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Comment by dfar1 | Hacker News Reader

The idea of colonizing another planets is so surreal it makes me wish I would live another 100 years. Having mars as our launch pad, I wonder where we could go from there.

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Living on Mars = living inside a crapped space your entire life and never being able to breathe fresh air, or take a walk outside.

Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice.

I think until then - nice for a short visit.

Living in a box would get tiring very, very quickly.

> Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice.

Wouldn't terraforming take much, much longer than that? Assuming it were possible(which doesn't seem possible due to lack of a magnetic field, as another commenter pointed out)

1000 years or a million - it's irrelevant I think.

After 1000 years of evolution and progress, we may have very different ideas about everything we understand.

We might possibly abandon Mars 'terraforming' for going to 'ready to go' planets that we can access further away.

Humans are not very good at planning at that horizon.

The only group that does that is the Catholic Church.

The big Cathedral in Cologne, Germany took 700 years to build. Imagine being born, raised, trained, and then working on a project that started 300 years ago and won't be done until 300 years after you are dead? Imagine being the guy in charge of that looking for investment 'for the next phase'? There are always more pressing costs.

It takes a commitment beyond that which our 'GDP' numbers capture.

Admittedly, 'space colonization' shares some of that impetus.

But the reality of it is, most people put their $ into Kardashian news.

Until then - my crazy but most actually realistic bet is that Wynne Hotels and Vegas-like entities, maybe Sandals resorts are the first people to make Mars accessible after NASA makes a few landings.

There will be a Casino on mars before most other things.

> The big Cathedral in Cologne, Germany took 700 years to build.

Yes, but: I doubt that they planned it that way.

Admittedly, you're right, it was not fully planned in that manner, but it would have taken a consistent vision over 100's of years, much like the colonization of another planet.

Atmosphere stripping due to solar wind is a natural process that takes millions of years. Atmospheric production is a deliberate process limited only by available energy and raw materials. And, of course, the economics. But the point remains: you absolutely can densify Mars' atmosphere, and you won't have to worry much about it until you get to the point where you start running out of raw material to replace the very slow loss.

My favorite idea to re-liquify the Martian core is to move Ceres into orbit around Mars. It'd take a very long time to do it, but you've got millions of years. But the point is, in the meantime, having a dense enough Martian atmosphere to walk around with just a gas mask is certainly attainable in a lifetime, so long as you have enough energy production to do it.

It might not take that long given the right tech. You'd need a legit fusion reactor, and enough material to build an long mass ejector and start shooting 0.01c ice pellets into the outer solar system, driving the rest of Ceres toward Mars. The same mass ejectors could be tuned to bombard Mars with ice at a much lower speed later, if needed for terraforming.

Sounds reasonable to me. Consider where we were in year 1016 vs now, and the rate of change is increasing. If current trends continue, 1000 years seems long if anything.

Even without terraforming, large enough domes would probably be good enough.

Don't need to terraform the whole planet just to have nice spaces to go for a walk in 'the forest'. I'd imagine a football stadium sized space could fit that purpose pretty well, at least for starters.

Dunno, sure mountains, lakes, and the grand canyon are nice. But how often does the average person see something like that?

Seems like most people are inside at home, driving, inside at work, or occasionally inside a store/coffee shop.

With less gravity, and square feet free for the taking you could build large interior spaces well larger than people are used to on earth.

TV/displays are good enough you could build a large underground house and sprinkle around larger "windows" with a view of whatever you want.

VR is going to help in this regard. Will VR be able to be a good replacement for a walk over the forest? I think it will. I didn't need VR to trade my outside activities for indoor, climatized comfy online ones. Although it's probably true that spending years inside a submarine isn't for everyone.

"Will VR be able to be a good replacement for a walk over the forest?"

Maybe in 200 years, when it's neurologically attached to our brains.

Until them, no :)

Replacement doesn't necessarily means it will be identical. It could be an inherently different but superior experience. Of course it would only work for people who isn't in denial. ^_^

Forget where I read it, gliders might be a popular recreation on Mars due to low gravity and low air traffic.

Strictly speaking, it should be possible for humans to go interstellar using current technology. Practically speaking, it's not, due to the partial nuclear test ban treaty. Here's a good start to that Wikipedia hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...

Most of that article deals with interplanetary travel. The only reference to interstellar travel is in the "Theoretical Applications" section. If you look at the chart in that section, you will note that the two theoretical spacecraft are using 300 thousand or 30 million bombs. This is a problem, since estimates of current worldwide nuclear weapon stockpiles range between 10 to 15 thousand.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion is a better article, since it talks about a variety of theoretical spacecraft. You'll note that almost every single application uses a unmanned craft in order to reduce mass and keep travel times down to about a century.

Charles Stross (cstross) has written on his blog about the difficulties of human interstellar travel multiple times:

- http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

- http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...

He also has written about the difficulties of radiation shielding on interstellar travel: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/08/san-trom...

> "Anyway, the point I'd like you to take away from this is that while it's really hard to say "sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible", the smart money says that it's extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances ... and that's for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there."

I know. That's why I said Project Orion was only the start of a Wikipedia hole.

My point is that you explicitly claimed that human interstellar travel is possible with current nuclear propulsion methods. Project Orion doesn't support this claim (since Dyson's models require a number of nuclear weapons several orders of magnitude larger that current stockpiles). Other similar projects don't support this claim either, since they use unmanned spacecraft. I referenced the Stross blog posts because finding a reasonable propulsion system is only one new technology that needs to be invented before human interstellar travel is possible.

If you have other sources (Wikipedia articles or otherwise) that suggest differently, please feel free to post them.

The problem with interstellar travel is that the distances are so huge that there is a high probability of having a catastrophic crash. Particularly at the speeds required.

What about when Mars declares independence from Earth and develops nuclear capability ?

Earth's politicians scapegoat the Martians for being the cause of all their problems, then strike first once they discover them working on nukes.

Ah, Project Orion! My favorite example of revolutionary technology that got banned for political reasons.

I'm sure there was someone in 1492 saying the same thing about America. The grass is always greener.

Living in North America is not that-that different from living in Europe.

There is no 'green grass' on Mars, literally or metaphorically. There isn't even any 'air'.

He was talking about his personal perception of the future not the technicalities of existence. Jesus the level of poindexter in even philosophical pleasantries is suffocating on HN.

I mean, they were right. Quality of life improved for the European colonizing nations. Not so much for the natives, but presumably we're not going to run into anyone already on mars.

Assuming mars has the materials needed it could become quite the space hub. Seems hard near the absolute limit to build a space elevator on earth. But with less atmosphere, less gravity, and a smaller planet an elevator (and dramatically cheaper access to space) could be quite useful.

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