Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan […]

By Albert Burneko

9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

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  • masterspaceEnglish
    3·
    5 days ago

    Solar panels would be my guess, though you can always build a space based nuclear reactor if you can refuel it and get rid of its waste.

    It would certainly need a lot more to figure out an actual feasible plan, but I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally impossible about doing it with today’s technology, let alone the future’s.

    • Midnitte@beehaw.orgEnglish
      21·
      5 days ago

      Mars gets roughly half the light of Earth, so I don’t think Solar panels would be realistic (how much solar panel surface would you need to power a magnet of that size?)

      I’m also not sure a nuclear reactor is realistic - forget the nuclear waste, how do you get rid of the heat waste?

      You’d need quite a big magnet operating at a level akin to superconducting magnets in particle accelerators.

      Perhaps someone could calculate more accurate numbers and feasibility, but to me, it currently sounds very out of reach for us (not impossible, mind you).