After the Cold War instead of dismantling some of the Nuclear Weapons they fire them at Mars?

Instead of dismantling some of the nuclear weapons and dealing with deposing of them they just fire some of them at Mars polar caps to see if it will help terraform it. World leaders just think this is a more productive way to get rid of some of them. It might show terraforming results over 100 years if they do it over the next few decades. They can't get there effectively in person yet for probably the next half century at least so why not and the radiation should die down by the time they do get there. Hopefully by the time they get there the caps will have melted to create water and caused a greenhouse warming effect on the planet. If it doesn't it is still better to send the nukes there then have nuclear waste on earth. Also it could still provide useful scientific research and knowledge. Thoughts?
 
Shooting nukes at the Martian ice caps won't terraform the planet, and this is well known to anyone who would propose it. It's also very expensive, since ICBMs (let alone IRBMs etc.) can't reach Mars, so you need to attach them to a different launch vehicle which is now nuclear tipped. People will freak out over this fact alone, even though realistically the worst that would happen if the rocket fails is nuclear material getting scattered everywhere. Considering these facts, it's far, far more expensive than the alternatives and is also illegal under international law--see the Outer Space Treaty. If you're so concerned about nuclear waste, you simply transmute it and make useful elements out of it which is also expensive but better in every sense than shooting it into space at this point.
 
Shooting nukes at the Martian ice caps won't terraform the planet, and this is well known to anyone who would propose it. It's also very expensive, since ICBMs (let alone IRBMs etc.) can't reach Mars, so you need to attach them to a different launch vehicle which is now nuclear tipped. People will freak out over this fact alone, even though realistically the worst that would happen if the rocket fails is nuclear material getting scattered everywhere. Considering these facts, it's far, far more expensive than the alternatives and is also illegal under international law--see the Outer Space Treaty. If you're so concerned about nuclear waste, you simply transmute it and make useful elements out of it which is also expensive but better in every sense than shooting it into space at this point.
I always found the Outer Space Treaty a bit stupid. Why would dumping waste or hazard materials on a dead rock matter? As long as it doesn't harm earth or a planet with life who cares. Also I think that treaty goes out the window once space travel is easier and cheaper
 
I always found the Outer Space Treaty a bit stupid. Why would dumping waste or hazard materials on a dead rock matter? As long as it doesn't harm earth or a planet with life who cares. Also I think that treaty goes out the window once space travel is easier and cheaper

Because we don't know the objects are dead or not. Even the Moon might have some Earth extremophiles we brought over. Especially if lithopanspermia is correct. Contamination is inevitable (and probably already has happened given lower standards in the earlier days), but it isn't worth messing with the place until we can get some serious instruments there. Only places safe to consider sterile enough would be the Sun and the gas giants, and maybe smaller asteroids since any life there would be too alien to be bothered by earth life or radiation and all that.

The treaty will definitely go out the window at that point, but it will be replaced by a complex field of law and agreements akin to international maritime law.
 
Because we don't know the objects are dead or not. Even the Moon might have some Earth extremophiles we brought over. Especially if lithopanspermia is correct. Contamination is inevitable (and probably already has happened given lower standards in the earlier days), but it isn't worth messing with the place until we can get some serious instruments there. Only places safe to consider sterile enough would be the Sun and the gas giants, and maybe smaller asteroids since any life there would be too alien to be bothered by earth life or radiation and all that.

The treaty will definitely go out the window at that point, but it will be replaced by a complex field of law and agreements akin to international maritime law.
The moon is a dead rock. The point of nuking Mars is to hit its polar ice caps with nukes so the ice melts to form water. This is also all theorized to cause a possible greenhouse effect that could help warm the planet to more livable temperatures since Mars is currently to cold and maybe give it more of atmosphere. If you did in the 1990s and landed on Mars by or after 2050 much of the radiation would have gone away. Any planet without complex life or oceans we should not be too worried about contaminating.
 
The moon is a dead rock. The point of nuking Mars is to hit its polar ice caps with nukes so the ice melts to form water. This is also all theorized to cause a possible greenhouse effect that could help warm the planet to more livable temperatures since Mars is currently to cold and maybe give it more of atmosphere. If you did in the 1990s and landed on Mars by or after 2050 much of the radiation would have gone away. Any planet without complex life or oceans we should not be too worried about contaminating.
Damn, I am glad AH.com attracted the very best xenobiologist of the planet, who knows how life can or cannot exist outside our planet in any possible form. It's a really good thing this field of research has been settled by your forum post, we won't need all these researchers mooching money out of taxes now. And I'm so glad to also learn here the super-duper secret that the total nuclear arsenal of humankind is actually powerful enough to initiate a terraforming process on a planet with so little atmosphere orbiting much further from the Sun than Earth.

Are you, by any chance, a world-class specialist in a few other fields to turn decades of research over its head elsewhere too?
 
Damn, I am glad AH.com attracted the very best xenobiologist of the planet, who knows how life can or cannot exist outside our planet in any possible form. It's a really good thing this field of research has been settled by your forum post, we won't need all these researchers mooching money out of taxes now. And I'm so glad to also learn here the super-duper secret that the total nuclear arsenal of humankind is actually powerful enough to initiate a terraforming process on a planet with so little atmosphere orbiting much further from the Sun than Earth.

Are you, by any chance, a world-class specialist in a few other fields to turn decades of research over its head elsewhere too?
The plan was proposed by elon musk. Also I personally don't consider microorganism on the same level as complex life forms so I would not care much if they contaminated them. I would only worry about contaminating a ocean or complex life but all this is just my opinion.
 
The plan was proposed by elon musk. Also I personally don't consider microorganism on the same level as complex life forms so I would not care much if they contaminated them. I would only worry about contaminating a ocean or complex life but all this is just my opinion.
Great, so you want to destroy potentially colossal scientific advancement for a stupid plan that is fundamentally idiotic and unworkable given how puny and weak nuclear weapons are in terms of energy compared to an atmosphere, just because some guy who pays some engineers to do hard work thought so.


Look at how many nuclear tests were done on Earth. It hasn't had any relevant influence on the atmosphere.
 
Great, so you want to destroy potentially colossal scientific advancement for a stupid plan that is fundamentally idiotic and unworkable given how puny and weak nuclear weapons are in terms of energy compared to an atmosphere, just because some guy who pays some engineers to do hard work thought so.


Look at how many nuclear tests were done on Earth. It hasn't had any relevant influence on the atmosphere.
You would fire a lot more nukes then that into a concentrated area. If we fired hundreds of nukes into our polar caps the effects on earth environment would be huge but not in a good way.
 
You would fire a lot more nukes then that into a concentrated area. If we fired hundreds of nukes into our polar caps the effects on earth environment would be huge but not in a good way.
Not really. The global nuclear arsenal has around 6E18 Joule. That's... barely 50 % more than the earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Nuclear weapons are puny on a planetary scale. Pathetic. The Yellowstone's last explosion? 3.6 E21 Joule, and that wouldn't be enough to do some real terraforming.
 
Not really. The global nuclear arsenal has around 6E18 Joule. That's... barely 50 % more than the earthquake in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Nuclear weapons are puny on a planetary scale. Pathetic. The Yellowstone's last explosion? 3.6 E21 Joule, and that wouldn't be enough to do some real terraforming.
The radiation and heat is the important factor here not raw power. A enough of that could melt a lot of ice if focused at one general area which is supposed to cause the greenhouse effect.
 
The radiation and heat is the important factor here not raw power. A enough of that could melt a lot of ice if focused at one general area which is supposed to cause the greenhouse effect.
Yeah, you definitely have no fucking clue what you're talking about. The value I gave contained all the energy released by nukes, period. You don't kickstart a greenhouse effect with such a small and pathetic amount of firepower as our global nuclear arsenal. Seriously, stop now, you're making a fool of yourself by posting as if nuclear weapons worked like in Hollywood movies. They don't. They are small weapons that barely scorch a few square km of the surface of a planet. With the entire nuclear arsenal we have, we could barely melt 20E12 kg of water, AKA 20 km^3 of ice. Melt, not turn into vapor (which requires to heat that water from 0 to 100 degrees and then turn it into vapor itself).

That's pitiful, and if Musk pretended it could be useful, as you claim, then it shows precisely why this guy doesn't have any advanced degree in geoengineering, or even basic thermodynamics engineering education.
 
The plan was proposed by elon musk. Also I personally don't consider microorganism on the same level as complex life forms so I would not care much if they contaminated them. I would only worry about contaminating a ocean or complex life but all this is just my opinion.
You know that Musk is a stoner, right? Ergo: his ideas are all hot air.
 
Agree.. Dumb idea and pointless to send them to Mars.

Want to Terra form Mars, you will need a few things such as how to make the atmosphere usable, Increase the temp, water, possibly soil that is usable.

But nuking Mars with 36,000 nukes isn't going to do much

Hell krakatoa was like a 200 megaton bomb going off at once. And honestly compared to the rest of the planet it was like a pimple.

Yellowstone was magnaritudes beyond that on a whole other scale.


Terra forming Mars will require, solar arrays, mirrors, diverting lots of comets, and will take an incredibly long time.

Mankind simply doesn't have to capability to do that on another world.

Hell we have only done it here. Because well . We live here and even then it's taken a fair amount of time and 10 billion people working daily at it
 
If @Histor32 above is correct, the global nuclear arsenal is 36E3 nukes big.

If @Rufus Shinra above is correct, that global nuclear arsenal could release 6E18 joules, which is big enough to melt 20E12 kg of water ice, which is 20 cubic kilometres of water ice

If the wiki article "Water on Mars" is correct, Mars has five million cubic kilometres of water ice.

So I think there's not enough energy to have anything close to the effect the OP requires.
 
If @Rufus Shinra above is correct, that global nuclear arsenal could release 6E18 joules, which is big enough to melt 20E12 kg of water ice, which is 20 cubic kilometres of water ice
Sources, BTW:

Global arsenal Joule equivalency: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php#id--The_Boom_Table - The Boom Table, one of the most important links ever for forum debates.
Volume of melted water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion

A gram of ice at 0 °C needs 333,55 J to turn into a gram of water at 0°C. 6E18/3E2 = 20 E15 grams of water = 20 E9 tonnes of water = 20*1000*1000*1000 tonnes of water. 1 cubic metre of water weights 1 tonne (roughly, small variations for ice, for water temperature, that sort of thing), so we have roughly 20 cubic kilometre.

That is, of course, under the very, very silly assumption that all of the energy released by these nuclear weapons gets perfectly transferred into heat in ice. Oh and, BTW, to get 1 gram of water from 0 °C to 100 °C, you need to give it 418 Joule. And then you need more than 1.6 kiloJoule, IIRC, to turn that same gram of water at 100 °C to a gram of steam at 100°C. So your energy expenditure isn't going to turn a lot of ice to steam. It'd be a shitload more effective to use barely a couple of nukes to divert a few asteroids or comets to Mars where they can crash with massively more energy release.
 
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