Re:Momentum is building to explore Venus
by sfkdjf9j3j on Thursday June 06, 2019 @04:26PM
(#20118751)
I wouldn't say we know exactly how to heat up Mars. Without a magnetic field, any atmosphere we conjure out of the polar regions would escape into space. We are far, far closer to completely reversing the effects of climate change on Earth than we are to teraforming Mars.
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Re:Momentum is building to explore Venus
by BurningFrog on Thursday June 06, 2019 @09:42PM
(#20120925)
Yeah, but I believe it takes ~10 million years for a Mars atmosphere to escape.
So it could be entirely feasible to treat the Mars atmosphere as a tire, that you "inflate" every now and then to keep the pressure constant.
That would be a very wasteful use of precious volatiles though.
But we could kick up a magnetic field with superconducting rings around the poles though.
Re:Momentum is building to explore Venus
by BurningFrog on Friday June 07, 2019 @12:12AM
(#20121605)
Losing 0.00001% per year is not "very wasteful" to me.
There are ideas for putting up a magnetic field based on putting a contraption in whichever L1/L2... point is between Mars and the Sun.
Convert that into tonnes, and then calculate how much biosphere could be supported with that volatile weight. And once it is gone, it is gone. It’s not a renewable resource. You’d be trading away billions of years of future Martian biosphere.
Re:Momentum is building to explore Venus
by BurningFrog on Friday June 07, 2019 @07:13PM
(#20129455)
Oxygen and nitrogen are hardly rare substances in the solar system, and probably not even on Mars. There are near infinite number of "tonnes" on Mars.
Besides, if the alternative is to leave Mars dead forever, I'd rather let it live for a billion years.
But maybe I don't get what your alternative is, if any?
Nitrogen and hydrogen are basically only really available via volatiles. They aren’t components of common minerals in the rocks.
The alternative is to spin up a magnetic field with superconducting magnets to protect that atmosphere from the solar wind.
well obviously we'd need orbiters that generate an artificial magnetic field my man!