Don’t stage off Starship

Water is actually probably the best shield, because you'll need it to support humans along the way. Gamma still is a risk but I think the concern has mainly been higher speed subatomic particles.

Anything with heavy nuclei actually produces significant and also highly damaging secondary radiation when hit by fast moving, heavy nuclei, cosmic rays.

Another interesting thing: Apollo astronauts could see sparkles in their eyes from the radiation effects of getting hit by cosmic rays travelling through their skulls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena

A loan shark that owns the air you breathe.

"Hey honey, let's cash in our retirement plan and doom our children to a life where they'll never see the sky except through a visor or viewscreen and never again feel the wind on their face."

Then, you send the human-carrying version.

I think the way this is going to work, is when there are 1000 Starships on the surface, some of them with workshops, some with power plants, others with science labs, human quarters, and so on .. and they land in a big field.

Humans arrive, string them all together.

We better start thinking about the legal issues now, as they are complicated, rather than just doing it in a rush when it starts happening.

That flight will likely happen in the next quarter.

Meanwhile, while SpaceX has been wading through NASA design reviews and red tape (some of which is probably good for them!) for Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon, they've been hard at work on this next-gen rocket for years (the engines since 2009, the rocket itself since 2014). We will likely see a SpaceX Starship reach Low-Earth Orbit within a year, so it's time to start considering what other requirements for getting to Mars might take longer to build.

The rush to get people into space and men on the moon was because of politics. If Musk wants people on Mars, he doesn't need bodies in orbit, he needs ships capable of carrying bodies in orbit. It's fine (and unnecessary) if they're unmanned. Which SpaceX has already done, docking with the ISS. NASA and the USSR were hasty putting people into orbit because it was a political necessity, not because it was important to the goal of developing ICBMs, surveillance satellites, or whatever else. They each needed to be the first to put an object in orbit, a human in orbit, a human on the moon, etc. Musk needed cheap, reusable spaceflight as an intermediate goal and a maned Martian capable profile as goal number 2. He doesn't need to take his picture at all the road signs along the way.

Musk at some point said he wanted to launch a human toward Mars by the 2024 launch window. I think this is optimistic, but it's not that far off. I would be surprised if they don't launch in time for the 2029-ish launch window.

If each launch moves 100 american-person-years of CO2 production off of the planet, that's... 1600 tons of CO2 that isn't being released.

100 person years per launch seems like a vast under-estimate too.

(Number sourced from the first paper that appeared when I searched "CO2 footprint of the average american" - https://externalassets.cooleffect.org/lib/content/wp-content...)

In the grand scheme of things I doubt enough people will go to mars to make a significant positive difference, but that's nearly synonymous with saying I doubt there will be enough rocket launches to make a difference.

Once a human society learns how to thrive on a single colony there is no reason it could not spread across the planet.

You are right of course that interplanetary colonization is completely different thing from the European colonization of Americas.

But it's quite silly to think it is childish. The thing is, we don't know what it would be like.

So you could be proven right ("what a silly idea this was, let's go home") or you could be proven wrong (it turns out humans can thrive elsewhere and we become an interplanetary species).

What would benefit our species is drastically reworking the economy to stop the massive waste and production of greenhouse gasses (which Musk may have slightly improved with Tesla, credit where credit is due).

Also, putting more economic and political power in the hands of the many instead of concentrating it all in afew hundreds or thousands of people would go a much longer way towards improving our species than some 'colony' on Mars.

I’d say do like bill gates and put the billions directly into worthwhile causes instead instead of suggesting the trickle down will be unquantified but amazing.

> The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs.

To put it another way, myself and Bezos are not equally free to spend Apollo mission money on solving problems.

And you really legitimately think that they did not know about this piece of information from the children's book about space? They don't mention it because it is so ubiquitous and common sense that they assume everyone knows it, not because they managed to "miss the memo" about Mars. The idea is that we terraform Mars with technology to make it liveable, not that we just go there and try to build a hut from dirt and call it a day.

Here's his article about radiation on Mars:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-is-f...

And here, on terraforming Mars:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/atmospheres-an...

And on the immense infrastructure we'd need for a sustainable colony:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/what-would-it-...

Detection is a solved problem.

Altering the trajectory of an asteroid requires a large amount of lifting capacity to be available on relatively short notice. That is, it has to already exist when the crisis is identified.

Congratulations. You've identified a positive externality of Starship.

Challenged— that’s the number one natural threat to (human civilization on) Earth. Or maybe the number one threat assuming we survive the next thousand years.

The number one threat at this moment is deliberate annihilation of the ecosphere by a very small number of insane humans.

The number two threat is negligent annihilation of the ecosphere by a plurality of merely shortsighted humans.

Not only is a Mars colony uniquely susceptible to these existential risks, the process of building one could plausibly make them worse.

Space folks like to talk a lot about how the technology you use to survive in space is technology you can use to live better on Earth. They don’t like to talk about how the technology you use to get to space is the same technology you use to murder human civilization anywhere it hides.

I wonder why.