Anti Terraformers BTFO

Can we create O2 on Mars by extracting oxygen from the rust?

the power requirements would be substantial.

you can do it when we have viable He3 > He3 fusion power that doesn't need a river to cool off.

cyanobacteria

A car sized electromagnet between the sun and mars. Probably has big solar panels on it or a nuclear reactor or something

And how long would it take until mars has a atmosphere we can work with?
I would imagine a couple of thousand years

The thing is orbiting the Sun, and not Mars, correct? In which case, why is it not pushed out of alignment with Mars relatively quickly? It blocks out the radiation from a Mars-sized spot in the sky, and all that radiation can probably deliver a significant push. Unless it has a huge mass, but then putting it in orbit becomes impractical.

Does it not take millions of years for an atmosphere to dissipate? Unless terraforming would take equally long then this device shouldn't be necessary... I'm not exactly up to speed on recent pop sci so maybe disappation is a bigger problem.

I'm thinking the same.
Solar shade for example has to be placed at lagrande points meaning they have to be pretty big.

Many people who want to terraform Mars want to do so to make Mars a backup planet that would keep humanity alive, even if Earth was fucked for some reason. So the problem with the atmosphere evaporating in a million years is that Earth will stay habitable for hundreds of millions of years into the future, making the Mars a pretty shitty backup over the long term. Not to mention that after the atmosphere evaporates, creating a new one would be exponentially harder, since then we would have to get the materials for the atmosphere from somewhere else, and transporting billions of tons of materials is no easy task. Also, what do you mean by "dissipate"? If you mean getting rid of almost all of the atmosphere, then even if that takes a million years, the Mars could become uninhabitable way sooner, when the pressure drops below a certain threshold.

I think the real problem isn't creating an artificial magnetic field, but sustaining it for a long enough time. We have never built a piece of technology that could reliably work for hundreds of millions of years, or at least definitely not on this scale and of this complexity. Of course, we could just keep replacing the failed parts, but that idea seems very strange to me. It would cost ridiculous amounts of money to keep it going for, say, 50 years, while providing no noticeable benefit on such a short timescale.

You dirty fuckers, I proposed this years ago and you all called me a retard and said it was impossible while stealing my idea and pitching it to NASA.

You could turn of this device for over a year and not much would change on mars.
The atmosphere of mars got blow away over a span of eons.

The thing that isnt clear to me is how big and how complicated this device needs to be?

Because if the Earth "gets fucked up for some reason" there's no one left to fix it.

If you have a sizable self-sustaining population on Mars, and one of these fuckers hit Earth (or any of the other millions of things that can goes wrong does), at least there's folks left who can fix it, and further, said folks will already have experience in terraforming. Thus it'll be easier on multiple levels.

Plus, eventually, the whole solar system is going to be uninhabitable, so ya gotta start somewhere. The sooner you do, the less likely you'll miss your window of opportunity.

>If you have a sizable self-sustaining population on Mars
Like how many people? Several millions?

Maybe, eventually, but ya just need enough to fix things on Earth when shit goes bad, so maybe 64K if you don't have an artificial method to avoid genetic collapse issues by then, depending on how efficient you can make their industry.

Not expecting more than a dozen in a science lab in my lifetime though, if that.

To clarify, I'm not against terraforming Mars, I'm just saying that creating a device that can protect Mars' atmosphere is only part of the challenge, the hard part is keeping it running for hundreds of millions of years, meaning OP really didn't BTFO anyone.

You snooze, you lose :^)

climate change is terraforming, even if it's affects aren't good

Well, ya don't really need it, provided you're willing to live under domes with about 3 feet of water in them or underground. The gravity is a bigger issue than the radiation, though it turns out even that may not be an issue, until they to return to their ancestral home.

>ter·ra·form - /ˈterəˌfôrm/ verb - transform (a planet) so as to resemble the Earth so that it can support human life.

So, no, if you break an existing human life support system, you've done the opposite of terraforming.

Granted, when aliens try to re-engineer Earth and kill all the humans in the process in sci-fi, we usually say they are "terraforming the planet", but this is technically incorrect due to the root... And I actually recall some gag where that was pointed out in old Doctor Who, "Shouldn't it be marsaforming or something?"

>the hard part is keeping it running for hundreds of millions of years
As far as preventing the atmosphere from leaking off, if you're adding to the atmosphere, you're probably adding faster than that process could possibly remove it.

But it doesn't have to last for millions of years - like everything else, it just has to last between maintenance jobs. If no one's left to fix the thing - it doesn't much matter if it breaks.

Jesus, why do we spend money on NASA anymore?

>Government agency
>Plan that could happen in "a matter of years"

>"he workshop was aimed to discuss ambitious space projects that could be implemented or at least started by 2050."
>2050
>expecting anything from the government to happen on time
>expecting anything to happen under budget
>expecting anything to happen

Let's face it, the government and the government's pet science department are both a joke.

When did NASA become a meme factory?

A magnetosphere isn't the only problem with creating a hospitable atmosphere and those gaylords know it

reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/3nxzuo/requesthow_much_energy_would_it_take_to_make_a/

apologies for the reddit link

solar irradiance at mars is somewhere from 500-700 watts per cubic meter. that's a third to half of the value at earth's distance from the sun.

it would be an absolutely enormous input cost but if you put enough satellites in orbit around Mars you could power them with solar energy and still generate a magnetic field on par with earth's

>"Shouldn't it be marsaforming or something?"

Areoforming, surely?

We need to build solar collectors somewhere one or near Mercury, then beam the power back to Earth and Mars using magnets or something.

You gotta get quite a bit further from the sun than Mars before solar panels start being worthless.

with the rest of the brainlets

power losses would be substantial
just build solar panels on-site instead of trying to cheat thermodynamics

What if we used batteries

how do you get the batteries from Mercury to Earth?

Battery powered drones

how do you propel a battery-operated drone off of the surface of a planet

Through the same magic that caused us to switch from the topic of setting up a magnetic shield near Mars to battery charging solar arrays near Mercury.

(Seriously, just build em close to where ya need em, make em bigger, and use some MW beams - you aren't gonna gain enough lums to make it worth putting them closer to the sun until you get out to Jupiter, so long as there's no atmosphere in the way.)

True, but I'm sure if we dump a few Chinese on mars they'll produce enough smog for there to be a working atmosphere in half that time.

Holy fucking shit that first answer. A fucking MRI machine won't have anything close to 50 microteslas six fucking thousand miles away from it (the radius of Earth), and the OP of the reddit thread clearly wanted a magnetic field as "powerful" as Earth's.

>6000 miles
meant to say 6000 km