Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
In my mind, the whole colonize mars plan, is nothing but a elites escapism, who refuses to deal with the problems the species causes on earth and the necessary political change that entails. Its in that, very human, not very different from a neanderthal, who wants to escape his tribe, to find new mammoths beyond the horizon. But easy mammoth is extinct now and all there is to do, is to sit on electrically charged rocks and meditate for enlightenment.
The same person advocating most strongly for colonising Mars is, er, also responsible for bootstrapping solar, battery and EV technology, and having a good go at working on traffic congestion specifically to preserve the environment on Earth. In fact that was his first passion, and his interest in Mars originated from an attempt to raise awareness of environmental issues here. He's devoting huge resources, time and energy to solve Earthside problems. So I really don't see where you got this idea that colonising Mars is about abandoning Earth, what did you base that on?
Is he? To an extent, but he's also extremely anti-better solutions that didn't originate with one of his companies. He thinks that digging thousands of tunnels for a vehicle per person is better for congestion than digging a significantly smaller amount of tunnels for rapid mass transit, which would cost less and is drastically better for the planet than everybody rolling around in a car, even a Tesla car.
Solar has been a steadily growing thing before Tesla was, so i'm not sure you can credit him with anything there.
It does not matter is it 50 or 500 years, technological advances will undoubtedly lead to spread beyond the Earth. Historically, many things were "never" - until we do otherwise.
I agree with the author that we need to solve problems here first.
EDIT: For example, atmosphere is not a problem, we can have entire planet living in vast network of underground tunnels, powered by nuclear energy. We already know how to bore tunnels. In that ways, also, it would be significantly fewer problems with cosmic rays and solar storms. Anyway, point is, for each problem there will be some solution if we put our minds into it.
Colonization of other planets in our solar system is probably feasible, but I doubt such a colony could be self-sustaining as modern technology requires incredibly complex supply chains to manufacture. And as long as we don't have any replicator-style technology this won't change. Imagine e.g. how difficult it would be to manufacture a microchip on Mars (or a space suit, which requires complex materials and processes). I think a colony on Mars could not survive on its own for more than a few decades. Colonizing other systems seems even more outlandish and outright in the realm of science-fiction to me.
I think we just believe that colonization will be normal in the future because science fiction works regularly tell us this story, so we naturally normalize it.
The opposite is also true. Many things we thought would be possible are either economically or technologically out of our grasp:
- Nitrogen fixation in wheat.
- A computer simulation of the catalyst that fixes Nitrogen in plants.
- Fusion power stations.
- Room temperature super-conductors
Maybe its possible to point to research that is almost there in most of these areas -- just like the 1950s.
We've made slow but steady progress on this pretty much since we figured out that man made fusion is possible.
- Fusion is around the corner, (and this time it is not yet again 30 years) it is just shifting more money into research, I read that globally only 50 bn is invested in fusion, jApple on its own has value of 2250 bn.
...
So that was one clear scientific reason. But people got the impression that the teams working on it are somehow unreliable, unorganized or keep moving the goal posts and are a butt of jokes.
I think the messaging around it doesn't help. It's the same with batteries or renewable energy as well though.
I’m sure we can have bases on any body in the universe, but that’s far from “colonizing”. If we want to live in tunnels or hermetically sealed bases we can do it on earth with much less effort!
The only reason to do it on Mars is hedging bets against extinction events. And I find it extremely hard to think you’d find someone interested in going anywhere otherwise.
It would be a lot more convenient to re-colonize earth after an extinction event than to colonize anywhere else!
> Recent observations have been made of the loss of Mars’s atmosphere to space by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission probe and the Mars Express spacecraft, along with analyses of the abundance of carbon-bearing minerals and the occurrence of CO2 in polar ice from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. These results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be emplaced into the atmosphere; in addition, most of the CO2 gas in these reservoirs is not accessible and thus cannot be readily mobilized. As a result, we conclude that terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.
For what it's worth, I think we will have cities of 10,000 on the moon because it's only 1 day travel and offers great recreational activities (moonball, moonbiking, etc). Televised sports offers a scalable business model.
I don't know why there's this assumption that living underground has to be in some dank basement with flickering fluorescent tubes, and that this is an absolute unsolvable barrier to Mars settlement.
I think we should just accept that if humans go to Mars, they're going to live underground and either go outside rarely or not at all, and just get over it. Maybe it won't be all that bad if it's done the right way. Realistically, a lot of space is going to be needed just for growing food, and that means the population per square foot of usable pressurized habitat floor space might not actually be very high. There may be wide open spaces and the opportunity to go on long walks through pleasant farms.
In Oregon near Bend we have a pretty decently large lava tube that's about a mile long, and in some parts it's huge. It's not exactly a pleasant place to imagine living when it's cold inside and lit by flashlight or latern, with walls that look like the inside of a dragon's colon and a floor of featureless sand that plays tricks with depth perception, but if one imagines it well lit with sealed, insulated walls, painted in light colors, or made to mimic the sky, with clusters of apartments and workshops and rows of plants, it actually could be pretty nice. The weirdest thing to get used to would be the one-dimensionality of the cave; it's just one long shaft with no side tunnels. That's what I imagine an early Mars habitat looking like: find a natural lava tube (due to reduced gravity they should in theory be bigger than the ones on Earth), and seal the walls and divide it into large compartments. Install solar panels on the surface, and then move right in.
Eventually one could imagine a habitat expanding by digging side tunnels once the right kind of heavy equipment is available, and maybe establish production for native building materials like sulfur-based concrete.
I think the urge to just hit reset and start from scratch is attractive because it removes all the messy unquantifiable problems like politics. But the reality is you'd just get more of that on top of virtually insurmountable technological problems.
Cost analysis of stratospheric albedo modification delivery systems
> We conclude that (a) the basic technological capability to deliver material to the stratosphere at million tonne per year rates exists today, (b) based on prior literature, a few million tonnes per year would be sufficient to alter radiative forcing by an amount roughly equivalent to the growth of anticipated greenhouse gas forcing over the next half century, and that (c) several different methods could possibly deliver this quantity for less than $8B per year. [1]
Benefits, risks, and costs of stratospheric geoengineering
> Using existing U.S. military fighter and tanker planes, the annual costs of injecting aerosol precursors into the lower stratosphere would be several billion dollars.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Costs
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Scrolling the cited wikipedia article down shows that this is not without criticism including skepticism that this will work at all. I’m personally gonna remain skeptic. There is a lot of atmosphere out there, and there is a lot of CO2 in it. Spraying aerosol sounds a little like trying to stop a hurricane by exploding a nuke inside it. Not only will it do nothing to stop the hurricane, but now you’ve made the hurricane radioactive.
The difference between CO2 emissions and geoengineering is that CO2 just randomly happens to change Earth climate. If we start changing climate directly and intentionally we can optimize all variables for maximal effect.
I agree that it's very underdeveloped and underresearched field. That's why I put my estimate at bellow 1000 billion dollars or 1 trillion.
Compared to potential costs of the climate change it would be worthwhile to invest 1 to 10 billion $ into geoengineering research to make sure that it will work, what side effects could it have and to figure out the costs precisely. We may have already triggered tipping points in the ecosystem that will lead to substantial global warming even if we stop all emissions tomorrow.
But my original point was that geoengineering appears to be feasible. If we can do it on Earth we can do it on Venus and to some extend on Mars too.
The fact that we caused climate change shows that we can terraform this planet. We could also do the reverse if we all stopped burning fossil fuels right now, but we are generally unwilling to do so.
If Mars were covered in easily accessible hydrocarbons and had an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen, we could terraform it the same way by sending over a lit match. But those preconditions are not present.
If Mars were almost exactly like Earth before the Industrial Revolution, only a bit cooler, we could make it exactly like Earth in a few hundred years by mining/drilling for fossil fuels and burning them in big piles.
Having access to space along with manufacturing and mining capabilities may give us some surprisingly large benefits in the long run. Right now the idea may seem a little silly because we don't even know for sure if we can do it, much less construct a plausible business plan to make a profit at the same time.
Anyways, part of the interest in living in a habitat on Mars is that it would be on Mars, doing (potentially) important work establishing an outpost in space that gives us easier access to the rest of the solar system. Rocket fuel can be made on Mars, and the weak gravity makes it easier to transport stuff up and down the gravity well. Getting back and forth to the belt (which may have significant mineral resources) is easier than from Earth. Basically, going to Mars isn't about just going to Mars, it's about establishing a foothold in space. It's also something we could plausibly do with current technology, if there's enough funding and enthusiasm to make it happen.
The atmosphere problem seems tractable by living indoors. I don't think we have any idea what mild gravity does to a person. We have some limited experience with microgravity but nothing with mars-like graviy.
Short term plans might be unrealistic, but never is a bit much.
Just have to define colonize and human in a way that makes your argument work.
Everything else is a challenge but to colonize you need upside motivation.
Europa has liquid water, but the average surface temperature is still colder than the worst ever recorded on Earth. The speculative oceans you seek would be encased under miles of solid ice, just like Titan's. Europa is likewise catastrophically radioactive.
These places are all extremely small, extremely far away and extremely deadly. They make Mars seem pleasant.
Good luck storing water and other supplies though. I foresee water piracy in the floating cities.
Much more opportunities and less risk for robotic AI out there.
Lagrange point stations may be feasable again.
They were a thing in the '70s.
Less hassle with those pesky biological necessities.
Of course still problems with radiation, but much thinner shielding needed.
And thinner Umbilical/Lifeline to Mutha Oith.
Low Life Need Not Apply.
Of course much less romance. But who cares, it's business anyway.
If we get AI with human like object manipulation and engineering skills before 2050, then I expect prices of basically everything to go down to the cost of impact on other market participants by 2075. Building stuff will be brought down to the impact of raw resources extraction etc.
We will may be technologically short of 1M people on Mars by 2075 if we assume no AI. Take nuclear submarines as first order approximation. Currently we seem to have around 500 submarines, although only 1 in 5 seems to be nuclear. So, with the current GDP doubling time of 25 years we could expect 2000 submarines by 2075 and 400 nuclear submarines.
For 1M people on Mars we would need an effort comparable to 8000 Ohio-class submarines with the current cost of 16 trillions dollars. In 2000 Bill Gates was worth 60 billion, today Musk is worth some 180 billions. If Musk or other billionaires could keep that rate they still would be short to command it alone, but only by an order of magnitude with ~3 trillion assets.
IMO impossible without AI, but possible with AI.
But even if it's possible, I think that people will not want to live on Mars in that numbers. It would require around 1 in 10 000 people to migrate to Mars and I don't see the apatite for it.
So, IMO it will not happen, not because it will be impossible, but we will not want to do it.
Some space exploration timeline from Metaculus [0] a prediction aggregator with established track-record [1]:
- When will Starship reach orbit? 50% after 2022
- When will SpaceX's Starship carry a human to orbit? 50% after 2024
- When will SpaceX launch humans around the Moon? 50% after 2026
- NASA lands people on Mars before 2030? 4%
- Will SpaceX land anything on Mars by 2030? 80%
- SpaceX Lands People on Mars by 2030? 26%
- When will the first humans land successfully on Mars? 50% after 2036
- When will the first AGI be first developed and demonstrated? 50% after 2047
- What will be the longest uninterrupted stay in deep space at the end of 2050? 50% less than 650 days
- One Million Martian Residents by 2075? 4%
Plus the radiation on the planet will give you superpowers like flying and x-ray view.
> A Citizens' Council of seven members, similar to a Board of Directors, will be popularly elected. The Citizens Council does not, however, manage day to day operations of the Colony. That task is left to a governor, who is appointed by the Council for a single, non-renewable six year term.
So a weak elected legeslative body and a strong indirectly elected executive with very few checks on their power.
> Under the Code, living and working in the Mars Colony is a privilege, not a right. All those who come to the Mars Colony will be permitted to stay under a license. That license is revocable. Similarly, all real property is held by the Mars Colony and leased to individuals or companies working in the Colony. Misbehavior results in losing the right to remain within the Colony.
Fun.
If you lose your license do you get a berth on the next shuttle or are you exposed to the elements?
This sounds less like the best laws and more like some of the more dystopian laws. Its basically a company town where you are not allowed to own property, don't have rights and are exiled if you step out of line.
Luckily the whole thing is bullshit. Nobody is on mars yet and nobody has adopted this. Easy to make laws when you don't yet have power.
So just like coming to US on a work visa. You loose your job - you’re out immediately.
And btw, Blue Card can be exchanged for unlimited residence after working there for 21 months.
> So a weak elected legeslative body and a strong indirectly elected executive with very few checks on their power.
Weak elected legislative body (Congress) and a strong indirectly elected executive with very few checks on their power (the president).
> Under the Code, living and working in the Mars Colony is a privilege, not a right. All those who come to the Mars Colony will be permitted to stay under a license. That license is revocable. Similarly, all real property is held by the Mars Colony and leased to individuals or companies working in the Colony. Misbehavior results in losing the right to remain within the Colony.
It's a very roundabout way of saying: you can live in the U.S, but we can send you to jail and remove your rights as we wish. Similarly, your assets are tied up as collateral, that will be collected and liquidated if we decide to revoke your rights. Misbehavior is a "Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go" ticket.
On the other hand, if AI technology is good enough, you might not need the human operator except for certain complex tasks. Most of the time you might be able to get away with high-level tasks like "dig a hole here" or "load this equipment onto this rover".