Actually it sounds like a plausible plan... https://www.infowars.com/wtf-supervillain-elon-musk-wants-to-nuke-mars/ Nuke the poles, melting/vaporizing the ice and creating some more atmosphere. As to the radiation, we've set off plenty here on Earth and, I imagine the radiation exposure on mars due to lack of sun blocking atmosphere is far worse than what would be added by nuclear weapons. At the very least, nuking mars is unlikely to make the environment there any worse, and if it does, its not going to hurt anything anyway. I think we should try it. Thoughts?
Of course. Theres many things we could do toward the colonization of mars that we're not doing. If instead of fighting in Afghanistan we had spent that money going to mars, we'd likely have a colony there already. OP is speaking to economical means, not ideal means (my fault for not clarifying that).
Why would you want to get rid of deserts? They don't produce their own heat. It comes from the sun. And areas with a lot of sand reflect a great deal of energy back into space. And we need water for people. Water shortages are coming soon.
Give me ten years and dozens of scientific studies and analyses. to think about it. On the face of it I HATE the idea. All of the water from the poles would be contaminated. What good would that do anyone or anything? Radiation from the sun is only dangerous at the moment it strikes a target. Then it's gone. It doesn't last for 10,000 years.
Water itself cannot be irradiated (or so say the internets) and the 'hot particles' that contanimate the water would soon settle out of the atmosphere. Given that any colonies on mars will most certainly be conditioning their breathing air and cultivation soil for generations anyway, hot particles won't be a major problem. In the dynamic of terraforming, removing and quarantining the top layer of soil, (where/if necessary), will be a tiny drop in the bucket of work to be done.
I don't buy that at all. It would be a massive undertaking even here on earth. And the hot particles would fall down on the planet - they are much heavier than atmospheric gases. Cesium is the biggest concern. That is a heavy element. It isn't going to stay aloft. It would be spread over the entire planet, with the strongest concentrations near the poles.
We've detonated 2476 devices in our atmosphere with a combined yield of 540,000 kilotons. I think we could probably vaporize the poles on Mars with far less than that without making the whole planet more uninhabitable.
I agree.... How are we going to attempt to terraform another planet when we can't live in parts of our own?
Nukes are most certainly not the way to terraform mars unless its nuclear power plants for atmospheric manipulation.
The BEST bet would be to pollute the atmosphere with co2 or better yet methane There are plenty of asteroids made of ice and co2 which could be mined for raw material
An excellent, yet still quite a bit more expensive plan. We could start nuking mars basically now for very little investment (beyond repurposing some pre-existing nukes). Which is really the only part of the idea that makes it attractive is its extremely relatively low cost and speed of implimentation. Its the 'we can't seem to get anything else going, so lets do at least something' plan.
Whats wrong? Are you worried this is a conspiracy theory, or are you just being triggered by the brand?
"Compared with other nuclear events: The Chernobyl explosion put 400 times more radioactive material into the Earth's atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; atomic weapons tests conducted in the 1950s and 1960s all together are estimated to have put some 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Chernobyl accident." [4] The radioactivity released at Chernobyl tended to be more long lived than that released by a bomb detonation hence it is not possible to draw a simple comparison between the two events. Also, a dose of radiation spread over many years (as is the case with Chernobyl) is much less harmful than the same dose received over a short period." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Com...leases#Chernobyl_compared_with_an_atomic_bomb I spose it comes down to how many nukes (and of what yeild) would it take?
