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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

What we have on Antarctica is an outpost, not a colony. It's made up of habitats, not homes. It has virtually no local industry, and cannot support itself. The only way it could endure for longer than its food reserves is by fishing, which is obviously not an option on Mars.

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.

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That is because of a treaty, not because of inability.

There's a similar treaty preventing Mars settlement.

I don't think that's true. What is the alleged treaty called? The Antarctic Treaty binds the contracting states to prohibit individuals from doing various things in Antarctica, the Outer Space Treaty doesn't really do that, and arguably does the opposite by prohibiting territorial claims. Regardless, I don't think any treaty should be taken very seriously. They will both be violated whenever it's expedient to violate them.

Quoting the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, "States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies."

The 1960's definition of "harmful contamination" sure leaves a lot of wiggle room.

As it should, though? At that point in time it was more of "we'll know it when we'll see it".

With that kind of wiggle room, it usually ends up being "We'll disagree when it becomes relevant".

I think parent is refering to wildly crazy nonexistent environment standards back then, like doing surface tests of nuclear weapons.

Remove the word ‘environmental’ and your statement gets better.

That's true, but it's defined (and kept up to date) in practice by COSPAR, who have a pretty elaborate set of definitions in place for Mars in particular.

The rules for Mars aren't based in the treaty but instead on "planetary protection" an abstract policy coming from no law other than forms of regressive environmentalism that tries to limit contamination so that it's easier to find potential microbes. It's already actively harming site selection for Mars exploration by preventing sending of rovers that might discover life to actual areas that might have life.

To save the possibility of finding life we are preventing ourselves from finding life.

COSPAR is (officially speaking) a private body, and as such their Planetary Protection Policy is not legally binding. They propose their policy as an interpretation of Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, but as a private body they lack the legal authority to make binding interpretations of an international treaty. The standard approach in international law would be to look at the intentions and understanding of the States Parties at the time the Treaty was originally concluded in order to interpret it - which would likely support a far weaker understanding of “harmful contamination” than what COSPAR proposes.

The treaty doesn't prevent Mars settlement. It just prevents claiming of territory. Antarctic treaty is actually significantly stricter than the outer space treaty in many ways.

No. It's because it's not economically worthwhile yet to do anything significant in Antarctica given the costs of doing something. Treaties will get renegotiated if there is enough economic value and in any case, treaties need to have millitary might ultimately to get enforced. The Budapest treaties never got enforced as an example and that's why we are where we are in Ukraine

The Budapest Memorandum was specifically not a treaty. The US and UK did enforce the terms as written by raising Russia's invasion as an issue in the UN Security Council. The memorandum didn't require them to do anything more.

https://treaties.un.org/Pages/showDetails.aspx?objid=0800000...

I'm fairly certain there would be major mining, commercial fishing, and oil drilling operations in Antarctica today it weren't for the Antarctic Treaty. (Also, wars.) It's a geopolitical accident that everything worked out so well with the treaty. I doubt it will hold forever.

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.

While it looks like there are resources (oil, gas and coal being mentioned) it does not seem they have been mined before the current treaty cam into effect, most likely due to the 19/early 20 century technology.

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.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes indeed the treaties prevent "privateer" operations. They don't prevent major nation state level economic operations backed by millitary force it one decides it needs the resources. You can see some of this playing out in Ukraine, South China Sea etc. This is even true for large scale private organisations Vs smaller countries though setting aside Antarctic treaty will require more millitary might - see squid fishing off Chile or drug cartel control of central America as examples.

Your argument seems to be "treaties between nations are violated whenever it becomes expedient." This might be true in some cases, but I think a the Antarctic Treaty is a great counterexample.

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.

> It's because it's not economically worthwhile

Given that there's laws and international treaties forbidding mining, resource extraction or resource exploration, of course it's not economically worthwhile.

The northernmost part of Canada is Ellesmere Island. Which is almost as large as Great Britain. There is no "you may not settle here" international treaty.

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.

It’s not desirable, but that isn’t the question. The question is, is it possible?

We will learn much more on how to build Mars colony from Mars outpost than from Antarctica colony.

By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.

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 flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.

By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about cultivating apples by cultivating oranges.

> Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.

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.

We already know all the basics about agriculture for example. Hardly any of the problems we need to solve to do agriculture in Antarctica are the same as the problems we need to solve to do it in Mars. The soil medium is different, the processing needed to make it useful for agriculture is different, the light levels are different, the atmospheric environment is different.

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.

Knowing the basics is still far removed from demonstrating self-sufficient capability at civilizational time scales. How many successful, isolated biodome projects are there? My understanding is that every one so far has failed. Theory ain't practice.

Of course, my point is that Antarctica is insufficiently different from e.g. Boston to make any difference to any research we might perform on earth. Meanwhile there will be conditions on Mars we can’t anticipate or fully simulate anywhere on earth. We need to do both.

Now try growing grain indoor with lights instead of just lettuce with no caloric value for multiple years with no outside input. And also balancing crop carbon needs against human breathing needs in a closed capsule without having something like mold or algae or other bacteria from throwing everything off balance because you lack 99.99% of the ecological diversity of anywhere on Earth. Or having access to fossil-fueled derived fertilizers which takes massive amounts of energy to produce without natural gas. It sure as hell doesn't make sense to ship fertilizer from the surface of the Earth to Mars, or water, or really anything other than handfuls of extremely specialized equipment like computer chips or extremely difficult to obtain or rare chemicals or elements. You are going to need sustainability of all your basic resources for years, if not decades, before you ever have a chance of assaying and mining and processing such materials for yourself.

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.

> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.

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.)

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