... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in all that time, they've only ever been right about Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
Only one technology matters: that which enables transportation.
Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a chance on a better life?
You can argue from either the perspective of futility of attempt (no chance of success) or futility of outcome (success wouldn't be worth it), but I'm pretty convinced both would be weak arguments, both logically and historically.
And if it hasn't been required, then how are we to look at existing practice and say we're bad at or incapable of it?
You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica.
Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that.
It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs), raw materials that aren't locally available (which means almost all of them), and habitable structures.
At the end of that epic effort you'll have something that will barely have a toe-hold on long-term survivability. Possibly. If you're lucky.
Not only is Mars far colder, it also doesn't have air. Or surface water. So all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder.
And it's much much further away.
Rhetoric and wishful thinking are not going to give you a better life if you can't deal with the reality of the challenges.
There may also be more carbon below the surface, see https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-b...
The only thing Mars has going for it is hype.
If you want to go somewhere beyond Mars, stopping there and then starting again just sets you back. (Same goes for the moon, or lunar orbit.) "Stepping stones" have strongly negative value in space transport.
If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
If you will need extra fuel to get home with, sending it to Mars is completely useless, because where you need it to be is not at Mars, but at the place where you will be at the time when you need it. That place is not Mars.
Is this really so difficult? Stop, breathe, and think.
This simply isn't true. From Mars to Jupiter is a little over 6 km/s of delta-v. From Earth to Jupiter is almost 9. The latter is just barely possible with SpaceX's Starship. The former allows for not only some breathing room, but more payload.
If your true goal is to have crap on and in orbit around Mars, do that without pretending it has any other value. You don't fool anybody, but you make people wonder about you.
Versus, cannibalising several extremely expensive ships in order to get one ship to a destination it's never coming back from.
And this is just one example. The lower delta-v from Mars would allow extra payload to the belt, so if anyone ever intend to exploit those resources, starting from Mars will allow them to get heavy equipment there in less time and fewer trips (provided, of course, that they can manufacture that equipment on Mars).
Maybe my million tons of freight includes a liquid methane sump on Titan, where I don't even need to synthesize, never mind liquify the stuff; it is sloshing around in puddles everywhere. There is an interior liquid water ocean, and ice lava flows.
Seriously, if you need more delta-V for a Jupiter or Saturn trip than spaceship design A gives you, you are much better off making a spaceship design B with enough tankage to make the trip. (Maybe B is just A with an extra tank strapped on; or, a tug boosts A to escape velocity and then loops around Luna and back, aerobraking to LEO.) Park fuel depots at both low and high Earth orbits; you waste nothing by using those, unlike anything parked foolishly at Luna or Mars.
Luna, anyway, has stuff that is worth visiting, like craters in permanent shade at the south pole, and lava tubes where vapors have maybe drifted in and froze for hundreds of millions of years. Mars is the armpit of the Solar System.
> You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars
The equipment for generating the electricity to perform ISRU on Mars is supposedly within the payload capabilities of a single Starship, 100-150 tons, not a million, and this should be enough for a ton per day, enough to resupply in the 26 month launch window. The equipment for collecting water and CO2 is another matter, and I don't see estimates on that, but with the above and some engineering margin, it seems plausible that this operation can get off the ground in under ten ship-trips to Mars.
Any trip to the outer Solar System that stops at Mars is, energetically, much more costly that one which does not stop at Mars.
In addition, getting stuff to Mars is itself a huge expense that completely swamps any imagined benefit of extracting fuel and launching it to stop by for.
If you want to go to Mars, go without promoting obvious falsehoods about any value it has as a transport hub. It has none. Period.
If, to make sense, your Mars story needs for Mars to be a useful transport hub, then it fails, and you need a different story.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This is as asinine as saying, if you can't get somewhere without a stop at the gas station, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at the gas station. Stopping at the gas station costs extra.
After all, it costs fuel to take an exit on the freeway and go to the gas station. It costs fuel to leave and go back on the freeway. It costs extra! Energetically, any trip where you have to make a detour to a gas station, costs more than a trip where you don't make a stop there.
Source?
- 38% of Earth's gravity
- 24.5 hour days
- lots of resources such as iron, carbon, oxygen, water (ice)
- aerobraking in the atmosphere saves fuel
- it's big (same land mass as Earth's). There's enough room for growth.
- temperatures are better than elsewhere in space (-63°C to +20°C at the equator)
- Lava tubes that could offer protection against radiation and meteorites for habitats
- good potential of life / former life
Nobody has colonized Antarctica not because it's impossible, but because it's difficult enough and useless enough that we all agreed on a treaty prohibiting it.
In contrast, we constructed the 63 radars (some with bases) of the DEW line in the late 1950s in under 3 years, with part of the Air Force's budget. Because it was useful.
Establishing a Mars colony is not impossible, it's just extremely hard. Which means expensive. Which means it needs a justification. Which is what I think the knee-jerk is really about.
And is a fair opinion. You may think interplanetary colonization should not be a priority. I think it should.
Our basic priorities are not in order and that is true for a lot of the world.
Tons of people need solutions now to problems we can solve, and we do not solve them because those priorities are not in order.
And with that, there goes that justification.
Higher priority items include:
Not shitting where we eat,
A much reduced focus on killing one another.
There are many others.
I agree with the other commenter.
It may be very frustrating and disappointing to get married to those ideas. No one reading here is going to see them.
Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported.
> nuclear reactors
Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars.
> nuclear and other fuels
The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long time.
> machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs)
Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality but you know what they do it anyways because some things are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what they could create from local resources or do without. They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or Antarctica with a single expedition.
> raw materials
Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate sources here because they are too labour or energetically or materially expensive but when they are your only option price and effort become less of a concern.
> all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder
No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.
I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means".
There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.
Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer).
I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"
Is this tongue-in-cheek? I genuinely hope so.
The fact that random groups people from the Old World decided to start colonies without any prior experience or preparation precisely shows that they didn't consider America to be "super-hostile".
My favorite moonshot project would be to create robotics that can clean up the environment and handle recycling. Having the technology to pick up dog poop and plastic bags in an efficient and affordable manner or separating recycling items would be a huge technological challenge that would create a ton of spin-off opportunities including a base on Mars. Or clean up the pacific garbage patch with robots.
We can build much better outside of gravity wells. Whatever you would land on Mars is more useful in solar orbit, parked next to any convenient asteroid.
And there's still the problem of ISRU.
"A stop" is not just useless, but is actively harmful in space transportation. You go, for free, until you get there, and then use up fuel stopping. Starting and stopping are exactly what costs. Stopping halfway makes the whole trip cost literally twice as much.
Until you understand this, everything you say about space travel will make zero sense, and furthermore will deeply embarrass you for long after you finally catch on. You make a fool of yourself by continuing in this vein.
However, it's likely that one task (going to Mars, even sending a couple rich bozos there) is small enough that you can probably do that and work on fixing things "at home".
In fact, one could argue that one set of big companies that exist this decade that didn't exist last decade is just a shopping list of "Crap I'll need for my martian condo"
https://blog.theclymb.com/out-there/because-its-there-the-qu...
Just don't stand in the way of those who chose to go.
Your "golly I'm on Mars!" euphoria would thin out very, very fast. "This place f'n sucks!" malaise would grow steadily and without bound.
Maybe that's a confusing distinction for some.