The best part about it is that it’s an extremely gradual slope completely unlike the mountain ranges on Earth, so you could haul stuff up there on trucks or trains easily.
The problem is you can’t have mountains like that on tectonically active planets (a mountain that big on earth would sink into the mantle), which is kind of a prequisite for a long-term magnetosphere so its unfortunately not something a species could likely ever have except as a result of terraforming a world like mars and setting up some kind of artificial magnetosphere.
Is there a lower density limit for having a magnetosphere though? A habitable planet with 1.5x earth radius and the same mass would be much easier to get off of.
Holy shit, I hadn’t considered that you could use Olympus Mons as a launch site cause it sticks so high up.
The best part about it is that it’s an extremely gradual slope completely unlike the mountain ranges on Earth, so you could haul stuff up there on trucks or trains easily.
The problem is you can’t have mountains like that on tectonically active planets (a mountain that big on earth would sink into the mantle), which is kind of a prequisite for a long-term magnetosphere so its unfortunately not something a species could likely ever have except as a result of terraforming a world like mars and setting up some kind of artificial magnetosphere.
Is there a lower density limit for having a magnetosphere though? A habitable planet with 1.5x earth radius and the same mass would be much easier to get off of.
I guess that could work? Earth is actually the densest planet in the solar system so our baseline mass > size ratio might actually be a bit abnormal.
If that’s true, how did Olympus mons get there in the first place? I thought it was a volcano.
Mars was geologically active but its core cooled.