New Mars Forums

denarjan

InActive

From: amsterdam

Registered: 2003-10-11

Posts: 2

Re: creating new earth from mars - the voilent way

hi

has there been a scientists out there who thought of colliding the largest moons in the solar system with mars , to come closer to an earth size planet able to keep hold of its atmosphere?

it could introduce nitrogen , water , carbonates etc ,the building blocks.

it would be a humongous project of thousands of years probably , but the benefits would be huge.
and the morale of people living on a planet probably would be better compaired to those living on easier to build spinships.

could it be done ? with mass reaction hydrogen bomb guns, magnetic rail guns (examples)by sacrafising some mass shifting orbits and fusing bodies to one that could evolve to another paradise?? it  probably would even be possible to bring it a lot closer to the sun.

in terms of energy efficiency its would be a rather stupid idea .
cilindrical spinships would be thousands of times cheaper,
but in the sense of race surviveability in relations to political , biological and cosmic incidents plus the morale effects might it not be a future of mars worth considering?

sorry reds ,

arjan.

Byron

Member

From: Florida, USA

Registered: 2002-05-16

Posts: 844

Re: creating new earth from mars - the voilent way

Welcome aboard, Arjan....it's always good to see new posters around here...

There has been talk about colliding comets and other bodies that contain a lot of volitiles such as water ice, ammonia, etc, which would be greatly beneficial to a Martian terraforming effort.  KSR talks about smashing "iceteroids" into Mars as part of his characters' terraforming efforts in his "Mars" series.

As for colliding a really large moon into Mars, it'd probably be next to impossible for one thing, and there's really no need to make Mars the size of the Earth to hold its atmosphere.  The number one reason why Mars probably lost most of its early atmosphere is the reduction of its global magnetic field, which allowed the solar wind to strip away the atmosphere over the eons.  So if you're interested in building and keeping a viable atmosphere on Mars, you'd want to focus on finding ways of building up a global magnetic field, and just stick with using "native" materials to terraform Mars as much as possible.

The substance that terraformers would most likely have to import is nitrogen, as Mars seems to be lacking in this vital element, which is needed for widespread plant growth...so for this reason, grabbing small comets from the Kupier belt and grazing them into the atmosphere one at a time would probably be the way to go...although it'd take a while.

The vast majority of people out there would probably be opposed to any sort of "big industry" planet-defacing terraforming methods, such as smashing up the surface with huge impacts, using nuclear devices to bust up the crust to create volcanos, building giant mirrors to focus the sun's rays and so on...which is the main theme of KSR's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars novels.  If you haven't read these books, I would highly recommend that you read them...you can order them on Amazon.com today...all 3 are in paperback.  You may want to start with the first one to see how you like it, and get the other two if you do...

B

denarjan

InActive

From: amsterdam

Registered: 2003-10-11

Posts: 2

Re: creating new earth from mars - the voilent way

sounds like some reading i'll commit to , thanks for the tip.

are there any plans what so ever in the next century for building spinships that you know of ?

in its simplest form it should be pretty easy to do. even as a sleeping module in the iss it's benefit in preventing bone degradation should be pretty obvious , and a great way to prolong a stay.

or would people be to sick all of the time and in that way to impractical ? working 0 g , sleeping at 1.

alokmohan

Member

From: india

Registered: 2003-09-14

Posts: 169

Re: creating new earth from mars - the voilent way

Byron s answer is convincing.