Why Not Mars
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That said, I'd love to hear what people who work at JPL and NASA have to say to your point.
Sample return step 1 (collect samples) is already underway.
The biggest flaw with the rovers is that they’re terribly slow, so they can only explore a small range around a landing site. If they could cover even 100km/day, which seems plausible on RTG or solar power, we could explore many sites.
It happened to Spirit, and it was moving at a glacial pace, with a team of people carefully reviewing its every move.
The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.
Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don't dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don't take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can't make headlines don't get billions from Congress.
We're not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that's true, but who knows what we'll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?
People tend to forget that we are still murdering each other over this planet.
Getting to Mars would either be a solution to that problem, or just an extension.
I guess, therefore, it matters who gets there first.
(See also: Psyche 16)
Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.
Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.
And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.
NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline.
The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.
It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.
It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.
We can build a replacement, more capable than Saturn-V, and less expensive even. But we cannot reproduce Saturn-V the way it flew in 1970s.
Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course).
We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V.
Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission.
> We can't even build a Saturn-V any more.
Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?
Dead end, yes; engineering, no. More: we didn't need it for so long that everyone who was responsible has since gotten old/died.
And even then, only a dead end given the scientific and industrial position at the time; those can change to turn dead ends into open ends.
It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.
Even the bloody 700 ton UR-500 which became the Proton eventually piggybacked on this, marked on paper as a 50-100 megaton warhead ICBM!
But looks like the Americans were thinking even bigger. :-)
For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it.
Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race.
It's a lot of fun.
Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back.
What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs.
And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective.
But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.
And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.
Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.
"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."
With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)
The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.
Edison and DC lost that battle.
At the time, whatever it was, it was warranted as being worthy of classification. Another tragic loss to the scientific community as I understand it.
"...not because it's easy, but because it's hard."
What Kennedy did not say, was "it's just hard enough". Hard enough that we can pull it off, and the Soviets can't, and the world can see that. Much better to gain a space upmanship victory than a shooting nuclear missile victory.
Now we are in a different place. Well, maybe not for too long, you never know. China has its own space ambitions, and military ambitions too.
But just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things makes no sense.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to expand what's possible with "actual machines", but that should be up to academia - and they're pretty clear that human space exploration isn't worth the money.
In the interest of discourse, who is the greatest proponent of Mars colonization who has been to Antarctica?
Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
The Mars-Antarctica connection isn't particularly strong.
I would 100% disagree with that. If you explained to people that Mars was a habitat untouched by humanity, possibly filled with life, most people would absolutely be against anything that would ruin it. People value preserving nature because they find it beautiful, not because they find it useful.
Personally, part of me hopes humanity never figures out how to get away from Earth and spread to other planets. An untouched rest of the universe seems far more valuable than one tainted with humans, at least to this particular jaded homo sapien.
This seems like a silly worry given the rate of expansion of the universe. We couldn't "taint" the universe even if we wanted to. At least nothing outside of our galaxy (but more likely outside of just our solar system).
The universe is essentially infinite. With essentially infinite planets, moons, stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Humans are unique (until proven otherwise). I say let the humans have their fun in their 0.000000000000000001% of the universe. In both best and worst case scenarios, there is still plenty of "untainted" universe left.
Until there's a dollar to be made exploiting it.
I'm sure colons back in the day thought something similar about "the new world". There are so many questions we need to answer first.
How are we going to terraform Mars? What kind of technology are we going to use to change the thermo-chemical properties of an entire planet? What impact is it going to have with its magnetic fields, its gravity, and its orbit? How are humans going to evolve to live there? Slight endocrine disruptors are making people infertile, what would living in another planet cause?
The solar system is an ecological system, just like Earth. Introducing massive changes like that is bound to come back to bite us. This kind of mindset in the past caused tremendous damages to our current ecosystem. Are we really ready to play god with the solar system?
> A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great!
Any actions we take that ruin parts of the quite likely ecosystem that lives on Mars will have zero effect on Earth’s.
I think a more likely threat is that we may bring something nasty back with a human mission to Mars, as unlike a sample return, you can’t keep the crew and every part of the returning spacecraft in a NASA biocontainment lab indefinitely.
But research stations in the poles are exactly why it's useful to have research stations on other planets. It solves the "if only we could..." problem.
As for his other points, microbial contamination can still happen with robots. I definitely agree that we should be sending more robots/rovers out to Mars before we send people as well as experiments like sending something to produce and store oxygen there just so we know it can be done. Hell, the rovers weren't even able to clean their own solar panels - at one point they had the fortune of a dust devil blowing the dust off the panels.
History is full of millions of examples of things that were asserted as impossible by smart people in eloquent speeches and essays that we do today regularly without a thought.
Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
Humans actively monitor and defend against each threat. In the U.S., NASA is committed to detecting asteroids, and recently successfully altered the course of one [2].
I believe we are most powerful to overcome extinction events as a united species on the planet we’ve evolved to live on over billions of years.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction
[2] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2022/9/22/the-science-behi...
So, having humans on Earth + Mars at best only marginally improved the chances of humanity surviving long term than only having humans on Earth, by a tiny amount.
It's a very exciting, multi-generational project to think about. Though frankly I think we're going to get AGI + brain/computer interfaces + cloud mind uploads before we get martian terraforming; and dropping the bag-of-meat related requirements would make extraterrestrial colonization much easier.
That's also the best option, not betting on a single idea or technology.
That is, they can bring a lot of fancy stuff with them, but to be self-sufficient they'd have to be able to maintain, repair and ideally rebuild what they need indefinitely without resupplies from Earth.
I think that it could be possible for them to focus on few important/key paths, in theory. But, unless they research and prepare for exactly that scenario and chances that it works would be strictly in their favor and they all would work hard, learn hard and motivate themselves through their entire life, I don’t see how it could work. Not to mention political, social, religious risks with the next generation.
I’m not 100% sure ofc, that would be no doubt an interesting “experiment”.
All the space infra could also possibly help detecting and averting space born threats, such as asteroids on a collision course.
That’s because there are places on Earth that similarly better than e.g. Antarctica or some desert.
The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.
The GP's point, as I understood it, is that we haven't even figured out how to make missions 1/1000th as complex as a Mars mission on our own planet viable.
From what I can tell people are talking about two different things here. Group 1 is talking about how we prevent humans from going extinct in the long term by setting up a Mars colony. Group 2 is talking about doing something easier before we jump to something harder (Antarctica -> LEO -> Moon -> Mars). I don't know why these two groups always feel so at odds with each other online, as it seems like both philosophies end up in the same place.
Group 3 are the people who think we should save Earth INSTEAD of going to Mars, and I think they miss the point entirely.
1. An event that affects the Earth without affecting Mars.
2. An event that leaves the Earth more uninhabitable than Mars, even temporarily.
A gamma ray burst or rogue star that destroys the Earth would just as easily destroy Mars. Meanwhile, even a colossal meteor strike such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, despite leaving the Earth a shattered ruin for millenia, would still result in a planet that is more habitable than Mars.
The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.
So even if a very low percentage survive within underground settlements here it would be far better situation than being on Mars.
The difference is that on Mars, we're for the most part forced to build underground.
On Earth we have to choose to do so, and we haven't done enough of that so far.
Yet we still have infinitely more underground settlements on earth than we can conceivably have on Mars in any imaginable future...
That doesn't mean not trying to do something is a great idea.
In the near term, absolutely. But the long term goal is to colonize multiple planets/moons. Eventually, Mars will be one of many worlds on which life finds a foothold, which is perhaps the best backup for life that humanity can currently deliver. But we still need to take that first step.
Seeding libraries for the culture that rose from the ashes would achieve whatever you are trying to.
huh. most honest answer I've seen so far. "We're going to mars so we can later to go war with Earth, ideally when they are weak"
BTW Do you guys think building big chemical rockets just automatically advances your matsci/chem/bio timeline? It doesn't. That's the effect of massive government cheese.
Fun fact about the age of discovery: shit was already discovered. Domesticated food, fresh water, and abundant friends were already there.
The universe is bored of generating new challenges for your particular kind of aggressive. It has lots of fun new problems for people who are willing to work together though. Sorry.
Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?
Any global extinction event is then just going to be a solar-system extinction event, Expanse style. To save enough humans from extinction in case of catastrophy probably some vaults are enough.
Life on Earth survived the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, obviously, otherwise we wouldn't be here now. The dinosaurs were wiped out, but the dinosaurs had nowhere to hide and were completely unprepared for the asteroid impact. It's important to keep in mind that the Earth after the asteroid hit was still vastly more livable and conducive to life than Mars is now. Mars is more hostile to life than a big asteroid impact, because Mars has no habitat to start with. Mars has no benefit whatsoever to humans as far as Earth disaster survival is concerned, except for the fact that Mars is not Earth.
A much better plan to avoid extinction is multifold: (1) Stop destroying our own environment, duh. (2) Get rid of nuclear weapons. (3) Stop killing each other in general. (4) Invest in asteroid detection and deflection. (5) Build shelters on Earth capable of surviving disaster, such as underground. It also wouldn't hurt to (6) Stop being afraid of vaccination.
We've got everything we need here already: normal gravity, breathable atmosphere, food, water, raw materials, people. It would be sooooooo much easier to build disaster shelters on Earth than to permanently populate Mars. The difference in difficulty level makes Mars a total joke in comparison.
As a species, if we can't even get our shit together on Earth enough to stop polluting, stop killing, stop the threat of nuclear war, and vaccinate against contagious diseases, then we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity. You can forget living on Mars, a massively hostile environment, if we can't do it right here on Earth, which was practically made for us.
We don't know if human nature can be "fixed" (in a positive way), so stopping other things until that's been done sounds a bit silly to me.
What's the point of a "backup plan" when the primary plan isn't even working?
The whole point of a having a backup plan is for when the primary plan isn't working :S
c/when/if
When your primary plan isn't working, you fix that first. Ideally, the backup plan is never needed.
If your house is on fire, you don't start building a second house, you put out the damn fire.
Also, it would be pretty dumb to put a backup in place more dangerous than the original. It would be like building your second home inside a volcano.
If one looks at the history of colonies (attempts to colonize the new world, for instance), we see that they often fall apart socially even in situations where they're in a place with much more resources than they had back home. Humans aren't dwarf fortress type automatons that can simply be handed whatever necessary job is needed and mindlessly go about their day for the rest of their lives.
No one has been able to manufacture a functioning mini-society, and every attempt has ended in spectacular failure. It seems crazy to think things will suddenly work if we drop the people in a place devoid of almost all resources and entirely hostile to life from Earth.
Flippantly using "stop destroying our environment" brings to mind a pastoralism that was triumphant in the 90s but is basically unworkable.
Your suggestion requires degrowth, and degrowth would entail a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions
It wasn't flippant. Global warming is one of the greatest dangers facing humanity.
> degrowth would entail a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions
We have no choice, because growth already entails a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
Energiewende was the renewable transition that primarily offshored responsibility to Russian natural gas and coal when plants weren't running, assuming that the renewables would grow and balance out.
That didn't work so well, and now a European heat wave is saving European lives.
People need heat, and light, and to compute.
The developing world cannot wait for net zero carbon energy, and the developed world cannot just stop all useful human activity to pursue climate goals.
The rhetoric around this is if we "just" had better politics, if the oil and gas lobby weren't such villains, if conservatives weren't sticking their heads in the sand we would be able to make it to net zero while "only" sacrificing things we don't care about, like big gas guzzling pickup trucks.
We are finding out that no, we can't.
Continuing down this line of rhetoric is flippant, or perhaps glib.
There's hope though, even if you believe that climate change will end humanity (it won't) - the status symbol cars are electric, more consumer cars are electric, renewable deployment is proceeding apace and we even have developments in fusion and SMRs.
That's how we win - not with the Extinction Rebellion, but with new people doing diligent work to produce higher and higher standards of living at less and less cost.
Fuel costs money, and nobody wants to use it if they don't have to - economics will eventually win, because the best low or no carbon energy sources require almost no operational cost due to lack of constant fuel input.
I agree except this doesn’t seem possible neither politically nor economically… launching people to Mars really sound easier
This is tricky. Both because for better or for worse, they do provide a certain military equilibrium, and also because you know, it's probably a good idea to have them around, at least to a certain degree, if the Xel'naga decide that creating us was a bad idea. Not that nuke might not be sort of like throwing rocks at an advanced civilization, but it's not like we'd have anything better...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
Which could also help with the second issue - say an alien elephant invasion. ;-)
Not as of now. The outer space treaty[1] forbids nuclear explosions in space. I don’t think this treaty will be revised until it is made obsolete by a total elimination of these weapons of horror (e.g. by another treaty[2]). So if you want to see nuclear explosions used as propellant in space (which honestly isn’t such a bad use for them) then I recommend you petition your government to sign and implement the UN ban on these world ending weapons, if they haven’t already.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_N...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
is more inspiring to me.
On a related note, lets also look at the nuclear salt-water rocket - arguably the king of crazy (yet theoretically viable) on the nuclear rocket field right now:
Similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-inertial_fusion
The exhaust is clean, because the system is closed.
Also it reminds me of some descriptions of so called 'Vimanas' which occur in old Indian scriptures, and nerdy people from today tried to reconstruct/reverse engineer/remimagine what's described in there.
And this fits, perfectly so.
Edit: I think of this as even more terrifying thant that saltwater thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
Would you trust in this evil trickster dust? ;->
Actually, I kinda think it demonstrates we really are not done with nuclear engines & even better, more crazy and higher performance propulsion methods will show up. And also, we really need to finally start building some of them them! :)
Like, even some simple NERVA or NEP would be at least a start. :)
1) it is achievable with 1960s technology
2) the payloads, my god, MILLIONS of tons is the ideal cargo size
3) one month to get to jupiter's moons!
I think if we had good funding I would do:
1) Get starship mature
2) capture some asteroids to make an orbital base
3) moon base + a lunar launch loop or launch rail or lunar space elevator
4) build an orion ship on the moon and launch from the moon
5) mine the major asteroids. Profit!
That all sure sounds simple enough if you handwave over all the inherent complexity, but by that standard so does colonizing Mars, and yet colonizing Mars also sounds like a fun adventure.
In particular, (2) and (3) are working at cross purposes here—nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945. Also, (4)—asteroid deflection—could provide a safeguard for earth, but could just as easily be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
(1) is a slogan and not a concrete plan. How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people? Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits. Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish, solar and batteries require mining rare earth metals, and so forth.
I didn't say it was simple. I believe what I said: "we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity."
> nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945.
A sad statement about humanity. Which is why I said we need to get our shit together.
Do we bring nationalism and nuclear weapons to Mars? How soon after settlement until the first Martian war starts? Could a Martian colony even survive a war, if the life-sustaining infrastructure is attacked? Or do they do it in the style of Star Trek "A Taste of Armageddon", with simulations and disintegration chambers?
> How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people?
How do you plan it? Hunger, power outages, homelessness, and lack of access to health care already exist.
> Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish
We're already killing birds and fish in many other ways more deadly.
Would a small Mars colony survive a single jilted lover aiming for the ultimate murder-suicide?
Then give up and cede the floor to the people who are actually trying to do something about the future of humanity. If you're really this defeatist about the whole thing, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation.
Also, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation in general. You've managed to quote almost everything I wrote in my post except for one of the central points, which was: "Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." You ignore that while quoting just about everything else to provide snippy and dismissive comments that aren't really engaging with anything. Of course, why would you contribute anything of value if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
The truth? Are you concerned with truth, or just wishful thinking?
Let's say you have a terminal illness, for example, ALS. Would you lie to everyone, including yourself, and say you're fine, that everything is going to be ok? Or would you admit the truth, and try to come to grips with it?
Of course we would love to have a cure. Nobody welcomes a terminal illness. But the reality and gravity of the situation cannot be honestly denied.
> Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits
In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant. The livability of the Earth's environment is a precondition for every other human endeavor. You can't have economic activity without ecological activity. And if you aim to convince me to be quiet about that, then the last thing you want to do is claim that we can "trade" the environment for something else. This kind of attitude only reaffirms my pessimism about whether we can, as I put it, get our shit together.
I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish when we're currently facing a period of mass animal species extinction due to human effects on the environment, such as global warming, chemical and physical pollution, deforestation, overfishing, etc.
> if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
I'm not philosophically committed to it, just empirically convinced of it.
I don't know how it's going to go down in the end. What I do know is that humans are essentially less hairy, more talkative apes, and as a group we can't responsibly handle the technology that the cleverest (but not necessarily wisest) among us were able to create. We're like the sorcerer's apprentice, except there's no sorcerer to show up at the last minute to save ourselves from the disaster we created.
We've known about global warming for many decades, yet we've done practically nothing about it, and now hardly anyone can deny that the consequences of it are starting to show. We're already past the point of no return. We allow amoral madmen to control world-threatening nuclear arsenals. We put anything and everything into the water, into the air, into the ground, without any apparent concern for the future. Millions of people are in near total denial of science, believing among other things that the world was literally created a few thousand years ago, and evolution did not occur. And by the way, these people dominate at least one of the two major political parties of the most powerful nation on Earth. I don't know why exactly I should be hopeful about all this. To whom am I supposed to cede the floor? The "pedo guy" guy?
In 1963, a graduate student was diagnosed with ALS. Instead of deciding that his life was pointless and meaningless, he completed his doctorate and spent the rest of his life contributing to scientific research and to educating the public. His name was Stephen Hawking and he passed away at age 76, in 2018.
> In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant.
Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable. This kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the issue is counterproductive and useless.
> I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish
I'm not saying not to build the windmills and dams. I'm saying that the benefits of doing so outweighs the ecological costs. I'm not concern trolling here; I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with. You're just so worked up that you missed the point.
1) I didn't say my life is pointless and meaningless. Moreover, I obviously care, otherwise I wouldn't bother to argue about all of this.
2) You're seriously going to pull unusual anecdotal data about a condition that has well known scientific statistics?
3) I think it's fair to say that Hawking's physics talent resulted in greater caretaking effort put into his life than the average case.
> Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable.
Of course nobody suggests it. They're not going to do it on purpose, they're going to do it by accident, due to carelessness and neglect.
> I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with.
Why? If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
You asked about my plan to provide the essentials, such as food and housing, but that's a bit of misdirection, because we do vastly more than just provide the essentials. We have rampant, insatiable consumerism, not to mention planned obsolescence, driven by zombie non-human entities called "corporations" that lack ethics and exist for nothing except unfettered growth. We have the military-industrial complex whose appetite for war and weaponry is never ending. And now people want to massively ramp up the space program again and constantly launch (polluting) rockets into space, even littering our orbit with satellites that block our own view of it that we so admire from a distance. I don't think the problem is the essentials. Rather, I want to know what the plan is for cutting back on the non-essentials.
> You're just so worked up
Please refrain from personal comments, which are unnecessary and uninformed. You don't know me, and you're certainly not in the room with me, so you don't have the slightest clue about my present mental or emotional state. At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
No, you said human civilization is doomed, and then you mentioned an ALS diagnosis as an analogy between an individual life and the fate of human civilization.
> If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
The point is that tradeoffs exist. It's not "tangential" to provide examples of tradeoffs when making the point that tradeoffs exist.
> At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
As far as I can tell, you are rattling this off in your sleep, because you aren't constructively responding to my points in any way. It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up, as opposed to having poor reading comprehension or some sort of apocalyptic monomania. At this point I'm content just dismissing you as a fanatical doomsayer with no interest in what anyone else has to say, because that's how you've conducted yourself thus far.
Yes. That doesn't mean human life isn't worth living. After all, the Earth itself is ultimately doomed, billions of years in the future. And it should go without saying that each of us is mortal. You and I are both going to die someday. Everyone acknowledges that, scientifically. What we do with that knowledge is a different matter.
If there's a way for humanity to avoid its sorry fate, I believe that the solution is not inherently technological. Technology may be needed, but the solution has to start with our acknowledging the truth, acknowledging reality, and becoming self-aware, self-reflective, especially of our own human flaws. We can't attempt to overcome our flaws if we don't even admit that we have those flaws.
The first step is to look inward, to human nature, not look outward to Mars. We'll never be able to govern the space outside of Earth unless we can govern the space between our ears. Rationality, ethics, cooperation, these are the keys to long-term survival of the species. And perhaps biological evolution would bring us to that eventually. But evolution works painfully slowly, so I fear that the combination of technology and self-destructiveness will get us first.
If humans even need something like "nuclear deterrence", for example, that's an inherently unstable and extremely dangerous situation. It's no way to live. Which is why I keep asking if we're going to bring that crap to Mars with us. Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.
> The point is that tradeoffs exist.
Ok. And 1+1=2. You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
> It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up
No, it wasn't. Try coming up with something other than your two uncharitable interpretations, the second of which isn't even worth repeating.
You don't think there is, though. You've admitted as much. So why are you wasting your time?
> Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.
That's always been one of the benefits of settling a frontier--any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form.
> Ok. And 1+1=2.
So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
> You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
It's certainly more nuanced than the statement of yours I was responding to, which was "stop destroying our own environment, duh". It doesn't take very much light to illuminate the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Because I've got time to waste? And because I'm not happy about the situation.
Honestly, aren't most HN commenters mostly just wasting time here?
> any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form
This does not seem true to me.
> So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
No, I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention. There are some obvious, massive environmental problems in the world, such as global warming, air pollution, water pollution, ground pollution, etc. I'm not seeing a serious global effort to stop, undo, or prevent these problems. In that respect, I'm not interested in "tradeoffs", which sound to me like a justification or excuse to continue to destroy our one planet for the sake of short-term profit. But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish, which as you can probably guess, doesn't impress me or justify doing nothing about the environment.
I mentioned those things as examples of tradeoffs where the benefit outweighs the ecological impact. “Doing nothing about the environment” is a complete strawman that you made up for some reason, it certainly has nothing to do with anything I mentioned.
I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either, but you’re still not really grasping it or coherently responding to it, so I have no reason to think you’re willing and capable of engaging with anything more nuanced.
I keep asking, over and over, for you to give examples of tradeoffs where the cost/benefit goes the other way, but you steadfastly refuse to elaborate. All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view. If doing nothing about the environment is a strawman, then why don't you go ahead and explain your non-strawman position?
> I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either
You're not making any point. That's my point. You apparently just want me to say "You were right, Phil, and I was wrong", despite my not even knowing what the heck you're supposed to be right about, except the totally vague, handwavey "tradeoffs exists".
Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You asked, "How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people?" Can we feed and house an unlimited number of humans? No. Can we feed and house the current number of humans? Yes, I believe so. We already produce vastly more consumer goods than is necessary for this basic purpose, but we refuse to distribute them equitably. In any case, if for some reason we can't adequately feed and house the current number of humans, the answer is certainly not Mars, which doesn't support human life at all and wouldn't help even a tiny bit to feed or house current Earth humans. The cost of feeding and housing a human on Mars is, as it were, astronomically greater than the cost of feeding and housing a human on Earth.
One answer would be population control, strictly limiting new births. There's a tradeoff for you. But as I already said, I don't think the basics are really our biggest problem: "We have rampant, insatiable consumerism..."
You haven't, actually. But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
More generally, carbon taxes and similar measures, like the cap-and-trade systems used for other emissions, are IMO a good policy mechanism for controlling ecological costs according to cost-benefit tradeoffs. I don't think anyone is smart enough to centrally plan these kinds of economic decisions, so it's good to use these policies to make the market work for us in these instances.
> All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view.
When you keep misrepresenting what I've already said, I'm going to go back and try and clarify the points that you missed instead of moving on. If you're going to continue making the same misunderstandings, I'm going to get frustrated and give up.
> Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point. I'd say that's progress, and I'm going to leave it at that because I don't think you're engaging in good faith here, and I suspect that if we continue, you're just going to circle back to claiming that I was "concern trolling" about renewable energy again even though I've clarified that point more than once.
This is demonstrably false. Reread the thread.
Me: "How do you plan it?" "If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?" "You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way." "I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention." "But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish"
> But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
> You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point.
From my perspective, you've spent the past three days hiding your real views in order to get me to get me to concede a point that in most circumstances would not be worth even mentioning, like 1+1=2. Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist", unless you believed that my conceding the point commits me to other things that are favorable to your own argument and views? There's a rather simple and obvious reason why I've been resisting what you called "one of the central points, which was Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." The reason I've resisted is that I want to know exactly what I'm agreeing to by conceding that point, and you've refused to say until now. And guess what, I do not agree about coal. So I think I was justified in resisting your point. I definitely don't agree with a laissez-faire market-based approach that always leads to the tragedy of the commons. I think "carbon offsets" are a joke and nothing more than a system to pay to pollute, as usual allowing the wealthiest to do nothing and get away with murder.
None of these quotes actually contain the question, “what are some tradeoffs that would go the other way?”.
> Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist"
Because your apocalyptic rants are very, very absolutist and seem to exclude the very possibility of tradeoffs. You are right that it’s a 1+1=2 type point, but you were passionately ranting that 1+1=11. I was trying to introduce some nuance into the conversation, and then you freaked out.
> And guess what, I do not agree about coal.
You don’t agree with me that we should phase out coal power plants? That makes absolutely no sense given your doomsday ranting.
Oh, I think I see what happened here. We agreed, I think, on hydroelectric dams as a case where the tradeoff favors building or maintaining the power plant. You asked for a tradeoff that went the other way, and that’s when I mentioned coal. See, hydroelectric goes the way of “let’s keep the power plant running” while coal goes the other way—i.e. not keeping that power plant operational. Or do you think we should phase out hydroelectric? You’re not making any sense here.
I don't think going extinct from the effects of any human capability is much of a concern. Humans have lived in stone age for tens of thousands of years. It's more that we wouldn't have nice things like houses, cars, and computers.
If we have to terraform anything, why not first learn to do it here on Earth? Plenty of inhospitable space that we can turn green, no need to go to Mars.
Doing that will almost double the amount of living space for the human population. Earth is a big planet. There is also ample space deeper underground. Why not make entire high-tech undergound cities?
Doing it will allow us to plan similar projects on Mars, or even some day, on Titan. Conditions underground on very cold planets should be much more "habitable", than those on freezing surface.
While we are at it, even the Moon has cave systems where various research can be made and where people can get shelter from radiation.
With no ocean and barely any atmosphere the damage would also be much more localized.
Most of the damage from the Chelyabinsk meteor was caused by the shock wave as it exploded high in the atmosphere:
It doesn't.
I get it, colonizing other planets is romantic and awesome. I love science fiction too. But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.
Let's figure out how to get permanent LEO human habitation going first, then figure out how to do that on the Moon. Then we can talk about colonizing other planets.
So far we've gotten short-term LEO habitation figured out, albeit with issues concerning expenses and trying to justify it all to the taxpayers.
From Mars your family will only get ashes because your body will have been deconposing for months.
There is steel, aluminium and oxygen on the moon,'it can host heavy indstry and peoduce ships, space stations, equipment. It can host a space elevator today,'made of normal kevlar. You could build an aircraft carrier and lift it into orbit.
No you can’t. You still need to spend the same amount of energy per ton to escape earth’s gravity. An elevator does not magically violate laws of physics
Edit: As pointed out below I probably misunderstood the comment I was replying too. My bad
We shouldn't be judging these things by the standards of generally risk averse people on this discussion board. It won't be people like us going.
Only while the thing is rare.
Is it gonna be disposable lower-class people?
In age of doscovery shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on a major voyage.
TThe past is fireign land, executions were a public holiday and children came to watch. We used to gove cocaine to children to stop them crying.
This meme comes from people who've watched too many bad sci-fi shows and don't have a good grasp of history. The people going to space will be the intersection of those who can afford it and those who want and are capable of going. The first people who traveled the oceans were not the lower class. They were the upper class who could afford to fund or pay for the journey by pooling money or independently pay for it.
The poor you refer to didn't come until much later in the age of discovery.
The prospect of an inhabited Martian colony living off the land is dismal, for anything except extremely far-future timeframes (thousands of years or more). Any extraplanetary colony is going to be invariably tethered to Earth and highly dependent on imports for survival. The moon has the advantage of not just being closer, but having a launch window of "whenever you feel like it", in contrast to Martian launch windows that occur 26 months apart.
On planets, a space elevator goes to (geo)stationary[0] so that the cable doesn't wind up around the planet, but you can't do that on the Moon, because luna-stationary is occupied by the Earth, which inconveniently is too massive and spinning too fast to anchor the other side of the cable. However, the L1 point is also stationery relative to the lunar surface, and is the place where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon balance out.
[0] IIRC, geostationary specifically means Earth, but there's going to be some more general term for the same idea over generic parent objects and not just Earth
Although (and I wish I could find this again), I've read that lunar He3 is so diffuse that getting it out would incidentally give us so much purified aluminium, silicon, and oxygen, that sending all that back to Earth and magnetically decelerating it on arrival would give us more energy than the He3, as would burning those ingots with that oxygen.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZteJmg1TfM (10 minute video, relevant around 4:00)
Though you could equivalently try and go for Earth-Moon L1 with a counterweight on the other side of L1. It would be significantly more unstable though.
For Luna or Mars, gravity is reduced and the required diameter is less. Maybe it would even be feasible to build such an elevator if it were above the Earth. But now you're building above an alien plant, so you trade one set of potentially insurmountable obstacles for another.
I'm not sure that that system would be unstable in human timeframes since the two would be tidally locked, although it would certainly alter the engineering stresses in ways that I'm grossly unqualified to calculate. I think a portion of the cable might be under compression rather than tension? I guess it depends on the rotational speed of the whole system.
Speaking of which, substantial amounts of energy would need to be spent accelerating the spin of the Earth/space elevator system to maintain a 24-hour day/night cycle.
However, Luna's presence would perturb the whole system, either tearing it apart with tidal stresses or being ejected from the system before that could happen.
See Isaac Arthur's video about it here: https://youtu.be/dc8_AuzeYKE?t=470
Compare this to anything on mars. It'll be 3.6-4.0km/s to mars injection. Then 2.0km/s to low orbit (can be optimized with clever aerobreaking down to 1.0km/s). To the surface will be a minimum of another 0.4km/s (no engine, parachute only) and closer to 1km/s if you want a soft landing. So you can expect 5km/s at the bare minimum and ~7km/s along established "routes" leveraging to-be-existing infra.
So then the question becomes whether lower delta-v returns, regular launch opportunities, and shorter comms delay are more or less important than 1km/s delta-v savings.
I'd argue the delta-v savings aren't worth it on their own. Mars will eventually be worth exploring and it's a valuable opportunity but by every measure other than raw "throw it at the orbital body with no support or return plan" delta-v savings, the moon is a better site for initial extraterrestrial habitation studies.
Except that all that delta at mars is done with aerobraking/aerocapture. Inbound probes can crash strait into the mars atmosphere without slowing down for orbital insertion. That's why it takes far less fuel to get to surface of mars than the moon, at least with objects car-sized or smaller. Only with larger/heavier objects is mar's atmosphere so thin that fuel must be used for capture prior to descent.
In the following deltaV map, much of the trip to mars is a free ride so long as you follow the red arrows. There are no free rides on the way to the moon.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/delta-v-chart...
In any case, bodies with atmosphere do enable you to effectively shave up to half of the delta-v for a transfer when you know what you are doing. :)
Looking at it from LLO isn't the number you should be using. It's the number from Lunar intercept orbits to landing.
Actually now that I think about it, if you want to save delta-v, you can get an extra 25% off the TLI leg of the direct route with a low energy transfer using weak stability boundary trajectories. These savings however come at the cost of a significantly longer flight time and far slimmer margins for failure.
Von Neumann machines have an existence proof in ourselves, and make it fairly fast to disassemble planets into a Dyson swarm. (I think Dyson swarms are a bad idea, and will grind to dust that blows away to interstellar space in the solar wind in geologically short timescales, but that's a different problem).
Assume reproduction such that population doubles every 25 years. Fast, but not insane.
(1000/25) = 40 doubling periods
8e9 * 2^40 * 100kg = 2.7 Mercury masses, or 12 lunar masses, or 1.3 Mars masses
That's a worst-case bound using a biological anchor. Dedicated VN machines can plausibly be faster: even if it's something weird like staying with biology and uplifting dogs, that's now 75 years, a plausible but currently hypothetical self-replicating 3D printer could make the timescales even shorter.
The sun provides enough power to do it in a week or two, though anything less than decades may have thermodynamics issues.
In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
However, these numbers are meaningless - you are assuming that doubling the size of a population that's 2^39 individuals will take roughly the same time as a population that's 64 individuals individuals, which is not even close to plausible - especially when we reach ideas like a population weighing as much as half a planet.
You're also assuming that it's even possible for a mahcine to convert a significant proportion of a planet's crust to copies of itself - which is obviously false, as the crust is mostly rock, and machines require plenty of liquids and water to be produced (whether biological or mechanical or electronic). And that doing so will not affect the growth rate at all, even as the planet starts being formed of molten magma once all of the crust has been used up. And not to mention the gigantic earthquakes and supervolcaones they would have to deal with as a significant portion of continental mass gets shifted around.
Overall, you are only extrapolating some numbers to a completely absurd conclusion, and calling it plausible. There is nothing even close to realistic in your scenario, and indeed we have no idea if it's even close to possible to strip a planet down to create a Dyson swarm. I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
> I'm not sure where your 8e9 number is coming from. Population doubling every year but the parents leaving the planet after mating?
That's the current human population.
> In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
You start with one human, I didn't. What are you even imagining that I'm describing, Adam-only parthenogenesis?
> Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
Even with Adam-only parthenogenesis, log2(8e9)*25 years is 822 years, less than one, definitely not plural, millennia.
Material science isn't my field, though it doesn't need to be given how many other places there are for whichever chemicals we want. Water? Oxides in the local rock, and four massive hydrogen gas giants (don't need much proportionally as H2O is 89% oxygen by mass).
> I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
Gravitational binding energy of Earth: 2.2e32 J; Mercury: 1.8e30 J; Mars: 4.9e30 J; Luna: 1.2e29 J
Luminosity Sol: 3.8e26 W
Time required to explosively disassemble (i.e. each part reaching escape velocity) each object: Earth: 6.6 days; Mercury: 1.3 hours; Mars: 3.6 hours; Luna: 313 seconds.
To preempt the obvious, yes I know that's the number for total luminosity and not the power available at any given moment given how many space habs have been built part way through the process, but that makes very little difference: Given the way the functions behave, you don't need most of the power of the sun until you can harness a significant percentage of it anyway.
I mean, this toy model also assumes that the only thing these humans do with their lives is reproduction, with the average individual adding only a little more than their own body mass to the VN swarm each generation, and not, e.g., building themselves a nice little space hab that's unlikely to mass less than 10,000 kg/person even if I make the grossly simplifying assumption of just adding life support to a tiny house or a camper van. It makes very little difference to exponential growth.
You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra. The amount reaching the earth is significantly less - 1.73e15 W, or about 10^9 times less - and the amount that can realistically be captured is far less than that.
Overall, don't worry: there is exactly 0 chance that any human advancement will disassemble even a dwarf planet in the next millennium in the real world. Just because Freeman Dyson could write some back of the napkin computations it doesn't mean this is actually possible in any meaningful way.
You know stuff cools down, right? Power loss to radiation is proportional to T^4.
> You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Good thing you're putting words into my mouth, then. Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
> Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra
I know, and I said as much with different words.
Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That's why I preemptively made the point that you're ignoring here.
It only took around 160 million years for the Earth's crust to form, so yeah, sure, stuff cools down, eventually.
> Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
Ok, mechanical was my idea - but chemical extraction of oxygen requires some other compounds to form, potentially making the whole thing even less usable for future conversion into more copies. Plus, it requires an input of some other materials, which may not be easy to create.
> Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That still only gives you the 10^15 watts that reach the Earth, not the 10^26 number you were citing. Also, covering the whole planet with mirrors or PVs is again not nearly as trivial as you make it out to be, and this "launch loop" idea is just some abstract design, not something we can actually build (despite what the author would have you believe).
This is already completely implausible given everything we know about human behavior, but it reaches impossibility very quickly when you consider the possibility of humans becoming more than a negligible fraction of the mass of their single host planet. We aren't machines that can trivially reproduce ourselves from commonly available materials and then eject into space. Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder. And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
Nah, we use plants to turn raw materials into what we can consume. And in the other direction, we can only make stuff on this scale with factories that take a while to build. But in both cases, that's a distinction without a difference. A farm and a factory rather than a spacesuit, makes no difference on this scale, so long as they feed themselves while growing their families.
> Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder.
Feeding ourselves is about 1% of our current labour. Getting into space is only hard because we use rockets, but at this scale we'd use launch loops, atlas towers, orbital rings, or similar. Those are extremely cheap, like "$300 to LEO" cheap for this thought experiment's ("spherical cow in a vacuum" model of a) 100 kg human.
> And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
There's lots of ways I've seen suggested. Even without the exotic options like the Dyson Motor (would take too long, at 40k years for Earth, not seen the numbers for Luna or Mars) or redirecting Kupier Belt Objects to blow off percentage points of the target planet mass at a time, even just with traditional digging, at that scale it's "how fast can you drill vertically?" and "how many launch loops can you wrap the target planet in?", followed by "how fast does the deep ground cool down when exposed?" — the latter being why I said thermodynamics probably gets in the way when the timeline gets down to decades; this is radiative-dominated cooling in a better vacuum (insulator!) than most laboratories let alone thermos-flasks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090616110337///www.aeiveos.com...
It's about what you'd call "hard SF" and one side calls their argument a "solved problem" :-)))
We know how, and we know it doesn't require more than operating at higher scales of industry than ever before. Any interplanetary or kardishev 1+ venture makes those assumptions.
Many countries import the majority of food / material inputs, but output high quality manufacturing, technical, and entertainment goods.
Whole books have been written on the raw materials available in space, both from the moon and from Near Earth Objects.[]
Mars is a bad idea that needs to go away before we lose the opportunity to perform the actual next step, which O'Neill and others mapped out decades ago.
> But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.
In either case, the main challenge, is rapid rockets reusability.
Nothing comes even close to the second place.
The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.
Having a self-sustaining living space is by far the biggest problem (one where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows).
The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
Each of these problems is fractally more complex than I make it out to be, and none of them would be fixable if rockets were very cheap. And these are just problems for a limited time Martian outpost, similar to a trip to the ISS. Thinking about an actual colony with some prospect of perpetual habitation being in orders of magnitude more issues, some of which may not even be solvable without biologically altering humans to make a new Mars-adapted species of hominid.
Without cheap space access they are not even worth properly researching.
> One where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows.
None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
I personally think we should intentionally seed all celestial bodies with life as soon as possible anyway.
If we find life in our solar system (especially life independent from Earth) we should become a lot more aggressive with space settlement, because it would make "great filter" ahead of us hypothesis a lot more likely. Settlement outside solar system should become one of humanity priorities as a matter of survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
> The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology
Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.
Not a showstopper for the willing.
> Thinking about an actual colony with some prospect of perpetual habitation being in orders of magnitude more issues
First things first.
On the contrary - these are all useful technologies to the goal of preserving human life. If we had the ability to create self-sustaining colonies in the most extremely harsh conditions on Earth (a necessary step to being able to colonize any other place), we would have a much greater guarantee that humanity would survive a disaster like a huge asteroid/super volcano/deadly plague/etc. We could probably also use the technologies developed for other uses - better homes, more sustainable agriculture etc.
We could also work on miniaturizing the things and then start thinking about sending them in space, perhaps even with currently existing rockets.
> None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all, given the hard physical constraints on rocket masses and available fuels.
> We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.
What would be the goals of the mission? Why do you think people desperate enough to accept certain death will be able to achieve said goals or even care about them once they reach the surface?
> First things first.
Exactly my (and the article's) point. First you send robots to Mars while developing colony technologies on Earth, then you start thinking about sending humans to Mars.
That's not how people work. People will go to Mars for curiosity, greed, fame, or some higher level desire (possibly religious) not necessarily in that order.
Odds of Mars being explored à la Star Trek are infinitesimal, I'd give that hope up.
We can explore how life appeared on planets in other solar systems.
It has held in place since then by both inertia & similar "if I can't have the resources, no one can" and other resource sources still being usually cheaper to mine.
Showing that's it's possible right now within reasonable budget.
That's the fundamental difference in logic here.
The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible.
> Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere
> It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all
Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes.
Starship HLS allows to take 50x spares of everything NASA thought would be required for the Moon landing.
And it's costing NASA as much as gross earning of the Avatar movie - $2.9B.
To what end? We could send a few suicidal people to Mars today for little more than the cost of a satellite launch if we don't care about their survival - hell, they don't even have to be suicidal, get some people who recently died, strap them in a rocket, and send them to Mars.
Instead, you have to set an actual short term and longer term mission goal - say, you want a mission that can prove that X people can survive for Y months on Mars without external help, with a longer term goal of hauling them back to Earth at the next launch window or something.
But for this type of mission, you actually need extremely sane people who greatly value their lives and those of their colleagues, otherwise you'll just have a few corpses sitting on Mars like in my initial example.
And more importantly, again, given current technologies, the actual result of the experiment is already known: those people will simply die if sent to Mars with currently known life preservation methods.
> This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
Then never send people to Mars - at least not until we have a very clear path to actually establishing a self-sufficient colon on Mars, for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
> Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes.
Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
And even if Starship achieves all of its goals, it will be nowhere near the ability to send resources to Mars outside the existing launch windows in anything approaching economic efficiency.
> for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper.
$100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume.
> Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything.
SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time.
> Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions.
It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.
> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission
These goals seem contradictory.
That problem gets a lot easier and cheaper when you don't have to design for margins of 1.2 to or so to save on weight. When you can throw extra weight at a problem to overbuild it for reliability you can solve these problems cheaper and more reliably.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
Planetary Protection is the new version of treating Earth as "gaia". It's a form of regressive environmentalism. This is not an important goal. Mars is not a very good candidate for supporting life now that we know how many geothermally active ice moons with undersea oceans exist in our solar system.
If hypothetical life on Mars is similar to life on Earth then it's not that valuable of a thing to learn and anything found would vary drastically from life on Earth from billions of years of separate evolution. If it's very different from life on Earth then it will still be easy to find even with plentiful human contamination.
Finally, with additional mass you can bring substantially heavier and more complex analysis and remote robotic equipment with you. (Or on a completely separate mission before humans arrive.)
> The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
This is overrated given that there's plentiful human experience throughout the history of humanity where humans suffered significantly worse isolation and hardship. Some projects will fail from human psychological issues, and the risk from them should be minimized (bring plants along, allow spaces for people to self-isolate, etc) but a single failure should not be taken as a reason that the entire concept is doomed. For sickness, you try to minimize possible issues by bringing significant medication and medical equipment, but sometimes there will be inevitable deaths. As mentioned, having additional mass that you can bring for human comforts and medical equipment saves a lot of potential deaths and issues
In LEO further you have no gravity and no materials so the only going there is bringing whatever you want to do there with you. There's no resources that can be used. With no gravity also many things simply can't work. For example you can't run any pumps that pump liquids built in a normal manner. You can't rely on gravity to separate or settle liquids.
Reading the article I think the author tries to figure why this requirement cannot be dropped and gets no rational answer.
2) even if it does, the point of GP's counterargument is not "if you want to colonize a hostile environment we have those here on earth" it's "your goal is extremely far outside of our current technological capabilities. We can't even colonize hostile environments in our own backyard."
The main reason cited is usually one of species resilience. “Not Earth” is an arbitrary requirement bolted on.
The main risk is that of an extinction-level event, such as large meteor impacts, substantial tectonic activity, or a worldwide nuclear disaster.
All of those would likely have minimal impact on an autonomous underground city with a complete, mostly hermetic air filtering system, with three redundant power sources (say, nuclear, solar, and geothermal). That would also be substantially easier to build than a >1K self-sustaining Martian base.
How would you make these islands habitable, including having a good atmosphere, without affecting the rest of Earth's ecosystem in undesirable ways?
That's one major difference. A goal of terraforming mars might actually be easier than terraforming remote islands on earth because:
A. It's an isolated system
B. We can afford to fail
Build a port, and have people delivery stuff by boat.
It's not that hard to do
We could stretch out a long hosepipe..
Hard problems on Earth get solved regularly, but they only get solved when there is sufficient payback to justify the costs of finding those solutions.
Without the added justification of "because it's another planet, and that's so cool", I don't think a mars colony makes a lick of sense.
This makes Mars pretty ideal as a home base, if you assume that in the future we are planning to mine and process asteroids for rare minerals and metals.
I love the "might" qualifier.
Let's not forget the heart and circulatory problems too.
Also, there's a very good chance that this type of exploration of Mars will forever contaminate it preventing us from using Mars to explore the origins of biological life, a much more important and achievable goal than space colonization, and one that doesn't shut out the other one in a farther future.
Considering that the "rest of the galaxy", aka the Milky Way is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km give or take across, the 250,000,000 km to Mars aren't going to provide much of a head start.
So as already mentioned, good local base for other activities in much more hostile surroundings.
With instructions for their 'gone enabler' engraved in dura-marble?
SPACEDRIVE! :-)
I'd turn that around, "We need to start thinking about how human beings are utterly dependent on Earth for the forseeable future and how we're destroying her, because there's no planet B in the time frame global warming is unfolding". Start working on protecting what we have. Don't flatter yourself into thinking there's an alternative.
I'm sure many have read William Shatner's narrative of his trip to real space but if you haven't, you should.
"I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her." (and continues...)
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldl...
Let's first create a self-sustaining vault that can house a million people for indefinite amounts of time on Earth, and then let's revisit sending humans to Mars with all the new technology we developed doing so.
In the meantime, let's actually spend space program resources on actual useful exploration, such as finding out if there is life on Mars or on other liquid-water worlds in the Solar System (such as Europa). Confirming or denying this would be a much much much bigger boon to scientific understanding than getting an ISS-style outpost to last a few years on Mars, and it would also be far cheaper.
The chances of humans surviving on Mars after such an event is extremely less than humans surviving on Earth. We know the Earth has remained hospitable to life after many instances, Mars hasn't been hospitable to complex multi-cellular life in its entire existence, or at least the last billion years or so.
Almost nothing. I agree the Mars colonialization idea is absurd in any foreseeable timeframe. My point is mostly fantasy seems serve to numb people to the damage to Earth that's now going. If someone is worried about the future of the human, they should be working on climate change. Especially if they have enough money and influence to make themselves widely heard, as do many of the people hocking the Mars-boondoggle.
This is such a common viewpoint - that earth will become uninhabitable - but I think you've been watching too many cataclysmic films. In your experience, what makes it so bad?
In my experience, this place is pretty decent. The worst of it is the strong governance systems we have - all these nonsense laws that are really there for someone else's benefit. But, while the strong governance will make/is making our culture unpleasant, there are no worries about the physical matter.
The problem is all the unfounded, unverified stories people believe, despite the evidence of their own senses, if you ask me.
We can’t even get a large % of humans to stop buying SUVs with vastly excess horsepower to avoid ruining our planet in a relatively short time frame.
The societal/political problems seem larger to me than the engineering ones, which are just a matter of effort.
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t stand in the way of people who want to try.
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.
Why should anyone do anything, really?
I see little point in exploring this on Antarctica which is why I believe no one really is entertaining idea of this type of test run on Antarctica.
In HN speak - “to learn to build a filesystem, build a web server first!”
The reason why is because you will learn a lot more by doing that stuff. The things that are going to doom a first Mars colony attempt isn't necessarily something like "we don't know how to grow plants on Mars" but "we don't know how to build a proper door for the Martian environment" (inspiration for this is taken from https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo, which has appeared on HN recently). If your ultimate goal is to build a self-sustaining interplanetary colony, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that maybe we should start by trying to figure out how to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere inhospitable first because it's never been done before, and all previous attempts have failed.
> Most (but not all!) doors open inward. There is a huge amount of snowdrift during the winter, and if the doors opened outward, they would be impossible to open without a lot of digging. This could be a life safety issue if the building is occupied.
On a Mars there is no "inward" like there is in McMurdo because swinging doors only work between sections with equalized pressure. Going outside requires an airlock that slowly normalizes the pressure to avoid shooting the colonist out the door with a blast of air. Going between sections requires doors that can slam shut in either direction to seal away damaged sections in case of emergency, like the sliding doors in almost every scifi movie/series/book - which we still haven't tested in the real world because there's nowhere to test that kind of pressure differential on Earth and our space station technology is still based on Cold War submarine hatches.
This is patently false. NASA has a 100 x 120 foot cross section vacuum chamber at Plum Brook.
There's obviously plenty of large vacuum chambers than can fit a door mechanism or even a small test room (the ones JPL uses to test spacecraft thermals was the first to come to mind for me, didn't know about the Plum Brook facility).
But wouldn't 95% of that "stuff" be the same as doing it on the moon.
Which is closer, cheaper etc.
But for some industries this could be a benefit & even if the lunar dust is abrasive, at least it won't move itself that much without wind (though there could apparently be some electrostatic effects in play sometimes).
Also can't do aerobraking/aerocapture, but there is Earth next door for that.
Hmm? It’s been done lots of times: it’s just that once people start living somewhere, we stop calling it “inhospitable.” But c.f. the Inuit, who’ve been living above the Arctic Circle for more than a thousand years.
But in my estimation, colonizing Mars would run out of steam really quickly. Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring. There isn't that much geological diversity, and there's no life. You wouldn't want to take a vacation there. I know there's going to be a lot of people here who are going to say "No! Mars is really cool!" The people here aren't normal. Living in a cave underground without being able to go outside and see the sun or take a walk is a nightmare for most people.
Landing on Mars could inspire lots of people. But once it's done, its mystique is just going to wear off. People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
Sports! Imagine playing basketball (or football, etc.) on a dome on Mars with less than half the gravity of Earth. People back on Earth would love to watch it. People on Mars would love to play it.
And I think some new sport would need to be invented.
Said as a joke or sarcasm or something.
In Terra Ignota, there's a "nation" (the novel has a radically different concept of sovereign states an nationhood than our world today) composed of people who many here I think would identify with: they take a vow both of productivity and leisure so as to maximize their potential ability to contribute to the betterment of the human race, and their national obsession is the eventual (500 year timeline) colonization of Mars.
(spoilers)
A critical ideological revelation in the novel is that despite the fact that basically the entire nation is obsessed with the eventual colonization of Mars (they send their bodily remains there so as to increase the organic biomass), when push came to shove for the idea of actually putting people on the planet, it was realized by many in the nation that they don't actually want to abandon all of humanity on Earth for a life sentence of scrabbling out a hard life on Mars. Not because they don't want to put in the work, they are arguably the hardest working society in the series, but more like, it would just separate them for the remainder of their lives from all of humanity, and they have to acknowledge to themselves that they don't want that.
As cool as you can make Mars with improving colonization technologies,I think that for a ticket to Mars to be economical from a labor, safety, equipment, and resources standpoint, it has to be one way. It has to be you telling yourself that you will die on Mars, away from all of humanity but the smallest slice. I think that's a pill too bitter to swallow.
And what a fate to impose on your children. You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter, and those future children would be essential to a permanent colony.
Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Mars (if that's even medically viable) decide that Mars totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Earth?
Do we build a wall around Earth and stop them as "illegal aliens"?
Seriously, life on Earth is likely to be much better, much easier than life on Mars, so there's going to be a desire among a significant number of Martians to leave, just as there's a desire among Earthlings to move for a better life. Then what? In order to keep the Mars colony sufficiently "staffed", do you turn it into a totalitarian regime, where nobody can leave? No personal freedom?
How many of us want to sacrifice our lives and our happiness just to be a "backup plan"?
I rarely if ever hear space enthusiasts talk about the morality of a Mars colony. They act like it's just a technological problem, and it's somehow a given that we can put large numbers of humans wherever we want, whether or not the humans themselves would want that.
Do we build a wall around Mars and tell them their shitty life on earth is all they get, and they should be happy with antarctica?
I think your moral argument can easily be flipped, why do you get to decide that we shouldnt do something because there exist people who dont want to do it? What of the the people who do?
If you dont want to go, then dont go...
I'm not personally in favor of the "colonize Antarctica" approach. It's true that if we can't figure out how to colonize someplace like Antarctica first, then it's unlikely we'd be successful on Mars, but I'm not advocating the colonization of Mars anyway.
> If you dont want to go, then dont go...
This completely ignores what I said, which was "You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter".
Would the offer of a trip back to earth for any child born on mars go any way to overcoming your concerns?
Most responsible parents strive to make the lives of their children better rather than worse. Not always successfully of course, but it's the goal, and going to Mars is predictably worse.
> Would the offer of a trip back to earth for any child born on mars go any way to overcoming your concerns?
It might allay the moral dilemma, but it would increase the concerns about the long-term viability of the colony.
>Do we build a wall around Earth and stop them as "illegal aliens"?
This was of course an analogy to the United States, where we put up barriers to prevent emigrants from seeking a better life here.
There's no shame in procreation, but there's shame in trapping people forever in a place where they no longer want to live.
That is an assumption but far from a certainty.
I would not hesitate to do so to any parents that leave a perfectly functional society to raise children as subsistence farmers in an smog-choked, irradiated, arid clime. Opting to raise your children under worse conditions than those one grew up under, and has access to is despicable and selfish.
This is essentially the plot of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (albeit on a generation ship heading mission to another solar system(
While I would like to live out the rest of my life as best as I could, and I hope everyone alive and not yet alive gets that chance too, I don't think it would be that great a tragedy if humankind no longer existed. Imagine a world where everyone is hooked up to a simulation that feels as real as real life and everyone gets to live out the best possible life (or even lives) for them. They can have as many (AI) children they want in the simulation and never even know they weren't real. In that world, where no one ever had real children again and humanity naturally died out, would that be a bad thing? Humanity is not providing any benefit except to itself.
The scenario you describe doesn't involve pain, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad. An empty, dead universe seems worse to me than one teeming with thought.
I can fully imagine a totally disconnected VR dwelling civilization that still has hordes or self replicating bots of doom that dismantle planets and stars only to make more memory and compute.
Might very well be more dangerous than a "normal" space faring civilization.
Think about a world without trees, birds, plants... well actually just imagine living on Mars.
They might not object to going with equally insane incels, but do I want to spend to send and maintain them? The best that could be said is they wouldn't be here anymore.
Volunteering to be taken in by a transparent con job is a poor criterion.
I doubt they will leave Earth to go dying on a desert planet with no oxygen, water and Instagram after they eventually gained the "Mars space program" status at home.
No-one that wants to go to Mars has any expectations to go back. It's not even a factor.
Note that we don't even know if any plants today would actually be able to fruit in the low gravity environment (nevermind if any animal would be able to successfully procreate).
The points you are making are excellent but I believe solvable. Also we do know if plants can fruit in space. We've already grown tomatoes in space and they are fruits of the tomato plant. And that was zero G.
They managed a pepper.
https://gpnmag.com/news/nasa-will-grow-tomatoes-in-space-abo...
Also nobody has yet produced a self-sustained biodome.
All living creatures have genes, why humans in particular?
Don't dogs and dolphins have offspring?
Aren't they intelligent?
And why not plants, which are the real reason why Earth life forms can exist on the surface of the planet?
But most of all, if you have children, would you really want for them an horrible life on a Mars colony where they would grow up in a labor camp like life and develop such weak bones that they could never live the red planet to visit Earth?
But, who knows, maybe such an animal will exist in the future.
In other words, isn't the threat to the human species mostly within itself, and finding solutions to those issues much more impactful (and attainable) than dreaming of building such fantasy structures?
Aside from the realization that society wouldn't work differently on Mars either. Look around you. The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth.
Society will break down, once there is no more hope.
Good sci-fi stories, like a colonisation of mars (like in the mars trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinsons) gives people hope, that a different world is possible, therefore (helping) preventing that breakdown in the first place.
This is the reason, why so many otherwise smart people ignored reality and signed up for Mars One for example. It is the dream of having the chance to start over in a clean way.
"The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth. "
And when you have colonists with that altruistic mindset, then yes - the idiot rate of that society has the potential to be significantly lower. This is why people would sign up for one way tickets - exactly to get away from the idiots here on earth.
But yes, a real mars colony is very far away and would likely stay a hellhole for a long time, until either terraforming becomes realistic, or big domes, that protect enough from radiation, but gives people freedom to move in sunlight.
No one wants to go to mars, to become a mole in a bunker, even though this is what the beginning most likely will be. It is the dreams, that attract us Mars enthusiast. I would argue, if there would be more people dreaming, instead of mindlessly watching netflix over and over, there would be a better chance to make those dreams real. Also here on earth.
If people sign up to this trip believing that they are getting away from all the selfish idiots, then they are in for a big surprise.
Seen what happened at Twitter recently?
sounds pretty sad for a lion or a moose and frankly impossible for a shark or a whale.
Science fiction is nice, but transporting wild animals for months in a spaceship to a desert planet with no water and oxygen?
Forget about it!
Hard sci-fi actually addressed the issue and the outcome is always the same: there are no animals in space, except some domesticated small ones. There are no wild animals in Asimov works, no wild animals in Dick, no wild animals in Lem or Clarke, no animals either in recent works, the Expanse for example.
There are humpback whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home though :)
The myth of the Noah's arc is just a myth, if we'll really move into space because our planet cannot sustain humanity anymore, we'll be the only species to survive. We, some plants we'll use as food and viruses/bacteria living inside us. Maybe we'll have perfected cloning technology and will try to resurrect them if the conditions arise.
But even then, how many people do you think could live in such a dome?
1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
Would we share the little precious oxygen with rats or mosquitos?
Trantor wasn't build in a day.
I would not be comfortable knowing, that the children I helped bring into this life are doomed in the long run. That would be pointless to me, there needs to be a way forward, whether it is mars or something else.
I don't get it.
Basically: Let's face it, when we're dead then we're dead. That's it. You have your life. Trying to achieve some sort of immortality or higher purpose by creating offspring is just as futile as praying or paying some quack to help you with afterlife matters.
If you feel that unconnected, than yes, that was it to you.
And sure, I will be dead one day, too and my name forgotten. That doesn't mean, my life was without purpose nor significance, because I do feel part of something bigger. Progress of humankind and the spreading of life and consciousness in general.
I don't know the names of my ancestors, but they are of significance, as without them, I wouldn't exist and without me, neither would the 1000. generation after me.
Please step outside and be amazed when realizing what the other species on this planet are capable of.
Well, other than possibly being catapulted to space in spore form by a big impact event.
Animals are awesome and I am indeed amazed by how smart some of the species are. Not a single one is near human level, though, and won't be for millions of years, if ever - which is not at all guaranteed, it's very much possible that human-level intelligence is evolutionary mistake/accident.
Let me know when you find an animal that can do e.g. lambda calculus and relational algebra like a human can. Since this has nothing to do with anthropocentrism, the same argument will be made - we have to preserve this species on another planet to ensure that intelligence doesn't disappear from the observable universe in case something happens to Earth/its biosphere.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much --- the wheel, New York, wars, and so on --- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man --- for precisely the same reasons."
And why would such disappearence be bad? Really, honest question. Is there some inherent greater good to adher to by preserving intelligence, no matter how narrow it's being defined in this thread?
It could just cease existing. I don't see the problem.
Putting boots on Mars doesn't help solving the above problem. As TA explains, the first humans would be mostly busy surviving and would be dependent on permanent resupply from Earth. It's a pure prestige project.
The effort would be better spent on engineering a streamlined and automated version of our technological base that can be deployed with minimal effort and supervision to set up a colony or a mining base. Once we have achieved that, we are on the way to become a post-scarcity civilization and can easily push much farther than Mars.
And yes I mean sure - colonizing another planet is the ultimate backup plan. But like this article(and many others) have said, it feels like jumping the shark - we can barely keep people alive for a prelonged period of time on a space station, and we are jumping straight to mars outpost from there? Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?
In the atmosphere, how do you meaningfully keep that bubble around you?
Yes. This.
I hope that we piggyback on Mars exploration for building infrastructure on the Moon.
The Moon is a much better target for a first self sustainable colony and also could become economically interesting.
There is nothing on Mars that is economical interesting AFAIK.
So I think it makes sense to talk also about surface bases, to get more people on board, even if those are potentially quite inefficient.
> build a colony at the bottom of the ocean
Sun enters red giant phase. Oceans boil away. You boil with them, before being engulfed by the sun.
Mars is a stepping stone.
Other countries have similar scenarios.
At the current rate we don't have to wait for the sun to kill us, climate change will do that first. Sure, it might not be an extinction level event but societal collapse requires much less than that. Disruption of the supply chains needed to maintain a Mars colonization program requires even less than that.
So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
You can have billions of years of spare time. If you only concern yourself with Earth and never move beyond it, you'll end up just like anemones
> Mars is a stretch goal.
If Mars is a stretch goal, we're fucked. By time of red giant sun Mars will also be toasted.
> climate change will do that first
It probably won't. Devastate and depopulate anything outside arctic circle? Yes.
Nuclear winter has a good chance but even that's not a certainty..
> societal collapse requires much less than that
I don't care about societies I care about totality of humans. All societies exist while their energy/work production can ballance the expanding complexity, or are knocked out of balance by another society.
Societies aren't immortal.
We were nothing more than sea anemones once too. In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight. The timeframe is just so unfathomably long thah it's impossible to predict what could happen.
> In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight.
That depends on how likely is human-level intelligence to arise, so far only one species arrived there and no other. Then you add expectations of being able to build a spaceship capable of escaping Earth's gravity well.
Hoping some future intelligence can do job we can do now is ultimate form of procrastination.
What do you think where your Mars rockets come from? Who mines the raw materials? Who refines them? Who builds the tech? Who does the assembly? Who does the research to actually make Mars colonization possible?
"Societal collapse" is another way of saying you will not go to space today (or ever). I'm not talking about a society. I'm talking about our entire global economical and political system. Unchecked climate change will wipe out food production and make vast swathes of land uninhabitable.
For someone who seems to focused on human survival and creating self-sustaining life on Mars, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of supply chains (and in case you're unaware: everything has a supply chain, even modern agriculture can't function without entire industries producing its resources and equipment). You'll have a hard time establishing let alone maintaining that on Mars in the next million years if we can't maintain it on Earth in the next hundred.
If you want to ensure human survival, fix climate change first, then we can worry about Mars colonization.
We have a lot less than one billion years. After that, the oceans start to boil.
There are millions if not billions alive today who are suffering from war, famine, dictatorships. And climate change is just making that worse. It would be more reasonable to help those souls instead.
Yemen is quite inhospitable, but people still prefer Yemen to living in the Sahara desert or the Antarctica.
Citation needed, because real-world experience shows otherwise.
Mankind is heading for a larger capacity for information processing, this is the unstoppable arc of history. Mars or space doesn't figure into this equation at all.
But none of that is the problem. The real problem is that we haven't learned how to do reality-based politics and economics, and possibly never will. We're so bad at this we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.
The idea that we might somehow get better at planning rationally by moving to a planet that has none of the above is really quite strange.
Haven’t we? I guess it could always be more stable. Where is the line for you? Is there any point where you’d consider this problem solved?
Besides, if things feel unstable to you, why would that be an argument against attempting to set up a secondary living environment on another planet?
If we had stability issues in our primary datacenter, would this be a reason not to create an offsite backup?
The problem was solved before the Industrial Revolution.
We have yet to come to terms with how the Industrial Revolution has changed and is changing the Earth's environment.
> If we had stability issues in our primary datacenter, would this be a reason not to create an offsite backup?
Does it make any sense to put an offsite backup in a place that is vastly less stable than your primary datacenter?
And what if your primary datacenter issues are caused by mismanagement and carelessness?
Since the industrial revolution, we have become excellent as destroying life. Not the opposite.
Yes, it makes a lot of sense for mankind, no doubt about it. Does it make sense for men and women though?
It's easy to say mankind. Flight makes a lot of sense for mankind too, but less than a third of the global population has ever been on a plane because for the remaining 2/3 it doesn't make sense to do so given their economic constraints.
> Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring
Yep, exactly.
Mars is fundamentally retro futurism promoted by a bored billionaire who ran out of ideas to impress the news.
edit: for reference. this is how Musk really ignited the public interest around SpaceX, whose goal is primarily reusable rockets, not missions to Mars.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/5/15/8613099/spacex-made-...
Uh no, this has been one of his passions for a very long time. It’s the reason SpaceX exists:
“Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, first presented his goal of enabling Mars colonization in 2001 as a member of the Mars Society's board of directors.”
How does that contradicts the premise?
SpaceX is primarily (emphasis on is) in the business of reusable rockets.
Musk launched the Mars colonization idea as a self promotional venture.
There are many things Musk said about Mars which are borderline retarded
Starting from the fact that he wants to colonize Mars, I am much more interested in the exploration and I believe it defines human nature much more than simply being a billionaire with a colonialist mindset.
For example
- Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess he believes that his life (and other billionaires like him) must be preserved. I'm not sure about regular folks like most of us...
- “I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me” this is from 2018, it hasn't aged very well
- I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. Why???
- Musk said there's 70 percent chance he’ll get to Mars within his lifetime, with plans to permanently resettle on the Red Planet. No, he won't. We all know he wouldn't do it. He's never gonna be an astronaut, at best he can be a Bezos.
- in 2021 he said he would send humans to Mars by 2026, now it's become 2029 (it's always five years away). He also said that by 2050, there will be 30,000 to 50,000 people who choose a one-way trip to Mars to begin a new life. Everyone's free to form an opinion on this, I simply call them BS.
He wasn’t a billionaire when he started working on it, and he’s been working on it for 20+ years, so I don’t think he’s bored.
The rest of your complaints boil down to his overly optimistic timeframes, and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
it boils down to the fact that he's lying. And he probably already knows it.
> and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
Please refrain from interpreting what I say and write.
I do not necessarily disagree with Musk on that, I simply can differentiate from day dreaming and reality.
Mars is a worthy goal as much it is going to live on the top of Mauna Loa.
Or deep down the Marianas Trench.
Musk said it: he would like to go because it's a challenge, like climbing mount Everest.
That's all he cares about.
But lets also be absolutely real: he means send someone to die, he will never be fit to be an astronaut, let alone a space colonist. He's also not stupid enough to go towards certain death after having accumulated an enormous amount of money here on Earth. That he could actually use for the good, but, who cares, buying Twitter is more fun.
It's also honestly quite depressing to listen someone with so much money say that humans are worth only if they waste their enormous wealth on macho challenges.
He literally said that humanity will be much less interesting if we don't become a multiplanetary society, which, assuming it will be possible (I seriously doubt it) will take millenia, if not more. And once it happens, Martians won't be able to come back to Earth, because our gravity would crush their body.
How splendid.
p.s. I'm a fan of retro futurism. I grew up watching movies like Forbidden Planet and reading Asimov.
Musk completely ruined it for me.
We haven't even solved the easy case where water and oxygen are available in unlimited quantities, let alone the much harder scenario of space or another planet.
To save the possibility of finding life we are preventing ourselves from finding life.
https://treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000...
Perhaps you're forgetting that the initial detailed resource assessment (exploratory drilling etc.) is also prohibited, which stops investment from getting a foothold.
(I spent a lot of time down there)
Edit: thinking a bit more... Why do you say the treaty isn't enforced? I've been under federal investigation for what some people thought was a violation of the Antarctic Conservation Act (US law enforcing the treaty). I don't think anyone has ever been charged under that law so you could be right, but I was scared and I assure you people take the ACA seriously.
But there certainly were substantial whaling stations in Antarctica for a while, with quite a lot of people & much more primitive technology compared to what we have now.
Do you know about the overlapping territorial wedge claims in Antarctica and how they were suspended by the treaty? If not I think you would find it quite interesting.
Given that there's laws and international treaties forbidding mining, resource extraction or resource exploration, of course it's not economically worthwhile.
Wikipedia gives the entire island's population as 144 - all of them at a military base. [Edit: Vs. a population of ~61 million for Great Britain.]
Actual daily life in the high arctic/antarctic is nowhere near so desirable as many people want to believe.
That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about cultivating apples by cultivating oranges.
Ridiculous, given that flight is entirely about swimming through the air, while space rocketry is mostly about how to get through and out of the atmosphere ASAP.
(Not to mention, rocketry as a field was already making better progress than flight back then.)
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
This is how we've always been learning, though. Even Leonardo and other early pioneers of flight constantly attempted things impossible at their level. It's those attempts that led to progress - the theory and methods to solve such problems on paper came about only in the century.
Incidentally, it also turned out that studying bird flight was a waste of time - bird flight is too complicated for us to replicate even these days, and we mostly don't bother, because simpler systems yield better results for the kind of needs we have now.
Ultimately Antarctica is so similar to, say, a mountaintop in the USA, or even a lab in a US city compared to Mars that I dont really see the added value. The unknown problems we will face on Mars are there on Mars, not here.
Will a city on Mars ever be viable, let alone self sufficient? I have my doubts, but there’s only one way to find out.
How much enriched nuclear material can we really send up in a rocket at a time in order to fuel the massive energy requirements of such a colony? We sure as hell don't want to send up multiple tons of enriched material at a time in a rocket to potentially fail during launch, and we would need that much energy to build any sort of functioning industry on Mars so it is anything more than a glorified emergency bunker where we send people to die.
Engineering advances fundamentally by trying to do things you haven't done before. If you already know how to do it, you higher a technician and hand him the instructions. (Many software developers for example are closer to trades people/technicians than actual engineers.)
I more easily believe in mining rocks on Moon as cool souvenirs. (And as a first step in developing the technology.)
Photosynthesis doesn't use sunlight all that well, PV + wavelength tuned LED can turn the same amount of sunlight into more biology.
But! Farmland is dirt cheap, so that's more of a solution in search of a problem than anything else.
Also, agreed to the final point.
Plus, the comparison shouldn't be "open farmland vs. PV+LED", it should be "for the resources cost of PV+LED, what can you build in the way of polytunnel or greenhouse?"
Which in turn reminds me of this YouTube Mars botany simulator, whose validity I can't help but doubt, but which is nevertheless moderately interesting: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDkilF5o6-Hfsnhn_HFxjJ0...
You can be very inefficient if it is your only method of producing food.
We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible. People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate. Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts, but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
Also looks like I can fly if I book the right tickets.
They could be though, at current tech level. It's the infrastructure that doesn't support it. Smartphones are as close as we got, but they reveal couple unfortunate things about the real world, such as:
- In a competitive market economy, everything ends up sucking as much as it can get away with;
- Magic wands would offer individuals more autonomy than the market, and possibly civilization, can sustain without self-destructing.
> wizards don't exist
Within constraints of the above, sure they do.
> Magic still doesn't exist.
_joel already provided the obligatory quote, but to expand on it, most of the magic in fantasy literature could be made possible with current technology, but would require supporting infrastructure to avoid breaking rules of thermodynamics. If you want to go less conspicuous, we'll have to wait for molecular nanotech ;).
Not with that attitude. ISS would like to differ, anyway.
> People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate.
Yes. But that's not because space is evil or haunted or a domain gods reserve themselves. It's because of weightlessness. We know how to solve this problem - it's precisely the kind of things GP is talking about: an engineering challenge we know how to solve on paper, but need to actually do it, to a) learn all the little peculiarities that always come with something new, b) actually have this working on some piece of space infrastructure.
> Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
There's lots of stuff in space. Within the distances past manned missions already covered, there's way more of everything than on Earth itself - except life. That one is on us to get there, you can view this as a natural process of life evolving to settle other niches :). And while space itself by volume is mostly empty, the reason you're talking about is just gravity.
> People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts
On the contrary, people treat these as equivalent and considering them just fantasy entertainment, instead of realizing that most aspects of sci-fi are somewhere between artist's concept (soft end of sci-fi) to engineering blueprints (hard end of sci-fi, which often literally describes real engineering blueprints in prose!).
People used to take inspiration from softish sci-fi; for all my love of Star Trek, it's as soft a sci-fi as it gets, and it managed to drive a couple generations of people to STEM, and predict, inspire and/or pre-market plenty of new technologies. Would iPhone and iPad become so popular so quickly if not for a large part of US population, and Western culture itself, having been familiar with those concepts for two decades already, thanks to Star Trek: TNG? You got a whole generation there, growing to await stationary and portable touchscreens.
Point being, people used to look up to sci-fi ideas, and stuff happened. Now they don't, stuff doesn't happen, and even sci-fi gets sadder and more boring year by year. It's like the whole culture advanced from energetic young adult stage into a depressed, bored middle-aged suburbanite stage.
(Also, a lot of Middle Earth / Harry Potter stuff is doable too, you just need a sprinkle of molecular nanotechnology and a post-scarcity economy where people can afford spending an order of magnitude more effort on showing off than on utility aspects.)
> but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
There's an abundance of evidence that human body is not capable of existing for years anywhere but on specific terrain in a small latitude band on the planet. Everywhere else, we exist thanks to technology. That's literally the story of humanity: inhabiting the previously inhospitable areas by building tools we need to survive. Space is no different.
There's still some atmosphere quite high away from Earth, the transition from "not space" to "space" is asymptotic.
> a ton of gravity (comparing to "actual space")
It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
> plenty of protection from the earth's magnetic shield
Fair enough.
But I reserve my right to hold ISS as being in space, to counterbalance the parent's claim: "We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible.".
Not saying otherwise; however, 400km above surface and eg. Stationary orbit are quite different things.
>It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
Actually, we don't know that. From a perception perspective, you are right;From a biological perspective, we actually don't know if there is any biological process that may be affected by the free-falling effect, specifically.
>"We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible."
The op's assertion seems to be right - most of what we know to date seems to confirm it. Maybe "not possible" is a strong statement, but certainly not feasible, and that is not going to change anytime soon.
literally everything is in space
Mostly slave labour and infinite oil money?
Sending machines makes sense. Sending humans, not so much.
Mars is a harsher environment than actual empty space, you can't just toss a space capsule onto the surface and expect to live in it for the next 2 years even if you had the food and power and extra parts.
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.
Yes, at least with their wallets (and quite possibly worth words too, though I can't be bothered to trawl through interviews to see if anyone asked).
> We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
That seems backwards. I would switch Mars and Earth in this sentence. Doesn't it make more sense to take the easier steps first, which will prepare us for eventually taking bigger steps?
I'm not against Mars exploration. There's no reason we couldn't do both: keep sending probes to Mars, maybe even humans in a decade or two, but make a Lunar base the priority. Then apply the lessons we learn on the Moon to establishing a colony on Mars. And literally use the Moon as a springboard for Mars missions.
I think this is pretty much universally agreed to be the sequence of events. A lot of discussion about this seems to imply we'll just proceed with some Mars colonization mission before we understand the challenges it poses, and before we're certain we can tackle them.
BTW, that JFK quote seems out of place in this context, considering it was made at the height of the space race. The speech was politically motivated, and was meant to inspire a nation to not "lose" the race, while instilling fear in the enemy.
I do not know a space equivalent, but in medicine, treating severe diseases teaches us a lot more about treating their mild cases than the mild cases alone could.
As for space races and political motivations, if you look at China's advancements in space recently, both in terms of launches per year and the pace of their construction capability in LEO, it is clear that we are in a race. On both counts (launch count and construction in LEO, demonstrated by Tiangong SS missions), the US is losing it. There indeed does not seem to be political motivation to do much about it.
And tautologically or not, it is important to recognize the value of how much we could learn from a Mars colony that can't be learned on Earth, in LEO, or on the Moon.
1) Luna first, send stuff to space with mass drivers.
2) Gravity well is lava, mine asteroids (near Earth, then Belt) and build massive space colonies to your liking (O'Neill Cylinders, etc.).
3) Lets build balloon cities in the atmosphere of Venus!
4) Settle (likely after doing nr. 2) the ocean worlds of the kerbal-scale Solar System analog around Jupiter.
But most likely, some mix of those will likely happen, with different organizations having different needs and aims (eq. massive free flying factories and scientific instruments vs self sustained city building).
Either way, events such as these that would have wiped out humanity as it exists today have not yet happened in the ~1.6 billion years of eukaryotes existing on Earth, so there are good reasons not to worry too too much about it.
Note that the asteroid that "wiped out the dinosaurs" would still have left humanity as it exists today in a much better shape than a Mars colony is likely to ever be in.
Also, note that much smaller meteors/asteroids pose a huge risk to a Martian colony than they do to Earth, as they burn less in the almost non-existent Martian atmosphere, and since a Martian colony will be much less geographically spread out than the Earth. An asteroid wiping put all of the people in North America would still not destroy life on Earth, while a similar impact would easily destroy any human life on Mars for any kind of foreseeable future, if it happens to hit the colony itself.
So certainly a bad news for the one spot, but another outpost a couple hundred km distant could be fine.
I think this will drive the proper colonization of Mars.
Science, of course, but it won't require a large self-sustained colony, much like Antarctica, or oil / gas fields of Siberia, or oil rigs in the ocean.
Not to mention, the Martian colony would forever be far far more frail to attack than any Earth society, since it has to spend so much of its nature wm resources just to keeping humans alive.
It's not entirely unlike an overseas colony in an inhospitable but not empty place. Start small and dependent, develop the land around you and become autonomous.
Of course the "other" cause may be to make a backup of the Earth civilization and humankind for a case of collapse on Earth, due to global warming, an asteroid impact that hasn't been averted, etc. But this is only possible with true material independence, such that can withstand any blockage or embargo from the Earth's side, else it won't stand the collapse on Earth. The colony may declare allegiance to a particular Earth's government, and inherit the civil norms from the culture(s) which built it, but cannot and must not be ruled from Earth.
Independence != animosity and bitter confrontation. It's more like Canada is independent from the UK, despite some formal allegiance, and the UK is not going to send troops if the Canadian parliament votes in a way that bothers the English monarch.
This is a colossal task, likely not achievable even in this century with the technology we currently have. Stuff like high-temperature atomic engines and other near-sci-fi stuff could alter the equation somehow.
But, if Puerto Rico wanted to become an independent nation, do you imagine the USA would let it without trying to quash the "rebellion" with both economic and military might?
The US did it for the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands in recent-ish years, why wouldn't they do it for Puerto Rico if they wanted to?
My point is that letting a dependent territory go on good terms is a known practice, so thanks for the examples.
Not to mention any attack coming from Earth and not from some nearby (in ship travel time terms) will be known for months if not years in advance.
But that Martian dust that gets all over the solar panels is also loaded with toxic perchlorates. Every time they wear a suit out, they have to absolutely insure that none of it gets into the living space. Good luck.
"Anybody who is saying they want to go live on the surface of Mars better think about the interaction of perchlorate with the human body. At one-half percent, that's a huge amount. Very small amounts are considered toxic ...."
[https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals...]
It's the infamous "unknown unknowns". Stuff we're not even aware we should be aware of. Stuff that will fuck us up in new and interesting ways.
If we ever do make it to colonizing any other planet, the road will be paved with the bones of the dead we sacrificed to find out what we shouldn't have fucked around with.
In another fun example, the idea of using microwaves to heat things up was also discovered completely accidentally. A [self taught] engineer working on an active-radar system noticed the system he was working on was melting a Hershey's Mr. Goodbar in his pocket. He then used it on a few other foods to confirm, and the microwave oven was born.
I think one of the biggest benefits of colonizing Mars will be things we can't even imagine. We'll find all sorts of great new ways to kill and maim ourselves, but we'll also discover plenty of new amazing tools we can use to do awesome things with. Over time the former will be mitigated and the latter exploited. Colonizing, as always, will be a game for those who are willing to accept a few decades being lopped off their average life expectancy in exchange for making way for a greater life for those to come.
Have we mitigated ways to kill and maim ourselves?
> Colonizing, as always, will be a game for those who are willing to accept a few decades being lopped off their average life expectancy in exchange for making way for a greater life for those to come.
I'm not sure that's an accurate description of colonist motivations.
Our species has proven again and again it's inability to care for the extended tree of life, heck, we still believe there are sharp and crisp delimitations inside our own species (the blacks, the Jews, etc.). Why then this gaslighting about "we must save civilization"? Just because some of the billionaires, those who our system lets to own the world, are afraid of dying? Hey, rich guy [2], got news for you: we don't have a civilization, we are barely a bunch of pseudo-evolved tribes, infighting for trivial resources and perceived boundaries.
Let's figure out how to have a civilization, then, maybe, we can try to save it.
However, as it stands, "we must save civilization" is doublespeak for "you, hoi polloi, go and build an Elysium for me and my friends", just as the Qataris said to the slaves to build them stadiums [3]. And if you own less than $30 million [4], don't kid yourself, you are still hoi polloi.
[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/humanitarian-organisation...
[2] There are no rich gals https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-ric...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/qatar-wo...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individua...
This is farcical on the face of it. There is no situation where the "hoi polloi" are going to be building colonies. This is a creation of science fiction with no basis on reality. You need fundamentally significant amounts of money to leave the planet. We're talking hundreds of thousands per person. Some rich person is not going to ship off people who are unwilling or don't want to go..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States
However, if you are willing to regress the definition of slave to a 19th century understanding: are you being paid a wage to sell your time to build an Elysium for someone else?, do you have to wake up at a certain hour to go to work?, do you have to eat/urinate/defecate at certain hours provided by your work environment?, do you have to sleep at a certain hour to prepare for work?, do you have to work or suffer hunger -> homelessness -> death? You, me, we are the slaves already, only the whip is different. But if you own over $30 million, it's fine, you are on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog here.
[1] https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment
Establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars does benefit us, even if it is more difficult.
In particular, does it include any of the people asked to pay for it?
That company's revenues, insofar as they result from what were once public funds, are primarily a result of projects related solely to the Earth (and perhaps one planned mission to the moon).
NASA is not paying for SpaceX to go to Mars. NASA is paying SpaceX to take stuff to Earth orbit.
Almost all of SpaceX's income, absent Starlink subscription fees, traces to tax dollars.
That's always been a stated goal of SpaceX to do exactly that. That's why they funded on their own dime the development of a massive reusable vehicle that has literally no reason to be that large unless your explicit plan is to design it for interplanetary cargo.
> Almost all of SpaceX's income, absent Starlink subscription fees, traces to tax dollars.
Not true. As stated explicitly by SpaceX in several years ago, the revenue split of SpaceX was 1/3 NASA, 1/3 other government and 1/3 commercial. But in recent years the commercial fraction has dramatically increased (simply as evidenced by the tremendous numbers of missions happening from non-government customers).
Yes, but his lips were moving.
Just like how America hasn't outright been unable to develop the means to go to the Moon again for the past 60 years, it just has had other priorities.
In fact, following your logic, Artemis also should be cancelled until we've spent the arbitrary duration of 100 years sitting around in Antarctica just to prove that we can do it.
An additional point being missed is that when we started talking about going to the Moon the first time around, we didn't really know how to do it, we sent out several impactors just to learn enough about the surface to decide where to go. By setting that goal we gathered data for the purpose and eventually managed to do it. Similarly, there will never be a time where we are 'ready' to go to Mars or any other distant celestial body if we just keep waiting for arbitrary requirements to be met. Right now it's living in Antarctica for 100 years, then it'll be something more ridiculous and arbitrary like maintaining an artificial atmosphere for 1000 years.
Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo. We've been studying the surface for decades now, have got rovers storing away reference samples and testing oxygen production, we've even been testing how much mileage we can get with less conservative choices in hardware (eg Ingenuity's processor being much more modern than Perseverance's and Perseverance's landing footage being mostly off-the-shelf industrial cameras made possible by the more modern coprocessors being used to compress the video onboard before transmission).
A stated goal of Artemis is to use the Moon as a step to Mars, which it's turning out to be given that the only vehicle remotely capable of making the trip survivable is on the critical path of establishing a long-term presence on the Lunar surface. Everything that has to be developed for missions to Mars will end up tracing back to something tested or learned from Artemis, just as many aspects of Artemis are based on things tested on, developed for or learned from the ISS.
We're not. The longest Moon landing was 12 days. The goal of the Apollo mission was not to colonize the Moon. There's no Moon colony or any current plans for one.
If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable. But the goal of "let's make life interplanetary" is currently a pipe dream at best, a religious cult at worst.
Because nobody wants one. That’s not an understatement. We have the resources to begin colonising the Moon. But nobody wants to. People want to colonise Mars.
Until they are asked to go AND stay for say 5 years, then all of a sudden it's a completely different answer they'll give you.
That’s fine. Wanting to colonise Mars, and being willing to work on it, and not on say crypto or ad serving or military pursuits, is still a net win.
We are not in the 1960s anymore, the US should do better than just an Apollo program 2.0, going into crazy Mars expenditures without a plan would guarantee you just that.
The inspiration should be the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan.
In both instances the super-geniuses with type-A personality got you to the Promised Land, but then what happens? They move on the next shiny thing. Nonetheless The Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan were able to continue because once the super-geniuses got the US to the Promised Land there were operators who got to keep the project going.
Generals, admirals, ambassadors were more than willing to dedicate their lives as operators to make sure that the U.S. Govt and its citizens would actually get a ROI on the 2 endeavours. You can say it's patriotism, status-seeking, the thrill to have authority over powerful weapons, borders and huge economic resources. Whatever the reason there were operators at the helm once the super-geniuses got out of the picutre.
The Apollo Program had the same amount of super-geniuses but no operators to take the helm to secure ROI, that's the reason why the U.S. Govt. had to pull the plug on the whole program.
Operators are not interested in writing their name in history books, they need enemies and competition to beat and take resources away from them. Said resources would then be paraded around and shown to citizens in order to both show the competence of said operators and improve the quality of life of American citizens.
What resources can be extracted from Mars and given to citizens in order to propel their quality of life?
If you think the infamous "We are there for the oil!" was bad then I guarantee you that "We don't know why we are there at all!" is much worse.
The former people will understand the rationale and even accept it, while being openly critic about it in public they'd be at peace with it while in the privacy of their homes with the curtain closed. The latter, not so much.
The only reasonable method of shipping rocket fuel to Mars or anywhere else in the solar system is to mine and refine it off the moon or an asteroid, which means a moon base or mostly self-sustained asteroid colony would need to exist first.
Why do you think we’re refining methane-burning engines?
You are going to need to produce 10,000x more energy than your fuel contains to make the fuel, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
Are you even attempting to Google these questions before posting them here with such an aggressive tone? Manufacturing oxygen on Mars is demonstrated engineering [1]. Manufacturing methane, theoretically sound and demonstrated in the lab [2].
This is what I meant by the aggressive strain of ignorance having overtaken the science with popular astronautics [3]. Some folks read a hot take on Musk and what Hawthorne hasn't done, ignore the thousands of scientists demonstrating actual technology a hundred million miles away, and then assume they're vindicated when the rest of us get tired of arguing with willful denseness.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170001421/downloads/20...
I just don't see a Mars colony as a reasonable goal without sending potentially thousands of rockets full of tools and materials, which is too expensive to do without an already existent space mining and processing industry.
That is an understatement. "People" have talked about a Moon colony for a long time. Even before there were Moon landings.
The primary difference is that a Moon colony doesn't have a billionaire propagandist.
Talk is cheap. People are working on Mars.
When is the Mars launch? What's the schedule? It's 100% vaporware.
Methane engines and atmosphere-agnostic propulsive recovery are far from vapourware. It’s not a launch schedule. But that’s a straw man requirement for “working on” something.
It's not a straw man when you don't trust the word and good faith of a modern day "Music Man".
Then don’t.
Do you dispute that those technologies exist, and were developed by people dreaming of colonising Mars? The “when is the Mars launch” standard for “working on” something is a straw man because, by that definition, nobody is working on fusion energy or Alzheimer’s disease.
You're talking about rocket technology. I already said, "If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable." The question is a permanent, self-sustaining Mars colony, where the biggest problem is not "Methane engines" but rather breathing oxygen, drinking water, eating food, not getting irradiated, not getting poisoned, not having circulatory problems, reproducing, and surviving in general.
> people dreaming of colonising Mars
Interesting that you use the word "dreaming".
Get in line, plus the benefit of time machines is that you don't need to wait for them to be developed.
Intentionally. Hackers dream. I have a background in aerospace engineering. That doesn’t mean I know how to solve the problems of permanent habitation. But it gives me a sense of where the edges are, and while some problems are super difficult (toxicity) others are wildly exaggerated (radiation) and none are blocking. Moreover, many of the processes we’ll need to develop have obvious counterparts on Earth, most interestingly, energy and fuel generation.
The author of the article wants an annual JWST or Cassini. I’d love that. But we aren’t getting it. De-funding Mars means going back to a post-Apollo NASA budget.
I'm sure they've got some engineering schematics for some of those things or re-warmed NASA papers about those topics floating around. But talking about Martian colonies without talking about the things that would just keep a couple of people alive is just bullshitting.
You're serious about an endeavor when you want to talk about the boring aspects of it. Talking up the exciting aspects is just bullshitting.
It doesn't. The Martian environment sets the limits on everything else. You could drag the entire Earth over next to Mars, and people still couldn't live there.
The irony is that the hypothetical "What if the Earth became uninhabitable?" is effectively the same as "What if the Earth became just like Mars?"
Not in the slightest. SpaceX's proposed Starship design has known mass and envelope limits. All of the required support systems can be designed with those limits (or subset thereof) as part of the constraints. In fact now is the best time to start designing those because it can inform design criteria or mission profiles for Starship. Having those as handwave-y unknowns while talking about colonies is just absurd.
A manned landing on Mars requires they have months worth of reliable support infrastructure available. None of that is just going to appear. It all needs to be built and landed with or before humans. It needs to be repairable with tools on hand. It must power on an be functional on Day 1. You're not serious about landing people on Mars let alone building a colony without talking about the "boring" infrastructure that will keep everyone alive.
Hell, as it stands it isn't even clear if initial vehicles will need auxiliary thrusters to avoid digging up a hole upon landing. Even NASA seems to be uncertain about that one.
So yes, it is ridiculous to argue that they aren't serious about setting up a colony based on what they're doing right now.
Beyond that though, they're working on the spacesuits (granted, they're so early into that they're nowhere near ones usable on Mars) and they have demonstrated the ability to perform some amount of important maintenance on the Starship vehicles without needing machinery that isn't easy to bring along.
Agreed. Most of the serious work on establishing visits is at NASA. But getting there and back sustainably is a big part of the problem. To borrow another comment’s analogy, we’re not going to establish a permanent presence (whether with a rotating cast of astronauts or permanent population) with the astrophysical equivalent of triremes.
Not only is Starship not currently flying but there's been no demonstrations of their in-orbit refueling, not even between two Dragon capsules. There's also been no demonstration of in-orbit engine reignition. No demonstration of multiple engine reignitions. These are all necessary components of any Starship mission. Starship must always have fuel for landing as there's no capability for it to do an unpowered landing.
This means without an in-orbit refueling its payload lift is massively compromised. It also doesn't have the fuel to get out of LEO without refueling.
Starship is currently making tiny baby steps towards launching while people talk it up like it's doing regularly scheduled launches. There are a lot of major unknowns in the Starship mission profile and there's no guarantee it can or will work as advertised. Even if it technically works the idea there's going to be daily launches is currently a pipe dream.
There may even be failed attempts where everyone dies in an accident as there were failed colonies.
What would those priorities be?
Other than arming itself and expanding NATO to the borders of Russian Federation? Bombing Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia and other nations to the Stone Age?
Honestly, I want to know which priorities made the trip back to the Moon impossible?
you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
Finally, what do you think will be the effect on climate change of at minimum quadrupling the people in Antarctica and providing them some sort of economically viable reason for being there?
What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison. Aside from all the other arguments that we CAN put people in Antarctica the complexity and side effects for our environment are more dangerous than putting them on Mars.
If you are seriously saying that getting 20k people to Mars is impacting Earths climate less than getting them to Mars then you need a reality check.
Hint: You can't not just not walk there, but anything apart from sunlight to support life isn't there which even Antarctica has in abundance (oxygen and water).
no I'm saying their excess heat generated in a polar region will be more detrimental than the excess heat generated on Mars will be. Among other things.
Basically that the day to day living in the area being damaged is going to be more damaging than the one off transportation. That said I haven't done the calculation, but since I was the first one to even bring it up I doubt anyone has done it either.
This is not how climate works, not at all. The issue isn't “the amount of excess heat”, it's about how many shit-tons of greenhouse gases we would put in our atmosphere by sending those people to those two places.
And given you need to send more stuff on Mars to make it livable than on Antarctica + the fact that you'd send them with freaking rockets instead of boats, it's going to be several orders of magnitude more damaging.
It impacts the pristine nature of Antarctica less. You’re also ignoring motivation. There are smart people motivated to see Mars. (Maybe not to settle. But to visit. The same way one may be curious to visit Antarctica without wanting to live there.)
CO2 emissions per a Falcon 9 : 425.
Emissions per human on a Falcon 9 (assuming 4) : 106
Emissions for a Starship launch: 2700
Emissions per human on a Starship launch (assuming 100) : 27
Emissions per year for America: 5,000,000,000
Emissions per year for a single American: 15
Emissions per for for a single American over an 80 year lifespan: 1200
----
I don't know if people don't really appreciate how many people there are, overestimates rocket pollution, or just like some person reads something on the internet, somebody else repeats it, and nobody at any point bothers to see if what anybody is saying makes any sense. Rocket launches are such a nothing-burger in terms of emissions that yes sending people to Mars (assuming they stay for a while) would definitely be a net reduction in emissions.
For some fun tangential data, to match the current emissions of the US, alone, you'd need to launch about 12 million Falcon 9s. Last year was the biggest year, for space, by far with a whopping global total of 178 orbital launches. So the entire global pollution impact, for that record breaking year, was equivalent to ~5,000 Americans.
https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
I don't think there's any point in making life in Antarctica sustainable for now. But there's even less of a point in making life on Mars sustainable until we have made life on Earth sustainable first. Burning through resources on Earth to chase a pipedream of maybe having a self-sustaining colony on Mars a few hundred years from now is a luxury we can't afford at the moment -- and because we can't afford it it's doomed to fail even if we try.
Meanwhile NASA costs 0.15% of US GDP. I might want to bump that up to 0.3% or so, so that we can do Mars. Much more than that and I agree that we have other priorities (like climate change).
I mean I suppose you are familiar with these things, it's not like the history of this debate should be new and strange to readers of HN.
Oh, I'm sure that's absolutely true and not at all an exaggeration.
Whereas the 100x more costing and 100x logistically harder case for Mars is?
>Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what?
That at least this level is realistic, and we're not jumping to conquer Everest when we aren't even fit to climb our 2% incline hill next to our house.
And that we can coordinate, invest, invent, build, and deploy, the infrastructure to make living there more livable and have an actual community there - even at "baby steps" level.
If anything that would make the idea of setting up anything more permanent and not a repeat of the moon-visits on Mars more viable: Lots of much simpler problems would have to be solved in a place like Antarctica first before one can even pretend to be able to solve the 100x bigger issues on Mars.
>What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change?
Hugely detrimental, if not for anything else, for the false hope that climate change doesn't matter, we can always go to Mars if push comes to shove.
This is besides the fact that we've mandated by international law that Antarctica is forbidden from being "economically viable" because of the restriction on any economic activity. Plentiful (more than 20K) people live and work in the far northern arctic on the European and the North American continent with conditions roughly equivalent to those seen in the less extreme portions of Antarctica.
You know where palm trees don't grow? On mars.
I’m a fan of Mars and beyond also eventually. Expanse TV series does great at near future sci-fi and solar system scale humanity.
We could learn great things, and maybe reuse technology for going on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_Station
And IIRC Concordia already tested some water recycling technology from ESA for example.
Basically, an Earth that’s capable of colonizing the moon or mars is probably already capable of further settling those conditions on Earth. That stage of humanity probably needs to have a stronger sense of community than current, too.
One of the advantages of a Mars colony is that the argument for it infringing upon any existing interests is much weaker than for anywhere on Earth. Of course, to some people, the idea that someone could just go somewhere and do a thing without anyone (who those people of course claim to speak on behalf of) being in a position to claim injury is disturbing in itself.
Space actually is one. And there are no (sentient) existing inhabitants.
IMO our current civilization has no way to account for, nor price, that reality - yet.
We know more about deep space than we do about deep water.
Submarines and nuclear tipped torpedoes can strike any point on the sea floor with almost no warning.
They're very much not a frontier.
There are places on Earth that we have never been to. The deep ocean is incredibly hard to get to.
We need to do some basic expreriments, take the soil samples and drill few meters down in order to check for water ice deposits.
But before all that, we need to send more rovers.
Provided you want to get the crew back to Earth of course, if not then "don't need to be there more than few hours" takes a whole another meaning & makes mass optimization of the mission much easier! ;-)
There are really no frontiers left on Earth that are not locked up by existing states.
That point is missed by the whole “space makes no sense because nobody lives in Antarctica” argument.
That and settling another planet is much more interesting than trying to settle a less friendly area of Earth where people already can live.
Exactly this. It has been tried many times and every time the project ultimately fails. There have been many greenhouse / biodome projects that tried to simulate living on mars or the moon and they always go sideways. These projects also assume everyone involved has passed a physical and mental health screening. Society as a whole does not align with such tests. One bad neighbor will cause an atmospheric loss and take everyone out.
If we are going to spend a lot of money in space ventures I would rather see that effort put into something that could save life on Earth from real risks such as getting really good at mining asteroids and controlling the trajectory of asteroids and even that should be 99%+ robots. Humans should be hanging out in near-by spacecraft to have a low latency control and monitoring of the robots and have smaller rescue ships that could be used to extract people from the control spacecraft when things ultimately go wrong. Rescue and maintenance drones should also be robots.
Mars should be a distant stretch goal when our technology advances to the point where we can transform the land and the atmosphere in one or two human lifetimes. We are obviously not there yet as we can not even clean up our own atmosphere here on Earth.
The concentration of resources involved in getting people to and on Mars, will as a side effect also open up these areas on Earth for habitation.
The same effect occured with the space race. Instead of standing around saying it's impossible, our species rose to the challenge and as a side effect the technologies developed ended up altering our lives on earth in fundamental ways.
We are doing it because it is hard. Because we know the payoff for achieving difficult things.
https://taxfoundation.org/tax-court-antarctica-not-foreign-c...
Once we have thriving biodomes in the Outback, then talk to me about trying to do it on Mars.
> the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit
This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.
SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.
- Hyperloop was a sort of snake-oil to squash High-Speed Rail
- The robot as a guy in a suit dancing on a stage ... I've no idea where he was trying to with that. I see there's been some movement on their robot since it was "launched", but why on earth did they start off with the weird dancing suit guy?
The hypertunnel reference seems to be conflating two (related) things: the Hyperloop concept and the Boring Company.
The Hyperloop thing is definitely questionable, but to steelman it: he truly believes the High Speed Rail is a waste of money and we should be more forward thinking with something like the Hyperloop, even if he didn’t personally intend to build it.
After all, if it was entirely fraud and then what did he have to gain from killing the High Speed Rail? I guess a small fraction of the taxes he pays not going to something he didn’t like?
Also, the origin story suggests it was not concocted as a means to kill the High Speed Rail:
“The recent plans for a version of vacuum train called Hyperloop emerged from a conversation between Elon Musk and Iranian-American Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar when they were flying together to Cuba on a humanitarian mission in January 2012. Pishevar asked Musk to elaborate on his hyperloop idea, which the industrialist had been mulling over for some time. Pishevar suggested using it for cargo, an idea Musk hadn't considered, but he did say he was considering open-sourcing the concept because he was too busy running SpaceX and Tesla. Pishevar pushed Musk to publish his ideas about the hyperloop, so that Pishevar could study them.”
He’s a car salesman. He wants you to commute in a Tesla and opposes remote work.
And he opposed remote work at his own companies because he believes (rightly or wrongly) it leads to decreased productivity.
> One-off projects like the High Speed Rail won’t make a noticeable dent in global sales.
You’re comparing now with several years ago when California was by far Tesla’s biggest market.
> And he opposed remote work at his own companies because he believes (rightly or wrongly) it leads to decreased productivity.
It’s called a hidden agenda.
The man is a sociopath and chronic liar, one would be a fool to take anything he says at face value. Instead we must judge Musk by his actions and past behavior, not his words.
The underlying serious point of these light-hearted jokes is that Musk's demonstrated approach to technological questions will not solve the challenges of keeping people alive without access to the resources of our biosphere for years at a time. This challenge is arguably more difficult even than building rockets.
You inadvertently proved a point of the article: now we are arguing about Musk and not about the technological challenges of getting to Mars.
The author essentially dismissed SpaceX with ad hominem attacks on Musk, who in his critics minds is simultaneously incompetent and the embodiment of his demonstrably successful companies.
> The author essentially dismissed SpaceX...
The article also makes the point that keeping people alive in space for years is a very different and unsolved and underestimated challenge than is building rockets. SpaceX builds rockets. It does not do the other thing.
I’m arguing we shouldn’t be arguing about Musk. I don’t know how much he is personally involved in the engineering decisions, but it doesn’t really matter because SpaceX has proved it can solve the vast array of problems that need to be solved to:
- Launch a rocket into to orbit
- Land and recover the first stage of that rocket (which had never been done before)
- Build a spacecraft that can be launched into orbit, dock with the ISS, deorbit, and be recovered
- Make that spacecraft support human life, and launch humans on it to the ISS, and bring them back alive (which also had never been done by a commercial entity)
I wouldn’t bet against SpaceX being able to do the engineering required to keep humans alive on spacecraft for years once it becomes a priority for them. At this point it’s premature.
Rapidly iterating on the incredible engineering difficulties inherent in building a reusable rocket does not mean you can do the same thing with an interplanetary mission that involves at least ~5 months of travel one way.
They need a whole other class of scientists and engineers to solve the "keeping a human alive for years in spacecraft/colony" problem. It just seems like a fundamentally different class of problem to me, and that SpaceX's strength of rapid iteration may be hardly applicable to this problem.
Possibly more sure than the "classic" testing (and paperwork) heavy model that usually does very few actuall test flights due to costs.
There are people out there doing real things, perhaps blundering along the way. If the articles author disagrees with their approach, they can just say "some well-publicized people think that cheap reusable rockets are a step 1 to any successful space endeavor, but I personally emphatically disagree with that, because a better way than cheap rockets is..." - instead that author launches a mud fight at that point.
This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.
NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.
A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.
It's an unknown. While we have manned rockets, we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed. As the article points out, it is not an experiment that can be done piecemeal. All elements must be in place and interacting before the effects are known: lack of gravity, radiation shielding, recyclers, scrubbers, years of time, etc
Gravity and radiation are well understood and we can definitely build machinery that can tolerate them well for many years.
> we have never entirely isolated a group of humans from the biosphere for even a year, never mind indefinitely. The times it was tried, it failed.
Why doesn't the ISS count? It gets resupplied every few months but a Mars base would be resupplied every two years so systems only have to scale to last 10x as long.
Lunar Palace 1 made it to 370 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuegong-1
Humans have an extremely bad habit of discounting future tech.
It is unfortunate that they're tied with Musk given his recent self implosion, but they will surely survive him.
You could send all the fuel there of course, but that's Apollo levels of throwing money on the bonfire.
Anyway, I don't see it happening at all so debating the execution details of things that are in the realm of the solvable already or at best an optimization isn't going to move the needle, the things that need to be solved that we have no clue about are life support, mental health, exposure to radiation for a prolonged period, waste management. Keep in mind that there is no way to re-supply a mission like that en-route and a crew of say four (which would seem to be a minimum for such a mission, and probably is too low from a redundancy perspective) will eat and drink their way through a small mountain over the course of 4 years+ total mission duration.
As for all the human related needs, the ISS has been a decades long study on practically all of those. That's kind of why we have it.
Supplying the mission isn't really a fundamental problem since you can send multiple times redundant amounts of all the supplies there on the previous cycle. But yes if something goes wrong they're on their own to solve it for (2 years - time spent there), much like any other mission not in close proximity to Earth. That's why you don't send idiots.
And you're right that there's no point in debating it further, because no amount of arguing will stop humans landing on Mars sooner or later.
One of the points of tfa is that this is unlikely to happen for a variety of other reasons.
Also with space resources you can make the whole thing quite comfortable - big ship, lots of fuel->deltav->short travel time and lots of shielding for when the Sun decides to reach out and touch you.
Making rockets reusable and the cost limited to refurbishment and propellant means you can spend the same amount of funding on greater redundancy. Need to build a landing pad on Mars with robots? How about 4 missions in parallel for the same price you'd be quoted by Boeing for just one? Even if three of them don't work out you're still set to continue.
A manned self sufficient base is probably far fetched, but a small short-term Earth-supplied research station is not something outside the realm of practicality. Remember that we haven't actually landed on the planet AT ALL yet. Baby steps.
And you won't be doing four missions in parallel before you've done one that succeeds and as far as I can see with the known technical limitations an economical improvement isn't going to result in a technical success, just in a cheaper failure.
> you won't be doing four missions in parallel
Well you do have the problem of only having an ideal launch window every 2 years, so you do have to do them at the same time with minimal spacing or wait forever to try again. I think the plan was to only do two ships at a time initially though.
Some things you can compensate and plan for, some failures are just natural or random. Like a micrometeorite hitting two of the main computers or something.
It was not a far-fetched idea even back then.
Now if you would like to defend the statement "SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets", that'd be a start.
But simply saying "Musk = bad" just proves GPs point and makes you look... silly.
Personally SpaceX has blown me away (pun intended) with their advances in rockets. Now what's your take?
Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?
We've been launching things into low earth orbit for ~60 years and orbital launch demand still seems to outnumber supply. If we could get our martian surface payload capacity to even 1% of our LEO payload capacity I'm sure there would be many organizations that would want to send something.
Before that one had to build and launch one big expensive satellite or beg another project to have their technology or experiment included on their mission, with a very limited number of available "slots".
Source: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730015241/downloads/19...
HTML: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
"Space flight, without any doubt, is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."
Compelling reasons to venture beyond this single, solitary rock include: Catastrophic volcanic eruptions. Devastating climate change. Extinction-level asteroid impact. Gravitational shifts from a rogue celestial body. Directed supernova blast. Coronal mass ejection. Unknown cosmic cataclysms. Loss of magnetosphere. All-out thermonuclear war. Unyielding plagues.
Back up your data, back up your species.
Most of the issues are already a problem on Mars, and the rest would affect earth and Mars at the same time. No less, the earthlings would be more likely to survive each of those situations because earth is way better in a general case.
It’s always been unclear to me how much a Martian civilization would improve humanity’s odds of surviving Seveneves, what with humans being involved and all. I think it’s the article of faith I’ve seen the least substantive critique of— maybe because it’s so depressing to think critically about.
BTW, on this note I can recommend The Ring of Charon[0] and its follow-up books. In this case, its Earth suddenly vanishing due to some ancient alien technology being activated by mistake. The book then follows the consequences for the advanced but still partially Earth dependent space habitats in the Solar system as well as people on Earth figuring out WTH their planet has ended up and why.
The open question I have is does a planetary colony help per se, once the technical problems have been solved on an emergency basis, and what’s left are social problems which are far too late to cure?
You can argue the other way: If we figure out how to live on Mars, global thermonuclear war on Earth is not a big deal anymore, it becomes an option.
(at least in the Earth-Mars cold war of The Expanse universe)
The article mentions some alternatives.
>> One path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human space flight would be enough to staff up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history.
Personally, I find that idea inspiring!
I'd think that "send modern probes to every one of the interesting moons of saturn and Jupiter" would be pretty amazing. For all we know one of them could be crawling with life!
Like really, even if you indeed made the JPL budget 100x bigger, at least short term you would indeed have the issue if not enough people being available to build and run all those robotic missions.
I would be curious who believes that today we don't have the technological capability to feed, to well beyond basic sustenance, every human on earth today. I include both growth, storage, distribution, and preparation.
I would be curious who thinks insufficient technology is the reason people starve today, and why they think that, despite philosophers arguing since the mid 1800s (with numbers to back it up) that we have the means to ensure none should go hungry.
How people are still fooled into believing this is beyond me
- A robotic Venus lander that can survive for a few days. The last lander to take pictures on Venus landed over 40 years ago, and it only operated for half an hour.[1] Venus Surface temperatures are around 475°C. The electronics overheated. Now we have silicon carbide semiconductors and laser welding, so continued operation at those temperatures might be possible. Here are most of the existing pictures of the surface of Venus.[2] It looks more interesting than Mars.
- A Europa lander. The recent Europa flyby shows much more interesting surface features than Mars. What are those long, thin features? Not rivers; rivers don't have right-angled intersections.
Mars is nearly airless and boring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14
Compress a gas until it heats up to 880C; send it outside to “cool down” to 450C; bring it in and decompress it where it drops to 20C; and bathe on deliciously cool room temperature air?
The problem then is power. Refrigerators are power hungry. Space exploration tends to be desperately short on power-- there's not a lot of sources of electricity that are happy to spend ten years at -100C and then spring forth to produce volts at quantity and with minimal mass. A heat engine is right out. (Where would the cold sink come from?) Batteries are tough. RTGs have terrible engineering challenges-- plus they'll use up a lot of half-life during the coast phase to Venus.
Given that design space, a Venus lander (that isn't built to operate at Venus temps) would probably have a battery and a store of internal coolant that undergoes phase change and is dumped overboard. A big block of water ice, or depending on the constraints, something more exotic.
>drops to 20C
Don't have to get that cold, fortunately. There is a considerable domestic demand for ultrahot electronics for wellhead sensors in oil exploration. (The head of a drill string needs to have some smarts for remote sensing-- figuring out if the rock you're drilling through has any oil in it. If you've got the money, you can buy a microcontroller than can run all day and night at 220 Celsius! https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments...
Fun fact: one of the handful of commercial applications for nuclear fusion reactors, today, is as a source for downbore neutron excitation gamma spectroscopy https://www.slb.com/-/media/files/drilling/brochure/neoscope... )
We will have a Donner Party-like memorial on Mars. And there will be a McDonald’s next to it.
You’re not going to win this argument because it is an argument against the basic nature of humanity, the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain.
Is that a basic urge? The actual glory of exploration? Or is it the need for resources? You reference the Donner Party, which was on its way to California, which had actual useable and useful resources. So of course people wanted to go there—there’s an ocean and sunshine. Mars has…uh…corrosive dust?
Not to live on it!
In the intervening thousand years, other climbers learned to cybernetically modify their bodies to be able to climb every rock face on the planet. The resulting boom in cybernetic technology granted immortality and immunity to all diseases to humanity. Humans never did master the raisin jet though (because they learned to transfer their conciseness over the internet so honestly jet engines seem kinda silly).
/S
Few will have an issue with a modern "Donner Party," who would buy interplanetary rockets out of their money, hop on them, never to be heard again. (Well, to be fair, if the party contains kids, people would object - consider that a sign of the society's progress since Donner's days.)
What people argue against is those quasi-Donners who demand that Washington DC fund their rockets.
Did they claim that the American west had no atmosphere, water, food, topsoil, or life of any kind, and only 38% normal gravity?
If you want to see extra planetary colonization, the moon is the most obvious first step by a HUGE margin, and even if it was made of gold or some other precious material, it wouldn't be financially sane, but the advantages mars offers pale in comparison to the EXTREME disadvantages its immense distance offers.
IF we can get something going on the moon, it makes literally everything else magnitudes easier. Doing anything else is, at best, a pointless exploration mission, and at worst, suicide by government spending. None of the mars plans are remotely realistic or grounded in reality, and all have so many points of failure it's going to be more worrying if we actually think we can get someone there.
It does not have to be an either/or mutually exclusive thing.
Do not ignore the importance of psychology and symbolism in long-term, cooperative human effort. A moon base that people can visit and inhabit will make concrete what would otherwise be an abstract concept. It will be much easier to get funding, buy-in and cooperation from an Earthling who has been to the Moon than from someone who at best sees anything happening in space through screens.
The article argues that with current technology and capabilities, a manned mission to Mars would actually do more harm than good to space exploration itself.
Also, this is reasoning by analogy. Mars is not West America.
If you want to argue for a manned mission to Mars, the article makes some excellent points that, by refuting them directly, would strengthen your argument.
if you're going from an moral perspective, European colonists had no right to colonize any part of the Americas. established civilizations already existed that were only driven out by mass death from foreign plagues and a desire for "we can so we will" mentality
Another factor is that the civilization that is able to reach Mars is going to be the one that has achieved the capability to dominate Earth. The original purpose of the space race was war, and though people no longer think about it, mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons.
if your goal is only destruction sure, the likes of ICBMs are great. for conventional warfare when you want to do things like topple regimes, annex resources, subjugate peoples, etc. not so much. it's exactly why Russia hasn't used nukes in the Ukrainian conflicts.
Not to mention artillery crews directing strikes via drone footage streamed over Google Meet running of their Starlink connection.
[citation needed]
Pfft these will just end up one and the same.
I think you're underestimating how great Earth is, how awful other planets are, and how big the solar system is.
> I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.
Colonization generally does not rhyme with peace. It's very likely there will be conflicts over territories. Space exploration and military production always have been tightly coupled. Where I live the space industry is dominated by "Airbus Defence and Space".
Until then, it's the best source of evidence on the Great Filter Theory.
The pithy phrase I've seen before is "let's fix this planet up before we go and screw another one up."
But, more importantly, it is a misconception to think that the people GOING to Mars will have their lives improved. Life on Mars will take a very long time to become as good as life on Earth. But the tech developed to make living on Mars possible will help people on Earth.
But what we always forget is that the mass extinction we are living right now (i.e. "we are destroying life on Earth") is not a consequence of global warming. Remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere right now, and we are still in a mass extinction. CO2 will just add global warming to the problem, but that's only a bonus.
This one is my favorite:
The Worst Journey in the World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World
But I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Shackleton's amazing expeditions
1. Send a lot of people (15?) and give people some flexibility in who they spend time with. 2. Give people a lot of space. I mean a _lot_ more than you think you need. Inflatable habs could be one approach, but if Starship gets going we might not even need that. 3. Let people escape. Loads of video games, books, creative projects, etc. 4. Help people anticipate the destination. Include remote control (obviously not real time) of robots at the landing site as one of the ongoing training exercises. Regularly simulate missions you'll be undertaking on the surface. 5. Give people lots of space at the destination. Cut and cover enormous living areas, and let people customise them. Give the crew something to look forward to.
People survive worse, and some people are better suited to it than others. We'll start by sending the people who are expected to fare best.
I suppose I am just some random on the internet, but I think a lot of people unjustifiably think "human factors" are insurmountable. Yes, it'll be hard, but the kind of people who plan these missions are used to solving hard problems.
Your last point, about the possibility of rescue, is really interesting and I wonder if there's any clever ethical way to control for that in a study like the one in the podcast.
You’d be totally reliant on one power source, sealed inside a pressurized tube, with totally disrupted circadian rhythms. But at least on a nuclear sub, you have the chance to escape to the the surface world, and a chance to restock there. On Mars? Step outside, you’re dead, and if you can’t replicate a resource on a world with less gravity & less solar power & not a shred of a biosphere, you’re dead.
Sounds like a fun, low-stress environment to me. Humans do great with living with unrelenting psychological stress in sealed metal tubes.
The reason I suggest doing it, is because it might inspire you. When you open the door to the main dome you walk into an overgrown tropical rainforest, complete with waterfalls, insects, exotic plants, and so on. It left me with a feeling that yeah, actually, we could live on other planets and it wouldn’t be half bad.
And even if we could replicate that level of Biosphere 2…well guess what? Everyone still went nuts anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_ps...
They went bonkers in a sealed bubble on Earth, with Earth gravity and Earth diurnal cycles. How would that possibly be easier on a planet where you’d have the innate factionalism in human interactions combined with the grinding stress of living on a world that wants to kill you?
> Waterfalls? With what gravity?
Mars has gravity, and any serious space habitat would have a rotating section to simulate gravity.
But within that domain, my point still stands. We have no plausible way to construct such a ship or station that produces significant pseudo-gravity by rotating. Building such a thing is basically impossible with anything we can manufacture—building a “wheel” that can rotate fast enough and be large enough to not cause wild motion sickness and have the structural integrity to hold enough mass to sustain an ecosystem is beyond our materials science, and would be impossible to lift into space.
Why on earth would you try that?
But built from Lunar/asteroid material ? Sure, you can build 8 by 32 km cylinder from steel with dirt for shielding with that has a standard earth gravity just fine. No exotic materials required:
thats an interesting one. Humans can only just about tolerate rotation rates of about 1 rev/min or slower or get dizzy. That means the radius of such a rotating habitat has to be quite large to achieve any meaningful acceleration, which leads to its own challenges.
For example, to achieve 0.5g at rotation rate of 1/60 per second requires an arm length of 0.5 x 9.81 x 60^2 or about 10 miles. If you tentuple the rotation speed, ie 10 revs / min, you still need a radius of 180m
I think a vat-grown culture of highly nutritious fungi (or algae or whatever, I'm no expert and I don't pretend to have even an SF writer's level of understanding of the subject) would be a much more viable solution.
And you are assuming there are no resource constraints on the sizes of those domes; Biosphere II was made by shipping machinery and raw materials across modest distances by truck, as opposed to shipping supplies from Earth by rocket.
I remember reading about Biosphere II in Omni magazine, in the late '70s. We still cannot create a self-sufficient sealed ecosystem here on Earth, 45 years later.
Consecutive stay in the ISS has been completed for 355 days (almost year) with less than 10 people onboard at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Mo...
The article quips that only incels will live on mars as a derision towards those that do better in solitude. I think what they meant was many people on the spectrum would be well placed in a place where solitude is the default situation and they can socialize in a well controlled environment via streaming video and audio with a delay. What I felt sad about was the derision, an almost musk like “pedo” comment, by a neurotypical about our neurodiverse.
With a deep space mission, you simply don't have the option. I wonder how that would change the situation - if for better or worse.
We need a highly condensed version of the main bullet points, preferably in TikTok format, to reach more people.
Anybody that believes that we have the technology capable of setting up a self sufficient Mars base should be invited to demonstrate such on the Moon, where in case things inevitably go pear shaped at least there is a small chance of rescue, which in the case of Mars is impossible. Anybody that signs up for a Mars mission may well end up bringing life to Mars, but not in the way that they intend to. Either way it wouldn't be intelligent life.
Is this not exactly what we're doing with the Artemis Program? From its wiki page:
> The program's long-term goal is to establish a permanent base camp on the Moon and facilitate human missions to Mars.
In places.
There is a classic banger of a paper, "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1], which assembles evidence that human space exploration, while expensive, is more cost-effective than robotic. So when i saw Maciej write:
> Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8]
I jumped straight to reference 7, and found:
> [7] I know, no robot can reflect on the nature of the Sublime while looking at sunbeams dancing on the limb of Deimos or whatever. But when it comes to tasks like “look under this rock on Mars” or “fly through this plume and sample it”, robots are awesome.
This is not exactly what i would call a well-researched statement.
The thing that troubles me about these takes is the "we." There is no singular "we" in the world. Using the singular "we" deceives people into thinking that it is binary choice. In actuality, there are potentially many nations, many companies, and many people who can pursue resources and make a choice without impacting others.
It has no more impact on you than your neighbor deciding whether to buy an insurance policy or not.
Humanity is not a single mass of protoplasm, thank goodness.
So when people use "we" and include their government despite not living in democracies, I get confused.
Plus Neil Degrassi Tyson has a great point on this in that robots can make discoveries and are low risk but they are way less inspiring. You know the Mars rovers names but the average person doesn't however the average person has a much higher chance of know Neil Armstrong because people inspire that.
Eventually logical arguments about how to acheive goals bottom out at raw, built-in desire. And no matter how many silly-sounding phrasings of the goal that you come up with, the fact remains that we want to go there. We just want to.
(This is no defense of any particular extant plan. OTOH I suspect OP underestimates the value of life support tech here on earth. But these are side questions.)
Dreaming of going to space makes some people happy and they won't let it go. Doesn't mean it's a good idea!
But sometimes it's productive to have an unreachable goal: it gives us the motivation to improve towards it and reap the benefits, even if we never hit it.
How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.
Need to scrub CO2 from the air? Nope, I'll just send over 10 extra cargo starships filled with Oxygen. Food for 100? Coming right up!
The whole plan hinges on making enough money with starship that sending up 100 rockets with triple-redundant resources becomes economically viable. At that point, you can slowly start building a somewhat self-sustaining infrastructure. But until you get there, the plan will just look foolish.
NASA has figured the can has room for a maximum of 17 astronauts on such a trip. And, that is without spacesuits or anything else they would need once there. So figure another, cargo, can for the stuff they would need on the ground.
Maybe bring along a couple of spacesuits in the crew can, to wear while they fetch the rest. And, maybe just 9 crew so none kill each other on the way out.
It's probably true that Starship would only be capable to support 10 colonists all the way to Mars and that's still pretty damn good. This number will grow if you have a separate life support system on the surface and don't have to rely on the ship but the first missions will indeed have a very small crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
Doesn't this seem like a much more exciting and compelling option compared to landing on Mars?
Venus airship will be unable to get raw materials - you are effectively making a space station in atmosphere of Venus. You can only capture gases and get energy from sunlight. You can't mine.
Or maybe exploit the huge temperature differences between the surface and much colder cloud layers ? Some sort of pipe or thermocouple or even winching materials with high thermal capacity up and down ? Now thinking about it I could imagine a "Venus forge" where you winch up and down batches of materials in heat resistant containers!
As for gas mining - most of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which is a good start - carbon for construction and food, oxygen for internal atmosphere and combustion engines and rockets. Then there is apparently a lot of nitrogen, so you could have a "real" atmosphere and not a pure oxygen flame fest. Looks like there is also water vapor, that gives you even more input for life support and hydrogen for combustion and rockets. Possibly for fusion tech in future as well.
Look like there is also a bunch of noble gases, chloride, fluoride - could be useful as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
As for surface mining - that's actually an intriguing idea!
Two options come to mind:
1) Essentially strip mining using suspended grappling claws. Grab stuff, winch it up or dump it elsewhere.
Is the rock down below too solid ? Drop a well isolated liquid nitrogen dewar on it, the thermal stress from that should be enough to tear it apart. Or go the other way around and make the stuff melt & scoop it.
2) Underground mining - the biggest issue would be to get a mine running, but once underground, the main extremes of the Venus environment could be overcome provided rock temperature underground it sane (is it ? not sure :P). The main issue would likely be atmospheric intrusion from the surface - at 93 bars it like about 1 km under the ocean, so likely solvable.
Criticism is good! Let the best ideas prevail.
So I believe that there is an argument to make that insanely expensive, hard, and pretty much useless engineering projects (w.r.t. solving the biodiversity problem, which is actually about survival on Earth) could possibly be questioned.
Some will say that "if you don't spend all that money into inhabited space exploration, you won't necessarily spend it wisely. But I would disagree there: we should really start spending money (and fossil fuels) wisely because we are running out of time.
And one man's snark is another man's sense of humor, humanity's grandest venture so far would be to learn to live in peace and to evenly spread our wealth, not to manage to hop to another planet and die there. And as dismissals come this one is anything but shallow, in fact, it's deeper than it needed to be.
I won't live that long but in case I do I hope you're right.
One, yes, there will be a lot of risk involved and it is infeasible to mitigate it all in our lifetimes. If we want to go to Mars in our lifetimes, we will need to accept more risk than possibly any manned space mission before. But would it be more risk than faced by, for example, sea explorers hundreds of years ago? Exploration has always been risky. I think it will be sad if we wait hundreds of years to mitigate every possible risk before trying to set foot on Mars. I think there are people out there willing to take on a relatively high level of risk; why deny them the opportunity?
Two, sure, you might have better "ROI" on research using robotic space probes, but be careful with that argument, because if you think about it any further you'll realize that you'll get even better ROI not exploring the solar system at all. If your goal is research for practical purposes then there's plenty of that to do here on and around Earth. If your goal is research for research's sake, then I submit that that's not inherently more virtuous than a goal of human space exploration. I personally prefer the latter and I think the public agrees. And if your goal is research to enable eventually sending humans out there, then we'll learn a whole lot more and faster by actually sending humans as soon as it is remotely feasible.
Three, contamination is inevitable unless you plan to make Mars off limits forever. And if by some chance there is actually life on Mars to contaminate, then I bet there's life elsewhere in the solar system to discover too. I doubt very much that Mars would be our singular chance in the solar system to investigate uncontaminated extraterrestrial life. Also, natural processes have likely already landed bits of Earth on Mars as meteorites, just as bits of Mars have fallen to Earth. If your thesis is that extremophile bacteria that we don't even know about are omnipresent on Earth and could survive on Mars, then they could certainly have contaminated Mars already. And if they did, millions of years of evolution would certainly enable them to outcompete anything we would accidentally introduce from Earth.
To me this is the most exciting point. Why aren’t we already building half a dozen probes simultaneously to look for life in the clouds of Venus, icy caverns of Europa, and every other interesting place in the solar system?
A steady stream of beautiful pictures and — hopefully — revolutionary biological discoveries from these unique worlds would seem like a much better investment than human selfies on Mars whose dusty mountains the public has already seen many times.
I'm sure that when Starship craters the cost per kilogram to Earth orbit (following it making some literal craters in development) we will be doing just that.
I can't put myself in the head of someone who doesn't understand inspiration, passion, or dreaming. It seems so short-sighted.
"Let's only do it once it becomes easy".
Would they say the same about climbing the highest mountain? About abolishing slavery? About sailing the high seas?
In my opinion I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that this sounds like the kind of argument people would use to be pro-slavery because of the economy. Practical? Maybe (though in retrospect not). Doing the right thing? Absolutely not.
To me shutting down these things is like dismissing the persuit of the meaning of life.
Aside from the Apollo program being maybe the most return on investment monetarily in the history of humanity, I wonder what the ROI is on worker and entrepreneur motivation in addition to that.
If we can put a man on the moon, then nothing is impossible. Every obstacle is conquerable. We need to know that science fiction is within our grasp, and we won't get there without taking any steps.
If humans can put a man on the moon, then surely we can get this factory 10% more effective while improving workers lives?
I bet at least one of the big tech companies would not exist without this motivation. "Humanity can't put a man on the moon, so maybe we should sell this 'google' company to yahoo". Google monopoly aside, without Google we may not have Hadoop, free email, or many other things. What's the ROI just in terms of having free email with more than 1MB of quota?
Nobody gets out of life alive. Why would you aim low just to attempt to? Not saying we should take needless chances, but as people and as a society we do need to actually… you know… live.
This is one of the most depressing soul crushing sentences I have ever read. It fills me with dispair. Its basically the justification for every kind of oppression and atrocity ever committed. Yet it is said with true starry eyed belief by you.
I'm saying literally "surely we can make this world better for everyone", and you see it as a negative?
We are not having even remotely the same conversation. This is going nowhere.
Wish you all the best.
Not just Mars but anywhere humans choose to go to. Since
a) discovery of extremophiles; b) humans themselves are a living (and flourishing) bioweapon (from an extraterristrial world's perspective)
– we have to accept a simple fact that full decontamination or sanitation is not possible, at least not at the current level of the technological progress of our civilisation.
There will be microorganisms that will survive UV, α-, β-, γ- and X-rays albeit in reduced numbers. A single toilet flush in certain cirumstances can be a biological catastrophe even here on Earth today, and a single bowel movement might yield a unmitigated disaster in extraterrestrial worlds that could wipe alien biomes or civilisations out. And select extremophiles will absolutely take advantage of a new environment, adapt and evolve. What the extremophiles will evolve into and that might entail for an extreterrial world as well as ramifications for humans are the biggest unknowns.
Then, at the extreme end we have prions here on Earth that we do not understand, can't neutralise, can't decontaminate prion infected surfaces and tools, and – more generally – can't contain the prions in any way other than hurling them into a nearby star (not practically possible today). What the prions will be able to do in a unknown environment is a very uneasy thought at the very least.
So the actual question is: what is the solution? Should we stop the space exploration out of fears of infecting other worlds with terrestrial microbiomes, sit around and do nothing? We won't even be able to visit asteroids in our own solar system if we do not find a way to allay our own fears.
Or, should we keep the humans on Earth, send out robotic missions instead and deprive the humans of fun of exploring new worlds and satisfying our own curiosity? We are curious creatures.
We need a solution.
Keeping humans alive on Mars would require nuclear power sources much larger then any that have been flung into space so far.
If you are thinking of solar power then consider than the watts per square meter is about 40% of that on earth, that a big pile of batteries would be needed as well and how much work it would be to maintain a huge solar farm.
Mars is cold, but I don't think that's a huge problem. You just need an appropriate amount of insulation.
I imagine a typical Mars habitat to be either sealed section of an existing lava tube or some kind of dome structure built at the bottom of a hole and then covered with sand, except for a stairwell. Either way, you'd line the inside with something. Aerogel, polystyrene, whatever works in that environment and whose ingredients can be transported to Mars in a compact form.
And then of course you need to also survive 14 days of no sunlight at all. At least here vacuum helps to reduce heat loss. :)
> The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars.
This is the most shocking takeaway for me from the article. Is it true?
There are lots of citations attached but they're all to individual papers, and the "99.999%" figure appears to be hyperbole, not any kind of actual calculation. (Nor is it remotely clear whether it's attempting to refer to percentage of life by mass, by organism, or by species.)
If this is true, shouldn't there be some mainstream news articles? At least a mention on Wikipedia? Wikipedia describes the existence of extremophiles [1,2], but nothing about any recent discoveries that they make up nearly all of the life on earth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microorganism#Extremophiles
I have always been a Mars-skeptic so this article reinforced much of that. That said, in reading this article I came to wonder why the author is even proposing we spend the money on more probes. Sooner or later, the probes only make sense if we intend to follow-up with human space travel. I suppose you could make the argument we are a century away from where we ought to consider that, but the author does not broach the subject of what the long term goals ought to be for space exploration and why.
From a science perspective, I am in favor of more things like JWST. More probes probably make sense for similar reasons. From a commercial and human standpoint, we should probably be focusing more on Low Earth applications with maybe some possibility that some of this ought to also focus on establishing a permanent base on the moon. But doing this on the moon assumes some really good reasons materialize for doing so. Whether it is the discovery of ice or minerals, or (maybe also) that there is an area we could setup beneath the surface the is shielded from radiation.
It would be great if we could find a practical reason for establishing a presence on the moon that then also laid the groundwork as an environment where some of these longer term problems could be tested and refined while we were also extracting some value from being there.
- little to no risk of contamination on moon
- inspirational goal
- achievable with current tech
- stepping stone to future projects (e.g. we can launch robotic missions from a lunar base)
You lose a lot of dv by stopping mid-trip; this isn’t like pulling off at a rest-stop.
A mission from the surface of Earth would cost ~13 km/s to get that same intercept - so, yes, it’s considerably more expensive. The majority of that is just making earth orbit in the first place (~9 km/s).
The big problem is that the mission on the moon has to come from somewhere. If you can fabricate your mission entirely at your moon base then the numbers above are accurate. However, if you have to ship stuff in from Earth - well, the Earth -> Moon -> Mars trajectory is more like 17-18 km/s. You’ve lost horrendously.
There are certainly perks to things like off-Earth fueling and assembly, but unless you’re getting a lot of the mass from somewhere other than Earth you’d be much better of doing that in low earth orbit (just from a fuel efficiency perspective, and there would of course be lots of other benefits to being so close to home).
If there is anything to pick up from the moon it makes more sense to deliver it to LEO first and continue from there.
I find that quite odd, since there is still so much we don't know about the Moon. If we have the technology, why wouldn't we send someone there to explore and make way for making of a lunar base?
I agree with you but this is definitely one of the things that should have a real world value.
Many of the brightest minds in the world when it comes to space would be working on a project like sending humans to mars for decades. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost.
Plus it's not like the alternative of sending robots to every planet and large moon in the solar system is not cool.
And sending robots is definitely super cool :)
For one, the new technology needed for manned space flight is more likely to have medical and defense applications. But mkre importantly, boots on Mars would be a huge political victory.
Think about it like this: corporations sponsor Formula 1 cars because the prestige and visibility they get has all sorts of benefits. A manned mission to Mars would be like the holy grail of marketing. It would be like putting a permanent ad in the history books that every literate human on Earth will see for the next thousands and thousands of years. It's not unreasonable to say that the good publicity from this will prolong the lifespan of the nation, and that's something that I'd expect Congress to pursue.
SpaceX is focused on reducing the cost, and no matter what you think of Elon, you have to agree that spacex focus on reusability in the falcon 9 has reduced their cost of access to space
The problem is that reducing spacex’s cost doesn’t reduce the customer’s cost… until there are competitors that can push the price down.
The focus on starship ultimately will reduce costs an order of magnitude again, and will permit vast payloads to mars.
Why does this matter? Because much of the cost of engineering of space missions is in custom making things to be light, power efficient and reliable.
If you can take more mass into space for less cost, you can add more solar panels into your design, make things more rugged, use off-the-shelf materials and you can double or triple the quantity for redundancy. Not only the launch costs go down, but all the associated engineering.
SpaceX launches are way cheaper than competitors already. More competition would drive costs further down but it very much already exists.
A SpaceX launch costs 5% per kg of what a space shuttle launch cost. A 95% discount is pretty far away from “doesn’t reduce customers cost”.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shutt...
It’s not like buying a bus ticket so pricing is complex and difficult to compare but spacex is all around dramatically cheaper than the competition.
I know for a fact that a lot of smart people there have been working on the Mars problem almost since SpaceX was created. I would not compare them with Hyperloop or the Boring Company with such a dismissive handwave.
Having said I do agree that going to Mars has lot of risks and would require decades of cooperation between different governments. Which is why I think it's better and feasible to build a moon base/city first.
The moon is only 3 days far which would make space tourism really feasible. The close proximity would be helpful in engineering, healthcare, entertainment etc. Lastly a proper city on moon can be a source of a lot of technological advancements and also a source of immense inspiration for all of humanity.
We could treat the Moon as a particularly large asteroid-mining process, don’t live on it, just extract resources.
I don’t think there’s much point in learning to live on all these different rocks. Most of space is space, we should focus on learning to live in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)...
But there are exception & Lagrange points should be generally safe.
If Mars does indeed happen to be a completely sterile wasteland (which it very likely is given that evidence of life contaminates every crevice of the earth), then human inadvertently depositing microbial hitchhikers on the surface of that world may be the most consequential legacy of humanity 10 million years from now
1. Humans are explorers by nature
2. Humans can do science 100x faster than robots.
3. People will be inspired by Mars missions to go into STEM and even if they don't end up working for NASA, they will likely do other great things.
4. It gives people jobs
The romantic explorers angle seems practically indefensible for the reasons listed in this article. I like the faster science angle the most in theory, but I didn't realize that contamination would be such a big deal.
Point 4 seems more a political/economic failure than a valid reason to pour resources into a Mars project.
The purpose of setting foot on Mars is to ignite the human spirit, you soulless pedestrian.
Even if life on Mars miraculously stumbled upon the same four (five) nucleobases, the same twenty (-two) amino acids, glucose, glycerol esters, and (deoxy)ribose, it would still seem pretty unlikely that it chooses the same three-base sequences corresponding to the same amino acids in RNA translation. But maybe we're still holding out hope for panspermia? And adaptable though our microbes are on megayear time-scales, we're also talking about the same cells that mostly can't survive intentional cultivation, as the author himself notes, so outcompeting the life native to Mars would be a real feat — merely surviving cold and dryness through dormancy is a well-known microbial swindle. I suppose it isn't impossible, but I have yet to hear a good argument that it's feasible.
But overall I agree, Mars has nothing. It's not even very big: the surface of Mars is roughly the size of the Pacific Ocean, well below doubling what we started with. Meanwhile, the asteroids are full of palladium.
So yeah the best “why mars” argument is maybe just that someone will do it for the lulz.
Even if congress or musk don’t get around to it, someone eventually will.
How soon does anyone think we're going to send people to Mars? In the next 10 years? 20 years? Personally - and I wouldn't mind seeing it happen - I'd be shocked if it was in the next 30 years.
Everyone has a different time frame but I don't think of that as soon.
We can most definitely get people on Mars by 2030. But we need to accept that some or all of them may die in the process. Are we as a civilisation ready for that?
The technology of actually getting someone BACK from Mars is a whole different thing.
In the worst situation we would have the world's most expensive reality survival show, watching when astronauts slowly die of starvation on Mars because hydroponics failed and they didn't bring enough dry rations.
That's the slippery slope.
I do agree:
1) government funding won't produce the end result.
2) real space stationd or lunar stations make more sense
I think we should let the economics of the starship rocket play out before planning anything. The starship rocket, if it achieves it's goals, changes the equation of staging equipment in low orbit.
That will eventually filter through the industry.
This is a great line.
> I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
> On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.
https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004...
A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+?
The entire Ömnögovi Province has 66K people.
That Wikipedia article links to https://web.archive.org/web/20140724131423/http://www.circle... from a decade ago which points out how the mine is taking water that was supplying the animals local herders used.
If that's still the case, and usable surface water is disappearing, that sounds like the opposite of a self-sustaining colony.
That would have been AWESOME if it happened tho!
That being said I think the Moon makes far more sense as a first off planet settlement. The transit time is short enough for a tourism industry among other things. It’s also short enough to permit relief flights and for people to quickly return if necessary. It would be a great place to basically prototype the technology and the social aspects.
Also the fact that it is more hostile in some ways is good from a prototyping point of view. If we can live with no atmosphere and 1/6 gravity we can surely make it with some atmosphere and 1/3 gravity.
Edit: and mining may be viable. Gravity is low enough to permit possible gun or mass driver launch from the moon back to Earth for raw materials. Probably wouldn’t make enough to make the whole venture profitable but could maybe offset it a bit along with tourism. Materials like gold, platinum, rare earths, etc might be found near the surface in concentrated deposits due to no weathering.
Because all those problems are human problems. Humans are short-sighted and selfish. Climate change stands out here. Sure, we know to fix that. Now make it happen. Get politicians to tell the fossil fuel extractors and refiners in their districts are out of a job. Now get people to give up their cars. Now tell people they can’t eat meat.
Oh, those are extreme examples, you might say. There are economic incentives and taxation that could ease the transition and provide incentives. We can develop better photovoltaics and a host of other green energy tech. Sure, we absolutely can! Now create those taxes so they don’t create perverse incentives, and we can have reduced tax spec…ah, and now it is way way way beyond easy.
If you want to figure out how to live and grow crops so far underground that solar radiation doesn’t bother you, Earth is a far easier place to do that, and equally resistant to asteroid impact and equally helpless to gamma ray burst.
When big houses became to common men built mansions, when mansions became too pedestrian men built castles on the sea in the form of yachts.
There are plenty of worthwhile reasons to explore and exploit the universe beyond our atmosphere, and in time I believe we will master not only the solar system but many others like it.
The ego of men is no longer a productive driving force for that. That works when the enemy is less powerful men. When the enemy is physics only a rational, long-term, consensual commitment can prevail.
The contention here I think is missing the possibility of a breakthrough or two.
We are making 'step functions' now and again in a lot of things, it's not entirely infeasible that a couple of step functions makes space just a lot easier. Maybe in superconducting or power generation or wireless energy transfer. Maybe if energy is super cheap and light, we really can haul a couple of orders of magnitudes more mass up into space, the 'close system' of keeping humans alive equation shifts enough to where it becomes much more feasible.
Obviously, generating an atmosphere on Mars would be immensely energy intensive and likely possible only after we level up on the Kardashev scale.
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/51f7d32f54b72
Also unlike planet scale terraforming, you get useful living space from the start & it expands as you go.
> Contamination
Concerns around Mars contamination are hogwash. We want to contaminate the f out of Mars. We want microbes to infiltrate every nook and cranny of every crevice on the planet, just like it is on Earth. If there are indigenous species, they will compete, and the best will win out. If we discover something harmful to humans, we will develop vaccines or pesticides.
The author must keep in mind that this is real life, not Star Trek with high-minded Prime Directives and some deep philosophical mission. Our mission is to colonise a new planet and make it liveable for the next billion humans. There is no Prime Directive.
> Research and engineering for life support
Yes, a lot of research is required to develop self-contained life support systems. It won't happen unless we do it. It won't happen if we focus only of robotics and automation. Human space exploration is the end goal. Dithering about with drones and robots is fun, but the real dream is a man (or 100) on Mars.
> human physiology, physiological effects of partial gravity, risk the safety of the crew
You cannot embark on a planet terraforming mission and not take on risk. The whole endeavour is risky. Not doing is also risky, we might not have a pleasant Earth in 200 years. Choose people who are of strong, sound minds (as best we can evaluate) and who are willing to risk their lives for a chance of going to Mars. We definitely should not wait around until we are technologically capable of sending a foolproof 200% safe-for-humans capsule.
> “Mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud”
Amen.
Speak for yourself. I want the continuation of the human species, I don't want to unnecessarily genocide another untold number of species to make that happen. I similarly don't like when we cause species here on earth to go extinct. I think space agencies should adopt a Prime Directive.
Do you believe the continuation of the human race requires genocide, here and on mars? That seems very zero-sum, I believe I can argue against this being necessary.
Any other altruistic Prime Directive (ala Star Trek) is a luxury affordable only by a species that has figured out a way past the eventual explosion of their system’s star.
No I don't think so. That's why I don't want to worry about "contaminating" Mars with our microbes. It's going to be ok. We should just do whatever it takes to fulfil our objective of settling on Mars. If our spaceship happens to land on a Martian anthill then too bad.
This will be great content and entertainment for billions. The endless travel time will actually be a key feature of it.
I can't decide if I am ironic, sarcastic or realistic.
And love him or hate him but Elon Musk has built a pretty nice Starship that might help getting that mission done. The traditional route of slinging trillions at the likes of Boeing is indeed going to take decades. We know that because that's the past 50 years. It doesn't work. But Starship is nearly ready for operations and might cut that time frame short. And its a bar gain in comparison.
There was no point in going to the moon either in the late nineteen sixties. But it was preferable for the US to get there before the Russians. The moon program was really expensive and yielded a lot of indirect return on investment. Lots of fat government checks that went straight into the US economy. In the end, all it took was Kennedy telling people that we were going. Only took eight years or so from there. The Saturn 5 was way bigger than it needed to be because the people behind it were already looking at Mars. The Mars capable successor was already being developed until it was cancelled by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N
Anyway, Starship was designed for Mars, is going to the moon first, and might be flying there soonish. A bit over eight years from merely being a crazy idea. Sounds familiar? Only this time it won't be a one off. This thing is reusable and there might be quite few "flight-proven" ones flying towards the end of the decade. It will be very tempting to use one for what it was designed for.
(Obligatory: Elon Musk did not build a Starship. SpaceX is building it.)
Saying it's Shotwell or Musk isn't indefensible. No one is irreplaceable anymore then any one person (as opposed to SpaceX as a whole) is building Starship but it isn't sycophancy to say that some people are more integral to the process.
Instead, Mars colonization should be though as an option at the point when humanity already could sustain life in space close to Earth — like in a space habitat city of 1000s of people with an option for fast logistics to Earth.
But first, it should be a Moon colony (the mission Artemis) that could be made sustainable via many safe iterations close to Earth. Then we need to build a space habitat on Earth orbit and use the Moon base for the construction support. Not to mention learning how to build factories in Space to process asteroid mined ore.
And only at this point it's worth start thinking about Mars colonization. That's like in a couple of hundreds of years at best. Before that all conversation about Mars are just pure science fiction.
Only then when the habitat of 1000s of people could sustain life and travel in space independent from Earth it could be sent to Mars to ignite terraforming process and building a small base. The good thing is by this time we already could solve sustaining life without Earth in Space with no regards to Mars in general. In reality, by the time we start colonizing Mars there already could exist many Space habitats and human colonies beyond Earth.
The thing is Mars is a really hostile and hard place to be. There is no reason for people to be there unless it has at least some livable condition. It's very cold (43% of Sun light), it has radiation, its dust kills all equipment. There shouldn't be humans based on Mars without an option for a fast escape or access to supplies should anything happen — that's what Mars orbiting space habitat would be there for.
So, there is no reason to even talk about Mars colonization without achieving more reasonable progress closer to our home planet.
So like Apollo, right ? :)
at some point in time, the costs/risks/futility will be close enough to zero to warrant such exploration
we left the sea, we left the trees, we left the caves, we will inevitably leave the planet
The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.
Whether we go with manned exploration or robot exploration. Whether we choose the Moon or Mars.
Nothing comes even close to the importance of rapid rockets reusability.
Minor things really...
So Europeans weren't going on what if journey, but they were trying to find a way to India, bypassing Ottomans. Spanish found America and it's resources (sugar cane, tobacco, potato, corn) and Portuguese found a way around Africa to India to get back to the spice trade.
The thing is that European motivation was clearly defined, while motivation to go to Mars is not clear at all, because there is nothing valuable there at this point.
But imagine finding on the Mars an alien shipwreck from 200 milion years ago, there would be several outposts build within this decade, because technology is the spice trade of today.
And there is even some alien technology salvage when Alien warships happen to have a human induced accident (read 240 converted naval anti-ship cruise missiles slam into them).
Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.
I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.
Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.
On a similar theme, calling those who support humans going to mars as being part of some Elon Musk-led culty "mars religion" is totally preposterous. There's a reek of "Everyone who disagrees with me doesn't have the truth'n'facts and have actually just tricked themselves into believing a religion".
Musk Derangement Syndrome is strong.
I actually support a lot of their statements though, e.g. about the rather silly lunar gateway that seems to have very little actual financial logic to it. It's just a shame.
In the mean time, we can colonize difficult places like under the ocean, the Sahara desert, Antarctica, maybe even the moon.
Maybe the next fancy device we send to Mars should be a high-throughput sequencer to look for metagenomic Martian DNA.
We are slowly accepting it with cars, trains, and planes.
It doesnt make such sense that we still pushing for crewed missions when all other modes of transport and mobilization are going to automation / or remotely driven.
i dont mean math hard or physics or biology i mean human species, everything hard. its interdisciplinary hard on a level that requires transcending class boundaries and race boundaries and if we cant even invite chinese taikonauts to our spacestation then we arent solving the real blockers.
mars is an every human effort.
But people still are enamored of the high mountains. I think that is basically because, at their core, most people’s deepest feelings about human life are also not utilitarian.
We should approach this in stages, starting with the basics. A government funded, fully documented, publicly disclosed second supply chain for everything. Starting with dirt in the ground to finished materials. Materials, crops, electronics, the whole network of supplies and suppliers. Every single bit if this network should be documented and stored in the archives of that network.
We could then start a 3rd network with the goal of miniaturizing it, reducing complexity, and especially the physical volume of the entire system. Ideally, in the distant future, it could be reduced to a Von Neuman probe.
I think if we do that homework here a few times, we can then see if it could be implemented in other places on earth, in Antarctica, Above the "death line" in the Himalayas, etc.
It's my strong belief that having a true backup to human life on Mars requires this homework first. Then again on the Moon, then finally on Mars and other destinations.
Take something fundamental, food? Now you need water, fertilizers and light. Okay, so either you have greenhouses or vertical farming. Either case you need some fertilizers, production of these could probably be done, just need to find inputs. Water is simple enough if you don't loose too much of it.
Light is big question. Go with leds or grow lamps, how do you make those and power for them? And by make I mean all components needed. And all components used to make stuff that makes them and so on. Not to forget generating the electricity.
Historically, they tend to either not make the attempt or go big.
why does that need to be prevented?
Mars has essentially no energy sources. Everything people need to survive, and return, will have to be pre-stationed there.
If the Chinese all want to move to Mars, fine by me. I don't think it's a solid plan, but they're welcome to try.
This thought process alone shows me that we probably aren't even mature enough as a species to go to Mars. A mission like that will likely need global cooperation, effectively dooming it.
If China somehow went to Mars on their own they deserve whatever benefit they were to get from and we shouldn't aim to prevent space exploration because of who does it.
If humans are sent to Mars, the most vivid lesson will be not to send humans to Mars. The most valuable lesson is that life without the ecosystem it evolved to inhabit is unsustainable in some pretty horrifying ways, and humans need to take better care of their ecosystem.
There is already an indictment written in the Earth itself: That time we exploded nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. That time we put lead in gasoline. Those deadly mistakes left permanent evidence of stupidity and arrogance.
That said, if Elon can take a thousand libertarian techbros to a different planet, it will likely end up as an unintended monument to What Not to Do that will last for millennia. I'd give him the Nobel for that.
Now, I know this is based in science etc. But looking at the effect on the emotions, from a cultural perspective, it's interesting.
There is religious fervour there, faith, heaven (Mars), hell (uninhabitable earth), lots of details, priests (NASA and other space agencies), but not much personally verifiable knowledge or experience.
First step really is to solve these issues here before we even attempt to kill people there...
Just like working a few days at a job can afford may people a magical global communications device. That's technology so advanced it requires little resources to obtain. Mars can be the same, our tech just isn't there yet.
Summed up by this line quite nicely:
“ Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it”
and yet, humanity also does not "need" laser stablized, automatic orbital docking (, except it was built just for the ISS so that docking modules can be done).
However, the fact that you can now have safe, cheap and effective laser eye surgery is a result of such technology being explored for one purpose, repurposed for new applications.
We did not need to spend the research dollars to figure out safety grooving to prevent hydroplaning, except that it was needed for the space shuttle landing (it went too fast otherwise). Now this research is applied to a lot of roads, as well as airports, and prevents skidding that would've otherwise happened: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/40-years-of-nasa-spinoff/sa...
So the idea that "humans does not need blah" is not correct, because you don't know what humans need.
Thing is, we do know what humans need. We need better battery technology, improved drugs and mental health, better power generation (such as nuclear fusion), and much more. Why spend so much time developing technology that may be useful but probably not, instead of developing something that is desperately needed right now?
Taxes are actually superflous. You only limits on spending are industrial capacity and inflation
how do you know that work on going to mars doesn't improve any of those?
And from another perspective, people like researching exciting things, and would prefer it over an unexciting field. Could you imagine someone being told to work on anti-hydroplaning for the onramp of a highway? Imagine talking about it to family/friends at a party.
But space exploration is fancy - people would want to listen to it, and you gain appreciation from them. But the outcome of the research is _still_ applicable to other fields.
So funding space exploration gets people excited, which would allow them to put more effort and soul into said research. You can't imagine how boring it is doing fundamental research otherwise.
You just demonstrated that you don't know - we dont need batteries spesifically, we need zero carbon power for vehicles, which can be done by fuel cells or plutonium or maybe something we haven't considered.
Same way before you would have asked for a faster oven, because you didn't even know a microwave is a possible concept
Research is not a restraurant menu, you dont get to choose what you will discover and how much it will cost
Yes, some of the research done for purpose A ends up being able to be re-used for purpose B.
It is not a compelling argument because:
1. We have no way of predicting how much or what technologies will be the useful ones or what they will be useful for
2. Any other scientific or engineering endeavor we do instead of sending humans into space, including a massive increase in building/sending robots into space, will have the same potential side effects
That's what I mean when I say as technology increases, resources required decreases.
All start to make sense when you look at it through geopolitics. Satellites have become one of the most critical components in the modern warfare. A lunar base helps you destroy enemy's satellites and you want humans in the loop.
And humans are well situated to be one of the survivors of a future large impact, by virtue of our tendency to burrow in the ground and to cache food. Indeed, one silver lining of the cold war is that major powers spent tremendous sums of money building fortifications with independent power and life support, as well as substantial food stockpiles, as well as numerous nuclear submarines which would weather the impact.
Another Chicxulub might kill 8 billion people, and would be an immense humanitarian tragedy -- putting people on Mars won't save us from that. But we have the technology for survivors to ride it out today.
What's nihilistic about liking Earth? All my stuff is here, all my friends are here; the food is good.
Whether intentional or not, the first question implies that the extinction of the human species would not be a bad thing. The second question is a non sequitur. The accusation of nihilism has nothing to do with liking Earth, it has to do with the apparent indifference to human survival.
My answer would be -- it's important if we deem it important, whether that's rational or not. If we start from the premise that life is good, that humans in particular are the most interesting thing out there as far as we can see, then it isn't totally bizarre that we should wish for the show to continue, extend it as far as we can. In that view, being bound to the fate of our home planet seems like an arbitrary restriction.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. If we cannot survive on earth it's impossible for us to survive anywhere else.
sure, this is the case right now, but by increasing technology (through research and development), making space (or mars, or moon) habitable is an achievable goal.
May be not in the short to medium term (as all of these habitats would require materials from earth to sustain), but in the long term, it should be possible to produce all required materials for survival and be independent from supplies send from earth.
However, in the chapter "The Mars religion" the author fails to explain why he disagrees with the transhumanists who think mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Also Musk often states that the window of opportunity is open now and we don't know for how long.
This whole article boils down to "I don't think we should go to Mars because I don't think we should, it would cost too much (limit not specified) money, it doesn't seem to benefit me immediately, and we should use robots instead, and it's all-or-nothing on the robot thing."
There are so many unstated assumptions, baked-in arbitrary limitations, and downright bizarre arguments that I'm struggling to understand what the point of the article is, if there is one beyond "stop it." I suppose if you really dislike the armchair-engineering hype factory of Elon Musk and you were looking for an armchair-engineering Space Eeyore, here's your boy?
A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.
Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission.
Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back.
And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option.
That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight.
It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple).
A trip to Mars and back is nearly 1000 days.
It’s not gonna happen anytime soon.
If we cannot, at a nation-state level, apply ourselves to 30-50 year goals, we might as well just give up on the survival of humanity.
Of course that isn't politically possible, but the other poster seemed to be talking about our capacity as a civilization in their comment, and really, the NASA outline presented in the article doesn't do much more to demonstrate it than my silly mission above. The "interesting" level for a civilization would be to build an actual self sustaining colony on Mars, and we probably don't currently have the capacity to do that (the challenges go from having the equipment needed to being able to manufacture it).
On a more serious note, I'm really sure you could mount a very suicidal one way mission to Mars with current (and possibly 60s) technology.
Could be an interesting narrative in a SF book - Project Hail Mary from Andy Weir actually comes very close, but takes it even further.
The costs probably aren't that much higher anyway.
Without going full "We choose to go to the Moon", I disagree with these points. It would be fun. It would open a new era of spaceflight. It is no more destructive or wasteful than most anything else humanity decides to put resources into.
Mars is a whetstone against which humanity sharpens itself against.
The absolute most valuable science to be done on Mars is to determine how unique Earth is.
Also I really don't get this fixation to "not contaminating Mars" - like, why ? Its one of the few usable planets in the Solar System! Of course we will contaminate it all over with life, possibly turn it terrestrial one way or another.
Anyone advocating against using one of the most important next stepping stones for Humanity must really live in a weird bubble.
Sure, pick some Kuiper belt object or some extrasolar planet and declare it a reserve and we will make sure we won't touch it when we get there. But doing the same with Mars is insane and almost seems like some weird irrational religion.
I just want an autopsy before before we cremate the body.
Seems like a moon base would make some sense, right?
Not to mention the Chinese one already in orbit.
In November SLS finally launched [0], despite an incredibly over schedule, extremely over budget for it's first Artimus-1 launch; ULA has taken far too many resources to be proud of this, but it has launched successfully.
Startship has been set to have a orbital test flight for the last couple of months, one wonders how much the delay is attributed to the FAA being upset with Elon's absurd antics as of late, and will have way more thrust power than SLS [1].
> "This has the effect of turning technical discussions into debates over the character and achievements of Elon Musk— just the way he likes it."
> "But their founder is who he is, and what he has publicly shared is not so much a blueprint as an inspirational poster."
While I valued many of the thoughts in this post, it made me think of the meme "I choked on a carrot this afternoon and all I could think was 'I bet a donut wouldn't have done this to me.'" Putting aside the argument of whether or not scientific research, especially in space, is a proper role of government/politics, it is disappointing to see what I believe is an intellectual defect to undermine inspiration for human achievement with ad hominems in the context of a collapsing culture lacking meaningful debate on significant government war funding power delusions and destruction. Conquering technical achievements in any form (e.g., "port-a-potty chemistry," getting "to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena") vs. conquering people is, IMO, a more appropriate intellectual debate. I'll turn my computer speakers up to 100% for inspiration by Elon any day to drown out the human destructive philosophies of the politicians this author appears to support. [1]
I think Ayn Rand said it well [2]: "The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11's flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist's emphasis on the dimensions of reason's power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211003211306/https://techsolid...
If Elon Musk wants to be jettisoned to Mars, I'll be the first to cheer him on.
But back on our current human planet, how do we avert apocalyptic scale of misery and deaths in a few decades?
We should consider even further: what about consequences of successfully colonizing Mars? I feel it would mean almost certain doom for both planets. I'll explain:
Imagine all of the hurdles mentioned in the linked blog are overcome. Improbable for the U.S. or EU, sure, but consider China. If everything goes well, they end up with a sustainable outpost with several hundred to several thousand inhabitants and a reliable supply line back to Earth. Everything is great, yeah?
But looking a bit further down the timeline, we will end up with generations of humans native to this outpost. All living deep underground, rarely seeing the surface. Sure there would be domes you could visit to check it out, but they'd probably see as much traffic as a planetarium or scenic vista - more apt for school trips than any part of daily life.
We know very little of the role of epigenetics in these conditions, but you might imagine that tunnel dwelling folk in weak gravity are probably going to express genes differently during development, than we see here on Earth. Different diets, different light exposure, different gravity and even different focal lengths will all have an impact. The forces of evolution will bear an increased impact here also - children that blossom into more Earth appropriate bodies will have increased pressure against their thriving in these conditions. Social forces will likely begin to exclude them from the gene pool, accelerating the occurrences of whatever Martian traits emerge.
These generations of inhabitants would eventually put pressure on the supply lines from Earth via the growing population. Or some enterprising politician will manipulate the supply lines in order to exercise despotic authority over them. Eventually the Martians will see pressure to become self sufficient. This will plainly lead to a revolution and independence - an intolerable insult the the patron government. Back on Earth, the strange look of the native Martians will stir racist hatreds and clamoring for subjugation with extreme prejudice. Recall that in the past few years we've seen extreme hatred rear up over the pettiest of differences, to the point where neo-nazis are flourishing and attempting coups in the most powerful nations. Hating weird gray/green skinned, 8 foot tall spider people from Outer Space would be reaaaal easy for these people.
The Earth will send their troops and bombers. The Martians will burrow deeper and humiliate those invading troops with relative ease. The Earth will maybe nuke the place? But that will have very little effect, even the aftermath of fallout and irradiated rock will be negligible to the Martians. But they will be angry. And it would take little effort to rig something up and launch Phobos at the Earth at 1% c.
But the Martians would soon learn that they were dependent on Earth for more than manufactured goods. Their delayed access to the internet would disappear, along with scientific advancements, intellectual culture, entertainment and archives going offline and leaving them with whatever had been cached/stored in their local cloud hardware. Would Mars have developed a chip fab (and the equally important thousands of suppliers for a chip fab) by this time? Medical knowledge? Would they have needed expertise in Computer Science? Imagine if some disaster left Earth with little more than a single hospital and a computer retailer, how would we recover?
Mars Colony may just soldier on for a while, but more than likely would ultimately succumb to genetic degradation, scientific stagnation, room to grow the civilization, lack of elements or molecules that are difficult to procure on Mars, etc.
Colonizing Mars is the worst idea. Just the worst.
There's basically no real reason not to, despite this cynical laundry list of FUD. It's not trading off against any major Earth-based priorities. It's not that expensive. The only mildly compelling argument is the contamination one - but the only real alternative is simply never going anywhere but Earth in case there are microbes. No fun!
You seem to be ignoring one of the main points of the article, which is that sending robots to explore the solar system rather than humans is cheaper, easier, and more effective. That alone is a very good reason to not focus on putting more humans in space.
Why spend more money and effort to do something less effective?
This quote is a reasonable summary, I think.
"The crew will not live in a Martian pueblo, but something resembling a level 4 biocontainment facility. And even there, they’ll have to do their lab work remotely, the same way it’s done today, raising the question of what exactly the hundreds of billions of dollars we’re spending to get to Mars are buying us."
Instead of encouraging people to imagine how good life could be HERE, we are focusing people's imaginations on space where corporate profits aren't threatened.
In the article, the author quotes NASA on why we should go to mars and clearly it's an answer designed to tickle people's imaginations. Why aren't we hearing similar speeches about automating food production for example? Why can't we spend a trillion dollars on a mission to do THAT?
because it's mostly a solved problem. It isn't really engineering, but economics that stops this from being a reality.
And to the contrary, i do think food production automation is being researched (by private entities, rather than gov't organizations) and slowly will become more common. You just don't hear about it, because it doesn't sound as exciting as space exploration.
In that case, we can pick another large engineering project to tackle. How about 3D printers for houses so that we can shelter people too?
as long as those people provide 'stuff' for other people in exchange. That has been the economic model that works.
Wouldn’t that be a great “mission” for a large-scale NASA-like project?
No, that would still be figurative.
The entire mars thing is discredited with NASA budgets and criticism of US government programs, then the criticism is taken as a given, the idea called a cult, and then and only then is private endeavor, the thing thats actually going to go to mars, even brought up. If anything the arguments are good ones, against bureaucracy.
When private endeavor is addressed, of course Musk is mentioned. Then all his marketing hype is mentioned, he's chocked up as a charlatan, the one thing conveniently, conspicuously left out being the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far. Talk about hand wavy.
The entire article is interspersed with unfunny jokes designed to make sure you don't think too much about what you just read. It's a weak "this is a dumb idea" argument after another that does a very good job of hiding the fact that it has almost no arguments of substance. It basically amounts to "we don't know how to recycle shit in a closed loop, the money could be used to send robots, we don't want to contaminate mars with coronavurus" (I can play the lame joke at the end of every important sentence game too).
You don't think people should go to mars? Too bad. People are going to go.
There's no contradiction here. Musk has regularly made ludicrous claims about what SpaceX is going to achieve, while SpaceX is much more conservative in its official statements. The entire operating model of SpaceX makes it difficult to claim that they've ever failed -- the fact that they're now on their fourth brand of "interplanetary starship" (MCT, ITS, BFR, Starship) can be chalked up to "iterative development", as can the fact they abandoned their first planned moon flyby, etc. I think this is a reasonable way for SpaceX to operate, but Musk uses it as a kind of "credibility battery".
Or have you bought into Elon's nonsense?
We can create fuel on Mars. Mars is far enough away from Earth that it's a safe redundancy for humans.
Sure we can use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, but we can also train for Mars like conditions in Nevada...
Either way, Mars is the only viable goal if you want to remove the single point of failure of an asteroid impact.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeo...
That's a bonus. The farther from the Earth, the farther from the explosion from a world ending event. The moon is not far enough.
> There is no magnetosphere and refueling idea is unrealistic.
Please explain how it's unrealistic. There's water and c02. You don't need anything else. Oh and you get oxygen as a byproduct.
> CSS[1] guys did a good rebuttal to all this nonsense:
Pointing to a Youtube video is not really a debate. Put it in your own words if you understand it.
I wouldn't dismiss SpaceX with a Youtube video.
The great thing is, who cares about the people negging, it'll get done anyway, and just like landing rockets upside down, people will find another thing to neg and say "impossible!"
Don't end the world then. Hypothetical Mars colony is doomed anyway without support from Earth.
>There's water and c02. You don't need anything else.
You need huge amounts of energy, storage and processing facilities. And water is not that easy to find and use on Mars. You should check the videos, really enlightening.
>I wouldn't dismiss SpaceX with a Youtube video.
Nobody is dismissing SpaceX with a Youtube video. The Starship and Mars mission are being thoroughly dissected which is relevant to the topic.
>The great thing is, who cares about the people negging, it'll get done anyway,
“Going to Mars reads like that ad for Shackleton going to the Antarctic. You know, it’s dangerous, it’s uncomfortable, it’s a long journey, you might not come back alive. But it’s a glorious adventure, and it will be an amazing experience. You probably won’t have good food. If an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive—but it’s a glorious adventure—sounds appealing, Mars is the place. That’s the ad. That’s the ad for Mars. Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. It’s tough sledding over there. We’re not going to make anyone go. It’s volunteers only.” - Musk
I don't think they should die. But maybe it's just me.
Becoming a multi-world species means insuring yourself against asteroids and other planet killers out of our control (super volcanoes, etc.)
Food can be grown purely on Mars. Unless you don't believe in vertical farming? We have the sun and water on Mars...
> Nobody is dismissing SpaceX with a Youtube video. The Starship and Mars mission are being thoroughly dissected which is relevant to the topic.
Yeah I simply meant instead of linking the video, to expand on what you think the strongest points were.
> I don't think they should die. But maybe it's just me.
People climb Mt. Everest just for fun knowing it is a risk to their life. Others put their lives on the line everyday to make the world run, from cleaning skyscraper windows to windmill maintenance.
It's up to that individual, not you.
The problem is that it is a very well marketed waste of tax money. It came with its own hollywood movie and a very effective guerilla marketing campaign. When I see those "cool" people wearing NASA shirts in bars, it makes me sick ... it is as if they want to steal money from me.
And I actually thought NASA was pretty cool back when they were doing mostly robotic missions that had a lot of bang for the buck. But back then of course there wasn't a marketing campaign to make NASA cool, nobody was wearing a NASA shirt in a bar, and NASA got constantly criticized even for doing its cost effective robotic missions.
Now that they are on the verge of a really massive boondogle, all of a sudden everyone is a NASA fan.