By Albert Burneko

9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    You just put a giant magnet in space at Mars’ L1 Lagrange point (the orbital point that is stable between Mars and the sun), and then it will block the solar wind that strips Mars’ atmosphere.

    lol… According to your own citation, this wacky scheme was just a talk at some conference. Like the researchers said, it’s “fanciful”. It’s not real.

    The confident dismissiveness of the author’s tone on a subject that they are (clearly) not an expert in, let alone took the time to google

    This is rich coming from someone who posts articles that they didn’t read.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      Yeah bud, there’s also these little shelters called caves.

      The author of the article literally guffaws at the prospect of respinning a planet’s core when that’s not remotely how you would approach that problem.

      It would be like writing an article saying “Come on, you believe in vaccines? What, you think a scientist can cut open your individual cells and put antibodies in each one? You really think they have tweezers that small? Get real dum dum.”