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YpsilonY t1_j8rhdx1 wrote

Reply to comment by Pornelius_McSucc in Terraforming a magnetosphere possible? by Pornelius_McSucc

Without doing the math, I'm pretty sure you could run an artificial magnetic field or just keep topping up the atmospheres for millions of years using less energy than it would take to move Ceres or melt Mars's core.

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Pornelius_McSucc OP t1_j8ri2tj wrote

I think it is half the opposite because all you would need for heating the core is a BIG nuke unless you did it electrically. It is however likely that it would take less energy to just top up the atmosphere than to move Ceres to guarantee the core would be functional.

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YpsilonY t1_j8rxy16 wrote

So my back of the envelope math says heating Mars' core from 1400°C (estimated temperature, exact value unknown) to the melting point of iron of 1538°C would take 8.21*10^20J or 2.2 billion TWh. So 100.000 times the current worlds yearly energy consumption.

How you produce that energy is kind of irrelevant, but assuming we use a perfectly efficient hydrogen bomb that somehow converts all it's mass into energy using deuterium tritium fusion, we'd need approximately 10.000.000 tons of hydrogen. Half of that deuterium and half tritium. That sure is one Big nuke ;)

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