Can't get the fascination with this desert? It's like post apocalyptic Earth.
The atmosphere is made mostly of CO2. At the surface, it has a pressure of 93 times that of Earth, and temperature of 464 °C / 867 °F. This is sufficiently hot and pressurized that the atmosphere is neither a gas nor a liquid, it's a supercritical fluid. Wikipedia says that we use supercritical CO2 industrially because of how good it is at dissolving things.
The record survival time for a stationary probe on the surface of Venus is 127 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Physical_characteristics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_...
Venus is also strange for having a retrograde (and very slow) rotation relative to other Solar System planets due to a mix of being close enough to be tidally locked to the Sun and its (now extremely thick) atmosphere creating strong thermal tides that affect its rotation. It used to be thought (and I thought this) that its retrograde rotation was due to impacts in its early history. But, in any case, having moons is unrelated.
Because it lost its rotation, it lost its magnetic field. Because it lost its magnetic field, it lost its hydrogen.
Mars lost its hydrogen the same way, because its core froze enough to kill its magnetic field. There is more than one way to go.
Venus is in a bad way.
I don't think hackers, explorers and founders have ever been most people.
Also I disagree that the technology to get to Mars or the Moon is inapplicable to elsewhere in the solar system. And most of the other options are generally worse than Mars for one reason or another. I'd like to hear what you think "Step 2" actually is.
If you could magic up a civilization on Mars today, it'd exponentially cheaper to launch materials from Mars to elsewhere in the solar system than to launch those same materials from Earth. Similarly it'd be cheaper to dig those materials out of the ground for use on Mars than it would be for them to be used directly on Mars.
Counterintuitively, it's cheaper to launch materials from Mars to Earth's Moon than it is to launch them from Earth's surface to the Moon.
On the other hand a rocket that flies from Mars surface too Earth's moon only needs to be 90% fuel which is a lot easier to do with modern materials. This also means that you can carry significantly more payload as your total mass.
With some napkin math, this allows you to launch, with the same rocket, from the surface of Mars to Earth's moon a payload 10 times bigger than if you launched it from Earth. The penalty you pay getting stuff out of Earth's gravity well is just simply huge.
The technology for living there, and some of the technology for going places, does. Would you really want to try to go to Epsilon Eridani without going to Mars first?
> it's much easier to build next-generation rockets on Earth
Ultimately probably not; Earth's gravity well is too deep. Mars is, AFAIK, the only place we could conceivably build a space elevator with current materials technology, so if we assume interstellar rockets will need to be built with materials from both asteroids and planets then Mars orbit is likely the best place for that.
That's not true: the Moon would be much easier.
But if you're just comparing Mars to Earth, then definitely yes. Building a space elevator on Earth is sci-fi for now. I'm not sure about Mars, but on Moon it would be rather easy actually, since not only is the gravity 1/2 of Mars', but there's no pesky atmosphere.
Really? The moon's gravity is 1/2 or 1/3 that of Mars, but its angular velocity is about 1/27th.
(from The Expanse)
Earth, metaphorically speaking, is humanity’s “cave”. A very nice and comfortable cave of course, the possibility space for the development of our species is bounded by it. It’s in our best interest to develop the ability to venture beyond the cave for increasingly longer periods and eventually become able to live outside of it indefinitely.
With this in mind, the moon is too close and convenient for long term self sufficiency to develop. Mars on the other hand is only reasonably accessible once every couple of years or so, which forces the issue of self-sufficiency right out of the gate. The first few decades of human presence there will be focused almost exclusively on self-sufficiency. This is important, because that means it has a far better chance of continuing to exist if/when political will for it wanes.
The upper layers of the Venetian atmosphere may seem attractive at first glance but it has several impracticalities, namely having to stay permanently aloft and total inaccessibility of the resources on and below Venus’ surface.
Will some take part in efforts to move beyond Earth’s surface with greed as a driving factor? Undoubtedly, but I don’t think it’s a valid reason to not do it.
The first words spoken on Mars should be, "Cool. Now, how far is Jupiter from here?"
To shield against the high energy component of cosmic rays, you need to wrap the crew compartment in something like a few meters of polyethylene or water. This is far heavier than anything we could launch today, but would work on something like a nuclear pulse rocket (that has a minimum weight requirement!)
There's an additional problem around Jupiter, which is what Pioneer 11 discovered. The strong magnetic field causes lethal radiation levels at the inner moons. Again you can solve this by wrapping yourself in crazy amounts of water or plastic, but it's far beyond our capability now.
Going to Mars is a legitimate goal.
But i would also like to see a make-the-Sahara-green-(ish) program.
Why not a Neom-but-in-a-viable-way program.
ALso, an even bigger debate is Appolo-mission-to-Mars vs 10-other-unmanned-programs-for-the-Solar system.
What other solar system destination would you propose instead? It's not like we have a lot of convenient alternatives to choose from.
I'd rather visit Mars than Venus, that's for sure.
Just don't visit the surface. It's really, really nasty down there.
Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America).
Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.
I mean... yeah it probably would've been a lot better. They weren't the ones who explored the Americas. It was the people we now call Native Americans
If the Spanish and Portuguese had instead solved AT LEAST their own problems of constant famines and the inefficiencies and brutality of monarchies, they probably would've been a much kinder people...
People like to act like hierarchy is just an inevitable result of increasingly complex societies but there is no archeological or anthropological evidence to support this myth. There's fascistic hunter gatherer groups and the Americas themselves had examples of very large complex and extremely egalitarian societies. Like Teotihuacan which was nearly as large as Rome. After a brief fling with total authoritarianism the people had a revolution and ended up creating one of the first examples of public housing we have evidence of as well as dramatically increasing the average standard of living of everyone
Yeah I think the world definitely be a better place if they waited to solve their problems actually
Then there’s the practicalities: while the moon has long days and nights, there’s no global dust storms, and we can send power from the light side to the dark side with a simple wire (the lunar regolith and the vacuum are both insulators, there’s nothing alive or tectonic to mess with one just draped on the surface, only impacts). The Martian atmosphere is so thin it’s only useful for aerobraking and drones, not breathing, and the lack of atmosphere on the moon means non-rocket-based launchers are much easier, which in turn makes the long-term economics easier (though still terrible with current tech).
But, hey, that's just me.
...
Is that good or bad?
Please don't act like Europeans getting lost trying to find a shortcut to India was a good thing.
Even though it's a future that is grotesquely unfeasible and unwanted for anyone besides the richest 100 people on earth as as ultra decadent projects while 95% of the population on earth lives in societies on their way to collapse from resource depletion and rising inequality.
The fact is that we could use our money on something real, something tangible like saving earth instead of war machines and false promises while the gini coeffecient goes crazy and public education fails.
And i mean this is not just a perspective i've got from researching economics, but from having lots of family in academic science - i've seen how much is about grant money, towing the line and about furthering some state or corporate cause sadly.
This has been explained repeatedly for decades.
There will be more humans on Mars in 100 years, if we skip sending the humans now and develop the technology to automate process first.
maybe someone can find Weinberg’s detailed explanation for others to read.
https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned...
We can't do that anytime soon. We can't even reliably automate most manual labor jobs right now. We can do some neat stuff with robots, but we always need humans supervising them and ready to step in and reset things because the reliability is poor.
All the current active conflicts and threats of armed conflict are being caused by easterners, not westerners. You're about 20 years out-of-date with your complaint of warmongering by westerners.