Lets Nuke Mars

a reply to: eriktheawful

just looked it up, this from june last year


An interdisciplinary team of MIT graduate students representing five departments across the Institute was recently honored at NASA's Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkage Design Competition Forum. The challenge involved designing a commercially enabled habitable module for use in low Earth orbit that would be extensible for future use as a Mars transit vehicle. The team’s design won first place in the competition’s graduate division.

The MIT project — the Managed, Reconfigurable, In-space Nodal Assembly (MARINA) — was designed as a commercially owned and operated space station, featuring a luxury hotel as the primary anchor tenant and NASA as a temporary co-anchor tenant for 10 years. NASA’s estimated recurring costs, $360 million per year, represent an order of magnitude reduction from the current costs of maintaining and operating the International Space Station. Potential savings are approximately 16 percent of NASA’s overall budget — or around $3 billion per year.

qz.com...

a reply to: Emit1

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

Hmmmm.

Yer know, when a something gets too dangerous, people tend to step in and do something.

Like a crocodile in the back yard. When it gets big enough to be dangerous intelligent folk just put the croc down before it does too much damage. Like eat the dog or the grandkids for instance.

Just a fact of life.

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

here's a mars episode

groan . . .

I'm not sure I should say thanks for educating me (vandalising?) to zim ; )

a reply to: Whatsthisthen

lol, it's an aquired taste i suppose. *mysterious mysteries is best episode

originally posted by: Blue Shift
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.

Where is the rain coming from ?

a reply to: Emit1

Voice actresses . . ... if "Kim possible's" voice was in there, well maybe you might convert me.

a reply to: Emit1


Look at how many space stations Russia has/had... I've yet to see news of one losing orbit. of course all things put up their are classed as "satellite" or orbiting body. Thats an example of in plain sight disinfo and people think a satellite is just for tv and communications thanks to those dishes.

originally posted by: pikestaff
Where is the rain coming from ?

In my plan? It comes from genetically modified bacteria and molds released into the upper atmosphere that eat the CO2 and sulfur and produce oxygen and water.

Of course, that still doesn't solve the problems of the rotation and the lack of a magnetosphere. But hey, you gotta start somewhere. With nuclear explosions, preferably.

EDIT: Actually, if we're supposedly moving out into space, actually landing on any planet and establishing colonies on the surface there is a shaky proposition to begin with. Why spend all the time and money and energy to lift all the necessary stuff out of Earth's gravity well only to drop it back down into another one? Our best bet would be to hollow out an asteroid or moon and live there. Or build our own huge space colonies. Not get our feet dirty.

a reply to: JinMI

Can we possibly know what will grow?

Mars soil is suitable for vegetative growth, under the right conditions. The atmosphere is rich enough in carbon and nitrogen for something to grow. The crucial factor with the nuclear option is, how much greenhouse gases will be released and will those warm Mars' climate sufficently for something like planet-wide vegetative growth to be established, at least near equatorial latitudes. So little is known about the actual extent of Mars' invisible water reserves, that without actually melting a great deal of them artificially, it is difficult to know precisely what Mars is capable of.

Having said that, many suspect Mars is capable of a great deal. Kind of like, just add massive, catastrophic climate change and shake, and wait a decade or two. We won't know unless we try. But if we succeeded, we'd be able to garner a great deal about who/what the previous Martians were, just that much more easily.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

The soil is antibacterial.

But that's because of dry, cold conditions and sublimation of all of mar's surface water over aeons. Melt those ice caps and things will start to look very different, after a few monsoons at the equator.

And it has no magnetosphere, so its constantly irradiated.

That wasn't a problem for the ancient (and perhaps modern?) surface Martians. They had iron-rich shells, mostly. And scales too, I'd bet. We'd need Reptile gene therapy to live there but hey, why not? I'd rather be a reptile than have a sex change against my will!

a reply to: Emit1

are the poles the best spot to nuke, assuming we want to use the least number possible to achieve the result?

That's where a good deal of the frozen water and CO2 ice are stored.

a reply to: pikestaff

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.

Nobody needs to be able to sunbathe on Mars. The point is making the difference between the planet being possibly more usable or being merely a research scientist's wet dream.

Radiation makes skin exposure dangerous -- but it doesn't make agriculture impossible. It's the climate that makes it difficult or impossible for humans to live there in numbers. I think it's worth the price of at least 2 nukes -- so does Elon Musk, I guess. But TPTB won't allow it, if they don't want to.

I thought we already nuked mars.

There was a rover that blew up a few yrs back.

srry i forgot the first rule of fight club

Nuking ice deposits at the poles would just vapourise them, and lots of the vapour would be lost to space. Mars needs a thicker atmosphere to be able to hold on to all that water.