can't come back if it never gets there in the first place

Hi TheRealBill,
Who were you working for if I may ask? I love firsthand experience. Did you consider the magnetosphere on Mars in your study?as WilliamShipley mentioned
Thanks DOB

I speculated dozens of nuclear power plants whose heat would be directed (via conduit) to the core in prolonged timed succession. This should heat the solid core and cause it to liquefy and to spin. The magnetic field from the core would create a container to hold at atmosphere, one created by humidity from the melting ice caps (orbiting solar mirrors) and the by product of human industry.

As opposed to crashing a nuclear furnace, this process would allow for contained habitation while controlling the terraformation process.

Yeah, I'm a dork. :)

So the mothership isn't coming back after all? Well, gee.

dino,
just don't give any more thought since it ain't happening. space travel is going to remain something for the heinline's of the world to write about "science fiction" and you thought there wasn't anything that is perpetual.

If the theory about heat trapping CO2 is correct, then Mars should already be a tropical paradise. Infinitesimal increases in our 400 ppm CO2 concentration are supposed to increase our temperature by 10 C. Well Mars has 95% CO2.

To buy into this you first must accept that there is man-made climate change which I think is ridiculous! Is this a spoof?

Well as long as we're blue-skying here, why not place a thin Mylar film over a crater, sputtered with a reflective so as to trap light and let entropy inflate it into a dome and just"terraform" the volume inside?

I have to laugh...Mars has more than enough Carbon, more than earth and CO2 does not warm anyway.
They started out rightfully stating that they needed to warm the surface and the water enough to cause a vapor to be sustained in the atmosphere. Now that's a "greenhouse gas".
Problem is, with a sketchy magnetic shield, a weak ionosphere and little gravity...how are you going to keep the new atmosphere from floating away?

They really need to go back to the drawing board and integrate more factual information.

My idea was to just crash a Nuclear Furnace on the ice caps and use the heat to melt the water.

I SPECTACULARLY disagree that it's so far in the future. Improvements to the EM drive (which they still don't know how it exactly works) even in the next few years would generate enough thrust (even in relatively small amounts to our eyes) to cut the trip length by 75-80%. That gives us a difference in a perfect one way hohman transfer trip from 270 days to 40 days. That means you could also take more stuff than current plans.

But I do agree with the main article that Mars needs to be a place worth visiting and colonizing. It does us no good to set up a base on that Planet when we can't feed ourselves, restock ourselves, or basically respond to calamities. I.E. If something happens to the first settlers, help would be 40+ days out, and that's just assuming it happens at the perfect time in the planet's alignment AND there's a rescue ship ready to launch.

Terraforming Mars is the best hope (in my opinion), but other avenues need to be considered as well. I.E. Underground bases, biodomes, and so on...

There is a fundamental problem facing those that would teraform Mars, Gravity! The gravity on Mars is insufficient to retain an atmosphere consisting of oxygen and nitrogen and global warming will only make the problem worse. The reason for this is the relationship between escape velocity and Boltzmann velocity distribution. Temperature determines the velocity of molecules in a gas. When the thermal velocity of gasses in a planets atmosphere exceed the planets escape velocity these gasses will be lost to space. Lighter molecules escape more rapidly than heavier ones and oxygen and nitrogen are relatively light so they are among the first to go. The process is aggravated by atmospheric "stripping" caused by the Solar wind which is also subject to escape velocity considerations. This phenomena is described by "Jeans's Escape". (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_esc... ) Does this mean that colonization of Mars is not feasible, no. But it does mean that open cities and settlements will face extraordinary engineering challenges.

Red Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson, recommended to me by CircuitGuy, did a good job discussing this. Unfortunately I could only get through the first two books due to the silly political message it was stumping for.

I believe NASA has worked out the beginings of terraforming Mars, but is holding off because O-dumber took away their mission (but not any money), and people are so worried about using the Genesis device and "destroying that life in favor of its new matrix".

Me dino can just hear the interplanetary econazis now~
Oh, no! Mars must remain pristine! People should not even set foot there. They will ruin it just like Earth!"
New thought. It was stated in the article that "We know humans have the power (THE POWER!) to raise a planet's average temperature---because that's exactly what's happening on Earth."
Exactly? Oh, really? We have such freaking THE POWER!? Reading that, me dino thinks, "Oh, the author is---one of those!"
Me dino also contends that atmospheric (perhaps that including volcanic) interaction with the sun and its revolving place in outer space made Mars what it is today.
Likewise, the earth.

AJ,
Successful travel to Mars is so far in the future if at all as I believe it is a waste of tax dollars to try.
That said maybe the global warm diehards may not have noticed that we are going into a deep freeze and the winter will be long.

It was a project on terraforming Mars that led me down the path of learning the underlying facts and fallacies in the global warming scare. We tried applying the "principles" to Mars and discovered it would not work. You could say we had a vested interest in the models being accurate, but they turned out to be wrong anyway. Because: science.

As I wrote, using nuclear power in timed pulses we could (theoretically) both moltenize and turn the core of Mars to create a magnetic field. Also we could heat the planet by using solar mirror to redirect sunlight to melt some of the ice caps.

These are legit hypotheses based on science. I just combined ideas to speculate. Interesting stuff.

Hi William Shipley , Your first sentence made more sense than the scientist promoting co2 and pfc's on Mars.

I'm wondering if there is any way to enhance Mars magnetic field. That might wind up being rather a critical factor.

Well count me out for financial support , this project is doomed for failure.Mr. McKay the top scientist on this boondoggle claims the same science they plan to use to warm Mars is based on global warming models on Earth. Bad data in flawed results out.