IOW, to magnetically 'polarize' solid rock by temporarily transforming it into a molten state in the presence of a magnetic field, which is neither practical nor feasible for Mars.

-bit (August 14, 2015, 05:54 PM)

I wouldn't be too sure of this. A sufficient quantity of nuclear devices detonated at once would result in glassing of the planet's surface, creating the necessary semimolten state to allow the iron particles to align to a suitable magnetic field.

The question then becomes how did earth gets its magnetic field in the first place, since that would probably lead to clues in how you would generate a planetary magnetic field in order to initially charge up the martian crust.

Without the charged particle deflection offered by a properly aligned magnetic field, the atmosphere just gets blown away. Using machinery to just replace it nonstop would result in the planet slowly but surely losing mass.

It is also possible to magnetize iron by way of impact. Vibrations will disrupt the crystalline structure of the metal enough to allow for magnetic polarity alignment, and this can happen through almost any method of making a piece of steel vibrate.

What if a comet crashed to earth at some point in the past that happened to be mostly iron with a pretty strong field? The impact energy would have made earth's surface hot, and the seismic waves of the impact would have vibrated the earth's crust. If that comet was magnetic, the whole planet would have become magnetic basically overnight.

"Willing but maybe not able" is an interesting category I might fall into.

"Willing" is an hour's worth of convincing. But if it's harder than "upgrade PaleMoon/Floash/Java" then we might be stuck.

-TaoPhoenix (August 09, 2015, 12:59 PM)

It is, and a dangerous process to boot that is best left to people who have experience with it and know how to recover from a failure.

Because a botched BIOS update can brick your system, and a lot of OEM boards do not have functional recovery systems because how dare you try to update the bios outside of the supervision of a factory trained technician.

Naturally this kind of flaw is something the NSA would have known about and been using for the past decade, and it only got exposed because they found a better one to abuse.

Called this.

Sooner or later if it isn't already, sharing a picture of a kitten leaping into a bucket with your mom will be a high profile crime worthy of half a million dollars in fines and fees and 20-life prison time.

I've been telling people to just practice civil disobedience. This is a law that obviously cannot be enforced because collectively the citizenship of the country simply ignores it and has no interest in obeying it.

If the courts actually worked as intended they would recognize this law is of corrupt intentions and does not benefit the people of the country, so they would order it striken from the books without any further negotiation.

Justice is blind, but she can clearly smell money.