Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.
Here on HN we say that is a feature not a bug lol.
I guess I'm just a bit weirded out.
> First, and most serious, I believe, is the almost exclusive teaching and learning by means of pure abject memory. This in no way teaches physics as a science. Nothing is understood; it is only remembered. This in no way satisfies the reasons I outlined for teaching science. Memorization of laws does not permit one to make applications of these laws to new situations; it does not permit one the pleasure of ultimately making scientific contributions; it cannot teach any techniques with the hands. From memorizing, knowledge is not understood, and the beauty of nature is not appreciated. It does not tell how things were found out, or reveal the value of an inventive free mind.
> For example, the telescope is an interesting device to make, understand, look through, and play with. It turned men's ideas and minds in new directions. It gave a great impetus to the modern revolution of thought. For a long while it was the sole revealer of the vastness of the heavens and man's modest place in it. But, in Latin America one learns that there are four kinds of telescopes: the Newtonian, the Cassigranian, etc., etc. In the first, the image is virtual and inverted, etc. (I put in all this "etc." because I really don't know how many kinds of telescopes there are, or what their names are, or which way the image is in each kind. But don't underestimate me; I know a very great deal about telescopes – how they work, how to make and use one, their powers and limitations, etc.) The result is that the telescope is lost. There is no more telescope, no lenses, no stars, no eyes, no light – just words memorized without requiring understanding. The examination is passed, for the question was "What are the four types of telescopes?"
> I must say immediately that I am not against memorizing. Some things, even many (though nothing special) may be learned by heart; for example, it is good, but not essential, to know by heart 7 x 8 = 56. What I oppose in any teaching philosophy is that the philosophy is used exclusively; but in this case it is especially serious because so little is left of the subject.
> ...
> When asked what Brewster's Law is, advanced students answer in a flash: "Light impinging on a material of index n is 100 percent polarized with the electric field perpendicular to the plane of incidence if the tangent of the angle of incidence equals the index of refraction."
> To these same students I then say, "Look out at the bay from which the sunlight is being reflected. If I look at that reflection through this piece of polaroid and turn it, what will happen?" All I receive are blank stares. No one knows. But I get cries of surprise and delight when they try it and see the reflections getting brighter and dimmer.
> This shows something is completely wrong. There is no knowledge whatsoever of nature. With the wrong entrance clue the memorization is useless. These students are like books, no more. I can look in the index of a book under "Brewster's Law" and find a reference equivalent to the students' reply. But in the index I cannot find "sun reflecting on bay."
> What do the students know that is not easily and directly available in a book? The things that can be looked up in a book are only a part of knowledge. Who wants such a student to work in a plant when a book requiring no food or maintenance stands day after day always ready to give just as adequate answers? Who wants to be such a student, to have worked so hard, to have missed so much of interest and pleasure, and to be outdone by an inanimate printed list of "laws"?
1: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
Please allow me to quote former vice president Dan Quayle...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Quayle was not a smart man, even by the standards of politicians.
It has radiator fins, so I assume that’s the main form of cooling over radiation; but with such a thin atmosphere I wouldn’t have that it could take away that much heat.
From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...):
efficiencies above 10% have never been achieved and most RTGs have efficiencies between 3–7%
Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?
The vast majority of heating/cooling that people experience in their day to day lives is done through conduction from the earth's atmosphere so in most situations you'd lose heat more slowly on Mars even if it is colder. It's kind of like the difference between being in cold air and cold water.
You would probably need very little thermal insulation, if any, for a space walk around Pluto as heat from sun will be quite low as well.
The energy of any radiation that may be going through a vacuum at a given instant is not a property of the vacuum (and is not an actual temperature).
I'll leave it here as I think I have repeated the same thing enough though I am not sure it has been heard.
I made a simple, yet fundamental statement. It's either true or false. There is no need to argue as if you had to out-do me in any way.
Vacuum cannot have a temperature. This follows immediately from the definitions.
This also means that the temperature of a vacuum's "walls", by which I'm guessing you mean particles in 'contact' with the vacuum, is just the temperature of these particles. It's not an indication of any "vacuum temperature".
Have a nice day.
That's what I have been repeating, yes.
You seem to agree with me since you explain how 'temperature' may be assigned to vacuum as a fudge. This is a dangerous thing to do as equilibrium temperature does not depend on the vacuum itself but on any radiations present.
In fact, during some weeks of the year the Space Shuttle could not visit the International Space Station because at the ISS inclination, the Shuttle would have spent too much time in the sun. The ISS, Space Shuttle, and other satellites have large radiators to cool them down.
Think about when it's cold, and when it's cold and windy.
Low pressure air is like "anti" wind, even less cold then no wind on earth.
If you set air pressure and humidity to "standard" values, and wind to zero, you can express the combination of other values as if they were a temperature, and call that windchill.
Of all the variables wind is most important, since the rest don't vary very much on earth. But air pressure does vary on Mars, and thermal emissivity varies in space.
The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.
The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
The country or company ? Its lured by the competition and wanting to be the one winning the prize.
But as a society ? When the inevitable "why fund space travel / fundamental physics / ..." question is asked ? Side gains is where it's at.
Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".
You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).
Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.
I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" - and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.
We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.
Individuals may think like that, but I think you're downplaying the Space Race. There was immense fear of the Soviet space domination, it was seen as an existential threat. If there could be only one goal driving us to those furthest horizons, it'd have to be conflict.
From the same speech as your quote:
"For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding:
JFK to Congress
"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth"
However, just building something like Biosphere was incredibly difficult and laor intensive. Trying to do that constuction on Mars would be a LOT more difficult still.
Think about it. To get off of Mars, you have two options really. Land the take-off rocket with the fuel in it or land it dry and then fuel it up. Landing a take-off rocket wet is super hard, especially on what amounts to virgin regolith. Fueling up the rocket means you make the fuel on the surface and transport it to the rocket. Also, super hard.
Supposing that you did manage to find a good pocket of the raw materials that you need for the fuel, you still have to have astronauts do that mining, or you need to invent reliable robots to do that for you. Such robots would completely transform the mining and resource extraction economy of the Earth. Then you need to get that fuel to the rocket somehow. Again, either you use astronauts or you invent a hell of a self-driving tanker, which, again, transforms the lives of all humans on Earth. There is the other issues of building the landing pad, the job site for mining extraction, the issues when the fuel spill everywhere with Earth 8 lightminutes away, the scientific issues of just mining willy-nilly into the regolith, the static electricity issues of super dry and thin air, yadda yadda yadda. Even with astronauts on Mars directing all the chaos, it's a nightmare of logistics and black-swan events to refuel a rocket.
Like, comparing the Apollo missions to the eventual Ares missions is foolhardy. The tech we got out of going to the moon is going to seem like brightly colored wood blocks compared to the F-35 that is the tech the Mars missions require.
The carbon and oxygen needed can be extracted from the atmosphere; the rocket only needs to bring the hydrogen - just 1/12th of required fuel mass.
The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.
PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.
Before we try to colonize Mars, we should try colonizing Canada. It's warmer than Mars! It has air and water, so it should be easy! And yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...
Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)
To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.
Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.
However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.
"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.
Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.
These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.
Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.
As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.
So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.
>The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.
"Oil rig workers" or not, if people on Mars would live there until their old age and death, I'd call them colonists. If they are there on a 3 year rotation, then nope, not colonists.
(As a side note Antarctica would be the perfect place to learn about eventual self-sufficient space colonies in an environment which is a softer version of Mars, without complexities around airlocks, suits, oxygen and the omnipresent sand etc.)
Earth has limited and dwindling resources but Mars is still completely untapped. Then again I have no idea what could be so rare or useful to actually drive the colonization of Mars. I mean maybe something like that exists already, but I just don't have an idea.
But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.
The atmosphere is too thin, and the planet itself is too small to maintain a real atmosphere. Even if we terraformed it using science fiction technology, most of the atmosphere would escape into space so it would require constantly producing this atmosphere, requiring a lot of off-planet resources, which is fundamentally impossible.
In addition, the lack of strong magnetic fields and Van Allen belts means that cosmic rays would kill everything eventually.
Everything they object to can be dealt with, including radiation and low gravity. If close to 1 G turns out to be necessary for human health, we could build cities as inclined racetrack centrifuges.
Given enough energy, we could not only make fuel in-situ, we could even make plastics out of the Martian atmosphere. In addition, Mars had geologic processes which would produce mineral ores. An entire human civilization could be started on Mars. Historically, this would be analogous to the founding of the United States, just without the smallpox and killing-off the people already there, also starting from more desolate conditions. (Instead of just starting agriculture and industry, we would have to start biospheres.)
Nothing in the article will stop individuals from trying, only government policy can stop that.
Good on the article for outlining a lot of the issues with this, though I don't think enough time was spent on the mental aspects. We're adapted to live in a certain environment - a different one with different, more boring light, minimal plants, extreme temperatures, no area to roam, etc., is most likely going to be a miserable experience for all involved.
Okay, but that's the experience in an atmosphere that is 100X thicker than that of Mars. :)
Humans are poorly adapted to space travel, and it takes a great deal of effort to keep humans alive in space.
It's a shame about what's happening to our habitat, when you think about it that way.
But I do agree with Musk: we must colonize Mars in order to survive the next extinction event.
Self sustaining architecture is one thing, getting it scaled up is another - and relatively hard.
Plus design so as to not cause problems related to living in confinement or in dreary space.
This necessitates at least village scale if not a bigger city.
I'd expect this specific thing to not be a problem - birth may need some assistance which we already know how to do.
Perhaps aquatic creatures might adapt better to an extraterrestrial environment: Squids in Space!
The next step is finding people who want to live in a permanent totalitarian technodictatorship, given that one small act, say a minor hvac compromise, is all that it would take to kill everyone in the Mars colony within hours. Seriously, on Mars, the consequence of the smallest criminal action is colony genocide. Think of the social and legal consequences of that. Presumption of innocence is too expensive when the consequence of crime is everybody dies.
I mean I imagine any Mars colony could be incredibly selective about who to take.
The title should really read "Humans Will Never Colonize Mars (using current technology, that is)"
Just imagine what happens if, finally, we are able to set off a bunch self replicating drones that will collect materials and fuel from across solar system and set it off to deliver raw materials in the direction of Mars. We might not even need Mars, we would just build platforms in space.
It is not really that inconceivable. The solution isn't outside the realm of physics. It really is just a bit of programming (not even AI) and kind of technological moonshot program (ie create a system of space factories that can gather and process raw materials up to the point where they can replicate themselves, creating also a bunch of drones that can scour solar system for raw materials and deliver variety of them to the factories).
A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self-sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nuclear energy and hydroponics, yet even this isn't being done.
How does the radiation environment on asteroids compare to Mars? Asteroids are extremely interesting targets for many reasons.
Let the machines colonize space (and let them create a paradise on earth)
It’s like seasteading except that when you get up to something the governments really don’t like the cost of intervening is extraordinarily high.
On Mars we can build our society of genetically engineered supermen that engage in plural marriage, ritual funerary cannabilism, and telekinesis.
At our current level of technology. Colonizing Mars is likely 50-100 years away, within that time frame it's very conceivable that we might develop the ability to travel between stars quickly.
This puts a hard lower boundary of 10 years for travel to an earth-like exoplanet. If we limit the craft's acceleration to 1g, add a couple of extra years (about a year to hit 0.9c at 1g acceleration, and then the same amount of time to slow down on the other end).
We also have to be clear what the end goal is for being on Mars. Is it to have a permanent research base or an actual livable planet where you can go outside and not die without a spacesuit. They're radically different.
Also, 8086 and 8088 had no MMU afaik.
"now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us." So we have machine learning that can do decent image recognition if you feed it massive dataset. How does that get to general AI? What, exactly, is the dataset I'm feeding a neural network to…live on Mars?
Intelligence is the only thing necessary to accomplish any task. We left the the so-called laws of Physics behind at around the turn of the 20th century. Medieval peasants would call cell phones impossible, so it logically follows that actually nothing is impossible.