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Comment by dmitrybrant | Hacker News Reader

Wait, a colony on Mars by 2050 that doesn't need to be resupplied from Earth? ...lol no.

Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.

We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.

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> We haven't been back to the Moon

...because until basically now, the tech for doing so was an immensely expensive, one shot, disposable rocket, which could only carry a return vehicle, one lander and a small crew. As a result, the only use for moon missions was (1) to do trivial kinds of science such as could be done with the very limited kinds of instruments that could be carried, and (2) for national bragging rights.

With the science done, with the missions becoming routine and boring, the only entity that could afford to go stopped spending its money.

This is all right on the cusp of changing.

Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point.

A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.

"At this point" sure, but it's not happening at all unless SpaceX succeeds with Starship at scale, which means fully, rapidly reusable and building at least a hundred of them per year, which gets launch costs to LEO down to about $50/kg.

Starting with that, SpaceX would send at least a hundred Starships to Mars with every launch window, each able to carry over a hundred tons of cargo. Price per passenger depends on how many you can safely pack in and maybe Musk is being overoptimistic on that, but he's shooting for half a million dollars.

These things don't happen naturally, they don't progress at some rate. They happen because people decide to do them, and then do them.

Humans haven't been to the moon in 50 years because nobody has decided to go in 50 years. Right now there's a man with more resources than almost any man on earth and he has dedicated his life to ensuring that people go to mars and live there. He is so to used on it that he has focused on creating novel technology just for the purpose, and demonstrated that technology. It is going to happen.

In space, distance doesn't really matter, gravity wells matter. Going to mars is not much different than going to the moon. You don't really need a trial, the people are stuck there no matter how far away it is.

The plan is for SpaceX to send 3 uncrewed launches to Mars (with equipment and supplies) before sending people. I think that if they succeed with Starship, they can very much do it.

And IMO, the more SpaceX progresses, the more people will get excited about space and investment money will be thrown at space technology. I invested some money in Rocket Lab, because they are a public company and the next best thing after SpaceX IMO.

Excitement cannot overcome a lack of exploitable natural resources at the destination.

Nation-state scale science programs notwithstanding, I think the possibility of independent sovereignty will be the main draw of going to Mars, if/when independent survival is technologically (and economically, in the local scope) feasible.

There are absolutely exploitable resources there; they are just irrelevant to an Earth-centric economy because of the prohibitive cost of hauling them out of Mars' gravity well and down to Earth. But if you've gone to Mars to be independent there, Earth's economy will become similarly irrelevant to you.

Humans evolved to depend on air, water, food, and a radiation shield that don't occur naturally on Mars. Being on Mars a few decades is unlikely to change those fundamentals.

Maybe your initial comment was not clear. Reproduced below:

> Excitement cannot overcome a lack of exploitable natural resources at the destination.

In context ("the more SpaceX progresses, the more people will get excited about space and investment money will be thrown at space technology"), I assumed your point was that natural resources on Mars cannot be economically relevant to Earth-based investors, and therefore no such investment money will be "thrown" at Mars colonization regardless of how "excited" people are about the idea. Hence the substance of my reply.

Did you instead mean to say that air, water, food, and radiation shielding are intractable problems for Mars colonization?

It's both.

Without local resources, whether economic or life-sustaining, you're not really a colony, but a scientific expedition or military outpost or both.

Both of which put you under the political authority (and reliance for survival) of your sponsoring entity, which to me largely quashes the whole sovereignty appeal.

That isn't to say that there won't be "true believers" who buy into the idea of starting a colony, as it's sold by Elon or NASA or the US Space Force or whoever. I'm sure they'll find volunteers.

You also seem to be taking as a given that independent survival on Mars is functionally impossible due to a lack of "local resources" from which to derive the essentials of survival viz. "air, water, food, and radiation shielding". Is that correct?

My original comment explicitly (see: "if/when independent survival is [...] feasible") takes no position on this matter.

Thanks for pointing that out. Guess I forgot that 'if' when I read:

> There are absolutely exploitable resources there; they are just irrelevant...

Because I haven't read of any human-sustaining resources except some ice. Rather that analyzed samples of the soil and atmosphere are too toxic and radiation at the surface too high.

It's definitely not an easy place to live. My understanding is that even in a best case scenario where everything you need turns out to be theoretically available, you'll need a bunch of currently-speculative industrial processes to extract it at scale.

I'm not convinced it's intractable, though, especially with a few more decades of progress in industrial automation.

"My original comment explicitly (see: "if/when independent survival is [...] feasible") takes no position on this matter."

Since "independent survival" will never be feasible on Mars, your comment sounds like pure fiction.

It's not like you can just go out in the wilderness and kill an animal for food, or find a river to drink from. You can't even breathe there.

"Independent survival" is barely even feasible on Earth.

You will always be dependent on the facilities, supply ships, etc.

Then there's the question of protecting what you have, without having any authorities, law enforcement, etc. to help you.

If you go there, it will most likely be an experience as in the old mining towns, where a single company owned everything, (factory, shops, residential areas, recreational areas, etc), and the workers will mainly be paid in "company bucks", that can only be used there.

For most people, it'll be like a dystopian neo-feudalistic nightmare, you can't wake up from. One where you can't even quit your job, because there's nowhere else to go. Indentured servitude on another planet.

But the Elon fan boys will no doubt be happy to sign up for it anyway.

I like how you call my comment "pure fiction" and then launch into a bit of highly opinionated speculative fiction regarding what "life on Mars" will surely be like.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what you think I mean by "independent survival", but just to be clear: I'm not talking about, like, one dude striking out for a life of rugged solitude in the great Martian outdoors.

Mars has oxygen, water, carbon, sunlight, and completely untouched mineral resources. Mars is the one place in the solar system besides Earth where it's possible to grow plants on natural sunlight.

Radiation on Mars is actually not that bad[1], it's comparable to the radiation levels in Ramsar, Iran, where people live happily to a normal age without elevated cancer rates. The perchlorates in Martian soil won't be hard to deal with either[2].

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

[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/even-the-dirt-...

I've heard it said before, there is no economic benefit to going and there never will be. People will go because they want to go. Perhaps one day, when a ton of people live outside of gravity wells, there will be an economic incentive, but as of right now, there's no money to be made.

I would like to see SpaceX outline a roadmap according to each Mars transfer window, currently don't see it[1]:

2022/08/07 - Assume no transit

2024/09/26 - First uncrewed launch (X tons of supply)

2026/11/15 - Second uncrewed launch (X2 tons of supply)

2029/01/03 - Third uncrewed launch (X3 tons of supply)

2031/02/22 - First crewed launch (X4 tons of supply, Y tons of people)

2033/04/11 - Second crewed launch (X5 tons of supply, Y2 tons of people)

2035/05/30 - etc...

... [2]

This way we can compare progress and keep pushing the schedule out as each transfer is missed to give a more realistic sense for what we're trying to do here.

My sense is that if people would really to dig into the numbers (and I'm sure someone has) to calculate out the tonnage and delta-v required and how that translates to resources (money, energy, humans) over time (esp considering regulations and safety factors) then I think we would get a more realistic sense of we're trying to do here and realize how insane it is to think we'd have anything resembling a "colony" by 2050 (14 transfer windows).

A 2050 Moon colony is a far more realistic prediction, though also somewhat far fetched unless we've solved the problem of economic and political instability.

[1] https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/

[2] http://clowder.net/hop/railroad/EMa.htm

> In space, distance doesn't really matter,...

Travel time and therefore distance matters. Months of increased radiation exposure, low gravity, and calorie restriction is very different than a few days going to the moon and back.

You don't actually have to endure microgravity for the whole trip. Tether two Starships and spin, and you've got gravity. Musk mentioned a few months ago that they were considering it.

Couple years ago I worked out what the cable mass would have to be, and it really wasn't bad. There's even a Kevlar-equivalent that stands up well to space radiation.

Yeah, but once you're there there's very little difference. Travel time to start the colony is (hopefully) only the first 0.001% of the life span of a colony. Also if the trip is so different how does a test run to the moon help us prepare for vastly different transit conditions?

Either way, a pilot program on the moon offers virtually no benefit. It amounts to dipping your toe in when you know the water is cold; you're looking for an excuse to back out.

Autarky on Mars, sure now. But now, the richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building 1,000 Starships to build a city on Mars and I'm pretty sure he's going to pull it off.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1461235511511633922

... the second richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building the a city in Earth orbit.

> my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.

Well that's a wacky prediction. What makes you think that?

We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years, sure, but we've barely been trying until recently. We're very close to having vehicles that can get to the Moon and Mars.

My prediction is much less wacky than predicting a colony by 2050.

I think everyone overestimates the public interest and "excitement" over going to Mars. The reason we haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years is that the public lost interest after the ~third or fourth launch, and stopped tuning in to the broadcasts. With ever-improving VR technology, I'd predict that more and more people would be satisfied enough with a VR experience of Mars, and be done with it. The need to physically "go" to a place and claim it for yourself will be a thing of the past.

I'm definitely not saying we'll have a colony by 2050.

I just think 80 years is a massive amount of time and we'll have feet on Mars by then, which is what my comment was specifically referencing.

I absolutely agree that we won't have a colony on Mars by 2050, but I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty of just traveling to Mars if you're judging based on the Moon. Political will? Perhaps, but I think the best way to think of it is that it was possible to go to the Moon on technology from 50 years ago. Modern rockets are far, far better.

not that I really disagree with your point, but orders of magnitude of distance are a poor measure of the kind of effort it takes to get places in space.

Almost all of the energy and effort is spent on getting things off of the earth to begin with, everything after that point is comparatively easy, especially if you are willing to take a long time doing it.

The major problem with a Mars mission is that the constraints of getting things into orbit are so oppressive, its hard to send enough supplies and equipment to orbit, due to the exponential explosion of the rocket equation.

No, the problem is the amount of resources you need to send to make sure the project survives.

So you send hundreds and hundreds of tons of stuff. You need tens or hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff to have any hope of making a colony that can survive for a few years, never mind become self-sustaining.

Multiple spare parts for every single thing, food, water, machinery, power sources... the list is almost endless.

Until there's hard information about what's possible on Mars - exactly what does and doesn't grow, how the seasons really work, how to deal with ecological issues, how to deal with waste, and on and on - you don't even know what you need to send.

There are also the political and psychological problems of keeping relatively small numbers of people in a relatively small space with relatively poor privacy and no natural resources.

It's basically going to be the most expensive and least fun picnic in history.

Musk is talking about sending at least a thousand Starships to Mars. Each can carry over a hundred tons.

The author never specified that the colony would be self-sufficient by 2050.

Elon Musk is planning on sending a Starship along with 100 tons of cargo to Mars in September 2022. He'll probably miss that window and send it October 2024 instead.

Musk also plans on building 50 Starships per year.

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." - Mike Tyson

So he'll actually wind up build 10 a year. Boo Hoo.

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