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Comment Re:Xi around long after Trump (Score 1) 24

Maybe they're merge into a single person: Xump!

"We now have the best pandas, everyone says so! All the other countries have ugly smelly bears that eat people and get into trash, but pandas are peaceful and cute, like me!

Only Australian koala bears can compete, but we're gonna buy Australia, and they'll thank us! Pandas and koalas will have babies together to make the Master Race of bears, just like Crypto Christ strongly asked for while I was taking a shit on my Golden Flushy Throne. MBGA!"

Comment Re: Pronoun culture battle (Score 0) 111

Overhaul English to not require gender'd pronouns; problem solved! Auto-tagging people's gender in everyday speech is obsolete, it serves no purpose other than making religious troglodytes happy, the same fools who tried to jail Elvis for dancing sexy. F 'em! They can move to Afghanistan if they still crave Gonad Cops.

Comment Re:Including air pressure (or lack thereof)? (Score 1) 33

Might be useful data for otherwise fanciful terraforming ideas, it'd be easier to make a "geologic timescale short-lived" atmosphere artificially than to modify the soil. And if microbes could grow in it they could off-gas to keep the atmosphere building up faster than the solar wind strips it.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

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