How can the solar radiation problem be overcome when trying to terraform Mars?
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Answer:
You're not right. Mars lost its atmosphere except for the heavy CO2 because of weak gravity. You could never terraform it unless you depleted the earth's atmosphere and then it would still float away. The radiation at the surface is lethal with no magnetic field. Even if you could fix the atmosphere, you'd have to live underground.
This is an interesting problem.
We probably will not ever truly terraform Mars.
However, we can build bases, domes with radiation shields, in which there could be air, plants, people, homes, airlocks to get in, etc.
As stated above, even if mars were to suddenly be given a nice earthlike atmosphere it would immediatle begin to drift off into space.
The surface of mars provides very localized bits of magentic fields that might give atleast some protection for humans. Those are probably caused by metallic meteorites buried underground by impacts. And they are very weak anyway apart from being small. But mars didn´t loose its atmosphere for that reason. It is a combination of mars low surface gravity and its proximity to the sun. So mars is so cold because it is too close to the sun...
Heat is simply kinetic energy between individual molecules and atoms. A gas is a substance where the molecules are moving so fast they cannot stick together because the weak bonds of the liquid phase are broken. So when you heat a substance its molecules and atoms are moving faster. On mars, with its low escape velocity, the sun can heat even quite heavy molecules of gasses so much that they can reach escape velocity and drift off into space. On earth the escape velocity is greater. So despite being closer to the sun only gasses up to 3us of atomic weight can escape. So we have a little He4 but no He3 despite the sun churning it out in tonnes.
Also mars has almost no atmosphere because it has no ozone layer. The suns ultraviolett rays can break molecules like water into hydrogen and oxygen. While the watermolecule might be realtive safe the hydrogen escapes rapidly. And the oxygen reacts with other substances in the soil of mars. This is how the water of mars (and venus) disappeared. And the water that is left is also subject to the smae process.
So mars has no atmosphere because it doesn´t have an atmosphere... So unless you can increase mars mass about 500% it won´t be terraformed anytime soon.
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