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Comment by zoba | Hacker News Reader

Some folks at NASA think we can just park an MRI machine's worth of magnetic shield a million miles in front of Mars to fix the issue.

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

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Yup, I'm a huge fan of this idea, and I think this is the obvious Step 1. After that, we can figure out how to genetically modify plants and other advanced terraforming techniques with automation.

Terraforming would be a very long-term thing, but we better get started now.

Yes - exactly this. A very large RTG or even fission powered electromagnet parked at L1.

Wouldn't the solar wind continuously impart some momentum on the field generating station, eventually pushing it out of L1? I don't doubt we could generate a good enough field, but the continuous station keeping might be tricky.

Probably, but I can imagine a converted starship being useful here - just keep refueling it every 5 years or whatever.

In a world... Where the entire survival of the planet is dependent on one shield ship... One man... Must save it... From the mad scientist who wants to destroy it!

I would see this sci fi movie!

Losing atmosphere due to solar wind is very slow process. If you spent 10 millions years building the atmosphere, you can afford few millions years to build a replacement for that ship.

That’s one hell of an institutional memory!

Yeah, but because of McGuffin it will happen in like 15 minutes if the super-villain gets his will. And then billions of Martians will needlessly die of suffocation and sun-burns. But our HERO John McLane III is there to valiantly save the day by employing fast one-liners and walking bare-footed on broken glass!!1

How much mass would you need for ion thrusters to offset that momentum?

It wouldn't be a problem for a species with an active space economy to keep a few satellites at L1. Should the species no longer have active space travel then eventually the planet would be screwed though, but how long is "eventually", and how long would the satellite have to be in place before the goal is met.

As a species we struggle do 5 years projects, let alone 500 or 5000 year projects.

You can park the magnet a little bit closer to the sun than a stable orbit would be and use the push to compensate for that. Make it a ring and you can even focus the protons around the middle of the disk and help Mars regain some hydrogen.

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