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Comment by OmicronCeti | Hacker News Reader

I see no point to it. As another commentor mentioned below, humanity is unlikely to travel to another star system. To me, terraforming Mars is like going camping in your backyard. It's different, it's harder, fun, but ultimately has no real purpose. Mars is more likely to be colonized for exploitation of its resources than as some utopian egalitarian human endeavor. To me that would be a shame. I would like to see it preserved more or less as-is as a record of its own history.

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I think we absolutely can travel to another star system. But more critically, this argument strikes me as goal post moving by space settlement skeptics: mass transport to Mars is increasingly appearing to be feasible, so we’ll put the goal posts on Proxima b.

The exploitation argument doesn’t make any sense because Mars doesn’t have any resources that would really make sense to ever bring back to Earth, except as a side product. It’s a new home like an island in the Pacific for the Polynesians. I don’t consider Polynesians settling uninhabited new islands to be objectionable at all, but instead an expression of what makes humanity wonderful. Preservation of a dead rock for preservation’s sake makes no sense. It’s treating stasis as better than life, and I just can’t get behind that.

Also honestly I think it's extremely fortunate that we have Proxima Centauri only 4 light years away as our nearest star. It's a red dwarf, and will continue to shine for at least another 4 trillion years, a thousand times longer than the sun will shine. Of course, granted it's habitability zone and other things are different, but that does not preclude us redefining habitability by inventing another life form to be our successor.

Proxima Centauri will outlive the vast majority of stars in the galaxy.

It’s worth pointing out that an a long time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands (not to mention millions) of years, the stars move around quite a bit.

The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years.

But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.

I said this elsewhere in this thread, but I study surface processes on Mars, so to me the planet is still alive and active. Things change, mysteries unfold, new environmental conditions come and go.

I'm sure you wouldn't object to national parks or wilderness areas, it's just that in the case of Mars there is no (known) life. How much each of us values the presence of life will differ, but in my view it's worth preserving Mars.

Pick a different planet to preserve.

Venus is very easy to preserve.

Then he would have to do another PhD!

Thoughtful response, thanks for your participation.

To me, if mars had life in its past and no longer does then we could consider it one huge grave. Lost in the terraforming debate I read is that any atmosphere we managed to kick up would be temporary. It might take a long time to leak off, but they’re not discussing any means to reverse the trend. As I understand, Mars doesn’t have an active core and thus magnetic field holding its atmosphere in place. There’s no way we’re going to fire up a core…

Turning choice, large asteroids into liveable habitats seems an infinitely more productive task.

Firing up a core is hard, but laying superconducting cables around the equator is not particularly hard (probably easier than terraforming). It could replicate a magnetosphere just fine, while also functioning as a planet wide electricity grid and a decade-long battery.

“Temporary” == millions of years.

I'm a lot less educated on the subject and my views are diametrically opposed to yours. Commentary like yours is mostly what has kept me hanging around HN all these years.

I'm surprised that a researcher wouldn't be enthusiastic about being able to do science directly on the planet's surface. Sure, an extended human presence there will require a lot of supporting infrastructure, and sure, that will all have a direct effect on whatever might already be there -- or might not be, and in either case, changing that environment might not be desirable.

But even at the current faster speed of remote exploration of the planet, you can expect, what, like 3 more robotic missions to Mars before you retire? And each one will be an iterative improvement over the last.

There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. What's your position on that?

He is a Mars researcher, as in he finds it very appreciable it’s current state. Basically a Martian, you are suggesting we develop and add malls to his beloved nature homeland.

Please stop contributing to the recent HN trend of putting words in other people's mouths just so you can ridicule them. I'm not "suggesting" any such thing, and if you aren't professionally in ~OmicronCeti's field of study, then I'm not interested in your opinion anyway.

Hey! Sorry I took so long to reply. The commenter below you is somewhat correct that I would identify as a 'Red' in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy.

I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life.

Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying.

To your question:

>There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around.

I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.

I think national parks have value, but not infinite value. We should weigh up using somewhere as a preserve against other potential uses.

There are millions of Mars-like planets out there in the galaxy. I'd be more than happy to preserve, say, 10% of them. But there's only one that's in the right place to be the next step for humanity.

As I said elsewhere, I do not believe we will ever travel beyond our own solar system so we should preserve what we already have close by, instead of counting on pristine worlds elsewhere.

One reason not is: we're directly responsible for any suffering that then happens on that rock. A biosphere full of life means horror and suffering every day for so many living things it potentially eclipses all humanity's past crimes combined.

By that logic we should take responsibility for the suffering on earth.

Seems like the winning move is to go double or nothing and try and make life more sufferable (containing less suffering) on both planets.

Mars is a single easily avertable project, still actually free for discussion unlike profit-motivated matters like the ongoing deforestation here. Until there's a clear profit to be made from Mars, it's politically possible to make a "ok, let's not" pact.

Why not make it more sufferable here on Earth first, build all sorts of guardrails on existence, e.g. modify biology such that we all have a certain maximum to which the pain knob can be turned. And only then terraform other planets? Why be premature?

You should read medical studies about people born with or who acquired a lessened sense of pain. It’s quite horrific. I’m not saying all pain is necessary but any pain that indicates damage is. It would be wiser to engineer biology to be more robust and to recover from damage more completely so that chronic pain is not a thing.

Give me some credit, I just said put some maximum on pain, not remove it. Yes it'd be nice to recover from damage better but that doesn't help when you are being predated on, like when there is a torturer to make sure you don't recover or when a parasite like the Ichneumon wasp has its whole lifecycle dependent on eating a paralyzed creature alive from the inside out. If you want a discussion please be charitable, it's no fun if you seem to assume I didn't think at all.

This question (your last sentence) has been asked and answered. Basically because the window of opportunity is open now and may only be open for a short time. If we wait, we may lose the chance.

> “A biosphere full of life means horror and suffering every day for so many living things it potentially eclipses all humanity's past crimes combined.”

This is the most astounding perspective on the value of life that I can imagine. Like the argument of a genocidal supervillain.

"I have the moral obligation to kill all the living humans today so I spare the suffering of until generations hereafter"?

That's only if you equate the value of life-that-lives-now and life-that-hasn't-been-born-yet. The majority of us value them differently: it's a lot worse to murder than to decline to give birth. Consequently, you can hold the opinion "Don't turn Mars into another biosphere" and nevertheless be against omnicide on Earth.

That’s only if you neglect the fact that reproduction is a continuance of life. Literally a part of each living being renews itself to continue living by reproducing either asexually or sexually. Not reproducing is equivalent to murdering your germ line and extinguishing all of the potential invested in you by your ancestors reaching back millions of years or further if you look beyond your own species.

Death is death whether caused by direct action or neglect.

This isn't meant as a rejoinder, but I think you should ask random people what they feel about the difference between murder and declining to be a parent. I think you've been sitting thinking this to yourself without really debating anyone.

As for me, I'm bowing out, thanks for the perspectives so far. Downvotes drain my energy.

The more appropriate analogy would be murder vs forcible sterilization or otherwise preventing/outlawing someone else from having children. No one is asking Omicron to move to Mars. Just asking him (and others) not to prevent others from doing so using threat of law.

That’s the most suicidal perspective I’ve ever heard.

If we sit on our hands and do nothing then life on earth is doomed to extinction and we will be directly responsible. Our duty as rational beings is to preserve and spread life. If you really want to be anti suffering then figure out a way to improve things so nothing needs to suffer. We’re already on a trajectory for doing that for humans so there’s no reason to think we couldn’t do it for all life.

Even if the odds are slim it’s cowardly to not even try.

You know, I agree fully on trying and not being a coward. I wonder why it sounds otherwise to you. I just think there's no need to spread life beyond those of us who are here right now. It's worth keeping currently living individuals alive and happy as long as they want to live, because it's a great ill when something with a desire to keep living has their life forcibly taken away, but I don't see the intrinsic good in breeding.

> I would like to see it preserved more or less as-is as a record of its own history.

But on the other side, what is really the point to this?

In a couple of million years, none of this really matters.

I see it as littering, we'll all be dead in 100 years so what does it matter if I toss my trash into the bushes?

What about leaving behind awesome artwork?

We could turn mars into a sweet art project.

You mean add graffiti to my beloved red rocks? Blasphemy.

Can you at least tell us why you like Mars so much?

I can't help but see Mars as a dead rocky that has no special value compared to the billions of others in the galaxy. But Earth, as far as we know, is a unique jewel containing countless unique ecosystems.

It must be very different to you, having studied it. Like how a biologist may have a fondness for a particular nemotode worm which means nothing to most of us. It makes me feel shortsighted thinking of it in this way. Reminds me of pro-colonial/imperialist rhetoric like this[0].

Will our descendents see us the same way? Is there a good reason we want to extend our empire into the stars other than... seeing it a lot in sci-fi media?

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

Should the indigenous people of Americas, Australia, Arctic and Eurasia see themselves as a colonial force?

The ingenious people across the world are the original colonialist. Should we condemn them for what they did?

As a Polish person who inherited an extremely difficult history, I feel fine with my Slavic ancestors.

What I know is that The Sun will destroy the Solar System. The time will most likely destroy everything else with the heat death.

So, I would want to explore to learn the answer to The Last Question - does everything has to die in ever increasing entropy?

You can read the short hard science-fiction story "The Last Question" here: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The same goes for Mars then too, right?

I would like to see it preserved too, but it seems there are some tradeoffs with respect to survivability of intelligent life in the face of potential extinction events.

This is assuming that worst case scenarios are possible on Earth as on any planet… I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

Interesting. To me, Mars is a large rock in a universe of large rocks, but it could be our second home (even if it is done for profit). In conversations like this I often consider this comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/modules

I don't care about Mars' surface processes. If I had a button to blast its outer layer off and replace it with a habitable one I would press it without hesitating - yet I imagine if I spent years studying the planet academically I would act differently, based on an amalgam of my concepts of "studying" and "Mars" I came up with on the spot and am ignoring anyway. Empathy is a poor substitute for understanding.

There's a philosophical difference here too. I don't see a problem with pulling resources from as much of the galaxy as we can reach if it prolongs Earth life, assuming we don't find other lifeforms. The galaxy only has mystique when we assign it, which we can't do if we're dead.

I mean a few hundred years ago people believed humans could not ever fly, but it happened, and we take it for granted now.

There is model for flight on Earth: birds. Humans achieved a similar feat through mimicry and the use of fossil fuels. There is no model for instellar transit. I am not optimistic that we can develop a technology that can speed transport between stars to such a degree before we destroy ourselves like every other hominid that has ever existed.

Planes work quite differently from birds. We were inspired by them, but we didn't copy them at all. Attempts in the past to copy birds mostly failed.

We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies in the past half century without any mimicry.

Maybe you don't, but I have very strong optimism for technological advancement, and also for modifying our life form to rid ourselves of our tendency to destroy things before heading to other stars. When I say "we" will go to other stars, it won't be Homo sapiens, but another species that we will create as our successor.

The distance to the moon and Mars is absolutely trivial compared to even the closest star: to Mars is 0.0007% of the way to Alpha Centauri.

>We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies

You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.

> You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.

I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel.

We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor.

We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy.

Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.

'we' did not go to Mars, 'we' did not go to pluto. We sent cameras with walky-talkies. That is so vastly different than sending people to the moon, that it's not really something we can disagree on in good faith.

If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.

If we can send cameras with walky-talkies, we can invent and send (possibly silicon-based) life forms that will carry on our legacy while being a lot more resistant to the elements, require much less support along the journey, and can tolerate whatever gases and radiation may be present at the destination while still reproducing and carrying on society just as life does now.

Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.

I can't believe I'm entertaining a reply, but how would a human-invented lifeform sent to the stars carry on human society if it is a) not human, and b) light years spatially distance and thousands of years temporally distant?

This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.

It would carry on our legacy as intelligent life. I don't think maintaining our current iteration in evolution is a condition that should be valued. We can evolve, or invent another life form that carries our civilization forward.

Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.

The question “what makes us human” is a deep one that has vexed philosophers for a long time. I don’t have the answer. If you have the answer, forgive me if I take it with a grain of salt.

I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).

We didn’t land on the moon?

LEO is 0.0005% of the way to the Moon, and yet once we'd done the first it didn't take us long to scale up to the second.

That's simply a facile comparison because most of the fuel is needed to get out of the atmosphere. The energy required for that 0.0005% distance is nearly 66% of the total.

Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.

Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.

We got to the moon. 12 humans have walked on it. Note that 50 years later, nobody is living there, or working there. Nobody has even returned.

We may get humans to Mars. It's technically possible. But I don't think we will ever live there.

50 years isn't a long time. I'm sure some dude said the same thing about Tibet being too harsh to live in, and yet there are cities there now.

What are you talking about? People have lived in Tibet for 20,000+ years?

The person you're replying to stated elsewhere that they don't believe in the conservation of energy, so (ironically) save yourself the energy of arguing with them.

Not to detract from your sarcasm but the conservation of energy only holds true in flat spacetime. So I guess you don't 'believe' in curved spacetime? That makes you a flat spacetimer I guess...

The breakthroughs in flying came when we stopped trying to make machines look like birds.

Submarines work well because we didn’t bother making them anything like fish.

> There is no model for instellar transit.

There is, but extrasolar objects don't have engines and do very low energy transits.

We'd need a large habitat, a power source that can last for a couple thousand years and a lot - and I mean a LOT - of reaction mass to accelerate it and to brake it when it arrives at its destination. Ideally, it'd be preceded by numerous robotic probes that'd chart the worlds ahead for possible refueling stops (that could add a couple thousand years to the mission) and have a number of possible targets lined up on a reasonable trajectory so that if the next system is not really that hospitable or doesn't have anything worth doing a very large delta-v for, it can just press ahead to the next destination.

Another thing it'd need is a lot of determination to build it, to seal it with a population, test it for generations to make sure the ecosystem works and is stable, and then send it out into the unknown without any possibility of returning to Earth. It's very long term engineering we rarely do.

There are numerous credible designs for space ships able to reach a few percentage points of the speed of light.

Reaching 10% would be enough to visit nearby stars within a lifetime.

And once we can extend human life spans to many hundreds of years these journeys become even more achievable.

>credible designs

As I said elsewhere, I think the disconnect here is between potential and probable. Homo sapiens have twice come to the edge of nuclear oblivion already (being saved only by luck essentially), and I would wager we are are speeding much faster towards nuking each other than reaching the stars.

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