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The remedy would be to put up a magnetic field in the L1 Lagrange point. It's an option for terraforming Mars.
by BurningFrog 3y ago
The 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.