Never mind 'Nuke Mars'.. you'd need to throw a lot of snowballs at it to get that.
i.e planetary bombardment with small water-ice asteroids, so that instead of forming big impact craters, they burn up in the atmosphere. (although you could ramp up the size as the atmosphere gets thicker)
I think Ian Banks suggested it first actually... instead of a few big comets, use lots of little dirty snowballs, <=5m in size. Plus, they're easier to move. Although I think his idea was to mine Ganymede or Europe [or one of the other ice moons] and use a mass driver to slingshot the man-made snowballs around Jupiter to drop them on Mars. Which is kinda of over-engineering it.
Ice mining might well be faster, because you'd have a large source of it. But that would require a lot more energy coming from somewhere, because you'd have to haul it out of the gravity well rather than simply redirect its own motion.
Agreed, Europa and Ganymede don't have much of a gravity well, but they do have one. IIRC it was proposed to use geothermal sources on Io for power and beamcast it to the mining site. I suspect that wouldn't work really.
OTOH, you have Jupiter and save fuel/power by using a sling shot around that.
That was my thought. You'd really need to build a comet trap. Of course, you don't have to net only the little ones -- if the trap has a gizzard to break things down to safe size, catching large comets is more efficient.
The asteroid belt is roughly 30% metallic, 50% chondrite or stoney, and the rest are water/gas ice balls with some dirt... and average size is estimated to be about 10-20m in diameter. So, we could mine the asteroid belt, use the stone asteroids for 'fuel' for the mass drivers, metallic ones for resources and send the ice balls to Mars.
That'd work. The asteroid belt is conveniently close to Mars.
Which is why there's usually a Belter-Martian split, because the Belters predictably get tired of working so someone else can have a nice place to live.
Yeahhh.. pretty much. I mean, Mars is a shite hole, and it's the bright-lights big city to most Belters...but then by that point anywhere where you don't have to pay to breath and water isn't rationed by default is going to seem like paradise.
They're going to have to watch that dynamic in the future, otherwise the Belters and Martians might start throwing rocks sun-wards at Earth. After all, they have the high 'ground' so to speak.
>> Yeahhh.. pretty much. I mean, Mars is a shite hole, and it's the bright-lights big city to most Belters...but then by that point anywhere where you don't have to pay to breath and water isn't rationed by default is going to seem like paradise. <<
That depends what stage the development is at and how much effort people put into sprucing up the space they have. If it's a colonial situation like usual, that creates an inherent conflict of interest with predictably bad results. But if people are free to homestead on their own, without someone on Earth (or later, Mars) creaming off the benefits of their hard work, then sometimes you get a string of little topias ranging from bad to good to really great.
>> They're going to have to watch that dynamic in the future, otherwise the Belters and Martians might start throwing rocks sun-wards at Earth. After all, they have the high 'ground' so to speak.<<
That also happens pretty often. It's easy to predict and straightforward to avoid, but humans keep wanting to take advantage of each other, which makes actually avoiding these problems more difficult.
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dancing_serpent
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Date: 2021-06-27 11:10 am (UTC)Never mind 'Nuke Mars'.. you'd need to throw a lot of snowballs at it to get that.
i.e planetary bombardment with small water-ice asteroids, so that instead of forming big impact craters, they burn up in the atmosphere. (although you could ramp up the size as the atmosphere gets thicker)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-27 02:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-27 02:51 pm (UTC)I think Ian Banks suggested it first actually... instead of a few big comets, use lots of little dirty snowballs, <=5m in size. Plus, they're easier to move. Although I think his idea was to mine Ganymede or Europe [or one of the other ice moons] and use a mass driver to slingshot the man-made snowballs around Jupiter to drop them on Mars. Which is kinda of over-engineering it.
Well ...
Date: 2021-06-27 07:51 pm (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-06-27 08:06 pm (UTC)Agreed, Europa and Ganymede don't have much of a gravity well, but they do have one. IIRC it was proposed to use geothermal sources on Io for power and beamcast it to the mining site. I suspect that wouldn't work really.
OTOH, you have Jupiter and save fuel/power by using a sling shot around that.
Yes ...
Date: 2021-06-27 07:33 pm (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2021-06-27 07:43 pm (UTC)The asteroid belt is roughly 30% metallic, 50% chondrite or stoney, and the rest are water/gas ice balls with some dirt... and average size is estimated to be about 10-20m in diameter. So, we could mine the asteroid belt, use the stone asteroids for 'fuel' for the mass drivers, metallic ones for resources and send the ice balls to Mars.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2021-06-27 08:27 pm (UTC)Which is why there's usually a Belter-Martian split, because the Belters predictably get tired of working so someone else can have a nice place to live.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2021-06-27 08:35 pm (UTC)Yeahhh.. pretty much. I mean, Mars is a shite hole, and it's the bright-lights big city to most Belters...but then by that point anywhere where you don't have to pay to breath and water isn't rationed by default is going to seem like paradise.
They're going to have to watch that dynamic in the future, otherwise the Belters and Martians might start throwing rocks sun-wards at Earth. After all, they have the high 'ground' so to speak.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2021-06-27 09:26 pm (UTC)That depends what stage the development is at and how much effort people put into sprucing up the space they have. If it's a colonial situation like usual, that creates an inherent conflict of interest with predictably bad results. But if people are free to homestead on their own, without someone on Earth (or later, Mars) creaming off the benefits of their hard work, then sometimes you get a string of little topias ranging from bad to good to really great.
>> They're going to have to watch that dynamic in the future, otherwise the Belters and Martians might start throwing rocks sun-wards at Earth. After all, they have the high 'ground' so to speak.<<
That also happens pretty often. It's easy to predict and straightforward to avoid, but humans keep wanting to take advantage of each other, which makes actually avoiding these problems more difficult.