Comte de Sats Germain on Nostr: I'm not convinced a magnetic field is actually required. If it is, we can solve that ...

I'm not convinced a magnetic field is actually required. If it is, we can solve that problem. Earth's magnetic field causes charged particles to move to the poles, and that certainly protects life, but I suspect we could come up with some chemical analogous to ozone in its function of blocking UV radiation. The major hurdle for terraforming mars is ozone. I was trying to tackle the perchlorate's problem and everything I looked at was blocked by the lack of ozone. Its the UV light that endangers life there, and that prevents us from using a bacterium to solve the perchlorates problem.

So the order of events has to be :
ozone -> bacteria -> oceans -> magnetic field

A far bigger problem is that mars doesn't have the mass to retain a thick atmosphere even if it has a magnetic field. Or, you could say that the field required to compensate for the increased bleed off of gases into space must be much stronger than the earth's.

But could we terraform it sufficiently to inhabit it for a few thousand years? Yes, definitely, but it relies on creating ozone first.