Elon Musk and using Nukes business...

OrbitalConfusion

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So Elon Musk Makes a statement about using Nukes on the poles to change the ice into atmosphere on Mars. I know... Links... http://www.iflscience.com/space/elo...erraform-mars-dropping-thermonuclear-bombs-it



So I by my logic I am an idiot. In a nutshell: I stated the reason Mars lost its Atmosphere to begin with was because it has little to no Magnetosphere. Solarwinds swept the atmsphere away and allowed radiation to literally sterilize the surface. By blowing up and melting the poles you would only create a temporary fix as you would still have to address the core of Mars.

Would it just be simpler to save those ice poles to use and harvest for bio-dome type habitats instead? As they sit they are relatively stable in "Storage". This seems to me to be cheaper and more Do-able than anything else.

Either I really am that dumb or I am being trolled. But I have had 6 people attack me for making that comment.
 

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Clearly he never watched this. :rofl:
 

Thunder Chicken

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fsci123

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I actually was going to ask a similar question a few days ago but I didn't have the courage.

Would the use of atomic/hydrogen bombs for construction and mining on Mars still have the negative side effects like use on earth? Would fallout get blown into space or would it be a danger to nearby habitats?
 

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I wonder how effective that would be.
It's not like there is enough CO2 in the polar caps to get any appreciable change in air pressure, and the air is already 90+% CO2.

AFAIK, lack of magnetosphere comes to play on geological time scale, as far as striping away the atmosphere is concerned.

And fallout is hardly a problem at that scale, since apparently we are talking large fusion bombs.
 

Soheil_Esy

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So Elon Musk Makes a statement about using Nukes on the poles to change the ice into atmosphere on Mars. I know... Links... http://www.iflscience.com/space/elo...erraform-mars-dropping-thermonuclear-bombs-it



So I by my logic I am an idiot. In a nutshell: I stated the reason Mars lost its Atmosphere to begin with was because it has little to no magnetosphere. Solarwinds swept the atmsphere away and allowed radiation to literally sterilize the surface. By blowing up and melting the poles you would only create a temporary fix as you would still have to address the core of Mars.

Would it just be simpler to save those ice poles to use and harvest for bio-dome type habitats instead? As they sit they are relatively stable in "Storage". This seems to me to be cheaper and more Do-able than anything else.

Either I really am that dumb or I am being trolled. But I have had 6 people attack me for making that comment.

  • Terraformation engineering will takes thousand if not millions of years; time scales are geological -astronomical- and not political here. The overall result would be no more rational than giving a recently deceased person a brief electric shock to the heart in the hope to reset the heart rhythm back to its normal. If there is no much magnetosphere left on all the minor solid planets/planetoids, then this is the result of a common reason. Too small a rocky planet, too fast its molten metallic core will cool down. And it is the rotating molten metallic core that is generating its magnetic field. In addition, too small a rocky planet, too small the reheating effect when the entire solar system is periodically exposed to intense neutrino showers during its rotation around the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • Bio-dome type habitats are unsuitable for magnetosphereless planets, whether it's Mars or the Moon . Only deep underground dwellings would be enough to compensate for the loss of magnetic field protection against space radiations. Cosmochemist and geochemist, Ouyang Ziyuan already clarified this when asked about China's future lunar base.

S☫heil_Esy
 
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Lmoy

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  • Terraformation engineering will takes thousand if not millions of years; time scales are geological -astronomical- and not political here. The overall result would be no more rational than giving a recently deceased person a brief electric shock to the heart in the hope to reset the heart rhythm back to its normal. If there is no much magnetosphere left on all the minor solid planets/planetoids, then this is the result of a common reason. Too small a rocky planet, too fast its molten metallic core will cool down. And it is the rotating molten metallic core that is generating its magnetic field. In addition, too small a rocky planet, too small the reheating effect when the entire solar system is periodically exposed to intense neutrino showers during its rotation around the Milky Way Galaxy.
  • Bio-dome type habitats are unsuitable for magnetosphereless planets, whether it's Mars or the Moon . Only deep underground dwellings would be enough to compensate for the loss of magnetic field protection against space radiations. Cosmochemist and geochemist, Ouyang Ziyuan already clarified this when asked about China's future lunar base.

Are you saying that terraforming would take thousands or millions of years? Terraforming Mars has been discussed at length elsewhere, with the usual estimates for making the surface breathable for an unprotected human are a few hundred years. This wouldn't be permanent of course (per the lack of a magnetic field), but it's an accepted fact that keeping it livable would require constant upkeep anyway. Additionally, the lack of a magnetic field can be compensated for in other ways, either through simply wearing protective equipment, particular combinations of aerosols put into the upper atmosphere, or just specially engineered atmospheric conditions. It wouldn't be strictly necessary to live underground forever, though it would be for a long time.
 

Soheil_Esy

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Are you saying that terraforming would take thousands or millions of years? Terraforming Mars has been discussed at length elsewhere, with the usual estimates for making the surface breathable for an unprotected human are a few hundred years. This wouldn't be permanent of course (per the lack of a magnetic field), but it's an accepted fact that keeping it livable would require constant upkeep anyway. Additionally, the lack of a magnetic field can be compensated for in other ways, either through simply wearing protective equipment, particular combinations of aerosols put into the upper atmosphere, or just specially engineered atmospheric conditions. It wouldn't be strictly necessary to live underground forever, though it would be for a long time.

Totally unable to forecast climate change even a decade in advance, here on Earth, but claiming to predict terraformation of Mars over several centuries with accuracy?:rofl:
 

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Totally unable to forecast climate change even a decade in advance, here on Earth, but claiming to predict terraformation of Mars over several centuries witn accuracy?:rofl:

"A few hundred years" isn't a very precise estimate lol. But it's not like the basic concepts aren't in place. It's difficult to tell exactly how long it would take (some sources I've read said as little as 100 years, others said well over 500), but it certainly wouldn't be millions of years. If by that you mean bigger scale things like reactivating Mars's magnetic field and such, of course that's much more in the realm of far-future science fiction, and I wouldn't expect THAT within the next few thousand years at all.
 

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Totally unable to forecast climate change even a decade in advance, here on Earth, but claiming to predict terraformation of Mars over several centuries with accuracy?:rofl:

Yes. Nobody though says that such a kind of terraforming would be cheap or sustainable. Mars would not become a second Earth, rather just less of a death zone. If I remember the estimates correctly, hundreds of tons of the right gases would have to be produced on Mars with Material from Mars every week just to sustain such an atmosphere.

Likely the project would only allow living on Mars like that for a few centuries.
 

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What is the minimum amount of terraforming that people could peform on mars that would allow earth plants to survive in? Possibly even small animals like worms and insects.
 

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What is the minimum amount of terraforming that people could peform on mars that would allow earth plants to survive in? Possibly even small animals like worms and insects.

It depends on what you mean by "survive". We could just nuke the poles a few thousand times and/or drop comets into the atmosphere to bring the datum pressure up to at least 1/4 or so of Earth's, which would make it safe to go out without pressure suits, albeit still with respiration equipment providing oxygen and thermal protective gear. That could be done is as little as a few decades, if the program was funded well enough (it wouldn't be, but that's beside the point).

If you mean "survive" as in "run about naked and not die" it would be at least a few centuries of careful and deliberate engineering. Making it livable for (gene modded) insects is difficult to guess, but you'd need a decent oxygen content in the atmosphere for them to survive, and that would require plants to generate that oxygen, and even with a suitable atmosphere the regolith is completely and utterly toxic to plant life, so it would require a lot of advanced engineering to produce soil that the plants can live in, or plants that can live in the regolith. It would be a long time before even insects could live on the surface, but in my former scenario you could almost certainly cover the planet in active microbe biomes and they would survive and thrive just fine.
 

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the regolith is completely and utterly toxic to plant life
Hm? I read that Moon rocks were actually a really good soil.
Are the so different from Mars ones?
 

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Hm? I read that Moon rocks were actually a really good soil.
Are the so different from Mars ones?

Lunar regolith isn't soil. "Soil", in the sense of "material that plants can grow in" only exists on Earth, as it must be manufactured by complex processes involving a rich microbe biome. Plants cannot live in utterly dead, sterile dirt. It's possible that lunar regolith could be turned into soil, but it would be a slow and difficult process. Besides that, the Martian regolith isn't lunar regolith. Mars has too few of the nutrients required for plant life, and from what I understand, way way way too much salt.
 

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Some researchers from germany wrote a paper about how cyanobacteria and polar lichens could survive on mars. If there was a deliberate effort to seed mars with lichens and bacteria, what would happen? Could dropping a few comets into the atmosphere increase the amount of surface water to allow lichens to thrive and colonize mars?
 

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Have we actually established that Mars is sterile? There seems to be some periodic methane outgassing of questionable origin, and (to my knowledge) none of the landers have had the means to definitively check for living microscopic organisms.

If there are living critters in the soil, maybe deeper than a few inches into the soil, we really ought to leave Mars alone IMO. Planetary biologists will have a second data point to study.
 

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420px-Oxygenation-atm-2.svg.png

O2 build-up in the Earth's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga).
Stage 1 (3.85–2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere.
Stage 2 (2.45–1.85 Ga): O2 produced, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85–0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85–present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

On Earth when oxygen first started to be produced, it took 1 billion years before oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere as it was reacting with the minerals in the soil.
 
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