Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Trekkin]

Other more realistic concern is getting the nukes safely beyond our orbit. High altitude nuclear explosions and fallout are far more pressing.

Perhaps a combination of high acceleration railgun and some ion engine could do. That or nuclear propulsion.

Closed cycle gas core for earth-to-orbit followed by NSWR once in space, perhaps. No nuclear devices needed, and you can cycle the uranium out of the bulbs and into the salt tanks once you're in translunar space.

[Reelya]

I request you calculate the moment of inertia of the earth, and then look up/calculate the amount of energy contained in nuclear bombs, and tell me if that is enough to give the Earth a tangential radial velocity of 1000mph.


Spoiler alert:

It won't be.

I said enough nukes. i covered that already.

[Trekkin]

I request you calculate the moment of inertia of the earth, and then look up/calculate the amount of energy contained in nuclear bombs, and tell me if that is enough to give the Earth a tangential radial velocity of 1000mph.


Spoiler alert:

It won't be.

I said enough nukes. i covered that already.

Ah, but have we enough fissile material at our disposal to make "enough nukes?"

[Reelya]

Fusion, yo.

The fission part of it is only a detonator, there's no practical size limit on hydrogen bombs, and no shortage of materials.

Actually, I'm wondering what would happen if you added drag to a planet. You see, the planet is currently spinning once every 10 days, it's just synced with it's orbit of the star. So to get a "day" you don't necessarily need to speed up the planet, you can in fact get the same thing by slowing it down, more effectively. in fact, it sounds like a good way to steal energy from this planet/star system, you use the kinetic energy from the planet, thus slowing it down, but then the planet/star's tidal forces speeds it back up.

[Trekkin]

Fusion, yo.

So we move from the question of "enough nukes" to "enough fissile primary devices and sparkplugs", but the constraint remains.

Or do you mean to imply the use of pure fusion weapons?

[Reelya]

If you pre-place the needed fusion bombs you could in fact only have a small number of fission detonators. But then again, we do only use fission detonators because they're what we have, not because they're the only possible way to spark uncontrolled fusion.

But of course, saying to use nukes for planetary engineering was only meant as a parody of all the "let's just nuke it" proposals from the 50's and 60's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/1949-scientists-wanted-to-nuke-antarctica-to-melt-the-ice/

Here was a proposal from 1949 to carpet-bomb antarctica to get rid of all the pesky ice and make it human-habitable. This was from Australia, but i've read of similar proposals from the US too, however these more far-fetched plans are harder to reference (I read them in books which are out of print now).

[Maximum Spin]

Nuke space: not because we have any good reason to, but because space deserves it.

[Madman198237]

Fusion, yo.

The fission part of it is only a detonator, there's no practical size limit on hydrogen bombs, and no shortage of materials.

Actually, I'm wondering what would happen if you added drag to a planet. You see, the planet is currently spinning once every 10 days, it's just synced with it's orbit of the star. So to get a "day" you don't necessarily need to speed up the planet, you can in fact get the same thing by slowing it down, more effectively. in fact, it sounds like a good way to steal energy from this planet/star system, you use the kinetic energy from the planet, thus slowing it down, but then the planet/star's tidal forces speeds it back up.

That's about as reasonable as slowing down Jupiter by throwing more New Horizons past it.

You should go look at XYKD, they cover the sort of energy loss you're talking about. Although, I do have a question: How do you propose to extract from the rotational energy instead of the orbital velocity (As covered in the XYKD article I'm talking about)

Also, "apply drag" is...difficult, when you don't (presumably) want to simultaneously send the planet hurtling into its star.

[Reelya]

That won't cause the planet to fall into the sun, because the drag is localized to the planet. The planet pushes on the atmosphere and vice-versa. The net velocity of the system vs the sun isn't affected. It's no more going to pull the planet into the sun than putting down your coffee cup at mid-day pushes Earth away from the sun.

also the ridges would be spread around the planet, think of it like the profile of a circle-saw blade. Each ridge has an opposite ridge pushing in the other direction, so net "push" on velocity is zero, while rotational drag is asymmetric, so only rotational drag would matter.

[x2yzh9]

So, quick hypothetical question.. with this research and/or news article in mind(https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/marsmethane.html)
I saw this in the news lately, and was very interested. If methane existed on mars, as per the article, in larger quantities-but is being produced by the life itself-hypothetically, and if(if we haven't already) we could carbon-date the methane gas or through some other process to see at what point in the universe's evolution methane existed in large quantities on mars, I think that would lead us to find a possible way of terraforming mars,
Nanotube filament solid gas(s) sent in explosive nuclear warheads towards the red planet
The reason I say this is because that would be relatively more cheap in the short term to do this. IF as the article states radiation was/is an energy source for any life on mars then a nuclear warhead, let's say one that emits a controlled amount of radiation, and a controlled amount of gases stored in the warhead, solidified and condensed through the use of carbon/nanotechnology, and let's say those solidified gas(s) would be uh..methane, and hydrogen(and/or oxygen, but I find that to be the most unlikely of answers as it seems to be a variant of simple human psychology that we would send or produce the same type of energy or atmospheric gas to simply make it more livable for us. I would think that the first step in even attempting such as a process is restoring the planet to it's original/optimal for life stage).

For the moment, this is all a theory and it's all hypothetical. But if you guys can make sense of it, I'm sure someone somewhere on this forum has a proper degree in mathematics to throw this theory out the window as a pipe dream but I hope for the unexpected.

[Reelya]

There are a few huge problems with carbon-dating on Mars.

First, Carbon dating is only meaningful to around 50,000 years. Carbon-14 decays, so really old samples won't have meaningful amounts of it.

Second, Carbon-14 is made when a neutron hits Nitrogen-13. And Mar's atmosphere lacks the nitrogen we expect on Earth. So Carbon dating on Earth relies on the fact that stray Neutrons are bombarding Nitrogen atoms and replenishing the Carbon-14 in the atmosphere at a reasonably steady rate, while carbon locked in a dead organism retains only the Carbon-14 which it had at the time of death, and which slowly decays.

Third, we'd need calibration tables for the Carbon-14 concentrations in the air going back thousands of years, which we usually get from ice-cores in places like Antarctica.

Hence, the technique can't really be generalized to Mars, or to times long ago. At least not with Carbon dating as we know it.

[Starver]

That's about as reasonable as slowing down Jupiter by throwing more New Horizons past it.

You should go look at XYKD, they cover the sort of energy loss you're talking about. Although, I do have a question: How do you propose to extract from the rotational energy instead of the orbital velocity (As covered in the XYKD article I'm talking about)

https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ is the link you probably wanted to give/direct to.

Warning: Do not attempt to drink keyboard-unfriendly beverages whilst reading.  (Unless you happen to have a beverage-friendly keyboard. Then go ahead!)

Nanotube filament solid gas(s) sent in explosive nuclear warheads towards the red planet

Waitwhatnow?

[x2yzh9]

That's about as reasonable as slowing down Jupiter by throwing more New Horizons past it.

You should go look at XYKD, they cover the sort of energy loss you're talking about. Although, I do have a question: How do you propose to extract from the rotational energy instead of the orbital velocity (As covered in the XYKD article I'm talking about)

https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ is the link you probably wanted to give/direct to.

Warning: Do not attempt to drink keyboard-unfriendly beverages whilst reading.  (Unless you happen to have a beverage-friendly keyboard. Then go ahead!)

Nanotube filament solid gas(s) sent in explosive nuclear warheads towards the red planet

Waitwhatnow?

Say we were able to condense atmospheric gases within a carbon filament/nanotechnology bound instrument, and sent them off alongside with a controlled amount of emitted radiation. As per the article, the hypothetical I'm guessing is that it would restore life to it's original state hopefully, but then it's an oxymoron as well as the sun itself is not what it used to be, so therefore trying to 'terraform' it into an original state rather than artificial one(even though the methods would be artificial and man made themselves) /could/ be redundant, but I was just exploring the option.

Also, calculating a nuclear payload and slingshot technology to mars would be a lot easier than say, putting people there. And by the time mars is anywhere near habitable, by proxy I think we would have the technology to go there. Yes, this would mean increased amounts of radiation, but hopefully the future provides some sort of decontamination aspect. But like I said, just read the article, the article itself states that some of the energy gained by prior lifeforms on mars is through radiation and something else, I'm too tired to reference, but it produces an end result of methane gas.

[Reelya]

A much simpler plan would be to just darken Mars (across as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as possible, not just the visible spectrum). If it's less reflective then it would retain more heat, making it habitable. This would also improve atmospheric pressure without any extra gas needed.

One plan involves importing dust from Mar's moons Deimos and Phobos - which are some of the darkest bodies in the solar system. Then that could warm the place just enough to get a foothold for algae and the like in some places, which would further trap sunlight (especially if the algae spread and adapted).

[Starver]

Say we were able to condense atmospheric gases within a carbon filament/nanotechnology bound instrument,

Ummm, okay. Not sure how/why. Is the filament nature (which would be highly oxidised bucky-tubes, I presume) actually more useful than merely being cooled down into Dry Ice blocks, or something?

and sent them off alongside with a controlled amount of emitted radiation.

Why radiation?

As per the article, the hypothetical I'm guessing is that it would restore life to it's original state hopefully,

Are you thinking "life concentrates certain isotopes of carbon" with "certain isotopes of carbon will aid life"?

but then it's an oxymoron as well as the sun itself is not what it used to be, so therefore trying to 'terraform' it into an original state rather than artificial one(even though the methods would be artificial and man made themselves) /could/ be redundant, but I was just exploring the option.

I remain lost. Or you do. But I'll stick with it being me, for now, and give you a fair chance to correct my intrinsic wrong-headedness.

(But we already have the technology to go there with people, far more than we have the technology to terraform it good enough for people.)

A much simpler plan would be to just darken Mars (across as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as possible, not just the visible spectrum). If it's less reflective then it would retain more heat, making it habitable. This would also improve atmospheric pressure without any extra gas needed.

https://xkcd.com/1504/