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I was thinking about how to terraforming the moons of jupitor ans saturn, Jupitor two large one could be but the be cold artic worlds with out big mirors, titan would be much harder because of the greater distance from sun.
Then I rember that some author made big flash lights by fusion the hydrogen of the gas gaints, the light aim at the moon would warm them. A bit hard, you would need a bid floating platform that would also hae to with stand the heat it creates. Better solution just set the whole big ball of gas ablaze! Now star form when there mass and pressure creat temps high enough for H fussion. The smallest stars re drafts are still 20 or 50 times the mass of jutitor. Since it is inpractical to increase their mass, increase their temps.
At its core jupitor is very warm but no where near the required temp. to increase the temp hydrogen bombs placed near the core could at like a macth when light papper to get a fire started. A small area would get heated high enough for fusion sense their is fuel all around it, the flame not go out it goes on earth but grow and spread. Like when start a log on fire no start with a small macth.
As the fire spreads in the core pretty soon the entire core is hot enouh to fussion of hydrogen to helium. Like a star but wit less mass, My guess is that as the heat travel upwards the gas will emit heat at first then red light. As it heat up it will expand a little bite it might eat up io in outer atmosphere.
But the outer moon would be warmed alot. It could work on saturn too.
If using lots of H bombs near the planets core in a sea of metalic hydrogen dont work, another idea of mine is the big hit. When a comet hit jupitor it left a scare the size of the erath, why not use a big impactor to raise the jupitor temp.
Sedena that new planet is large, with the great speed it would get form moving into a lower orbit, and gravity sling shaot from saturn and neptune. Its speed and there energy would be great. Aimed to hit jupitor head on, the impactor could go straight to the planets core and release a great amount heat, enoughe for fussion to get started. If not enough pluto, or other unknow kepler belt objects could slam into jupitor as many times possible to get what we need.
Is this idea new, I have not hread people talk about before?
Anyway what do you think of my ideas, I think their great!
I love plants!
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So how would one get the nukes to jupiter and then plan to what drill to the interior to plant them not to meantion compress the hole that was dug to get them there in order to maintain the down would pressure such that when the nukes are detonated that they just do not blow out the plug for the hole that was dug to get them there in the first place.
But maybe you thought was to have them go into nuclear melt down rather than blowing up, that changes what may happen especially if some are saved, a few for when the core temp does come close to that point for fussion to be nearly able to begin such that when there are then detonated that it is given that extra push to begin the fussion process.
The concept of thrmal nuclear melt down could be also applied to mars to help in creating a magnetic field by forming a liquid core as well.
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It is easy to get thermonukes to jupitor, we send probs to other planets all the time. From what I know about jupitor core is that it is etheir ice and rock or metal and rock different sources give different info, But we do know that near its core that the pressure and heat is so great that it like liqued metal. Big reason for jupitors hug magnetic shield. Geting the nuke down to the core is easy, rember that jupitor made up of gas? We just parashoot it down to the core boundier, we want to set the hydogen ablaze not the rock of the core. Big problem pressure, but nuke are solid so it wont be impolded. Equal pressure pushing back just like here on earth with are air pressure.
What do you think about hitting jupitor with small planets like sedona or pluto? that sould make a lot of heat.
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David R. Criswell - stellar husbandry and star-lifting...
Gregory Benford - star-stirring...
Paul Birch - stellar mining...
Freeman Dyson - circumstellar spheres...
Many famous scientist regarded the possibility of stellar engineering. For example our plain old Sun will consume just one tenth of its hydrogen when after ~7 bln years goes out of the Main sequence to blow as red giant and finally to stay uncountable billions of years as colder and colder white dwarf... Feeding back the hydrogen in the core will prolonge its lifetime at least 10 times. It could be manipulated later to burn its He-4 hydrogen fusion residue in stabile carbon untill all the opportunities to utilize the solar gravity as inertial confinemet mechanism are completely utilized. If we dissasemble the solar mass in smaller portions in >70 red dwarfs they will release the same amount of energy for at least 3-4 orders of magnitude longer time or 50-100 trillions of years of more stable and much more controlable manner. Dissasembling a sun-size star will provide us not only with all the termonuclear energy available, but also with all the available constructional material from these under 1% of non-H/He astronomical "metals" stellar content. The Sun, for example has >5000 times the Earth mass in carbon.
Regarding this we shouldn`t forget that the fusion is not the most powerfull energy source we know... The complete astroengineering, in its literal sense of stellar manipulation, gives us just the full stage of K2 - Kardashev Type Two civilization. K3 - total galactic control, K4 - taking over all the Metagalaxy - the observable part of the universe, K5 - full possession of the entire Hubble volume of our Universe inflated between 10exp30 to 10exp10exp12 times the size of the Metagalaxy, K6 - creating and controllling other Universes... are the next logical theorethical steps of growth and development under the Kardashev`s taxonomy based on the single and simple criteria of energy consumption...
Tha smallest astronomical bodies in which intestines nuclear flame existed for a while, several millions of years of Deuterium fusion, are the smallest brown dwarfs -- the division line between the planets and the stars...
I think to totally ignite gas giants and brown dwarfs and to turn them in gravitationally confined fusors, which to radiate all this heat in the naked vacuum is INEFFICIENT... although technologically absolutelly possible, even without injecting micro-black holes in their cores. The proposed impact with sufficiently large body is plausible scheme. The impact of , say two Litium Deuteride pellets moving with >100 km/s will fuse them. Enough energetic impact in the metal hydrogen layer of jovian planet will cause some part of the Deuterium and He-3 there to fuse, and later the planetary mass to release the heat in slower manner. In principle such impact will turn the planet in mini-brown dwarf increasing its photosphere temperature up to red glow for many millennia... Warming up the big moons to more livable temperature...
BUT:
When one needs to warm his house , he doesn`t incinerates the whole nearby forrest, but feeds little pieces of wood in his fireplace...
The much better way to provide light and heat to the Gallileans an Titan with local resourses, is not to fusorize the gas giant planets, but to power pseudowhite lasers orbiting them or floating in their atmospheres utilizing their ENORMOUS stockpile of rotational and geothermal energy first, and later by industrial fusion instalations, SLOWLY and EFFICIENTLY using first, the deuterium+helium3 reserves, later with the advent of such technology fusing of the plain hydrogen. The Gallileans has ~45% of the earths area. Calculating the necesarry amount of ~100 Watts/m2 it is easily to see, how long on smaller dosage will last hypothetical Gallilean civilization if entirelly relly only upon the local reserve of geothermal, rotational and thermonuclear energy...
TRILLIONS of years, non counting the Sun.
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Utilizing the Hydrogen of gas giant planets by self replicating Hydrogen Bomb Robots; The robots would self assemble inside the gas giant, and then travel to an earth mass object to explode, creating a customized mini star.
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For example, if Hydrogen bombs were exploded on the far side of the Moon, warming the Moon to the Sun's temperature, we could have Moonlight as strong as Sunlight.
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1.From wikipedia:
"Gravitational confinement All mass and energy in general creates a gravitational force. One way to hold the fuel together long enough to undergo fusion is to put enough of it in one place that the gravity created by the fuel is enough to hold it together, as in stars. Stars are self-regulating, the force holding the star out against its own gravity is the heat being generated by the fusion inside. Thus if the rate of fusion rises, the star expands and the rate slows. Some simple math can demonstrate that the mass of fuel needed to make a star using the D-D reaction is about the size of the Moon."
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although I don`t believe that it will be economical for advanced enough civilization, able to distile and collect in one placve such amount of deuterium, to produce such mini-stars. Except if it start to process the free interstellar void gases to make such and other type of "designer stars"...
2. Stellarizing Jovians:
Jupiter has mass of ~1.899exp27 kg. Of these by mass 71% is hydrogen, overwhelmingly mostly plain single proton nuclei hydrogen with traces of deuterium. With this natural deuterium percentage a planet needs about 13 jovian masses to start for short - several millions of years to fuse it - and to become the smallest type of the stars - brwon dwarf. If we some day are able to technologically non-gravitationally to make fusion of 4 protons in 1 helium-4, than easily is calculable, assuming ~100% effectiveness for how long the Jupiter hydrogen reserves will last if we fuse them in helium to illuminate the 4 Gallileans with ~100W/m2 or with light of ~231exp14 Joulles per second. Fusion of plain hydrogen may perhubs occur to be quite difficult, needing total transmutational technology, than - Why to stop on He-4... The most stabile element is iron -- turning the Jupiter reserves of lighter elements via fusion and the heavier via fission in iron will provide us with these 231exp14 Watts for quadrillions of years. This only rellying upon theorethically most advanced possible nuclear technology... Deepening our know and our how down and down to the plank scale will provide us with all the mass/energy in any necesarry form needed...
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Utilizing the Hydrogen of gas giant planets by self replicating Hydrogen Bomb Robots; The robots would self assemble inside the gas giant, and then travel to an earth mass object to explode, creating a customized mini star.
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For example, if Hydrogen bombs were exploded on the far side of the Moon, warming the Moon to the Sun's temperature, we could have Moonlight as strong as Sunlight.
Why to hawl all these bombs to the Moon? It is solid and will rather shatter in pieces, than to be heated up to 6000 degrees Celsius. The self-replicaring Hydrogen Bomb Robots can be designed to burst under sufficiently thick layer of jovian atmosphere JUST beneath the certain Gallilean moon which we want to illuminate. The explosion of one gigatonne bomb generates enormous fireball lasting for dozens of seconds, and filtered from the harmfull radiation by the atmosphere, and repeated as often as necessary such explosions sequence could serve as pointed and economical pulsating pseudo-sun.
The nuclear-pulse illumination has the avantage that it almost lies within our tech grasp -- we blow H-bombs, but we don`t know how to confine non-interupted continuous fusion reaction. The bombs couldd be designed as mostly visible light emiting and with pointed charge in matter of efficiency. The neutron flux from them will resuply the jovian atmosphere with deuterium... The self-replicating H-bomb robots can also utilize the energy of the bursts to replicate and move in firing possitions.
The bombs can be designed as X-ray laser bombs, but firing most of their energy in visible and IR light, very sharply targeted at the necesarry moon... The deuterium(lithium? He-3?) can be harvested directly from the surrounding air cause over half the jobvian mass all gas giants has quite evenly distributed elements in them.
The same tech Sels-replicating H-bombs, can be used also to produce billions and billions of bombs detonated en mass in the deeper layers of the certain jovian planet in order to make it in artificial brown dwarf without need of huge impact. Such thermalized Jupiter will increase its volume a little, and if it has photosphere temperature of , say 1000 K will have the emission properties of a least brown dwarf:
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form wiki: "Brown dwarfs continue to glow in the red and infrared after their deuterium is exhausted. This glow is from the leftover heat generated by their formation and by the earlier deuterium and lithium fusion. The atmospheres of known brown dwarfs range over temperatures from about 800 to 2500°C. All brown dwarfs cool over time; more massive objects cool more slowly than lower mass objects."
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If H-bomb thermalized Jupiter has 1/10th the solar radius and 1/6th its temperature than its luminosity will be ~130 000 times lower than the Sun. That means -At the Io distance the illumination from Jupiter will be almost as intense as the Earth receives from the Sun, but in IR mostly, Europa will have ~0,4 times the Earth`s , Ganymede - ~0.17, Callisto - ~0.04 ( or just twice the nowaday amount including the Sun contribution).
The upper shows that this is totally ineffective to turn the gas giant in stars - radiating their energy in all directions wasting it in the naked space and under the law of the radius squared. The use of pseudowhite lasers, directed exactly on the certain moon is far better. The lasers could be much more versatile also - they can be powered by the rotational energy of the planet via its huge magnetism inntitially, form fusion of deuterium, lithium, He-3... after we succee in building fusion reactors... and finally by reactors fusing plain H or even He-4... The fast axial rotation only will give us all the light for eons - thousands of times longer than the total life expectancy of the Sun on Main sequence.
The best light sourse , however, remains lensed by soletas natural star light, up to ~2 light years from the star...
Only very distant from a star interstellar gas giants or other interstellar planet will need artificial small scale fusion for light production.
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Now assuming that we can heat Jupiter up to be a designer star to heat the Galleon moons. Three of these Galleon moons are Ice Moon with less gravity than Mars has. You heat them up and they will melt and the water will evaporate into space and if they have any atmosphere they will lose that too. It Jupiter’s Magnetosphere that helps to keep the solar wings from blowing away those atmosphere on those Galleon moons. But, now your going to have Jupiter’s solar winds blowing those atmosphere away too.
So we may be trading one problem for another problem that can be just as bad or worse.
So we would have to look at the ecological consequences of doing that too Vs the benefits of doing that.
Larry,
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Is it possible to to ignite the Hydrogen of Jupiter to enhance a Hydrogen bomb ?
For example, if a large cluster of Hydrogen bombs were exploded simultaneously, inside the expected sea of metallic Hydrogen, would it fuse the surrounding Hydrogen ?
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I am thinking of several spherically concentric layers of hydrogen bombs exploded in a sequence for maximim central temperature. Possibly initiating fusion near the center.
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Now assuming that we can heat Jupiter up to be a designer star to heat the Galleon moons. Three of these Galleon moons are Ice Moon with less gravity than Mars has. You heat them up and they will melt and the water will evaporate into space and if they have any atmosphere they will lose that too. It Jupiter’s Magnetosphere that helps to keep the solar wings from blowing away those atmosphere on those Galleon moons. But, now your going to have Jupiter’s solar winds blowing those atmosphere away too.
So we may be trading one problem for another problem that can be just as bad or worse.
So we would have to look at the ecological consequences of doing that too Vs the benefits of doing that.
Larry,
The water can be stopped from evaporating by cold traps at the tropopause and exobase + returning the gases which managed to go out in jovian orbit. The Jupiter mag field utilized for production of electricity to feed the illumination lasers... If the ices covered with foamy thin "crust" above it could thrive normal temperature biosphere, bellow - permafrost...
BTW, stellarizing the whole gas giant although in principle possible is not effective. Untill some moment we could begin to exploit its light elements content for fusion fuel, but en mass to ignite it is pure waste.
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Is it possible to to ignite the Hydrogen of Jupiter to enhance a Hydrogen bomb ?
For example, if a large cluster of Hydrogen bombs were exploded simultaneously, inside the expected sea of metallic Hydrogen, would it fuse the surrounding Hydrogen ?
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I am thinking of several spherically concentric layers of hydrogen bombs exploded in a sequence for maximim central temperature. Possibly initiating fusion near the center.
The plain hydrogen fusion, or proton-proton chain reaction is matter of chance, i.e. time. That`s why it occurs only in enormous bulks of mostly hydrogen in the hearts of the bodies with mass bigger than 75-80 Jupiters. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-pro … n_reaction
But: "To overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between two hydrogen nuclei requires a large amount of energy, and this reaction takes an average of 10 billion years to complete. "
In the Sun the quantum tunneling over the Coulomb repulsion barrier allows the reaction to exist and steadily to fuse protons in helium.
4 protons on 3 steps fuse to He-4 and the net energy gain is 19.79 MeV... Fusing protons to form ~1kg of He-4 results in release of ~27exp12 J, or all the ~1.4exp27 kg of H1 in Jupiter will give us total output of 37.8exp39 Joulles. Remember that we need 231exp14 J/s to illuminate the four Gallileans with average 100 watts/m2 or fusion via proton-proton chain reaction of less than 100 kg per second. Assuming that the whole transformations chains - from nuclear binging energy to visible light directed photons will have total efficiency of , say 10%, than if the hypothetical proton-proton reactors fuse every second ~1 metric ton of hydrgen-1 in He-4 , we have from Jupiter fuel for ~2exp24 seconds or >63 QUADRILLIONS OF YEARS!!! illuminationally maintanance the habitability of the Gallileans...
Igniting in bulk of the core of Jupiter will provide in the best case only several millions of years of red afterglow, able to warm up only Io. Pure waste as I said, compared with this practical eternity of gradual in small doses proton-protion fusion.
If in future the nuclear technology elaborates the helium burn, aka triple H-4 reaction or fusion of helium in C-12, that will give us having ~2exp27 kg of jovian He-4 after fusing all the H-1, another ~2.3exp12 J/kg or totally ~4exp39 Joulles or >63 QUADRILLIONS OF YEARS, more!!!
Gradual transformation of the H/He reserves of Jupiter and turning it in diamond gives us much more than 100 000 000 000 000 000 years of lifetime for the eventual Gallileans` pocket-civilization. Such lifetimes exceed with 3-4 orders of magnitude even the smallest red dwarfs with the longest stellar longevity, and spare us all the negative side effects of wrong light spectrum, stellar bursts, etc.
Even after all the He-4 is exhausted in C-12 producing fusion the jovian corpse still is very warm and fast spinning body. Extracting these rotational and geothermal reserves of energy will even double the H-1 and He-4 longevity figures combined, without puting in the account the opportunity the C-12 to be further fused up to the most stabile iron...
All this was pointed to show that the artificial is good. The fireplace is better than the forest wildfire. The water plumbing is better than home Niagara. The effectiveness is everything.
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Detonating selfreplicating HYdrogen bomb-robots deep into Jupiter will not ignite the metalic H-1, but will enrich the deuterium content via the first step in proton-proton chain reaction ( H1+H1 - H2+...). This can be economical if the deuterium consumed for the bombs results in more deuterium produced after the bursts. Thus in Jupiter could be produced in possitive backloop manner valuable H-2 for the first stages of fusion economy needing deuterium nor plain hydrogen. If its possible than we really have unlimited deuterium supply. The selfreplicating robots harvest the deuterium - part of it participates in H-bomb explosions in the most usefull layers, part is hawled up for export, and the total quantity increases... BTW, if the deuterium breeding operation is very effective, than after certain critical point you will have the conditions to make Jupiter little deuterium star ( or artificial brown dwarf )...
Let someone else calculate how big should be the percentage of H-2 in jovian mass in order fusion reaction to be gravitationally confined, the same way as a Moon-mass of pure D will turn in mini-star...
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A better way of heating up jupitor is instead of using hydrogen bombs, use anti matter bombs. Anti matter turns all the mass into energy when it hits our matter. Althought too much could lower the mass of the planet or star.
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A better way of heating up jupitor is instead of using hydrogen bombs, use anti matter bombs. Anti matter turns all the mass into energy when it hits our matter. Althought too much could lower the mass of the planet or star.
Antimatter is way too expensive. It costs at least many-many times the energy we confine in the mass of the produced antiparticles. Now the efficiency of antimatter production is far less than 1:1000000000 between the antumatter outcome and the energy invested. Even in the far future if we succee in elaborating method for antimatter production with , say 9-10 orders of magnitude bigger efficiency, than still direct injecttion of heat via lasers or something else in the core of Jupiter will be much more effective/cheap than to inject antimatter -- if we want just to heat it up. But heating a ball of hydrogen/helium with 1/1000 solar mass for warming it`s moons, as was shown is as stupid as to incinerate a forrest in order to heat a town, instead to chop the trees and to feed them in the fireplaces. If we have the energy to warm Jupiter to, say 1000 Degrees Celsius surface temperature, via lasers, bombs or most ineffective antimater core deposition... than it is utterly insane to not use this energy to warn directly the moons with it and to ensure as was estimated above QUADRILLIONS of years of habitability for them all -- evenvly distributed, literally photon-by-photon.
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The idea of stellarizing Jovians, even innefective in principle, compared with the opportunity to microsinthesize their hydrogen to He-4 or even their He-4 further to C-12 in pace according to the power needs of the Gallileans, receives some reason if we relly entirelly on local resourses of energy and materials and if we stop on goal to turn the planet in brown dwarf not real star.
I personally prefer the gas giant planets to be exploited as TANKS of fusable material, rather than gravitational confinement reactors, but look:
A normal distribution of H/He ~ 70/30 ( + ~1% of astronomical "impurities") body above 13 jupiter masses fuses its deuterium and becomes brown dwarf. Above 75 jupiter masses the fusion of plain hydrogen makes the body real star.
The natural deuterium/hydrogen isotope ratio is 1:7000.
To turn Jupiter in brown dwarf we should incrase it mass 13fold-absolute impractical, although possible if we extract 12 jupiters more of H from the Sun... OR to increase at least 13 times the partial content of D in it. Bodies bigger than 0.5 jupiter masses are well mixed, because of different origin ( collapse vs. accretion) or simply, because the supercriticality of the mateials in it...-we can not count on the D to stratifies bellow the hydrogen and to use extra-pressure/temperature up to D-D fusion boundary, as in the case with the very probable "helium drops" presure liquification - partial sourse of the Saturn`s excessive heat output...( The phase shifts of the matter is always good technological resourse).
So, the overal D-content should be increased >13 times in order its fusion to be started and maintaned by the natural gravitational confinement of the planet.
In nature the D occurs via synthesis of two protons ( mostly in the Big Bang conditions and as part of the proton-proton chain fusion reaction in stars bellow 15 000 000 K when PP-reaction predominates the Carbon cycle hydrogen fusion reaction). We have plenty of protons in Jupiter. And one of 7000 is coupled with neutron to form D-nucley.
IF: self-replicating system ( as proposed by MarsDog) extracts deuterium and makes exponentialy D-D reaction Fourth generartion pure fusion NEUTRON bombs, than each explosion of such enormous neutron bomb within the as deep and dense as possible jupiter layers should lead to capture of the released fast neutrons by protons and to production of more deuterium.
IF: the process is effective and has possitive outcome, i.e. the innitially used for bombs deuterium is less than the produced by each explosion, together with the exponential growth of the number of the explosions, will grow also the mass of the deuterium in Jupiter. Something like D-synthesis chain reaction. Self-replicating system acting like a deuterium breeder reactor in order to reach point of D-amount able to be fused in the mass of Jupiter.
So, send a probe to sink deep enough in Jupiter and to float down there as a special submarine, able to withstand the terrible conditions. The probe has energy and mateials harvesting and processing plant on board and it is able to reproduce itself once a year. The probe is also multi-gigatonne neutron bomb. The probe and its progeny is programed to duplicate and explode. After an year we have one burst and two new bombs. After two another two explosions and 4 bombs. After several decades the quantity of deuterium in Jupiter reaches the critical point and it starts fusion under the natural confinement of the planet, as in the case with the pointed out from wikipedia mini-brown dwarf ( a lunar mass of pure deuterium ) or the real natural brown dwarfs. Its surface temperature reaches ~1000 degrees celsium as it was due to the gravity sqweeze immediatelly after formation (http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/first_direct_image_exoplanet.html?1092004 - about 5 times Jupiter newly found gas giant with formation residual heat resulting in surface temperature of ~1000 C, BTW any close "gallileans" to it should be within a "habitable zone") and the planet warms to the mentioned in my previous post in the theme figures for insolation of the Gallileans. Only Io is as warmed as the Earth and Europa hardly receaves some reasonable amount radiation - in the deep red and IR range. Ganymede and Callisto energy input doesn`t changes dramatically from the present level. The enormous part of this generated heat will be lost in space.
Such approach to harvesting the fusion reserves of the Jovians here and abroad is practical only if:
1. One doesn`t have means of direct fusion of protons in small scale
2. One has means of collecting all the output of the deuterium enriched artificial brown dwarf via Dyson Sphere or Swarm, Birch`s Supramundane habitat, Talbot`s Total photospere lasers or Pat Gunkle`s Topopolis complete tube-world mesh envelope...
Brown-dwarfing of Jupiter is possible, total gradual burn of its fusables is possible, BUT the major question is which is ECONOMICAL.
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