DescentBB

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolog ... vi-BBmbLwE



I don't know. Well, I do.....I'm entirely too old to participate(and feel Buzz may be too old to be doing the planning.....). However, among you younger folks, is this something that would occur to you as an option in your lifetime? I'm not sure I like the odds of being in the initial waves of 'colonists', even if they do eventually make a workable plan of it. Seems like volunteering for the first Jamestown colony knowing the outcome in advance.....thoughts?

I would never want to live on a planet without a magnetic field.

Or at least a planet with a magnetic field significantly weaker than the one currently shielding Earth.

Mars does have a field, but it is very weak and doesn't even cover the entire planet (mostly concentrated in parts of the southern hemisphere). Actually in as much as you can call it a magnetic field, Mars has a pretty oddball one that scientists are still kinda scratching their heads on trying to figure out how it ended up that way. One popular theory is that the northern hemisphere was blown apart by a collision with a Pluto sized object some time early in the planets history which wrecked the magnetic symmetry and overall weakened the field. Which would also mean Mars had a collision very similar to the one Earth had which formed the Moon, only it didn't glance off and instead impacted at a steeper angle so it was absorbed completely. Pretty interesting stuff to think about.

The lack of a thick, dense atmosphere doesn't help with meteoroid and asteroid protection either.