Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Elon Musks Dumbest Fans: BUSTED" video.
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@shiftyjesusfish There's a little known subject in that some call "planetary mechanics." Its sort of the first step in any ideas about terraforming. Its about raw numbers regarding how much stuff you need. Your not worried about the dynamics of the planet as it rotates about the sun (or a star) its just about how much stuff you need.
Mars has a surface area of 144,000,000 km If you consider it like very big ball with 144,000,000 cubes stuck on the outside year sure there's gaps but then some of those cubes will have mountains inside. In quite simple terms you can approximate that to 144,000,000 cubic kilometers of AIR if you want to make the surface of Mars habitable. That's just the most basic thing getting enough air.
Atmospheric air at sea level is about 1.2kg per meter cubed at around 20C. So that 1 kilometer or air around Mars would weigh something like:
1.2 kg/m3 * 144,000,000 km3 * 1,000,000,000 m3/km3 = 172,800,000,000,000,000 kilograms of air.
Or dropping some zeros 172,800,000 Mega tons of air.
To put that in perspective the entire world production of iron ore is about 3,000 Megatons a year. So its an extraordinary amount of air and its not simply locked up in rocks or ice. Were talking about going comet hunting for suitable sources of Oxygen and Nitrogen.
If your wondering why this might seem crazy you'll now know why we don't discuss these things much. It just confuses people, but the most basic thing to realise is that planets are bloody big objects.
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