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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

Things I know about Mars:

No established legal or social framework.

Things I know about Earth:

Probability of finding a place to be left alone with a small group of like minded people. 0

A certain type of person is interested in living a life where they have a large amount of control over the political and social systems they live with. The American frontier was an ideal place for such people to move to. Many took advantage of the opportunity. This frontier is now closed.

Off Earth is the only viable place for similar frontier to exist and Mars is the best place. It has a ~24hr day, decent gravity(0.38g), Ok solar radiation, H,C,O,N readily available on the surface, and possible terraforming to a open-air livable planet.

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>Probability of finding a place to be left alone with a small group of like minded people. 0

Probability of doing the same on Mars, where even getting there means submitting to all kinds of established legal and social frameworks to be accepted on a mission, and where you'd need to stick close to other members (whatever minded they are) to survive and constantly report back home: below zero.

>A certain type of person is interested in living a life where they have a large amount of control over the political and social systems they live with.

Mars is the last place that type of person should be concerned with.

(On top of total establishment control of any "political and social systems" there for the next 100+ years, they'd also relinquish control over the environment to whatever capsules of livable space said establishment can build and give them in its own terms).

There's always Western Sahara and Antarctica, much more realistic (and already habitable) places, with internet and everything.

Maybe the US could designate some areas for "free towns" in northern Nevada and western Oregon (currently almost uninhabited) where all national, state, and county laws (except maybe pollution laws) are not enforced. People there just deal with the local laws and taxes. Would be cool to see how some of these areas would develop.

The upper atmosphere of Venus is actually the closest to Earth conditions we have in the solar system.

Just float around in an airtight habitat. Gravity is the same as on Earth, pressure is the same, temperature is 25C. You literally only need to be airtight to keep the noxious atmosphere at bay.

But where do you get additional resources?

Literally out of thin air.

By closed-system agriculture and farming and so on.

Why, where would you get them on Mars?

From the ground. Building materials etc.

If you want to build a closed system, it doesn't make sense to put it into a gravity well.

It's easier and much more efficient to get resources such as raw materials and metals from the ground. Being in the air without option of landing means you are completely dependent on import of raw materials to repair/expand your habitat. Very inefficient as well as not economical.

It might be cheaper to get to Venus than to Mars but on Mars you can actually start mining and building factories on the ground. At some point, it becomes much cheaper and more economical. It's just the initial hurdle of getting there with enough stuff and people to start a colony which can self sustain itself and grow.

Once you have brought enough initial stuff to Mars, you get to a point where you can start extracting materials from the ground and free up all the cargo in the ships for just people and perhaps some special items you still cannot manufacture on Mars. But majority of cargo space is freed up.

>It's easier and much more efficient to get resources such as raw materials and metals from the ground. Being in the air without option of landing means you are completely dependent on import of raw materials to repair/expand your habitat. Very inefficient as well as not economical.

Assuming you overcome all the other difficulties and have a colony on Venus' skies, what prevents you from having ships that can go to the ground, get stuff, and come back?

It was my understanding that the surface of Venus is infernal, with super high temperature (hotter than Mercury which is closer to sun), rains of sulphuric acid and very high density. Building machines capable of landing there and being able to return seems like a tall order.

Since for humans it is inconceivable to go down to Venus ground (they'd die immediately from the heat), mining materials and then lifting again and returning back to the habitat in the upper atmosphere, then you'd need to automate the whole process.

The automated machine would have to be incredibly durable to survive the hellish ground environment and be able to fly away again. Also drones that would do the mining work would need to be made from incredibly strong materials. There's a reason we only send suicide probes to Venus that live maybe for couple hours before dying.

Also for humans, cold temperature is easier to survive compared to very high temperature. We can generate heating for astronauts (batteries in space suites can generate heat, we can recharge batteries from solar panels brought by the mothership or on previous automated mission, or from RTG). I'm not sure how would a cooling system for astronauts to be able to survive in 700 degrees Celsius for longer than few minutes even work.

High temperature and strong winds on surface can be beneficial to machinery. You can fight with them or you can use their help to reach goal. IMHO, an AI system and physical simulator can develop some pretty interesting ideas how to use these conditions for efficient mining and transportation.

First idea: use wind to power instruments directly via mechanical or pneumatic link.

Second idea: use silicon to produce machinery and tools.

Third idea: high temperature means it's much easier to melt ores, some metal can be collected directly in liquid form.

Fourth idea: air balloons should be very inexpensive way of transport ores to top of atmosphere, where they can be picked up by colonists.

Fifth idea: use mechanical computers to control equipment. It's not so hard to create surfaces which will perform calculations required to navigation, landing, mining, and floating back to surface. Mechanical computers can be crawled out of silicon, with liquid metal for transportation of messages, and vibration can be used to power such computer. 100kHz vibration is easy to reach. At 100kHz, it will be equal to 1kHz electronic computer.

Check out what happened to the Venera landers. It's really hostile at the surface.

The atmosphere of Venus on ground level is incredibly hostile. 467 °C temperature, pressure equal to 900 m underwater, winds with speeds of 100 m/s and covered in clouds of sulphuric acid it even has lightning strikes. The longest we have been able to keep a probe operational on the surface of Venus was 2 hours.While the gravity is slightly lower than on earth the pressure itself would make it incredible hard to launch anything from the surface back up. It's like launching an armoured rocket from 900 m below the sea while being bombarded by lightning and acid eating away at you + lifting up resources at the same time.

I'll get the Zeppelin...

Another benefit is that getting to Venus is a lot cheaper than getting to Mars.

No established legal or social framework.

Not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

And where are the weapons to enforce this?

- "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"

You think they'd let random "mavericks" go there without a police and guns and laws?

The whole reason of spending trillions to get people there would be to exploit and control the shit out of the place...

We can put that another way: the odds of a populated Mars being an anarchist utopia are nil. Politics and power dynamics would remain.

Moving planets doesn't let you escape power-structures, and anarchism is still stupid - you still have to hope you get a good power-structure.

It appears you are setting yourself up to a series of sound disproofs, such as having to point out how communities with purpose without the damaging effects of power dynamics are more efficient, intelligent and effective.

Even in a frontier society there are power structures, and they are better off that way, no?

If you can get to Mars then the US military can certainly do so. The government would certainly deploy some power structures (police force and/or soldiers) on Mars once a sizeable colony is built there (let's say couple hundred colonists that can self sustain themselves). To keep order and enforce laws and potentially, if the colony grows enough to have a functioning economy, to collect taxes.

Good luck trying to be 'left alone' when you're literally at the mercy of an Earth government for the importation of the very air you breathe.

Terraforming is an interesting concept. Are there even ideas how to keep the thin atmosphere near the surface?

IMO there is plenty of space left on Earth - oceans, deserts...

Not saying that we should colonize all Earth, but IMO it'll happen way before any significant Mars population due to costs.

Its also worth mentioning there are plenty of places on Earth with pretty hospitable environments, it's not just deserts and the article circle. Yes cities are overcrowded, but that's just because people go there for jobs.

My wife's grandmother lives in a remote part of Eastern Europe, the nearest small town with a supermarket is half an hour drive away and the nearest neighbour is a few km away. She (aged 78) grows most of their food, and milks cows for a living. In the winter it can get down to -20c, but with modern insulation that's nothing to worry about. The fire/boiler is fueled by wood they chop down on their property. There are plenty of similar places in even more favourable climates like Spain or the US.

Yes, agreed! There is so much space left, I really don't see any overpopulation (that's not isolated to certain places) happening anytime soon.

However these places lack the advantages like no government. Oceans are ideal for that, deserts less so.

Plenty of international sea available.

I would not mind if all misanthropes went somewhere else and left humans on Earth alone.

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