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Comment by revicon | Hacker News Reader

With no magnetosphere would there even be a point to terraforming?

Terraforming is an engineering project on such a scale it's probably reasonable to assume advancements like radiation resistance/repair in humans and artificial magnetic fields. For example, this apparently feasible (but currently batshit crazy) proposal: https://www.universetoday.com/153368/an-absolutely-bonkers-p...

A strategically placed powerful magnet outside Mars can protect from the solar wind. There is an orbit that places the orbiting body always on the line between Mars and Sun. Place a superconducting magnet there that generates a few Tesla. Due to the distance from the planet, even though the magnet will deflect more distant particles to relatively small angles, this should still be enough to keep Mars completely in the "shadow".

Of course you'll have to and solar-powered thrusters to keep it on the orbit, and fly regular missions to replenish fuel in the ion drives. But thil looks doable even with today's level of technology, given enough money.

The ‘intuitive’ strategy of building a compact electromagnet and placing it between Mars and the Sun at the first Lagrange point is unfeasible. The most feasible design is to encircle or wrap Mars at the equator with a superconducting wire loop. The resulting wire diameter could be as small as ∼5 cm. With this design, the magnetic shield would have a mass of ∼10^12 g and would require mining ∼10^18 g, or only 0.1% of Olympus Mons. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.05546.pdf

Maintaining an atmosphere is a lot easier than creating it in the first place, and can use the same process and machines. In other words just live with the slow loss and replace the loss gradually.

I think what I meant is with no magnetosphere we would all die of radiation exposure regardless if there was a terraformed atmosphere or not. Without a magnetosphere we'd all be living underground anyway, no point in terraforming.

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