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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read about how humans are about to colonize Mars, I think about how much logistics it takes to keep even a single base with a handful of people populated on the South Pole. It's like Mars, but with plentiful oxygen and atmospheric pressure, plentiful (albeit frozen) water, shielded from radiation, low-latency communication with civilization, and is reachable by air and ground vehicles. Given how difficult and fraught it is to keep a few people alive down there, how does anyone expect to keep a few people alive on Mars, let alone build a colony there?

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> how difficult and fraught it is to keep a few people alive down there, how does anyone expect to keep a few people alive on Mars, let alone build a colony there?

Necessity is the mother of invention. It makes no sense to use precious Antarctic time and space growing all the food when it's cheaper to ship it in. Similar to how civilizations with a history of littoral shipbuilding figured out ocean-faring--if you're always a day from port, you don't bother baking hard tack. That doesn't mean you can't.

Precious space? Its a pretty big continent.

> Precious space? Its a pretty big continent

That you can't farm on. The farmable bits are in protected, heated shelters that are expensive to build and maintain.

It's roughly a million times easier to grow food on the South Pole than it is to grow it on Mars.

> a million times easier to grow food on the South Pole than it is to grow it on Mars

And it's a million easier still to import it. So apart from hydroponics for treats and research, it's not a problem worth solving.

> it's not a problem worth solving.

Exactly. Farming on mars is not a problem worth solving.

The people who will be born there will likely not agree with you.

Resupply latencies not exactly comparable.

So I would say that yes, farming on Mars is a problem worth solving, and one that will be solved once there's a need to do so (that doesn't mean it will be easy or inexpensive).

> Exactly. Farming on mars is not a problem worth solving

I know you're being flippant, but this is a textbook propositional fallacy. (Affirming a disjunct [1], I think.)

In summary, you argue: farming on Antarctica is difficult, so we import food instead. Farming on Mars is difficult, but we don't want to import food. Herego, we shouldn't farm on Mars or bother with it at all. Alternatively, if X (farming is difficult), Y (farm) or Z (import). You're arguing neither Y or Z by, implicitly, rejecting Z. That doesn't make sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_a_disjunct

Exactly. We need replicators[0], problem solved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)

On Mars you have soil you can process into something plants can use (note: needs to be washed free of its perchlorate contamination first) whereas at the South Pole there is no soil that is not buried under hundreds of meters of ice. You can't just create a heated greenhouse on top of the ice because it will melt the ice underneath.

They've already done tests where they've grown plants in Martial soil simulant.

>at the South Pole there is no soil that is not buried under hundreds of meters of ice.

https://www.scenic.com.au/news/seasons-of-antarctica

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2015/scientists-heading-t...

https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-how-antarctica-managed-t...

South pole. I'm not talking about Antarctica as a whole. There's plenty of areas on Antarctica's coast where small plants/lichen grow.

This is a statement about the absence of immediate first-order incentives.

But there are other incentives, for example, being interested in the problems of actually settling Mars.

Necessity is certainly motivating, but people serious about their ambitions often don't wait for it to motivate their preparations. Would-be serious ocean-farers probably want to become practiced in producing/storing/carrying/consuming/restoring hard tack (or other equivalent sustenance) before relying on it over weeks away from port.

The absence of self-sustaining colonies in harsh outposts on the earth (and similar absence of more local positive terraforming projects) indicate limits in how serious anyone is about colonizing Mars.

> absence of self-sustaining colonies in harsh outposts on the earth (and similar absence of more local positive terraforming projects) indicate limits in how serious anyone is about colonizing Mars

This is a stronger argument. I agree. I think there is serious interest in establishing permanent facilities on Mars. But a self-sufficient, self-sustaining population isn't being planned on because there are too many unknowns for any definition of a plan that doesn't overlap hard science fiction.

Something I've never even seen mentioned, let along seriously discussed, is the protocol for deciding under what circumstances the first human will be born and raised off-earth. I predict that will turn out to be an intractable problem.

> the protocol for deciding under what circumstances the first human will be born and raised off-earth

This one's easy. We won't have one when it happens.

> predict that will turn out to be an intractable problem

In what ways?

Goodness, where to even begin? Maybe here...

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/spacebabies/

We've never even successfully raised a mouse in space.

Oh, you're talking about extraterrestrial reproduction being intractable. Sure. I have no view on this scientifically. That won't stop people from trying. And I'd assume there's a massive difference between zero g and 0.4g.

Maybe. We have zero data about this.

> have zero data about this

I agree with you as much as I am certain that data have close to no consequence for the people making the decision.

> That won't stop people from trying.

Or, what I consider more likely, people not trying but nature, um, finding a way. None of the common prevention methods is 100%.

Have you not read Stranger In A Strange Land?

Yes. Why do you think that's relevant? You are aware that this was a work of fiction, yes?

Wait, what? Someone wasn't actually born on Mars, and there aren't actually Martians? You're joking! /s

Did you honestly believe that I was suggesting that the first person born on Mars was going to be considered the owner of Mars?

When a female crew member gets nutted in on the two year long journey to mars...

I give it like a day before they're all having sex.

I can't imagine they won't all be fixed for that reason.

Let me pose a different question.

If the purpose of Mars is being a lifeboat for some life-ending disaster on Earth, why doesn't that group of people go and build a self-sufficient colony in the Antarctic?

It'll get you 90% of the way there for way less than 10% of the effort.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and nobody is doing it because it's not actually necessary. Martian colonisation is more of a religion, than the product of an actual positive cost/benefit analysis.

> the purpose of Mars is being a lifeboat for some life-ending disaster on Earth, why doesn't that group of people go and build a self-sufficient colony in the Antarctic?

There are various reasons for wanting to go to Mars. I don't think most people's primary motivation is species-level survival.

Like what? A research outpost?

You have to get into a knife fight with your peers to get a grad student who works for ramen on your lab's funding proposal, you're not going to get the amortized cost of a real lab on Mars approved. For that money, there's a thousand languishing research proposals that we should be looking into instead.

There are no economic reasons to go there, either. It's too far away, it's too dangerous, and shipping anything is too much work.

There are no military reasons to go there, either. The military is happy to put weapons in orbit, but Mars is too far away.

> research outpost?

Sure. Tourism, too. Many of us have an exploration urge and instinct, and I can't say it's all rational.

> there's a thousand languishing research proposals that we should be looking into instead

But we're not. People are motivated by passion. I'm not convinced every engineer at SpaceX would be engineering without that mission in their head. I'm also certain the capital being pumped into SpaceX isn't fungible into other research.

Mars, Inc. made a good pitch. It got people excited and involved. I get the sour grapes. We all have pet projects we'd prefer be prioritized instead. But I don't see us fighting over a fixed-sized pie.

George Mallory's reply to why he wanted to climb Everest will do: "Because it's there."

The "research outposts" thing was pretty much solved by sending robots to these hostile environments. They have some serious limitations, but it's a lot cheaper to send a few kilograms on a robot than a few hundred kilograms of meat to carry out a few known procedures.

Because any calamity serious enough to threaten humanity on that level is likely to threaten Antarctica just as seriously.

TIL "littoral"... I initially misread it as a misspelling of "literal".

How is it necessary to colonize Mars?

My friend who wintered over claimed that the Pole doesn't have "plentiful oxygen and atmospheric pressure" - it's high above sea level, the earth's spin reduces the pressure at the poles and if a low pressure weather system comes in people suffer from altitude sickness

https://www.usap.gov/USAPgov/travelAndDeployment/documents/M...

Compared to Mars?

No not compared to Mars, more compared to where humans normally live

TIL thank you, that is very interesting!

We've had permanent bases in the south pole for 120 years now. It's not particularly fraught. It's not free, but with a small investment of money we're perfectly able to do it.

We can't colonize it of course, because The Antarctic Treaty forbids territorial claims. Not because we aren't able to build things in the conditions that exist there.

Mars introduces a lot of new challenges, but 120 years of technological development gives us a lot of new tools to address them.

How do you figure 120 years? The first South Pole Station was Old Amudsen Scott which started operations in 1957 (65 years ago), the winter of 57-58 was the first time humans stayed through the long night at the pole.

Wikipedia is claiming that the Omond House - 1903 - was the first permanent base. Renamed to Orcadas Base in 1904 and permanently inhabited since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcadas_Base

That's not even within the Antarctic circle, I don't think I'd consider it a "South Pole" outpost.

Orcadas Base is 60°S, if that's a pole station than so is St Petersburg.

humans aren't about to colonize mars. At best we could put people on the surface for a week and return them home safely (with some non-zero probability of death).

What's really crazy is what it would take to build sustainable non-earth infrastructure if earth wasn't available. I mean, sure, start with space robots that can extrude aluminum, but ... if you read the story of the western colonizers, it was brutal especially if they couldn't get resupplied.

>if you read the story of the western colonizers, it was brutal especially if they couldn't get resupplied.

For all of the places western colonizers went, there were always resources that Mars will never have. Skipping past the obvious lack of atmosphere, there are no food sources. While they have found ice meaning some water is available, it is actually potable?

Trying to compare early colonizers of any place on Earth to the experiences of whatever will happen on Mars is just pure folly.

THe point is to say that if we can't win the game on easy mode, probably best not to try to win it on hard mode.

That's a fun analogy. I feel like Musk is running through everyone's Mars mission planning meetings yelling "LeeeRoooy Jenkins!!!"

Robots people robots,

Why people run out of imaginations when thinking about robota is beyond me.

Free labour of everytype avalaible 24/7,

This is a latency vs. throughput / pipeline problem in disguise. You could send a food truck's worth of food every hour towards Mars; the first few months will be peaceful and quiet, but things change when a food truck appears in orbit every hour or so.

That only helps if they need lunch not some specific part or medicine etc.

Also, Earth Mars transfers get dramatically more expensive outside of specific timing and of course actually sending multiple packages gets ruinously expensive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit

Increasing the number of vehicles in the fleet lets one consider alternative transfers, like the bi-elliptic one mentioned in the article.

...though it might make matters a bit difficult that expected durations vary between 300-ish days and 4 years when I run the numbers in NASA's Trajectory Browser: https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/

Humans are not going to visit Mars anytime soon, let alone colonize. There are not one but many unsolved technical, economical etc. issues.

But its a dream and a wish list. And We're the only species who can have dreams as big as we want.

Economical and ethical issues are the kind that would be immediately swept away if, say, China said they were going to beat us there. The cost is approximately trivial compared to the US's budget. Technical issues I don't really buy. Getting to the martian surface isn't much more complicated than going to the moon and back. Getting back into martian orbit is trickier, but not in a "Requires novel breakthroughs or undiscovered science" way.

It's perfectly reasonable to say the reason we don't currently have anybody on Mars is because we (politically) just don't really want to. If the Russians had beat us to the Moon, we probably would have made it Mars decades ago.

Planning, quite simply. Antarctic station is planned to be as robust as needed, and so it is.

I think everyone envisions Mars as harder than the South Pole. The reason people like Elon envision colonizing Mars instead of the South Pole is that they posit a big prize for succeeding at the former (becoming the emperor of a large, viable landmass, out of range of other nation-states' control and blast radius) but not the latter.

(I think this is an accurate observation of motives, but I disagree with the posit.)

i think your observation is excellent.

but the entire Mars thing, the last several years, smells like Elon Musk trying to drum up interest to force government funding that he hopes to channel his way.

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