the sands unprotected.

The world is inhabited by a native group of people called the Fremen, who have lived on the planet for thousands of years and learned to adapt to the harsh environment.

Clothing called stillsuits help them retain moisture that would be quickly lost in the desert heat.

Stillsuits have multiple layers of filtration fabric, as well as a moisture-catching nose plug, re-route the body's sweat and exhaled vapor into a pouch that the wearer can sip from a tube.

Urine and feces are also captured, then their water is extracted and filtered before being collected in the drinking pouch. 

 'With a Fremen suit in good working order, you won't lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day,' said Fremen ecologist Liet Kynes in the first film.

The stillsuit is very similar to what astronauts use aboard the International Space Station, where moisture in the air, wastewater from washing, and even urine are filtered, distilled, and sterilized to produce drinking water.

In Dune: Part Two, we learn that the Fremen have a multi-generation plan to reshape the face of Arrakis.

To this end, they have been collecting water in massive underground wells for many years.

A simulation showed how the weather on Arrakis behaved in the year 10,191 (left), when the movie takes place, and how it behaved 50 million years earlier (right), before the planet was a desert.

A Fremen stillsuit includes a nose plug that captures the water vapor exhaled by the wearer. That moisture is then filtered and collected in a pouch, where it can be sipped from a tube

Whenever a tribe member - or an enemy - dies, their body's water is extracted and poured into the vast pools, which are sacred to the Fremen.

They prophesize that one day, a leader will arise who can use this water to restore the planet's once-rich plant life.

Even within the science fiction world of Dune, there is a logic to how this will happen. And it mirrors the strategies that scientists have for terraforming Mars.

One of the most important commonalities between Mars and Arrakis: vast water resources trapped beneath the planet's surface.

In January, the Mars Express spacecraft revealed that there is a formation of frozen water locked in the red planet.

This formation is two miles thick, and by one estimate, if melted it could cover the planet in nearly nine feet of water. 

The water ice is below the surface at Medusae Fossae Formation, a large geological formation of volcanic origin near the equator of Mars 

Map of potential water ice thickness at the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF). The water ice deposits are up to 2.2 miles (3.7km) thick

But covering the planet in water isn't enough.

Unlike Earth, Mars has no magnetosphere.

This electromagnetic field surrounds our planet and protects us from most of the radiation coming from the sun.

Without it, the sun's rays would evaporate all the moisture away from the planet. So even if we could somehow melt this equatorial water, it would just evaporate away into space.

And that is exactly what happened to ancient Mars, which, like Arrakis, once teemed with flowing water.

So one strategy for terraforming Mars would involve creating an artificial magnetosphere.

The now retired scientist proposed covering the Red Planet in a giant magnetic shield to block it from the sun's high-energy solar particles

This is exactly what retired NASA chief scientist Jim Green envisioned when he proposed that a giant magnetic shield could enable people to inhabit the planet. 

'Yeah, it's doable. Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself,' Green told The New York Times.

'The higher temperature and pressure enable you to begin the process of growing plants in the soils.'

The process of making an uninhabitable planet suitable for humans could take generations, but simulations showed that blocking the sun's radiation would begin to restore the Martian atmosphere in just a few years.

This would kick off a whole chain reaction: The planet's equator would begin heating up, and eventually its polar ice cap would collapse, releasing water into the atmosphere and onto the land in the form of lakes, rivers, and oceans.

Some organisms could be bio-engineered to pull certain gases out of the Martian atmosphere - like carbon dioxide and methane - and create nitrogen and oxygen. Shown is a series of possible steps if Mars were to be terraformed 

Another strategy, which has been researched by DARPA, includes using biology in our favor. 

There are plenty of existing organisms that use chemosynthesis to survive. This means they pull chemicals from their environment to produce the necessary molecules of life.

For example, bacteria living near deep-sea volcanic vents turn poisonous hydrogen sulfide and methane into sugars that they use for energy.

If microbes like these could be deployed to Mars, they may be able to consume the carbon dioxide and methane in the thin Martian atmosphere to produce water, oxygen, and possibly even edible carbohydrates. 

This plan mirrors part of the Fremen's plan to terraform Arrakis.

Besides them, the other main inhabitant on the planet is a species of gigantic sand worm they call shai-hulud, which can be over a mile long.

These animals consume sand plankton, sort of like land-dwelling whales. As they do, they produce oxygen - sand contains the elements silicon and oxygen - which makes the atmosphere of Arrakis breathable.

There are, of course, some key differences between Arrakis and Mars.

Despite Arrakis having a harsh environment, it is not totally uninhabitable.

In 2021 a team of researchers simulated the conditions of the planet as described in the novel and found that people could indeed live there. 

Dune Part Two ends without the terraforming plan coming to fruition, but in the sequel novels, the Fremen slowly terraform the planet, starting with planting little oases and developing technologies that can pull moisture from the air overnight.

Their plan eventually produces a climate on Arrakis that allows people to walk around without their stillsuits.

So if humans are to ever make Mars habitable to people, it will likely be the result of many generations of work, with scientists dedicating their lives to a dream that most of them will never live to see.