Maybe this is a crazy idea. If we put superconducting cables around Mars at say +/-50 degrees latitude, can we create a planetary magnetic field to prevent atmospheric removal from the solar wind? Would the atmosphere start to thicken?
I posed this to an EM friend and he estimated 1,000,000 Amp-turns would be required. Never checked his math but that current seems plausible with a good superconductor, plus it's cold on Mars!
You don't need to recreate a full planet-sized magnetic field for that, you can more feasibly put a much smaller dipole at the L1 Lagrange point that will deflect the solar wind sufficiently so that it avoids Mars.
Mars doesn't need a magnetic field, without it it takes hundreds of millions of years to lose its atmosphere. It's probably much easier to just top it up a bit every few million years.
The magnetic field could help shield Mars from radiation. This recent paper on building an artificial martian magnetic field with a few thousand kilometers of superconducting wire looks fun.
Not really. We needed to industrialize to get the point we are now where we can manufacture clean energy. Coal and oil got a humans here from their simplicity (burn it) so that we can now have clean alternatives like solar panels and wind turbines.
So no, cleaning up isn't easier or we wouldn't be fucked right now. By the time we get to Mars as a colony we will, by necessity, have the tech to produce clean energy and will not be able to rely on oil. Thus starting fresh without polluting from the onset - something that was impossible on our own world.
Escapism can be a precursor to failure too. I'm not being cheeky. I think that we're not open enough about the fact that we're jumping ship, because we're not sure we can take care of this one. That's important, because it carries serious concerns for how well we'd do on Mars.
I see it not as escapism, but as steps to learn how to take care of a limited resource. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.
One thing to watch out for though, is that it's only half of the rationale behind escapism: we're concerned about our own stewardship of the Earth, but there's a very real concern that a disaster could happen to it that's not of our own making. An asteroid, for example.
Mars would protect us from several categories of these, and becoming multi-stellar would protect us from several more.
That was what i've always think as well. If theres a problem with our culture, that we keep passing through generations, we could even buy more time if we escape, but the problem might go with us.
If we dont fix the problem in the core before we colonize other planets, we will become a interplanetary virus working as a parasyte and killing our host with time.
Hedging is not a bad idea. We clearly have the resources for it. And to make matters worse, every day we are discovering something new about the instability we are wreaking upon this planet. Why on earth would you argue against hedging in the situation we are so badly ignorant we might see a planetary collapse within a minor variation sufficient to wipe us all out?
Fair. But I think there is a lot we can learn about sustainability and what humans really need by putting them on an empty planet with zero natural resources except the minerals in the ground and some frozen water.
Mars will build up to sustainability, while on earth we try to cut back to sustainability.
I think the idea of "jumping ships" is silly, this is technically impossible in the near future. But urgency of expanding existed long before any recent events. To survive we need to spread.
This is a major life altering question. If we can't learn to all live together peacefully, learn to help each other solve problems here on earth; what makes anyone think that we will survive in space & beyond...
I love everything about space exploration, but I'm not naive enough to believe its the solution to our problems here on earth. One might argue its a distraction from our ongoing global humanitarian crisis.
People everyday are dying from lack of food, water, shelter, etc...
What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs. IMHO...
It's a bit of a false dichotomy I think. Injustice causes our global humanitarian crises and while rocket scientists are very smart they're probably not the best people to solve corruption and injustice.
There are 7 billion people on earth. That gives us a bit of leeway to multitask. We can have activists and rocket scientists solving different problems.
> What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs
This is often repeated but makes no sense at all. The time and resources humanity as a group spends on those activities corresponds to 0.1% of our output. Infinitely more is wasted on mundane stuff like manufacturing cars, golf carts, office jobs or reading online forums.
> "In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center ... Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation ... later published by NASA, and titled, “Why Explore Space?”"
I think you started great, but didn't follow through on your own thought.
"learn to help each other solve problems"
The most important problem we need to solve, is how to survive in the universe, where any large rock falling from the sky can wipe out our civilization, if not the whole mammalian branch.
We don't have to abandon efforts to improve human life on this planet while trying to expand to more than one.
The root causes of many (but not all) of our major problems are political or social in nature and can't be solved by throwing money or engineers at them. Also, there are many people on Earth, "we" can work on multiple problems simultaneously.
Are you asking if we can bump the existing magnetic field dynamos into stability? It's an interesting idea but given the size and power of earth's natural field, I'm pretty sure that the math would work out to more energy than all of earth's resources could provide or something like that. You'd be literally manipulating the core of the earth.
I posed this to an EM friend and he estimated 1,000,000 Amp-turns would be required. Never checked his math but that current seems plausible with a good superconductor, plus it's cold on Mars!