I just thought of a way to make mercury (partially) habitable

Its commonly accepted Mercury is impossible to terraform, or there are only a few purely theoretical ideas that aren't serious to terraform it(mostly involving orbital mirrors.

However I have an idea that wouldn't involve any manmade planet sized structure BS.

The idea is to make the side that the sun doesn't face to be permanently habitable.

1. create an atmosphere so that it keeps the heat. By creating an atmosphere there will be air currents. The air currents will heat up on the side that faces the sun, and and will warm up the dark side.
2. Amplify the magnetic field. Mercury alredy has a magnetic field that can defend against the majority of the solar radiation. Its still not enough to protect a theoretical oxygen atmosphere from being blown away. Since the mercurial magnetoshere is tidally generated, we could take some small moons(

So what do you think? Do you think humanity might have the technology to achieve this feat in the far future (after 500-1000 years)?

What would you add or remove from the idea?

If you think my idea is shit, Im sorry, I'm a brainlet that likes to imagine.

>create an atmosphere
pls elaborate on how the fuck you plan to accomplish this

The same way you create an atmosphere on mars? Crash comets. Create factories that create oxygen. Humanity will have figured it out by then.

Mercury already has a magnetosphere so it will be easier.

You seemed to cover all the points. Seems plausible and useful to colonize planets closer to the sun, especially since these are the types of exoplanets that are easiest to detect. The only thing that might be a problem is the rings.

If the rings are dense enough to cast a shadow on the surface and/or reflect enough light for photosynthesis, especially that close to the sun and that much light density, the radiation pressure might cause the rings to be destroyed.

You mean the solar winds will scatter the rings?

*ring

It's possible. The orbit of the Roche Limit on Mercury is much lower than that on a gas giant, and it might be unstable when considering solar wind.

Could adding shepard moons to the ring gravitationally prevent it from scattering?

I must also keep in mind that Mercury's Van Allen could interfere too.

>we could take some small moons(

I was thinking some sort of orbital dome which we can transfer them in? Sure the technology could be tricky, but I have some theories.

Almost total heating on one side? Would it really be a light breeze of summer warm air or some shark-nado level storms

If we're gonna be moving moons around, lets haul Titan into the habitable zone and see what happens

Really large fusion or kugelblitz drives strapped on to 1 side? We can consider such moons just large asteroids(Ceres is much larger than, say Miranda or Mimas). If we could find a way to propel small asteroids, then we could find a way to propel larger ones.

part of the sun facing hemisphere would be permanently shaded by the ring, and the atmosphere itself could perhaps convect some of the heat, so only around 30% of Mercury's surface would be heated to uninhabitable levels, and that would hopefully be enough to warm the rest of the planet, but not cause much storms. Also the atmosphere would be thinner so I don't think storms would be as severe as earth's.

If you're going to haul Titan then why not just haul Mercury further away from the sun

Put it between Venus and Earth and then use it for a playground

Because Titan has lots of cool shit that you can't find anywhere else in our system (besides Earth)
>thick atmosphere but not THICC like Venus (scientists think its atmosphere is very similar to Earth's when our planet was young)
>liquid methane
>methane cycle that is like our water cycle
>more hydrocarbons than we would know what to do with
>might have icy volcanoes
If it was warmer, it would basically be a mini bizarro-Earth.

Not to mention you could fly with an ornithopter on Titan.

Sorry I didn't mean permanently shaded, the ring would shade the opposite hemispheres of Mercury each day.

mars is a lot better for this than mercury. Mercury is smaller, and closer to the sun, so its atmosphere is held less forcefully and under a stronger attack.

Maybe? It seems possilby accheivable, though it might need maintainance (but not on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years, probably)

A day on mercury is 58 Earth days. It's also ~2/3 of the year on mercury, so the shaded region would actually move back and forth across the surface.

I'm an autist who thinks he knows a lot about astrophysics.

Btw you should really tripcode yourself.

hey dude
you forgot
there's no fuckin gravity
mercury dont got no fuckin mass
you're going to lose your atmosphere
and you're going to lose your moons
or mercury is going to start orbiting that "moon" and your dark-side-of-the-planet party is going to get a shitload of lumens

I don't think you quite grasp how orbits work, if you had an inclined ring system it would only be obscuring the surface for about half of the year, while the other half it would be "edge on" to the sun and do not very much. It would be more effective to put a sun shield at the Mercury-Sun L1 point and try to maintain it there.

Then there's the suggestion of moving a moon from fucking Saturn to near Mercury.

Mercury has more gravity than mars.

Not an argument

What do you mean "back and forth"?

For the shade to not be permanent, the ring would have to change tilt constantly, and that's impossible.

>while the other half it would be "edge on" to the sun and do not very much.

Did you even read I wrote? The point was never to make Mercury fully habitable. Yeah, the atmosphere would be too hot on part of the planet. thats the point. Air currents which pass through the zone will warm up the rest of the planet to reduce the temperature amplitude and and make the mercurena night to be room temperature.

Because of the day on mercury being 2/3 of the year, the sun rises, then turns back around a couple times in the sky before setting. This is what I meant by the shadow traveling back and forth.

>no manmade planet sized structure bs
>transport a fucking moon

That would require no planet sized structure, just very powerful drives which we will likely see in the future

Titan? It'll melt.

I promise you a manmade planet-sized structure would be easier to build simply on the basis that a man made planet-sized structure is not a solid ball of metal, and requires many small trips as opposed to a big fuck-off engine.

Slow rotation simply means a slow sunrise. There is no tirning around.

I am not sure that a moon will be required to amplify mercury's magnetic field so it might not be necessary. Planet size structures require a massive workforce, have an extremely slow build time, and require constant maintenance. Not to mention even more resource transportation. A small moon simply requires a lot of propulsion. An orbit lasts billions of years. A space mirror lasts a few hundred?

Well if you're gonna dump that sweet venusian co2 somewhere...