Elon Musk wants to nuke the Martian ice caps, in order to release CO2 and warm the place up.
Making Mars habitable is a goal of some very smart people, mostly because one day — either due to environmental disaster, an expanding sun, or any other number of disaster scenarios — the Earth will become uninhabitable.
But is nuking Mars really the best way to create a new Earth?
Why it might work
Right now, Mars seems like a dry, dead planet. But its polar ice caps contain about equal parts water and carbon dioxide.Nuclear weapons could be used to vaporize them, releasing those materials into the atmosphere. Once the atmosphere got thick enough, the greenhouse effect would kick in: energy from the sun, absorbed by the planet and released as infrared radiation, would be trapped.
That would continue heating up the planet, releasing more carbon dioxide, setting off a chain reaction until, ideally, the surface pressure of Mars would increase enough for liquid water to exist — making it much more habitable for oxygen-producing plants.
“You could start turning Mars from a red planet into a green planet,” Michael Shara, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s astrophysics department, told NBC News.
Would Elon Musk’s Plan to Nuke Mars Actually Work? – NBC News
You just can’t make up stupid like this.
- The nukes would only melt a small amount of ice, an hour later the temperature would be the same as it was before, and the ice would refreeze. Alarmists are always bragging about global warming accumulating billions of nukes every year.
- The Martian atmosphere is already 95% CO2. Adding more will have essentially zero effect on the radiative balance. The Martian atmosphere contains about ten times as many CO2 molecules as Earth’s atmosphere, but the temperature there is -60C.
- The total mass of the Martian ice caps (1.6E18 kg) if entirely evaporated, would only bring the atmospheric pressure on Mars up to about one third of Earth. This couldn’t happen, because half of the ice caps are water, and would remain frozen. The highest atmospheric pressure you could realistically hope for would be about 150 mb. At that pressure, the temperature on Mars would remain well below freezing.
Seventy years ago, scientists wanted to nuke Antarctica to melt the ice cap. They never get any smarter.
01 Feb 1947 – World of Science Atom Bomb To Reveal Antarctic R…
Musk isn’t stupid though. It is just one more of his schemes to extract billions of dollars from the US government.
This lunacy from the man who promises to save the world with his little batteries. I imagine there quite a few thinking this might work. Mars cannot be made habitable. It’s gravity is far too low.
Gees Alan, they will just create artificial gravity..
…. just like they created artificial warming.
Would Mars actually be able to hang on to water molecules or would they just zip off into space – gone forever?
Even his Tesla Co. cannot survive without massive subsidies from the taxpayer.
The entire scam hinges on government paying for tesla owners’ electricity.
Uh . . .electricity and their beloved hydrogen gas are not sources of energy. They are energy transport media. The electricity must be generated by true fuel source, the one of choice for the US is our world class coal resources. Electric cars are actually coal fired cars. Don’t tell the tree huggers, they might get violent.
What if we nuke Mars and the Martians retaliate? 🙂
“The Martian atmosphere is already 95% CO2. Adding more will have essentially zero effect on the radiative balance. The Martian atmosphere contains about ten times as many CO2 molecules as Earth’s atmosphere, but the temperature there is -60C.”
Doesn’t this disprove the hypothesis that CO2 “traps heat?”
I’m in favor of it, on one condition. I want to see the numbers before they start. They need to tell us exactly what temperature they expect for any given atmospheric pressure and CO2 percentage. Then we’d have… What do they call it in real sciences? A falsifiable hypothesis.
Nuking the hell out of mars is a much cheaper way to test their theory than destroying the world’s economies. And at least we’d get a legitimate scientific test, instead of today’s double talking. You can fudge temperatures all you want, but you can’t fudge the phase of pure water. It’s either liquid, or it’s not.
I’m in.
I’m not very worried about the Martian idiots or any other national climate hoaxsters for that matter. Here in the People’s Republik of Kalifornia our fearless leader Moonbeam Brown is on a full frontal attack to eliminate all fossil fuel sources in the state by 2025. He has vowed to put oil companies out of business (requires a massive taking or private property but that is no big hurdle for our Marxist regime) within a few years and shut down all power plants in the same time period. He is already in the process of spending a $trillion on a high speed rail to nowhere. They already put the ag industry out of business with a man caused water shortage. When oil goes the only significant industry left in this state will be welfare for illegal aliens. Sad demise for an economy that only a decade ago was equivalent to the 7th larges nation in the world. I am 66 and making way too much obscene profit as a petroleum engineer but when I retire I am leaving my once beloved California birth home for Texas.
And we will welcome you. Just don’t bring along any idiots or illegals. 🙂
What I’m wondering is, will Moonbeam mandate a new, separate power grid, just for changing Teslas?
Oh, and that train to nowhere is electric, too. Fortunately, it’ll never actually get built.
Has anyone ever asked Moonbeam why he hates his father so much? Most of these projects he’s trying to tear down were built by his father, Pat Brown.
A high speed train dependent upon wind and solar power. Obviously will need a train load of Tesla batteries for backup power at night and on cloudy days.
Imagine trying to keep to a schedule on a cloudy windless day 🙂
Don’t knock Musk he is a genius. A genius at extracting money from the US government. Between Tesla and SpaceX the government has already given him four billion dollars in subsidies and grants.
Of course it helps if you have politicians who want to be seen to be doing something. They can alway point to Musk as a success even if you have to call a car such as Tesla with a range of 400 miles (if there is no air-con or heating turned on) followed by hours of recharging before you can continue.
Yes, we would need to continue to bomb the ice caps to keep them liquid, probably 1000 nuclear bombs a day should do it, continuously forever, with people wearing radiation suits that double as space suits because Mars has a poisonous CO2 atmosphere and no oxygen. Nobody would be able to remove the suit to bathe, which doesn’t matter because there’s no water to bathe with.
CO2 isn’t poisonous. You just can’t live by breathing it without sufficient O2 as well. What you are saying is like claiming water is poisonous because it is possible to drown in it.
Apologies for my pedantry.
Pedantry. 😉
The atmosphere of Mars is poisonous to human beings because it has the wrong balance of CO2 and O2 and N2..
MW clearly said it was the atmosphere that was poisonous, even mentioned why..
He never said that CO2 in and of itself was poisonous. 🙂
ps.. did you know that if you breathe pure oxygen for too long, it is also poisonous. 🙂
Its all about the interchange between O2 and CO2 in the human lungs.
Elon Musk faced steep competition from 5,000+ physicists at CERN who have little or no understanding of physics but managed to grab the headlines with scary stories about the possible consequences of “head-on collisions“ between particles accelerated to high energy.
CERN’s Large Hadron experiment shows all the finesse of five year old children running locomotives of toy trains together in “head-on collisions“ to see what happens.
The timing of CERN’s scary news reports, just before 9-11-2015, is intriguing.
Here are two entries from CERN’s 5,000+ physicists in steep international competition for the “Intergalactic Stupid Science Award“
http://wchildblog.com/2015/09/03/cern-scary-apocalyptic-events-september-2015-high/
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/scientists-built-most-powerful-physics-182927605.html
Are CERN’s 5,000+ physicists all Stalin’s scientists? tinyurl.com/na7exfc
Hey, I saw that movie. Final scene from ” Total Recall.” The Schwartenegger version, not the remake (didn’t see that one). Setting off the alien machine restored the Martian atmosphere.
Gayle Combs, whom we have not heard from for a while, and I have the same fundamental beliefs
Well, generally anyway.
First, regardless of what gets said, we have probably picked the lowest fruit on the fossil fuel tree,
and, we have done it in a century. I do not know how long our store of fossil fuels will last, but the radiant energy stored in them was stored over eons of time. The storehouse will maybe last a long, long time, but it is finite.
Contrast that with the warmist idea of using current solar irradiance. Regardless of how it gets
calculated, energy is very quantifiable and small minds will not accept the fact that it will be insufficient. Useful yes, sufficient no, and far from it.
Other things like geothermal or gravity (tides) will help but not much and of course things like tides have a very low efficiency.
The solution that Gayle and I agree on, in fact I am sure that someday it will be inevitable. is energy from within the atom will be the primary source instead of all the rest which is stored in the energy levels on the outside
We agree that some day nuclear energy will be used in a process to produce fossil fuel like compounds and the energy derived could be essentially limitless.
Then we could simply send the waste products to mars. (Maybe to melt the ice caps ::) )
Darrylb,
Yes, we have picked the lowest fruit of the fossil fuel tree.
That is why we must eliminate the falsehoods in nuclear and radiation physics so we can make rational decisions on the use of nuclear energy.
I encourage you and other talented readers to invest 1.5 hours watching Galen Winsor’s video on the nuclear radiation scam:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3VIFmZpFco
Yes, I know that is a big favor to ask, but unrealistic fear of nuclear radiation may have been promoted by fossil fuel companies for their own self-interest. History shows that Hiroshima recovered an became a bustling city.
Sorry. That was the wrong video. It shows the NASA Administrator releasing data from the 1995 Galileo probe of Jupiter.
This one is the lecture by Radiation Safety Officer Galen Winsor on unrealistic fear of nuclear radiation after WWII:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ejCQrOTE-XA&feature=player_embedded
Does anyone know what happened to Gayle? I hope she is OK.
Andy, I am fine
I managed to make it back from Indiana safely despite trying to drive a dually south from the Kentucky/Indiana border on 421. I really really hate heights especially when the narrow road is crumbling and the guard rail is half way down the cliff…. My hands have finally uncramped.
I have been digging fence post to put in a new pasture for my sheep. Hope to have it completed in a couple of days. I have been reading but not posting.
Glad to see Henry P. has now join us.
Glad you’re back Gail.
If you’re good at controlling sheep, you might get a well-paying federal job.
That part of 421 and some other parts are noted as a great for motorcycle rides. Not for dually with trailer unless one likes challenges.
rah, I’ve heard somewhere that Gail is Evel Knievel’s younger sister.
Glad you’re back Gayle .
Nuke Mars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2&v=wzJv2dCJ2xk
Nice.
Never mind the carbon dioxide, water, gravity and so on. Mars has a solid, cold core. There is no equivalent van Allen belt or magnetosphere to help protect the planet from lethal cosmic radiation
Exactly!
The core collapse happened 6.3 million years ago and it never had the key chemical-magnetic material constituents to support the infrastructure such as our planet earth enjoys…
The collapse strived for a full reversal (just like ours does periodically), but was unable to do so…
I’ll write that down
Nor to protect it from the solar wind which will just blow a good bit of the atmosphere away! Why create something that can’t be sustained?
A much more peaceful way to colonize Mars:
https://pianetax.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/archeo-misteri-magazine-luglio-2015/
If all you have is a nuke, every problem looks like earth.
Ouch! I think you nailed it!
Why not try it on the Middle East first, to see if we can make that habitable? 😉
Bad Gator!
When it freezes over …
Very much on topic..
couldn’t happen to a more worthwhile bunch of freeloaders.. 🙂
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/mammoth-european-carbon-fraud-uncovered/
https://vjindigo.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/mars-aliens-telling-fuck-off-go-home.jpg
Obama plans to help Muslims make Minot North Dakota habitable…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNvHAjcHAvs