SimEarth: Terraforming Mars by the Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "Today NASA has an online terraforming simulation based on the McKay/Zubrin/Fogg model of Mars' weather modification. The simulation shows that the greening of Mars can be done in at least three ways: 1) mirrors melting stored carbon dioxide in tropical soil and polar dry ice; 2) a fluorocarbon (CFC) factory; 3) blowing a vent thruster in the side of a methane-rich asteroid and engineering a collision (perhaps many impacts, but a mere 0.3 km/s impulse drive if using an outer solar system asteroid, such as Chiron, beyond Saturn). Irrespective of the merits or wisdom of these huge engineering projects, their simulation allows moving back the clock to a previous time when Mars was blanketed by greenhouse gases, and thus much warmer."

Comments

Re:speaking of SimEarth...

[eggstasy]

Erm, there is no such thing as abandonware... All PC game copyrights will expire long after we're all dead and buried unless someone in the government decides to shorten them or the original author forfeits them.
Downloading old games is as illegal as downloading newer ones. Even if no one is selling them. Even if the company is long gone and all programmers died. It's still copyright infringement because it's still copyrighted, what with the insane length copyrights have these days...

Re:Magnetic field.

[Alsee]

we just need to add enough fissionable material so that the overall radioactivity of the martian core goes up just enough to [melt the martian core]

You are completely missing the scale of energy here. A nuke is zero compared to the core of Mars.

The entire Earth's stockpile of nuclear weapons is about 5000 megatons explosive yeild. 1 megaton is 4.2e+15 joules. The entire nuclear stockpile is then 2.1e+19 joules. There's 1055 joules in a BTU (sorry for jumping units, it was the most convient method when I was researching the numbers). So the stockpile is 2e+16 BTU. It takes about 50 BTU to heat 1 cubic foot of iron or dirt by 1 degree F (sorry, I'm American chuckle).

You can therefore heat a 51.4 mile cube of Mars by 1 degree F.

If you preffer metric, you can heat a 42.3 km cube of Mars by 1 degree C. (km is smaller than mile, but a degree C is bigger than a degree F)

Nukes are great at vaporizing buildings and flattening SQUARE miles, but they are useless melting BILLIONS of CUBIC miles of anything. A nuke has zero energy when you start talking about planets.

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