By Albert Burneko
9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
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The rub there is that it’s 1-2 Tesla’s over the whole cross sectional area of Mars (I believe).
It’s not that hard to make a 2 Tesla magnet, but the most powerful electromagnet we’ve ever made is only 45 Tesla’s and even that only produces a 2 Tesla strong field out to 2.8m. So you might be looking at a Mars diameter worth of small magnets.
Wouldn’t that make it not an embarrassing way to open the article at all then?
No, not really. If we’re talking about colonizing a planet, building a bunch of magnets connected to solar panels is not going to be that big or expensive a part of it.
It’s also the kind of relatively cheap thing that takes a long time that we may as well get started now. I mean we churn out that much bullshit e-waste constantly for no reason, if we were more focused / more billionaire’s money went to that, you might actually be able to get it done.
The scale of what you just described is really goofy.
It’s also a very delicate shield against a very serious problem.
I don’t think it’s feasible to protect a mars-diameter disc of massive magnets from damage by either normal objects traveling through the area or from some human engineered attack.
If you’re imagining the capacity to create such an emplacement, don’t you imagine that such phenomenal effort and wealth of resources would be better spent solving some terrestrial problem?
There’s a real difference between e-waste, which is mostly byproducts of the petroleum refining process with electronic components smeared liberally on, many of which rely on petroleum byproducts themselves and electromagnets, which are, at the scale you’re discussing, massive chunks of metals refined, shaped and organized into configurations that will create magnetic fields when dc is present.
I have a hard time imagining a level of focus required to bridge that gap.
The word you’re looking for is “big”. As in, it embiggens the noblest spirit.
It’s also not possible to protect the ISS from either of those and yet it’s operated fine for 30 years. You do not need every little bit of it to be perfect, you just need to deflect enough solar wind that it allows Mars atmosphere to build back up which is what provides the real protection.
Like I said, we waste more resources than that all the time. I’d rather we didn’t build yachts and country clubs and private schools, yet we do. There’s no reason to not get started building that array, especially if it will take a while.
That is not what e-waste is. E-waste primarily consists of silicon chips and the metal wires connecting them. Even the circuit boards themselves are primarily fibre glass, not petroleum.
And no, we wouldn’t be creating those using actual magnets, we’d be using electro magnets, which is just coils of wire connected to PV and logic chips.
I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly. You know that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire right? And you know virtually that all of them just sit on their wealth, and do nothing with it but wast on luxury lifestyles for themselves right? Yeah it would be better if billionaire’s did not exist, but as long as they do, why are you upset about their money going to space exploration as opposed to just yachts and $20,000 a night hotel stays?
Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”
Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.
I would argue that the majority of sci-fi has predicted otherwise.
How much (metal, refined, produced on earth) wire would you say is required to produce an air (actually vacuum, but we know air core really well so there’s math for them) core electromagnet which can generate a field capable of deflecting solar wind over the area of its pv array? In order to maintain that field strength, how much current is required? Can it be supplied by a pv array equal in area to the effective field area? How many of those are needed to cover the area of mars?
That’s-a lotta metal!
Also speaking as a person who deals with e-waste daily, it’s both by volume and mass composed of petroleum products. Fiberglass is reenforced plastic. Ics are 90% plastic by volume. Discrete components are made of petroleum distillates in a lot of cases and encased in them in even more cases!
Even if you only considered the boards as the e-waste and not the plastic cases and bodies themselves, those dont exist in a vacuum like our hypothetical electromagnets, a reduction in printer boards means fewer printers which are almost completely just plastic.