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Mars

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts (bgr.com) 101

Posted by EditorDavid from the making-a-statement dept.
"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."
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Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts More

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts

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  • ...Bruno's music isn't that bad.

  • Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChromeAeonuim ( 1026946 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:57PM (#59097728)
    Okay, not even a link to buy the shirt if we wanted to? Just an implausible scheme tweeted out in a few words, and this is news? Yawn. Here's some way cooler space shirts. [roadtoapollo50th.com]

    But on the topic, it was my understanding that even if an atmosphere could be generated, solar wind would strip it away without a magnetic field to shield it, and speaking of which, even if you did have a warm, breathable atmosphere, it still wouldn't stop the solar radiation from messing you up in all sorts of ways. You'd need to restart the martian planetary core somehow, which I don't think you can do just by dropping a crapton of nukes. I'm all for space exploration and even terraforming, but this plan sounds dubious.
    • How many millions of years would the atmosphere last?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jvp ( 27996 )

      But on the topic, it was my understanding that even if an atmosphere could be generated, solar wind would strip it away without a magnetic field to shield it, and speaking of which, even if you did have a warm, breathable atmosphere, it still wouldn't stop the solar radiation from messing you up in all sorts of ways.

      Mars does have a magnetosphere, but it's super-weak as compared to Earth's because it no longer has an active dynamo to keep it going. I'm not sure the "new" atmosphere would vanish immediately, but yes: it would be in serious risk. Also, as you point out: the solar radiation would still cook us alive. "Really bad sun burn" doesn't begin to describe it.

    • Musk's plan isn't dubious. His plan is to regularly say something stupid, that even HE knows is stupid, because it keeps him in the headlines and keeps investors engaged so he can continue to make more money.

      • Continue making money? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        so he can continue to make more money.

        Wait, what? I must have missed it. Since when did Musk start making money?

        $408M loss [techcrunch.com] last quarter.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          And +$614M FCF. Your point?

          It's almost impossible for a company undergoing a rapid exponential scaleup to return profits (that Tesla has done it in two of the past four quarters is exceedingly abnormal). It's FCF that keeps the scaleup going. Profit (net income) is the change in assets vs. liabilities, but a growth company outgrows its liabilities before they come due - you pay for your liabilities with a company that's much larger than it was when they were accrued. Contrarily, you stop focusing on exp

    • Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Sique ( 173459 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @08:37PM (#59097866) Homepage
      I've serious doubts that Mars contains enough carbon for a carbondioxide atmosphere thick enough to cause a greenhouse effect strong enough to have temperatures comparable to Earth. Mars' atmosphere now is 95 percent carbondioxide, but it creates a measly 15-20 K Greenhouse effect. Ok, Mars' atmosphere is also much thinner than Earth's atmosphere, but the partial pressure of carbondioxide is much higher than on Earth (6.3 hPa on Mars vs. 0.4 hPa on Earth). With Mars' gravitational field being about a third as strong as Earth's, it means that Mars' partial carbondioxide pressure on Earth would be around 20 hPa.

      For Mars to have similar surface temperatures than Earth, the Greenhouse effect must be around 100 K. The amount of carbondioxide you need for that is really huge. The energy radiation is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature. To have around 290 K instead of 220 K right now means that the energy radiation from Mars' surface would triple, and the atmosphere would have to contain that.

      • Best scientific estimates are that if we nuke the ice caps we get maybe 6% of the atmosphere we have on earth. What's the point? Still going to have to go out in space suits. It's not going to let us grow plants outside.

        There really doesn't seem anything more beneficial than keeping an eccentric billionaire in the news by doing this.

        • Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @12:12AM (#59098158) Homepage

          There is quite a point to that, which is that if you get above the Armstrong limit (the ice caps are estimated to have enough CO2 to reach between 50 and 150mbar, depending on the presence and concentration of clathrates), and you can get the temperature hot enough to create liquid water (even if seasonal or temporary, and including from any alternative means as well - e.g. soletta, GHG production, etc), you can grow methanogens out in the open. Which produce the much more potent greenhouse gas methane, to further raise the temperature. With increasing temperatures comes increasing ice melt and regolith outgasing, and a rising water vapour partial pressure. The additional production of oxygen for the atmosphere would ideally be from, say, engineered photosynthetic iron-reducing bacteria (Fe2O3 to FeO or Fe(OH)2) (if the oxygen source were water rather than iron, it seems inevitable that the freed hydrogen will be re-oxidized on human timescales). The partial pressure of methane would be far too low to be combustible. The addition of oxygen would add a new partial pressure to the total atmospheric pressure. The goal would be Earthlike partial pressures of CO2 and O2, alongside significant methane, for a net pressure in the 0,2-0,25 atm range (which are entirely survivable for humans... and indeed, offers some significant advantages over the same atmosphere with the addition of nitrogen, such as faster gas diffusion and less effort for respiration).

          The problems I see are still twofold.

          1) The mere presence of bacterial biomass means the re-binding of your atmospheric carbon. So you still need lots of carbon (and need to make sure you free order of magnitude more O2 than you bind... which is not how photosynthesis normally operates, for any species). Even when you include regolith outgassing, and potentially decomposition of carbonate deposits, to your carbon inventory, there still just isn't all that much carbon to work with.

          2) Mars's nitrogen inventory is highly depleted. Amino acids fundamentally require nitrogen. There is some nitrogen locked up in minerals on Mars, but its isotope ratio tells a clear story of having been depleted from the planet. I see no other near-term (e.g. not "crashing minor planets together") options beyond just freeing all you can and accepting that plants are going to have to struggle a lot more to bind atmospheric nitrogen than they do on Earth.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by phayes ( 202222 )

            Thanks for this, Rei. It’s been a long time since a comment I saw on /. was this informative.

          • Plants don't struggle at all to bind atmospheric nitrogen on Earth...
            They're incapable of it (minus a few small exceptions)
            Their nitrogen comes from the soil, fixed by other organisms.

            Or am I missing something in your explanation?
          • Once you start to get appreciable PP[O2] then the bacteria will start to use the methane as a fuel converting it to CO2 and reducing your net GHG warming.

            I see no other near-term (e.g. not "crashing minor planets together") options

            There isn't enough carbon dioxide in the asteroid belt to give Mars a usable atmosphere. Even if you did bombard the planet with literally millions of minor planets.

    • Okay, not even a link to buy the shirt if we wanted to?

      The link is right there in TFS and where else would you get it other than the SpaceX store?

    • But on the topic, it was my understanding that even if an atmosphere could be generated, solar wind would strip it away without a magnetic field to shield it

      Quite a slow leak... 1 bar would last for awhile... would take on order of a million years before most if it was gone.

      and speaking of which, even if you did have a warm, breathable atmosphere, it still wouldn't stop the solar radiation from messing you up in all sorts of ways

      It would do a lot. The earths atmosphere provides the equivalent radiation shielding of 30 feet of water.

      You'd need to restart the martian planetary core somehow, which I don't think you can do just by dropping a crapton of nukes. I'm all for space exploration and even terraforming, but this plan sounds dubious.

      As planet scale projects go creating an artificial magnetic field is "easy". Half dozen superconducting rings at various latitudes around the planet each consuming about a gigawatt of energy would do.

    • Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by darkHanzz ( 2579493 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @05:18AM (#59098576) Journal

      But on the topic, it was my understanding that even if an atmosphere could be generated, solar wind would strip it away without a magnetic field to shield it,

      According to NASA, having an artificial mangetic field on mars is not completely unfeasible: https://www.extremetech.com/ex... [extremetech.com]

    • It seems that the atmosphere blowing away thing was way overblown. More recent calculations seem to indicate that this process takes millions of years.

    • I'm all for space exploration and even terraforming, but this plan sounds dubious.

      Elon Musk announces an unrealistic plan tied with overpriced merch? Shocking. Now tell me about his 10x multiplied weed burner he called a flamethrower and how he' going to build a submarine all the experts say won't work to save kids trapped in a cave.

    • But on the topic, it was my understanding that even if an atmosphere could be generated, solar wind would strip it away without a magnetic field to shield it,

      For some reason I originally had misunderstood that the nukes were for atmosphere.... Instead I thought it was related to the dead core and no magnetic fields. For some reason I forgot about my original mistake until I read this message. I feel like people have probably nagged Elon about the issue with the core.... but he ignores all of them because it's easier for him to get attention and sell shirts this way.

  • Bad science (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:58PM (#59097732)
    Elon may be trying to drive us forward. But he's not looking at this objectively. Even if you do release CO2 Mars has neither the mass to keep a denser atmosphere nor a magnetic field to prevent it from being swept away by the solar wind.

    • Re:Bad science (Score:5, Interesting)

      by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @07:24PM (#59097768)

      From what I've read, even without a magnetosphere, it would take a few million years for Mars to lose its atmosphere again (assuming it can be reconstituted in the first place). As for nuking the polar ice caps, I would avoid that. Instead, I would opt for a method described in a book called "The Greening Of Mars" back in the 80s... release some potent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (like methane or CFCs) which could be manufactured on Mars.

      They also suggested inoculating Martian soil with hardy lichens from Antarctica, in hopes that they'd propagate on Mars, reducing its albedo... but that's more of a speculative long shot.

    • Re:Bad science (Score:5, Interesting)

      by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @07:27PM (#59097774)
      Nah. The gravity is strong enough and the stripping rate low enough for the atmosphere to remain there for any period meaningful to humans. A much worse problem is that the polar CO2 ice is hardly enough, unless all you want to do with the atmosphere is to make the landings and ISRU somewhat easier. At one point you will simply need to import some frozen gases from the outer solar system. This of course would require tremendous effort and time.

    • Even if you do release CO2 Mars has neither the mass to keep a denser atmosphere nor a magnetic field to prevent it from being swept away by the solar wind.

      I would point out that it would take solar wind millions (if not billions) of years to strip it away, just like the original. That provides enough time to solve those problems.

    • But he's not looking at this objectively.

      A clever marketing trick to get fans to buy shirts and further generate revenue?

      I'm not being facetous or critical here. This is genuinely a good idea, and at the same time far better for the environment than Trump branded plastic straws.

    • Even if you do release CO2 Mars has neither the mass to keep a denser atmosphere nor a magnetic field to prevent it from being swept away by the solar wind.

      Earth is also losing atmosphere to space. Something like 20% of the water this planet started with is now gone. If the sun never ran out of hydrogen and earths magnetic field never failed the earth would still eventually lose its surface water and atmosphere to space.

      What is important to consider is predicted rate of loss not the fact loss is occurring. If you can keep the vast majority of what you add for even thousands of years that's way more than enough time to work more permanent solutions such as i

  • Sueing you for hate crime.

  • Musk (Score:2, Informative)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 )
    This guy thinks he is way funnier and cooler than he really is. It's kind of embarrassing.

    • Hay, he was one of the co-founders of PayPal, and kicked out when he was trying to make PayPal worse.

      What does he have to lose, trying to be 'cool' and all?

      • His self respect?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Motard ( 1553251 )

          His self respect?

          Not likely, after PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX. Say what you will about any of those, but losing respect is something he's not really in danger of.

          • It doesn't matter what a person has accomplished in life, if they are idiots, they are idiots. His behaviour has a person leads me to think Paypal was just right place, right time and the others just came from the money of the former.
    • My understanding: Elon Musk is extraordinarily intelligent. Also, I think he is exhibiting symptoms of mental overload. If he wanted help from me concerning that, I would be glad to help him. I've done a lot of studies about how people use their brains.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by lazarus ( 2879 )

      Know anybody with ASD? I'd be willing to bet real money that if he was ever tested he'd have high functioning autism.

      Try to imagine having Autism, billions of dollars, and access to Twitter. You're right, it is embarrassing -- every public speaking engagement he does is terrible. Earnings calls. New product announcements. Podcasts... I feel bad for him, but admire his fortitude.

      Although I'd pre-order a Roadster if he'd give up Twitter.

  • I think Musk recently watched "Total Recall"

  • Magnetic field? (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @07:11PM (#59097756) Journal

    Wouldn't it make more sense to establish a magnetic field first?. Without that, you might as well just blow all that CO2 into space, right?

    • The escape rate of Martian gases due to solar wind is estimated to be around 100 g/s. [nasa.gov]

      • Other sources I read seem to indicate it's non-linear though. There's equilibrium now because that 100 g/s is balanced out by emissions from the planet's interior. If the atmosphere were thicker, there would be more atmosphere for the solar wind to "bite into" for lack of a better expression, and the loss rate would dramatically exceed 100 g/s.

        • That doesn't make any sense. Why would the emissions from the planet's interior, as opposed to the momentary state of the upper atmosphere, have any effect on the speed of escape in the Martian exosphere? Also, there's no equilibrium that we know of - Martian atmosphere actually seasonally fluctuates wildly as it is due to polar sublimation and desublimation. And this 100 g/s figure is not a "net" rate of escape minus resupply or anything, this is just the stripping rate. And yes, it's reasonable to assume
          • I don't know about the planetary outgassing aspect, however, it's a pretty clear line of logic that leads one to conclude that a denser (and higher altitude) atmosphere is going to suffer a larger loss, as more of it is less shielded and subject to higher ionization rates, as well as a lower escape velocity.

    • My theory is if they establish a stable magnetic field, the rest takes care of itself.

    • wouldn't matter. It's estimated Mars lost 99% its atmosphere over a period of half a billion years. If Mars were terra formed and most an atmosphere lost over tens of millions of years it wouldn't matter

    • Wouldn't it make more sense to establish a magnetic field first?. Without that, you might as well just blow all that CO2 into space, right?

      Sure, without the mag field it will blow away - over a few hundred million years or so.

      You might want to add a mag field eventually, to deflect primary cosmic rays and radiation from solar flares. But there's no rush.

  • He's crossed over from 'Eccentric' to 'Bond Villain'

    Someone get him a white cat.

  • Hasn't it suffered enough?

  • Mars has no magnetic field, any terraforming will be stripped away by the solar winds at almost the same rate.
    Now if elon has an idea on how to restart said field, then he might have a case.

    • No, it wouldn't, unless you plan on terraforming with a timeline of hundreds of millions of years.

    • Restarting the magnetic field sounds like a haywire enough project to involve old Nicolas Tesla himself.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      It sounds like we need to build some giant electromagnets on the poles of Mars to get that jump started!

      • It sounds like we need to build some giant electromagnets on the poles of Mars to get that jump started!

        Naw. Just string a few bands of superconductor around the equator.

        Or do it on one of the little moons, and let its field wrap the whole mars demios phobos system. Less material needed that way;

        It's a lot of energy, though, to charge it up.

    • People who repeat that don't realize the time scale involved. Mars lost 99% its atmosphere over a period from 4.2 billion to 3.7 billion years ago.... that's sloooooow when talking about how long a newly created atmosphere would last. If it's good for even 10 million years the human race would be something else long before then....

      • If it's good for even 10 million years the human race would be something else long before then....

        Not to mention that, if you can pump it up in the first place, you can do a tiny bit more every millenium or so to maintain it.

        If you're smelting rocks into metal on an industrial scale you might have the opposite problem: Adding too much oxygen.

        (Since the '70s we of the L5 Society have talked about the problems of lunar air pollution: Polluting the Moon with air, to the point that high-vacuum industrial proc

        • High vacuum industrial processes can be done plenty of other places, we need the moon for solar powered metal making for space stations, habitats and transport, and solar powered electrolysis for fuel. Ruining the 100 molecule per cc of moon is wonderful price to pay for foothold in space.

  • How about? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 )
    Nuke Elon Musk.

  • This idiot wants to *nuke Mars*, for Christ's sake! What's next, "Elon Musk washes the windshields of passers-by, get the DVD!".

    There are guys on street corners with syringes hanging out of their arms making more sense than this imbecile, why are we still listening and breathlessly reporting his every utterance?

  • Late-Breaking News from the Council... MEAT?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17, 2019 @09:00PM (#59097892)
    K'Nord, Speaker for the Council of Elders, dragged former Speaker K'Breel from what he thought was going to be a well-deserved retirement, and addressed the Council in the form of a joint press conference regarding the latest incoherent raving threats received from the blue world next door: "I know, K'Breel, the war was supposed to have ended a year ago, VICTORY and all that, but this is important!"

    They addressed the Council thus:

    "For more than 27 years, we and our podmates have sought to comprehend the invaders and their their metallicity. Their steely digging appendages. Their laser-powered weapons. Their radio-frequency sensory organs. The care that they take to carefully cleanse themselves of all self-replicating organic matter before they cross the vast reaches of interplanetary space in order to invade our dear world."

    And now - we find ourselves as bewildered as any of you when we exclaim in absolute incredulity: the creatures that want to bomb our world back into a watery grave - "they're made of meat?! [mit.edu]"

    "You know how when you slap or flap your gelsacs it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat. I don't even want to think about what they do with whatever they use for gelsacs."

    "Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and just ignore him. It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

    A stunned junior reporter was rendered so dumbfounded at the concept of a meatflapper capable of arming itself with weaponry based on elements 235 through 239, that he found his gelsacs detached amidst riotous peals of laughter.

  • Smoking doobies and tweeting. A powerful combination

  • Why bother with nukes? (Score:3)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday August 17, 2019 @10:24PM (#59098000) Journal

    Why bother with nukes.

    Hang some solar sails on a few asteroids or comet heads and warp their orbits to impact Mars near the poles.

    Just as much energy. Far cheaper (if you're willing to wait an extra year or so for the packages to arrive.) No radioactive pollution.

    You can even add water (and thus oxygen once it gets cracked) by using iceballs rather than carbonaceous chondrites.

    "Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this week."

    • Why bother with nukes.

      Hang some solar sails on a few asteroids or comet heads and warp their orbits to impact Mars near the poles.

      Well, nukes would be cheaper, easier, and quicker. Solar sails are in their infancy and not much past demonstration just to prove they work. Practical solar sails to move meteors or comets to crash into Mars would require a megastructure which we have yet to even dream of attempting in space. It woudl still probably take a century or so to move it. The dV for such a mass means a great deal of energy.

      More practical solution would just be mirrors around Mars focusing more solar energy onto the poles to melt t

    • Just as much energy.

      Na, more.

      Far cheaper (if you're willing to wait an extra year or so for the packages to arrive.)

      No way in hell.

      No radioactive pollution.

      Perhaps your most important point.

      Overall, the process could be more efficient in terms of energy input per dollar, but in no way is altering an asteroid's orbit to coerce an impact in reasonable timeframes going to be cheaper than the production and launch of a warhead.
      Before you say a launch is a launch- no, it isn't.
      A warhead is on a one-way trip. Deceleration and maneuvering is not a concern of it.

  • Modest alternative proposal: crash Phobos (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Sunday August 18, 2019 @05:20AM (#59098580) Homepage

    Phobos is perhaps only a few million years from the end of its life. Why not speed up the process and crash it into Mars? That's got to have a lot more warming power than a few nukes.

    It seems others have had this thought: https://marspedia.org/Bringing... [marspedia.org]

    The advantage of nukes may be political. With above ground testing outlawed on Earth, there could be countries eager to test their nuclear weapons on Mars. And hey, any excuse to make more of them.

    • What we really want is to crash comets into Mars. More hear plus more water. Phobos might be useful later.

  • He should get an EU shop or get a better shipping deal if he wants to make a dent. Shipping costs are 28.84 USD for Economy shipping. (Yes I want one ;-)

  • At least that's a given.

    If it's a different planet than ours it is a bonus.

  • Seems to me you could accomplish thermo nuclear capable explosion(s) using a large kinetic weapon or by redirecting a space rock to the poles. This would eliminate radiation hazard. You would need to provide a heat shield to avoid burning up in the atmosphere. May I should make T-Shirts for this alternative method. ROCK MARS ...

  • We can't live there at all; Mars is livable with suits; way better than the moon. And a backup place to live if we nuke this planet.

    Impact several large asteroids, timed just so, and we'd have a non-radioactive planet to build an ecosystem on.

    One large one to remove most of the current atmosphere. Bonus points for letting it form a moonlet.

    One to increase the rotational speed of the planet to closer to 24hours. Bonus points for making it turn the right direction, which it does not currently.

    One of highly re

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • We find out there really are martians and now they're upset at us bombing their planet.

  • I prefer the Russel Solution.

  • This happened because Total Recall was on cable this weekend.

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