NASA can now reliably produce a tree’s worth of oxygen on Mars
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
It's like someone saying, "hey I knew your cousin Dan". Nice, I have no idea of their relationship but they're trying to "break the ice" so to speak with an irrelevant tidbit.
In there any species of tree that would be intimately known to a global anglophone audience?
A better analogy would be anything that can be expressed in volumes. For this reason, "4 football stadiums" and "2 school buses" would actually be pretty good.
Anyway, most trees can't.
...it's a rate, it would be bananas/hr.
I ran the calculations, 6 grams an hour seems to be about 15% of a single astronaut's oxygen consumption.
The planned larger machine they talk about, about the size of a chest freezer producing 3 kilograms of oxygen an hour, should be enough for ~85 astronauts. Though I assume that's also needing to produce rocket oxidiser for the return trip.
There will most likely be insects, bacteria, fungi; All which also consume oxygen.
On top of organic things, the Earth2 experiment famously ran into a problem where the concrete they used to build the biosphere kept curing long after construction finished, and kept sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.
And don't forget to take into account that NASA's machine can produce oxygen all day, everyday, where trees stop producing oxygen at night, and over winter (and actually start consuming oxygen)
> Managing CO2 levels was a particular challenge, and a source of controversy regarding the Biosphere 2 project's alleged misrepresentation to the public. [...] The crew worked to manage the CO2 by occasionally turning on a CO2 scrubber [...] In November 1991, investigative reporting in The Village Voice alleged that the crew had secretly installed the CO2 scrubber device, and claimed that this violated Biosphere 2's advertised goal of recycling all materials naturally.
> A mystery accompanied the oxygen decline: the corresponding increase in carbon dioxide did not appear. This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate in a process called carbonatation, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen.
Like maybe they aren't seriously insisting they can believe that "small" tree does refer to a 40+ft tree.
It's not a very good comparison to communicate to a lay audience. A far, far better one would be in terms of "resting oxygen requirement of an average human."
The hard part is generating the oceans in which phytoplankton might live.
Saline pools would have multiple benefits. Not only when kept warm could you use them to generate oxygen with phytoplankton, if you have to cut off power for some reason, they'll work as a great thermal heatsink, and they will not freeze as fast so they present less risk of piping damage.
Is there anyway we could do that in several orders of magnitude less on Mars?
Even 1 million times faster is still several human life-times.
Any off-Earth population will have to live in cans rotating to simulate gravity.
“A forlorn land covered in crages and stormes, and wholly bereft of life giving aether, this continente of ‘Columbia’ is a kingdom moste unsuitable for a civilised Englishman.”
We have no valid reason to assume a pregnancy could be carried to term in Mars gravity.
Perhaps we could generate a Martian artificial planetary magnetosphere, but I don’t know how.
See [1] from NASA.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/a...
They produce quite a lot of oxygen. The main issue is that they don't produce much surplus oxygen as they consume it too. And make no oxygen when the sun goes down.
> Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
Yes. But then, these are living organisms that need to be cared for and fed. If there's a malfunction that wipes out your oxygen producing organisms, you have a big problem. You need to give them light, control the temperature and keep it in a very narrow range, provide them with water, nutrients, shield them from radiation, avoid contamination by other organisms, etc. Water and nutrients are not easy to come by in Mars, at least not yet. At this point, they aren't very different from a machine, it's just going to be a large bioreactor.
At large scale, they are probably still the best bet. But it will take a while until we have the proper environment for them. The good news is that, once there's such an environment, we don't have to ship tons of them. Let them replicate.
MOXIE is nice as it's a machine. You can store it away, bring more capacity online, etc. It can be added to both bases and vehicles (potentially suits(?)).
Trees as a collective do not increase or decrease oxygen to the atmosphere in this era.
True, but not the whole story. Phytoplankton did not create Earth's oxygen atmosphere but today is the majority producer of oxygen. Earth's oxygen atmosphere was initially created by cyanobacteria up to 3.5Bya and which today still produce about 10% of atmospheric oxygen.
The detail I am unsure of is what produced most of the current volume of Earth's oxygen. While phytoplankton today produces the most, that does not mean that most of Earth's oxygen was created by phytoplankton. My suspicion is that, though today cyanobacteria does not produce the majority of oxygen, that cyanobacteria in fact created most of the oxygen currently in our atmosphere.
Surely someone here knows for certain and can speculate on whether the idea of installing cyanobacteria on Mars is any good.
Makes sense, our tech is a couple billion years behind.
I don’t know man, I think that’s pretty advanced technology.
We went from room sized transistors to nm sized ones in less than a century. No way we will need a billion years to catch up.
There's no reason to assume exponential type improvements. That's not how the world works.
Did we read the same article? This was a test. The full-scale version “would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees” with close to an order of magnitude more efficiency “because a bigger machine can run at lower pressures, saving energy on compression.” There are better reasons to expect exponential improvements than not.
I just don't see any of your opening statement being even close to correct given the context. There was even significant progress in space travel and fusion in the last 50 years (e.g. first reactors being net positive after startup and reusable rockets with commercial space flights).
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.
“Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Moore's Law is the prediction that the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months.
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
The speed of processors actually increased much faster than the number of transistors on a chip until recently. Smaller transistors used to mean both faster switching speeds and the ability to get more done per instruction cycle. The difference between the days of a 4 bit Intel 4004 and a 32Bit 486 was vast.
Not sure why you needed to rip them apart for words that you put into their mouth.
I should probably qualify my "first transistor" statement; the device I was referring to is the first prototype created at Bell Labs in 1947. The first transistor that someone could actually buy to build a circuit out of came out a year later and was only a little larger than today's through-hole mounted transistors. They did get used to build early minicomputers, before integrated circuits took over.
> Building something useful out of that would end up comically large.
The transistors are MicroSD-size, not RPi-size, but still, it has been done:
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.
Most extremophiles we’re aware of tend towards high temps or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity and water presence. Which don’t line up with Mars much.
We’d have to be managing the environment they grew in, which makes it hard.
The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and biochemical availability of that energy. Life ‘eats’ to survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and biochemically hard to access, it’s not a good environment for life as we know it.
To me, this is not "generating its own electricity". The device is still an incredible accomplishment, even more so because it's operating on Mars. But it doesn't generate its own electricity. They still need to connect it to a separate energy input to run the reaction.
I want to clarify this just in case anybody skimming the comments gets the impression that chemically splitting the CO2 into CO and oxygen gas somehow produces enough energy to sustain the reaction without external input.
Technology just optimizes for different things than nature. Otherwise the lander would have just carried a couple gallons of water and some algae.
As far as I know, nobody tried
There's no way this is scalable. Whatever innovation we produce here, has to be super light and super small enough to be economical.
We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in.
If there's an alien race that has discovered locomotion via warping the space around it (sort of like a bubble formed around an object under water allowing friction free movement) then our solution would be funny to them.
"So you dig up this dinosaur juice, you then, chuckles, light it on fire to push a tiny payload on top of it to put stuff in space?"
"Then your hope is to weaponize it so you can fight better wars and colonize other planets to dig rocks and ship it back home?"
All of this must be amusing and depressing to an alien race that has mastered space travel and then some.
We had cryogenic rocket engines in the 60s [1].
Climbing a very good rope. I think this option is the most medieval.
Using a huge launcher brings to mind trebuchets.
An electric plane can give you a higher platform but I'm skeptical of that getting fast enough to be the bulk of a launch.
Antigravity magic? I guess that's not medieval, but I'd argue that magic is in some ways quasi-medieval.
Rockets are likely the least medieval option.
You mean big explosions targeted at the right side? If the Dark Ages had that, they would be lit!
The goal is to send just enough resources that settlers can then create more of the products they need using the resources present on Mars. If you can (for example) figure out how to cultivate Mars soil to make it hospitable to Earth plants, you could turn Mars into a net exporter of food.
All of this is theoretical of course, but it's not implausible to assume that there's a "tipping point" past which inhabitants of Mars are self sufficient or can even export things to Earth.
At a guess, 23.19
However you don’t need the latest process node to produce most electronics. And integrated circuits are probably the last thing you’d produce off world.
By the way, hydrolox is not dinosaur juice. Methane would be but insufficient specific impulse is a problem.
And as for ETs being peaceful zen wizards, the fundamental problem of resource scarcity would seem to be universally applicable. It's this resource scarcity that causes species which are good at competing to develop. So it seems likely that any species intelligent enough to become technologically advanced would have a history of belligerence similar to ours.
Thinking aspirationally about what sort of species we should strive to be is great. But I find the belief that, across the universe, humans are specially anti-progress to be a little silly. The laws of physics are universal.
The development of life took a few billion years to get to where we are now, so if for some otherwise equivalent civilization that highly random process took 0.1% faster or slower, then that makes for multiple million years of difference in development.
If we encounter another civilization, then it would be a wildly implausible coincidence if they happened to be close to us in technological level - say, just a thousand years or so; a more advanced civilization would be much more advanced - and we can see just how much things change in just a few centuries of technological development.
It's fallacious to presume that we -- or any other species -- will automagically find ways to beat the lightspeed barrier, but it's also hubris to presume that our current understanding is the most "correct" that it can be. Could there be some new sea change in our understanding of the world, that allows for things general relativity considers impossible or incoherent?
My understanding of the "peaceful zen wizards" trope was that if you've got the technology to cross the unimaginably big [0] gulfs between stars, let alone the gulfs between inhabited stars, you concomitantly no longer want for resources or territory in any way that civilizations of our Kardashev type [1] understand them. What's the point of belligerence, culturally, [2] at that point? And if you do want territory and mining and extraction and whatever, why not use a combinatorial explosion of Von Neumann machines? The only reason to send actual people would be to say hello to the locals and look around.
[0] cf. Douglas Adams' intro to THGttG
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
[2] I acknowledge that humans are genetically belligerent, but we can just choose not to be, especially in conditions of plenty. The fight is close, but culture ultimately beats genetics. I present, by way of example, the condom.
Who's to say that this advanced alien race didn't have the same pains (or worse!) when they started their space program?
> There's no way this is scalable.
There is - we need to stop shipping devices from Earth's gravity well.
I wouldn't get too hung up on the "dino juice" side of the equation. Global extraction is enough to fly a couple million of the biggest rockets every year and that's only counting dino fart extraction. Add in equivalent energy from dino juice and dino... cookies? and you'd be looking at somewhere above ten million rockets every year.
Fossil fuels are about the most scalable and scaled enterprise on the planet. They produce most of the energy to feed, house, and transport billions of people.
Meanwhile,humans were able to solve that problem in a fraction of the time that evolution would take.
It's fair to say that we're millions of years behind the curve when it comes to creating usable energy from sunlight, however. That's an indisputable fact.
One would say humans cannot solve it faster than evolution since humanity < evolution.
It's a good feedstock for making hydrocarbons and petrochemicals and also as good a reducing agent as hydrogen for making metals. In fact you could use the CO to make, say, iron, producing CO2 which gets cycled back into the above reactor.
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-365
? but iron is an element?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace
since it partially burns coke to make CO which reduces FeO to Fe producing CO2. An alternate approach is to reduce FeO with hydrogen producing H2O. Either way this is likely to be a circular process in a space economy since volatiles like H2O and CO2 are precious.
[1] https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemistry/...
With that in mind, any metal ores had plenty of time to oxidize just like on earth. But metal from asteroids that impacted over the last two billion years or so should be unoxidized.
CO as rocket fuel isn't as effective as Hydrogen or Methane, but for the lower gravity of Mars it can still be useful for Mars-Mars transport or even returning to orbit.
> "The demonstration is only the beginning. A future version, about the size of a “small chest freezer,” would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees."
> "MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The machine then separates out the oxygen and expels the carbon monoxide, alongside other gases, as exhaust."
The real necessity is to make methane, assuming you want to launch rockets from the Martian surface. The presence of ice on Mars in some regions means this might be plausible: dig up ice/dirt, warm to generate water, split water, collect H2, mix with carbon monoxide to make syngas, pass over catalyst to generate CH4.
The downside is relatively low Isp, so you need a much larger rocket to get to orbit.
So such a rocket would be convenient if sourcing Hydrogen proves to be very difficult.
First, terraforming. This is such a monumentally massive task that it is almost beyond comprehension. The distribution of molecular velocities in a fluid is a Boltzmann distribution. The average of that is the temperature. Some molecules go very fast. In a liquid this allows them to overcome surface tension and gravity and become a gas. This is evaporation in water. In an atmosphere, a certain portion of the molecules are fast enough to escape the atmosphere and to be lost to space. This is called the Jeans escape energy.
The Earth's atmosphere loses about a million tons of gas every year. And that's fine because the atmosphere is many orders of magnitude more massive than this.
Mars has lower atmosphere and no protective magnetosphere from solar winds. This means proportionally more mass loss. The atmosphere would have to be so massive that you can afford to lose possibly millions of tons of it every year.
You can calculate how much energy that requires and it is massive.
So this brings us to creating oxygen for habitats. This is a way more solvable problem. Mars still has all the suual negatives:
1. A weak atmosphere, which is actually worse than no atmosphere, because it covers all your stuff in dust. Some dust storms last months;
2. The ground is toxic (eg perchlorates). There'd be no growing food like in The martian;
3. Low gravity;
4. No protection from solar and cosmic radiation because of no magnetosphere and (almost) no atmosphere.
So you can calculate the energy cost per gram of oxygen this produces and work out how much you'd need to create for whatever use (eg breatheable air, making water, making rocket fuel) and then work out how you'd get that energy. Solar is the likely candidate. I think you'll find the required footprint is massive.
Oh and cosmic radiation is important for life on Earth. Why? Cosmic rays are constantly hitting nitrogen in the atmosphere. At a predictable rate, some of these nitrogen atoms (7 protons, 7 neutrons) such that a proton becomes a neutron. 6 protons and 8 neutrons is Carbon-14. That's literally how we do carbon dating (because C14 is radioactive).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
Anyway, my point is - why do we need exotic technologies to convert CO2 to oxygen? An algae bioreactor can do it using decades-old and well-understood techniques, plus you can build yummy algae cakes out of the waste product.
presumably not so well understood on the moon or mars? Suddenly you have more, and more complex, variables with sustaining life.
https://www.space.com/space-station-algae-experiment-fresh-a...
The algae didn't just convert the CO2 to O2, there needed to be an energy input for that.
The Sun, which has far lower output once you're on Mars. What would be the O2 output of your algae farm then?
Yeah, but from the article,
"MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide."
So it's not as if MOXIE works for free either.
> mars gets less sun than earth
Yeah, about 43% as much. You can address that with mirrors.
MOXIE sounds better if all you want is oxygen (and CO). Give it power and off you go.
lol, this comes across as FUD. Mirrors aren't high technology. They have no moving parts and do not require batteries.
Temperature control? Keep it the same temperature as your habitat, you should already have parts for that. Heck, keep it in your habitat. But algae isn't that sensitive, it can operate over a temperature range.
Salinity control is absurd, who's putting salt in the water and why can't you just tell them to stop?
Water intake and filtering? What? Dude it's essentially just water in a transparent container. There's no flowing or filtering.
Killing competing organisms? Algae is the competing organism, it can take care of itself, even if we brought competing organisms to Mars, which would be a silly thing to do.
I mean, maybe radiation is a factor, I don't know, but all that other stuff is not challenging.
And you're spending so much time inventing "challenges" for a simple algae farm, while just handwaving at a device that needs to compress the gas and heat it to 800 degrees celsius?
I'm not saying MOXIE won't work, or won't be useful in some circumstances. It's just that I don't understand why it's supposed to be simpler than tried-and-true alternatives.
And since we can't seem to get even that right why bother with Mars?
And then humanity gets wiped out by a rogue meteor. A rogue blackhole. A really bad solar flare. An object comes to our solar system and knocks us off our orbit. Our home is wiped clean in nuclear fire. Take your pick.
We have all our eggs in earths basket. I love earth, lets get the hell out of here though.
The most likely cause of Earth’s total destruction is our Sun turning into a red giant in a few billion years.
There's some discussion about it here and there, but the most viable route seems to be just wrapping the planet in 5cm diameter superconducting wire:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
Doing this on Mars would be a monumental task, but the concept itself isn't completely ridiculous.
Edit: but cool technology I suppose
That's a lot of candles if you intend to use it as the primary supply for a multi-year multi-human mission like Mars will entail.
"An explosion caused by one of these candles killed two Royal Navy sailors on HMS Tireless" probably gives NASA engineers the shivers, too.
[0]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/25-years-ago-fire-aboard-space-...
Even submarines, here on Earth, don't use the candles all the time. Why?
This point isn't obvious though. E.g. we'll likely be shipping them finite supplies of food. Supply chain disruption sucks but so is your MOXIE breaking down. MOXIE and 10 weeks of backup candles or 10,000 weeks of backup candles.
It's not obvious to me which is the cheaper / safer option.
We don't use them on subs all the time because subs don't have a lot of storage, and electrolysis is pretty easy to do.
Is it useful? Almost certainly not, just don't burn the hydrocarbons in the first place and use that nice concentrated source of carbon (and atmospheric O2), instead of burning oil and O2 to produce CO2, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere, and then unburning it.
Will someone do it here? Probably, SpaceX is saying that they will as a way to develop the technology and claim they're carbon neutral.
If it makes sense at all, I think that it would make more sense to deploy a solution like MOXIE-at-scale *after* we have replaced fossil fuel power generation. There's an argument that says that the planet itself could clean up the excess CO2 reasonably quickly once we stop adding more.
Show me the distribution and I'll show you the median.
Climate changes and dangerous weather events aside, I don't think that things are quite as dire, in regards to breathable air. Well, at least outside of certain metropolitan areas in certain countries.
That said, the fact that we even have the technology to do this is good - if we ever actually needed to utilize it after the collapse of too many ecosystems, at least we'd have the option to try scaling it up, provided that the powers that be would deem it "financially viable".
Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a rocket company kicking around.
I guess that's not sexy
but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it terribly if leaving became the only option.
So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars as longingly as we do.
This experiment turns CO2 into oxygen and expels CO. How is that “infinitely more effective and eas[y] here on Earth”?
If you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth then… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per operating cycle [2], it also means you aren’t superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has no use on Earth. It’s tremendously useful on Mars.
If you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars.
This is fundamentally false for the device this article highlights. Different chemistries.
> you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars
It’s not. There isn’t oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense. Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
[2] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-mono...
There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity.
There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs.
:shrug:
Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
As the below comment alludes to, maybe the answer is keeping a sufficiently bottlenecked society to force that psychological change. But then you're not really recreating the parts of society that people are worried about losing. You might as well start a self sufficient commune here on Earth.
I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to colonize Mars.
Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up.
I think we should be focusing on establishing a space industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars. And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find that we don't need planets anymore.
You can’t get to the Moon by climbing successfully higher trees. This experiment might as well be Exhibit A. Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This device would be useless in Death Valley or on the Moon. There is also a realistic chance of establishing an industrial base on Mars in a way that’s more challenging on the Moon and worthless in Death Valley.
you mean other than the 6 times we landed a crew there ?
Constellation was supposed to be back to the moon 2 years ago.
...you absolutely must work in HR. Or for a transport company.
Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be very important to a long-term human colony.
Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on demand a self-contained and functioning society is _extremely_ hard, even if we're trying to do it in pleasant environment where we don't have to deal with almost any environmental hazards. If we were able to do it successfully, allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer.
But Mars colonies are probably so far off that a lot of the difficulties are easy to ignore. NASA seems to do something similar to what a lot of tech companies do, where they tease tech seems to be just around the corner, but which they know actual implementation is very far away (remember Amazon drone delivery?).
It wouldn’t be super productive if it were self contained. Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.
Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are able to overcome the numerous technical issues.
I’m arguing those constraints are what will drive ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart, ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on the history of settler civilisations outperforming their home countries.
I don't believe settler civilizations outperform their home countries across the board. Certainly there have been many that failed. Successful ones tend to be in places that offer a lot of natural resources, often even surpassing the home country. But of course, the opposite would be true for Mars.
A Mars colony wouldn’t be a hermit kingdom. It would be isolated, but there would obviously still be dependence on followed by trade with Earth. Recreating that mix of semi-isolation and adversity on Earth strikes me as silly. Even if you got the mechanics right, what’s the attraction for the denizens? What keeps them there when the going gets tough? What are they doing and seeing that they fundamentally couldn't in more comfort?
The primary barrier to doing this is politics, not the environment. Colonizing the artic would be a major violation of international treaties, and would certainly see you detained (or killed) by a hostile country. Wars have been started over much less.
People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting.
> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?
No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). We already have research stations in the arctic. We don't get to experience a different amount of gravity, different geology, different atmospheric chemistry, different (primarily a lack of) biosphere, or pretty much any interesting feature of either mars or space. Nor do we get any of the "backup population of humans" we would get from mars if we manage to make it self sufficient (admittedly a very tall goal), because the arctic isn't really isolated from the earth. Nor we do get the inspirational effects of going places we haven't before.
_Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with them, or traded for, to survive.
> No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does).
This is a remarkable claim. Virtually space projects have involved considerable rehearsals of different sorts on earth. Human survival in extreme environments isn't an easy or solved problem. It makes me sad if many people believe we have nothing to learn in these circumstances.
The other reason is that humans closer to Mars would be scientifically useful. We don't have that many open questions about the moon. We had a couple manned moon missions doing lots of science, and with the moon being only a lightsecond away, you can drive rovers almost like RC cars. Mars is many lightminutes away, making rovers complex, costly and slow. Opportunity took 15 years to drive 45km. Manned lunar rovers have driven roughly twice that distance over just two years (Apollo 15/16/17). The amount of science we could do with boots on the ground would be incredibly valuable.
We get floating cities!
I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need to go down to the surface you don't need extreme cooling systems.
If you did want people to be able to live on the surface it is kind of an interesting question how you'd manage it. Presumably there'd be ample wind energy available if you can just build a wind turbine that doesn't melt in that environment.
Either way I'd rather go to Mars.
If something happens to the floating cities, the "fall" would be a horrendous fate.
Temperature isn't "nice", would still be around 160F high up.
Importing materials... at that point why not just make space stations?
No water.
If you actually don't know why Mars might be an interesting place to test on, then you should do some research about the topic.
McMurdo Station [1] in the Antarctic is generally self-reliant/self-contained. Regular shipments of things like diesel, of course, but it also sees a sometimes surprisingly large residency (Wikipedia points out it can support around 1200 people at times) for what people generally consider a "small" science installation, and it has been in perpetual, year-round operation for decades.
McMurdo is about as self-reliant as we might reasonably expect any moon base or Mars base to be in the short term. The details of shipping schedules among the closest on this planet to those thrust upon us by the economics of orbital mechanics in space projects.
It's absolutely not perfect self-reliance. It's still more self-reliance as an example than we are likely to find elsewhere on the planet and "good enough" for complaints that we aren't "ready" for space colonies because we haven't done enough of the homework. We've collectively done at least some of the homework.
For McMurdo: is there a situation where neither the US nor New Zealand (partners, run the next nearest Antarctic base and technically "control" the land McMurdo is on through wild politics and loopholes in political treaties) can send supplies?
It's an interesting exercise, certainly, but the kinds of doomsday scenarios where that is likely to occur, humanity as a whole may have much larger concerns than if the people stranded at McMurdo might survive.
Planning a space base certainly has a much longer list of not even quite doomsday scenarios to consider where contact/supplies/cargo runs are all the more infeasible. You can't account for all possible scenarios, but what are the threat models worth concerning about when all of the nations with spaceflight capabilities and all of the private corporations now with spaceflight can't and/or won't help out if humans are stranded on a base in space without possible contact? What are the cases where problems on Earth dwarf any humanitarian missions to space? I'm sure there are such threat models. I certainly don't know enough about them to talk to them to any detail. It's a bunch of entangled, interesting questions. Preparing for those scenarios may not necessarily require, a priori, expecting a base to survive with absolutely zero contact from the rest of humanity for extended periods of time. We may be able to assume a baseline of contact and know that breaks from that baseline risks the lives of people. I don't know. What's the threat model?
it's not a doomsday scenario, it's just what it means to be a colony. if it can't keep itself alive it's not a colony, it's an expedition.
obviously people are always moving around and moving stuff around, but a colony that can't produce any of the necessities of life just isn't a colony.
McMurdo is useful at least as a science mission, in the sense that it studies a part of the planet that humans live on. There is basically an infinite number of empty, dead rocks out there in space -- we shouldn't waste research focus on this particularly large one that happens to be nearby.
It turns out that resources are not evenly distributed. There are only a handful of locations where it is economically feasible to gather or mine some elements. And until we have techno-magic replicators that can turn energy into matter, this problem will remain.
No colony 100's of thousands of people is going to be self-sustaining on Mars. It's simply not possible. They will always be dependent on Earth.
The general public has some interest because Elon Musk is "good" at twitter and advertising, but not a ton of interest.
I'm not sure why Musk is focused on Mars, I think you need to do a ton of drugs to get into his head. Or it might just be that he needs a big picture goal to help motivate SpaceX.
Mars is not a good target for colonization. It is just an inhospitable rock. A big pointless gravity well. Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. Plus the view is better, and you can go fly to somewhere more interesting like the Asteroid belt.
A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make building materials and rocket fuel.
The asteroid belts are probably worth visiting too, but I can understand wanting to go to Mars. It's probably the most Earth-like environment in the solar system excepting the Earth itself.
The Moon isn't quite so favorable for this, the end result wouldn't be as nice and would be more because it would be useful than desirable.
Numerous TV shows have proven that to be true.
If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess.
Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.
Wasn't that Bezos's goal already? It's unfortunate that the best execution is aimed at a less productive goal (imo).
Bezos may chafe at having to buy rides on someone else's rocket.