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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

You could replace 98% of the earths atmosphere with Methane and it would still be more habitable than Mars. (The only way methane would make it worse is if you turned the atmosphere into a fuel air bomb and a few weeks after the detonation it would one again be more habitable.)

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Well, I was referring to the hypothesis that the release of previously sequestered methane caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event where 96% of marine species and 70% of land species died [1]. I think it's fair to say that a poisonous atmosphere is less habitable than no atmosphere.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinc...

Exposure to the Martian environment would kill 100% of species that we know of. If that has happened on earth before, we can say pretty definitively that elevated levels of methane are less harmful.

Not all species that we know of require oxygen to live.

Earth's is 101,000 Pa dropping to 30,000 on top of mount Everest. Mars's mean surface pressure is around 600 pascals which is below waters triple point which prevents water from forming regardless of temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point Still that's close and in some creators the pressure increases high enough so it's possible for water to form.

Unfortunately, on top of that what makes the atmosphere truly deadly is a lack of Nitrogen one of the primary building blocks for organic chemistry.

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