(no subject)

[threeplusfire]

My dream of terraforming Mars may be crushed by physics. The planet might be too small to sustain an atmosphere, with escape velocity being low. Damn. This might make me cry.

To dull the pain, I bought cds for the first time in almost a year. David Bowie's new Heathen and Our Lady Peace's Clumsy. I don't think the new Our Lady Peace album is out yet. They are however, playing July 17th at Stubb's and I am determined to get tickets.

Slowly cleaning the apartment. I have moved lots ot things out of the living room, and picked up all the papers scattered about. The kitchen just has a lot of things sitting on the counter. Now if I could only clean my room.

Comments

it's not nice to insult someone's childhood dream

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

As if biospheres aren't? We couldn't even get one running in Arizona, it went toxic in less than a year.

Re: it's not nice to insult someone's childhood dream

[amp23.livejournal.com]

i didn't mean to insult your dream...

it's just that terraforming requires not only putting an atmosphere on a rock, that atmosphere has to be warm enough to keep the necessary elements in a gas state. Mars does not have that warmth, and short of moving it to the earth's orbit or putting a massive nuclear reactor in the core, there's no way of doing it and still staying within the laws of physics...

biodomes sufficient for colonizing other planets haven't been perfected yet, but it's a much closer possibility than bringing an entire planet from sub-zero to the thin temperature range needed to support human life...

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Ideally I suppose we would jump start the planet's engine and see if we could create a dynamo that would generate a magentic field and help provide heat. You need magnetism and warmth enough to generate some kind of atmosphere. The problem I see is the low mass/low escape velocity. The atmosphere would probably whip off in less than half a billion years. Not that any of us will live long enough to care about that, but still. I think you would have to start in the canyons.