The 1990 movie Total Recall was about an implanted memory in which Arnold Schwarzenegger Terraformed Mars by melting the ice. The movie featured this car.
Arnie had a few problems there with the low atmospheric pressure which caused his skin to boil.
At low atmospheric pressures, the boiling point of water is close to the freezing point.
Now Elon Musk is talking about melting the subterranean ice on Mars, which would cause it to quickly boil away and dissipate into space. He also has his own Total Recall car.
I want to be the first to comment on this and be the first to help make this a dream come true, to warm up Mars, so we all have a planet to escape to, if needed…. wait a second isn’t Mars the planet that has 95% CO2 in its atmosphere? never mind that I want to help contribute to warm the planet of Mars and I have an old space heater that I will donate to the cause. it does have to be plugged in and I’m not sure where to plug it in….. but never mind the details… Walmart’s having a sale on extension cords so we can work that out… lol
Musk will say anything to rationalize the absolutely irrational.
His Mars Mission plans.
His argument that Mars is good for humanities long term survival(in case of another devastating dinosaur-meteor-impact) is nonsense,as even then survivability on earth would be thousand times easier because even then life on earth would be 1000 times easier as result of easier access to ressources,o2
and warmer climate while even the most simple task on Mars requires a highly specialized expensive suit and everything must be imported.
And building dozens of huge underground shelters for a sufficient number of humans and animals all around the world is still way cheaper than his Mars Mission.
Terraforming does not work:
We can”t even stop a 0.001% increase of co2(not even fake warming) in our atmosphere with trillions of dollars,yet we want to transform Mars atmosphere 🙂
It took trillions of tons of Cyanobacteria all around the planet half a billion years to transform our atmosphere into a liveable o2 atmosphere.
There is no machine that can even do a fraction of a fraction of that in a trillion years.
The heating of Mars is impossible as it would require thousands of fission reactors and all the molten water would get lost drop by drop all over the planet(even if it would not get lost to space) and absorbed by the “soil”.
Covering Mars with soot won’t work as winds would simply blow it away.
It is way cheaper to built a meteor protection system inside our solar system
to manipulate the direction of incoming objects by the tiniest of degrees.
If far enough away this should make dangerous objects
miss earth by tens of thousands of miles later on.
But if he wants to fly to Mars.
Let him.
Even if it totally fails it will become one of the biggest stories in human history.
But not the way he wishes.
But maybe he will get less ambitious and get the idea
that the first step to colonize Mars is to colonize the Moon first.
Where in theory,one can sent help within 24 hours,if things go wrong.
And to get the necessary experience and data about longterm survival,ressource extraction,attrition etc on far away objects
with a superhostile environment.
Btw – the short story the movie is based on is really good..
A bit dusty but with a nice twist at the end.
Since he first made a name for himself Musk has made my skin crawl in the same way that Barry Hussein, the former homosexual prostitute/voodoo priest minus the little tophat, does. The fact that his alleged girl-thing is named Grimes should tell us all we need to know. The Mission to Mars is idiot-theater and the idiots buy into it. Just “Elon” having fun trolling the eaters. As you mentioned everything would have to be imported. What’s to stop Mars from imposing high tariffs? And inevitable supply chain disruptions due to the scheduled pandemics – ‘Mission control to Mars base: Sorry guys, male and female equally, you’ll just have to eat sand for the next six months.” And you neglected to mention that covering the poles with soot will leave an enormous Carbon Footprint. The Greenie Fruitbats will go mental, blocking traffic and gluing themselves to hand rails
Import is not a problem as long as you have a product to sell/Export. Of course they could print Mars Dollars and make it the intergalactic currency.
”There is no machine that can even do a fraction of a fraction of that in a trillion years.”
Volcanism could do the job just like on Earth. They used to have a big one I believe.
I wouldn’t call it a machine.
And the stuff blown out ain’t usually what you desire.
And how many million years are we away from controlling volcano outbreaks.
And we would need 1000s of them for many 1000 years (which would end in many earhquakes as result of hollowing out the planet)
And how much heat is left inside a supercold planet after 5 billion years.
We are still at the initial exploration stage of the Moon and Mars in which the resources available and how they can be exploited to achieve self-sufficiency is to be determined. It will be a good fifty years before the pioneer stage can begin, let alone the settlement stage. Those who imagine an Earth-like bucolic great outdoors are likely to be disappointed. Suffice it to say that initial colonization will not favour the claustrophobic. What the colonies will look like depends on the resources available. Demanding an Earth like environment is rather like a technocratic Inuit demanding the deserts to be frozen so that igloos can be built there.
In order to get surface temperature and pressure comparable to that on the Earth, something like 27 tonnes of gas must be introduced into the atmosphere for every square metre of the surface. Good luck with that.
Terraforming Mars requires the out gassing of about 4×10^15 tonnes. This achieves the desired surface temperature through gravitational compression of the circulating gas (the real reason Venus is hot) as well as an acceptable surface pressure. This represents a long term (probably never) goal. However, it seems more likely that colonization would be underground, as depicted in Total Recall, as conditions on the surface are distinctly unhealthy. Also, the much lower gravity permits far deeper mines than the few kilometres which are possible on Earth. What mineral wealth exists within, say five kilometers of the surface, is unknown, as we have literally only scratched the surface.
Underground will be the only viable option – probably forever.
As any leak in an artificial shell has the potential to wipe out the entire colony.(keep in mind that all those many tiny asteroids/stones/meteors whatever
that are being burned by our Atmosphere face significantly less resistance on Mars and turn there into bullets.)
+ the isolation may be far better underground.
As we already have a bit of a problem to sustain colonies in Antarctica(I don’t think that any station there is selfsufficiant by now), Mars will be a completely different animal.
The Zelensky amongst projects,
where you’ll pump hundreds of billions for no reason and the tiny green men will always complain and ask for more.
And who wants to travel millions of miles to spent the rest of their life underground..
You can do this already on earth
or move to Antarctica .
It’s warmer and its only dark half of the year while Mars underground is eternal darkness.
In the end – after those with suicidel fame wish have arrived and the hype is gone – the only colonizers will be autonomous robots.
As those are less vulnerable,more durable and recyclable and one can use their spare parts.
And they do not need superexpensive suits that can be damaged and leak any second while mining.
A single just-in-csase caretaker,a DEI hire and an inclusivity expert will eventually be the only humans there.
“The Zelensky amongst projects,..” Funny. Trump did state in his surreal inaugural address ” “We’re going to plant the American flag on Mars!” and he’s a man of his word, sometimes. It will be called “Stars and Stripes Forever – Project Zelensky” (chants of USA! USA!). It will be completed entirely by diversity hires, transgender minority womyn, and unencumbered by toxic masculinity and transphobic racisms they will accomplish the task at Warp Speed. But wait, the US (not “American”) flag was placed on the Martian surface in 1976 with the first Viking lander prominently featured in a true color photograph, red, white, and blue. The sky on the horizon was blue. Many surface photos from subsequent landers/rovers were overlaid with a chocolate brown patina. For reasons unknown