Uploaded January 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
WASHINGTON — NASA’s chief scientist quit last weekend, saying he has found a way to get Mars to terraform itself into a paradise planet. Here are the details:
The New York Times reports that NASA”s chief scientist started his retirement on Saturday January 1, but on the way out he touted a plan to geo-engineer Mars so that humans can live on the planet.
Jim Green says his plan is to place a massive magnetic shield between Mars and the Sun, to protect Mars from the Sun’s high-energy solar particles that have been stripping the planet of water and atmospheric gases for millions of years.
With Mars blocked from the sun, the temperature would eventually rise to a point that allows the carbon dioxide on the polar cap to sublimate, returning to the atmosphere and enhancing the greenhouse effect.
Green told the newspaper: “Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself. That’s what we want: the planet to participate in any way it can. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up.”
Green says higher pressure and temperatures will start the process that will allow humans to grow food in the planet’s soil, and one day walk freely on Mars without spacesuits.
But scientists like Lucianne Walkowicz of the Adler Planetarium are not convinced.
Walkowicz recently stated: “Despite terraforming’s hold on the popular imagination, it remains solidly in the realm of fiction. For one thing, Mars seems to lack the necessary reserves of carbon dioxide to pump up its atmosphere and warm it in the first place.”
SOURCES: NY Times, Futurism, The Independent
nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html
futurism.com/nasa-chief-terraform-mars
independent.co.uk/space/mars-venus-terraformed-giant-shields-nasa-b1986334.html
WASHINGTON — NASA’s chief scientist quit last weekend, saying he has found a way to get Mars to terraform itself into a paradise planet. Here are the details:
The New York Times reports that NASA”s chief scientist started his retirement on Saturday January 1, but on the way out he touted a plan to geo-engineer Mars so that humans can live on the planet.
Jim Green says his plan is to place a massive magnetic shield between Mars and the Sun, to protect Mars from the Sun’s high-energy solar particles that have been stripping the planet of water and atmospheric gases for millions of years.
With Mars blocked from the sun, the temperature would eventually rise to a point that allows the carbon dioxide on the polar cap to sublimate, returning to the atmosphere and enhancing the greenhouse effect.
Green told the newspaper: “Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself. That’s what we want: the planet to participate in any way it can. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up.”
Green says higher pressure and temperatures will start the process that will allow humans to grow food in the planet’s soil, and one day walk freely on Mars without spacesuits.
But scientists like Lucianne Walkowicz of the Adler Planetarium are not convinced.
Walkowicz recently stated: “Despite terraforming’s hold on the popular imagination, it remains solidly in the realm of fiction. For one thing, Mars seems to lack the necessary reserves of carbon dioxide to pump up its atmosphere and warm it in the first place.”
SOURCES: NY Times, Futurism, The Independent
nytimes.com/2022/01/02/science/jim-green-nasa-mars.html
futurism.com/nasa-chief-terraform-mars
independent.co.uk/space/mars-venus-terraformed-giant-shields-nasa-b1986334.html


![Russian Invasion: Disturbing Radioactive Dust at Chernobyl Suicidal
CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE — Chernobyl dust kicked up during Russian capture of the site a suicidal decision for soldiers involved. Explainer.
Russian soldiers who drove their vehicles through Chernobyl’s toxic ‘red forest’ kicked up clouds of radioactive dust on their way to capturing the nuclear site in the opening days of Russia’s invasion, according to plant workers cited by Reuters, with a sensor near waste storage facilities recording the absorbed dose of radiation as seven times higher than normal, according to the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management.
Without radiation protection, this was ‘suicidal’ for the soldiers, according to one Chernobyl worker, as the radioactive dust is likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies.
However, it is not the main nuclear threat to Ukraine right now, according to nuclear expert Vadim Chumak, cited by MIT Technology Review.
Rather, the main threat comes through spent fuel. There are about 20,000 spent fuel assemblies stored at the Chernobyl site, and they contain a huge amount of fission products, such as cesium and strontium, which are very radioactive. If Russia was ‘crazy enough’ to demolish these storage sites, Chumak said, it would “pose a problem.”
The scale of that problem at Chernobyl is mitigated by the fact that the material has already decayed over time. However, elsewhere, at Zaporizhzhia, the second Ukrainian nuclear plant the Russians have captured, any damage to the spent fuel assemblies could “result in an enormous radiological emergency, comparable to what happened [originally] in Chernobyl,” according to Chumak.
This possibility is of particular concern because while reactor buildings are extremely difficult to destroy, spent fuel assembly storage was never designed to be attacked by tanks or missiles, and “definitely could not resist a strike by modern weapons.”
What’s more, the vulnerability of these bundles of used fuel rods was demonstrated in Fukushima, according to Chumak. There, the developers ‘put countermeasures for a tsunami in place to protect the equipment. But the tsunami was one or two meters higher than predicted for the worst-case scenario,’ he said. In that instance, rising temperatures in spent fuel rods along with explosions and a fire contributed to the release of higher levels of radiation from the plant.
SOURCES: Reuters, MIT Technology Review
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-russia-chernobyl-radioactive-dust-b2046066.html
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/25/1048297/nuclear-risk-in-ukraine-a-radiation-expert-speaks-from-kyiv/ Russian Invasion: Disturbing Radioactive Dust at Chernobyl Suicidal](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/uHoiasExuSI/mqdefault.jpg)







