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Related: About this forumHere's the stupid reason Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars
Source: The Next Web
Heres the stupid reason Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars
by TRISTAN GREENE 1 day ago in DISTRACT
lon Musk aka Lex Luthor in spirit is on social media yapping about nuking Mars again. Hes not trolling; hes not acting as a provocateur; he really wants to bombard the surface of our planetary neighbor with actual nuclear weapons.
Link to tweet
Heres why: he thinks itll kick-start the planet and make it habitable by releasing trapped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hes been pushing this theory since at least 2015 when he told Stephen Colbert that Mars was a fixer-upper and that we could fix it by nuking it. According to scientists, hes mostly wrong.
NASA research indicates that dropping nuclear weapons on Mars will release some carbon dioxide, but not enough to make it even close to Earth-like. A 2018 study indicates that there simply isnt enough carbon dioxide on the planet to make that big a difference. Currently, Mars has an atmospheric carbon dioxide content of about .6 percent of the Earths. If we let Elon Musk fire off nukes at it, scientists believe thatll raise it to a mere 7 percent of the Earths.
But thats not stopping the controversial billionaire engineer from riling up his 28 million Twitter fans with tweets talking about nuking the red planet and selling T-shirts:
Link to tweet
Its unclear where Musks getting his information from he could be speculating or riffing off of related research but weve been able to find nothing peer-reviewed to indicate that terraforming Mars is possible in any way using current technology.
-snip-
Read more: https://thenextweb.com/distract/2019/08/16/heres-the-stupid-reason-elon-musk-wants-to-nuke-mars/
klook
(12,154 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,653 posts)even if we did "adjust" the CO2 level, it would be temporary, because the solar wind would just strip it away.
Wounded Bear
(58,653 posts)Mr Musk seems woefully ignorant of basic science. Mars has been pretty well studied over the past couple of decades. The lack of a magnetic field knowledge dates back to the Voyager and Pioneer probes in the late 70's IIRC.
RockRaven
(14,966 posts)And it does not take any special training or knowledge to a) encounter this argument or b) understand it.
NickB79
(19,236 posts)Remember, it took millions of years for Mars to bleed off it's native atmosphere when it's magnetic field died.
If we could magically give Mars a full-Earth-pressure atmosphere today, it would be habitable for hundreds of thousands of years even without a magnetic field.
PSPS
(13,595 posts)Not ever paying any taxes is one root cause of this parasitic disease that foists the likes of Musk on mankind.
NNadir
(33,517 posts)...his car for millionaires and billionaires is some kind of environmental wonder.
It is anything but that. Even if it were good for the environment - it isn't - the fact is that it still depends on cobalt mined by slaves, some of them children.
His launching of his stupid car into space was one of the most obscene pieces of marketing of which I have ever seen, even worse than Jeeps driving over pristine rock formations.
defacto7
(13,485 posts)ice cream sandwiches would have a similar effect without the fireworks. Just call me a dull boy.
NickB79
(19,236 posts)There are synthetic gases available that are 7000X as effective as CO2. Mine the soil for raw materials.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/10/new-greenhouse-gas-powerful-chemical-perfluorotributylamine
NNadir
(33,517 posts)NickB79
(19,236 posts)I can see your point if we found life there, but a lifeless world?
NNadir
(33,517 posts)Never mind. Let's pollute the shit out of Earth firing rockets to strip mine Mars.
Lord knows we're polluting the shit out of "dead" deserts to built wind farms.