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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

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If we all wait to start anything in Mars when it is too late for our planet, well... humans won’t be around anymore.

Think about Mars as redundancy site for the human race.

It only counts as a redundancy site if the colony could survive without Earth. What's the minimum Martian colony size that's self sufficient? Self sufficient doesn't just mean the ability to create sufficient food, water, air, shelter, sewage, etc but the ability to recreate all of the necessary machinery starting only from your initial supplies and undeveloped Martian natural resources.

So many of the industrial processes that we've developed assume a huge interconnected network of supplies. To make Mars self sufficient you'd have to reinvent a huge chunk of the modern industrial system while also trying to keep your small population of colonists from dying. It's a monumental challenge with today's technology.

I agree with you, but this isn't about creating fully working self-sufficient backup in a single go. There needs to be a first step, and then another, and so on. We will learn great deal from it, be it IT technology, materials, physics but also about us - psychology, physiology etc.

What event are you thinking of which will make Earth less hospitable than Mars? Supervolcano? Asteroid?

All those plus climate changes, lunatics in power, etc.

With all those things, even after nuclear war, Earth is still much better place for life than Mars.

Depends on the size of the asteroid

> Depends on the size of the asteroid.

Which is inversely correlated with the chances of it coming in any particular timeframe.

I'm the biggest fan of colonizing Mars, but my children know that if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.

And yet, I'll be the first in line.

> if Daddy ever has the chance he is going to Mars to suffer, not to play. Mars will be hard and unforgiving. Life will be horrible for the first two generations at least. At no point will it ever be better than life on Earth.

This reminded me of computer tech in its first approximation: hard and unforgiving. It took about 2 generations to make it into a ubiquitous mobile device. In about four generations AI will make space colonies possible. "And AI shall produce acomodations for adventurous humans and preserve them". Space seems first and foremost the realm of AI, embodying our outreach. We won't actually go to space unless a planet is discovered and farmed to be hospitable.

Bioterrorism, rogue Nono-tech, rogue AI, hyper-stable authoritarian government.

Pretty sure we would bring all of this baggage with us to Mars.

Bioterrorism strongly depends on the incubation period. Probably safe on Mars. Rogue nanotech - not unless it has AI. (Though gray goo is not considered very realistic nowadays, as we've realized just how hard even regular nanotech is, and how hostile the natural environment is to nano-scale mechanisms.)

Nuclear war is the big one. Mars colonization would be less about preserving human life, per se, and more about preserving an operational duplicate of the peak state of human civilization.

My opinion is that these are just be symptoms of our social mental state. We're the virus. We need to fix ourselves. Maybe space exploration will help us see a little more long term? Hope so.

But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then. In my opinion, it is better to spend money that would be spent on a silly Mars pipedream to put out those fires first.

> It is much more likely we annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons or global climate change and pollution way before then

That’s the point.

Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation.

Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation protection, and water can be extracted from the clouds of sulfuric acid droplets there. You couldn't directly breathe the air, but oxygen could be produced in-situ, and bags full of breathable atmosphere would be buoyant, so you could easily suspend cloud cities there just by using the atmosphere inside the environment domes.

There's this real cool concept about a manned blimp that was produced by NASA a few years ago. It has a really cool video to go with it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0az7DEwG68A

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end, useful as a research base but nothing more.

But without easy access to heavier minerals it would be essentially a dead end

People who have been thinking about this are way ahead of you. There are plenty of minerals on the surface. We should be able to build remotely piloted mining equipment using phase change materials (like water) to shed heat. To cool the equipment off, we just haul it back to the high altitude base before the phase change material tank runs dry.

You can do both. It's not an either-or scenario like you are describing.

Also a very tiny amount of people are working on space right now (maybe 500,000 between NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ESA, ISRO, JAXA, etc). That's 0.00625% of the world's population.

It's actually in about 100 million years as the sun gradually increases in luminosity.

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."

I see an estimate for 1% every 110 million years, is that enough to make Earth uninhabitable? Surely not.

Apparently the Earth's orbit places us in the hot end of the inhabitable zone, so only a relatively modest increase in received energy makes us go the way of Venus.

Yea, I think a good demonstration is Antarctica. Antarctica is both much more accessible and much more hospitable than Mars. But there's very little human activity there.

It's hard to imagine there's an economic case for Mars or the Moon while Antarctica remains undeveloped.

It's worth noting that Antarctica remains undeveloped in large part because the Antarctic Treaty System bans commercial exploitation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

Not that there would be much going on without the treaties, but it would likely be commercially viable for oil exploration or maybe mining.

Antartica is not a stepping stone to further and greater endeavors out into the cosmos It's more of a "dead end", cosmically speaking. This is why it doesn't have same interest or appeal.

There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

Note, these things are true for any next-gen space endeavor in our corner of the solar system. It doesn't have to be Mars, or even just Mars. For example, we could build larger and more advanced facilities and machinery in LEO, while also building a small base on the moon and exploring Mars for the first time.

Antarctica is a great place to do science, and the majority of the activity at the US South Pole base is currently astronomy. Mars and the Moon will pass through that sort of phase before they might become actual colonies.

Yeah, I don't mean to put down Antartica. I think the research we do there is very cool, and we should keep doing what we can there. But it isn't even close to an alternative to humanity pushing further out into space.

> There are also other reasons. You can't learn about the possibility of life on other planets in Antartica, and seek to answer one of the greatest questions of all time: "are we alone?". You can't closely study another planet in Antartica. You can't be a brave new explorer seeing incredible places for the very first time in Antartica. There are far less new scientific and engineering challenges in Antartica whose solutions will greatly benefit everyone here on Earth. And so on.

That's an argument against research on Antarctica, but that's the one thing humans do there.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that you can do in Antartica that wouldn't benefit from being done in space.

For example, Antarctica is a great place to research Antarctica. And Mars is a great place to research Mars. For that reason alone, there will be people on Mars, even if there's nothing to commercially exploit there and no reason to colonize it.

Not necessarily true. The artic and Antarctic destroy structures over time. It's also dark for several months at a time.

No light for part of the year vs no air ever. Hmm, let me think about that one for a minute.

I think settling Mars will and should happen, but anyone who doesn’t realise it will be thousands of times more expensive, risky and dependent on external support than eg Antarctica I think isn’t really grasping the difference in scale of the problem.

Yea, I mean, just as far as accessibility, it costs 10,000 times more to deliver a pound of cargo to the ISS vs McMurdo station in antartica. I don't have numbers for the building and maintenance of the two stations, but presumably its even more than that.

Mars does have an atmosphere, although unbreathable.

I don't think it's called air if you can't breath it.

Colonizing Mars and others is not about the economy. It is about survival of the human race.

The irony is that this kind of technology could be important on earth now. From an environmental perspective a closed ecological system could be very beneficial. A system where resources are not wasted or allowed to pollute. And where all outputs are used as an input for something else.

We already had this but then we decided to dig out fossil fuels and we could no longer go back to the previous life style.

Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what?

Wasn't there a fair bit of difficulty involved in building fleets of sailing ships and exploring the Earth? As it so happens, the reward for doing so was to become dominant in the new global geopolitical context. There's an incentive to keep up in the new expansion of context to keep from being left behind and engulfed in a larger context. The potential total population of the solar system, even based on just on foreseeable technologies, asteroid resources, and solar power could easily be in the hundreds of billions. Fusion power increases that potential by orders of magnitude.

It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.

These aren't mutually exclusive things. And make no mistake: Many things involving ocean travel prior to the industrial revolution literally involved rushing to places that want to kill you, via another place that wants to kill you. Isn't rushing to a place that wants to kill you another kind of "doing things that don't scale (at first)?" If it means eventual geopolitical dominance in a future larger context, there will be wealthy nations willing to foot the bill.

It's been claimed that the high demand for timber is partially responsible for much of the deforestation of the British Isles. In fact, the demand was so high that the Colonies also provided a significant quantity.

http://www.wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Melby-Patrick.pdf

The performance of the large American frigates may be partially attributable to the characteristics of American timber.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-USS-Constitution-bounce-cannon...

In Roman times, the British Isles were also a significant source of lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain

We do not have the technology to settle every inch of space on Earth in a sustainable manner. We also do not have the tech to live on Mars.

There is a good chance that creating the tech for the later will make the former possible, but not vice versa.

The benefit of going to mars is that it opens up knowledge and know how / experience upon the human race to go further beyond. Spreading our species gives an evolutionary advantage.

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