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Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 58 points 2 months ago* (21 children)

I felt exactly the same way about Elon Musk back in 2018(?) when he went on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and said the easiest way to terraform Mars was to just nuke the polar ice caps...and voila...instant atmosphere.

I don't think I've ever palm-slapped my forehead that hard in my life. All of a sudden I knew he was just another fuckin' moron with way too much money to burn.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere, any atmosphere you create would fuck right off into space

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    And even if it worked (and it would take a LOT of nukes to work) ... well, congrats: now Mars has an atmosphere -- a highly radioactive atmosphere.

    Thanks to Mars's lack of a magnetic field, high radiation levels are already a concern. Adding even more radiation into the mix really isn't going to help any of your terraforming goals.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    And that's why we should just drop a few million cockroaches on Mars and let them figure it out! /s

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    If you make it fast enough it will stick around for a while. "A while" in planetary terms can be a few hundred thousand or million years. So it's possible you could produce sufficient atmosphere to make it breathable, and it would remain so for longer than human civilization up to now. Of course, by possible, I mean with the right tools and the resources to support that, which would be substantial. Feel free to find out how many comets you would have to impact into Mars to get that.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    He has no imagination, at least in any way that matters.

    What I'd like to see is what would happen if thermonuclear devices were detonated at or very near the core, directionally like a shaped charge to get the core a bit hotter but more importantly moving faster. What impact would that have on the magnetic field of the planet?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    I think you may either be overestimating the effectiveness of nukes or underestimating the thickness of planets.

    Project Plowshare envisioned using nukes to dig holes on the order of hundreds of meters, not thousands of kilometers.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I'm doing neither one, but it's pretty clearly not an idea for this time. We lack an awful lot to be able to pull off a project at that scale, but frankly that makes me more curious not less.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    Saying it's a matter of scale is an understatement. You need mass to keep the core molten, along with the right combination of elements to produce a working magnetic field that doesn't fade over time. Mars has neither of those things going for it.

    If you want to terraform Mars, you would have to rebuild it from scratch...basically creating a whole new planet with the right core composition and size. Even if you could pull all that material into one location and guide it all into a stable orbit, it would then take hundreds of millions of years to cool and set into something we could even hope to live on.

    I don't think human beings will ever be capable of that level of geoengineering. It's just not realistic given the alternatives.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Even not underestimating the scale, I'm not sure it would work because all the debris would need to be ejected from the thousands-of-kilometers-deep hole. And then you'd also have to have a solution to stop the walls from caving in before the next bomb had a chance to arrive. It's almost as if you not only need thousands of extremely powerful (even for nukes) bombs, but also need to deliver them in a continuous stream to keep the blast pressure up and the hole open.

    I feel like, at that point, the easier strategy to accomplish your goal would be redirecting a large asteroid to impact the planet, or something like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Oh, I don't care about the surface viability. An asteroid capable of altering the core would probably liquefy a significant portion of the planet though which is also not desirable.

    The goal of the thought is to give the planet a magnetosphere closer to that of earth, anywhere between would be a success. The general idea is to get the core somewhat hotter and moving much more, which probably also means it needs a more beefy moon than it has to maintain the change for any significant amount of time.

    idk it's just an idea I like to kick around sometimes.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't that the plot of the movie, "The Core"?

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