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lol yea your right... and there are probably hundreds of other problems that haven't been discovered yet in terms of terraforming Mars. one can dream though
obviously the most glaring issue would be the lack of magnetic field, without it protecting us on Earth we would all die from cosmic radiation. ugh a pretty terrible death as well. the only life that would be safe is the stuff in the deep caves! and the atmosphere would slowly decay from the bombardment of particles from space (solar wind). that is part of the reason why the atmosphere of Mars is so thin, it may have been more dense millions of years ago.
i do think terraforming Mars is possible (in the sense that anything is possible), but it may require some epic technological advancements before it can be done. maybe we'll need 500 or even 1000 years of advancement before we can tackle a project of that scale...
You don't have to set up a gigantic magnetic field around the planet but lots of smaller ones that interconnect around the settlements If they are sufficient strength, it should give us a similar level of protection on Earth.
As far as the weather boxes are concerned, just do the standard 12 months twice and you can do all 24 months
Nah. It's all about sucking money out of the government for all these studies.
Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere. And the magnetosphere is the thing that makes life - and reproduction - possible here on earth. Without a magnetosphere to protect us, the forming DNA of a fetus would be shredded. Terraforming of Mars - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But scientists know all that. They just want money to "study" it.
Scientists really don't know what health effects lack of magnetosphere would have, but magnetic reversals on Earth (where cosmic rays come in for a long stretch) that have occurred without noticeable disruption of life suggest that it can't be that deadly. Earth's atmosphere is thick enough to be opaque to most cosmic rays. Experiments in 2007 showed that the killed cells are not likely to generate tumors, which is contrary to current conventional wisdom on radiation. Also, a mission to Mars even as it is now wouldn't exceed current suggested limits for career radiation exposure; over a lifetime it would but even then one would still be able to live out a long healthy lifespan. What people nowadays fail to understand is that being safe is not the point of going into space; you face vast risk but you get the possibilities, discoveries, and experiences of the whole universe in exchange. Think of the benefit of the world being your oyster, only with a world of practically infinite size.
There are also ways to mitigate it: shielding built into spacecraft and buildings would take care of most of it, as would on-site generation of a sufficiently-powerful magnetic field. For a terraformed Mars a habitable atmosphere alone would nix most of the health risk. Such an atmosphere would not be stable over geologic time, but would be stable over thousands of years, more than enough on a human scale. The forming DNA of a fetus would be just fine.
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