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If Earth lost its magnetic field, how long would we last? My understanding is these sort of geological scale events would take thousands of years. Maybe a milli
by xwdv 3y ago
If Earth lost its magnetic field, how long would we last? My understanding is these sort of geological scale events would take thousands of years. Maybe a million.
- jwells89 3y agoYes, atmospheric loss driven by solar wind is a very slow process. It’s the only reason why anybody entertains ideas of thickening the Martian atmosphere… the loss is slow enough that if a civilization has the means to do that kind of planetary engineering, maintenance to offset losses is trivial. Intuitively I’d expect it to be faster in the case of Earth due to it being so much closer to the sun but I don’t know this for certain.
- asdff 3y agomagnetosphere also shields you from cosmic radiation. long term human settlement would have to be in shielded dwellings, easiest built underground, making the logical case much stronger for just becoming troglodytes on a dying earth than attempting to revive a dead mars as troglodytes.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThe remedy would be to put up a magnetic field in the L1 Lagrange point. It's an option for terraforming Mars.
- api 3y agoI’ve seen some math that suggests that this or perhaps even doing it on the surface with superconducting rings near the poles would take less energy than you might think. If I recall correctly it was something like the power grid output of the state of California. A lot but entirely within human capacity. If it were space based you’d have a ton of free continuous solar power.
- asdff 3y agoHuman capacity and human will are, however, rarely aligned. Many great things we can do with collective efforts, but this is not our society.
- api 3y agoI think will is pretty aligned, unfortunately. There’s a pretty good series called For All Mankind about an alt history where all our Cold War military spending went to space instead. We are going to Mars in the 90s. It’s plausible. Not that many people care about exploring the universe. Far more care about squabbling over little bits of dirt on Earth.
- JohnMakin 3y agoWhat would power it?
- slashdev 3y agoYou have 24/7 solar power in space
- JohnMakin 3y agoThe energy requirements to generate a large enough magnetic field to shield an entire planet from radiation is many orders of magnitude higher than any reactor we already have on this planet can produce, let alone from solar power, and let alone the energy requirements from cooling, etc. In other words, this is science fiction. It isn’t something we even know we could do.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slashdev 3y agoTerraforming planets is science fiction. We’re a long ways from there. We don’t even have industry in space yet.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoTerraforming it to our liking is a long way off. But it might be easy to accidentally terraform something. Microorganisms are shockingly creative at survival.
- queuebert 3y agoWe do lose our field periodically. IIRC it reverses over the course of ~100-1000 yr every 20,000 yr or so. During that time, the field is multi-polar and complex and doesn't shield us well. We're still here, nevertheless.
- dylan604 3y agowhat would this do to radio communications during that course of readjusting?
- withinboredom 3y agoHeh. What radio?
- wheelerof4te 3y agoLet's say that we would need an alternative to Internet by then.
- xwdv 3y agoIn a world where long distance electronic communication is no longer possible, packets of data must be delivered physically from place to place. The people who deliver these packets still go by the name… Courier.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoI, for one, wish we'd go back to physical storage media such as DVDs, Blue-Rays and CDs. It made you value the content so much more.