Atmosphere's worth of dry ice found at Mars south pole | Hacker News Reader

Atmosphere's worth of dry ice found at Mars south pole

arstechnica.com

38 pointsevo_913 comments

While part of me likes that this doesn't have a breathless tone about terraforming possibilities, another part of me really would like to hear some intelligent analysis of the impact on terraforming possibilities.

Without larger magnetic field the sun would blow the atmosphere into space.

How does the atmosphere it has now remain there?

I believe small amount left is relative to the small amount of magnetism protecting from the solar winds.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-atmosphere-00b.html

What is the actual story of Mars's magnetic field and would we ever have the tech to create one?

As things stand now, we don't have a perfect understanding of how the Earth's core works. Even if we did, though, the amount of energy that would be required to start up a magnetic field on another planet would be, well, astronomical. Keep in mind, the planet weighs 6x10^23 kilograms. A full mole of kilograms is going to take a lot to get spinning.

Will we ever have that much energy at our disposal? That depends on how likely you think humans are to a) annihilate ourselves and b) continue our roughly exponential growth of technology indefinitely.

Re-spinning the core is unlikely to be the best approach. Winding a giant cable around the equator and pushing a giant current through it is probably within our capacity, though orders of magnitude more expensive than any project ever attempted.

Should we ever have that much energy at our disposal, I think we're pretty likely to annihilate ourselves with it

If we have that much energy at our disposal, we'll presumably be so spread out we'll be incapable of annihilating ourselves all in one go. Some will remain to learn from the mistakes of others, and the anti-tech-crazies will get to say "we told you so".

China is building 400 nuclear reactors over the next 30 years, that would do it.

Not even close.

reminds me of Total Recall.

Welcome to Hacker News! I see your account is brand new, so please accept this HN pointer...

I'm sure plenty of people thought of Total Recall when reading the headline, but most realized that it didn't actually contribute anything of substance to the conversation. If we were on reddit, I'd chime in with a Schwarzenegger quote and it would cascade into an Arnold quote thread, we'd all have a laugh and move on with our lives. But this is HN where we try not to be your typical Internet hangout. If you can't add value to the discussion, just read and appreciate what others have to say.

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