Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I agree, though I see no harm in waiting a bit. Going to Mars soon feels like an attempt to build a billion dollar supercomputer in 1979. Technology useful for space missions moves slower than computers alone, but I can't help but think that in just 50 years we'd be far more prepared if we diverted today's Mars cash into robotic space exploration and, particularly, space mining research.

View on HN

It isn't minerals we're running out of. If we, as a species, expect to survive, we're going to have to stay at a population below the carrying capacity of this planet. Failing that (and we are failing badly, a fact barely disguised by petrochemical fertilizers) we need to spread. There's good reason to believe that Mars can be terraformed (imperfectly, since there won't be adequate natural magnetic shielding against radiation). Colonization technologies are what we desperately need to work on. Mining's the easy part once we're there; food and water are a little more difficult to dig for.

Colonization, or simply shoot for drastic population reduction in the next century. Given the evidence of previous extinction events, I'm betting on the latter 'solution' for now.

I highly recommend the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's fiction, so the science is suspect in places, but it raises a lot of fascinating issues - the main one being that the science and engineering behind keeping Martian settlers alive might be the easy part. The politics of what happens on a new planet is the hard part.

Fertilizers can last forever. Matter is not actually used up.

As long as we have enough energy, we can make fertilizers. Of course, petrochemicals are a nice raw material, but not necessary.

And we are not running out of energy, anytime soon. (Though we may run out of oil.)

The conservation of matter is an amazing thing.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe - Carl Sagan

Yes. Though to be more precise, in the process of using fertilizers, even the atoms are conserved. Though you will have to re-build the molecules.

On the practical side: Using coal as a raw material, you should be able to make fertilizers with only somewhat more energy than from oil.

I'm pretty ignorant of geology.. The main reason I added space mining was because a rush for resources, especially commercially exploitable ones, seems to have spurred significant third party interest in risky exploration.

Rather than the government funding everything, the mere possibility of being able to find a 100 ton lump of gold (or whatever) would get multiple space exploration efforts kicked up the butt immediately ;-)

Computers only advanced though because we tried to build better ones. You don't build better muscles by lifting weights you can already lift.

If we want to advance our Space Travel technology, we need to keep trying to do things beyond our reach, to force us to improve.

actually you do, but I completely agree with your point despite that :)

I wondered about that but dismissed the idea because computers and survival technology seem to have both come on leaps and bounds in the last 20 years without significant government or space program involvement. Or no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com