Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Would you trust Musk with hundreds of H-bombs?
Elon Musk Wants to ‘Nuke Mars’ for Humans to Live—But There Is One Problem
By Sissi Cao • 08/16/19 12:17pm
Firing nuclear weapons at Mars might have been the last idea on Elon Musk’s mind before going to bed last night. “Nuke Mars!” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted Thursday night a few minutes past midnight, prompting a Twitter frenzy with over 100,000 likes by Friday morning.
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He later clarified that the plan is not to drop nuclear bombs on the surface of Mars, but in the sky above its two poles. Specifically, Musk wants to drop hydrogen bombs (which use fusion) into the atmosphere above the Martian poles every few seconds to release the carbon dioxide trapped inside Mars’ ice caps.
Because CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, the more CO2 Mars can release into the atmosphere, the warmer the planet’s surface will be. The effect is similar to how the fusion process inside the sun produces energy to keep Earth warm.
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Read more: https://observer.com/2019/08/elon-musk-nuke-mars-colonization-plan-spacex/
The article goes on to cite a study which concludes that the plan is not feasible.
Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars
Bruce M. Jakosky &
Christopher S. Edwards
Nature Astronomyvolume 2, pages 634–639 (2018)We revisit the idea of ‘terraforming’ Mars — changing its environment to be more Earth-like in a way that would allow terrestrial life (possibly including humans) to survive without the need for life-support systems — in the context of what we know about Mars today. We want to answer the question of whether it is possible to mobilize gases present on Mars today in non-atmospheric reservoirs by emplacing them into the atmosphere, and increase the pressure and temperature so that plants or humans could survive at the surface. We ask whether this can be achieved considering realistic estimates of available volatiles, without the use of new technology that is well beyond today’s capability. Recent observations have been made of the loss of Mars’s atmosphere to space by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission probe and the Mars Express spacecraft, along with analyses of the abundance of carbon-bearing minerals and the occurrence of CO2 in polar ice from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. These results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be emplaced into the atmosphere; in addition, most of the CO2 gas in these reservoirs is not accessible and thus cannot be readily mobilized. As a result, we conclude that terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6
Its probably worth having a closer look at Mars before dismissing the idea. The opportunity is potentially so enormous we shouldn’t write off the plan based on an aerial survey; a ground based survey might settle the question more definitively.
But even if this daring plan gets the go-ahead, I’m not keen on Musk being the person in charge of all those H-bombs.
Are people really taking a tweet seriously from a (probably) sleep deprived man just before he goes to bed? I don’t know about anybody else, but that’s not when I do my clearest thinking.
Mars is a dead planet so it wouldn’t make much difference. But that distinction would seem to imply that there’d be no radiation concerns because they’d be H-Bombs (fussion) and not on the surface.
Last I heard, the detonator for an H-bomb IS a nuclear (fission) bomb.
Yes the detonator is an atom bomb … !
nuke mars? https://icebergisle.com/products/nuke-mars
This made me laugh!
……’ …Because CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas…..’ ? Eh? Says it all about him and he rest
Even though Mars has higher partial pressure of CO2 than Earth it doesn’t have enough surface pressure to broaden those wimpy, thin CO2 absorption lines. Moreover, there is not enough other gases, greenhouse or otherwise, for local thermodynamic equilibrium to prevail.
There are reasons why Mars has little atmosphere – No magnetic field to protect it and too little gravity. Nuking Mars would accomplish nothing except polluting the surface with radioactive materials.
If you want to live on Mars, then you need to start aiming comets at it gradually building up both gravity and water. If you do this long enough, say a few thousand years, you might then have a planet capable of hanging on to some of it’s water and atmosphere (other than ice). You would have to keep replenishing the atmosphere because of the lack of a magnetic field strong enough to protect it.
In any case, it ain’t happening in Musk’s lifetime.
I really get tired of this guys’s idiotic ideas, don’t you? Tell people what you think.
Get your Nuke Musk! shirt here:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/professorjaytee/works/40651980-nuke-musk?asc=u&p=classic-tee
As Mars supposedly has 2 sites with XE-129 atomic weapons signature , Maybe someone or thing could say ” Been there , done that Elon ! “.
He builds geat rockets, tho!
“Its probably worth having a closer look at Mars before dismissing the idea. ”
Even if CO2 was as powerful as the IPCC claims, this idea is trivial to dismiss. Just considering it as potentially viable is silly. If Mars had the same 1 ATM atmospheric pressure as Earth and the same amount of atmospheric CO2 Mars has now, the atmospheric concentration would be well over 10000 ppm. Any additional CO2 will have little, if any, incremental GHG effect.
The scientific reality is that CO2 is at least 3-4 times less powerful at warming the surface then claimed by the IPCC which turns silliness into insanity. Pegging our future on terraforming Mars with GHG’s is an exercise in futility. It’s about as insane as dropping a nuke into Yellowstone to cool the Earth.