There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars | Defector

By Albert Burneko

9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

…

hackerwacker ,

I honestly don’t think any wetware human will ever land on Mars or even enter its orbit.

We’ll be posthuman cyborgs before that happens.

acosmichippo ,
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

just landing on mars? nah that’ll happen soon. settling it on a long term basis is a whole other matter though.

hackerwacker , (edited )

We can land corpses or soon-corpses on Mars sure. Getting people there and back reliably and in good shape is going to be extremely difficult if not completely impossible. And the benefit is near zero.

TommySoda ,

Fuck Elon Musk, but don’t discourage human curiosity and stupidity. There’s nothing humans love more than conquering an impossible task. Humanity would have never made it as far as we did without people doing stupid and crazy shit. Humanity is the kinda species that just says “fuck it, we ball” and then proceeds to just do exactly what they shouldn’t do. Shit like walking across ice sheets to new continents because why not and go to the fucking moon.

Someone will figure it out eventually. Might take a couple hundred years (if we don’t kill ourselves first) but we’ll get there.

masterspace , (edited )

This is a pretty embarassing way to open this article:

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

NASA legitimately has a plan for this, and no it’s not crazy, and no it doesn’t involve restarting the core of a planet:

phys.org/…/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo…

You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point (the orbital point that is stable between Mars and the sun), and then it will block the solar wind that strips Mars’ atmosphere.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/8d00c9f0-c8c0-4f3d-8df8-5ee80538f521.webp

Otherwise cosmic rays etc are blocked and interrupted by the atmosphere, not the magnetosphere.

The confident dismissiveness of the author’s tone on a subject that they are (clearly) not an expert in, let alone took the time to google, says all you really need to know about how much you should listen to them.

Midnitte ,

You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point

Well, that’s a lot saner than nuking the poles.

Doesn’t seem like we’re near technical feasibility, though - how would you power such a massive magnet in space?

masterspace , (edited )

Solar panels would be my guess, though you can always build a space based nuclear reactor if you can refuel it and get rid of its waste.

It would certainly need a lot more to figure out an actual feasible plan, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally impossible about doing it with today’s technology, let alone the future’s.

Midnitte ,

Mars gets roughly half the light of Earth, so I don’t think Solar panels would be realistic (how much solar panel surface would you need to power a magnet of that size?)

I’m also not sure a nuclear reactor is realistic - forget the nuclear waste, how do you get rid of the heat waste?

You’d need quite a big magnet operating at a level akin to superconducting magnets in particle accelerators.

Perhaps someone could calculate more accurate numbers and feasibility, but to me, it currently sounds very out of reach for us (not impossible, mind you).

masterspace , (edited )

Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, but Mars L1 Lagrange point is only 2.2million km, in addition to not having atmospheric interference. They would actually be far more effective than Earth based solar panels.

If anything you might have the opposite problem

Crozekiel ,

Why oh why did you change from miles to km? :(

Midnitte ,

but Mars L1 Lagrange point is only 2.2million km [from the sun]

I… don’t think that’s true? The L1 point is fairly close (in solar system scale) to the planet. https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/803d2b10-68f2-4021-ad83-5afb37a0e78f.webp

ValenThyme , (edited )

NASA’s idea was an inflatable dipole, i linked the article about it up higher

ValenThyme ,

as masterspace noted NASA has actually given it some thought.

“This new research is coming about due to the application of full plasma physics codes and laboratory experiments. In the future it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind.”

source: phys.org/…/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo…

It also doesn’t completely protect the entire planet just two critical points on the surface.

Midnitte ,

In the future it is quite possible that an inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind."

Indeed, “in the future” seems to be doing quite a lot of heavy lifting. As noted, 1-2 Tesla is a pretty powerful magnet - so you’d need a pretty big and powerful magnet.

It also doesn’t completely protect the entire planet just two critical points on the surface.

That is certainly an important catch.

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I’m pretty sure I saw a documentary about doing this exact thing back in 2003…

acosmichippo ,
@acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

also just… caves and shit.

PowerCrazy ,

This is cool. Reading the article I’m not sure if 1-2 Tesla is sufficient for the shield, or if you would actually need a lot more. But either way I feel like when we get to the point that we are seriously colonizing Mars in such a capacity that we need to worry about the magnetosphere, that putting a powerful magnet at the L1 point wouldn’t really be that big a deal.

masterspace , (edited )

The rub there is that it’s 1-2 Tesla’s over the whole cross sectional area of Mars (I believe).

It’s not that hard to make a 2 Tesla magnet, but the most powerful electromagnet we’ve ever made is only 45 Tesla’s and even that only produces a 2 Tesla strong field out to 2.8m. So you might be looking at a Mars diameter worth of small magnets.

bloodfart ,

Wouldn’t that make it not an embarrassing way to open the article at all then?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •