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For Earth-sized planets solar winds don't have much affect. Geologic activity continuously pumps gas into the atmosphere and the planet has sufficient gravity t
by jjk166 3y ago
For Earth-sized planets solar winds don't have much affect. Geologic activity continuously pumps gas into the atmosphere and the planet has sufficient gravity to retain its atmosphere over long time periods. With a thick atmosphere, the losses from solar wind just don't make a dent, it's only for planets with an already thin atmosphere that it becomes a significant factor, and even then it's still not the main contributor. For example solar wind only accounts for about 5% of Mars' current atmospheric loss rate. The component of Mars' atmospheric loss due to the solar wind is about 100 grams per second, which over 10 billion years would remove less than 1% of Earth's atmosphere. Venus, despite having essentially no magnetic field and being even closer to the sun nevertheless has an incredibly thick atmosphere more than 90 times thicker than Earth's.
- XorNot 3y agoOne of my bugbears about discussions of terraforming Mars really: any atmosphere we added to the planet to give it substantial surface pressure would take hundreds of thousands of years minimum to be lost in any quantity (i.e. by redirecting water ice comets to bombard it with Earth's ocean levels of new gases). Atmospheric loss just isn't a problem compared to the technical challenge of doing the comet redirect (which is actually the most plausible part of the enterprise, compared to the monster which would be developing an ecosystem on a barren planet that stabilizes at a human-habitable point of usefulness and isn't just "walls of sulfur algae" for a few thousand years.