On my other media I discuss how we might make Mars much more habitable for colonization by a plan that I thought of..
My idea was to put a magnetic bubble either by spearing or wrapping around Jupiter's moon Callisto, the outermost large moon of Jupiter.
By my original plan the strong magnetic field of Jupiter would be used to react against the magnetic bubble, multiplying it up and this would accelerate Callisto powered out in a more linear path from Jupiter's gravity by its strong magnetic field. It would move out relatively rapidly in a relatively short time and crash into Mars, Mars now with atmosphere, liquid water, atmospheric pressure, and even soil that's not so radioactive.
Radioactive soil for Mars may be a problem otherwise although I think it may not be that severe anyhow because it's only about 3 feet deep.
But the worth of another planet with liquid water and pressure, relatively warm temperatures and even some better soil would not be so bad if it costs much much less than the trillion dollars estimated just to send colonizers to Mars now.
This will be also be hugely faster than taking thousands of years by other methods of terraforming Mars that have been considered. This would take perhaps decades but no more.
I originally thought we would use any large icy moon of Jupiter for this because while for a while I was not yet in higher resolution about this and I believed we might use Europa for this. Even so I realized that it was radioactive and smooth on the outside, with water ice there presumably tainted by being inside Jupiter's strong radiation belt as it's melted by the heat. And the ice techonics are believed to be what causes the fractures on the surface of Europa by circulation of the ice in all the way down and back up and the radioactivity may circulate all the way down and make life more difficult to start inside of Europa.
So at first it seemed this wouldn't work but then I realized Callisto has an old surface because it has a lot of craters left over from the age with the formation of the solar system presumably because it's outside the radiation belt and its water won't be so radioactive, so here might be something of use for events like changing planets as we might like.
(Radioactivity by this cause seems one caution to the idea that there's life inside of moons like Europa. In addition I think there's no surface for the life to compute on, and life always needs a surface as they found in exobiology about what chemicals need to form life like on distant asteroids which need sugar molecules and so on.. This might mean the possibility of life with oceans inside, like Ceres or Enceladus is not as common even if they have low levels of radiation in the water.)
Another idea of mine was we might want to add a magnetic field to Mars since it won't have one, even if we give it an atmosphere and liquid water and heat with the above method of crashing a water moon into Mars. Other than by the added gravity of the moon's mass we might crash into the side of a planet for this use Mars would not be with a strong magnetic field.
So I thought we might want to drill or blast somewhat deep wells into the north and south of Mars and hopefully use strong electromagnets to then give Mars a strong enough magnetic field to shield it from radiation storms that otherwise hit the surface regularly. This would help maintain our improvement about the atmosphere so it won't lose pressure over time as the atmosphere would tend to boil away more often if not shielded by the magnetic field.
This could magnetize Mars for millions of years as a permanent magnet because it has much iron. I would think we could power the magnets by fusion as it develops while even fission might do the job.
To drill in to Mars might be a lot easier than into the Earth because when they put the drill bit down four miles into the Earth and they pull the drill back up with a new bit it fills up with the fluid flow of the magma and they can go no further down. Mars with reduced gravity has reduced pressure and so the rock isn't so fluid and can be drilled much deeper.
These initially were my best plans for terraforming Mars more cheaply and quickly. After the first survey missions, it was believed Mars was more like the moon than the Earth so changing Mars has worth if we want more land and the security and advantage this might give us.
More recently I thought of a cheaper method yet... Using laser beams as steam propulsion methods.
It's been found using small laser beams deployed from a mothership can move an asteroid with as much force as a space shuttles exhaust with just four or five small lasers due to the sublimation of the ice on the asteroid into steam by the small laser..
So an alternative to using magnetic bubbles is by this same method used to move a body like Callisto without even having to a move a larger magnet by zapping it in the side and the steam will boost it away from Jupiter. It goes on and terraforms Mars in years not centuries.
The icy moon would interact with Mars not mostly by impact but rather while Callisto is believed to have 5 Earth's worth of the oceans below the ice crust it's actually only a fraction of Callisto's radius with the ocean, so I imagine it would roll around and spin off with Mars' gravity attracting the water. At the right speed more of the ocean is attracted away from Callisto.
Even so I can imagine it fusing more with Mars with more gravity to hold on the water and for the atmosphere. One option might be to impact Callisto with another solid asteroid or machine of our own as it rolls around Mars at the right rate to break it into smaller masses of both water and rocks that then would be fused to Mars the same way but with more healthier soil as well as the liquid ocean and atmosphere.
If we could move Mars closer to the Earth's orbit or Venus near the Earth from the sun I think it's possible we might one day terraform and colonize both.
MOVING PLANETS
I had considered how to move a planet itself. Even if we crash a large icy moon into Mars and give it a magnetic field it will have pressure but this isn't enough to give it enough heat to be comfortable. While crashing an icy moon into Mars is a good idea itself it may not be as good for our comfort and cost as finding a way to move Mars inwards to Earth radius or moving Venus also so it's not too hot. Here as I say below I consider using fusion to boost heavy weights by momentum transfer. Fusion may dramatically change our future and literally give us new worlds.
We read about how NASA thought in the distant future we might want to save the Earth from the Sun at the end of its time on the main sequence. This idea is using an asteroid for momentum transfer, the asteroid goes around in an 11,000-year orbit and each time it whizzes past the earth it would move the earth 1 foot..
NASA has the patience of a saint don't they, and so creative!
I was looking for a faster way to move a planet and I realized it might be better if we put magnets in orbit with solar collectors and while it's going around in one orbit it charges its magnet or magnets and then for the second loop around turns on the magnet to move Mars by a magnet or magnets on the surface.
While this wouldn't be a speed demon itself it would be a lot faster than waiting 11,000 years to move the Earth a foot. If time is money we might all be 1000s richer..
I considered this method for moving Venus outward from the sun combined with the other method of crashing a watery moon into Venus for cooling the volcanos (Venus has been found to be putting out more heat than it's taking in from the sun so this may be because of the tides between Venus and the Earth where it always keeps the same face to the Earth, so if we move it outward the heat source may be reduced and it would eventually cool down especially with the ice from the outside by the large mass of water smashed onto it). Other methods like this perhaps may help us eventually to put both Mars and Venus in Earth radius orbit giving them both liquid water and healthier soil and a much easier way to reach them cheaply and easily by going only sideways in Earth's orbital path, not nearly as expensive as going against the sun's gravity with each launch of a payload to Mars or from Venus.
Before I go on I want to say that I understand that we may or may not be able to actually move Mars or Venus like this. It's been found that the L5 stabilisation points won't work for large masses and only for small masses like satellites. For this I would think we could give periodic boosts to the planet to keep it in stable orbit. I think it might also be possible for larger masses like planets themselves, the L5 might be increased. Don't quote me on this, but I think it's possible.
Second, it's been found in research, if we flip the orbits of Venus and Mars, it would destabilize the inner solar system and this we wouldn't want. This has been considered in a recent Scientific American article, but I would ask how the orbits of the planets have maintained stability right at the Bode distance for billions of years.
Venus always keeps the same face tidally locked facing the Earth, and this is believed to have been caused by something huge hitting Venus. This means something large has been moving in the inner solar system sometime in its history and yet the planets aren't destabilised.
Of course, huge is a relative size and we might say that moving something the mass of a planet is different from whatever has hit Venus. And while we can't reengineer the L5 like with more gravity, I would hold that it's not the L5 that's maintaining Earth's orbit or the other planet's orbits.
This would be caused by gravity and centrifugal force. You can take 3 weights on strings and spin them and they don't destabilize. This leaves gravity to consider, and we might be able to definitely find out about this by studying planetary systems like this around distant stars.
The only three masses we would have in the inner solar system would be Mars Earth, and Venus, and as long as these don't destabilize the outer solar system, and if we can find stable exoplanetary systems like this that have had impactor collisions like about the Venus impactor or larger, I think it might be worth more development at any rate, if we had a relatively faster way of moving both planets.
Even so, these seem to be daunting problems, and while I still think it's possible we might even move the planets, I also start asking questions about ways to engineer changes in the large scale atmospherics of each planet to make them more comfortable to live on the same orbit they are now. As I say for Mars any rate, we may be able to take fusion and compress part of the mass after digging wells down to the center of Mars to give it the right gravity. Likewise, as above, we may be able to engineer Mars so it has a more viable magnetic field and also by crashing Callisto into the side of Mars we give it a non radioactive atmosphere and oceans and land.
Also, by crashing the right kinds of asteroids into Mars, we can engineer it to have the right chemicals and minerals et cetera for our colonisation.
In order not to stir up a lot of dust on Mars, I considered in one plan how we might first crash a water moon into Mars and let it freeze into ice at the pole after awhile.
Next if we used laser steam ablation we might use the laser's fusion power charged particle beams and magnets to tilt Mars over so the pole can now be centered for the large laser to create a lot of steam by the ablation to much more rapidly move Mars eventually into Earth radius orbit.
Then we simply right Mars back up with the North towards the north star and perhaps Venus also, and relatively cheaply we would have three habitable planets in orbit at the Lagrangian points saving far more cheaply and easily than other methods that have been considered and also in years not centuries.
Alvin Toffler was the author of famous so 20th century book Future Shock (about the accelerating speed of technology that he believed was stressing the world). When asked what he thought of terraforming Mars, he said the idea horrified him.
I personally consider this to be much different from moving the Earth to fit our image. I consider the atmospheric and land circulation systems of planets like Mars and Venus to be simpler than the Earth's with its complex feedback loops we depend on for life itself.
Exoplanets have simpler chemical balance systems maintaining the conditions, determined more by geology and physics than biology. We might have less concern about changing Mars than we might have about changing a mountain on the moon.
Even so it seems possible that attempts to fit the chemistry of another world to our image may turn out to be quite difficult to achieve, while not impossible. The reason I believe this is because of the results of the Biosphere 2 experiments. These experiments conducted around 1990 were an attempt to show that we could synthesize a building to fit our own hopes for an artificial life system.
Biosphere 2 totally failed because of problems like bacterial instability and the inhabitants were so stressed by the event they often didn't even talk to each other after the experiment was over.
To me this means a major caution about terraforming the earth, and sooner or later there may be a huge weather crash.
But I believe we may be better off having three planets we might be able to live on instead of just risking 100 or 10 billion% of what we have on luck. This might be a clever way of putting more of our eggs in three baskets, in event of contingencies like a weather crash on the earth or a nuclear war.
Perhaps it's just true as in the Biosphere 2 while the life wasn't willing, we might think it's possible simple chemistry like geology of another world might not be so horrible to contemplate being able to stabilize.
After all just living in a house we're basically creating a completely artificial area to live based not on bacteria gone wild as in the Biosphere 2 but essentially more on simple physics. I would say that's true that systems based on life are a lot more complex and so more resistant to change while if we lived on a planet we had changed in simple ways ourselves this might not be so much of a problem.
In other words I think it's possible if we repeat the Biosphere 2 experiments without biology, our real estate may be enriched..
Even so it also seems possible because it's a large scale chemical system, a planet like Mars after we had added air and water might also have large scale instability that sooner or later would lead to weather crash much like the Biosphere2 had.
This might be rapidly reversible with fusion energy becoming viable. I think it will be really important to look at the basic chemistry of the "geology of Mars" if named so. In the future we might want to look carefully at what the forces are that are balancing things like the temperature and of course if we had oceans of liquid water on Mars we would want some kind of fusion powered filtration system to purify it so it doesn't become so stagnant it's a burden to our future life not a boost..
Another possibility I consider is to use a sort of mechanical coating of the entire surface of the planet and this would seal off the entire influence of the chemical instability we might not want. To make the surface coating might be low cost with fusion and with materials on hand. Not only is the soil of Mars radioactive it's also got harmful chemicals otherwise poisonous to life if we lived there without this method. We want, pressure, water, breathable atmosphere, radiation reduction, with heat like on Earth...even so we also don't want to be constantly poisoned by the environment..
More recently I considered ways we might move Mars by using fusion machines which they've just been developing for super amounts of cheap energy. We do this by launching weights from the surface of Mars up to an asteroid that catches it and then another launcher on the asteroid launches it back down to the surface and also a launcher on the other side moves the asteroid back down to restart the loop and move Mars perhaps 10 feet per launcher each day with 100 launchers.
This would be hugely cheaper than other methods they have thought of of boosting giant rockets filled with air and supplies from the Earth etc.. And it would only take 10 years instead of like thousands by their plans.. It's estimated it will cost a trillion dollars to send one person to Mars by the "new old fashioned" methods.
I was thinking of using lasers between the surface of Mars with mirrors on both the asteroid and the surface for the same result of moving Mars nearer where the Earth is so it's much much warmer and comfortable.
Then I calculated that this may be slow at the laser reflector rate and take a million years with the laser mirrors or the magnet solar array method so I thought of launching the power weight by the large launcher.. And due to the way it multiplies up we might be able to do this and once more it would only take 10 years .. I'm not completely sure about this calculation but fusion is super powerful. By the usual chemical boosters to Mars it takes 9 months but momentum transfer by one of NASAs visions takes about 45 days.
Essentially there's no limit to how much force we could apply to a planet by momentum transfer and fusion.. So the earlier plans I used like the solar array magnet, or reflecting mirrors back and forth between the surface and an asteroid will be much much more limited than using fusion and momentum transfer..
Boosting a rocket to Mars with small pellets as by NASA will be limited by the distance the pellets can travel without dispersing even while they have the advantage over lasers in this respect. Use of a large weight launched over and over between the asteroid and the surface would have a lot more power to multiply.
Note that for all these machines it's low cost because the fusion generator gives more power to make more machines, like by self-assembly. For example the fusion machines to make the surface coating would also make more machines out of the fusion energy to power stuff like the printers in order to finish ahead of other methods.
And no doubt we can make multi-purpose use of the fusion machines which could be a launcher and used elsewhere.
If we crash a large mass into Mars in the direction of the Sun or outward for Venus this will also send it more in that direction saving on the cost of moving either into Earth Radius Orbit. Of course we can only accelerate half the distance where we want to send it and then we'll have to decelerate into Earth Radius.
Originally I had read that it would take millions of comets crashed into Mars to give it pressure and air, so I really didn't agree with Elon Musk's plan of crashing asteroids into Mars at the north.. this would cause lots of pollution for Mars and would ruin its beauty unlike my plan, while at least adding a lot of water from the icy moon would convert it from a more complete desert and my method would change Mars more in a positive sense .. but Musk's plan lacks heat and this we might only get really I think by moving Mars into Earth Radius Orbit and also for Venus to move it away from the heat.. Pollution is a major problem for Musk's plan.. crashing asteroids or comets into Mars would in no way remove all the poison carbon dioxide all around.. using a large icy moon may be enough to cleanse away all the carbon dioxide..
So I believe it's possible in 20 years from the start by my simple engineering plan for this, we might have three or more times as much land area to live on, three Earthlike worlds! The surface area of Mars is exactly equal to the land area of the Earth. And Venus has as much gravity as Earth, so I think if we crashed enough asteroids for moons into Mars or drill down and use fusion to compress the matter at the center it would have enough gravity.
This idea of compressing matter with fusion might have some value for taking a mass like an asteroid and giving it enough gravity to hold an atmosphere. Remember that most matter like atoms is 1/10,000 occupied by mass and energy. I could imagine using fusion-based chemical methods to condense something like the super dense aluminum that's been considered to be useful for nuclear energy and instead drilling down and putting at the center of a mass to give it more gravity.
We would want it to be dense enough to have gravity more but not so dense that it has risk of radioactivity.
And of course we want to give engineered worlds like this an exactly 24-hour day so no one will get terrible "jet lag" as the controllers back at Mission Control found with the Mars rover missions. At the end of the mission they were exhausted!
And also I think we could even put a satellite around these new earthlike worlds so the oceans wouldn't stagnate and also for the physiology of the females. Because these are simple and cheap plans
I think all this may bode well for our future and our civilization becoming more scosmic.
