3 ms·
Wait. There's an asteroid with more water than Earth? How?!? Aren't there only a handful of asteroids over a 100,000 cubic kilometers? Even if they were entire
by onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
Wait. There's an asteroid with more water than Earth? How?!?
Aren't there only a handful of asteroids over a 100,000 cubic kilometers? Even if they were entirely ice - aren't there 1,350,000 cubic kilometers of water in the oceans?
Even if the largest asteroid was completely ice - it still couldn't have as much water as the ocean, right??
- XorNot 6y agoCeres is believed to have more water in it then Earth's oceans. Ceres is huge, of course, and we probably can't redirect it. But deorbiting more amenable bodies into Mars from the numerous comets that impinge on our solar system is achievable. And of course if there's water somewhere, then there's water almost everywhere (which there is - if nothing else there's a huge amount of it in Saturn's rings). The point is, what you can do terraforming Mars, is quite different to anything you could do to Earth, because you can't just freely cause some cataclysmic events here. EDIT: The other key point is all this work is largely fire-and-forget once you know how. An automated solar reflector probe can be launched and happily continue causing some body to outgas for years, with no human intervention at all.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoDoesn't Ceres have a diameter of less than 1000km? Even if it's entirely ice - pi*500km^2 = ~785,000 cubic kilometers of water, right? Isn't that half of what's in the oceans? What am I doing wrong??