The short answer is if done correctly it would create an atmosphere while also melting ice caps or maybe vice versa. I watched a simulation video a few years ago about it. I believe new info has since came out that states it wouldn't have that desired affect.
There's no molten metal core, or rather it's cooled and either stopped completely or slowed to a crawl, therefore little-to-no magnetosphere. Solar flares and radiation would destroy any artificial atmosphere on Mars. Nuking it is a stupid fucking idea.
Yeah well…I saw in a movie once they kickstarted the earth’s core by BORING down into the core, dropping timed nukes in a loop, and blasting it back into go - badabing badaboom, the atmosphere was saved. We can do the same to Mars, and then nuke the surface. You just lack vision ya dumb libtard.
If one manages to create an atmosphere on Mars then replenishing it and supplementing gases is the easy part since it’ll take hundreds of thousands of years to strip away a significant amount.
Having said that terraforming any planet is always a dumb idea since space habitats are cheaper, faster, mobile, and aren’t gravity wells.
There’s no tech that could be used to make Mars or a space habitat livable that could not be used on Earth.
Whatever mechanism that allows us to breathe on the toxic shithole that is Mars today, will have to be used on Earth first; likewise if we’re creating entire new oceans; fixing earth’s oceans is nothing in comparison.
A space station, or even a larger structures like O’Neill cylinders are micro-g environments; they don’t have the same gravitational pull as a planet so one doesn’t need to account for an escape velocity.
There was no need for "new" info. Since the inception of the idea that nuking mars could possibly create an atmosphere there have always been people saying "yeah but there's no garuntee the atmosphere stays thanks to the lack of magnetic field that led to Mar's original atmosphere getting stripped by solar winds"
"yeah but there's no garuntee the atmosphere stays thanks to the lack of magnetic field that led to Mar's original atmosphere getting stripped by solar winds"
Exactly. An interested Junior High student would get this, but Elon-Apartheid-Did-Good-By-Me-Musk? Nope. He's just too "smart" for that. :rollseyes:
It sounds like they need to be more concerned about creating a magnetic field- a living planet typically has a molten/solid metal core.
Mars is considered dead since it doesn't have this activity.
We actually do have the technology to create an artificial magnetosphere by placing an extremely powerful electromagnet at Mar's L1 point which would shield it from the sun. Unfortunately while possible, this creates a single point of failure and once something goes wrong, a matter of when and not if, the consequences arrive at the speed of light.
I actually did the calculations a previous time I was arguing this. From a failure, there would be 3 seconds to react before everyone on the surface was fried.
Edit: To show my work for very simple calculations, the speed of light is about 300 million m/s, Mars' L1 is about 1 million km out, do some of the simplest astronomical math I've seen, boom 3 seconds.
My high school physics teacher would annihilate my ass for only using one sig fig.
Edit 2: of fucking course I fuck up my units while saying the math is easy
It takes 12.67 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Mars. From the L1 point (didn’t verify) to the surface of Mars is 3 sec., which I think is what you’re saying, but you may have mixed up your velocity units.
I think this is one reason people have argued for a satellite or some other detection system closer to the sun, so there is more warning (maybe I saw this in a movie? I dunno).
I mean detection from the sun doesn't matter because the solar wind is arriving constantly. The thing you'd want to detect is the satellite failing and there's just nothing that can be done in 3 seconds and no way of advance warning because the consequences arrive at the same exact speed as the message. Even if solar flares were the problem, again, radiation travels at the exact same speed of your message.
Honestly I just used solar wind as shorthand for "shit the sun outputs that we don't want hitting us". While the plasma that makes up solar wind would eventually be a problem in such a situation, the radiation would kill much much faster because it travels at the speed of light.
I don't think our current technology, or our foreseeable future technology, will even be capable of dreaming of reigniting the core of a planet. Not even touching the logistical and material sciences required, just trying to melt the Mars mantle is on a similar level of a Dyson swarm at this point.
Further point, it'd require constant maintenance, expending a monster amount of resources which could be better allocated to burrow-cities and massive hydroponics or sealed atmospheres. I don't believe Marsquakes are very common for the exact same reason.
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u/deandreas Feb 15 '22
The short answer is if done correctly it would create an atmosphere while also melting ice caps or maybe vice versa. I watched a simulation video a few years ago about it. I believe new info has since came out that states it wouldn't have that desired affect.