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Not practically. Joel Send a noteboard - 07/12/2012 02:27:02 AM
Its surface pressure peaks at 0.6% of Earths and only 0.13% of that is O2. So, on average, a liter of Earth air has about 25,000X as much O2 as a liter of Martian air. There is plenty of CO2, of course, and I still think our best bet is building greenhouses that both generate and retain diatomic oxygen, but Mars' atmosphere "has" about as much O2 as the Pacific does gold, with similar utility. Mars' lower ground and atmospheric mass, combined with its far lower air pressure, mean that if we added O2 in breathable concentrations it would leak like a sieve.

From what I could tell, the articles content does not support its headline about "blowing up" the moon: They intended a single A-bomb whose blast would be visible (or at least detectable) from Earth. It sounds like the planned deterrent was not "if you go to the Moon we will blow it up" but "we will blow up anyone you send to the Moon."


I said setting a nuke off on the moon would pretty much contaminate the whole thing, and that relatively speaking this wouldn't much matter in terms of danger to astronuats. The effective fall out range of something in lower gravity and with no atmosphere is different. There is no atmosphere to slow particles from drag and the escape velocity is 2400 m/s, shoot a bullet at 800 m/s at a 45 degree angle on Earth and it will land within a couple miles, from the higer gravity yes but especially from drag effects.

Shoot it on the moon and it's going to travel several hundred miles, a much longer relative distance on the moon whose area is about 7% of Earth's. Means a bomb blast with 800 m/s shrapnel on Earth - low for most explosives - would litter a mile or so maybe but on the moon would leave shrapnel spread out over a few percent of it's surface. Needless to say bit of un-fissioned uranium blown out by an A-bomb often have speeds of 2400 m/s, some more, and they'd blow out into the void, some just less, and they'd fall on the other side of the moon. Set off an explosive with an expansion rate equal to or greater than the escape velocity of an object that has no significant atmosphere, and bits of the debris will be everywhere, if not evenly thickly.

Frankly, I would not be surprised if the Moons vacuum surface admits more radiation from cosmic rays and the solar wind than a lone atomic bomb would leave as fallout. I would also be surprised if blowing up the entire Moon were practical even in the days of much larger thermonuclear arsenals, and it was never under consideration regardless. "US plotted to blow up Moon" just makes a much more eyecatching headline than "US planned to set off small atomic device on Moon."

Now as to 'glassing' Mars, I don't know that I'd want to start terraforming a place by irradiating the hell out of it but Mars is entirely capable of keeping it's oxygen. Atmosphere retention has to do with the V-RMS of the particles in question, relative to the escape velocity of the planet, which from a practical standpoint has to do with how hot the planet gets and what the surface escape velocity is. Earth can't retain molecular hydrogen or helium for that reason, Earth out at Mar's orbit would retain them better because it would be cooler. Mars' escape velocity is 5 km/s vs our own 11, but keep in mind the V-rms is √(3RT/M), essentially oxygen, 16 times heavier than hydrogen, (mono or diatomic) has 1/4th the speed, V-rms, at the same temp, and Temp is fairly minimal as a factor here, as the square root of temps in Kelvin doesn't change much between Earth and Mars. It would leak oxygen and hydrogen faster than Earth - especially from the lack of decent magnetic field - but still ought to be geological timelines not years or decades.

You know the physics better than I, but just increasing the Martian atmospheres oxygen ratio to Earths would mean increasing its oxygen content 150X if it kept every atom. That still would not be enough to prevent hypoxia though, because the Martian atmosphere is only a small fraction as dense as Earths (i.e. even if it were 100% oxygen it would have far less per liter at the surface than Earth does.) As for temperature, I must ask you to elaborate on why lower temperatures aid gas retention, as I would expect gas molecules to escape more easily as they gain heat (and thus energy.) As you say though, there is little difference in Kelvins between Martian and Terran temperature, and bombarding Mars with thermonuclear bombs could only raise its temperature.

If you hit the planet with something moving faster, relatively, then the escape velocity of the planet, you'd lose some in the initial strike, that's complex and there's modeling on that I'm not too familiar with. Otherwise it will all stay there, and you lose small fractions with time. The 1/6th rule I recall vaguely from memory is, I believe, based on observations of planet's by their mass and atmosphere density determining that those worlds under a certain threshold wouldn't retain atmosphere over billions of years, not millions let alone thousand. Oxygen is the third most abundant material in the Universe and 8 and 16 times more massive in it's common form than the 2nd and first most abundant respectively. If it leaked 1% a millenium and was a void in 100,000 years it wouldn't 'retain' in the astronomical sense but in all probability such a loss would be considered trivial to anyone who added stuck it there manually in the first place, but it would vent hydrogen faster and you'd need to add that, to keep the water, and frankly it's a cheap commodity. In any event, last I'd heard the earth vented about a kilogram into the void every second, mostly hydrogen with helium as about 5% of that and oxygen much less, our atmosphere masses, as it turns out, 14 pounds per square inch or about 10^17 pounds. So an annual loss of about 30,000 tons compared to about 50,000,000,000,000 tons, means even if that leakage was all oxygen and nitrogen, as opposed to virtually none of it, we'd be talking some billion years. If Mars was leaking a thousand times faster we'd be talking some million years. I'm not sure if anyone's actually done a rigorous calculation on the matter but replacing a few thousand tons, or even a few megatons, of air a year is a pretty trivial problem compared to sticking it there in the first place, especially since Mars already has uncounted megatons of oxygen in the native minerals. Sand is over half oxygen by mass and that red crap we call rust that colors that planet is mostly oxygen, I hate to point out the obvious but the byproduct of turning rust into iron is iron plus carbon dioxide, which in turn gets sucked up by plants into plant mass and oxygen... the world currently produces several hundred megatons of steel each year and a like amount of CO2, and thus oxygen, so even that super pessimistic megatons leakage figure would be pretty irrelevant in that it could be fixed by scooping up that rusty iron and making it into steel for the building and such.

Assuming we had a practical way to convert CO2 into O2 onsite; if we did, the CO2 in 95% of Mars' atmosphere would obviate the need to nuke the whole planet.

Mars not only has far less mass than Earth but (partly for that reason) far less atmospheric pressure (and far less atmosphere in general.) Again, if we just say, "Mars' atmosphere is only 0.13% O2, unlike Earths 20% ratio," our O2 concentration looks ~150X higher, but the pressure difference makes that more like 150­­²X. Making Martian air breathable requires adding any and all oxygen man will ever need, and leaks that would be trivial here would be catastrophic there. Earths atmosphere has 200X the pressure AND mass of Mars', so comparing the air loss of each is comparing apples to oranges.

Incidentally, the figure I keep seeing for Earths atmosphere is 5,000,000,000,000,000 tons but, regardless, it is only proportionally applicable to Mars, which only has 25,000,000,000,000 tons of air. Multiplying the molar fraction that is O2 (0.13%) by oxygens atomic weight and dividing by the Martian atmospheres average molar mass shows pretty precisely how much O2 Martian air has: Just over 19 gigatons. Leaking 30 megatons/year would thus be significant; depleting all of it would still take 7 centuries, but it goes without saying the air would be unbreathable much sooner (since it already is, even with that 19 gigatons of O2.)

However much oxygen (in whatever form) Mars does or does not have under its surface, its mass is only a little over 10% Earths, so we already have about a tenth as much matter to work with, whatever its content. There is less mass from which to release oxygen just as there is less to retain however much is released. Once released that oxygen would stream away into space at a relatively high rate, especially if super-heated by thermonuclear bombs (that already punch holes in Earths stratosphere despite our higher gravity and pressure.) Increasing Mars' atmospheric O2 (only about 0.004% as concentrated as Earths) to breathable levels would mean increasing it to at least 10,000X current levels, and any amount of leaking would start a very short countdown on how long it remained breathable.

Mars terraforming isn't exactly an underdeveloped discussion, we keep it in vague terms because there's a lot question marks about best method and specifics.

I still like greenhouse domes; they solve the problems of pressure, leakage, heat and food plus exploit the fact what little atmosphere Mars has is nearly all CO2.

Keep in mind there's precious little practical difference between nuking the fuck out of Mars and bombarding it with icy asteroids and radioactive leftovers are a smaller issue with H-bombs, especially really big ones, because the byproducts of the Fusion stage are very, very short half-life stuff and you just have the radioactive remains of the fission stage which is more or less the same as an A-bomb with a tiny fraction of the power. When you're setting off 100-MT bombs you're getting parallel radioactive debris to a 100-kT in terms of leftover heavier-than-iron stuff because they have around the same amount (kinda). Lighter-than-iron byproducts are usually just temporarily charged, like particles in a radiation suit, don't hold it very long.

Unless I badly misunderstood thermonuclear weapons, the amount and persistence of fallout depends greatly on the bomb. I admit I only studied the topic as a layman years ago, but IIRC "basic" H-bombs use a fission cores heat to initiate fusion in surrounding hydrogen, producing relatively little fallout since fission byproducts are at the heart of a fusion reaction that leaves little but very hot helium that soon leaves Earth. However, an additional exterior fission stage is a very different, much dirtier affair, because fusion sends high energy particles streaming through an outer layer that quickly fissions and scatters to the four winds, leaving a trail of fission fallout in its wake. So really huge bombs (which terraforming surely requires) would pretty much cover the whole Martian surface in persistent radioactive fallout.

Yeah, if you wrap an H-bomb core with more U or P you get a dirty weapon, that's sort of a deliberate act though, Joel, and incidentally generally has to do with Uranium happening to be a handy thing to make the exterior cone of a missile re-entry vehicle out of anyway. Using 100 kilos of plutonium in a raw A-bomb and using it as catalyst for an H-bomb still produces parallel amounts of that 100 kilos as byproduct, you just have way more energy released, I'm not sure what the left out byproduct is, percentage-wise, but I'd guess an H-bomb leaves less un-fissioned in absolute terms and of course considerably less as a percentage of energy produced.

In any event the plan would either be to nuke it from orbit and have the blast expend a maximum amount of energy over an optimized amount of land, baking the oxygen out of it, or burying the nukes an optimized distance under the ground so the heat diffused into those upper layers and baked the oxygen out but near enough that most of the oxygen could escape the ground into the air, I really have no idea what that depth would be or which method would be better, but I'd be ton the sub-surface detonation leaving less contaminants around to endanger people compared to an aerial or surface blast.

That "maximum amount of energy" is the problem. Sure, fission-fusion-fission bombs (like most bombs) must be intentionally designed as such, but routinely are, specifically to maximize yield. Terraforming even a small planet like Mars, where the atmospheres pressure and O2 content is far below any place on Earth, would almost certainly require maximized yields. That means an exterior fission stage, and THAT means a lot of persistent radioactivity covering the surface.

A fusion bomb would not be so bad, because much of the fissile material would become alpha particles inside the fusion reaction (or be blasted into space,) but if the U/Pt is on the outside rather than inside much of it is shot EVERYWHERE before that can happen. Subterranean detonation and the short beta decay half-lives of oxygens radioisotopes would mitigate that—but Mars' crust is not 100% oxygen (Si-32s half-life is over a century; Fe-60s, 2.5 million years.)

American Physicists, last I checked, had a higher rate of military service then any other field except 'military science', followed by engineering, those two would essentially have been the two groups of scientists consulted on the matter. Not a bloodthirsty crowd but contrary to the stereotype weaponization of a given interesting new bit of science is usually very obvious to the discoverers and as a group I'd deem them neither more nor less likely than Random Joe to think that a good or bad thing. The group is further biased since the people asked would have been those from the group disproportionately made up of service members, prior serivce, or those that cheerfully worked with the military all the time, insofar as NASA was more or less a wing of the military back then.

Reasonable (though I would have expected a higher percentage of mechanics and metallurgists to join the military,) except that, once again, the senior career military officers were the ones saying, "um... this sounds kind of dangerous...." In other words, even the people who coined the dismissive euphemism "collateral damage" were concerned enough about it to kill the project but the scientists' chief worry was evidently damaging something they had only begun studying.

Like I said, I don't trust the article or commentary on the subject to be very accurate, but nuking the moon or Mars doesn't even set my threat radar off concerning humans, I'd be worried about damaging the geology of the moon when we hadn't studied it yet, back then, myself, more than the possible accident option of the nuclear material blowing up during launch or boost phases. A rocket exploding on the pad and spraying the vlast radius with nuclear contaminants isn't much worse then it blowing up on the pad anyway, and frankly I wouldn't expect a big ball of uranium or plutonium to seriously fragment if the rocket blew up, a single, or even a few dozen, dense shards of fissionable material tumbling onto land or sea isn't exactly nothing but then neither is a train derailing at speed in the middle of city. If it totally atomized into fine dust on the way down it would be spread over some ellipse hundreds or thousands of miles long, radiation isn't to be laughed at but the better part of a million square miles would be a hell of a diluting factor, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were moderately dirty weapons and they hardly made the entire Archipelago there dangerous. Fragments would be easier to cleanup but totally fragmentation probably wouldn't even need it.

In any event, we shoot plutonium up into space regularly already, we used about a bomb's worth of the stuff in that new Mars rover.

Realistically, I would not have been too concerned about endangering human life (certainly not from high altitude disintegration) OR lunar contamination (the relatively small bomb and relatively larger lunar surface should make that negligible even if the low gravity and vacuum did not blow most fallout into space.) It was just, IMHO, a ridiculously impractical idea in the first place. It would probably have backfired in deterring a Soviet lunar landing (nuking the Moon and nuking a specific lunar target are two different things,) and the PR effect would have been a disaster. The headlines (and not just in Pravda) would have been something like "US Cannot Beat Soviets to Moon, Nuke It Instead." It is hard to imagine a more overt admission of defeat and inferiority.

Fair point on the radioactive elements in the Martian landers; as others have noted, the real problem with shooting lots of nuclear waste into space is weight. :(
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Carl Sagan Advised US Defense Department to Win the Space Race by Nuking the Moon - 02/12/2012 05:04:40 PM 697 Views
Way to jump the shark, Carl. *NM* - 02/12/2012 06:48:30 PM 151 Views
Agreed - 06/12/2012 12:17:16 AM 436 Views
Mars can retain Oxygen just fine, and this isn't exactly new - 03/12/2012 12:25:14 AM 360 Views
It does not seem to be doing a very good job of it; Mars' atmosphere is ~0.1% O2. - 06/12/2012 12:16:16 AM 420 Views
There's a difference between retaining added and not having any - 06/12/2012 01:44:56 AM 322 Views
Not practically. - 07/12/2012 02:27:02 AM 928 Views
Am I missing something? - 03/12/2012 08:18:25 PM 477 Views
Perhaps Sagans subsequent suggestion we nuke Mars to make it habitable. - 05/12/2012 11:00:08 PM 436 Views
Re: Journalists - 05/12/2012 11:27:10 PM 460 Views

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