Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]
spacex.com
spacex.com
Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff, outsource jobs, build hotels, run for President, etc. So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?
There can be criticisms of a plan to send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away at incredible cost that do not require jealousy as a motivator.
My lack of skills necessary as a programmer to help, and my health issues mean that I can't really do anything but cheer from the sidelines. There will be mistakes, but sometimes you have to jump into the river with both feet if you wish to cross.
*There's criticism: "Maybe it would work better with Type A rather than Type B" and there's _criticism_: "Thats stupid and you are stupid for thinking its not stupid"
Apollo was dangerous, expensive, and didn't accomplish anything that couldn't have been done more safely and cheaply with probes. It was cool as shit too, but I'm not going to pretend that 'cool' is a real basis for public policy.
Mr Musk is welcome to spend his money as he wants, of course.
I wish I had this much talent at putting a negative spin on things. You could make a cure for cancer sound like the bubonic plague.
"This is nice, but my cousins, uncles, framework that's coming out next week is way better!"
To quote from Elon's Q&A, "space questions only".
True, people here can be frustrating at times. But the mod team is one of the sharpest, and they cull abuse. And they do it well.
When the abuse is removed, what's left is substance. Sometimes that substance is disagreeable, and sometimes even hostile, but never personal.
It can be un-fun sometimes. But it's been rewarding to watch this place grow and see all of the new and old opinions intermix. Sometimes you end up learning about yourself more than other people, which are special moments. I haven't really felt that on other sites, so HN feels unique and worthwhile.
It's a journey. The community has ups and downs, but Dan (and now Scott) have always taken care of it.
Total side anecdote about this: I was at the airport check-in counter. At the only open counter was an obvious hoarder with many trash bags as carry ons asking all kinds of vague questions about if the TSA was going to take his stuff. The guy behind the counter kept answering his questions politely. I guess policy was never to tell a customer to get lost. This was taking a very long time, so a little old lady at the front of the line went over to him and told him to hurry it up. He looked a bit shocked and moved on. I guess companies are so scared of bad reviews or creating controversy that they indulge these people for as long as it takes and it's up to the other customers to put a stop to it.
That's been happening since I've been here, since around mid 2007. Not to dismiss what you're saying, I just want to say that there have always been people fighting the good fight.
I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.
To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many "undiscovered" capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.
It's not like Elon Musk building this rocket is at the expense of SolarCity (improving the environment through solar energy).
Sure, I've seen humans change - but only under heavy "brainwashing", i.e. internalizing an ideology that values being fair, helpful and truthful, and that only holds with a support structure of adherents. And I doubt it scales.
If you look at the world, a lot if not most changes for the better are technology-driven. Technology alters the economical landscape, which makes people do things better, even though they're still following the same behaviours as they always did.
TL;DR: I think individuals have much less agency than we'd like to think.
Besides that, Musk is doing two things at the same time. He tries both to protect the earth (Tesla, solar power), and initiate a base in case something happened to our home.
Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.
It's funny that you would say that - you may want to take a quick look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs
(The main site is: http://www.icemanwimhof.com/)
http://www.parool.nl/binnenland/-iceman-oefening-eist-opnieu...
You also don't drink and drive.
http://loweringthebar.net/2016/09/frozen-guru-update-iii.htm...
I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.
Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.
So, let him do what he is doing, he is doing everything right, now if you are communicating with people through mobile phones is just because of satellites, that happened only because people explored the space and it's application.
So, the final goal of Elon is great, support people so that you will also get good support when you have a great idea.
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.
The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
Yeah, those things are an example of something that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work out in practice.
I don't remember wanting for collapsable threads and such four or five years ago, but now I can't imagine sifting through all the junk without them.
But I also feel like my karma goes up faster now too, but that could just be in my head.
The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.
But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I watched a trainwreck explode simply trying to discuss anonymity itself: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/qdxyzy2x4lbaq_4rx81nnw
HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.
Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)
I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)
Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.
I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I'm not familiar with lobsters.
You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.
That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)
the irony is too damn high
That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.
With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.
On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:
1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.
2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.
3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.
4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.
HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.
I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.
Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.
All this said, I'm hugely and awesomely excited by the future prospects of becoming a multiplanet species.
(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)
It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?
I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)
Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.
One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.
Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.
Edit: fixed a word
You don't need to be an expert to understand the limitations of rockets as a means of getting to space.
Here to the crazy ones.
I encourage people to say, "This won't work, here's why, but here's how it could."
We'll all in this game together, learning how to be a single mind. Be nice to your fellow human-cells no matter their goal, if their goal is for the greater good. The thing is - we can save the dolphins && live on Mars, not mutually exclusive goals.
If somebody told Elon "don't go Mars, do something like cure cancers first" what would he say? Thye're missing the point altogether, right? People are curing cancer, saving dolphins, working on hunger. The reason Musk is so successful and iconic is because specifically he followed things that interested and mattered to him, i.e. energy and colonization.
If someone is following their passion and investing enough energy to be recognized on the level of these people, they're assuredly more cognizant of what's in the realm of reality in their scope than the average journalist/internet commentator. I can glean so much from just listening to the man react to the audience's question.. the one about the Funny or Die video, he's sending "you're wasting our time" body language... I get it, though, this is a pointed, focused thing they're working on; grandiose and monumental indeed, focused nonetheless.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Considering progress humanity made this letter is more actual than ever. So I wish more people understand that it's super important to work on what you like and can do the best since there always chance that space exploration help to solve other problems too.
Anyway success of people as species is through specialisation. Side effect is that we also have specialist naysayers
Skepticism is a good thing but it's unevenly applied in the weirdest way. Solar Roadways, it seems like the smallest amount of skepticism would have dismantled the entire idea. Two nobody snake oil salesmen from out of their garage were roundly applauded by everyone to such a degree that competitors opened up.
When Musk presents a design on a much larger scale following a career of related success, it's called down?
Therefore I appreciate criticism but I'm skeptical of its sources.
“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.” - robert-a-heinlein
Right. And as what appears to be the loudest voice in this discussion, it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.
Lets not pretend there is not competition for attention, capital and enthusiasm for vision based projects. That I advocate for one over another - in competition - is exactly what is supposed to happen.So, bring the merits of both and have the conversation.
Just saying yay this thing is credulous and doesn't actually evaluate what are possible futures.
In my case I advocate for Transhumanism and AGI as our solutions to his existential questions and promote those (as does Musk actually but to a lesser extent).
Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don't agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?
That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.
Because there is nowhere to engage with them or around their capital allocation specifically? Also because the problem set they are trying to solve is not as ambitious. Remember the problem set for this Mars project is basically "Saving Humanity from Extinction."
You see similar conversations come up when large scale renewable projects are invested in - wherein people shout about how people should be investing in fusion or Thorium etc...
Also, if someone comes out and says "We're investing in Docker" and the response is "You should be investing in AI instead!!" it just makes you look like a crank - largely because they are different value investments.
Sure, people do this stuff all the time. And it's ridiculous, and I can't understand why people are doing it here or why you're defending it.
You're saying that if people are highly ambitious and trying to do some good, that makes them more of a target. And furthermore, you seem to be embracing that. I agree with the former, but strongly reject the latter.
Personally, I'm worried by the fact that it's a billionaire driving this, nevermind which one in particular. If and when SpaceX colonizes Mars, what sort of life will the people up there live? Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.
It wasn't the "earth dream" I grew up with either, and yet, here we are.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...
I think my fear of potential corporate dystopias is informed by my knowledge of actual government dystopias.
Many nations with dystopian origins are fine now, sure, but there was a lot of suffering along the way; I don't think it's unreasonable to want to prevent that.
I'm not ever so familiar with that history, but a quick look at the wiki suggests very much not; some of the elites were (and, at certain periods, the non-muslim population), but never the regular population, and indeed this was a major point of contention leading up to the war.
> Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.
Musk is explicitly talking about a "public-private partnership". I think any project on the scale of Mars colonization is necessarily going to be intimately entangled with one or more governments.
i see the possibility, with corporations there is always the option of quitting the job - that's the limiting factor, so that it can't get really totalitarian as it doesn't have the teeth for that. However you don't have the option of quitting up on Mars. There will probably be shortages and huge problems during the initial stage, so you might end up with a highly stratified society (provided that there are no robots that could do all the work for us).
Now there is always the option of a benevolent dictator who will actually quit after two terms; it has happened before. They might just as well put up reasonable institutions of government given that we have this tradition down here on earth.
i guess the colonists will not just silently comply with a dictatorship (that's a key requirement for keeping this system), just because they are not used to this sort of governance.
If that were actually the case, then there would be no poor people, and we can all at least agree that all other things being held constant, a society where no one is poor is better than one where some people are poor, right?
For one part, I think many people just expect wealthy people to do questionable and outright destructive things. If there's someone that doesn't fit these expectations he or she shatters that worldview because wealthy people can't at the same time be good people, too, can they?
This has a lot to do with a warped sense of equality and equity: People who aren't so well-off don't get to have these opportunities to change the world in one way or another so the ones who are in that worldview shouldn't get to embark on positive endeavours either, so everyone is equally miserable.
The fallacy with that of course is that with everyone feeling equally miserable everyone's worse-off whereas if people - wealthy or not - make the most out of the deck they've been dealt everybody (or at least society as a whole) will profit.
I regularly get approached by vision-driven projects, to help them make something concrete, and the vast majority of them will accomplish nothing because the people on them are not doers and they don't understand practical matters. Many, many people do not understand the difference between dreaming and doing. And many people will happily waste their entire life dreaming about things and then getting bitter when someone else doesn't realize it for dem and give them the credit.
I'm not going to name names, but I had a discussion with a fairly known "visionary" who has been trying to claim credit for something which he did not do. Simply because he fucked around with an idea without actually making any progress on it for _decades_. All he did was to make it ever more complex and unattainable by adding useless shit to it. Then when someone actually managed to strip the idea down to something that could be realized he first shit all over it and then tried to claim credit for it once it became successful. Yet he wanted everyone to recognize him for his "contributions".
I generally don't give a shit about what people who do nothing think. To me, they do not count.
Elon Musk does stuff. His critics don't. Let's start there.
Let me argue that allocation of resources as a zero-sum game is a deeply flawed view of the situation. There is competition, but this is not a bucket-for-bucket transfer and given the figures displayed here as well as ballpark estimations, there is more than largely room for all of those to develop simultaneously. As mikeash points out, there is an untapped audience as well as boatloads of resources going down the sink that totally dwarf the resources put in any of those endeavours (and this extends way past "wasteful" billionaires)
This is especially biting when you go out to raise money - there is a limited pool of money out there that is looking to be allocated. Sure, some small changes open up small amounts - such as the introduction of crowdfunding - but generally speaking there are more companies seeking funds than there are funds seeking investment.
Said another way the pie grows too slowly to consider the market anything other than zero-sum over the window of time that a venture has.
I'm sure you have it all figured out.
Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?
If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?
Same reason as anyone else I suppose. Not really sure how to answer that without sounding like a douche.
If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?
I mean that's exactly what I'm doing...
You're not advocating for something your advocating against something.
We all advocate for what we believe, advance our best arguments, and collectively reach conclusions. That's how discussion is supposed to work, no? Or are we supposed to pick the smartest person in the room and then ignore everyone else?
Well, maybe they like to shout "the King is naked". Or maybe they want the interest in space exploration to go towards what they think would be more realistic and/or reasonable plans.
He's proposing a system for getting stuff to Mars cheaply enough.
Characterizing this as "emotional manipulation" is ridiculous. You want to see what emotional manipulation actually looks like, watch an Apple keynote. This is a guy risking his fortune on a crazy dream and presenting his efforts in a technical and factual manner.
Remember, the talk was about a method of transportation, not colonization as the title suggested. Optimism is great; don't let it be a means of deception.
I'm certain folks have tried on Antarctica (we've had constant human presence there for decades).
However, we still failed even under a much more controlled and hospitable environment - Biosphere 2.
Biosphere 2[1] failed because of our lack of understanding of our own ecosystems on earth. A minute imbalance led to the entire ecosystem failing.
The issue with Mars isn't getting there (or back) - government's have been doing this for more than a decade.
The issue with Mars is getting people there, alive... and keeping them alive for the duration of the mission, and then returning them home alive.
We're only now starting to explore the effects of microgravity on the human body - and having not figured out how to mitigate some serious issues (such as your eyes losing shape, causing you to go blind[2]), we're not going to be able to seriously consider long duration space travel, let alone inhabit another planet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
[2] http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vis...
Biosphere 2 was in many ways more challenging than Mars. It was intended to be totally self-contained with all water and oxygen recycled. On Mars, water can be found outside, and oxygen can be made from the atmosphere industrially.
The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months. Astronauts have already spent far more time in orbit than that. There are negative effects, yes, but blindness isn't one of them (and your link doesn't even list blindness as a potential consequence, just impaired vision).
It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible. Maybe Martians have bad eyesight and shortened lives, but nobody's doing this for their health anyway.
Nobody said they _had_ to, but I'm sure someone has tried over the years out of a scientific interest. (Although I have no source for this, so it's unsubstantiated unless someone digs something up).
> The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months
Travel time depends on trajectory, however safe estimates usually are around 6 months each way.[1]
> It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible
Well, the effects we're observing now (for the first time!) are largely from Scott Kelly[2]'s year in microgravity. Going to mars and back takes around 1 year's time (6 months approximately each way), plus we assume they'll stay on the surface longer than a few hours... so these may prove to be serious complications. The scary thing is, few talk about these issues when dreaming about traveling to Mars (Musk included, apparently).
[1] http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...
The figure I stated comes from the presentation we're discussing, I didn't just pull it out of my nether regions. You can go faster if you're willing to use more fuel.
You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here? I can't carry on a conversation like that.
We have yet to see if these figures are sound. Hauling enough fuel up there for an oversized vehicle quickly becomes an issue - the more weight, the more fuel required, which adds to weight.
Regardless, 3-4 months each way is still a long time in microgravity. I don't see the point you're raising.
> You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here?
The grand point I raised was we've tried this on earth, and failed. We understand earth fairly well, comparatively... yet we've failed each time we try. We can't just waive hands and say this isn't an issue.
I'm not talking about Mars anymore, because it would be fruitless.
A grand point that you have failed to back up with anything other than a hunch, and are defending by rejecting numbers, that while are far from infallible, you didn't give any reason for rejecting.
Maybe as a hobby idea. But has anyone seriously tried, with an 8-9 figure budget, a team of engineers, etc.? Shipping in supplies is cheap. There is little financial motive to make a self-sustaining colony.
The point is to make humanity resilient to what would otherwise be an exctinction-level event, such as an engineered superplague, weaponized nanorobotics, or a massive asteroid impact.
His viewpoint is that SpaceX is a transportation company, not a colonization or habitat company. He drew an analogy to the railroad companies that built the first railroads to California. Once they made California easily accessible, others came after them to settle down to and build the state.
Two-way transportation is the biggest obstacle in the way of Mars colonization. That's why SpaceX is focusing on it. But colonization is what gets people excited, and it is the long-term vision, so it has to be the central pitch.
A switch with what, exactly? If he's just trying to make money, just space tourism alone would be more than enough, since he could charge the same as he'd charge for a Mars trip . Also, if your goal is to colonize Mars, a pretty critical step one is getting humans to Mars. It's not some nefarious plan.
The fact that something is marketed does not diminish the utility of a thing.
Sending multiple tons of robotic drilling equipment to Europa to look for life under the ice for example...
I'd venture that's because it somehow silently challenges the humanocentric point of view that many (unconsciously, mostly) hold onto. Why would anyone seemingly cling so much onto that pale blue dot unless it's held as deeply special in some way?
We have no chance of achieving that if we keep on endlessly postponing each step towards it. And as far as rocky space dots go, Mars looks incredibly close to Earth.
The man who says it can't be done needs to get out of the way of the man who's doing it.
That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.
The really weird thing is we already sort of know how - "bottle gardens" are a thing. It seems to be mainly a question of scale. So why aren't we building bigger and bigger bottle gardens?
Apparently, after giving it one little shot here in a convenient location and failing miserably, we think we can just skip straight to Mars and be successful there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#See_also
So that's at least five.
In Poland, there's a Mars-like base being built right now, though not aimed at testing self-sufficient ecosystems but equipment and work procedures of potential off-world colonists. My guess is there's more of such little-known projects happening.
The point being, the number of projects related to living off-world is slowly increasing, and my guess it will only go up as the perspective of Mars mission comes closer (SpaceX is doing a lot of good work making this close to "very soon" in peoples' minds). So we're definitely not "giving it one little shot".
The insects and plants selected didn't cohabit well, as well another issues. There was clearly lots to learn from the experiment.
>That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.
>An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
It was a failure. Go back and look at what I replied to: the OP said someone should go set up a self-sustaining colony. That was attempted with Biosphere II. It failed. It was not self-sustaining.
It they learned stuff from it, that's all well and good, but it doesn't meet the requirement from the OP of being self-sustaining.
The OP says we should set up a self-sustaining colony on Earth as practice for something in space. We have not done that. We tried and we failed, and we didn't bother trying again. So the point here is: what makes us think we can set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars when we can't even set one up in Arizona? Cart before the horse.
But it can also be thought of as an experiment whose purpose was to test the hypothesis "this is a good way to set up a colony". In the scientific sense of the term, experiments that disprove their hypothesis are as successful as those that prove it. A failed experiment is one that is inconclusive or incomplete.
Building a habitat on another world is not a scientific experiment; it's an engineering project.
Obviously it's not completely trivial to sustain humans on Mars, but there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology, to say nothing about whatever we're going to invent over the next fifty years.
Keeping humans alive on Mars starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950. I wonder how many armchair pessimists there were for the space program back then.
Fixed. Mars is impossible, for now. We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested. Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less (there's a few small pros and cons but being so far away is a major con).
> there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology
Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it, any fantasy seems plausible in comparison. At least try to start a closed biological system with a rat and find out how hard that is, then add the lag-time to service problems and a low gravity high radiation environment, etc. The movies have really poisoned the reality for the US population, but maybe it's part of the PR to raise money. I can understand that, but I won't concede that it's doable yet.
> We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested
SpaceX claims to be able to do it in as little as 90 days. You can go a lot faster with more free fuel. We've kept someone in space for 4 times that.
> Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less
What are you referring to? Mars has available gasses, water, and more easily accessible useful solids than the moon. It will be easier to get radiation shielding on Mars, as the surface is more amenable to building underground structures.
> Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it
You are aware that we have sent probes to Mars, yes? The only difference between that and the human is how much money you're willing to spend to increase the chances of the journey being survivable.
What about the tech to grow food in space? Is it "just expensive" or it doesn't exists? I think it doesn't exist.
I think we need a dedicated food-growing space lab, and run it for least 10 years, until we're confident we have a robust technology that works.
Once on Mars, we could probably use something like this:
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/the-martian-food-growing-sy...
For producing crops and oxygen, and maybe even supplies for a return trip.
A quick google search says a trip to mars varies between 150-300 days. The longest human spaceflight exceeds that at 438 days aboard the Mir space station [1] from 1994-1995.
1. http://www.space.com/11337-human-spaceflight-records-50th-an...
See e.g. http://www.mars-one.com/faq/health-and-ethics/how-much-radia...
But this is pretty basic for any Mars trip. I'm sure it's been considered.
I'm not one of the nay-sayers. Musk has a good record of getting things done, although sometimes maybe he pushes a little too hard.
I certainly don't think "That's s stupid waste of time and money."
And if Musk doesn't do it, someone else will.
No, the risk v reward curve has to be better than an equivalent risk v reward curve for a terrestrial species survival project to justify the mission.
I would argue that just about any PhD in epidemiology, disaster relief, or geopolitics will have a risk/reward curve far better than any Mars mission.
People keep making this argument that, absent any other information, a two planet species is more robust than a one planet species. But that's not the choice we're facing. The choice is a two-planet species versus a more prepared one-planet species.
That's not the choice. Those two options are not mutually exclusive.
I think it may take some time - centuries even - for colonizing Mars to "pay off" in terms of reduced extinction risk. But I think in the long term - say 500 years from now - we will indisputably be safer as a species if we started colonizing Mars 500 years ago than if we didn't. And if we don't start now, then when?
I would increase that number if someone could tell a story with even a whiff of truth about how it could happen.
Anime reference: "Starship Operators".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen–Scott_South_Pole_Stat...
Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.
I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.
Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.
What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?
The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You'd just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.
So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.
Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.
I just want positive comments to appear as the top comment more often.
Negative commenta should have a bit of a higher bar (in other words, need more votes) to get to the top
"I think it's a good idea to start a national wingsuit base jumping team."
"I don't know if that's a good idea. Pretty high chance of death"
Penalized - negative post
"I think these questions at IAC are great, it's good that people get a chance to <self promote thing> at a technical conference"
"Wtf is with these stupid questions at IAC? They should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"
i.e.,
"I think these questions at IAC are great,..."
"...they should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"
But it could be useful to look at the comment history of a user. When someone who is an overall positively minded contributor (with a high average positive sentiment) suddenly writes one scathing reply, this could mark a potentially interesting thread.
You say it's "degraded", but it's more likely that HN's audience has diversified as it's grown, and therefore it's less likely for you to agree with any given comment.
Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another's "nay-sayer", I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.
> If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted
Just because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.
Pointing out flaws == not valuable?
What a load of rubbish. Note that HN already has strong moderation, and does delete "way out there" contrarian views. If this was taken to the extreme, only back-patting allowed, the comments would become useless. And I feel, like others, this already goes on a lot (e.g. the top karma posters all tend to agree/compliment each other, there isn't that much disagreement although it happens sometimes).
It should make its way to HN guidelines.
Because most others aren't constantly being worshipped by people on HN and the like. Musk worship was the reason I stopped bothering with the technology subreddit.
Some folks who only focus on wealth would call it foolhardy regardless, though.
The hero worship should be pretty simple to understand: he's built (with the efforts of thousands of people working for him, of course, it's a huge group effort) amazing things. Every time I get in my car, I marvel at it. He's landed an orbital rocket on a barge in the ocean. Several times! Even if somehow these things somehow fade into absolutely nothing, they're amazing accomplishments.
I have no problem with people arguing against SpaceX's Mars plans, either on the basis that the plan is infeasible, or that he should be doing something else. I have a huge problem with people arguing against it on the basis that the commenter doesn't like it and the whole idea is dumb.
I just want to see an intelligent conversation.
That said, its incredibly exciting.
(It is indirectly funded through some tax dollars with things like their ISS resupply missions, but that's money the company would get with or without a Mars plan, and could easily just take as profit instead.)
Reading this whole thread I'm reminded of something from my childhood that greatly impressed me. My mother emigrated in the sixties from a country which had undergone a communist-fomented civil war in which her father, a policeman, was killed (when she was four). When she arrived here she know no one other than my father. One of her first and greatest friends here was a woman that along with her husband was a card carrying member of the communist party. When I was old enough to understand these things I was pretty stunned that two people who by rights should probably hate each other, could get along and be so friendly. That has stayed with me to this day. We can seek consensus and argue positions and come together or stay in our corners. But the ability to do it without being dicks is very special.
Just comes down to how well prepared you want the human race to be for a planetary or solar system wide disaster.
The chances of the second one are pretty low, but some people think that any chance is too high.
We can also start improving these facilities today, if we care about the survival of homo sapiens. Even out the gender ratio at Cheyenne mountain, give it a small nuclear reactor, a hydroponic farm, and a seed bank and we can be reasonably confident in it weathering anything but a very near miss.
I'm pretty sure humanity currently possesses the knowledge and resources to build multiple underground shelters around the Earth (as seen in Hollywood movies) that can sustain a population of at least one million indefinitely. Food can be grown with artificial lighting. Air and water can be brought in from outside, purified and recycled. If you need anything else, send robots (or people in protective suits) to scavenge the surface. The only thing we lack is political will.
Then changing planet doesn't help unless the colony has people who are protected from them compared to those left behind.
I have no problem with intelligent, well thought out negativity. It's just the "why would anyone want to spend $100,000 to die in a metal box?" stuff that I really dislike.
We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.
A few more vastly wealthy eccentrics building teams to play with space, fusion (carefully I hope), generation, or whatever pipe dream they have could easily make up for some of the global short termism.
Does it matter if he sells enough tickets to Mars to profit? I doubt it. I don't think that's the point. The moon landings were excellent for helping humankind dream big, Mars will be too.
What will the moon landing conspiracy theorists do then? :)
I think you are assuming that being wealthy is just a state someone gets into magically.
While the things you mention aren't on their own crazy species changing ideas, the selling stuff, the getting a cab is what allowed some folks to become wealthy and go after crazy things. So don't discount the process of acquiring resources.
It's the means to the end. Nothing wrong with that either.
Bezos was being connected with space as the destination in the 90s long before Amazon was even a certain hit or Blue Horizon. Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream. That's not to trivialise an Amazon, but had Amazon failed, which it almost did, whatever came next would try to get big enough to make Blue Horizon. Selling books online wasn't unique, getting big fast was more so, at least for a while.
For Musk, he'd identified as having a dream of alternative energy, solar, and electric vehicles from years ago and mentioning it along the way. No surprise that as soon as he can he's founding Tesla. With SpaceX right after Paypal I cant recall hearing earlier mention, but I'm glad he did.
Lots of people have wacky childhood dreams. Our society picks who gets to pursue theirs based on money. Some inherit it. Others execute magnificently on something daring.
For the latter, their dreams seem like good bets to bet on (but only given the prior performance). For the former, I suppose it's a plus they mostly remain in a holding pattern.
they say NASA has changed Mars colors in the photos, it is more Earth-like, because something
Oh but we do. Statistically such things contribute a lot more to humanity overall, it's just less visible because the benefits are widely distributed. What enables projects like this is the huge amounts of human labour that have been saved by less glamorous projects, along with general innovation in manufacturing.
~ Orville Wright
Yep. I'm sure plenty of detractors tried to pull down the Wright Brothers. Human innovators have had these detractors as always.
It's fine with me if some of my fellow crabs climb out, but it is very important not to lose sight of the fact (and to his credit, Musk gets this right) that unless all of us climb out (and we won't) then conditions in the pot are still going to matter to those -- almost certainly the vast majority -- who are left behind.
That would be unacceptable if it meant the end of humanity.
If he would have said "You know guys. We're going to Mars. But right now, we're working on making rockets that go up, on time, in one piece.
When we finish with that, we'll show how to go. It'll be hard. Here are the technical and sociological issues involved. When we're getting close to being ready to go, we'll get working on them."
I can't understand how this kind of openness gets labeled "a reality-distortion field."
While he's going good, and is launching rockets, but right now he's behind OldSpace in doing what he's actually doing - launching rockets.
In any case, it's not like he infused the whole thing with a "we are the best at space" attitude, so why does that even matter?
OldSpace has not devloped a new rocket or rocket engine or rocket in a while. OldSpace has almost completely been pushed out of the international launch market. OldSpace launches cost at least 2x more, and for a number of missions more like 4x more. SpaceX is flying a young rocket that is seeing huge amounts of improvement still, while Old Space is flying Old Rockets that don't really improve all that much.
They are not just 'launching rockets'. SpaceX is flying an active Space ship, Dragon 1, and are working on another one. OldSpace company Boing is for 4.2 Billion for the Commercial Crew contract, SpaceX only 2.3 Billion. For that money SpaceX will have to perform extremely complex tests, that the Boing craft will not even be capable of. Plus, Boing has actually tried to get around even the more basic tests. Additionally to that Boing is already far behind on their schedule, even thought they were specifically picked over SNC Dreamchaser because 'they are the most likely to finish development in time'.
1. I consider Arianespace and Proton "OldSpace" - Old established players who exist to make a buck.
2. What counts is success at your business. If you're good at that, you can take time off to do R&D. If not, you're rightfully seen as a not-focused, unreliable company.
It's like if Firefox Os. If Firefox was a great, secure, light browser and then they want to also came up with an OS, fine. If their browser needs work but instead they write experimental OSs, they got their priorities wrong.
Now it's true that OldSpace has been tremendously lucky with the latest rocket incarnations, but except the three Delta_III launches, they were tremendously successful.
Delta II was 151/153 Delta III was 1/3 Delta IV is 32/33
That's 184/189. That's five mistakes in 17 years.
They are in space, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, driving around the surface of Mars, flying by Pluto and escaping the solar system. And that's just NASA.
While its true that they haven't landed a rocket on a barge, I'd say SpaceX is far, far, far behind.
Today, I don't care. His clients know what they're getting involved with, and if they don't care, I don't either.
My concern is when he does go to Mars, he'll have hundreds of people signing up not realizing that he's putting lives on a beta rocket.
As I thought about how he is perfecting rocket technology, I wandered off on a tangential rocket technology (thought) that would tract nuclear rockets launched from the earth's surface and curry them off into space... and return home.Is it a good idea? It is if it works. Do I plan on working on it? I don't know shit about rockets, so probably not. The point it, we need more "Mars Men" in order to discover the ideas that will change things here on earth. Maybe Musk won't cure cancer or end wars but maybe someone inspired by him will.
Which is not how it works.
The cost of the actual raw materials to build almost anything is a tiny tiny tiny 1% fraction of the cost of what the thing actually costs to build. Rocket fuel, titanium etc. are all cheap compared to the cost of actual rockets. So the question of course is, where does all that extra money though? And the answer of course is: into people, process and technology.
The cost of rocketry, or particle accelerators or fundamental science, is correctly viewed as a massive sponsorship and investment into people and tools to improve how they do something so they can do it better.
And that is why "spin-off technology" actually happens in the first place - because large projects mean that we have now skilled up, tooled up and improved the capability of vast numbers of people, companies and fields of trade - which is what makes new innovations possible, or changes the market dynamics so things become economical and then profitable.
Hypothetically, if the US were to put 20% of their budget into (truly) getting people on Mars, they'll do it.
If they put 20% of their budget into eradicating poverty?
Right now the US government puts between 10% to 30% of their budget into Medicare and Medicaid.
Is poverty eradicated?
1. Part of participating in humanity is being critical. Part of participating in anything is being critical. If people have complaints, it doesn't harm you to hear them out. If you only seek to have your beliefs validated via the internet, you're going to have a bad time.
2. Just because someone criticizes Musk doesn't mean they're not critical of anything else. They're just giving you their thoughts on the subject, which is better forum etiquette than just randomly going on about China when asked about NATO, so to speak.
I must have written my original comment poorly, because a lot of people seem to have come away with the impression that I don't want to see any comments that aren't fawning. That's not it at all! I just don't want to see knee-jerk stupid negative comments that add no value to the discussion.
These do cause harm, because they waste time and derail conversations that could otherwise go to more interesting places. It's not a huge harm, but the harm is on the same order as the good that comes of a site like this.
As for #2, I don't see this sort of negativity towards the more mundane projects of other super-rich people when their activities get brought up. I don't expect to see it in this thread, but there seems to be a lot more effort put into whining about why Mars is a terrible idea than goes into, say, doing the same for why Uber is doomed in China or whatever. (Those get negative comments but at least they're mostly well thought out!)
Yes, excessive negativity can be a bad thing. But when a small minority of the comments being critical (comments mostly downvoted to the bottom) is considered too negative (to the point where people are advocating scripts that remove or auto-downvote comments deemed negative), it suggests that there's a danger of people being overly sanguine and reflexively hostile to any criticism.
I'm not sure how something as massive as this could ever be accomplished without taking it seriously. And I don't think it can be taken seriously without taking a good, hard look at the numerous challenges that face it. Mindless hype doesn't really get us anywhere.
A caveat: particularly in the case of someone like Musk who already has, conservatively speaking, some very decent stuff under his belt, if someone wants to post something against an idea they themselves have the responsibility, to make sure it is indeed well thought out, and not just knee-jerk negativity, pessimism or cynicism.
Likewise, people need to realize that excessive fanboyism really needs to be tempered and can really turn others off from supporting some of the truly great innovators of our time whomever they might be. No matter how stunning a person might be, they still gotta take a shit like anyone else, and you bet that shit's gonna stink too.
Maybe you're right that the numbers don't justify my complaint, but this isn't about silencing dissent or being hostile to criticism, I just want intelligent criticism.
HN bunch is courteous and precise and that is generally best applied to topics which require expertise. You triggered them to defensive mode and by now most are accusing you of fanboyism in the most courteous and precise way possible.
I hope you set an example to future commenters on what not to write.
Well, man is still a teritorial animal driven by instinct, and as any animal, it perceives the unknown as dangerous and it will attempt to stop, in a knee jerk reaction, anyone who will try to change the status quo.
We're still driven by the past, by what we know, than by the future. We're not used to thinking in terms of probabilities and possible outcomes, but Elon does.
This is why most great breakthroughs have been made by exceptional individuals that fought through resistence and brought progress for the rest.
We are still not ready to act like a single consciousness. I wonder if we will ever be..
I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.
Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.
I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.
Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"
Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.
"things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless"
On the granular level, considered from only one problem's prospective, decisions actually have a binary value. For a supposed genius like Musk it's no wonder why there's a backlash for the wrong ones. The judgment itself has a scale of tolerance for its subjects (even though this is harder to admit openly) and exactly this high bar inherently set for highly potential, highly resourceful people like genius billionaires is what we see here. This is a good thing, I think.
This is kinda a stupid position to hold as statistically for the average human on this planet everything today is better then it was yesterday and most likely will be better tomorrow then today.
What are these subtleties? Why is it better to invest energy into space instead of sustainability? It's just heartbreaking that we can't remotely get as excited about sustainability as we can about romantic memes of curiosity and history books. Is the 'subtlety' that we just got to accept this as a fact about human nature and hope for sustainability as a byproduct?
If you have data about this, please share, otherwise avoid making unsubstantiated generalizations about the community. It's a predictable rhetorical device that doesn't move us towards gratifying our intellectual curiosity.
I've been annoyed by this attitude for quite some time now. You see it all the time. Same deal with Tesla an Model S. Because not everybody can afford it, and because not all power is renewable an electric car like Tesla Model S seems like some sort of terrible crime.
Whatever people level against Elon Musk he seems to have already done something about it. People say don't go to Mars, save the planet earth instead. So Elon answers I made electric cars. Then they are like, but they don't run on renewable energy but coal power plants. So he can reply I am also promoting solar power through Solar City. Ah whatever, people shouldn't be driving car anyway, they should take trains. Well I came up with Hyperloop, Elon can answer to that.
But somehow it is just never enough. He should have pushed out an electric car yesterday which everybody could have afforded while simultaneously have closed down all coal plants and replaced them with solar.
And his rockets are nothing because he hasn't landed on the moon like NASA yet so screw him.
Man these negative people just gets my blood boiling. I am from Norway, so I grew up with the Law of Jante. I am surprised that that law seems to have spread across the globe.
And even with solar power, I've heard criticism, stating that it's not renewable because you need rare earths possibly for solar panels (i don't know) but especially for batteries. And that it's only effective enough in regions where there is a lot of sun, even though Elon claims that it would work fine even in the UK.
Action > Words even when it's about physics.
Elon Musk grandly announces: I'm going to make humans an interplanetary species. This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.
Hyperloop, as you so mentioned? Yeah, he announced he would try to implement a concept already thought about, that without absolutely major breakthroughs in several fields remains impossible or at a cost of trillions of dollars, by far the most expensive private undertaking in history. So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.
*(Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing achievement, it deserves all the praise it can get and I will be the first to give it. It's when he starts with these talks of master plans, and multitrillionaire projects, and making humans a multiplanetary species, that my brow starts to frown.m)
So when he talk about stuff like this, people have begun to pay attention.
This is why people get irritated when he gets criticized because the arguments boil down to "this is so ambitious and will likely fail, so why even try?"
Your argument comes across as "There are unsolved problems, and it's expensive, so don't try". Attitudes like that don't drive human progress. Society was not built on "it's hard, so don't try". I'm kind of surprised that this attitude has to be argued against on Hacker News, of all places.
I feel that saying, "So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again" is along the lines of when you come up with an invention called the potato peeler and everyone says, "But isn't that just a dull knife?".
People constantly downplay new ideas, they're only recognizing the similarity and not the genius the slight alteration an existing invention offered them.
On a positive note, Elon Musk has somewhat of a track record for executing on his dreams/goals and making it happen. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B
Further, Musk explicitly admitted that his ability to create realistic schedules is poor, and the timeline should be considered more aspirational than concrete.
To me, "no ground in reality" would apply if they had announced, say, plans for a warp drive, or a teleporter. This plan looks extremely grounded in reality to me, which is why it's so exciting.
I'm also dubious of the economics of this venture. I simply don't understand how living on Mars is advantageous for anybody. Mr. Musk is welcome to set his money on fire if he wants, of course, but I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth, nor do I see paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to live a hard life and die in a frozen wasteland to be rational. I suspect after the initial enthusiasm dies down, very few people will choose this.
Also, why would someone do this? Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves. That's why I want to do it. Don't care it's cold and dry. It's obvious to me that it's the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. To each their own, but I'm pretty sure you can see how I come to this idea; it's not far fetched.
This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go? If we wait 50 years, wouldn't the technological progress make such an endeavor cheaper, safer?
And the counterpoint is, well... it's been 50 years since apollo and still we don't have the ability to get to mars, so if there's nothing driving the technology then it doesn't just magically happen, and there's nothing to say that it will magically happen in another fifty years either.
To me, it's not the natural extinction events that are driving this, but the thinking that there is a short window of perhaps 200 years between technological enlightenment (particularly in nuclear and biological engineering) where the risk of self-annihilition is considerably increased, and the only way to decrease it is to add the redundancy.
To be sure, we will not achieve redundancy during the first decades or even perhaps centuries of this colonization. I think that terraforming needs to happen first
Could a natural extinction event happen in the next 50 years?
If the answer is 'yes', I think we should go as soon as it is possible.
Humanity has been much closer to self-annihilation in the past. That gives me hope that we wont nuke ourselves before a giant rock falls from the sky ;)
>Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves.
People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution, or because they were slaves or prisoners transported against their will (by someone who wanted gold, or timber, or land). They received resupply, not as charity, but from companies which expected to receive gold, tobacco, timber, or other goods in return from their investment.
Colonization is driven by economics. That's why thousands live permanently in Norilsk, Yellowknife, La Rinconada,and Kalgoorlie, but nobody lives permanently at Amundsen-Scott, under the sea, or in LEO. If history is any guide, "how will this turn a profit" is the question any Mars colony needs to address if it is to have any hope of prospering.
That was before the industrial revolution - the new world offered relatively mild opportunities; nowadays people still cross the ocean - but these are all people from third world countries, or countries destroyed by civil wars; i think that in order to move people from the first world you would need to promise to make them really rich.
For instance: I'll try to do it for the sake of it. Sampling folks around me, a dozen would. It's not that crazy or rare a proposition. Arguably my environment doesn't represent an unbiased share of the population, but it's still a certain amount of people.
This is, thank god, incorrect. We have closed loop systems for food, water and air.
I have in front of me a shelf of books relating to closed loop systems. They were designed for two purposes, space travel on one side, and on the flip side as a final resort against nuclear annihilation. I can give you sources to look up if you're interested.
The details were worked out in the 70s and 80s, but the projects were closed down when the West began to lose faith, no thanks to exponential energy shocks but that is a separate story for another day.
> Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.
I would not call the manufacture of steel bolts a simple problem except in a colloquial sense.
This is something different to food/air/water, but we should be able to accomplish this in a new closed loop project.
The secret to space colonization and closed loop systems is not physics, but chemistry, knowing the correct procedures for the synthesis of new compounds from more basic elements.
> I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth
This is another subject again, but many rare things exist in abundance in space that could be used to create an economy unlike that of Earth, such as platinum and the isotope helium-3. Then there is the ability to use nuclear systems in a way we cannot without political and environmental problems on our home planet.
To lift all restrictions on the use of nanotechnology, biotechnology and nuclear engineering would unleash a torrent of creativity from our society that is presently bound up in other things.
This is something that is not anybody's area of expertise. It is the area in which businessmen are going to have to come up with exploits.
And let us not forget one important thing from geopolitics. He who controls the skies, controls the earth. So going up is not really an option. The full weight of military support should be behind any spacefaring entrepreneurs. You want Iran or Korea slinging rocks at our cities? You do not need nuclear weapons if you have that much kinetic force on your side! You cannot be at the Apex if there exists a rock hanging over your head.
Fortunately our enemies disapprove of science fiction, or we'd be in a spot of trouble!
Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.
The D-D reaction does produce neutron radiation but it's lower energy than D-T neutrons and more easily shielded. The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.
The famous Biosphere 2 project:
Biosphere 2 John Allen The Human Experiment Jane Poynter Life under Glass Abigail Alling
There exists other biospherics projects but not much information on them. The ESA and Russian projects have materials but in languages I cannot read.
I suspect a lot of this stuff is also classified under sources and methods for other secret government projects.
> Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.
That is nice. I know it is an important subject but am ignorant of even the most basic physics. Nuclear engineering appears to be dying which is an indictment of our society.
> The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.
I saw that, I think sama posted something about it or it was on techcrunch. I wish them the best of luck, because like I said, it is dying on the vine. Society, at least in the West, appears to be turning its back on all forms of science that could lead somewhere and the inmates are not just running the asylum but adding new wings to it.
Social dysfunction to me is the most likely calamity to strike us down, which is why we need to go to Mars, we need some kind of control group!
Use that gray stuff in your head to think of a way to do it. It depends on the type and grade of bolt and how it's holding the things together. You could broach & thread the hole and replace your broken bolt with a larger bolt.
Then you can collect your metals, melt them down, work the metal with some oils to imbue it with some carbon, and make reclaimed bolts.
With power, a lathe, and time you can build anything round. With some more tools you can build anything of any shape.
Just recycle everything.
Musk is a visionary, and I think we need people like that. He said of Tesla and SpaceX that he went in with a fatalistic view: that there was a 10% chance of success.
In his talk yesterday, he repeated a phrase he used before, about moving the ball forward as far as he can.
So I'm an Elon Musk fanboy because he has real vision, tempered by reality and pragmatism.
I think what a lot of vocal skeptics react to is less Elon Musk (or whoever), and more to the seemingly mindless fawning of some of his 'followers'. That also bugs me.
As an engineer, I'm always looking for the ways something can fail. At the same time, I try to add as much vision as I can to my professional work, so long as its tempered with real engineering skepticism.
And Elon Musk appears of the same mindset.
By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars? If close to true, that's pretty awesome, in my opinion at least. I and he suspect that once that benchmark is reached, the additional billions necessary to get a real civilization going there will flow more easily.
Yeah, he did make that claim. I think the specific claim was meant to ONLY cover getting the initial transportation system running, not the cost of setting up an initial colony there. He is focused on the transportation problem and wants other people to figure out how to support human life there.
I was also particularly impressed by the assertion that they would start sending some vehicle in every transit window to mars. Regular cargo flights to mars will be crucial to getting started on the science required to support the initial colony.
He even did that with regard to the chance of surviving the trip to Mars: he emphasised that there was a high risk of death for the first travellers and that he wouldn't want to do it. He actually stated that the first travellers would have to be comfortable with the high risk of death.
He's not saying "I'll colonize Mars". He's saying "We should colonize Mars. I'll make sure people interested in doing it can get there."
I think you and Musk probably have pretty similar views on his chances for success. He mentions that this is precisely why he likes the name "Heart of Gold" for the first one of these ships he sends to Mars: It is extremely improbable and the Heart of Gold ran on an improbability drive.
edit: typo
But going from this to imagining a space taxi and a space settlement? There is so much work that needs done first, effect of radiation on people? Effect of lower gravity? Effect of high concentration of heavy metals on plant life? Recycling everything? Making propellant on Mars? And so much more, he just hand waives it saying that is easy, all their idea relied on was reusing their booster 1000 times, even when they have not reused it once! If I wanted science fiction (not that I think it is impossible), I would read a book.
It's really like the Wright brothers doing their first test flight, and then imagining a commercial airline system, complete with Boeing 777, airports and hell even SR71 Blackbird. It's just too far off, and feels like a sci-fi con. Plus you can see what kind of people this thinking attracts, like that idiot who thinks that Burning man is what mars is going to be like, completely ignoring the thin atmosphere, lack of gravity, cold temperatures, and all its' effect on humans, plant and building materials.
And where in the recording did he say it was going to be hard?
And, again, nobody's saying it's anything other than a long shot, not even Musk himself. But a lot of people seem to be pooh-poohing it for bad reasons. For instance, the awful quality of the audience at the Q&A does not in reality tell us anything about SpaceX's ability to execute on some or all of this plan. In fact, I think Musk was ready for much more challenging questions than he ended up receiving (how could he not have been?)
Musk is pointing out, correctly, that this is possible with existing rocket technology -- at least the transportation. Keeping people alive once they're there is apparently somebody else's problem, but until we have the materials science for a space elevator, an obscenely heavy lift vehicle will probably have to do. Ultimately he's going to be asking a lot of people to climb on top of a monstrous Engine and hope that it explodes correctly, and I hope that his conscience is clear when that day dawns. Probably you are right that we're going to have a hell of a time keeping people alive on Mars, but we seem to have a tough time of that here as well.
This is not science fiction. There is no new physics required, just some fiendishly difficult engineering challenges. The Wright Brothers were able to build their plane because there was nothing physically stopping them. They had the scientific knowledge and the dedication, and everything else followed. Really it's not that people -- even Presidents -- haven't been talking about doing this and working on details and preliminaries for decades. This is news precisely because it's not science fiction. This time, it could actually happen.
I am pretty sure this is exactly the kind things people said about going to the moon, build a machine that can add numbers together faster than humans etc... lol
"This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm."
What have people see NASA do when Kennedy announced landing a man on the moon? Would they be able to accomplish if people would tamper their enthusiasm? I don't think so. They had to invent technology that didn't exist to accomplish it and I believe this needs the same thing. Hence the reason I am stoked about it.
Someone who grew up admiring the achievements in space and technology(I was born the same year the Voyagers left earth) that kind of dreaming and willingness, set me on course as a child to study science and work in tech. I am very excited to see announcements like this. Because without dreaming it up and setting a direction we would stagnate. Just like NASA did with the space shuttle program.
Helping out and working on a CubeSat project that is going to be launched in June 2017, I see how much work it is to even communicate in leo never mind beyond that(I can't even begin). Yet I can barely contain my excitement :)
And it could inspire a whole host of companies that simply try and do X on Mars. And perhaps in the process we will learn how to do X better on Earth also. Because the unique constraints of Mars are an extreme version of the sustainability issues we face on earth. Humanity has to evolve to be independant of ecosystems that we will otherwise destroy.
A similar concept is 'tall poppy syndrome'.
I understand where you're coming from. But it is not about all negativity per se.
I am quite negative about our progress over the past few decades. But that is because I think we could be doing much, much more.
I think it is a combination of seemingly opposite attributes that is the most helpful here. Enough optimism to have faith in the future, and enough pessimism in another part of the brain to catch the bugs before you get taken down by the obstacles.
So please don't throw me in with the crab people! :-)
Elon Musk has given us a torch for the first time in a long, long time, and if he falters, our cadre shall pick up the fire and continue on.
AD ASTRA.
This just suggests Elon chose to run forward to avoid any questions asked about the current and the past. He didn't revolutionize anything yet, made a few small dents in status quo but still far away from his plans and visions. Why talk about interplanetary travel in 5 years if SpaceX rocket has just made a single successful flight to Earths orbit? Why talk about revolutionizing transportation if Tesla cars are just a tiny percentage of all automobiles without clear grow path beyond fanboys? Same with battery industry - nothing meaningful so far, just plans and visions. Deliver first then build on that...now even a single critical remark about Tesla can make the company value go down and Elon mad - get some solid foundation first and then look at the stars.
"The timeline is unrealistic and major problems X, Y, and Z must be overcome." I welcome this kind of comment.
"Going to Mars is stupid. You'll just die in a box. We should focus on climate change instead." This is what I'm complaining about.
SpaceX has a bunch of rocket companies working on reusability when just a few years ago that was dismissed as stupid. Tesla has a bunch of major car companies working on serious electric vehicles when just a few years ago there was nothing of interest. Both of those are already revolutionary.
You forget that Musk envision a public-private partnership for his insane project. That means public money will be involved.
I don't mind Musk building an interplanetary rocket. I even agree with him that it will be useful to visit other places than mars. But his project to build a "self-sustaining city" on mars sounds ludicruous to me and I don't wont any tax money to be spent in it.
I don't think I can do anything as valuable to humanity here on earth as I can by even helping space missions. Even if there is a 50% chance some system fails and I'll die in space I still think its important to do so.
And on a side note I've also always wanted La Forge's cool visor so if you can throw that in too I'd be very happy.
One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of "Tomorrow's World" and "Horizon" telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I'm a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Command and global cooperation (which always seemed a big ask as we were at the height of the cold war).
However, I can't help thinking if we do become a multiplanetary species before resolving the issues of this one a few things are just a matter of time. That some politician claims we don't need to care about emissions as we now have a spare, so he's going to build loads of new coal. That Esso wants to know if there's oil. That we have an interplanetary falling out (OK that's probably a while away). That we start littering and buggering up the rest of the solar system.
Mars' soil contains tons of perchlorate at levels which are very toxic to humans.
TBH Venus seems like a better candidate for long term terraforming.
You can build floating complexes in it's upper atmosphere, and it has enough oxygen and water locked in it's atmosphere and we might be able to fix the rotation and the density of the atmosphere in one go by using the atmosphere to speed up the rotation of Venus. While both of these are quite "far fetched" technically, as far as terraforming goes we aren't any closer to terraforming mars than Venus, and at least for Venus we don't need to figure out how to give it a magnetic field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Induced_ma...
Additionally the current theory is that if Venus will be sped up to below 56h per rotation it would regenerate it's intrinsic magnetic field which should be near earth levels.
And while Venus does have higher gravity than Mars, it's still lower than Earth's, and overall the delta V for venus insertion orbit is slightly lower than what you need for Mars.
As far as terraforming goes, Venus is just a better candidate for long term colonization.
That's great and all, but how exactly do we realistically speed up the rotation of a _planet_?
The mass of the venusian atmosphere is high enough for this to actually work and still leave you a lot of atmosphere to work with, it will take 20-30 years but it still doable.
But compressing acidic gasses makes the corrosion problem worse, doesn't it? How do you deal with that?
This is planetary engineering. It's not supposed to be fast.
Unless, of course, you are a Kardashev II civilization.
I see this as a disadvantage; the major difficulty of space exploration is getting out of the Earth's gravity well. I don't think it's wise to fall back into another one.
The point of the booster for Earth is both to get out of Earth's gravity well and through its atmosphere (both of which are far less of a problem on Mars).
The moon also has a small gravity well, but no real resources to help you escape it. Mars has a bit of a gravity well, but has many more resources to help you escape that gravity well.
In the long run, there should of course be settlements on both bodies.
Tourism would be an obvious sustainable Moon industry. That does fit your description :)
A space colony would have much more need to get supplies from Earth.
Once we've learned how to run a space colony on the Moon, building a second one on Mars would be much easier.
None of those problems exist on Mars. Others exist, but you can't just directly say it was easier.
So you can grow plants in some kind of transparent pressurized place... Just like on the Moon.. or on a space station
You can use ISRU and atmosphere resource extraction to generate rocket fuel on the surface of mars, rather than being restricted to the rocket fuel you bring with you.
Ultimately, the answer is Mars has the necessary resources and when you look into the details just makes more sense and is easier.
That depends entirely on the effect in question.
You'd have a hard time pressurizing the moon's atmosphere to harvest it for propellent.
Mars is much smaller than Earth. From Wikipedia: "Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass, resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity."
Ref: Old man's war.
Of course you want the first colonists to not be sickly, but they won't need to be Olympic decathletes in their 20s. Equipment for lifting heavy objects can be sent more cheaply than people (it can go slowly and doesn't need life support).
I think for a venture like this maturity and patience is going to be more important than physical strength. There will be a lot of tedious tasks with long checklists that need to be followed near exactly to succeed. There will be a lot of disappointment and frustration when things fail or timelines slip. There will be the irritations of being stuck in a small social circle with a few people you intensely dislike but have to depend on for survival.
Add in the fact that your sperm or eggs will probably get exposed to large doses of radiation until they figure out how to get to Mars faster, and it will be far less attractive to anyone who is planning to have kids someday.
in my own personal experience, this thing works worse for older folks, who get territorial, grumpy and so on. But we aren't discussing folks in their 40s, rather 50s and 60s
On the moon it means you need enough solar power in batteries to power your gear, and to power appropriate spectrum lighting for plant growth.
If you can rely on solar power more reliably, then you can construct (significantly more complex than those required on earth) green houses which still benefit from natural light.
I actually agree that there are numerous challenges associated with very long days and nights. Artificial lighting per se is not among them. Solar power is a reasonable one.
We can try to explain solar system formation through mathematical models and simulation (Phobos and Deimos would be clues) but we can't go back in time and find the real explanation. No law of physics mandates that Mars' rotational period should be similar in magnitude to Earth's.
I guess direct to Mars is sexier. :)
(I'm behind live too.)
Its biggest, and perhaps only, advantage is that it has an atmosphere, and gas is so much easier to deal with for ISRU than anything else, as you don't need to mine it: just open a valve and suck it in. I notice Musk's ISRU plan is to mine ice; I do wonder how he's going to do that, as it won't be easy.
But... you know what... if you can get to Mars, you can get anywhere.
If you can get to Mars, getting to the Moon is so trivial you might as well build and maintain a base there just to test the equipment.
If you can get to Mars, you can get to near-Earth asteroids with enough spare capacity to take a whole a mining plant in tow.
If you can get to Mars, Ceres is only 400 m/s further away. (And Ceres is interesting.)
If you can get to Mars, then the outer solar system is reachable (with preparation and some disposable boosters).
If you can get to Mars, anyone who can afford a IST ship can have a space station.
So, hell yes, let's go to Mars. (And I'll cheerfully wave goodbye to you from my ice-mining cometary habitat.)
Mars first has the enormous advantage that it's tangibly in progress, however early, rather than being a great NASA idea that isn't getting funded. So I don't actually care which if only one is having rockets built. I saw enough artist impressions in the 80s. ;)
My recollection of the NASA idea was a Mars voyage would reconfigure/refuel at the space station but never land on the moon. The moonbase is the warehouse, fuel and whatever else would be needed to keep space station fed, and gets developed into manufacturing.
Lower G meaning larger vehicles, lower launch cost and so forth. The station at L2 was supposed to be a good jumping off point for anywhere - Mars, asteroids, rest of solar system - supposedly the most fuel efficient way to all(?) of them from here.
It's a while since I last read about that, so I may be mistaken on details.
The Moon's not very sexy. It's all dusty blacks and greys. Everyone knows it's a dead rock, we've already been there, and public consciousness is dominated by the Apollo program pictures of astronauts in gigantic, bulky spacesuits.
(This is mostly perpetrated by NASA unaccountably not sending any decent rovers to the Moon. Even the most recent lander, China's Chang'e, deliberately landed in the most boring place they could find. There aren't any interesting pictures of the moon because we haven't been anywhere interesting.)
ISRU's hard there, too. There's water ice you can mine, but carbon? I don't know where you'd get that.
But... if I were building a water ice mining plant destined for Mars, I'd want to test it somewhere. The Moon's a good place. So now I've landed an ITP ship with a mining rig. I'm going to load it with scientific instruments, too. And scientists. In fact, I might as well land two; it's good practice for Mars. And we're mining water, so we might as well use it, and help test the recycling systems. After all, the Moon's close enough that you can dash back to Earth in an emergency; it's the ideal place. We've got two ships; let's use one to recycle the crew on the other, and leave it there long term; there's plenty of interesting science to do, and it's all excellent practice.
So I'd be really surprised if a long-term presence on the Moon didn't sneak into this plan by the back door. And then if a carbon source were to be discovered in large enough quantities for meaningful ISRU, then sourcing methane from the moon would slot neatly in.
Getting water on the moon is a completely different problem then getting water on mars. Testing these things on the moon is totally insane anyway.The moon has some water, we don't know how much, and not exactly were it is. Mining it would be extremely difficult, specially without a nuclear reactor.
As for recycling systems, we are already good at them. We can and do test them on earth. We do test them on ISS. There is no need to go to mars, to these systems.
On Mars the most important resources for ISRU is easily and everywhere available, on the moon that is not the case.
The Science on Mars could answer fundamental questions about live, that is almost impossible on mars. Mars is clearly far more interesting from a scientific perspective. That is not even a point worth debating.
I am all for going back to the moon eventually, but mars is far more important. If you want to go to mars, go to mars.
Anything without an atmosphere you have to carry the fuel to stop after chasing it down, then land on it slow enough not to die. For robotic missions we can approach these objects in very favorable orbits with transit times measured in years, so the delta-v needed to slow down is manageable.
For human-based missions we have to get there fast. Going there fast means you have to dump alot of speed to stop once you get there. Without an atmosphere, that takes fuel. Not as much as it took you to reach that velocity, since you're lighter now, but still just about as much in terms of delta-v.
I learned this playing KSP. It will open your eyes to the real challenges of orbital mechanics. The hardest planet to land on in the entire game is the one with a mass/gravity approaching the game version of earth, except with no atmosphere. The in-game numbers aren't realistic, but the concepts are.
And hell yes, lets go to Mars. Where do I sign up?
Load up the icy dirt into a chamber using a digger, heat it up and precipitate out the water vapor. The only potential problem is separating out other volatiles, but fractionation is pretty basic tech.
Provided you have a decent power source that's easy: the hardest part is getting your raw material into the chamber and disposing of the debris afterwards. Humans driving flat-pack bulldozers, most likely.
Would work on the Moon, too.
ps: I heard Musk incentive to research interplanetary escape as a safety measure. But this is not what's sold here IMO, it smells too much of space travel tech infused greener (sic) heaven.
On space and Mars we must agree to disagree. Apart from the exploration and new discoveries that may arise from another planet, like the space race of the 60s many new technologies will arise. By introducing research on other planets (as we have done on ISS) there'll be a lot of basic and blue sky research that's hard to fund down here as it's not thought commercial. Some will be commercial, some might help save the planet. We don't know what we might discover, but it'll be vastly more than staying here arguing about fracking.
That commerce is getting us there and NASA hasn't in 50 years is telling. But it's as telling that there's a willingness to fund ridiculous wars on drugs and terror, and ill-conceived adventures in many places than develop the species with global missions to our home system, or alleviating hunger. I suspect for a fraction of the cost. If Mars were a threat we'd have been there decades ago.
Having an escape route, or at least the start of viable interplanetary travel, even if most wont get to use it might be handy too.
But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline.
"Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I'm not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space (or any other scientific/technical endeavor for that matter).
"Expected" may be the wrong word. People that have the capacity to travel through space but basically interact in familiar ways may just be a better fit for the medium than people who interact in unfamiliar ways.
There's some old video made in the mid-1960s showing "a view of the future", which basically depicts every home as having a home computer connected to some kind of communications network, where people would be able to read news, send messages, and even do shopping.
While a lot of sci-fi really seemed to miss the bus as far as communications go, there were some people who really did see what was coming. For some odd reason, they never got involved with anyone who made movies. But the internet really is pretty simple and easy to understand to an intelligent person from before the internet: they had news programs and TV, they had newspapers, they had magazines, the had snail-mail, they had telephones, and they had mail-order (and telephone-order) shopping. All the internet did was tie it all together and make it easily accessible to everyone, which had gigantic network effects that were unexpected.
>But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline.
That's because those movies were all extrapolating, accurately many times (like with 2001: A Space Odyssey), based on then-current trends in aerospace technology. Just look at the progress of aerospace between ~1900 and 1970: we went from just figuring out the airfoil wing to making airplanes that decided a world war (II, they had a good part in I too), to making supersonic planes, to making rockets and then landing men on the Moon. That's pretty remarkable progress for 70 years. After that, what have we done for the last 45 years? We've sent out some neat deep-space probes and rovers, we've had a few rickety space stations in LEO, and we've made passenger aviation much more ubiquitous and inexpensive, and (related) improved fuel economy. We haven't progressed remotely as much. We've made huge strides in computers and electronic networking though... We've also made some big strides in medicine. If we had kept up our attention and funding in the space program like we had in the 1960s, we would have a rotating space station and a Moon base by now.
>"Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I'm not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space
I will.
We cut back our funding for space exploration long before the Internet became publicly known. The Internet was conceived in the early /mid1970s IIRC, and only become commonly-used in the 1980s in academia. It only became known to the general public in 1989 thanks to Robert Tappan Morris and his worm, and only become generally used by regular people in the mid/late 1990s after the invention of the WWW and the HTML browser. By contrast, the funding for space exploration was cut in the early 1970s, before the Apollo missions were even done. There were a bunch more Moon missions planned; they never happened because Congress cut their funding and redirected what was left to the bloated and ill-conceived STS (Space Shuttle). Things went downhill from there. In a nutshell, once the US landed men on the Moon, the "space race" was considered done and won by the Americans, so the Soviets mostly gave up on such highly-ambitious goals, and both space programs instead turned to much more practical matters, namely coming up with ways of more cheaply launching spy satellites, navigation systems (GPS, Glonass), etc., instead of giant national-prestige projects that served no military use whatsoever (but instead advanced science and civilian technology tremendously). The US had given up on things like a real space station or a Moon base long before the Internet was something people had any serious interest in using.
Quite a change from the 40s and 50s and the transatlantic blur of experimental aircraft - X planes, VSTOL, supersonic, first jet airliner prototype in 1949, Concorde protoype in 1969. Nuclear power was meant to usher in an era of cheap, abundant, clean energy, and science had a pretty positive rep.
I've no doubt the effects of oil crisis and following recession put paid to an awful lot of NASA plans. As they'd proved they could do it, and did so first, I expect politicians saw less point in keep going back.
The arrival of market forces for everything with Reagan and Thatcher will have further limited, seeing plans for space stations and bases shelved and building small probes instead. This was the era of the artists impressions. Of things we'd never see.
Since then it's more about balance sheets and budgets if you want a large project. Military excepted.
It's like "well the others are going to cure cancer, fix the internet, make it so that machines can talk with us and make gold fall out of the sky".
If our understanding of fundamental physics is correct, there will never be an interstellar civilization of the sort that sci fi depicts. Only balkanized civilizations separated by many decades of travel. Within a solar system, no doubt interplanetary colonies will happen, but the conditions for life on other planets within our solar system are overwhelmingly harsh, difficult, and expensive.
Most of the work that needs to go into making either of those things happen will occur here on Earth. Although a Mars colony could help, if there was some economic imperative which could sustain and drive it.
as for physics - we don't have even standard unifying theory that would work in all situations, so there is some room to grow our knowledge. we observe a lot of powerful and strange stuff happening in cosmos, but these are natural things - matter seems to be doing couple of variations of same cycle - group by gravity till planet/star is born, exist for some time, explode/die slowly/collapse/go exotic. who can say what will happen when we literally take matter, energy and spacetime into our hands?
But before we will reach these situations, our society will change completely, probably many times. implants, prolonging life endlessly, going completely into digital existence and who knows what. why would inter-galaxy travel matter if we would exist in endless sea of some data banks?
Diversity in every way possible is in our Genes. Even within our own cultures, if it's possible for people to live a certain way you're highly likely to find at least some people living that way. Some of these ways of living seem pathalogical. Travelling people, isolationist survivalists, even homeless people but if civilization were to collapse, as it has many times in many places in the past, some of these people would be superbly adapted to survive it or even thrive.
For any given place, eventually catastrophe is almost inevitable. We are all the descendants of people who survived some catastrophe or other by moving out before it struck. All of us. In fact that's true of every surviving species on Earth. It's a strategy that works. Let's keep doing it.
One of my earliest memories was the challenger explosion. I've basically missed out on any of the truly revolutionary space accomplishments.
You can help make it happen. The Planetary society is actively lobbying Congress to increase funding for space research.
Sorry.
I guess it won't necessarily be spent for a handwavy "but it is progress", needs more realistic goals.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon! ...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
It's a form of in-joke/group which is very Reddit and is used to get upvotes because everyone loves being in with the cool kids.
But not everyone has read or watched every classic and knows every famous person of countries X speeches, hence why you attribute the source or even just the speaker, fictional or not.
Is it really that hard to Google the source?
Where the hell did they get this audience from? Is this hosted on a frat house with some academic invites?
There's a dude jokingly saying that burning man felt like mars with a lot of shit and no water, there's a guy plugging his comic book, there's a guy making a joke on how we should send Michael Cera to Mars, a girl complaining about Space X not hiring people from other countries, a girl asking to go on stage and give him a kiss, a guy that identified himself as a local idiot that I'm pretty sure is completely drunk, ....
There are some good questions too, but I just can't understand it.
Elon just went on stage and delivered a plan so ambitious you couldn't even imagine. I have thousands of questions, and astonished these people couldn't think of anything else.
Seriously this Q&A is incredibly odd.
People have to wait weeks in space to just get refueled?
Why not send 4-5 tankers (supposedly reusable) up first and then refuel almost instantly? That thing seems really low scale/budget.
To go any faster you'd need more tankers as well. I don't forsee the tanker having commercial value short-term, so this would still increase the cost. With two tankers though, you can just have a full tanker waiting in orbit which is the fastest possibility, so there is no need of extra boosters in that case.
I agree with the premise of multiple boosters though. I wonder if a spacecraft could be made that could do both commercial earth orbit satellite missions, and serve as a tanker. This could finance a larger number of tankers. I think you'd need a 3rd stage on top of the tanker in this case to get the satellite in position. [EDIT: I mean either carry the extra fuel, or carry a 3rd stage + satellite, not both at the same time.]
Just launch tankers and fill up tanks on Tiangong and then the space craft with passengers would just have one trip to the space station to fuel up and then go to Mars.
China is going to throw away the station anyway, so might as well give it (or lease it) to SpaceX for a good price in exchange for at-cost refueling for their own ambitions.
If you're going to Mars, your vessel has a reasonable crew habitat, so you don't need Tiangong I for that.
Tiangong I is more payload than spaceship. Its tanks can only hold about 1000kg of propellant. Mr. Musk's proposed transfer stage has a propellant budget that's nearly 2,000,000kg.
Having to maintain compatibility with it may be hard (comms, docking, etc). There might be some hardware you could loot off it, but it's not worth flying a mission just for that, and launch windows mean visiting on a trip somewhere else would be prohibitively expensive.
There might be practical considerations, too, like if someone is on the ship for a couple days and then realizes that spending months on a ship or living on Mars is just not for them, they can get transferred to the next convenient ferry back to the surface.
We're probably overthinking this, though; what order the passengers, fuel, and cargo load is a pretty minor detail that could easily be revised when the plan is closer to completion.
Kinda like the "heart of gold" -- it tickles Elon.
If I chair a board meeting wearing a clown nose, I can't complain when the members pull out squirt guns.
But how many people do you know ACTUALLY working in Aerospace tech? For better or worse, that constituency is what today probably makes up a good chunk of people caring about this space, which just goes to show how little it is compared to what it probably SHOULD be.
I had some of the same reaction when I went to a lecture at NYU Law on interplanetary legal issues. There was the same mix of people with genuinely interesting and thoughtful questions, and people who I'm pretty sure did not know what Apollo was.
This kind of outreach is one of the many things to admire about Elon's work. Yes, he's kinda dorky and often touts timelines that are woefully inaccurate, but boy, does he get people fired up!
Just a pretty clear example: Yes, the audience there had some pretty awful questions, but think about the debate that the SpaceX telecast alone helped spur on HN!!! Yes, a lot of that audience was pretty unhelpful, but I think that especially by doing things like this, Elon is helping the proportion of those people diminish significantly.
A lot.
This is pretty standard work for many schools which offer a mix of Computer Science and Electronics. Alumni finish their degree and go into Aerospace.
If you ignore the Silicon Valley area which is dominated by trendy web startups, there is a lot of work in old school aircraft/aerospace/military/defence companies and contracts.
I could argue that there are actually more [decent and stable] jobs in Aerospace than in web startups.
I guess the reason for inviting non-technical press (and being so patient with their silly questions) is to get access to a non-technical audience. Like he said, part of the challenge is to get more people to want to go to Mars (maybe not personally, but as a species), so appealing to people of all sorts, not just people to who read science & engineering reporting, would contribute to that. My best guess, but still, wow, at those questions.
The announcement was held at the "International Astronautical Congress". "The IAC is attended by the agency heads and senior executives of the world's space agencies." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Astronautical_Co...
Source: Me, I was there.
Lesson learned: if you're running a big event with Q&A, always always either restrict it to qualified people or vet the questions before they're asked.
Don't allow a general audience to just form a line in front of a microphone.
--
If you're an organizer hosting Elon Musk, the heads of the major national space agencies, and the leadership of all major aerospace companies, you don't want to give some assclown 60 seconds of microphone time to ask whether there will be enough Portapotties on Mars.
--
Thought experiment: I'm sure that this video will get over 1m views on Youtube. 1m * 60s = about two years of people's time
It was one of the dumbest things I've heard in a while. Do these people not realise that these comments will go down in history. Also the "like, I was, like, thinking, like" valley girl talk was very odd (I'm from the UK) to hear as I didn't think people, like, talked like that in real life.
Thankfully, as SpaceX matures and become mainstream, the weirdo element gets diluted. The same way the early web was little more than tribute pages to baby boomer rockstars and endless pages and commentary about the illuminati and the new world order.
He says mid-way through he'd gloss over detail and leave technical questions until the end, and what did we get..?
I feel so bad for the guy in that regard.
Let's hope the seed is planted - that's all that Musk has fundamentally wanted anyway.
Not your fault, they didn't show him on the stream.
It actually made me realize that I may not want to go with others if the average person is like that.
I was actually there in the audience. Trust me, all the experts in the room, from all over the aerospace industry, were very irritated too. Many folks walked out of the room when people started asking silly questions.
Same place that made a reality show from the election of one of the most powerful political positions on the planet.
The 21st century.
It's comedy night at the time traveller's agency.
However, Musk knows that in order for his vision to succeed, he needs support and engagement from more than just rocket scientists. He needs the engagement of the kind of people who ask these sorts of questions. He needs the interest of people who see something (of self interest) to gain from being associated with this project.
I'm really glad that Musk did a good job of taking some of the lower brow questions and turning them into informative and interesting answers.
Downvoters, tell me why I'm wrong?
The earth isn't the problem - The problem is the human brain. We aren't genetically capable of processing the world we have built.
Expect there to be Trump IV vs Clinton IV 2117 hosted live on Mars if we haven't made significant improvements in human engineering.
Think about it this way. What if there was an uninhabited island out in the Pacific that was hard to get to. What makes it worth trying to get to? There isn't anything any more special there than here. In fact from all we've seen so far it's much less special. Same goes for Mars.
What is the value in being "multi-planetary?" I mean the idea that this is a hedge against some existential threat to humanity is silly. Mars is more hostile to human life TODAY than earth would be after a massive ELE asteroid - and the likelihood of an ELE asteroid is actually higher for Mars as it does not have a stable barrier atmosphere as good as Earth's - meteorites are more frequent as a result.
So best case scenario is that we have a group of people who put 75% of their time into just surviving because there is no atmosphere or biome to support them. On top of that these people have the same biological makeup - including cognitive limits, biases etc...as the rest of us on earth so even if they sorted everything out, tribalism and the rest of our hardwired heuristics would just make them behave like the rest of us.
The better approach is to start engineering our faults out using data to make us better, more resilient processors of information and discovery. Improve humanity and everything is easier.
The technical challenges on Mars will probably only compound the political problems. Double plus fun.
The first people who landed on the Galapagos islands were also pretty excited about it. Once they realized that there is no fresh water there, they got the hell out.
Ideally, before the cold death of the universe, I want to transition my body into a higher dimensional body. So I'm entirely in support of your argument.
However, digitizing our brains, or any other transition away from the status quo right now is not only not currently possible, it is currently unimaginable. There have been no prototypes, no significant research, not even any real theories on how to accomplish such a task. Even repairing/repurposing parts of our current bodies is a giant challenge. Hell, we can't even appropriately map our biology or understand how they actually work.
Transitioning away from biology will take time. However, until that day, we need to stay alive and we need more resources. Becoming multi-planetary is just one "safe"(predictable) step towards the future you would prefer.
I know that's what I'm doing.
At a "smaller" scale,
- Previously, our rivers have dried, and our crops turned to dust.
- Our planet will eventually run out of resources.
- Our solar system will eventually get consumed by the sun.
- Our galaxy will eventually shrink into its central singularity.
Whenever we come across a resource time bomb, the final option has always been and will always been to migrate away. The only question has been, "where should we go?".
But aren't there potentially:
- infinite parallel universes?
- infinite higher dimensions?
- infinite recursive simulations?
However, infinite sounds like a lot, and maybe there are only a finite number of each of the above, but I don't think it'll matter. We can't keep beating time. Eventually the entropy time bomb will go off before we are able to solve its riddle. The only thing I want, is that before that day comes, I want to have beaten it a few times. Shown entropy who its master is. Because on that day, I want to be happy for my long time advisory and proud to have been the master of time, even if the student finally surpassed the master and has gotten its long deserved win.
That's why I brought up the accelerating rate of expansion of space ... everything will be moving away from us so quickly that eventually we'll run out of places to migrate to.
There is no point in arguing which one is easier. Feasibility and difficulty shouldn't be reasons for discarding long term efforts. Many current ideas were seen as impossible or extremely difficult.
Lets focus on that, since without those factors a billion years will just find the raccoons or squid that replaced us facing the same problem.
We'll be fine.
Owning one stock that has previously grown at 10% yoy is the same as owning ten stocks which have previously grown at 10% yoy right?
The cost of buying a stock is generally same between assets (within one or two stdv). Using your example it's crazy expensive just to "buy the stock." So its not really an option.
So, the advantage is that you build a completely separate civilization that is relatively immune to all these problems.
I would imagine that, after reaching the point of self-support, Mars inhabitants would focus more on securing their own existence, such as building underground.
Ditto for saying we haven't seen anything special out there, considering that we've barely even started looking (and every time someone proposes looking, a whole bunch of boring people show up to go, "why bother?").
A massive ELE asteroid is capable of doing enough traumatic damage to civilizations on Earth to entirely reset hundreds of years of technological development on this planet. Having another technologically-advanced civilization on another world just makes sense from a species survival perspective. And an ELE asteroid isn't even the most plausible traumatic human disaster we can imagine on Earth; war, politics, disease are all far more plausible.
It seems you also need a reminder that so much of the technological advancements we're enjoying now were developed, at least in some part, by a country that started out as an unexplored frontier (and, I'm sure there were people in 1450 that would have insisted Spain solve its own problems first before sending ships out to find a new route around the world). We have no way of predicting what kind of technology (environmental? energy?) or politics will be developed on a new world so isolated from Earth and populated by, presumably, many of the best and brightest from Earth.
Recontextualizing 21st century issues is key to us actually solving them, but that means we do in fact need to do things which has emotional impact on large populations. The moon-landings captured the imagination of, conservatively, half the planet, if only briefly. Mars-landings are likely to be similar. And an ongoing Martian colonization would be another one.
A Martian colonization effort is kind of interesting in this regard: because once you send enough people (and ideally, bring enough of them back as well) then 6 degrees of separation starts to take hold if they're distributed within the population. Start building up the quorum of people who've been, have gone, are there now and suddenly that context is leaking back into your general population. People know people who know a returned Martian colonizer. Projects and processes are compared to "this works on Mars, it'll work here" in the same way that everyone on this site who doesn't work at Google probably has said something like "well Google do ...".
One of his points is the effect that space exploration has on kids. It excites them. It makes them want to be explorers too. Kids are full of imagination, they hear about people on another world and they imagine themselves doing it too. It happened with the moon landings, and it inspired kids to become scientists and technologists and to follow their own paths to exploration.
edit: despite being born too late to be mesmerized by the moon landings in real-time, I was one of those kids. I started playing with computers and writing my first programs when I was 8. I watched a lot of Star Trek and James Doohan's Scotty was my favorite character. There was a picture of Neil Armstrong on my wall. I got "Odyssey" magazines and had a book that artistically imagined what life might be like elsewhere in the solar system that I read until, literally, the cover fell off. I had an audio cassette that took you on a wild ride through the solar system.
The hope of exploring space someday is what drew me into technology.
So many years later, and I only use that technology to have arguments with other people over whether exploration is "worth it" at all. How's that for some weltschmerz?
We're really not close to being a "multiplanetary species", and the major bottlenecks have nothing to do with the rockets to get us out there. A lot of smart people are aware of just how much trouble our species is in over the next century or so, and there's an element of understandable misery and panic. That really is no excuse however for cheering and weeping with joy when the guy selling the rockets points to the stars and says, "Humanity's future!"
Why not? Just because he's selling something doesn't mean his actions aren't useful.
They're not? If getting stuff from Earth's surface to low earth orbit and beyond weren't prohibitively expensive, we'd be doing a lot more of it.
Sure, there are many other technical (and some social and political) challenges inherent in sending people to Mars but if we don't solve the launch cost problem it'll be difficult to make rapid progress on the other problems that would suddenly become more pressing if launch costs weren't an issue.
Would it be immune to accelerated climate change on Earth?
availability of land isnt the only factor here.
(i dont actually know the answer to these questions, and obviously it would likely depend on the details of this water habitat)
http://www.space.com/18504-mars-rover-curiosity-astronaut-ra...
The Moon, on the other hand, is baldly exposed:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/0...
In the distant future, Mars may not necessarily afford protection either.
It's going to be sad if the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction some day applies within a multi-planetary context.
Most likely this would take the form of national territories being established on Mars by existing nuclear powers, the weapons either being imported or fabricated on-site.
Of course, the wierder scenario is one where advancements in propulsion technology allow for faster and cheaper delivery of payloads to Mars, resulting in some sort of Earth-to-Mars nuclear strike capability. Transit may remain quite latent, but it could still do the job. Imagine having weeks or months to contemplate an incoming nuclear attack.
I don't think that follows. The forces that exert a stranglehold on terrestrial freedom-seekers will exert 10x the grip on territories where the resources required to contain dissidence are greater than terrestrially. If they won't let people run around in the Ozarks with machine guns, they sure won't let them on spacecraft in a fragile space colony.
The simple fact that an extraterrestrial colony requires more resources than a terrestrial one implies there will be limited freedom there. At least until the planet is somehow liberated from excessive control. But I don't see how that will happen until thousands of planets are available to the point that Authority can abandon a planet...
...or until a "Space-Columbus" is able to colonize another planet without the control of a terrestrial force or until another planet is able to liberate itself from Earthlings. That will take a while, but I guess you have to start somewhere and maybe SpaceX is it. :)
Persecution is certainly one motivator, but hardly the only one. Some people are driven to explore, some are religious nuts looking for whatever they look for, some just hate civilization or people or their family or whatever, some can't explain their motives.
Civilization isn't for everyone.
It is. If you are yet not convinced, you might want to take a look at how many species go extinct every day.
There are a many threats to human existence beyond human behavior and preparing for them is a good move forward.
Also, show me the species on other planets. Far as we know there aren't any and none of the planets seem to be habitable. Stop living in fantasy land.
Exactly, lets go there and see for ourselves.
You surely don't mean that no other planets could be used to sustain life with technological assistance?
Mars has water, accessible nitrogen (HNO3), carbon (CO2), hydrogen (H2O), oxygen (all of the above)... technologically assisted humans could absolutely inhabit mars.
Most technologies developed for these missions will be reused or new ones will built on top of them.
We would be going to a less inhabitable place, while taking all the problems of mankind with us. I must echo the grandparent post: Earth is not the problem -- we are.
For all our accomplishments, the human species is one unavoidable planet-scale disaster away from total extinction. We know this class of disaster has happened in Earth's past, and we know we lack the capability to stop it. Colonizing Mars gives the species that much more chance to extend its survival past the terrestrial-impact threshold.
There are myriad other ways we could wipe ourselves out that myriad people are working on. None of them matter if something kills Earth's biosphere (much like this project doesn't matter if something like war kills us off before we succeed). They aren't mutually exclusive.
Going to Mars fixes none of these problems however and wastes a lot of energy in the process.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/508906/mars-astronauts-li...
It'll just be wealthy people for a long time. Wealth is strongly correlated with intelligence, peace, and other desirable factors. Perhaps the social baseline will be a lot higher. This is hard to predict given that we don't really know what the psychological and epigenetic effects of going to mars will be.
Please note that this isn't an argument against going to Mars now. There's a lot we can learn by building an outpost on Mars that is supported heavily by Earth, including how to build a self-supporting Mars colony. I'm just asking what the current state-of-the-art opinion is on the challenges of building a self-supporting Mars colony.
Unless we build a battery/solar panel factory there is no way solar is going to cut it.
2% of a very low pressure may not seem like much but in total that's about half a trillion tonnes, or half a million cubic kilometers of Nitrogen. It'll be a very long time before that resource is depleted. Additionally, Mars has nitrates, which can be mined and exploited.
The Q&A was the worst Q&A I have ever seen. Truly awful. I usually am a pretty calm person but watching that made my blood boil. This venture could well be one of the most important things to happen to humanity, and those were the questions that people asked. The questions were awful at all levels. Featured self promotion, ignorance and plain stupidity.
I just needed to get this out there. Seriously, what the actual f.
Sorry, please? That is the best question you can come up with? I stopped watching after this.
> Send Michael Sera to mars because we don't want him back >> Elon talks about the importance of offering return trips
> Where do we put the shit on mars with no water >> Elon talks about how the critical shortage is power, not water.
> Are you thinking about interstellar travel >> Creating a colony on mars creates the incentives to spur us to create the dramatic improvements in space travel that will one day give rise to interplanetary travel
While I understand the frustration, including the general public in this discussion in critical to build the support and good will needed for this project to succeed. We need more people to be willing to address questions like this.
The only time I felt bad for Musk was when that girl asked him if she could take him upstairs and give him a kiss. He mumbled something like "I don't have that here" and moved on.
Lot's of people from outside of the industry went to the event, just to see this talk.
The rocket looks very large and they mention 120 million newtons takeoff thrust so the weight is about 10 million kg, 3 times Saturn V size.
The first stage lands back on launch stool, the tanker stage is put on top of it and it launches again. This implies a relatively fast turnaround.
Both the second stage and the tanker seem to have complete heat shields and stub wings and ability to re-enter either Mars or Earth.
So all parts
1) big
2) landable and
3) short turnaround time
I don't understand the 100 000 km/h which is 30 km/s speed for the Mars cruise. Would be really hard to achieve with chemical propulsion. With 4 km/s exhaust velocity and delta vee of say 20 km/s you get a required mass ratio of e^(20/4) which is 150. And they lug the upper stage engines all the way, and there's heatshield and wings. Impossible.
Also the 200 kW electrical power advertised is puny for electrical propulsion. With an ISP of 1000 (exhaust 10 km/s) you get an 20 Newtons of thrust [correction from 200N], which is nothing for their ship size. If they only have ten tons of mass, then it takes 200 days to accelerate to full speed.
Typically you might need 10 to 20 km/s speed for Mars.
Their plan does not compute for me.
EDIT: So it can work if they only go for 10 km/s.
I am very curious what the selected family of orbits is, and even more importantly how long & how much life support for the large passenger number.
There's not much leeway, it's going to be something close to a Hohmann transfer, with the aphelion ahead of and above Mars to get to a hyperbolic capture orbit with the periareion deep in the atmosphere for (almost) direct re-entry.
This kind of orbits can be solved for arbitrary departure date and time of flight using a Lambert's problem solver and numerical optimization. Not a particularly difficult problem by modern standards.
Pure Hohmann transfer to another planet will result in inevitable collision due to relative velocity, but it's useful for lower bound estimates.
Another alternative for recurring Mars intercept is is the "Aldrin cycler" (after Buzz Aldrin) which is a free return trajectory but that is difficult when the goal is to land and take off again.
There are lots of possibilities for lower energy transfers but most of them are out of question when life support is required for humans on board.
A pure ion drive for all the equipment even if this means it takes 4x as long to get there, then a 'small' capsule back and forth for people.
Basically you need at least 10 kW per Newton.
The other option, is to have a pure transit vehicle from earth orbit to mars orbit and then a 3rd vehicle to land with. This, would work really well if we wanted to really colonize mars. But, if your only sending say 10 people the R&D is not worth the fuel savings.
PS: Let's say it's a 20,000 lbs craft or ~1/10th of the shuttle and your getting ~8.8 N or 1 lbs of thrust for 120 days. That's 9.8 m/s / 20,000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 120 = 5k m/s. If you already need the panels while in mars orbit, that seems like a no brainier. Finally, If that's 200kw in mars orbit then the numbers seem even more reasonable as that's 460 kw near earth and the extra 260kw ~= 26 newtons which could add ~5km/s to a 60,000 lb spacecraft.
Maybe for course corrections where you need to fine tune the orbit a couple of mm/s here and there?
For unmanned missions it does make good sense as the mass doesn't grow so strongly if the trip time gets longer.
Thinking about that I think I figured it out. The earth is going 30 km/sec around the sun, so that's probably where the 30 km/sec comes from. 30 km/sec is well past single stage to orbit and they would not need a booster if they could get into that range.
Mars is doing 50km/sec around the sun, but you can cheat in a few places as your earth orbit can add ~8km /sec from orbiting around earth. That's 50 - 30 - 8 ~= 12km/s plus delta V get out of suns and earths gravity well. But you can also play with orbital mechanics to save some energy and you can also subtract the orbital velocity around mars.
Anyway, I am not sure how much delta V you need, but it's well under 30km/sec.
PS: Video had refueling in what looked like LEO, but if your in a higher orbit the craft needs less fuel to get to Mars from that orbit.
With traditional rockets you can accelerate, get a gravity assist boost and save enough fuel to slow down quickly when you are at the orbital insertion point.
For example, Mars Science Laboratory did the same, and it didn't need to spend fuel trying to enter orbit.
http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/timeline/approach/
The closing velocity of spacecraft and Mars is nowhere near 25 km/s.
As another example, Apollo did a direct entry to Earth as well.
Even when entering orbit, you can sometimes use aerobraking or aerocapture, though it's either limited in delta vee or dangerous if you go lower.
They massively oversize the second stage and launch it almost empty, so it can just do the 5 km/s or whatever is needed for orbit. Then they launch multiple tankers to refuel it.
They don't need lots of engines on the second stage because it's launched light.
So it's pure chemical propulsion.
But still with only 4 km/s exhaust velocity, no matter how you slice it, the mass ratios required from a single stage get impossible, ie even if the rocket tanks and engines didn't have any mass, payload sets an upper limit to the mass ratio.
EDIT: So looks like it has 10 km/s delta vee. Not 30.
Most of it, you would get for free, since the ship is launched from the Earth, which is already moving at ~30 km/s. The delta-v cost is much less then that.
Imagine being colonists on Mars without the ability to be totally self-sustaining without technology and supplies from Earth and nuclear war breaks out. It's going to be a long time before any Mars colony can survive on its own.
Mars escape velocity is ~5 km/s compared to 11 km/s for Earth, so right off the bat it takes half as much delta-v to get off Mars. The numbers get even more attractive when you consider that Mars's atmosphere is so thin you can use vacuum-optimized engines on the surface.
It's a near-certainty that the second stage of ITS will be able to launch fully fueled from the Martian surface and return to Earth orbit, and possibly Earth's surface, without any refueling on the way.
And it's much easier and cheaper just to have underground bunkers than to bring a few people back from Mars on a rocket right after some disaster.
If a small fraction of civilization survived a global disaster in bunkers, it's very possible they would regress during the aftermath and never achieve a global society like ours again.
A self sustaining civilization on Mars guarantees not just our survival in the Darwin sense, but our continued technological advancement and expansion.
As far as war breaking out, we're not going to make it to Mars in our current state. I don't think Mars is viable until we enter a post scarcity world. I find it unlikely we can even attempt it if we're still in a money based economy.
I highly recommend The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's one of the most believable and well thought out sci-fi novel about what populating Mars would be like conceptually.
Q: Who should be the first humans on Mars? Q: Who should be the first humans on Mars?
A: The first journeys will be very dangerous, the risk of fatalities will be high. Likely no children - must be prepared to die. A: The first journeys will be very dangerous, the risk of fatalities will be high. Likely no children - must be prepared to die.
Why? Moving a few thousand humans to mars really isn't that expensive, in money or energy.
I agree, and I would even say this is the main challenge of the project long term - whether we have the stomach for seeing hundreds of people blow up on the launch pad, suffocating in interplanetary space, or dying from exposure on Mars when a hab block fails (and all of that possibly repeatedly). For some reason we don't have problem sending millions of people to their deaths where they don't happen publicly, but that's where we are right now.
You have to weigh these risks (and PR impacts) against the severe drawbacks of civilization-wide stagnation, of which a potential mass extinction event on Earth is just one example.
Personally, I would choose to go even if there was a 50% chance of blowing up on the launchpad.
> The first colonists will most likely not come back.
If they survive for a few years, there will be return opportunities. There is no downside to offering people a ride on returning transports. I would say establishing a reasonable transfer rate between Mars and Earth is vital to the program on several levels. Update: just made it through the QA and Musk seems to agree with me, he says having the option of going back is vital, and they'll be offering free return trips on their transports.
> I don't think Mars is viable until we enter a post scarcity world
That amounts to never. As a transhumanist and futurist myself, I have grown far less optimistic about the political will to even work towards such a state in recent years. People are violently opposed to switching away from capitalism, for many irrational and even some rational reasons. I allege that technologically speaking the industrial nations of the world could switch to a post-scarcity scenario for the everyday needs of citizens pretty much right away if they wanted to.
There is also no compelling reason in my mind why colonizing another planet is something we just can't do using our current means. Some people say there is not enough money to do it, but in reality money is a malleable entity, and we're not batting an eyelash at wasting literally trillions on it. But for some reason investing mere billions into technologically progressive ideas suddenly brings up fundamental questions about the scalability of our economy?
Lastly, I also believe starting self-sustaining colonies elsewhere might be the only way of rebooting into a post-scarcity system. Not saying that's what will happen, but at least there is a chance.
Do you really mean that? In the real world, knowing there's a 50/50 chance your life would end, you would take that risk for the chance to be a frontier colonist on Mars?
There are not a lot of things I would take such risks for, but this is definitely one. And don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of life extension and anti-aging research, and an atheist and a transhumanist to boot, so it's not like I enjoy the prospect of staring down the barrel of death. But looking at the impact my life is having right now, and the potential impact I could have by being a frontier colonist, that's not even a comparison.
I'd do it with a 1/4 survival chance, and I'm far from suicidal. Some things are worth more than my life. Cynically, just the personal adventure would be enough for me to risk my life to land on Mars.
"The spaceship is coming back anyway, you can get on if you want. Free"
That's a problem that really just takes care of itself.
The same thing that would have happened to anyone on the moon if they had lander failure, or to anyone on the ISS if they have catastrophic failure.
For that matter, the same thing that would have happened to the First Fleet if they had landed on Australia and been slaughtered in 10 minutes.
Of course it's dangerous. Of course there is a real risk you won't come back. That's not a reason to not go, and each individual can make that choice on their own.
There are scattered in somewhat normal questions... but not by anyone I would consider qualified to even be asking questions.
I wonder what kind of people accompanied Columbus and other explorers on their ships. If you also noticed there was one woman questioner, who wanted to kiss Elon Musk. Perhaps that's the kind who would take such risks, to be the first crew. So I didn't mind those questions so much. By and large the crowd was very excited - thunderous applause several times.
http://engineersf.com/12-reasons-spacex-wont-fly-a-manned-mi...
There's a ton of cool problems lurking around the corner. I hope humanity backs the public part of this public-private partnership.
1. Cargo Capacity — Scaling is Hard.
2. Proper Maintenance — Accessibility is Important
3. MTBF Expectations are too high.
4. Jet Fuel is Corrosive and Methalox engines are a tough design proposition.
5. Cosmic Radiation — Impedes human interoperability.
6. Solar Panels —Mars Dust Storms impede sunlight.
7. Living Module — 7 month duration for a living module.
8. Microbial Realities — We rely on microbes to live.
9. Parachute Design — Size vs. Thrust vs. Jettisoning Fuel
10. Electronic Protection — Shielding is Resource/Weight Intensive.
11. Eye Sight — Your ability to see diminishes in space and we don’t quite know how this works fully. (This one is huge)
12. Muscle Loss- you lose muscle mass as you stay longer in space.
To give some context around how difficult it is to build mega engineering projects in the hey day of innovation, just think about Steel. There's over 3K different types of steel and 70%+ were invented in the last 20 years.
Timing, sequence, funding, and focus are going to be such a huge part of this.
5,8,11,12 are really tough. I think the other ones are solvable in some way right now, but will take some configuration/tinkering/experimentation for sure. Plenty of engineers are motivated to work on this kind of thing though, so that's a good signal.
The bigger concern I have is for children that are born on Mars -- if you want to have a self-sustaining population there, you're going to be raising children there, and physical growth in a low-g environment isn't something we can test in the timeframe Musk has in mind.
Also, Musk specifically mentioned that they weren't planning to use parachutes with this architecture, so you can scratch #9.
We went to the moon. That was not an easy thing to do. We developed nuclear weapons, which was certainly more difficult than establishing a colony in the Gobi desert.
See the excerpt of the JFK moon speech from above. "we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
I'm for exploration and all that but there's a pretty good point. Figuring out how to make the desert habitable on this planet is a pretty good test run for the Real Deal.
Survival of our species. Protection from an extinction event on Earth. Stepping stone to further expansion (interstellar).
EDIT: or moon surface
It's a lot harder to build a self-sustaining colony on the moon than on Mars. Mars is rich in carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. The moon is not.
There's no reason for a self-sufficient (nuclear?) underground or underwater habitat to notice global firestorms or impact winters. They would notice a direct hit, but you can hedge against that by building them in multiples around the globe.
The amount of talent and power this guy has while being so humble is just very rare. As soon as I can afford a Tesla I will definitely buy one, not only because it's a great car, but even more to support these kind of people.
(1 hour 31 minutes)
FTR: this is Elon Musk's show and I don't trust his ability to keep his pet project from turning into a corporate dystopia.
Edited to add: Guys, I'm not against Mars exploration and colonization at scale -- I just want us to put our best foot forward. That means not rushing the process, and doing it in a democratic and non-chaotic manner.
And I also think if colonisation ever was big enough to absorb a significant (i.e. 5%+) portion of Earth gross product (i.e. the sum of GDPs) then it could also improve life on Earth by improving the effective ROI of the capital deployed elsewhere.
Which is a long way of saying that I may not be one of them, but I sure as hell will feel sorry for them.
I believe Elon said it would take 40-100 years for the population to reach that point, and he is saying that there will be a return mechanism, and a probably an extreme labour shortage which favours a strong bargaining position for both the entrees and the Mars local population. Ideally I'd like to see the return ticket + life support until the next return flight provided as part of the entrance fee to minimise risk, but there is still the problem of enforcing the contract.
[EDIT: I don't consider this a "fair" argument so I left it out, but as an aside, if minimising pain is your goal then mass sterilisation is the optimal strategy IMO -- there is no reason to continue the human race which will certainly produce millions of people in pain -- and if you have another goal which requires human existence to fulfil, then decreasing our extinction probability should be a huge priority]
We accept that in Syria already, and the potential upside's a lot bigger for Mars (survival of the species if Earth gets clobbered).
According to Musk, whoever pays.
> Who rules?
Not to be flippant, but who cares? The worst case scenario is that we repeat British colonialism and the martians overthrow the despotic earth government in a few generations. Same as always, the colony is too far away for the motherland to effectively maintain control. The important thing is getting humans to Mars; all the short-term stuff is important, but it's just small beans in the long run.
> Are we going to Terraform Mars?
Musk clearly wants to. It is not clear how feasible this is with current tech.
So Mars is going to be a colony of the developed world elite.
> Who cares
A million people generate is not short term or small scale. Property rights, criminal law and all of these other things that make civilization civilization will need to be hashed before we get out there.
> Musk clearly wants to
This is pristine, unspoiled nature we're talking about. There are immense ecological concerns here that aren't simply mitigated by Musk throwing cash at the problem.
Sounds awesome! Decreases the chances of them being politically abused.
> will need to be hashed before we get out there.
They probably will be for the most part, but why do you say "need" to? Should we screw around here on earth until we figure out some utopian system that's going to make everyone happy (good luck), or should we accept that it's OK to be adaptive and figure some things out as we go?
> This is pristine, unspoiled nature we're talking about.
That's one way of putting it. Another is "lifeless, barren, frozen, useless desert".
Isolation and distance do terrible things even to supposedly well educated people. I wouldn't count on people to not drop straight into barbarity after prolonged exposure to the truly alien environment on Mars.
> Why do you say "need" to?
Because the first time someone murders another person in a tent city of a million people with no air, you want to have some way of prosecuting and punishing that doesn't involve sectarian violence and lynching.
You vastly underestimate the social aspect of this endeavor.
> lifeless, barren, frozen, useless desert
I'm impressed: in this short internet exchange, we have pretty much rehashed the entirety of the conflict Kim Stanley Robinson sees playing out on Mars.
Musk has basically stated that he has no interest in being involved at that end. He has said SpaceX is making the transport, it's other peoples' job to figure out what to do what we get there. He likens this to building a railroad into a new frontier. California was barely populated when the Union Pacific was built, and yet it was not the railway's job to govern the colonies that popped up alongside it.
Now it'll obviously be more nuanced than that, but if there is a viable sustained transportation strategy to Mars, you can bet a lot of people
I don't think you get to control all transport to an isolated colony and disclaim all responsibility for the social cohesion of said colony.
BTW, I haven't read these particular books, and perhaps they are different from other KSR stuff that I've seen, but at this point I would honestly take pretty much anything over what he would consider an ideal or even a good society. It kinda puzzles me why people who value things like caution, leasure, and social cohesion above actual progress so insist on calling themselves 'progressives' -- they certainly have a right to their opinions, but couldn't they have picked a term that was less of a misnomer?
But I'm unsure about the morality of it. I think the drive to expand and discover new things is perhaps a direct cause of the deeper problems we have on Earth. Would humanity be better off just becoming a sustainable population of monks? Or are we morally equivalent to a virus, reduced to survival of the fittest and always seeking out the next host to reap?
But even if we go farm out every other planet and make it barren and even if we mined every ounce of every other planet in our galaxy... if we're the only life in the area, or the only life in the universe, it doesn't matter one bit. We could blow up every single other planet and it wouldn't hurt us at all, because we can't live there.
So the only thing that makes sense is to keep living like we are the only life in the universe, all the while trying to figure out if that's true or not. Mars isn't alive. Venus isn't alive. The moon isn't alive. It's not "reaping" a "host" any more than me painting the walls of my house is. It doesn't make one lick of difference. There's nothing immoral about spreading to other lifeless planets.
uh...we aren't.
And if you only mean conscious life, (1) I'm not sure why that is a special consideration, but I am familiar with the discussions around this point; (2) it is more than possible that certain animals, like other primates, dolphins, whales, etc., have some degree of conscious experience, and it is also more than possible that we won't find anything more obvious than that on another planet.
Edit: Ah, I see. You were saying there is no life in space. I was thinking more along the lines of, "what about all the environmental damage we will do in order to travel to outer space." I just didn't realize that I should have included that concern in my initial comment, since for some reason I thought it would be obvious.
Sure we may cause environmental damage to get there, but I think that is far outweighed by the benefit of being a multi-planet species.
But we are in such a critical moment right now in terms of our ability to really destroy the ecology we depend on. It's like there a small fire started in the bathroom and some of us have chosen this moment to start planning a new vacation home.
For Elon Musk personally, he's so involved in the shift away from carbon through his work at Tesla that it feels like it balances out. He's a leader in fighting the fire and also spending half of his time on the new house. But in general I can't really commend the aerospace engineers working on problems like this when we are so close to being able to fix so many age old problems on Earth.
This is such a critical couple of decades for Earth technology.
It would be great to avoid, but moving people out of coastal cities certainly has a precedence, and there's plenty of land in Kansas, the Taiga, etc. Life would be tougher than today, but it's not an existential thread.
If waves lap up against my place in Queens, I'm not going to start killing my neighbors. I'm going to move to a Minnesota with better weather.
Would the Minnesotans be happy with that?
Why not both? It's not too hard to see how in the long-term, Tesla and Solarcity's progress are relevant to the needs of living on Mars as well (ground vehicle propulsion, electric power generation and storage...)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/780275236922994688Though I think there is talk of moving all Falcon to the Raptors eventually.
Because that would decrease the redundancy, right? With Falcon-9 you would lose 2/9 of thrust if you turn off the mirrored engine in the best case. In a Falcon-3 scenario, you would lose at least 1/3 for middle engine failure or 2/3 for a side engine failure.
The numbers I could find said minimum thrust of Merlin is 360 kN. The stat sheet for Raptor showed minimum thrust of 20%, which works out to 610 kN. So with a single engine at minimum thrust, they'd need to either come in even harder than the Falcon 9 currently does, or find a new method of propulsive landing.
More relevant to your question, a 3 engine configuration doesn't allow firing a single engine because there'd be no middle engine like the Falcon 9 has. You'd need at least 4 to have symmetry and a centre engine.
Musk said they're already building more than 500 Merlins per year, so they are not at all worried about being able to build Raptors fast enough.
To be honest I think it's a really bad fit to have these kind of questions during such an event; but hey, because of them I'm pretty sure this is all really honest and not at all orchestrated... Which is good, I suppose.
The lower the pressure, the safer the structure, so one imagines you could have a colony where many of the workers from these three population groups, nature taking its course and we end up with legitimate Martians. People who could live in cheap structures or deep canyons with no suits for generations before the rest of us.
As far as ITAR is concerned there are no friendly nations (there are a few that have reduced paperwork needs, but still fall under ITAR).
Gravity in Mars is 3.7 m/s², compared to 9.8 m/s². In a way, it's convenient since it would take less effort to reach Martian escape velocity.
Mars does not have a magnetosphere, and therefore little protection from radiation. The technology to induce a planetary magnetosphere does not exist. If Mars does form an atmosphere, it can be lost to space during increased solar activity.
What I think is that our best chance is to send robots to prepare an habitat for the first manned visits.
We would absolutely need to start designing and testing prototype colonies on Earth first. Probably in old mineshafts. The only similar experiment I can remember is the two attempts at Biodome, and they were both failures. There is a lot we don't know about making a self sustaining sealed habitat.
and in a totalitarian sort of way, which would be better for the human race, getting off this rock or having the world upgrade from an iphone 11 to an iphone 12?
It would also imply a world economy that could easily support the development of such a colony. It's not an either/or.
The biggest difference is the emphasis on reusable craft.
I'll post something more in depth once I watch the whole video (or some rocket-head will beat me to it).
Mars Direct did not do any refiling in orbit, but rather does multible direct launches. That allows them to use smaller rockets. Zubrin worked under the assumption that the best he could get was a modified version of Shuttle (pretty similar to SLS actually).
Mars Direct assumed a rocket with a normal upper stage that then deployed its payload to mars.SpaceX makes the spaceship itself the 2nd stage.
Mars direct leaves large the hab behind and does a direct fly back with the MAV. In the SpaceX plan you fly back with the hole ship, this gives you the same comforts in both directions.
Mars Direct assumes continually new HABs, MAVs and rockets to be built to keep up the exploration or base building. Its a very good plan if you have a space agency that has a budget every years and wants to continue doing what they are doing.
The SpaceX plan want to massively decrease price and thus makes more extrem choices such as re-usability to not waste anything.
Basically, SpaceX makes a spacetruck that can transport a lot for cheap. Mars Direct aims to deliver what you need for long exploration in the simplest way.
Both are great plans.
Mars Direct is all about the cheapest, simplest way for a state-sponsored space agency to send 4 people at a time to Mars, with a slow build up towards permanent settlement via increasingly concurrent missions.
SpaceX is trying to start a permanent settlement within the first 5 or so missions, with the first few hundred people being uber-qualified astronauts, and everyone thereafter being whoever can put up $200k for a trip, potentially one-way.
It's like a fusion of Mars Direct and the very plans Zubrin was opposed to (Elon acknowledged this by making a reference to "Battlestar Galactica", which Zubrin used many times as a pejorative in The Case for Mars). The only reason the multiple in-orbit refuelings and re-usable rockets makes sense is the ridiculous scale (100 people per trip) and the ultimate goal (Mars Trips for anyone who wants to go).
NINA_5_ FINAL_draft_MarsTalkRevised_v4_17_nm_112716 copy 12
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/mars_presentation.p...
Think of it like a game. You start off with a lathe and a CNC mill and some 3D printers and a bunch of other stuff. You now need to grow crops on Mars. You need to refine Iron ore and produce high quality steel. You need to manufacture plastics, glass, concrete. You need to mine water ice to make water. You need to use electrolysis to make Hydrogen to feed the Sabatier reactor that makes Oxygen/Methane from the atmosphere. You need to explore, you need to maintain and expand the habitat, you need to facilitate future flights to make them as easy as possible and to build capacity for offloading passengers and equipment smoothly and quickly. And then you need to figure out how to use locally produced steel, aluminum, concrete, glass, plastics, etc. to build more machine tools, to build more habitats, to build more farms, more life support equipment, etc. How would you build a backup generator system that ran on LOX/Methane using local machine tools and locally produced materials, for example? How would you build high pressure gas containers for life support systems in habitats using the same?
All of this is like The Martian times a million. It'll be go-go-go every day, because the amount of work remaining will basically be infinite for your entire life. Once you "solve" one "problem", once you advance the state of Martian industry, agriculture, technology, etc. by one step, you're really just opening up the problem space further. The kind of people who will do best in this environment and those who are extremely capable, self-reliant, inventive, goal oriented people (basically workaholics).
They could have plenty of freedom, but if you're not 100% dedicated to working to build and advance the colony you probably won't get along with the rest of the colonists. If you don't obviously bring something valuable to the table (which doesn't need to be industrial/technological/agricultural elbow grease, and could easily be things like being a musician, artist, reporter, chef, even a poet, etc.) you'll probably have a bad time. But on the plus side, if you are a very results-oriented, goal oriented person, you'll likely have a lot of freedom. You'll be able to build, experiment, "hack", and explore to your heart's content. For the most part you'll be able to have your pick of interesting problems from day to day, you'll be immersed in a sea of experts in various technologies, all of them eager for apprentices to come learn and help. And at the end of the day (well, years anyway) you'll be able to look back and say "I built that, and that, and that, and that" for values of "that" equal to significant parts of the local industry and ecosystem. Imagine being part of the team of people who built the first structures to house the first Martian forests. Imagine having your name stamped in the side of the first iron foundry or steel mill on Mars. Imagine having your hand prints in the concrete of the first habitat built using local materials on Mars. That's what being a colonist will be like. It'll be some of the toughest work, but also the most rewarding.
since there is a ~10 minute delay when accessing the internet, I think any form of entertainers would be quite sought after :)
Tom Muelller, SpaceX employee number 1 and current VP of propulsion was part of a liquid fueled rocket club and was building what became the Merlin engine in a garage. Elon came by and asked if he wanted to start a rocket company.
You can go to deep water. That doesn't mean we've been everywhere in deep water, or even on land.
A total waste, I say.
Technological Requirements for Terraforming Mars
This is conference everybody can go to, and it seems the people who really wanted to ask questions were not the space nerds.
To compensate he made a Q&A with journalist right after, he answered some great questions that the community was already wildly speculating about, I don't have a very good link, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/54j2y4/rspacex_offi...
> Essentially, this becomes a problem of people overestimating the amount of fuel required to bring the stage back, underestimating the weight of the parachute system (which would be in the hundreds of kilograms at least), and underestimating the fragility and controllability of a parachute system.
It wasn't until about 15 years ago that it was realized that we had no clue how to land a large craft on Mars. "Plainly put, with our current capabilities, a large, heavy vehicle, streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has about ninety seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, change and re-orient itself from being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and finally, gently touch down." - JPL.[1]
The approaches used for the small landers don't scale. Giant supersonic parachutes a hundred meters across don't look workable. There are some exotic parachute/heat shield concepts such as "hypercones" which have never been tried. Deceleration outside the atmosphere with rockets takes huge amounts of fuel, but should work.
The refueling in orbit plan makes sense. (Sending the fuel tank up first would be simpler, if less impressive visually. Build up fuel storage in orbit with multiple launches. This was von Braun's original lunar plan.)
[1] http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-...
Using parachutes limits you to only landing on places that have a thick(ish) atmosphere.
Being propulsive, they can land this thing anywhere in the entire solar system. (Then he said Venus would be tricky, and it must be solid, not liquid)
I want to join Musk's society! Let's keep humankind going!
It seems like in the longer term, it would be more efficient to take a shuttle to orbit, and then dock with at a space station to get on the interplanetary ship. Cruise ships and military ships use this method in places where docking is infeasible. It would be a much higher initial cost, however.
Six months on ship isn't so bad. Six months is the length of a WESTPAC, though you get to leave the ship periodically. I think the longest we went without docking was a month, and the guys in the submarines often go for even longer stretches.
If you are curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeditionary_Strike_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_expeditionary_unit#The_...
Next time I'm giving a talk: one question per person (want to ask more, go to end of line), and ask your damn question.
0. https://ericrossacademic.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/mapping-th...
Kind of like a space elevator for fuel! :)
I'm not engineer, but wouldn't a pipe be easier to build than an elevator?
I think I would prefer more presentation from him than any QA.
I would actually like to hear more about what happens on Mars: the steps to generate oxygen, food, energy, water, and the fuel for the return trip. What are the various ways that Mars could be terraformed, and what are the ethical and practical considerations?
I know that this comes on the heels of an unfortunate accident, but I'm in the camp that accidents and mistakes can lead to better process with less risk, and sometimes simpler solutions.
And, I'd like to invest in SpaceX. Whether it's in stocks or bonds, I just want to help.
There have been 302 manned orbital launches according to [1] and from adding up the successful launches in [2] there seem to have been a total of 5057 orbital launches so far, in the 70 or so years of spaceflight.
Apparently the Mars fleet needs from 3 to 5 tanker launches per manned craft, so this program will require between 4000 and 6000 orbital launches, so around 5000 - which is about the same number as the total number of (successful) human rocket launches to date!
Looking at the table in [2] we can see that the best success rates for manned launch systems are 97% for both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle. using this as a worst-case estimate, out of those 5000 launches we can expect 150 to fail. Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program.
I guess that we can expect improvements in reliability with a program this size, and using a mass-produced vehicle which is re-usable is not something we have safety data for in the space-flight arena yet. You would hopefully expect reliability and safety to improve, getting towards the standards of modern aircraft, or at least experimental aircraft or military systems perhaps. But even three nines (99.9%, or one failure per 1000 lanches) is still multiple orders of magnitude better than we can achieve with spaceflight right now, so SpaceX are setting a pretty tough goal for themselves here. Still, I really do hope they succeed, and it will be exciting to watch them try...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights [2] http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logsum.html
A failure in the rocket does not mean everybody dies. There is a launch abort system for that. Musk has confirmed this after the presentation.
There are also the instances of missions (Japan fairly recently in a Venus probe) where issues affecting an unmanned flight but not causing failure of the mission, would result in failure of a manned flight (expenditure of all life support resources).
The estimates here do suggest some significant loss of life will be expected. That's not unheard of in voyages of discovery, colonisation, and exploration.
That makes it different from the Shuttle for example.
All glory to the Empire!
The Q&A, however, seemed to be straight from a second-rate Comic-Con panel.
Clearly, we've already identified some of the folks who should be left on Earth.
In short, King Elon for World Emperor 2016.
Here is evidence:
I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
Will it be a personal dictatorship of Elon?
Unlike Earth, once you're there, there's nowhere to go without his blessing.
You can't just "move next door".
And knowing how "locked down" his Tesla cars are, it'll be interesting to see how he'll deal with a rebellious colony.
But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with potential dictatorships like that.
In the past he's discussed direct democracy as a preferred form of governance for smaller colonies with all/most laws having sunset provisions requiring them to be debated/voted upon on renewal.
But that's not the main issue. The main issue is that until another company opens up shop on Mars, you literally have nowhere to go, and the colony will be dependent on earth for quite some time.
What will happen if Elon doesn't like what they're doing and threatens to withhold supplies? rockets? Internet?
1. It means you have somewhere to live and even if you set up habitats it acts as a fallback habitat.
2. You'll need a return to Earth option if things go potato shaped.
3. It can manufacture fuel in advance for future visiting ships so acts as a backup to their Sabatier reactor and other important systems.
4. Once you have several, you can afford to risk using one to travel to other parts of Mars and back to get science from other biome... er.. I mean prospect for resources.
I wonder if these will be capable of operating automatically. It would be nice to be able to prove out the system by sending an automated cargo only mission there and back, or maybe with a skeleton crew. It's fascinating that they're aiming to go directly to this without any less ambitious manned vehicles and missions first.
They have said many times the F9 lands itself completely autonomously, because when it's happening on Mars the signal delay will be too great for them to do anything from Earth anyway.
Given that, I'm going to take the leap and say the whole thing will be autonomous. I also think it makes sense so you don't need trained "pilots". You can pack the thing with 100 people that have no clue.
Refueling is an easy autonomous one.
Eventually you'd only need to inspect and clean the engine every x flights, etc. and maybe you just do that each time it's back on Earth.
I wonder if a scale model test launched on Falcon Heavy would be viable or useful?
They didnt think it'll add that much in practise.
"I think its kind of encouraging to see that you don't have to be a great public speaker to get people to listen to you, as long as you are able to accomplish things off the stage."
PLEASE. FUND. THIS.
Loan the money to SpaceX, or partner with private investors, or increase NASA's budget and have NASA pay for it. Just make it happen.
Even if this project fails, the benefits from having a lot of smart people trying to get to and establish a colony on Mars will pay dividends for a long time.
Please make it happen!
I wouldn't look to the Public sector for funding this. Governments have grown increasingly hostile to long term projects. Just ask NASA how much fun it is to have senators constantly threaten to cut your funding and the need to build things in an incredibly inefficient (expensive) way just to keep Congress happy. Plus you get all sorts of curveballs as administrations come and go and want to juggle the priorities. As a government project this would just be an endless money pit and if it ever got off of the ground it would be decades late and severely cut back in scope.
1) Funding: Current SpaceX resources are tied up in creating the basic infrastructure that will lead to interplanetary travel. SpaceX is still private leading to Musk prioritizing these awesome ventures but still tied to revenue from contracts and limited funding. Going public will destroy the vision but give him the cash reserves to pull in the timeline.
2) Competition: NASA, other government space organization, and the private sector have or will have plans for interplanetary travel. Healthy competition often leads to more innovation and constant motivation. At the same time, it leads to competition for shared resources such as...
3) Talent: Musk mentioned in the Q&A that he can only hire green cards and up. The international talent pool is and will remain untapped unless something drastic changes. Assuming this talent goes to the competition and capitalizes into the positive effects, then it will be worth it. Unfortunately, we have yet to see another private sector company like SpaceX push the envelope as much so I'm not as hopeful that someone has the ability to utilize talent like Musk has. At the same time, SpaceX is known to drive employees into the ground. 7 days a week, tough hours, and impossible timelines is not sustainable for employees. The allure of SpaceX, similar to gaming, keeps talented individuals in line to get a shot at working for SpaceX. As mentioned due to the limited talent due to immigration issues, SpaceX may run into the talent shortage sooner than later.
4) Non-Transport Issues: Transportation is necessary but not sufficient for interplanetary travel & habitation. We don't have a SpaceX/Musk for the other non-transportation related issues. The political/cultural/international issues will be big and then there's terraforming and everything involved with that. Musk may get ahead of schedule but these other issues may push the timeline further and further out.
5) Public Interest: Space travel is not as sexy as it used to be for the public as compared to the Moon landing with the backdrop of the Cold War and arms race. Yes, this is not using direct public funding (if/until NASA decides to pitch in) but the public needs to make this objective be top of mind for it to become a reality. Musk and the science enthusiasts will not be enough. We need to develop a few "X Prize" equivalents for the non-science community to progress on the non-transport issues and show why it matters for the rest of the world.
For #2: We'll see about that. Mars has sat there for a long time, and nobody else has done much about it. By the time others get interested because of (a) SpaceX showing that it can be done (b) Popular interest due to SpaceX's work, SpaceX may be too far ahead for anyone else to help (outside of being customers).
For #3: Agreed. I think this may naturally occur as the company stabilizes a bit and the "living on the razor's edge" feeling dissipates. At some point they'll focus more on getting it right then meeting deadlines.
For #4: You can control political/cultural/international issues on mars by controlling who gets on the ship from earth.
For #5: a bit of hero worship for the future marstronaughts will do plenty, I think. There's a lot of innate interest in whoever becomes the first human to step foot on another planet.
I think it would be better to just launch many small and cheap ships, then just leave them in space or let them crash into mars after dropping cargo by parachute with some air cushions. They could be carried into low orbit by a jet airplane, then use "dumb" rockets like water under high pressure in cheap lightweight tanks. And heat it up to vapor temperature using then sun.
How has this announcement and Elon's dream in general excited or inspired you?
Any ideas for how the plan could be developed, improved, augmented?
scitechdaily.com/earth-loses-50000-tonnes-of-mass-every-year/
Earth has been through a lot, it turns out.
Musk's promises that they'll travel in comfort sounds too close to what the Jamestown colony residents were promised. Life on Mars is going to be a hardscrabble existence where you have to solve problems that you don't have on Earth. Probably a mostly subterranean existence.
Musk's video seemed to imply that people would terraform Mars, but we aren't even close to attempting that yet. We can't even keep the atmosphere of Earth in balance. Elon Musk's biggest problem may be that he was born 100 years too early.
I really wish him to succeed and if he asked me to donate money I would.
Mars will be nothing more then a research station for 500 years. Ceries and the space stations at L1-5 will be economic powerhouses before 2100.
"Hey Elon, I've got my electric bus parked outside. Want to take a look?"
Elon/team deserved much better.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=1%3A30+cst
[1] https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/780835809696092161
sigh
Central standard time I'm guessing, so mid-US I guess "central" and "standard" mean here, so I'm guesstimating GMT-7. That would put it around 8:30 GMT.
For what it's worth, i too hate when people say things like "EST","CST" etc. Not only are they difficult to remember, but they're ambiguous. i.e. AEST is Australian Eastern Standard Time, but no one includes the A when it's spoken and rarely when its written, which often means when two people over email say "lets talk at 9am EST", hopefully they're on the same continent, or they will miss each other by around ~14 hours.
Also, for the rest of the thread, central time zone is currently observing daylight saving time, so the correct abbreviation is CDT.
Sorry to jump in with such pedantry. Datetime math is hard! :)
You're an adult with the Internet right in front of you, act like it.
Having to look it up is the inconvenience.
A) the most revolutionary venture of this century
B) the largest Ponzi scheme ever
However, it could also simply be a huge pile of money getting burned, with a few useful innovations made along the way.
I would venture to say that is the most likely outcome, actually, although I prefer A) to happen, of course.
Edit: looks like he's aiming for a city of 1m people in the short term, Terraforming in the long term.
I'm just saying it's probably unwise to focus and spend time and money on this right now. We probably won't even make it to that day. It's better to learn to live on Earth responsibly and then maybe, once we've learned our lessons, start looking further.
I heard this guy Tesla was involved in a car company that was trying to make an nice electric car that produces no emissions. A noble pursuit in the direction you suggested, living here on Earth more responsibly. But then it turns out that those cars have huge costs in other areas.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Not sure what to make of any of it. We keep trying and digging bigger holes it seems.
What do you do for a living? Your profile says you work on DeployBot.com. Why? We have so many problems on why are you working on something to deploy code? Shouldn't you be working in medicine to help those in need? You shouldn't you be working on reducing CO2? You shouldn't be working on any code deployment tools until we solve healthcare. It's really irresponsible.
Do you see the issue here? There is no reason someone can't spend their money (or company's money) to pursue a goal they're passionate about.
The discussion here is about the viability and importance of the goal of colonizing Mars. Elon is free to pursue any ideas and dreams, like everyone else. I was just offering my ideas about his ideas, and sometimes they oppose. Not everything has to be a circle jerk.
Yes, I work on DeployBot.com but I'm not pushing the agenda that humanity now needs to become "continuously deploying species" because that's what I enjoy.
I mean you specifically say it's unwise and say we probably shouldn't bother until we learn some other lessons that you don't specify. That doesn't talk about viability or importance or really your ideas beyond some basic complaining.
I agree not everything should be a circle jerk and when it comes to Musk it's quite easy for HN and Reddit to go down that hole but at the same time I don't understand the empty criticism. That's not really criticism.
> Yes, I work on DeployBot.com but I'm not pushing the agenda that humanity now needs to become "continuously deploying species" because that's what I enjoy
So an announcement is "pushing an agenda"? I mean I would agree but why wouldn't everyone do that? You don't want to advertise yourself / what you do? Is there something bad about that? Your phrasing makes me think you're not a fan of press releases or announcements regarding things you disagree with.
I'm quite thankful none of the European powers said "you know, we really should stabilize things here before we try and head west".
And when they landed in America? They KEPT PUSHING. In every single direction. Through revolutions, bloody coups, and multiple changes of government back in Europe, people kept exploring and expanding.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Elon on the other hand is trying to colonize a known deserted wasteland and propose it as a viable future home for humanity.
We can't stop desertification on this planet, yet plan to turn a planet-sized desert into a hospitable place. Crazy.
I do recognize that it wouldn't solely be scientists to choose colonists, I'm not that naive, but I'm confident that there would be enough controls in place to ensure that the right thing is the default answer to what do we do now?
But we can. There are these nanomachines that take in CO2, store the C, and release the O2 (on a simplistic level)... called trees. For the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere. http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang...
Probably the same stuff we do on Earth? Also- sports would be pretty cool in low gravity (37% of Earth's gravity)
How many industry leaders see planets as merely resources to be exploited like they do people?
To achieve multi-planetary status, we need to make ourselves less fragile than we currently tend to be. What I mean by that is that if we devoted half as much time, money and resources as we do to wage endless wars and collectively shifted our focus to medical advancements such as the technology we need to keep ourselves alive in the hostile environments we'll encounter in space, our astronauts very likely could be traveling in self contained, iron man-like suits by now.
Aside from that, we may have to upgrade our own physiology so;
We NEED nanotech that can repair us, keep us healthy and help us adapt OURSELVES to new environments that have enough of the proper elements. Can you imagine being able to Evolve On Demand so that you can breathe a different atmosphere and derive whatever your body needed from it? I can.
If relativity holds then planets that are either bigger or moving faster might have a very different local space-time from what we're used to, so imagine if jet lag was so severe it hospitalized you.
We need artificial intelligence capable of both supervised and unsupervised learning to run and monitor our environments, our medical conditions - both physical and mental. The 'quantified self movement' actually has a very, very useful purpose here.
We need to be able to repair a ship while it's in space. We need to be able to repair an environmental suit while standing or perhaps trapped in a volcano that ejects molten Dihydrogen Monoxide on Titan.
We need real, functioning, scanning, recording, data-analyzing Tricorders. Yes, if if weren't obvious by now, I AM a total Star Trek nerd and if we want to explore space, we need those mobile forensic labs that will allow us to truly see the universe and ALL of its wonderful colors. I could go on, but then someones' R&D department is gonna have to pay me.
Let's focus all the money and effort we would spend on getting to Mars and living on its wasteland, and use it to understand the human mind and digitize it into a realm not individually constrained by physics? I actually think that may be a more realistic and practical goal, and our quality of lives could be much better. I mean, what do we really get from living somewhere like Mars? A storage compartment for excess humans? To what end? What will happen to it when we cure aging?
The idea of terraforming Mars cracks me up. Maybe when Musk completes his hyperloop will also be when I start taking him more seriously.
More directly to your point - Mars solves the risk to our species of a comet strike. Musk mentioned extinction events in the video. They've happened before and will happen again. All the health and cognitive improvement in the world won't save us from that.
But mostly?
Because it's hard, and rising to the challenge can supersede politics and superstition and, we can only hope, recapture the sense of, "holy shit, we did it!" not experienced by a large percentage of our population since 1969.
So what? Does it improve the human experience more than addressing human biology & cognition?
> We get to leave behind a planet whose ecosystem has been screwed by its current population and try to make the right choices on a new one.
Unless you can substantiate that claim, I don't necessarily agree. You are also speculating that we would somehow make better choices with a different planet than this one. Not that it's impossible, but I find it hard to believe. Are you saying that it is more practical to terraform a planet that doesn't support life than to address existing environmental issues on Earth?
> Because it's hard[...]
That's not a very good reason to do anything. It might give people motivation to do things, but "because it's hard" speaks nothing to what we stand to benefit from doing said thing. There are plenty of things that are hard to do, like building a giant pogo stick that can bounce you into outer space, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worth the time and money to do.