Resource-wise, Mars is a sink. Humanity would get far, far more bang for the buck from settling in the Asteroid belt and the Trojans, instead of trapping ourselves at the bottom of a new gravity well.
Discussion
Mars without a strategy to restart the magnetic core is not a plan at all. Better off building beneath the surface of the moon.
How one would even attempt to restart Mars' magnetic field, though, I have no idea.
sounds like you got your hands full...
good luck!
who said it ever had one?
maybe magnetic fields are only present when there is sufficient mass to cause the core to be supercritical (above boiling point but solid)
I saw calculations once that showed, no matter your plan to induce a field, it would take on the order of 100,000 years for the field to stabilize. The planet fights back with an opposing field until you can saturate all the layers. Mumble mumble skin effect or something.
Restarting the core not going to happen. But there's a "cheat code" - L1.
Put any human activity there, and you disrupt the solar protons eroding the Martian atmosphere and irradiating the surface.
Even the tiniest deflection is enough to make those protons miss Mars. NASA has talked about parking superconducting magnets there, but actually any human activity will do.
Using electricity? You're inducing magnetic fields. Industrial processes? You're leaking pollution. Transport activities? You're spraying propellant around.
The idea of colonizing Mars is an absurd boondoggle that fails to grasp just how incompatible with human life the red planet it, and the expense of keeping humans alive on an ongoing basis. Maybe at some point in the future we'll have developed the technology that could cheaply and feasibly support a long-term human colony, but that point isn't on our visible horizon. It's a ludicrous plan once you really consider the necessary logistics and expense.
You're not wrong, but humans being how we are, "develop the technology" requires we go there.
The engineering we can use simulations for some, and cheaper testbeds like Luna for some more, but the politics and funding can only be sustainable with a human presence on the Red Planet.
Multiple, rival presences, if the European colonisation of the Americas is any guide.
This article very accurately breaks down why we're not colonizing Mars.
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars
Its witty, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't know when I was 12.
Mars has challenges. Outback Australia has challenges.
Mars' are less challenging to us in 2024 than Australia's were to the British in 1788.
I'm not sure you're actually hearing what the author is saying. Colonizing the Outback is not even remotely close to colonizing Mars in its inhospitability, and expense. There is literally no analog you can compare with on Earth. The cost alone would drain the resources we would need to continue maintaining the level of life we all have on Earth to a shocking degree. It's simply not a plausible scenario given our current technology and civilization, nor our conceivable technology in the foreseeable future. It is the very definition of boondoggle.
We are currently draining Earth's resources into a confrontation between nuclear powers.
The Martian landscape is far less inhospitable to human life than a politician's soul.
I'm well aware of the challenges, but the author of that essay seems to be unaware of most of the last sixty years worth of developments.
Specifically, what technology do you believe we've developed in the past 60 years that would negate the reality of the challenges to sustaining human life on Mars on permanent basis? Remember, we're not talking about sending one or two people for an exploratory, 2-day mission. We're talking about a group of humans are expected survive and thrive on Mars permanently.
"In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk's well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine"
Thanks for the completely unbiased article from this spiritual redditor.
I think in the future we will be able to restart the core with an equatorial band of satellites displaced by 180° with quantum tweezers tuned to the anti-metastate form of crystalline iron.
Sadly no one in the Dirac(i) split of realities ever developed the quantum metastate theory. However, all those branches had long fascist eras, so perhaps we got the better branch for personal sovereignty.
I laughed, but this is Nostr, so I'd better underline - that was a joke, don't ask him for his paper.
I've heard of that idea before. Put a big electromagnetic at Mars' L1 powered by solar panels or something, that might do the trick.
This isn't necessary. The rate at which atmosphere is stripped by solar wind is too slow for human time-scale to notice. Also the role in magnetic fields protecting against radiation is over stated. Most of that is physically blocked by the planet on one side of you and the atmosphere on the other.
Granted the atmosphere is thin, but the daily dose of radiation is fairly low. Most arguments depend on a lifetime dose being high. But that's a bit like claiming that I'll drown in the 10,000 gallons of water that I'll drink over the course of my life. Yes radiation damage does accumulate more that water, but our bodies do have repair mechanisms that make life-time dose nowhere near equivalent to a short term dose.
Mars has such familar geology, though. Mostly the same minerals as Earth, and in predictable locations.
We know how to mine Mars, and our technological toolkit will "just work" if we have ice or water. Good luck with gravity separation on Ceres, and its all downhill from there for other minor bodies...
It's probably not economic to ship unprocessed ore back to Earth, so there's quite a lot of tools and equipment that will have to be produced on-site or shipped from Earth.
Mars doesn't have a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere, so even with local methane you're probably not going to be able to use chemical fuels for mining or industrial production. The obvious energy sources are solar and fission, but both have their drawbacks.
I think the key to human utilization of Martian resources will be (approximate) self-sufficiency. If humans on Mars can locally produce industrial equipment, food, and (nuclear) energy, it's likely that they can create something of sufficient economic value to trade with Earth.
If any of these three are lacking, this implies a continuous flow of resources from Earth.
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