10mo ago

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.

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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:
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html
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.
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.
- also just... caves and shit.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.amp
  It also doesn't completely protect the entire planet just two critical points on the surface.
- I'm pretty sure I saw a documentary about doing this exact thing back in 2003....
- 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.
  lol... According to your own citation, this wacky scheme was just a talk at some conference. Like the researchers said, it's "fanciful". It's not real.
  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
  This is rich coming from someone who posts articles that they didn't read.
  
  Yeah bud, there's also these little shelters called caves.
  The author of the article literally guffaws at the prospect of respinning a planet's core when that's not remotely how you would approach that problem.
  It would be like writing an article saying "Come on, you believe in vaccines? What, you think a scientist can cut open your individual cells and put antibodies in each one? You really think they have tweezers that small? Get real dum dum."
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.
- Shit like walking across ice sheets to new continents
  Go for it, homie.
Colonize is not the same as terraform.
Mars could be colonized without terraforming it. Closed habitats could be permanent thus providing a way of colonization.
Terraforming is a trouble without magnetosphere that's true. But not impossible. As there are tech concepts on how it could be possible to shield mars atmosphere. And doesn't seem imposible, just expensive and complex.
Could you imagine relying on elon musk for your oxygen supply?
- He's a "free-breathing absolutist." He thinks everyone should have a supply of oxygen except the people he personally doesn't like.
Never say never - unless you're writing clickbait.
Doesn't colonization require stealing resources from someone else?
- Billionaires are stealing resources from humanity to waste on some wacky escape plan to mars.
Even in the unlikely event that Elon did get a colony going on Mars, he'd be like Cohaagen from Total Recall, but worse.
We, as a human race, will face so many problems, of various orders and magnitudes in the near future, that thinking about colonizing Mars will be considered an outrage.
- It's already considered an outrage by anybody who's not totally brainwashed.
The problem of sun radiation can be mitigated by dwelling underground as many early humans did so
- Humans can already live underground here on eatth
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.
- The idea of "posthuman cyborgs" is so fanciful, that I don't think you are connected enough to reality to even make an accurate judgement on "the possible."
  We have the technology TODAY, RIGHT NOW to go to mars and make it back. There is no over-arching reason to do such a thing, but there are also no significant technological barriers preventing us from doing it. Human Cyborgs are 100% impossible today, and there are a myriad number of things preventing that kind of development. For example, we cannot today, keep a brain alive for any significant time, outside of it's existing organic support body. Individual neurons? Sure, but a system of neurons at any comparable complexity as even a simple mouse brain? Nope. On the other-hand we have actually kept people alive in space for over a year, and we only need around 2years to get to mars and back. We also have the capability to send things to mars and bring them back, so combining those two things, and there ya go.
  
  We really don't. We can barely make it to orbit. Boeing is failing at even doing that.
  It's like saying your grandpa can climb Mount Everest because he can shamble to the local tesco. It's not even close.
- just landing on mars? nah that'll happen soon. settling it on a long term basis is a whole other matter though.
  
  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.

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