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Don't nuke mars, please


PB666

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Life adapts, be when less strength is needed, the structure has less strength.

There's no reason why regular strength training couldnt aid to this extent. It may also be required to place exceptionally young children into centrifuges whilst they sleep.

Bone density might be the biggest issue, but it may be possible to use a weighting system similar to the ones used in "Harrison Bergeron".

At the end of the day, regular travel wouldn't be required, and there's no particular reason why, if all else fails, a mechanical system couldnt be used

We know for certain that grown men and women have trouble coming home from weightlessness. And they're already developed.

To be fair, they've had very little exercise for several months

Edited by Skyler4856
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We know for certain that grown men and women have trouble coming home from weightlessness. And they're already developed.

Children, who are still developing, wouldn't be able to go to Earth at all.

Life adapts, be when less strength is needed, the structure has less strength.

That's just conjecture. We have no idea how children will develop in low gravity, to what extent their bone and muscle mass will be reduced, and so on.

A human raised on earth doesn't just snap like a twig when put in a 2g centrifuge. I don't see why a human raised on Mars would automatically do the same if they visited earth (especially as they could gradually adapt if they travelled in a craft with a centrifuge. It would gradually spin up on the journey to allow them to acclimatise slowly)

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There's no reason why regular strength training couldnt aid to this extent. It may also be required to place exceptionally young children into centrifuges whilst they sleep.

Bone density might be the biggest issue, but it may be possible to use a weighting system similar to the ones used in "Harrison Bergeron".

At the end of the day, regular travel wouldn't be required, and there's no particular reason why, if all else fails, a mechanical system couldnt be used

To be fair, they've had very little exercise for several months

However, that extent isn't large. Yeah, centrifuges would help.

I'm not saying it's impossible to negate the problem. I'm saying that if there are no negations used, the Martiabs wouldn't be able to travel to Earth.

They actually have had a large amount of exercise, and still isn't enough.

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That's just conjecture. We have no idea how children will develop in low gravity, to what extent their bone and muscle mass will be reduced, and so on.

A human raised on earth doesn't just snap like a twig when put in a 2g centrifuge. I don't see why a human raised on Mars would automatically do the same if they visited earth (especially as they could gradually adapt if they travelled in a craft with a centrifuge. It would gradually spin up on the journey to allow them to acclimatise slowly)

We know it will be reduced to an extent.

A human couldn't live in 2g for an extended period. They wouldn't be able to visit Earth for very long, if at all. Slowly getting crushed...

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Magnetospheres only capture some radiation. Most is blocked by the atmosphere. So when Mars when gets one, it would be safe, if not safer than earth. The 0.4g is a big problem, though.

atmospheres are great at capturing low energy radiation, such as radiation from the sun, that kind of radiation is not the problem, the problem is cosmic rays, very(comparatively) heavy particles traveling at VERY high speeds that will pass right through your shielding unless you have tons of the stuff. But magnetospheres are so gigantic that they can deflect these cosmic rays and turn them into easily blocked, low energy radiation, and really if you have to live in a centrifuge underground so you can live on mars you might as well live in a space colony and not be stuck at the bottom of a gravity well.

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Also if you want to speculate on the effects of low g (but not 0g) on human fitness and development go ahead and speculate, because there has been NO RESEARCH on the subject, that's what NASA should be doing, building low g biomedical research stations in LEO. And considering that this could make or break a mars mission, you would think a mars-oriented program would be doing stuff like that.

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However, that extent isn't large. Yeah, centrifuges would help.

I'm not saying it's impossible to negate the problem. I'm saying that if there are no negations used, the Martiabs wouldn't be able to travel to Earth.

They actually have had a large amount of exercise, and still isn't enough.

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We know it will be reduced to an extent.

A human couldn't live in 2g for an extended period. They wouldn't be able to visit Earth for very long, if at all. Slowly getting crushed...

You don't know that. See a discussion I had earlier this year with AngelLestat about this very topic: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/118308-breathable?p=1904306&viewfull=1#post1904306

atmospheres are great at capturing low energy radiation, such as radiation from the sun, that kind of radiation is not the problem, the problem is cosmic rays, very(comparatively) heavy particles traveling at VERY high speeds that will pass right through your shielding unless you have tons of the stuff. But magnetospheres are so gigantic that they can deflect these cosmic rays and turn them into easily blocked, low energy radiation, and really if you have to live in a centrifuge underground so you can live on mars you might as well live in a space colony and not be stuck at the bottom of a gravity well.

People always underestimate how much air there is above you at sea level. You really do have tonnes of the stuff. 1 bar is 101kPa, or 101,000 N/square metre, which means above every square metre, there is an air column with a mass of about 10 tonnes. On Mars the column would actually have greater mass for the same pressure due to the lower gravity. It will give you more than enough protection, you won't have to live underground.

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So aside from possibly removing evidence of the history of Mars why shouldn't we do this. I'm not talking about the effectiveness or the amount of energy required. Simply reasons of why not. I mean you created the thread but you didn't really explain yourself.

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Are there calculations of how much greenhouse gases are needed for a runaway reaction?

Here's a good write-up about this (by a planetary scientist):

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kgpey/how_would_nuking_mars_poles_create_greenhouse/cuxbjt4

tl;dr: It can't work. There's not nearly enough CO2 ice.

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you are better off using the nukes in an orion drive to drop a mars crossing object into the ice cap. find an object with a close approach in the near future and nudge it in. you might not even need nukes, some kind of ion powered gravity tractor might be enough.

That's actually a lot less efficient at delivering energy to the Mars surface. Remember, high Isp means high specific power. 3,000 s Isp means 30,000 m/s exhaust, each ton of which carries away (1/2) m v2 = 4.5 * 1011 Joules of kinetic energy.

Edited by cryogen
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Here's a good write-up about this (by a planetary scientist):

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3kgpey/how_would_nuking_mars_poles_create_greenhouse/cuxbjt4

tl;dr: It can't work. There's not nearly enough CO2 ice.

That makes sense, planets are humongous things. 3 million hyper-efficient nukes to produce a tiny increase in global pressure sounds about stupid enough to be true.

That's actually a lot less efficient at delivering energy to the Mars surface. Remember, high Isp means high specific power. 3,000 s Isp means 30,000 m/s exhaust, each ton of which carries away (1/2) m v2 = 4.5 * 1011 Joules of kinetic energy.

Still, it addresses the lack of enough CO2 to properly do the job. And you are forgetting orbital mechanics: the relative velocity of the impact dwarves the dV needed to create the impact in the first place, by several orders of magnitude if you are smart about it. Still, of course we are talking about a stupid number of comets being redirected, so there's that.

All in all, my position is actually one that has been tangentially alluded, but not properly exposed: terraforming a planet is such a huge, long endeavor, it probably won't happen, and it shouldn't happen anyway: by the time we have the resources to consider such a thing seriously, we must have already solved free-floating colonies to have the economy to consider it. And of course, free floating colonies make MUCH more sense than planets to live on, they have a total population potential that is larger by several orders of magnitude and provide 100% custom conditions for the population with much less effort (gravity, pressure, radiation and climate are all design parameters). Plus, inherent redundancy because there will be a lot of them.

Planets are great laboratories for science (form geological and biological, at least), and as such they should be kept "wild", as we found them, and studied properly from a distance.

Rune. Plus, planets have this "natural disasters" thing that makes them quite scary to live on.

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If only we can collect CO2 on earth enmasse somehow. Solve global warming here and terraform Mars at the same time.

Financially un-do-able. To make enough difference on Mars, there would have to be a lot of atmospheric dumping. The cost of getting the CO2 in a significant quantity to warm Mars and to allow Earth to cool (which is a bad plan anyway, considering data indicates we are heading into a cooling cycle in the Northern Hemisphere). It would nearly bankrupt any conglomeration of nations; any single nation trying to do this would exhaust its economy before even the smallest change could be detected.

Terraforming will be a slow, ongoing developmental process once Mars is colonized. Personally, I think the domed city concept will be what happens until a few key things happen to hasten the development of future terraforming technologies. I suspect that asteroid harvesting and comet harvesting will be the first aspects of true Mars terraforming. Another component would be an industrial process where iron and silicates can be extracted from the Martian soil to produce basic building materials and creating O2 and Co2 which can be released into the atmosphere as a by-product. At this point, it's just pure guesswork on my part of what would be released from such a process...

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