#Ftl terraforming series#

His 'moholes' wouldn't work at all - it would soon get back into equilibrium, perhaps warm it up by a fraction of a degree for a short while. See the podcast here and summary on Io9 here here. We have to fix our problems on Earth to have any hope of surviving on the timescales of the book. He says that we can’t use Mars as a ‘backup planet’. Kim Stanley Robinson himself says that it would take far longer than his trilogy suggests, which is based on 1980s ideas. The main focus is on social issues but he has a backdrop of terraforming with plausible sounding science, and this has influenced many people to think that terraforming Mars would be easy and accomplished as soon as a couple of centuries. In this he envisions Mars terraformed and developing a planet spanning civilization in a couple of centuries.

#Ftl terraforming series#

This is a series of three books, Red, Green and Blue Mars that came out in the mid 1990s together with a book of short stories with the history as backgrop called “The Martians”.

Many of you may be influenced by Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars' trilogy which gave the impression that we can terraform Mars in a few generations. Fi Teeshirts What about Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Mars' trilogy? Nukes Can NEVER Terraform Mars - A Million Tsar Bomba's, Largest Nuke Ever Made, Can't Do It - Elon Musk's Sci. Still it may be fun to find out why not, and I'll look at some other ideas for terraforming Mars and also the ethical dilemmas that it would involve if we did ever find a practical way to do it. That's about all you could do with nukes on Mars. It would soon melt over but it would remain liquid for some time beneath the ice. You could however use a nuke to melt a lake in the polar ice caps. Not make it habitable as in Earth habitable or even close. or it would just freeze out again pretty quickly.Īnd anyway, as we'll see, it wouldn't work. Anyway the atmosphere still would need continual extra warming even if you did liberate the carbon dioxide (CO 2), (that's the reason for the giant space mirrors). Giant space mirrors, yes, impacting comets yes, artificial greenhouse gases much more powerful than carbon dioxide or water vapour, yes, these have all been suggested, but nukes, they are just not powerful enough. There has never been any paper suggesting nuclear weapons could terraform Mars, either quickly or slowly, not on their own anyway, AFAIK. And even then not at all clear it would do much to Mars. This is just way way into the realm of Sci. To keep two such suns going constantly you need to make around 3000 nuclear bombs every day, in a production line, constnatly transporting them to Mars and then exploding them over the poles. It is then moving at about 1 ,150 feet per second, which is slightly faster than the speed of sound at sea level.ĬHAPTER II: Descriptions of Nuclear Explosions At 50 seconds after the explosion, when the fireball is no longer visible, the blast wave has traveled about 12 miles. A nuclear explosion lasts less than a minuteĪfter the lapse of 10 seconds, when the fireball of a 1-megaton nuclear weapon has attained its maximum size (5,700 feet across), the shock front is some 3 miles farther ahead. Which takes it into the realm of science fiction, a factory of some sort making so many nuclear bombs that you can explode them constantly. 'What I was talking about,' said Musk, 'was having a series of very large, by our standards, but very small by calamity standards-essentially having two tiny pulsing suns over the poles.”Įlon Musk Clarifies His Suggestion To Terraform Mars By Nuking It In response to all those criticisms, Elon Musk later clarified it by saying that he meant nuclear weapons detonating continuously over both poles of Mars to create two new mini suns - a far future sci. Also we've been getting several serious questions about it on quora today as a result, basically social media is buzzing with it today.Īnd it's an interesting question, so, given that there is so much buzz about it today, I think it is worth looking at it anyway, in detail :). For instance, the Independent reports Want to make Mars hospitable? Drop nuclear bombs, says Elon Musk and many other headlines of that nature today. Joking, remark has been taken by some reporters, reported as a major I found it surprising how seriously his rather off the cuff, and He just says 'The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons on the poles': He just says 'The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons on the poles': He talks about it here at 2 minutes in to this video. But is there any potential in the idea? He talks about it here at 2 minutes in to this video. I think it is reasonably clear he was not putting forward a serious worked out future plan for Mars.