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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Numerous TV shows have proven that to be true.
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.
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.
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.