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Starting a colony on the ocean floor is also challenging and possibly leading to a lot of innovations [1]. However, compared to the efforts around Mars, there is no-one trying to settle the deep seas (that I know of). You don't need to go to another planet to find problems.

So for Mars, I don't think merely the opportunities for _any_ innovation, are a convincing enough argument, at least for those investing in Mars. For them the specific innovations around spaceflight and non-earth construction are indeed valuable, because of future expansions into space and first mover benefits, using Mars as a stepping stone.

As for the colony on Mars itself, I speculate that having somewhere outside of existing jurisdictions is also attractive for a lot of people; the new unclaimed West. Some may imagine this to become a scientist utopia, free from the restraining politics of Earth; others might be more cynical.

We will see.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130930-can-we-build-und...

I don't think it's about space in general, but rather the vision of making humanity an inter-planetary species (at least that is what Elon Musk talks about a lot). I think the idea of expanding humanity beyond our single planet inspires a lot of people, myself included.

Fundamentally that is how it is different from colonizing the ocean floor.

Let’s send people to Mars where there’s a million reasons unknown and known they can’t survive so that they are forced to innovate to survive. Or you know, they die. This is a moronic argument for Mars colonization.

They’ll have the same or worse technology we already have on earth. They’ll have far fewer people and far less access to things to solve problems they didn’t plan for. But nah they’ll innovate and make great innovations, more than could ever be done here. I don’t wish to be rude but I honestly cannot understand for the life of me the rationale of this argument.

It is a moronic argument. Try building a self-sufficient city on earth first. I think space colonialists will be surprised just how difficult it is.

Solving interplanetary space travel is the most expensive form of procrastination I have ever seen.

If we look at the reasons why people have historically colonised parts of the Earth, many of them would now seem pretty crazy. But craziness was apparently no barrier to entry. Perhaps colonists just are morons?

(Myself I think we'll go when it's easy. The best way to make it easy is to work on relevant technology like nuclear fusion, automated manufacturing, CRISPR, and so on.)

except they didn't truly conquer those places, they just colonized the populations (and sustainabloid life patterns) already present...

What exactly does conquering mean to you?

In support of your parent, I am thinking of the Polynesians. Arguably the most successful colonists ever. They drifted to previously uninhabited islands. Likely most attempts would have resulted in death in open ocean.

They didn't drift. They knew how to sail. How to transport live fruit trees over vast distances. The history of the pacific is really long and complicated.

I don't completely disagree.

There would have been indications in wave pattern. And they knew how to read these, as well as meteorological hints and knowledge of tides.

Nevertheless, in the context of this discussion, landing up on an inhabited island thousands of kilometres from here is a huge shot in the dark, and most hopeful colonists would have missed.

Landing up on an inhabited island thousands of kilometers from here is a huge shot in the dark, but you know you got air and fish, and you can survive even if your seeds don't grow, and you know you can leave if the island is not ideal for survival.

But on Mars, you don't have proper air and you don't have wild life for food. And you cannot easily leave for other better places.

I meant it's most unlikely to successfully reach said island. There'd have been many more who'd tried and died trying.

Once the location is established, regular trade becomes much more feasible.

Yes, there's no guarantee of finding a destination. That's one form of idiocy. Another, from today's point of view, is killing all the inhabitants (if any) upon arrival.

>But on Mars, you don't have proper air and you don't have wild life for food.

Good point. It would make sense to send robots in advance to manufacture huge stockpiles of air and food. Which is of course beyond present technology.

Agree that's it not a good idea .. but the problem is one of investment as much as innovation.

With enough money you could set up 1000s of semi-autonomous robots to mine, mill, farm, .. and make more robots to help.

Citation needed that asteroids are easier to mine.

They win on arbitrarily long timelines, but they start to look a lot worse if you want ROI in under 10 years. It takes a ton of energy to reach and return from most asteroids in a sensible period of time. With unlimited time you can use various slow tricks to park them in accessible orbits, but this is a gold rush not a 100 year infrastructure project.

O'Neill had it right IMO, Lunar and Martian mass drivers firing up to Lagrange points are going to win. In the early days those bodies win because you can iterate on your mining tech way, way, way faster and keep up with the falling cost curve. In the later days economies of scale win the day.

Think about all the innovation coming out of military research. Like the internet - arguably more useful to humanity than the space blanket!

So should we spend trillions more on military? Well maybe it is just that spending trillions on research towards anything tend to lead to some useful inventions on the side. But what if we spent the same amount of resources on researching something actually useful for humanity? We might still get the side inventions.

Building a colony on Mars is a useless waste of money.

> they’ll have no choice but solve them

Isn’t that a bit like saying if you toss a 10-year-old off a boat, he has no choice but to swim?

The focusing effects of a clear goal are real and powerful. But lets not pretend that the default option isn’t death.

You are missing the part where the colonists go there on their own volition.

Trivia question: did you know that most of the Mayflower colonists died? Ahem, I mean, all of them died. All of us will die sooner or later, some people find it meaningful to go where no one has gone before, even if that means danger of death.

You do realize you can innovate here on earth right? And that you'll have a lot more money with which to innovate, because you didn't waste it all trying to strand yourself on another planet?

Necessity is the mother of invention. Imaginary necessity not so much though...

There are plenty of unmet needs right here on earth.

Couldn’t this exact same argument be made for building a colony a mile under the ocean? except, of course, that we could easily rescue those people.

can't we just be honest with ourselves and say we want to do it because we have an innate desire to explore and expand our horizons? I think that's a good enough reason - economics should exist to support human endeavours, not the other way around.

Red Mars is a good book to read for this.

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

Arkady wouldn't like this article.

On the other hand they also assume that tenting large areas of Mars will be the way to go, just like this article

There are already devices designed to melt the rock as it is being bored and use that molten rock to line the tunnel as the machine progresses. Not sure how that would impact your statement about needing concrete, but thought I would share anyway.

Why not create a colony on the Moon then? Much faster, cheaper and easier to reach, etc, etc

While I like the moon for those reasons, it has the downside of 14-day-long night and wild surface temperature variation.

While solar + batteries will last an Earth night or a Mars night, for something with a big enough population to be called a “colony” rather than a “base”, you suddenly find you need either a nuclear reactor, or some very big orbital mirrors, or a circumlunar powergrid.

None of these options are impossible, but they might make people prefer Mars.

There are places on the moon where there is quasi permanent sublight. These places also have some ice and are perfect for a moon base project.

Although not “eternal” in the original sense, they are sunlit for extended periods, well beyond the typical lunar day-night cycle.

What is the significance of such features? Permanently lit areas of the Moon are important for future habitation and use of the Moon for two principal reasons. First, these sunlit areas are prime locations for the establishment of solar photovoltaic arrays. The constant sunlight here means continuous generation of electrical power using solar panels. This solves one of the most difficult problems of lunar habitation, survival during the 354-hour lunar night. Prior to the discovery of the quasi-permanently lit areas, we imagined that the only feasible power source to survive this long night was nuclear reactors. Such a power system does not exist and would require several tens of billions of dollars to develop. So sunlit zones allow us to go to the Moon and stay there without this expense and technology development.

The second advantage of a sunlit area is that it is thermally benign. The surface temperatures at the lunar equator and mid-latitudes depend almost entirely upon incident solar illumination and range from less than -150° to over 100° C, a 250° temperature-swing over the course of a day. In contrast, the surface temperature of these quasi-permanent lit areas is nearly constant – a nice, toasty -50° ± 10° C. This simplifies the thermal design of surface habitats and equipment and greatly relieves the energy required for thermal control at an outpost.

The sunlit areas of the poles occur in close proximity to high concentrations of water ice and other volatiles at the poles of the Moon. Their presence indicates the lunar poles are the best places we have found off-planet for human habitation. Constant sunlight, benign temperatures, near the water and a great view – that’s prime real estate.

[]: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the-lu...

https

Gravity.

I personally like the idea of a colony on the Moon. In my mind I even have the killer app for such a colony: an astronomical telescope. There are 5 things going for such an telescope: 1. no atmosphere (so no need to deal with atmospheric turbulences in post-processing) 2. no radio chatter 3. no seismic activity 4. 14 days out of 28 the darkest night one can have inside a solar system 5. a little bit of gravity. The last one is something that can't be said about space-based telescopes like Hubble and James Webb. Having a bit of gravity means you can have people working over there. It means you can perform maintenance and upgrades. With Hubble and especially James Webb, what you send in space is what you'll ever get. So you better send something good. Once in space, there are no iterations, except software upgrades. Nothing like "move fast and break things". This necessary perfection at iteration number 1 makes the price of a space-based telescope skyrocket. JWST is projected to cost a cool $10 BN [1]. At that price, I'm sure we can build a whole Moon base and a telescope much bigger than JWST.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...

Correct me if I am wrong but aren't the Martian moons uniquely suited to build sky tethers for inter solar slings shots using current tech?