Should We Nuke Mars?

This episode of why science is sponsored by Borderlands 3 Mars is not the most attractive place, the atmosphere is too thin, the surface is too cold and there is not enough oxygen to breathe and yet Mars could be our best alien candidate for a radical transformation let's be technical no, I guess I'm just orbiting Mars certainly isn't a home away from a home planet yet, but it still ticks enough boxes that it's probably our best chance at terraforming another world. Terraforming is the process through which we can improve. the ability of a planet to support life as we know it Terraforming Mars would require global systemic change with radical engineering feats like bombing the surface Bombing Mars has been orbiting conversations about terraforming for years, but recently loving billionaires have brought it back to the forefront. public awareness reshaping the surface of Mars with nuclear weapons, so now is a good time to ask what nuclear weapons could do for Mars.

Can we bomb Mars? Should we explore the details in full? Oh, that's my trip, oh, space car first, if we're going to terraform Mars, we're going to have to change a number of planetary variables, these are some of the most important ones. We can't really do anything about the 60% lower surface gravity on Mars, but we could do something about the very low temperature pressure and very high ultraviolet radiation. The radiation reaching the surface right now is so cold that if you spit on the surface of Mars, your saliva would freeze before hitting the ground. The pressure on the surface of Mars is so low that it is less than 1% of atmospheric pressure. pressure you are feeling right now and the ultraviolet radiation is so high on the surface of Mars that it will cook it, as you can see we would have to change these variables substantially if we wanted to successfully terraform Mars and we have even estimated how much some of these would have to change variables with research and articles dating back 40 years.

Carl Sagan himself was even thinking about this problem as it stands now, generally speaking, Mars needs more heat, more air, and less radiation reaching the surface because For example, right now, even if you found frozen ice on the surface of Mars and you wanted to heat it to get some water for humans, it wouldn't turn into water, it would just sublimate directly into steam. This is where nuclear weapons come in. Wow, tunnels are convenient, there is nothing man-made that releases more energy more quickly and catastrophically than an atomic bomb. Just a few milliseconds after the atomic explosion, a terribly energetic sphere of air can reach temperatures similar to the interior of our Sun, but the most common idea regarding nuclear weapons and Mars is not to use this immense temperature to directly heat the planet. .

No, the most common idea is to use nuclear weapons to cause a kind of terraforming type of global warming, not the kind that ruins the Earth, and this. It's not what you think it is It's not if anyone knows what this is I'm not one of those If anyone trusts me If anyone knows what it is I'm not one of those who were probably safe wherever I put Mars you need more atmospheric gases, yes, but more specifically you need more greenhouse gases if we really want terrorist formation to occur, for example, if we could increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, radiation from the Sun would enter through of the atmosphere.

The planet's surface tries to reflect back into space, but is captured by those greenhouse gases, which increases the average temperature of the planet. Mars has CO2 to work with, but not really in the atmosphere. What Mars does have is carbon dioxide dissolved in the atmosphere. ice and its polar regions and absorbed into the earth the regolith through the Martian surface, the idea suggested by both scientists and billionaires is to use nuclear weapons to vaporize all this carbon dioxide and mass and add air to the planet increasing the amount of carbon dioxide. in the Martian atmosphere would eventually, in theory, warm the planet or at least parts of it add air and therefore pressure to the atmosphere and could even make it because of all that liquid water viable on its surface, all It sounds simple enough like just doing something and putting a planet on autopilot inducing a runaway greenhouse effect is the most talked about scenario for terraforming Mars, but it turns out that quickly transforming your planet's atmosphere is a little more complicated than blowing up some of them sounds. bombs that terraform Mars specifically with nuclear weapons.

It's an idea that only a billionaire really interested in anime could come up with, but it's been considered a real possibility of climate change for decades in the scientific literature. Much of that literature comes from Martin J. Fogg, a physicist who actually wrote the first textbook on terraforming. and in a previous episode of this show he actually helped us turn Jupiter into a black hole star, while bombing Mars doesn't sound like an incredible fog and others over the years have found a couple of problems with the idea that the first of these problems is energy, remember. that the basic idea here is to use nuclear explosions to violently release carbon dioxide trapped in the Martian soil and Martian ice to increase the pressure of the planet and warm it, however, if you actually do the calculations for the formation of the earth to begin To increase the temperature of the planet by about four degrees, Mars would have to be bombed with nuclear weapons, for example, an estimate by Zubrin and Mackay in 1997 calculated that to maintain a heating power at one of the Martian poles of 27 terawatts, which is 10 times more than all of humanity uses at any given time, by the way, you have to hit one of these poles with the biggest nuclear bomb we've ever had every 20 minutes for 50 years, once you hear numbers like this you start to feel the scale of the problem. and the raw numbers don't make bombing Mars look any easier in the articles you can find on this topic, estimates of the total amount of energy you would need if you are bombing Mars are in the EXA to yata astronomically large joule range. numbers and at the high end of these estimates the amount of energy you would have to impart to the Martian surface is 10 times the amount of energy the Sun hits the Earth in an entire year, this does not mean that nuclear weapons cannot produce these types of energies definitely could, it's just that the figures provided by Fogg and others who can read notes suggest that we would need an absurd amount of nuclear weapons to make this happen, like multiplying the energy of all the nuclear weapons in the world combined by 6. million, that's how many nuclear weapons we need, multiplying the world's nuclear weapons arsenal by potentially thousands or millions and then getting every country on Earth to help get all of that to Mars is probably geopolitically complicated, let's say, and Then there's the cost, there's no space, I think that's the appeal. of nuclear weapons is that the perceived simplicity of the project whether or not it warrants nuclear weapons that we know are incredibly powerful, we already have a lot of them and therefore if there is a possibility of terraforming Mars with them, it seems like a cheap no-brainer, well , even the Conservative estimates of the total cost of this project, based on the cost of making all these nuclear weapons, sending them to Mars, placing them in the right places, and then detonating them, amounts to several trillion dollars.

This cost is equivalent to the GDP of the entire US economy and some estimates go even further for this project, relating it to the GDP of the global economy. If manufacturing thousands or millions of additional nuclear weapons sounds difficult, than asking the entire planet to do rain with literally all the money so it could one day rain on Mars that sounds completely impossible oh is this what it feels like? Estimates of the cost of bombing Mars vary, however, and new technologies could, in theory, give all of these numbers a much more plausible landing pad, however, there's an even bigger hurdle here. that we haven't even mentioned the goal of nuking Mars and this version of terra formation is to release a lot of energy very quickly and heat the planet with carbon dioxide, increase air pressure and possibly make it more viable.

For water and soft humans like us to exist there, it all depends on whether there is enough carbon dioxide to release, but what if there isn't enough? In 2018, a scientific article was published describing possible carbon dioxide reservoirs on all of Mars. It is the most recent article on this very topic and concludes by citing that there is not enough CO2 left on Mars in any known, easily accessible reservoir to produce an increase. significant in temperature or pressure. Therefore, it is not possible to terraform Mars in the foreseeable future using co2 resources. available on the planet, taking all this together, the number of bombs we would need, the cost and simply the lack of CO2 resources, and bombing Mars is still a dumb idea, but it becomes extremely impractical and is unlikely to have success, but rejecting nuclear weapons does not.

This does not mean that there are no dishonest multi-billion dollar ways to initiate the formation of the terra of Mars. Carl Sagan himself suggested adding a layer of black carbon on the surface of the Martian poles to gradually increase its temperature over time and vaporize the material into the atmosphere. Of course, just when we thought there was enough carbon dioxide on Mars, other scientists have suggested finding and then launching a few dozen asteroids with ammonia ice onto the surface of Mars and this would vaporize the material with these huge impacts and add that ammonia to the atmosphere, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, and others want to build a giant space mirror, not a death ray, a giant space mirror, or mirrors that would use the free energy of the Sun to heat the surface of Mars.

These are all fantastic and forward-thinking ideas, but it doesn't matter. its ultimate viability, nothing we've described here today addresses the other fundamental problems we would have to solve before humans can actually colonize Mars, even if we add a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, increase air pressure and we increase the temperature of the planet there is still not enough oxygen to breathe here something would have to be added and without the right atmospheric conditions you are going to fry here consider that if you are on earth during a very sunny day and 275 milliwatts of ultraviolet radiation hits every square meter of your skin, you would suffer a very serious sunburn in just a few minutes.

Now consider that without something like an ozone layer to protect it, the surface of Mars is bombarded by more than 2,000 times the amount of ultraviolet radiation that would burn your skin in just a few minutes, even if nuclear weapons could unlock all the carbon. on Mars and heat the planet, increase the air pressure, it's not like you can come to Mars, take off your helmet and leave, but let's say we could do it all, we could perfectly terraform Mars and turn it into a second Earth, thinking again about bomb Mars, it seems that with the right technology maybe we could make all this happen in a relatively short period of time, like an explosion of Progress is correct, but almost all research places the minimum formation time of the terra for something like this in a few hundred or thousands of years using technology we don't currently have.

Most likely, not even our grandchildren will breathe Martian air. a base, so if we bombed Mars right, we could bomb Mars right now, but even the most generous research makes this project probably at best ineffective and impractical and at worst a dangerous depletion of the economic resources of a planet. Still, I think it's valuable for the public and for scientists and propane gun suppliers to think about and solve these problems because if the human race ever answers our most burning cosmic questions, at some point we'll probably have to expand to another planet and we

should

think about doing it even If it takes a long period of time because of science, I'm just going to make sure this thing comes out safely, but it's not what you think, it's not if anyone

should

know what this is, it's me.

However, I will say that there are ideas floating around out there. which are a little more feasible when you're trying to bomb Mars. I've seen articles that suggest just exploding just a few, like nuclear weapons, in the right place to dump enough dust into the atmosphere that it basically creates a sort of like greenhouse gas effect that could do the same thing, but I haven't seen nothing more than aarticle that suggests that and there's a bigger problem here that we're not mentioning, which is if you're using nuclear weapons to do something to Mars, even if you're creating a lot of artificial suns outside or near the atmosphere, you're still potentially contaminating a lot of Mars, you could be destroying a significant portion of the surface and we just don't know if there is anything we could still be destroying Mars that we might want to study, so bombing Mars is impractical.

Thanks again to Borderlands 3 for sponsoring today's episode. The original moon shooter is back and bigger than ever with four all-new vault hunters and literally over a billion weapons. It's time to lock loading and loot pre-order Borderlands 3 now so you can play it when it comes out on Xbox one, ps4 or PC on September 13 let's make a friend thanks so much for watching Josh if you liked this video we have a lot from Other weird rocket science videos that I know you'll enjoy, so check them out and if you want to suggest ideas for future episodes or interact with us on the internet, follow us here on these handles.

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