Martian Toxicity

[Drashner1]

From what I understand Mars's core is dormant. Has any serious work ever been done into reheating a planetary core. It would seem like a logical direction for a longterm terraforming project.

A magnetic shield, though practical, would strike me as an interim measure. Such structures are susceptible to failure or sabotage as shown in 2312.

Regarding the soil toxicity, how does the chemistry work for filtering out chlorite (I'm not a chemist)

Somewhere in the depths of my old Analogs there's an article about re-energizing the Earth's core billions of years in the future. I don't recall much about it, and might be able to dig it up again if folks are really interested. I do seem to recall that it wasn't particularly interesting in its content.

Moving beyond that, as Steve mentions it is probably possible for Y11k tech to do this sort of thing. But it might not generally be considered to be worth the bother, as well as being tricky to do without also turning the surface of the planet molten in the process.

A couple of more direct and easily done methods might be:

a) Worldhouse the planet and include superconducting magnetic shielding in the structure - OA tech has had room temp superconductors since very early in the timeline (pre-First Federation).

b) Build superconducting magnetic windings around the planet (probably on or under the surface), similar to the method proposed by Dyson for spinning up a planet - but probably lower power. Use these to generate a planetary magnetic field.

You could also gengineer the planetary ecology to increase its radiation resistance.

Finally, it should be noted that with OA tech, it is fairly straightforward to make a lot of technology self-repairing and self-maintaining, similar to how biological lifeforms can heal in RL. As such, an orbital mag-shield, or the two planet based versions mentioned above could all be self-repairing and tremendously long-lived (functionally immortal probably). This wouldn't necessarily protect against deliberate attacks, but if someone wanted to really hurt the planet, they could likely find a way regardless of whether or not a 'natural' magnetic field was in place or not.

Just some thoughts,

Todd