I think terraforming Mars won’t ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.
We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).
That’s gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars’ dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don’t even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.
To get back an earth like dynamo, we’d need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars’ insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.
I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars’ magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.
Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic
one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
Planets are kind of big, that’d require lots of power in a very large area.
We’d probably be able to get more done by putting a few sattelites between Mars and the sun and generating the necessary repelling field there. Still requires a huge amount of energy, but doesn’t require it to also be distributed around a planet.
I think terraforming Mars won’t ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.
We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).
Right so we give it a magnetosphere.
That’s gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars’ dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don’t even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.
To get back an earth like dynamo, we’d need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars’ insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.
I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars’ magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.
Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
Rather than restarting Mars’s internal magnetic field, could we build a solar or nuclear powered artificial magnetic field?
Nah man what we need is a solar wind-powered artificial magnetic field. Make the problem pay for its own solution.
Planets are kind of big, that’d require lots of power in a very large area.
We’d probably be able to get more done by putting a few sattelites between Mars and the sun and generating the necessary repelling field there. Still requires a huge amount of energy, but doesn’t require it to also be distributed around a planet.