Yup. Even with the magnetosphere, and cleaning the toxic compounds from the soil, and presuming the gravity is no issue (perhaps boost with a centrifuge?), you'd need a couple of meters of regolith might make up for the lack of 10,300 kg of atmosphere per square meter between you and the radiation — but at that point, why bother with Mars?
Some point out that (1) the atmospheric loss is slow on timescales we care about, and (2) that anyone who can put the air on Mars in the first place can deal with the losses and replace it.
(1) Is falsified by global warming, where we saw the risks over a century ago, and yet are still having a culture war about if it's real
(2) Would be true in principle, if we were really organised. But anyone who can move that much air around is so much more advanced than us, that us trying to plan for that is probably harder than getting Ea-nāṣir personally to accurately guess the best way to build the transport infrastructure of the USA in 2025.
Just assume a technocracy on Mars. Doesn't have to be the US constitution or anything that guides them.
In fact, a constitution built around an agrarian earth community on a new unspoiled continent with abundant resources, is probably ill-suited to Mars which has none of those things.
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Yup. Even with the magnetosphere, and cleaning the toxic compounds from the soil, and presuming the gravity is no issue (perhaps boost with a centrifuge?), you'd need a couple of meters of regolith might make up for the lack of 10,300 kg of atmosphere per square meter between you and the radiation — but at that point, why bother with Mars?
Some point out that (1) the atmospheric loss is slow on timescales we care about, and (2) that anyone who can put the air on Mars in the first place can deal with the losses and replace it.
(1) Is falsified by global warming, where we saw the risks over a century ago, and yet are still having a culture war about if it's real
(2) Would be true in principle, if we were really organised. But anyone who can move that much air around is so much more advanced than us, that us trying to plan for that is probably harder than getting Ea-nāṣir personally to accurately guess the best way to build the transport infrastructure of the USA in 2025.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=surface+area+mars+*+1+a...
Just assume a technocracy on Mars. Doesn't have to be the US constitution or anything that guides them.
In fact, a constitution built around an agrarian earth community on a new unspoiled continent with abundant resources, is probably ill-suited to Mars which has none of those things.
Why would assuming anything about the government make the planet more habitable?
And even if it did, why not a technocracy on the Moon, or on an O'Neill cylinder?
Just responding to point (1) and (2) which seemed related to human institutions, not habitability.