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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (887025)	9/11/2015 7:54:07 PM
From: d[-_-]b	2 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 FJB Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577883

Elon Musk's comment was clearly made tongue-in-cheek. I would call it hypothetical but impractical - sort of like his money losing cars that exist only on the largess of tax payer funding.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (887025)	9/11/2015 10:23:13 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577883

Yeah it is. In fact, a recent Martian orbiter has helped refine the models. NASA did a study not too long ago on terraforming Mars. Far from ignoring the atmospheric erosion, they highlighted it and analyzed it. It is believed that it took several hundred million years to get to where it is today. Plenty of time to deal with the problem. Of course it was. As are his comments about getting a volcano lair. Terraforming Mars is a viable concept. The atmosphere erosion by solar winds is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Building up the density of the atmosphere would be the first step. Likely a combination of the two methods I proposed. A key gas made from rocks and soil would be chlorofluorocarbon compounds. Very powerful greenhouse gasses. The comet capture one could be done pretty soon. It is now technically feasible to fly to an asteroid, break off a chunk and bring that chunk to Moon orbit. That will be even more feasible once the Falcon Heavy is flying. It is but a small step to build shuttles to go between Mars orbit and various comets, taking chunks and bringing them back to Mars orbit, refueling and repeating. Maybe even mining Titan for water, methane and ethane. Actually, nuking the poles is not a bad idea. That is where there are the deposits of frozen CO2. You'd use small, low yield weapons, of course. The only fly in the ointment is if it turns out Mars has life. That would complicate things.