Nuclear Engineer reacts to Kurzgesagt "How to Terraform Mars - WITH LASERS"

Hi, I'm Tyler False. I am a

nuclear

engineer

with just over 10 years of experience in the commercial

nuclear

power industry, from

engineer

ing to operations and emergency response. I don't claim to know everything there is to know about nuclear energy or science, but I can certainly share some knowledge if you like this video, hit the Like button below and go ahead and hit the Subscribe button if you want to see more videos like this. If you didn't like the video, leave me a comment below. and leave me a suggestion on what to do better. I'm always looking to improve.

Today we'll be looking at another video from Curse Gazette called how to

terraform

Mars with all caps

lasers

. This was another video that I actually requested. I've been getting a lot of requests lately to check out Kurz Gazad's stuff. So thanks for the suggestions. If you have more suggestions, let me know in the comments. Let us begin. Moz is a disappointing hellhole that is missing pretty much everything we have. We need to stay alive, it looks like we'll just have small crews spending a miserable time hiding underground, except we could

terraform

it into a new green world, but to solve the planet's problems we first need to make it worse and turn it into oceans of lava with gigantic

lasers

idea interesting I love its animations it's not some far-fetched sci-fi tale terraforming Mars is possible on the kind of time scale that our ancestors built great monuments on if humanity solves some of its pressing problems and ventures into space to expand into the solar system this may not be that far away, so how can we terraform Mars quickly?

Well, it's complicated. Mars is dry and has no soil to grow anything. Its atmosphere is too thin to breathe or protect us from radiation, which poses a high risk of Cancer, so that's true. One of the things we take for granted on Earth is the magnetic field. It actually protects us from much of our cosmic radiation. Astronauts on the International Space Station receive considerably higher doses than people on Earth's surface. that includes people who work in the nuclear power industry, they will even receive higher than normal doses in the stratosphere on a plane compared to the nuclear power industry, it's not much, nothing life threatening , but it is something to keep in mind.

It is a new home of Humanity, we have to give it a suitable atmosphere similar to the Earth, it must be made of 21 oxygen, 79 nitrogen and a little bit of CO2, with an average temperature of 14 degrees Celsius and under one bar of pressure, we have We have to create oceans and rivers and then the soil has to be eroded into fertile salt to support living things so we need to install a dollar this looks like one of those many civilization world building games you see on your phone I would love it if only out that simple air on the surface and preventing it all from falling apart by installing protective measures that can stand the test of time is difficult, but a big laser makes it much easier to challenge the atmosphere about four billion years ago Mars had a nice atmosphere Rich in oxygen and home to vast oceans and rivers, it held onto it for several hundred million years before being washed away.

Ultraviolet rays broke down atmospheric gases and then the oceans until they were swept away by the solar wind. Today Mars is a dry and barren wasteland, fortunately a considerable portion. of the water is frozen in deep reservoirs and on the polar caps, enough to create a very shallow ocean, and enormous amounts of oxygen are bound as minerals in Martian rocks, like oxygen in the iron oxides that give the planet its rust red color. as well as carbon dioxide in carbonates, to release these gases we need to reverse the reactions that enclose them through the use of thermolysis that occurs at temperatures as high as on the surface of the Sun, in short, we want to melt the surface of Mars, the The best way to do that would be to put lasers in orbits pointing their beams toward Mars.

The most powerful laser today is the Eli NP, capable of producing beams of 10 petawatts of power for a trillionth of a second to melt, that's a lot, a watt pedal to get a sense of scale a gigawatt is about what it produces a nuclear power plant. 1000 gigawatts go into a terawatt and I think a thousand terawatts go into a petawatt, so it's a lot of energy but in a very short period of time or the nuclear power plant keeps you going. running constantly, then we need a laser twice as powerful that runs continuously. The easiest way is to use a soda-pumped laser that can be powered directly by sunlight.

The core is metal-infused glass rods that absorb energy and release it like a laser beam if we build. a series of mirrors in space approximately 11 times the size of the United States. We can focus enough sunlight on them to melt bars. Let's make it interesting in that little diagram. I think they should get more sun, you know, having it on the other side of the planet and then reflect it if you're a little closer, yes, the lasers hit the surface, about 750 kilograms of oxygen and some carbon dioxide emerge from every meter cubic of molten rock. If we are efficient, our lasers only need to melt the first eight. meters from the surface to get enough oxygen, it would look terrifying, the skies would be wreathed in storms, while the ground would glow red hot, shot through with lava flows, a tireless laser beam would sweep across the landscape leaving trails too bright to look at after pass the ground. it cools rapidly a strange snow falls the ashes of all the elements that solidify as they cool such as silicon and iron Mars is still a cold planet at this point the side effect of this hell is that all the water in the caps polar is even deep underground.

It rises to the sky as hot vapor forming clouds that fall over the entire planet and would eliminate the most unpleasant gases from the atmosphere. I have to say I love the animation they use and showing what this would look like theoretically. It is fascinating. chlorine and would wash away the harmful elements that accumulate on the surface, eventually forming shallow oceans, saltier than on Earth, we may need to do additional cleaning afterwards, it would take about 50 years of continuous lasing to create our atmosphere of oxygen, we could use this. opportunity to dig deeper in some places to create basins for salty oceans or rivers and save some iconic features such as Olympus Mons and Valles marineris.

We are not done yet, although the resulting atmosphere has almost 100 oxygen and only 0.2 bar, it is difficult to breathe and very flammable to make it Earth-like and much safer we need to add a lot of nitrogen which Mars sadly lacks. We have to import it. The ideal source is Titan, a large moon of Saturn covered by a thick atmosphere that is almost entirely nitrogen. We have to move three trillion tons from the outer solar system to Mars, although that is not easy, it is feasible to process much of Titan's atmosphere. We have to build giant automated factories on its surface powered by our lasers to absorb the atmosphere and compress it. in a liquid, this is pumped into bullet-shaped tanks housed in laser-driven factories.

I guess just the energy induced by it is fine if it shoots up to the red planet where they explode and mix with the oxygen we already have. If we were able to send individual missions to Saturn in just a few years with enough resources, it should be possible to complete the task within two generations, of course it would be much more convenient to have leftover nitrogen from the terraforming of Venus at the site where we explain this. detail in another video, so it's good to know why not terraform multiple planets at once or more or less, they are doing this in a very step by step approach, almost like one of those YouTube instructional videos.

I guess it's one of those, but for something theoretical, but it would make more sense for each phase of your project, just like with construction, to say something on Mars and a similar project on Venus that can kind of attract Resources with Century after the start of the terraforming process we have a breathable atmosphere that has the right gases if the CO2 released is not enough to heat it to temperatures we can withstand we simply add some super greenhouse gases to Mars at this point it looks like a black marble by all the cooling lava dotted with growing oceans and red spots where the ancient surface remains intact.

It is still a wasteland no better than a desert on Earth. We need to fill it with life. Challenge 2. Biosphere. Install a biosphere in a new one. The planet is very difficult, unexpected interactions between species or sudden illnesses can destabilize it to the point of collapse. We would probably start by seeding our young oceans with phytoplankton, without competition, they would flourish, quickly filling the oceans until they became the bottom of an aquatic food chain. It can be followed by small zooplankton, fish, maybe even sharks and whales. If things go well, life in the oceans will thrive.

Life on land is more difficult. Plants need soil full of nutrients to sink their roots into something. which I'm not sure about and it showed a lot of terrestrial life forms. I wonder how less gravity would affect things. Gravity on Mars is about one-third that of Earth, but most of the surface is frozen remains of lava and ash. We could wait thousands of years for water. and wind to grind it into finer sands or try to do it manually, but we want to be fast and we have a big laser. Turning the lightning on and off in rapid succession would cause the ground to heat and contract rapidly, which breaks it. smaller and smaller pieces, we add a little water and we obtain a kind of dark mud.

In this mud we can mix nitrogen-fixing fungi and bacteria, which are capable of absorbing nitrogen and converting it into nitrate compounds to feed the plants, the first plants we want to bring. They are native to Earth's volcanic islands, as they are perfectly suited to the laser-destroyed Martian landscape. Over time, the enriched mud becomes the basis for grasslands and forests in the lower gravity of Mars. Trees can grow very tall, very quickly, their roots gathering the nutrients they need. Tackling gravity right now is good, then dig deeper to turn more rocks into soil forming a self-sustaining ecosystem at this point we can slowly introduce more varieties of plants, insects and animals, not mosquitoes, although yes, please don't bring mosquitoes into the next planet we have.

It is necessary to maintain the opportunity to start over and build a planet from scratch or populate a sphere to prevent it from becoming unbalanced. If plants grow too fast, you will absorb too much carbon dioxide, the planet will cool too much if key species become extinct, we could see populations collapse faster than they could recover on Earth, other species would move in to fill the empty, but our Martian biosphere is not so flexible. It takes hundreds, if not thousands, of years before Mars becomes a stable environment, but eventually the planet will. have the potential to support large human colonies with air, water and food available we can finally call Mars black, blue and green Our Hope a giant volcanic island in space will last Challenge Three the long-term future there is a problem we haven't had The Mars' core does not produce a magnetic field, so it does not have sufficient protection from solar or cosmic radiation.

This becomes dangerous for the long-term health of Martian populations, so as a final step, we need an artificial magnetic field. They don't have to be beach-like Earths, you just need to deflect the solar wind enough so it doesn't touch Mars. I love this animation with a big magnetic symbol and of course the radiation you're showing is green, you haven't seen it. my videos before gamma radiation Cosmic radiation no radiation source is green everything is invisible on that scale the easiest way is to build a magnetic umbrella far in front of Mars that splashes the solar wind on the sides a large superconducting ring powered by facilities nuclear is all it takes to orbit in the I love how easy they said it was is all it takes um I guess relative to designing a new biosphere and all the crazy lasers to create a new ecosystem, this one is probably easier than everyone else. stuff just because you know you can put it in space and park it at a LaGrange point, it looks like that's what they're going to do with a son of our point, constantly keeping it between the Sun and the bars and protecting the new atmosphere and that's it's terraforming Mars, which requires some work. considerable resources andprobably a century or ten, but it would be the first time we lived in a house designed and shaped solely by us and for us the first step towards our future.

Among the stars like the detail. to show the small moons of Mars and uh in the background, the first step that we can now take here on Earth is to learn more about physics and biology, now it comes to its advertising, uh, yes, that's it again. I love how they do it. Is this video like a typical instructional video that is no different than how to build a shed in your backyard? A good high level explanation. A couple of things they didn't address was high gravity for humans on the surface of Mars. or the humans who will be born naturally on Mars will be taller, but if they came to Earth, they would have to wear Earth suits to deal with the three times Martian gravity, which is what they will be used to.

As they grow, so do many of the larger animals they transplanted. I wonder what the long term effect of that lower gravity is on a person. Interesting, they mentioned that Venus Venus has a gravity of about 80 percent of Earth's. so it'll be a minor concern there, but still there's something else they mentioned in that L1. For those of you who don't know LaGrange Point, think of it as a sort of parking spot in space relative to Mars or any planet. You're looking at that and the Sun. Any space station you put there will be fixed relative to Mars or whatever planet you're orbiting the Sun on.

It will look like it's rigged to stay in tune with the planet's orbital plane, if so. you think like that, but yeah, that was fascinating, thanks again for that recommendation, please let me know what you thought. about this in the project or in the comments below thank you very much for watching and see you next time