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An absolutely bonkers plan to give Mars an artificial magnetosphere:
As the study points out, if you want a good planetary magnetic field, what you really need is a strong flow of charged particles, either within the planet or around the planet. Since the former isn't a great option for Mars, the team looks at the latter. It turns out you can create a ring of charged particles around Mars, thanks to its moon Phobos.
Phobos is the larger of the two Martian moons, and it orbits the planet quite closely—so closely that it makes a trip around Mars every eight hours. So the team proposes using Phobos by ionizing particles from its surface, then accelerating them so they create a plasma torus along the orbit of Phobos. This would create a magnetic field strong enough to protect a terraformed Mars.
It's a bold plan, and while it seems achievable, the engineering hurdles would be significant. But as the authors point out, this is the time for ideas. Start thinking about the problems we need to solve, and how we can solve them, so when humanity does reach Mars, we will be ready to put the best ideas to the test.
Simple solution, really. It's the dependencies that are a bear...
Journal Reference:
R. A. Bamford, B. J. Kelletta, J. L. Green, et al How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars
(DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.09.023https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2021.09.023
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 23 2021, @07:20PM (1 child)
Part of me thinks that colonizing the solar system will be accomplished by private players. They'll take all the risks, figure out what works, and enjoy a halcyon period before the criminals who call themselves governments try to muscle in on the action.
Maybe, though, with decentralization in software, and increasingly hardware, it may not pan out the same way it always has. It used to be that governments and the powerful had a monopoly on information, but now that monopoly has been broken. We're still going through that process, of course, but we can see the light at the end of that tunnel. It's possible that we can see that phenomenon spread to hardware and energy.
Maybe we'll get human colonies that successfully maintain their autonomy. They'll attract the best and brightest and become incubators for the next quantum leap in human capabilities. Ganymede, Mars, Europa, Enceladus will form the constellation of competition for the title among our grand kids. It's far-fetched, but then the world we live in now wasn't even a twinkle in the eye when I was a kid.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 23 2021, @07:53PM
The current culture of openness, and the tech revolution that made spying / copying trivial, should continue to be transformative. Anybody with the resources (Bezos through Branson - pretty thin slice of the population, really) should be able to pull off manned launches to wherever they have the balls to pay for. However, the billionaires exist as a result of each other's tolerance. If one gets too far out of line, the others will take him down. If one starts behaving badly on the Moon, according to the others, I believe they will quickly find their operational profit margins flipped into the red - it's amazing how easy that is to do with government incentives, taxes, and regulatory filing requirements.
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