Colonising Mars is unlikely and a bad idea

The part that I've been asking myself for years, is how do you create an atmosphere without (or almost without, can't remember) a magnetic field. Is it possible or we would have to generate one?

I thought the plan to bomb the poles wasn't just to melt ice, but also to restore the magnetic field to help trap the atmosphere from escaping, is that true?

The primary points the article raises are:

* Potential life after recent detection of suspected liquid deep water

* Not enough reserves of gases remaining to eventually thicken the atmosphere

* Lack of a magnetic field to preserve the remaining and new atmosphere if created

1. Life has always been possible on Mars. The discovery of liquid water improves this but doesn’t affect possible colonization efforts. Short term, people will be setting up to survive either on or near the surface. It will be important to stay away from such areas except for study, but that doesn’t preclude human settlement efforts.

2. Terraforming in any form is a long term (centuries) goal. The state of the atmosphere won’t degrade in anymore significant way in the mean time. There are more than enough resources in the solar system to import material if that ever becomes a goal for Martians.

3. There are proposals already for satellites in Lagrange points between Mars and the Sun to generate artificial magnetic fields to slow down and prevent the stripping of the atmosphere. By the time technology like this is required, millions of people will already be living there for at least a century or more.

So overall the gist of the article would be like telling colonists to the Western Hemisphere in the 1500’s that it’s not worth trying because building a highway across the continent is impossible with current technology. While true at the time, there was no need for such a long term goal back then and wasn’t for centuries.

Plus one thing about Mars is that no one’s there to displace. Scientifically I care a lot about planetary protection and discovering if life exists there, but that is ultimately less important than colonizing Mars. It’s not like it’s going to spring complex life on its own and we would ruin those chances. It’s a planet’s worth of gravity and natural resources that aren’t going to do anything on their own.

Really terraforming Mars in itself is peripheral to if we can colonize it. Creating a vast possibility subterranean "bubble-city" is technically also a possibility that would reduce the needed gases by orders of magnitude. It would probably also call for a lot of design work to be psychologically tolerable to its residents long term. The why bother remains the same however - unlikely to pay off directly in itself but the research from trying will likely have other applications. Emergency backup for humanity is likely the biggest "practical" reason.

Technically we could theoretically recreate a magnetosphere and import gases from other sources but calling it recordbreakingly expensive would be a massive understatement. Even attempting it calls for a degree of megalomania.

> While it is true that the solar wind has stripped Mars of much of its original atmosphere (due to the lack of the planet's magnetic field), and that any man-made atmosphere on Mars would eventually be dissipated by the solar wind - the speed at which this occurs is measured over geological time frames - on the scale of tens, if not hundreds of millions of years. If humanity were to create an artificial, life-conducive atmosphere on Mars, any atmospheric output due to economic activity (CO2 + other gases) would easily exceed any atmospheric losses. Thus, the atmosphere would be stable.

From ... https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceX/wiki/faq/mars#wiki_what_will...