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Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

At least in my case, I see trying to start a Mars colony as a death trap. It's the illusion of carrying on the human race, but it's really just dooming a bunch of pioneers to a grim fate in an extremely hostile environment. I think making a south pole colony would be hard enough, let alone a Mars one.

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I mean, Musk himself is very upfront about the risks involved, especially for the first few waves of colonists. And indeed, there would likely be very little personal upside for them, even if they survived the grueling initial period. But you're making a false equivocation: considering the colonists personal risks in leaving against the species shared risk in staying. If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony off of Earth (and I don't think you can argue that success is inconceivable/vanishingly improbable), then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level perspective, which is precisely the perspective taken to justify the mission.

> If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony [...] then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level

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.

> 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.

Sure they are. Every engineer working on a Mars mission is not working on sustainability/stability engineering.

Well, there are a couple engineers currently working on things which are not sustainability/stability engineering.

Those problems on earth stopped being engineering issues a long time ago. See the current US election.

I think no amount of geopolitics PhDs will reduce the chance of wiping out humanity through nuclear war more than Mars colonization does.

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?

There's a big failure of game theory (and ists) with respect to MAD; unwinding it as a dominant game would be a Ph.D for sure...

There is no vaguely plausible scenario where humanity goes extinct through deployment of the current nuclear arsenal. I would put the probability at zero.

I would increase that number if someone could tell a story with even a whiff of truth about how it could happen.

I don't understand the abject lack of imagination, or optimism, or whatever it is, that makes some people believe that mildly complicated engineering challenges are somehow impossible. Do you think no one in SpaceX has thought about this for more than five seconds?

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.

> Keeping humans alive on THE MOON starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950

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.

Nope, I meant what I said. The moon was impossible in 1950. Actually impossible, not just expensive like getting someone to Mars in the very near future. The tech didn't exist.

> 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.

> Actually impossible, not just expensive like getting someone to Mars in the very near future. The tech didn't exist.

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.

I don't think growing food in space is all that important, as long as you can grow it on Mars. You can pack supplies for 80 days, especially if you have an effective water re-usage system like the one on the ISS.

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.

> We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars

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...

They're not comparable. Life in LEO gets protection from solar radiation. Life in space, on the surface of the Moon doesn't. Life on Mars gets some protection, but it still needs to be managed.

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.

Which immediately suggests a way to help with the Mars plan - in the time SpaceX and (hopefully) others are building the transportation architecture, someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert. Data and experience collected will be invaluable and directly useful for the Mars mission.

One smaller but related effort in that direction is the year-long Mars habitat simulation in Hawaii that concluded a month ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/29/491794937/...

Here's one example, and references to several others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

>someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert.

That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.

That only says it needs to be tried again. And again. Until it works.

Hear, hear. I can't for the life of me understand why that experiment isn't being tried hundreds of times, all over the world. Learning how to create sustainable sealed ecosystems is one of the most important things we can do. Quite apart from the valuable knowledge we'll gain, once we get that nailed we can seed those suckers all over the place - South Pole, Sahara, orbit, Mars, upper atmosphere of Venus...

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?

>I can't for the life of me understand why that experiment isn't being tried hundreds of times, all over the world. Learning how to create sustainable sealed ecosystems is one of the most important things we can do.

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.

There are four additional experiments listed under this link:

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".

They actually learned a bunch of things from that. Including that the concrete took CO2 from the atmosphere in chemical processes that was unexpected, leaving the plants short and not producing enough oxygen.

The insects and plants selected didn't cohabit well, as well another issues. There was clearly lots to learn from the experiment.

An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.

>someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert.

>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.

You appear to be thinking of it as an attempt to set up a colony, whose purpose was to be a colony (or a simulation thereof). It failed at that, sure.

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.

You seem to be thinking of it as a scientific experiment. I'm not. In the context of the OP's comment, I'm thinking of it as a "trial run", to see if we can figure out how to build a self-sustaining colony here on Earth, where it's safe and we can cut the "simulation" short if there's a problem and try again, before we try it for real on another world. In that context, we failed. We did not set up a self-sustaining colony and prove that we can do such a thing successfully. Perhaps we could be successful if we tried it a few more times, but we have not been successful yet. Therefore, we are unprepared to attempt any such project on another world.

Building a habitat on another world is not a scientific experiment; it's an engineering project.

We live pretty cushy lives, so it's easy to forget just how difficult progress was at times. Read about David Thompson and what he went through to discover the northwest passage, or any of those guys who did things like that.

Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.

You say a south pole colony would be hard enough as though we don't have one. We have a south pole colony [0], and there are a half dozen multi-million dollar experiments there that must be manned year round.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen–Scott_South_Pole_Stat...

I believe under discussion is a self-sustaining colony. The south pole runs on imports.

We could do that too, we just don't have sufficient reason to.

The most important part of a Mars colony program will be the team on Earth raising money for more supply runs.

Raising money? Just equip the colony with Go Pro's and stream the content back to Earth as a reality TV show.

Keep those ratings up or your supplies are cut off.

Anime reference: "Starship Operators".

Sounds great, let's try that. We're all doomed to death, anyway. Clearly we're not all doomed for greatness.

Why should your opinion dictate what other people try to accomplish?

I'm not saying "don't try", I'm just saying "I think what you are attempting is foolish and that you are just going to kill a bunch of people", that's all. I can express an opinion about a potentially deadly venture, can't I?

I wasn't suggesting that you cannot have an opinion. It's a perfectly valid opinion. I was implying that as a society we have a tendency to impose our opinions on others through laws and social pressure.

A lot of large engineering projects have killed a bunch of people before succeeding. It's fine, as long as the people accept the risk, and aren't deceived.

How is an opinion dictating anything other than expressing someone's skepticism?

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