Elon Musk said one of the methods they are taking into consideration to create an atmosphere on Mars is to nuke its poles. How nuking the poles would create the atmosphere?
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1It should work because it is well-known that any problem can be solved by dropping bombs (or menacing to do so). – Stéphane Rollandin Sep 15 '17 at 08:26
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6Possible duplicate of Using nuclear devices to terraform Mars: Elon Musk's nuclear proposal? – Stéphane Rollandin Sep 15 '17 at 08:29
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Please refer here for a similar question.
The idea of nuking the poles of Mars came around when people started to seriously consider the idea of terraforming another planet. If Mars's poles were to be nuked, the Ice Caps, mainly made of carbon dioxide, would vaporize. This vapor of carbon dioxide would be the first step in this process as a small atmosphere would form from this initial step. However, a larger atmosphere is achieved when you consider the greenhouse effect. The carbon dioxide would trap heat from the sun, heating up the ice caps and causing almost the entire Ice Cap to disappear and become a larger atmosphere. With carbon dioxide to warm the planet, trees could then be planted to chemically alter the atmosphere with photosynthesis producing oxygen that we can breathe.
This idea appears to work in theory if there is enough energy in the thermonuclear bombs, however, our current energies of these bombs would require tens of thousand of them to be dropped to release a small amount of carbon dioxide. Therefore this plan may not be feasible.
t.sand
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Even Tsar-bomba was never considered as a top limit for thermonuclear bomb yield rather as a demonstration that if you want to make them more powerful you can do it. Our current bomb yields are limited by their military use - many smaller yield bombs are more likely to reach the enemy targets and each one of them is powerful enough already to destroy a city. That also allows to use them in the limited conflict whereas large bombs are good only as doomsday devices (and during the cold war there were quite insane proposals in this direction) – OON Sep 15 '17 at 08:01
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You want "insane" ? Giving Elon Musk a nuke to play with when he's already got the launch vehicles ! :-) – StephenG - Help Ukraine Sep 15 '17 at 09:26
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@OON Yes, the Tsar bomb was way to big to be useful already, and no near limit to expect. The US did not even care to build a bigger one. – Volker Siegel Sep 22 '18 at 11:33