I think terraforming Mars won't ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.

We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Right so we give it a magnetosphere.

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 2 points 4 months ago

That's gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars' dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don't even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.

To get back an earth like dynamo, we'd need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars' insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.

I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars' magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.