Lets Nuke Mars

I think Venus is a better target. There's a planet that could really use a nuclear winter. If we were going to colonize Venus, it would really help if we knock the temperature down right away and then start working on getting the rain cycles working again.

Or course, it still rotates very slowly. I don't think we can nuke it to make it spin faster.

Why not just make Mars a prison colony. No worries, ever again, about an escapee.

a reply to: Christosterone

At what Cancer rate?

originally posted by: Thirty6BelowZero
Why not just make Mars a prison colony. No worries, ever again, about an escapee.

It would be way cheaper to just outsource it to Siberia. No need to even build walls. Three thousand miles away from any town, and they don't speak your language. Pennies on the dollar.

a reply to: Thirty6BelowZero


Seems to have worked out well for Australia eh ol chap? Eventually enough bodies hitting the ground that something will grow out of it either way. What... it's how ours has been functioning for billions of years now and continues to do so.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF


Hey it's only a matter of time before Jupiter ignites in to sol 2.0 anyways... impatience has never really been a virtue.

originally posted by: Namdru
a reply to: Emit1

The fastest way to terraform Mars is to nuke the vast resevoirs of water ice hidden underneath its drifting dusts and sands. There's vastly more water than anyone suspected before. Imagine of all of earth's water were buried in the form of layers of dust, sand, and compacted snow. That's the situation on Mars. Nuke that and you've got water, plus a huge amount of atmospheric vapor. It just might make Mars suitable to grow again.

It would be a great loss to astro-archeology but a great gain for lucky humans trying to escape the wreck that Earth will be in a hundred years or less.

Not enough gravity, not enough air pressure, no magnetic shield to speak of, not worth the price of 2 nukes to find that out the hard way.

Gotta nuke somethin.

a reply to: okrian

Didn't the US already nuke the whales in the Pacific?

a reply to: Thirty6BelowZero

It costs way too much to do that.

Margasahayam points out that, while the space shuttles were more expensive — a whopping $500 million per launch (or possibly $1.5 billion, according to one analysis we've seen) — each mission carried about 50,000 lbs. (plus seven astronauts!). That means each pound of cargo used to cost about $10,000 to ship on a shuttle.

Orbital Science's Cygnus spacecraft costs about $43,180 per pound to send things up, dividing the $1.9 billion contract by the maximum 20 metric tons of cargo the company is supposed to supply.

For SpaceX — the cheapest of NASA's new carriers — dividing the cost of each launch ($133 million) by the cargo weight of its most recent resupply mission (5,000 lbs.) gives you about $27,000 per pound.

But that's a high estimate. SpaceX told Tech Insider that its Dragon cargo spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket can carry up to 7,300 lbs. — and that you could bring just as much cargo back to Earth, too (something Cygnus can't do). So if a Dragon is full of supplies at launch and on landing, the cost dips to $9,100 per pound.

Here's how much money it actually costs to launch stuff into space

And what if the prisoner got their case overturned?

a reply to: tadaman

i did address your concerns in the op. it would be unfortunate to lose the science but there are other planets.

a reply to: Whatsthisthen

you could well be right..lets nuke it and find out, a kind of forced disclosure if you will hehe

invader zim is one of the pinnacles of human accomplishment to this point imho (half joking)

here's a mars episode

originally posted by: eriktheawful

If you really wanted to get people off Earth fast in a sustainable environment, then orbital habitats are the fastest way to go

i have no idea why we aren't already doing this..

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

do you have a guesstimate on the time this would take if we started on it tomorrow?

a reply to: Blue Shift

mars, venus, whichever the boffins decide is best is all good. just need to pick one and get started imo

a reply to: okrian

while i dont particularly mind the nelson comparison ( i admire his footballing prowess) i'd like to make clear i'm not advocating environmental vandalism without good reason. my idea of utopia is that no-one is allowed to live on earth, the entire planet is a nature reserve we get to visit once a year for holidays.

a reply to: Emit1

Money.

Cost a lot to do it, and no one sees any profit in it. Not yet anyways.

It can make people money if they use it for power transfer, as us humans are energy hungry. Considering it's a very good way to get energy here, and has a very low impact on environment, people would be willing to pay for it.

Eventually though it will be the way to go, as we run out of room to grown crops, or suffer from climate that prevents it, you can make room in orbital habitats, and can completely control the climate in them.

But the start up cost is tremendous.....still pennies compared to trying to terraform and colonize a whole other planet though.

a reply to: Emit1

Venus is a whole other ball game.

Where Mars is very cold and hardly any atmosphere, Venus is way too hot and has a atmosphere so thick it would crush you down into a small meat ball in seconds.

Interesting though, there is a parallel: I said one way to warm up Mars is to set up giant mirrors at the L1 point to focus the sun's light on Mars. You'd do sort of the same thing for Venus, only you block the light, or reduce it greatly to help cool Venus down.

Of course it would take a lot more than that since the reason Venus is so hot is from greenhouse runaway. We'd need to greatly reduce the amount of CO2 in the Venus atmosphere.

Right now we do not have a really good way of doing that, as we'd have to remove a very large amount of that atmosphere.

One suggestion of colonizing Venus is to stay way up in that atmosphere, where the temperatures and pressure is much better, almost Earth like, by using great floating colonies using balloon systems.

While a very cool idea to imagine and talk about, personally I think it would be a disaster waiting to happen. Can you imagine what would happen to a floating colony of thousands of people who's system failed and they fall down? Yikes.

Still, goes to show that people do think big.

originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: Emit1

Money.

Cost a lot to do it, and no one sees any profit in it. Not yet anyways.

snip/

But the start up cost is tremendous.....still pennies compared to trying to terraform and colonize a whole other planet though.

do you know if anyone is still looking at the space hotel type startup? plenty of willing billionaires to holiday there i'd wager. wonder if elon has looked into it.

a reply to: Emit1

I seem to remember several years go some hype over trying to do something like that. Can't remember who it was talking about it.

You're right though: it would be a hotel for billionares considering how much they'd have to charge for a room for a single day.

That is how most things start out though, really expensive until it's something that can be mass produced and common place.

I've always said that the Space Boom would happen if there's something that can only be found or made out there, that demand is quite high back down here.

Many have suggested mining, but the truth is it's much easier and cheaper to mine things here in the Earth's crust than to go find an asteroid that has it, or even on the Moon. There's still a great abundance of precious metals and minerals in our crust.