Mars Is No Earth
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.
We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. *Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game, none of them lasts forever. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species, might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving that they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds.*
Herman Melville in Moby Dick spoke for wanderers in all epoch and meridians. He said, "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas."
Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Silently, they orbit the sun. Waiting.
She's talking about the man who accelerated our transition to electric cars by years, who is significantly lowering the cost and acceptability of solar power, is enabling the transition of the grid to renewables through the Tesla Megapacks, is pouring billions into battery R&D which will be critical to a green transition, is sponsoring a $100 million prize into carbon capture and is researching the production of fossil fuel replacements from carbon dioxide.
Who has done more?
But ze electric cars and push to megapaks.. No one!
To be fair then: Tom Werner of Sunpower, Dan Shugar of NextTracker, Employees at Bell Laboratories (created the first solar cell), Employees at SunEdison (created the Solar PPA, the backbone of even Musk's solar financing) all have done more for Solar Photovoltaics. I don't know who to credit at First Solar but, surely someone: these are all the Solar OG's.
We've been doing the "spiritualism self understanding" thing for 100,000 years and it's just let to wars, virgin sacrifices, and other dumb human outcomes.
It's not even clear what "understanding ourselves" means.
I'd argue that Science has led to more enlightenment and improvement of the human condition than spiritualism ever has.
Indeed. At some point, if you stare inwards hard enough, you just end up divining patterns in a random number generator.
Any consideration that there's depth to the majority of human beings beyond sophisticated pursuit of Mating or Resources is completely delusional.
Some, very few people, have vision, but the grand majority are just existing in the four F's of survival (myself included, I'm no Elon Musk or Jobs or Einstein or Pasteur).
Plus there's a non-trivial overlap with what you need for a self-sustaining Mars. We know we can build a functioning supply chain on a planet rich in resources; the real technological question remaining is, can we build a functioning supply chain out of nothing but energy and the requisite atoms not already preconfigured in desirable molecules?
BioSphere was interesting and all, and this Mars shot is interesting, but if we really want this kind of technology, what we really need to do is to build ourselves a base in Antarctica, with the goal of producing a base that can build a duplicate of itself with no additional outside resources other than what the base itself can scrounge from the environment. (With possibly a couple of carefully selected exceptions; we might spot them some yellowcake or something.) Or to build a base, whose goal it is to build a base, that can then duplicate itself without the first base. Once you have that tech stack, you'd have a pretty good idea what you need to do to start building self-sustaining space presence.
The problem is, it's intrinsically impossible for such a base to compete economically on Earth with the other entities using the local abundance of resources. It has to be a deliberate project.
If I were a billionaire targeting human survivability in the long term, this is actually what I'd be doing right now, not reaching for Mars. Once you have this in hand, you'd have something you could actually send to Mars and have some hope of it surviving.
(This gets you a good 80%+ of the way to super-long-term sustainability on its own terms; anything short of an extra-large planetary impact event would in principle be survivable by such a facility. Lifting it into space later would almost just be the icing on the cake.)
Breaking free of gravity, moving industry
Beyond the planet's surface into space
Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies
Total productivity and nothing goes to waste
Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids
While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased
So reach for the stars, they're not that far! The only way to go from here is out!.
Ann Clayborne?
If you define "terraforming" as "engineering a planet for safe long-term mass human habitation", I would really rather we focus our terraforming efforts on Earth. We're currently not doing a great job at that and it's a several orders of magnitude easier problem.
https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-En...
Note first that it proves too much. Richard Nixon referenced this speech as he was resigning the presidency after Watergate. Was Nixon the "man in the arena" who deserved praise for "striving valiantly"? He thought so.
Not also that it assumes what it is trying to prove: that the critic does not have practical experience, that the cause of the criticized is "worthy", and that "daring greatly" is more important than daring correctly. But perhaps most importantly, it assumes that critique is epiphenomenal, that it will not have any effect on the course of events. But we know this isn't true.
In this case, many of those critiquing the project of manned planetary exploration are experts in the field. They are in the arena as much as those being critiqued.
The Earth will one day be dust, whether by astronomical disaster or by the sun's natural lifecycle moving to later stages. We live on the Earth. If we do not go elsewhere, we will be dust at that time. So for self-preservation, we'll need to go elsewhere eventually.
Mars is elsewhere, and is much easier to reach/terraform/colonize than say... Proxima Centauri B. Mars is a good "practice" shot at being elsewhere.
So obviously, we should go to Mars. It's just a question of when.
So all the hand-wringing about the inhospitality of Mars is just fluff, this is really the gist of the article. The "fault" of Musk is not that he is pushing humans to Mars but that he is not "helping those in need", whatever that means.
Are people like Bezos, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin etc (arguably group who are more in position to help) really "helping those in need" so much more that Musk deserves to be singled out, just because he doesn't use his wealth buying frivolous tropical islands but is executing his vision (misguided or not)?
The entire article boils down to this one tired old argument.
And in the case of Musk, while Teslas don't help people in need directly, the adoption of electric cars and other electric transportation will help the entire world population by reducing air pollution and climate change.
So, whynotboth.jpg.
This one tired old argument again. While reducing air pollution is a plus (at least in city centres), electric cars are nothing but green washing. If you really are concerned about climate change and pollution, reduce the need for cars and own no car. Abandon Euclidian- and single-use zoning (i.e. reverse urban sprawl and make cities liveable again), improve public transport, make cities walkable, improve bike infrastructure, etc. etc.
In other words, put in the actual work instead of shifting the problem around and creating even more intrusive infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained ("tunnels", "hyperloops", blah).
You don't even have to change anything if you just keep driving your 2010 ICE car until it literally rusts away under your buttocks instead of buying a new car (electric or not).
It'd be interesting to compare the actual CO² and energy use difference (including manufacturing costs for the new car) between driving an existing ICE car less frequently and keeping it longer versus buying a new electric car while keeping the the same driving habits.
The issue is the article actually had a tired argument, your broken attempt to reframe electric cars as useless is really bizarre and not fitting at all to the sentiment it just points out how shallow and negative you are being
That "genuine development" you talk about is over 140 years old. In fact the very first cars in mass use were electric and it was only later ICE cars became more popular due their advantages (back then).
It's not a new or even great development at all if nothing changes in the end - you still need to build these cars, old ICE cars won't just disappear either - they'll be shipped to poorer countries in turn increasing their air pollution and need for infrastructure.
So instead of viewing my point as "shitting on things", how about refuting it with counter facts instead? Like, how is it better to still rely on individual transport, huge wasted areas due to sealed natural ground for roads and parking spaces, the inefficiency of urban sprawl and ridiculous zoning laws which necessitates cars in the first place, deaths and injuries from car accidents, etc. etc.?
Electric cars are like treating symptoms instead of the cause and the treatment basically just trades one symptom (air- and noise pollution) for another (need for more infrastructure) while leaving others untouched (roads, parking spaces, cities built for cars not humans, etc.) and celebrating them as a solution to environmental problems is... very irritating, to say the least.
No one's gonna refute the ""arguments"" because it's a fucking long dipshit statement of epic proportions. Who wants to argue with a 5 year old?
Put in the actual work yourself instead of shifting the blame on others for not enacting the changes you desire.
Note: I agree all the issues you listed (mostly city life related) are real important issues. And they are hard issues. Especially because they are not technical issues. And I would love to see them fixed. But they are not Musks responsability.
By the way Musk did and still does claim to provide "fixes" for these problems: tunnels, hyperloops, and point-to-point rocket flights, because "I would love to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner" - you know, as one does. [1]
The thinking there isn't visionary at all - it's good old 20th (or even 19th) century thinking with 21st century tech applied to them. I mean - why even fly all the way to Riyadh in the first place if you could instead improve tele-presence to the point that physically going there doesn't make much difference anymore?
> Put in the actual work yourself instead of shifting the blame on others for not enacting the changes you desire.
First of all - cheap shot, especially since it's not me who declares that electric cars are the solution to pollution and climate change and it's not me who advocates for personal lifts into underground tunnels under every home to fix traffic. Secondly - I don't own a car and take the bike, the bus and the train instead. I live by my principles, even if it hurts sometimes. What about you?
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...
Oh come on. Electric cars are a fix, just not a total fix. Cars are going to be replaced by new cars anyway, and replacing them with electric instead of ICE is strictly, objectively better for the climate problem, as it cuts emissions down and increases energy efficiency. Would it be better if we had less cars and more public transit? Sure. It's also a completely orthogonal problem. Also, what would be even better than more of current public transit? Fully electrified public transit. That is a possibility now only because of development done for electric cars.
I'm reminded of "Copenhagen Interpretation of Morality" - the view that if you as much as touch or comment on an issue, or worse, try to do something towards fixing a part of it, you suddenly become responsible for it all, and judged by not coming up with a complete solution.
See THIS is were I disagree completely. An electric car that replaces an ICE is NOT better than an ICE car that's not being replaced at all (be that by using it longer or by simply not needing it anymore).
Actual fixes exist and I listed some of them. You don't even have to get rid of all cars - it'd already be a huge step forward if the average number of personally owned cars per capita went down below 1.
You see, the problem with seeing electric cars as ANY sort of fix or improvement is that it's actually preventing much needed change from happening. This has nothing to do with any bullshit philosophy matters - it's just a facts-based assessment of the situation.
There's even more to the whole fixation on personal transport by means of automobile that I didn't even touch on. Not a single traffic problem will go away with electric cars and the inefficient and destructive suburban lifestyle will be actively supported even longer. Again, and I can't stress this enough - if you actually care about climate change and efficiency, you need to change your LIFESTYLE, not your car.
Lipstick on a pig...
> An electric car that replaces an ICE is NOT better than an ICE car that's not being replaced at all (be that by using it longer or by simply not needing it anymore).
That's not on the table, though. People who now drive ICE cars will continue to replace their cars. The immediate choice is between buying an ICE and buying an electric, and the latter is strictly better. Over time, this will eventually (hopefully) replace ICE cars with electrics.
> ANY sort of fix or improvement is that it's actually preventing much needed change from happening
It's not preventing anything, as new cars are going to be bought anyway. You can argue that it reduces perceived urgency of reducing the number of cars on the road. That I'm willing to admit.
> Not a single traffic problem will go away with electric cars and the inefficient and destructive suburban lifestyle will be actively supported even longer.
True. But that's exactly orthogonal to the idea that, ceteris paribus, replacing ICEs with electric is an improvement.
> if you actually care about climate change and efficiency, you need to change your LIFESTYLE, not your car.
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen at scale, though. There are three tried-and-true ways to get people to change their lifestyles: economic pressure, religion and new technologies. Just asking isn't going to help.
Does accelerating the transition to renewable energy count? Of course, reasonable people can differ on how big a difference Tesla Motors has made, but it's undeniable that Musk took an enormous risk with a large chunk of his then available assets.
Showmanship, and the inescapable realities of rocket science. The truth is that it is technologically easier to land on mars than the moon. The delta-V requirements are less because of aerobraking into the mars atmosphere. And you don't need to worry about restarting big landing engines in zero gravity. So it is easier to put an object to the surface of mars than to put something on the surface of the moon. Landing on Venus is off the table and everything else is too far away. Mars is therefore the easiest target for anyone wanting to make a show.
Imho we will have an easier time living on our moon or any number of asteroids. Even Mar's moons would probably be easier than getting back and forth from Mar's surface.
Not a popular opinion among rocket surgeons but you know what they say about hindsight.
But it is not a solution for our relatively short time problems (100-200 years). It won't solve global warming, nor will be an alternative for mankind against what global warming will do this century here.
All the arguments about colonization of other planets strike me as tautological. We should have people on other planets because it would be good to have people on other planets, or we shouldn’t because we don’t have people on other planets and we do have them on Earth. So people will argue, and each side will direct the resources they have to their side of the argument. Not sure what else there is to be said.
It took humans 100,000 years to go from spears and caves to developing portable phones to surf cat videos.
So we have a lot of work to do to get to interstellar travel.
Ultimately we are going to go extinct and there is no point to the colonization scheme other than delusions of grandeur.
Let's focus on one thing at a time!!!
(*All numbers are estimates)
We still have to develop fusion, some sort of way to shield our ships from space debris, faster travel, etc.
Or maybe develop physics so advanced that we can wormhole to places.
Who the hell knows. But that's only a few million generations to create enough Einstein's to get us off this planet.
Meanwhile smart people are having fewer kids than the average people an education for the masses is worsening. So it's kind of a race against time.
Edit: Much easier to move out of the way when the Sun expands into a red giant, as well. Not that we have to worry about that for a while yet.
It’s likely a signaling mechanism. The elite doesn’t need technology because they don’t need change. So opposing change signals that things are good for you already.
I don’t love Elon Musk but at least he dreams big and has a change-positive attitude. Because I think things do need to change.
It's clear from reading the article that the real issue in the article is not Mars or Earth or Carl Sagan, it's Elon Musk. Or more specifically, the complete lack of respect Elon publicly gives to elite media.
I like the comparison between the Canaanite religion and Judaism. The elites are Canaanites and dealt with their not being enough for everyone by having the lower classes sacrifice their children to Mammon. This is the equivalent of the endless complaining about useless eaters and overpopulation by extremely wealthy people.
The Jews, and the rest of the Abrahamic religions on the other hand, let the people who properly prepared survive (e.g Noah), with a few carveouts, such as the gleanings for those that didn't. The king could never take your property without just compensation. The priest could never ask you to sacrifice your children. This individualistic struggle to survive is what culturally has led to the huge technological innovations in the west.
I don’t think that is the consensus view. It was more to do with the university system, the scientific method, and the invention of capital markets. That and a huge influx of free resources and gold that came from the discovery of the Americas. Also of course the Middle East was annihilated by Ghengis Khan and Western Europe wasn’t. A lot of historical factors were at play.
Fixed that for you (agree with the rest).
I can also think of instances when mainstream media has been uncritically supportive of new technology, even when they were pretty obviously unsound. One example was their uncritical promotion of filtering technologies that would magically remove microplastics from the ocean, even when there was no way for them to distinguish microplastics from same-sized algae and microorganisms--in addition to a host of other logistical challenges.
So I don't think the problem here is that media elites hate change, or that all change is inherently good. In this case the Atlantic is pointing out real, significant challenges for permanent human habitation of Mars at a large scale. Do you believe there's any way to write that story that wouldn't be "anti-technology, anti-progress"?
There are a number of species alive today that existed in a similar form when the dinosaurs were alive.
A Martian society would survive by virtue of already being equipped to operate in a hellscape.
This alone is a reason to support the space program. The excitement and curiosity it taps into gives us an opportunity to fund science and technologies we need longer-term, that are otherwise unfundable.
If we recklessly consume Earth into dust that's actually ok because technology can save us as we simply load into rocket ships for a new life on the offworld colonies.
If we accept the notion that actually there's only one Earth, that we already live on a paradise planet and that we must protect what we have then going hand and hand with that is the notion that we'd have to halt much of what we've been doing doing for the last decades to save paradise.
The acceptance of one planet that must be conserved at all costs suggests that there could be even be limits to production which is antithetical and untenable to capitalists.
Not only will you be drawn and quartered for blaspheming, some might just kill you out of pity. The poor mad thing.
Today a 7 year old can say that with as much non-chalance as you please. And yet - Mars is impossible. A delusion. Surely you jest.
Nah. This just comes off as alarmist.
We might accelerate a naturally occuring process ever so slightly but it is by no means an exinction event. You underestimate the homo sapiens ability to adapt to their surroundings. Berbers live in deserts, eskimo in ice tundra - arguably the very extremes of human habitats. You can throw everything at them short of a super volcano really. When the polluters have to pay the piper - they'll get their just desserts. Unfortunately a world war for resources isnt out of the question. We're not even close to that yet. Not when Apple Inc is still the most valuable company in the world.
What I hate is the destruction of millenia year old forests and the biology that inhabits it. That's just driven by mindless greed when fucking Doritos is more important than the home of the last wild jungle elephants or 2 millenia old trees just cut with impunity. Not to mention the people to whom those forests are holy land and home.
- ISRU fuel production on Mars is closely related to carbon neutral green fuel production on Earth. In other words, turning carbon dioxide into fuel.
- Agricultural production on Mars and vertical farming on Earth.
Is that so? Which timeframe are we talking about then, because for the entirety of humankind's existence, including its ancestors (so going back at least 4 million years), Earth was a mighty fine place to be. The occasional ice age didn't stop our non-technological ancestors from spreading all over the globe either.
> You really only can argue that maybe it is one or two centuries too early to think about colonizing Mars, but you gotta start somewhere.
How about closer targets then? The Moon is just a few days o travel away, can be evacuated at short notice if need be and communication delay allows for near-realtime information exchange. This obsession with Mars and "colonising" it is really quite baffling to me.
It's not even clear whether the physical conditions (especially gravity, which no amount of "terraforming" can change) would allow for long-term human settlement. Instead of planning (permanent) research outposts to find answers to these questions, Musk is already fantasising about "1 million people on Mars by 2050", which is just bonkers.
Considering that our species developed in an environment with 1g gravity, 1 atm of air pressure, plenty of water and moderate temperatures, I find it quite astonishing how anyone in their right mind would find Mars of all places to be necessary for human survival.
A civilisation capable of modifying an entire planet's atmosphere, temperature, and magnetic field would much more easily (in terms of energy required) be capable of creating free floating habitats with orders of magnitude more living space, carefully tuned parameters (air, temperature, artificial gravity, etc.) and versatility than a small cold, barren rock like Mars.
It would be much quicker to create such artificial worlds, worlds, too than to slowly heat up and build up an entire breathable atmosphere.
By the way - where are all the required elements for a proper atmosphere and ecosystem (e.g. nitrogen and phosphorus) supposed to come from? Even extraction from minerals (assuming sufficient presence) would be incredibly costly: 1 m³ of air is appr.1 kg of nitrogen and given a similar composition of Mars and Earth, about 0.03% of the crust would be nitrogen. That'd be about 3300 kg of soil to process per m³ of air to get the nitrogen for an Earth-equivalent atmosphere at sea-level. If you want a column of just 100m of air with a density in that ballpark, that'd already be 300 tons of soil to process per m², or (given an average density of 4 tons/m³) 70 metres of the entire surface of Mars...
Just to give you an idea of what the scope of such an undertaking (e.g. "terraforming" Mars) would be. It's something that a post-scarcity society can do as a vanity project, but most certainly not as a "necessity for survival".
It almost did. Estimates range there were between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs of humans 70,000 years ago.[0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Also, climate shift is implicated in the collapse of Mediterranean civilizations in the Bronze Age.[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#Possi...
> How about closer targets then? The Moon
Not as hospitable or cool. :c But a Moon base space port seems like an important strategic asset.
> Musk is already fantasising about "1 million people on Mars by 2050", which is just bonkers.
Yep. Have research outposts first.
> A civilisation capable of modifying an entire planet's atmosphere, temperature, and magnetic field would much more easily (in terms of energy required) be capable of creating free floating habitats with orders of magnitude more living space, carefully tuned parameters (air, temperature, artificial gravity, etc.) and versatility than a small cold, barren rock like Mars.
Agree. But bioengineered supervirus or bolide impact or short-range nuclear war are still salient existential threats that multi-planet civilizations would resist better.
> It would be much quicker to create such artificial worlds, worlds, too than to slowly heat up and build up an entire breathable atmosphere.
Artificial habitats are definitely 1,000,000 times better than living on planets for many reasons, but I don't think they're quicker or easier to make than colonizing bodies. How do we do mega-scale construction with our current or near-future orbital industry capacity or material science or governments/incentives?
It seems easier to stay rock-bound for the time being.
> By the way - where are all the required elements for a proper atmosphere and ecosystem
Yep. It's easier to have an improper atmosphere and ecosystem.
Well, life belongs into the environment it's adapted for.
Planets are just a collection of physical and chemical parameters that can be emulated without life "knowing" or "caring about" the difference.
A culture of bacteria in a petri dish couldn't care less about the nature of its habitat provided it gets the nutrients it needs.
You argument already falls part with regards to humans: we can take the same idea and argue that humans don't belong in houses and that cooked food is unnatural and therefore wrong. Same difference.
The idea of colonizing other planets and terraforming them, on the other hand, sounds appealing.
Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust.
> we can take the same idea and argue that humans don't belong in houses and that cooked food is unnatural and therefore wrong. Same difference.
Not quite, there's a balance to be struck here. I certainly don't think humans belong in tiny apartments where they eat processed foods while hunched over their media terminals.
How do you get from free floating habitat to soylent green pray tell? A field inside a free floating habitat grows the same wheat that a field on a planet does.
The air and water you breathe and drink on Earth has gone through many a dinosaur and you breathe molecules that Dschingis Khan breathed in with every breath you take here on Earth. Just because you don't realise that everything you eat, drink and breathe on planets is recycled as well (I guess that's what you're referencing when talking about "soylent green"), doesn't make it any less true.
> Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust.
While it's true that both aren't achievable with current technology, one isn't any less bold than the other. Given the same amount of effort, one can create living space equivalent to hundreds of Earths, while the other yields a fraction at best.
Simple economics suggests that one is more efficient than the other. "Boldness" is very subjective and thus not something I'd choose as a basis for my argument. But YMMV.
IMO Planets are for research and recreation. Space is for living, working, and expanding into - why try so hard to escape one gravity well and its consequences, only to go back down into another?
Like I said, I'm not making an argument, I'm expressing an opinion, a matter of taste. If you don't get why the idea behind things like Soylent are repulsive to some people, I don't really have the words to explain it either.