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Would be wild if a sufficiently large object with a lot of water and organic molecules hit Mars, ejected a lot of material in to Mars’ orbit to then go on to fo
by nandomrumber 1y ago
Would be wild if a sufficiently large object with a lot of water and organic molecules hit Mars, ejected a lot of material in to Mars’ orbit to then go on to form a sufficiently large moon that tidally massaged Mars’ core to cause a dynamo to generate a sufficiently strong magnetic field to…
Terraform Mars!
- WithinReason 1y agoYou don't need a magnetic field to terraform Mars, it can hold onto an atmosphere without it for 100M years.
- nandomrumber 1y agoWithout a magnetic field, isn’t the surface of Mars subject to sterilising radiation from Sol?
- cyberax 1y agoPlanetary magnetic field only weakly protects against cosmic rays (extra-solar origin). A thick enough atmosphere will stop pretty much all the charged particles from the normal solar radiation.
- jajko 1y agoIf it would be so bad, Earth's polar regions (experiencing aurora borealis) would be inhabitable too. Earth's magnetic field is not magically neutralizing all charged particles from the Sun, just diverts them (some maybe away, but many simply towards poles). And clearly even our mag field (and Sun's heliosphere) is not enough to shield us from those crazy cosmic rays.
- noduerme 1y agoin a somewhat related story, I was on a beach in Costa Rica last week, watching some spider monkeys in a palm tree trying to whack open small nuts. Just then, an American family walked up the beach with two teenage boys. They didn't notice the monkeys I was watching. But one of the boys grabbed a coconut off the sand and became determined to break it open with a rock in front of his parents. So watching the monkeys and the boy simultaneously, I had the distinct feeling of how slowly evolutionary, let alone geological, processes actually move.
- nandomrumber 1y agoHaha, cool, that gave me a chuckle :) “We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” - The Hitchhikers Guige to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
- hermitcrab 1y agoNice story. But are you implying that we are somehow more evolved than the monkeys? Both the human and the monkey in the story have evolved for the same amount of time since our last common ancestor.
- MarkusQ 1y agoThat argument always struck me as vacuous. Dump a barrel of ball bearings on the top of a craggy hill. Wait as they all bounce around, some getting stuck in local minima and some bouncing over obstacles and covering large distances. Would you claim that they all traveled the same distance because they all traveled for the same amount of time? Evolutionary space is very high dimension, which makes the argument that just projecting onto the (1d) time axis is misleading even stronger.
- hermitcrab 1y agoI'm not sure more/less evolved is a meaningful concept in Darwinian terms. Organisms have a level of fitness for their environment. Perhaps you are talking about cultural evolution?
- belter 1y agoWhat is easier? Not mess up this planet, or Terraform Mars?
- olvy0 1y agoUsername checks out.
- malfist 1y agoI don't know. Have you seen humanity? I think teraforming another planet is probably easier than not fucking up this one
- bee_rider 1y agoBelter, our future is in orbital habs. Going downwell is for tourism and archaeology.
- dotnet00 1y agoCan you walk and chew gum?
- irrational 1y agoIt’s not worth doing because it is easier, but because all of our eggs are in one basket (planet). We know of disasters that can wipe out almost all life on a single planet. Of course, there are also disasters that can wipe out all life in one star system (and one region of the Galaxy). So, ideally we need to colonize many worlds in many different parts of the Galaxy, but baby steps. Step one is to have a sustainable population on multiple moons/planets/stations of this star system before we jump to other star systems.
- SoftTalker 1y agoVastly easier to not only stop but also undo all the damage here than to do anything of consequence on Mars.
- nandomrumber 1y agoWould be pretty hard to fuck up Mars’ biosphere.