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“If scientific knowledge was all we were after, then the Federation would have built a fleet of probes, not starships. Exploration is about seeing things with your own eyes.”

— Captain Kathryn Janeway, One Small Step, Star Trek Voyager Season 6, Episode 8

(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751282)

I think your position is extremely defensible. I'd suggest that we should be sending many robots to Mars in order to bootstrap an economy of sorts. Things like food production, shelter etc could all be done by robots before the first human arrives. The first humans could arrive to crops ready to harvest, fully constructed compounds/shelters. IMO we should be sending robots and supplies now (just as big of payloads of fuel, tools, robots, food) as we can. Later we send people who can continue to build w/ what was previously sent.

Sadly its not a popular exercise to say "We're spending billions to send a bunch of solar panels to mars, though no one will use them for decades..."

>if we're going to think seriously about colonizing Mars, we ought to think seriously about colonizing the arctic and antarctic first.

And with this you completely miss the reason why we need to colonize away from our planet.

What if a catastrophic event completely destroyed all life on Earth - the poles included? All of humanity. Wiped out in a single event. Getting people onto Mars is the first step to making sure humans can continue to exist in such an event.

Why is that such a priority for people? Why can't we just worry about taking better care of the people we have NOW?

We could treat everyone like millionaires and that wouldn't make an ounce of difference to anyone if our entire species went extinct. Absolutely no treatment we can give to one another prevents a catastrophic event from wiping us all out.

A catastrophic event isn't going to stop and think "Oh hey, humans are treating each other nicely. Maybe I shouldn't wipe them all out?"

Why is the perpetuation of Homo Sapiens a moral imperative?

The people who think going to Mars is a good idea will go to Mars, procreate, and slowly fill the galaxy. They will out-compete the Earth-bounders. Darwinian evolution.

And this should affect my behavior why?

If I cared about perpetuating my DNA, I'd donate to sperm banks to produce more genetic offspring than I have any hope of supporting on my own. From the Darwinian perspective, I would be regarded as enormously successful.

Why is being nice to others a moral imperative? In fact - why should any decision be based off morals?

The continuation and survival of the human race is the top priority among a large population of people. Some contribute by researching new medicines (Why do this?), others improve quality of life for others (Why do this?), others have children (Why do this?), and others look for a way to get us away from a potentially doomed planet in case of disaster scenarios. They all have the same reasoning - just different methods.

Morals are subjective to a population. The majority population of humanity has decided that continuation of "us" is a "good thing".

Of course, one could argue things would be better off if humanity went extinct. But that isn't in humanities' best interests (read: survival), so people generally wouldn't agree with you.

I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here, but I think there are some key differences with your analogy.

The goal of colonizing another planet would give a small subset of people the ability to continue living if the people on Earth were to destroy themselves. This is a hypothetical situation that -if it happens- will kill off almost everyone, dragging hopes, dreams, money, infrastructure, standards of living (basically everything that makes life enjoyable) with it. So if that is destroyed, why does it matter if humans continue living as a species? Especially on an extremely harsh planet.

Your analogous examples differ because all of those things -medicine, quality of life, children, even sustaining our environment- help us now. We do those things to make our own lives longer, improve our own children's lives, and make our quality of life greater, not some hypothetical future civilization away from Earth. You're right that humanity's best interest is survival, but I think way more people are concerned with their own survival and I think that's where the true incentives for those examples lie.

"The continuation and survival of the human race is the top priority among a large population of people. Some contribute by researching new medicines (Why do this?), others improve quality of life for others (Why do this?), others have children (Why do this?), and others look for a way to get us away from a potentially doomed planet in case of disaster scenarios."

The vast majority of medical research goes to diseases that pose no existential threat to Homo Sapiens. Even Malaria, which kills upwards of 500,000/yr, does not pose any existential threat. Late-life diseases such as alzheimers have no effect whatsoever on Homo Sapiens, yet receive substantial funding. No, medical research largely serves to decrease human suffering, a goal which I do regard as noble.

Likewise, why does increasing quality of life matter? Humans will continue to reproduce even in conditions of abject poverty. What does quality of life have to do with anything? (You, after all, seem to think putting humans in a thin metal tube and hurling them through space to live out their life on a cold, barren rock is important. Surely you don't think this would increase their quality of life).

As for children, I have no clue what people see in them. But they seem to reproduce because having children makes them happy, not out of some perceived obligation to Homo Sapiens.

My point isn't that you need to share my morals. My point is that you should acknowledge your morals are not universal.

Let's assume life insurance would cost half of my salary, and pay merely 5 years of my current salary in the case of my untimely demise. I feel healthy enough and confident enough to find a cheaper plan an put the difference in government bonds, so that my family is not 100% unprotected but have my future self - who will probably be still alive - collect most of the benefits in a decade or so.

Colonizing the Artic/Antartic is way cheaper than Mars, and would help us pick most of the low hanging fruit research for a fraction of the cost. We can always do Mars later if that is the way history turned out.

Not to mention that there are much more dire and certain risks today, which will likely cause huge loss of life and property (like climate change, or resource depletion, or geopolitical instability). But because those are not extinction level events, people do not freak out about them and little mitigation is being done.

Sending and returning people to Mars is a problem that has far fewer question marks than having people stay there. A return mission is essentially an engineering problem: likely one of the most difficult ones humanity has had, but at least we know how to pose the questions which we must answer.

For a non-return mission, there are so many unknowns. We have barely a clue on how to sustain a human body on such a far away place nutritionally, psychologically and medically. If we were to send humans to Mars to grow old there, there will be so many unknowns that they will likely die quickly and helplessly due to some aspect of Mars missions we are ignorant of. It is running an experiment with human lives. Given that we know so little about the risks involved, I think it's unethical to send people there like that. Even if people choose for this themselves, it becomes at best unhelpful for humanity's view of space exploration to see people die helplessly on some remote world because we were running a grand experiment.

Sending people to Mars, and ending up having to say "Wow, we did not see that coming" is not something that will benefit humanity. We are not even close to being well-prepared enough for such a mission to become a success.

Moreover, return missions are a way to actually prepare the colonization experiment. Colonization can be the next step once longer and longer return missions give us the vital information we need about how living on Mars works for humans.

Return missions are something we know we can do. We know how to sustain humans for days in environments like outer space and the moon, places far more hostile than Mars (the trip to Mars will likely be far more hostile than actually being there on the surface). We just need to solve an engineering problem.

I also think you are overestimating our robotics. A trained geologist on the surface of Mars for a few weeks with a suitcase of instruments and e-mail access would give us exponentially more information than all previous Mars missions combined.

Well Ron, you've got a big advantage over all the other folks here. You've almost been there already by yourself with your remote agent for the DS1. (Ron built the remote agent SW when he was at the JPL/NASA: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html)

So your opinion is a good one, but will not impress the big masses. The same held for the moon. A purely political accomplishment for the US. And a big one.

Colonizing the Mars with the current rocket tech will not work. But maybe with the upcoming ion drives. They look good.

> You've almost been there

DS1 didn't go to Mars. I did work on the research program that was the precursor to the Sojourner mission, but I didn't work on any of the Mars missions themselves. So I haven't been to Mars any more than anyone else.

>So your opinion is a good one, but will not impress the big masses. The same held for the moon. A purely political accomplishment for the US. And a big one.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore, we've had so many successful robotic missions - to Mars, other planets, comets, etc. - that all captivate the public for a span and return valuable data for subsequent mission planning. Pretty sure PR is neutral factor now in deciding on human vs robot missions.

Robot tech might be rapidly improving (and actually by "robots" you seem to mean rolling laboratories like Curiousity rather than truly general purpose robots), but AI is no where near close to capable of replacing a technician/scientist on the ground (or even in orbit). Doing things remotely is massively slow. E.g. commanding a robot to pick up a rock and having to wait 4-24 minutes to find out whether it succeeded. It's going to be a long time before humans are obsolete.

Colonisation is a completely different question/goal to sending humans to Mars.

Wouldn't putting humans in orbit solve the latency issue without having to solve the relaunch issue?

Yeah but colonizing Mars is just straight up cool.

Is it? Why? The truth is that Mars is a pretty miserable place for humans. It's cold. It's dry. It's dusty. I just came back from a trip to northern Canada, and it was a pretty bleak, desolate place, but it's a tropical paradise compared to Mars. So what makes Mars so cool? I really don't get it. The only thing I can imagine is that people think it's cool because they have no clue what it would really be like.

Well, if we get a self-sufficient mars colony up, nuking ourselves will become survivable.

More like slightly more difficult and not likely to happen by accident. Which is still an improvement.

>>> Yeah but colonizing Mars is just straight up cool.

>> Is it? Why?

> Well, if we get a self-sufficient mars colony up, nuking ourselves will become survivable.

Along with releasing an eco-system ravaging engineered biological organism. Or nanotechnology. Or AI. Or getting a bad luck roll with an asteroid. Or climate change blowing past a tipping point. Or something that I have no concept of anymore than an individual circa-1900 would understand the concerns of today.

Why?

Because we owe it to the !$%^ing universe to safeguard our (as near as we can tell) incredibly rare existence.

You know what happened to all those species that said "This planet is good enough?" Something bad happened. 1,000 years; 10,000 years; 100,000 years; at some point. And... poof... have fun starting another 3.5 billion year slog back to us.

Disclaimer: I don't think "us" is necessarily the pinnacle of evolution, but I tend to feel we're special enough to save another 3.5 billion years of history on recreating.

So why colonize Mars, and not the Moon?

The Moon is much closer and you're facing similar problems - low gravity and virtually no atmosphere or no atmosphere. At the same time you eliminate the long trips that would complicate Mars colonization.

It's much cheaper to make global superpowers economically dependent on each other, so that "nuking ourselves to extinction" event does not arise. With the added benefit of better economy. (Well, to be fair, trying to send a dozen people to Mars will also generate a lot of economic activity, so maybe it's a moot point.)

Also, even with the worst kind of nuclear war we can imagine, the number of people still clinging to the edge of survival on, say, New Zealand will easily surpass the biggest Martian colony we can optimistically imagine for the next 300 years.

So, if we're really that worried about our survival as a species, build a nuclear bunker in New Zealand. Actually, build one in every nation on earth. I'll bet it will be still cheaper than going to Mars.

Going to Mars is "cool", and I do want to see it in my lifetime, but treating it as some kind of insurance for mankind just doesn't make sense.

If that was the end goal, it would be far easier and far far cheaper to colonize the bottom of the ocean, or deep cave systems. That's just as safe from nuclear war as Mars and much more livable.

Mars may sound not very fun, but I'll argue it's better than big parts of Russia or Canada. And those are habitable. Not many people live there, but they do.

Mars has no air. That's downside.

But there's no snow to block your roads and no rain to turn them to mud. Then there's no permafrost to make ground undiggable. That's tremendous upside for e.g. mining operations.

There's no rivers, lakes or forests. There's probably some rough terrain and canyons, but you may build bridges that'll last long.

Whatever you build on Mars, stays on Mars. Whatever you build in the far north, detoriates rapidly.

Bad news. :\

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8786

Images are similar, but that doesn't mean ground is as hard. Water could vaporize and migrate to caps ot submerge, leaving relatively diggable soil.

> there is no rational reason to bring a human back from Mars.

You're right. As the article mentioned though, the public doesn't like the idea of leaving someone on an alien planet, and the public isn't rational.

Private industry should fund the colonization of Mars. Who cares what the public thinks? Musk and early colonists will end up owning an entire planet.

> will continue to be a whole lot more hospitable than Mars even under worst-case climate change scenarios.

One might almost say, "especially under worst-case climate change scenarios".

I believe Bill Nye put it this way - a human geologist can do the same work as our current Mars rovers, but 100-1000x faster. So what takes a week for a rover might take a few minutes for a human walking on the surface.

And cost how much more? More than 1000x more? It's probably economically worth it to just send probes. Better yet, swarms of mini-probes: http://news.mit.edu/2006/microbots