Careless futurism and amateur science fiction
Like many internet savvy Americans I've long been a fan of science fiction. For the last few years I've been writing short stories and scenario snippets based on my readings of nanotechnology, futurists and assorted others which I'm calling "The Glassman Anthologies" I hope to have the collection on the web before summer is out.Today my futurism thinking is centered on terraforming Mars. There's been a lot of work about thickening the atmosphere of Mars with chloroflourcarbons, melting the polar ice caps, installing domes and releasing CO2 from frozen reserves. But these plans overlook one of the biggest issues causing the martian atmosphere to be degenerate from the point of view of earth life. This is the lack of a powerful magnetosphere. Much of Mars' atmosphere is lost to scouring by the solar winds.
To prevent this it would be necessary to install both synchronous orbiting magnetic field generators and to locate nuclear powered magnetic field generators on the surface near any residual magnetic domains preferably near the poles.
This would allow gases to accumulate more readily in the atmosphere as well as reduce harmful particle flux from the sun.
My other terraforming ideas involve an enormous freznel lens made of thin film placed in a parallel orbit to mars that would focus sunlight near the equator of the planet. This could actually be a narrow ring with a diameter greater than the planet thus not blocking light to any other part of the planet. A similar parallel orbit scheme could be used to place a gigantic shade cloth between the sun and Venus thus dropping the temp of Venus. But there's the whole solar wind pressure problem to deal with there. Still working on that...
posted by Guy @ 4:40 PM
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