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I was imagining her voice doing voice overs. <<chills>>

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She’s awesome!! Story here

Well that no longer seems practical.

So my back of the envelope math says heating Mars' core from 1400°C (estimated temperature, exact value unknown) to the melting point of iron of 1538°C would take 8.21*10^20J or 2.2 billion TWh. So 100.000 times the current worlds yearly energy consumption.

How you produce that energy is kind of irrelevant, but assuming we use a perfectly efficient hydrogen bomb that somehow converts all it's mass into energy using deuterium tritium fusion, we'd need approximately 10.000.000 tons of hydrogen. Half of that deuterium and half tritium. That sure is one Big nuke ;)

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And why would you want to terraform those iceballs anyway? Just dig down and live in the ice shell or the subsurface oceans. Not much difference really.

Put a ring on it to shade the surface. A polar ring at about the right altitude might also give it a more earthlike day/night cycle.

Argument for an artificial magnetosphere. Maintenance cost over the long run (hundreds-thousands of years) vs development of AM and less need for maintenance upkeep of the surface. Otherwise, if it’s not really needed then 🤷🏻‍♂️.

Out of curiosity, what ways exist to cool down a planet like Venus, if you can’t just add lots of ice?

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Well wow. That's a big weight off, I suppose is one way to look at it lol. Possibly still a good idea for Jovian moons being baked by Jupiter's radiation? But then again, any settlement on a Jovian ice moon will be completely enclosed to begin with, as terraforming is an impractical impossibility I assume.

I’d like to slip this link, which contains another link to an answer about why a magnetic field is not critically helpful in keeping an atmosphere intact.

Found it

I’m not sure how much thinner atmosphere would be required for radiation to be a big issue - I mean it doesn’t just instantly become an issue once it crosses a certain threshold - but I think it’s likely that any breathable mix is going to reduce the radiation to negligible levels.

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Tucker, we present to you the Tucker Carlson Center for Warm Weather Smarts and Stopping Yucky Germies.

Tucker, doing his little furrowed brow frowny face: "What is this? A center for ants?"

So there is really no benefit after all? Except maybe radiation in a less dense atmosphere like ours?

IIRC we had some really good answers from actual scientists about why magnetic field doesn’t do jack about the atmosphere, but idk why they’re not here. I’ll try to find it.

Mars has liquid core. This is known since 2003.