Mars: Inside the High-Risk, High-Stakes Race to the Red Planet
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Suggesting that humans might find refuge on Mars after
messing up Earth is “ethically and technically absurd,” says
McKay. “I think we need to take the view that failure is not
an option. The notion of Mars as a lifeboat makes the Titanic
look like a happy ending.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet) is is a little smaller than that and estimated at 9 x 10^20 kg. So call it 10^21kg.
KE = 1/2 m * v^2 (mass in kg, v in m/s = joule) but a bomb is not 100% efficient call it 50%. So, 1/2 * 10^21 * 1^2 /50% = 10^21 joule.
Largest bomb ever detonated is = ~2.1×10^17 J so ~5,000 of them is kind of an ultra optimistic estimate. Not that we actually have 5,000 of them. Worse each of those weigh ~60,000 lb so we now need build rocks, and even build the infrastructure to build the rockets to get 300,000,000 kg out there not just LEO.
At a rough ballpark 1/2 the worlds GDP for 8 years is not going to get you there. Worse that 50% was crazy optimistic.
The rocketry there would seem to be the impossibly limiting factor.
Technology will surely improve in 10 years, but the laws of physics won't. It takes energy to move mass, and lots of energy to move a huge mass. I really do not think we're going to invent warp fields in 10 years like they did in the ST:TNG episode with a de-powered Q and use that to magically reduce the mass of the asteroid.
Asteroids the size of 300 miles don't just appear out of nowhere. In order for them to hit Earth, they must be coming out of the deep space, and they have to hit Earth (radius 6371 km) out of a circle of radius 1 AU (150,000,000 km).
To put it into perspective, if we can observe one "hostile" asteroid from outside the solar system crossing the circle made by the Earth's orbit every ten years (Note: we've never observed anything like that in our history, and we would surely have detected such a thing with 20th century technology), it will take 10 * (1 AU / 6371)^2 = 5.5 billion years before one hits Earth, on average. By that time the sun will destroy us anyway.
I guess they are still more likely than a group of hostile jerk aliens sworn to exterminate humans once we set our foot on Mars, but not by a wide margin.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids
However, the larger point stands. Earth is not completely safe and we really can't protect it from everything.
It's a better backup plan than never using a computer ever again.
It's sort of like the autopilot thing. You shouldn't call it autopilot unless you're ok with people thinking they don't need to worry about driving anymore, and you shouldn't call Mars a backup plan unless you're ok with people thinking they don't need to worry about Earth anymore, because Mars will be there if we ever need it.
The context of the quote is a response to people who are really enthusiastic about actually being Mars colonists. "It’s a lot easier to imagine a few scientists spending a year or two at a small Martian research station, like the ones in Antarctica, than it is to imagine thousands of people emigrating permanently to a Martian metropolis."
That would make it plan A. Backup plans are for when the primary plan ends in failure. Obviously a tiny city scraping by on Mars by itself while billions die in WW3 is not the goal.
After all...there's always Plan B, right?
If we're need the public to change their behavior to preserve the habitability of this planet, then giving them excuses for inaction may not be productive.
If we're able to set up a self-sustaining settlement on Mars, then we're going to be able to survive on Earth, no matter how badly we mess it up. Just build a bubble and pretend you're on Mars. Short of total thermonuclear war, it's hard to imagine any non-survivable world where we have that technology.
On the other hand, _someone_ building a backup colony on Mars because _someone else_ decides to get in a nuclear war doesn't sound unreasonable.
Plus, there are world ending scenarios outside our control. Meteors, volcanic activity, etc.
1. Cosmic-size bad stuff could happen, at a scale where we are powerless. "Think of the dinosaurs", etc.
2. "Thanks" to the continuous progress of science and technology, we are putting more and more power into the hands of the everyman. Wherein the sanity and the moral trustworthiness of the aforementioned everyman is on a bell curve just like everything else - meaning most people are fine, but it's guaranteed there are a few spectacularly bad apples somewhere in that pile. Think of Jim Jones with nukes, or tabletop biotech.
So, making Mars livable is important for the same reason why you have backups for your data - only even more so. You do have backups, don't you?
We should absolutely do both - protect the Earth, and settle Mars.
But even if it killed only 90%, think about what the remaining 10% would do. They would probably wage war on each other to grab whatever land and natural resources remain. Furthermore, civilization as a whole would severely regress technologically, as we would lose the vast majority of power plants, laboratories, factories, data centers, etc. We would find ourselves back in the Middle Ages.
Compared to that, a super high-tech stable Mars colony that has a population of 1,000 would have it pretty good. Sure, they would be living most of their lives under the surface, but so what?
And I'm really not sure why you'd expect a Mars of 1,000 people would have more technology than an Earth with 100,000,000 left alive. A technological civilization like ours depends on a body of knowledge that's way too big to fit in one or 1000 people's heads. Maybe in the future we'll have advanced AI that lets us get around this but that'd render the whole discussion moot.
A fully self-sufficient Mars colony would not, by definition, be "struggling for survival."
>> A technological civilization like ours depends on a body of knowledge that's way too big to fit in one or 1000 people's heads.
A fully self-sufficient Mars colony would have plenty of computers that can store data. In fact, since the goal of such a colony would be to act as Earth's backup, we would most likely have most of the Earth's combined knowledge stored in a large datacenter underneath the Martian surface.
On the other hand, the shockwave from an asteroid that wipes 90% of the population on Earth would also instantly fry most electronics and render most technology useless. Like I said, it would send civilization back a thousand years. Sure, we would still have the knowledge in people's brains, but it turns out knowledge can be forgotten, especially when not actively recalled by the brain. When all your scientists have to become farmers, it is not likely that humanity would be able to retain all the knowledge it has collected over the past millenia.
Same with people and planets.
Few hundred years from now people may appreciate the foresight.
There's guaranteed gonna be a catastrophic event outside of our control on Earth given a large enough timescale, be it climate change consequences, glaciation, collision with large meteorite, fatal epidemy, etc etc.
Mars makes for a shitty backup plan, sure, but we can't pretend that the Earth is gonna last forever either. A shitty backup plan is still better than simply sitting on our ass and hoping that no natural catastrophes ever happen; taking good care of Earth is not enough on the long term.
Large impact protection and geo-engineering are considerably easier efforts than colonizing mars considering just how hostile the environment is (even the martian dust is extremely poisonous to humans).
You are effectively going to live on a planet with no effective atmosphere, no magnetic field, with extreme temperatures and plenty of natural hazards.
The level of geo-engineering required to build martian colony which is both self sustainable and could serve as a lifeboat for the human species is currently insurmountable, we haven't even sent a single living thing to mars, we haven't sent a single person, nor we returned them safely.
We have not studied the effect of long term exposure to the martian environment and we have virtually no clue on what is going to be required in practice to enable large number of humans to live there for eternity.
And most importantly everything on that list with the exception of a gamma ray burst (which would fry mars also) is going to live earth considerably more liveable and hospitable to humans. If you can build a self sustaining colony on Mars you can build on on earth even after a mega impact event, supervolcano, another ice age or extreme pollution.
Earth has an atmosphere that at best would require a rebreather, it has a magnetic shield that protects you from radiation, you won't die or suffer serious health effects because you were exposed to sand, and in any case the temperatures would still remain considerably more hospitable to humans than they'll ever be on mars.
Earth also has a diverse biome, which means regardless of what is going to happen life would still continue to exist in one shape or form, if nothing else this would constantly provide humanity with food, energy, and oxygen.
We already have small artificial environments here on Earth that people live in for extended periods; we call them "submarines". We also have the ISS and previous space stations, which people have inhabited for years at a time. So we know how to make artificial habitats which support life. Now we just need to scale them up a whole lot, make them rotate for gravity, and give them shielding since they won't be in LEO.
Also, a space station will have a much better view than an outpost in Antarctica.
A city in the Gobi desert would be pointless. First, it's owned by China and they aren't going to let you just build a city there, and second, we have tons of cities in deserts, so why would we want another one? There's no compelling reason to bother with such a thing.
More practically, it can be used for a lot of missions, like learning how to manufacture stuff in low-gravity (and taking advantage of low-g or zero-g for manufacturing) (the middle of the station would be zero-g), or acting as a waypoint for other missions to the Moon or asteroids or Mars, etc.
The main disadvantage to the huge space station is, of course, cost. But there's enormous economic opportunities there beyond tourism and research, starting with resource extraction.
Sorry, but this comment is just plain ignorant. Would you also call the Apollo missions pointless? Building a giant space station would give us a permanent and significant presence in space, and would give us enormous advances in technology as we figure out how to deal with the challenges of such an engineering undertaking, just as we did with Apollo. Moreover, the station would have a lot of other uses, such as manufacturing. You can't do zero-g manufacturing in Antarctica. There's untold uses for low-g or zero-g manufacturing, perhaps things involving crystal growth. The station can also be a waypoint for asteroid capture missions, which would give us immense mineral wealth without having to do environmentally-horrible mining operations here on Earth.
I tend to agree about the "backup Earth" justification. But is there really any justification required, other than it's our human nature to want to explore and push the frontiers?
When people started moving from Europe to America in the 17th century, I don't think anyone saw it as a backup plan.
i like the Mayflower crowd motivation, in particular "found the Dutch morals much too libertine."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_Fathers#Leiden
So, once the transportation to Mars starts working, one can imagine various new settlements by groups "special" in one way or another. Imagine an Amish colony under a giant glass dome for example.
[1] - http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-art-of-amistics/
And if you're thinking, "why not just develop that specific technology that we need and save the money of a whole Mars venture", thats not how development of real, usable tech works. There are many things that were developed for one use that were eventually used for something else. R&D is a complex web of different ideas and solutions to different problems.
Even if we don't realize all that we want to on Mars, the new booster system will open up many other options for Earth-based satellites that can be useful here and now [1]. Space science has been essential for studying climate change[2], and will continue to be in the future, even (and especially!) if that space tech extends to other planets.
1. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/09/what-els...
2. http://www.planetaryresources.com/earth-observation/#eo-intr...
I think the Martian killer app may turn out to be a not too inhospital, shallow gravity well, that can serve as the industrial jumping off point and base for developing the rest of the solar system.
Such a stupid sentiment. Humans can be wiped out for a variety of unknown reasons. It's not necessarily that "we messed up."
* a nanotechnology disaster
* Implementation of technologies that enable a global super-stable oppressive state.
* An AI disaster along the lines of a paper clip optimiser
* An AI or augmented intelligence that deprecates all lesser intelligences.
* The film version of I Robot.
* Biotech plague.
* Regression to a stable social and biological state optimising for lower intelligence or stagnation.
The way I think about this is that it's not just a backup. It's also deliberately introduced variation in environment and social structures that variegated Hunan civilization. Well develop technologies and social structures we wouldn't otherwise have that might help mitigate some of these risks. Semi-isolated from Earth, it would be at least partially protected from many of these threats. Of course, it could introduce new threats, but the isolation would work to protect Earth to some extent in that eventuality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_catastro...
I am yet to hear a decent argument about how AI will wipe out the earth. It starts to belong to the same category as politics, nobody knows what they are talking about, but everyone has an opinion. Even the so called "smarts". I remember there were news about Stephen Hawking being concerned about AI, if you watched his interview, he literally pointed his software to the "Existential risk from artificial general intelligence" wikipedia page and read the abstract... Elon Musk started by comparing AI danger to "The Terminator" scenario. Seriously a f* movie? How about we don't go to Mars because of the "Alien" movie? Now he says that "not all scenarios are benign..." - no shit, Scotty.
I ask AI how to create a biological virus that would kill every human on the planet that's encrypted enough other AI would not be able to cure it in time.
This would also likely to affect mars.
> Implementation of technologies that enable a global super-stable oppressive state.
And what prevents them from just sending a few nukes to mars?
>An AI disaster along the lines of a paper clip optimiser
Mars and earth are going to share some form of a network, an AI disaster on earth is not likely to be contained to earth and vise versa.
>An AI or augmented intelligence that deprecates all lesser intelligences.
Same as the above, also what prevents that AI from building spaceships and exterminating the humans on mars?
>The film version of I Robot.
Again what prevents them from building spaceships of their own?
> Biotech plague.
Plagues cross oceans they can cross interstellar space also, it's unlikely that any sort of natural/unintentional release could be contained in an era in which interplanetary travel is a common occurrence, especially if people would seek refuge on Mars, and there is nothing stopping some death cult that releases a bioengineered plague intentionally from infecting mars also.
>Regression to a stable social and biological state optimising for lower intelligence or stagnation.
Again nothing about Mars implicitly provide protection against the stagnation of human culture or knowledge.
The point is simply any large scale disaster would either not be contained to a single planet, or would still leave earth a considerably more habitable place than Mars.
None of these reasons are of course a reason why we shouldn't go to Mars.
> Semi-isolated from Earth, it would be at least partially protected from many of these threats.
It introduces a significant time and space gap, a firewall between Part of human civilization and the rest of it. It's not a guaranteed solution, but I think it could give us a much better chance. I'll counter your line of challeng - how do you know for certain it won't help mitigate any of these risks?
You also seem not to have noticed my argument concerning introducing a source of variegation into our civilization that might help us cope with some of these threats better.
The author argues that a major problem with the manned space program was that we had no rational need to send humans to space.
Was going to the moon about science? National defense? International relations and prestige? None of these arguments held up. (Most scientists hated the huge amount of tax money spent on manned space flight that could have been spent more efficiently. The case for sending people instead of robots was based more on fantasy than on reason.)
The story makes Eisenhower seem very wise (for trying to avoid getting into a pointless and wasteful race against the Russians and his awareness of how the military industrial complex would serve its own interests at the expense of the nation as a whole). It even points out that Kennedy was nowhere near as enthusiastic about the moon landing as you'd assume and regretted locking the nation into an expensive promise he couldn't get out of.
Quotes from astronauts who visited the moon portray it as "magnificent desolation":
The first thing that springs to mind is the vivid contrast between the Earth and the Moon... I'm sure that to a geologist the moon is a fascinating place, but this monotonous rock pile, this withered, Sun-seared peach pit out of my window offers absolutely no competition to the gem it orbits. Ah, the Earth, with its verdant valleys, its misty waterfalls... I'd just like to get our job done and get out of here. - Michael Collins, Apollo 11
I see this time and time again, but nobody has given me a proper reason why we cannot send a spinning ship, one where zero-gravity wouldn't be an issue. Radiation is certainly a problem, but again that is a matter of shielding/weight. I don't see any monumental reason why we couldn't send perfectly healthy people. The only real issue seems one of cost.
Start with a design that can produce 1G from spinning with a suitably gentle gravity gradient that people can live in it.
Then try to figure out how to accelerate that very large structure so it can get to Mars. (You can use the fuel as a radiation shield, since there will have to be a metric assload of it.)
But that is a real issue. A tiny ship is billions of dollars. A ship big enough to provide even half a G is more like a trillion dollars. It can't simply be a tiny spinning wheel. It has to be dozens of meters across.
Of course, trashing Iraq cost us over a trillion so far, and will likely exceed 2 trillion before all is done, but that's different.
I suppose if we are talking about a one-way death trip then yea. Maybe some people will do that initially, but long-term you'd have to think our goal of reaching Mars would include being able to return.
"Exposures on the ISS average 150 mSv per year, although frequent crew rotations minimize individual risk. Astronauts on Apollo and Skylab missions received on average 1.2 mSv/day and 1.4 mSv/day respectively."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays
10x rate of bone resorption in osteoporosis. bones are the biggest worry imo.
even though the astros work out 15 hours a week, it's still not enough to cover this rate of resorption, and (this is an asspull) pretty sure it affects them for months or years after doing long stays at ISS.
I'm not sure if there's any proof that we could create artificial gravity such that these decreased loads wouldn't still occur. wouldn't it mess with their inner ear as well?
And yeah, the only real issue is cost, but that's a doozy of an issue. what country is going to spent monumental budgets on making this ship with all the financial crises going on currently?
Acceleration is acceleration. Your body doesn't care whether it's coming from a big hunk of mass in the form of a planet, or from continuous rotation. Yes, artificial gravity will work just fine in completely eliminating the negative effects of microgravity on humans.
>wouldn't it mess with their inner ear as well?
Only if the diameter of the structure is too small. Then you get coriolis forces large enough to cause these side effects. Effectively, the "gravitational" force felt at your feel is smaller than what you feel at your head. And also, with a small diameter, you have to rotate the structure at a high rate to achieve 1g. With a sufficiently large station, these aren't a problem: the rotation is very slow (maybe 1 rpm) and the difference felt between your head and your feet is negligible. But building a large structure in space like that is difficult and costly and we haven't done it before. But now's a fine time to start....
>what country is going to spent monumental budgets on making this ship with all the financial crises going on currently?
That's the main problem, and it's entirely the fault of the political leadership in those countries, who are mismanaging resources and allowing corruption. George W Bush's Iraq war is a prime example of this: for the cost of that war, we could have built a rather nice space station.
Mission plans that call for much slower travel (6+ months) are much more likely to cause trouble for the travelers, which in why in my opinion any plans that are seriously considered should minimize travel time as much as practically possible. The logistics in getting a craft into space, getting it spinning appropriately to produce artificial gravity, and hurling it towards Mars are significantly more complicated than, say, refueling in orbit to allow for reduced travel time.
Also consider that its a few months trip (Scott Kelly did over a year) and the real problem is when they live there. Mars gravity is only 38% of earths. So the problem while slower, still will be an issue.
Not all ice on earth is water. Some of it is methane. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Once the arctic permafrost containing methane starts melting, produces a strong greenhouse effect that raises temperatures, reinforcing the melting process by making it faster...
This is believed to be linked to the Permian Extinction event. In that sense, this would be an existential threat that needs to be managed carefully.
http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casestudy/news/n0681-now-th...
Among the obvious side effect --raise in temperature-- the oceans starts absorbing carbon dioxide and methane becoming more acid, acid enough to for example erode the shells of snails.
Also, does an echo chamber necessarily mean something is wrong?