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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

I think the first humans on mars will go with the understanding that it's a one-way trip. And there will no doubt be people willing to sign on for that.

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I think the first humans to go to the red planet will actually orbit and not touch down. They will stay in orbit and either pilot robots on the ground or study what happens to the body during long space flight. This will help future space faring people that visit Mars and beyond.

I don't know about that. I think that would be a pretty big waste of time and resources. We're already controlling robots on Mars from Earth and anything they would be wanting to test on the body could be done in Earth's orbit.

I'm also fairly certain they're already quite knowledgeable regarding the effects of weak gravity on the human body.

Yes, but the lag time between Mars orbit and Mars surface is far less than Earth surface and Mars surface.

Not only that but I guess they will accept they won't be able to live for long there too. Radiation and muscle wasting due to low gravity being the top two problems and growing food. Not much chance of overcoming those obstacles in even the medium term, if ever.

Is muscle wasting a significant issue? Mars does have gravity, the people will no doubt be doing some physical work, so it won't be as bad as in orbit. On top of that, if they have no plans for ever coming back to Earth, then is there a significant downside to at least some atrophy?

It's true that exercise does limit the loss and I guess you are right that it won't matter if you stay there.

I suppose we just don't have enough data to say one way or the other.

Edit: an old Nasa article on the topic...

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/as...

Correct. We know some things about how bad zero gravity is, we do not know how bad microgravity is. Given that it's probably a range (one presumes that .98G is probably medically indistinguishable from 1G, one presumes .02G is very like 0G though perhaps not quite indistinguishable), it's probably fair to say we are comprehensively ignorant.

I don't think seeing people deteriorate and die on Mars on TV/YouTube will be great advertising for Mars colonization efforts, so hopefully they will wait until surviving and returning is possible.

Unless they're almost entirely self sufficient very early on, that means an open ended spending commitment by whoever is running the programme. You can't cancel the programme because the colonists will die.

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