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Comment by polairscience | Hacker News Reader

I've been following these efforts closely. For these projects, crewed endurance space efforts, I strongly believe the most difficult component is the human. It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment. And we don't adequately simulate or study what that might truly be like. I know that this was about nutrition but I just don't think nutrition is going to be the hard part of these missions.

I say this with experience. Living and working doing science in the Arctic and on ships is grueling. It's grueling, and not anywhere near as difficult or unpredictable as being in space. The things that happen in that pressure cooker are really hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.

It's not ethical or easy to do the kinds of simulations that would actually be useful. How do you simulate "your colleague is gravely wounded and on life support. now you have to work for 90 hours straight to fix whatever mamed them". Oh, also, you have 9 months of mission left with one less crew.

It was mediocre at best but "for all man kind" highlights just how weird things might get in these places. The only analogous efforts I can imagine are the adventures of sea-fairing people of centuries past. Maybe we should invent time travel and do some sociological studies.

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there is this review of "for all man kind"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7772588/

why should it be any different on mars than on earth?

> This show has a cool premise, that being what if the space race never ended. It's a sort-of alternate reality and it does a good job of weaving in actual historical events with where the timeline diverged. The main problem is that I feel like the show is being pulled in two directions. In one direction, there is the tension of the space race, engineers scrambling to be the first on the moon/mars and dealing with all manner of technical issues in a realistic-ish way. That part of the show I enjoy. Then, for some reason, the show also throws in a bunch of trite interpersonal drama and stupidity. Like inter-marital affairs, people leaking NASA secrets to the soviets, and a CLEARLY unstable drug-addicted astronaut being given solo control of a super important mission. It's like the showrunners thought the show couldn't stand on it's own without dumb drama, as if there couldn't organically be issues and drama in the context of Frigging SPACE. The first season does this better, but by the 2nd/3rd seasons most of the issues come not from unforeseen difficulties of life on the moon/mars but idiots. It really makes me wonder if they just aren't sure who their audience are. The people who like the technical stuff are not going to like the artificial drama, and vise-versa. Pick a lane, show, and stick with it.

I would argue that sometimes "dumb drama" is a good mirror of humanity. Inter-marital affairs really do happen (including in the highest levels of public policy as well as the astronaut corps), people do disclose "secrets" and pilots (including astronauts) are known to deceive medical professionals to avoid being "grounded".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak

https://www.space.com/spacex-employee-lawsuit-sex-discrimina...

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2019/04/30/after-video-of-sp...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/27/faa-pilot...

Where there are humans, there will be dumb drama. It's practically a law of human nature.

My other favorite example of dumb drama at the highest levels: ex-director of the CIA, David Petraeus, was forced to resign after being caught by the FIB in an extramarital affair with his biographer. [1] You'd certainly think that the ex-military head of a spycraft organization would know to be a little more disciplined... and less vulnerable to blackmail.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal

My expectation is the exact opposite, CIA chief would be a libidinous drug addict, but my view has been shaped by this character: https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Avery_Bullock

The drama isn’t even done that well. Like you say, it’s stupid; the people are on average just worse than the sort of people who would actually be there.

I wanted the technical sci-fi to be worth it, but it wasn’t. There really isn’t much catering to an engineer audience.

As somebody who has spent a lot of time with high-quality academically pedigreed humans in far out places, I assure you that they're very capable of dumb drama. And, again tho I hated the show, everyone will be watching just as they were in for all man kind.

maybe it should be mandatory to watch all episodes of "Big Bang Theory" on a trip to mars for educational purposes ;-)

as if 1 year trapped on a tube in space wasn't arduous enough

People have many facets of intelligence, and no one hits them all across the board. Where there are blind spots, there will be drama.

> The people who like the technical stuff are not going to like the artificial drama, and vise-versa. Pick a lane, show, and stick with it.

I like the show as-is. Maybe I'm not in love with every single subplot but in general the show is pretty great. IRL people have motivations that drive them to do greedy, irresponsible things -- even astronauts.

It's a little bit unfair to say that this mission was just about nutrition – apparently there were simulated stressors, although I wish there were more details about what there. That being said, you're right to say that people weren't being pushed psychologically to the "real" limit that you'd get on long-term isolated missions... I guess that's where The Right Stuff of ye olde Space Age comes in.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/chapea/about-chapea/

> It's really difficult to be isolated in a high stress environment.

Mars seems more like a high boredom environment. It's a dead planet where nothing more than the occasional feeble dust storm happen.

> Mars seems more like a high boredom environment.

Something tells me that the first few thousand people sent to Mars won't be bored. There will be tons of things to do in the pursuit of making a habitable space.

Besides that, you have the constant death factor. I know we all live with risk 24/7. But, unless we're doing something outside our comfort zone, our brains largely ignore it. Living on Mars will not be like that for a settler. There are real risks that some piece of equipment will fail and kill you all. You'll likely be well aware of that because you'll be working on it. (Or worse, that idiot over there holding the spanner the wrong way is working on it.)

Should we pursue such a simulation in an undersea environment instead? Real stress, real risk, real isolation - but could pull someone up if super urgent. Would also simulate the long voyage to get there.

That might be a good idea if space suits are available. It would be risky, tbf.

Analog astronauts are already doing this.

>but could pull someone up if super urgent

This is the key, IMHO. We've simulated such things as human isolation and closed-loop ecologies before, numerous times. And we did learn some things. But I don't think there is much you can do, and surely not anything ethical, that would correctly simulate being months away from Earth.

Just as you said, when you're on-planet, anything that goes wrong can be dealt with. Have a leak you can't fix? Someone just had a medial issue and is unresponsive? You just can't take it any more? Whatever the case, help is just a press of the red button away. I'm not sure if you've played many video games on Hardcore mode, but it's a totally different experience to know your saved game file(s) are in jeopardy if what you're about to do goes south. I would imagine the feeling is somewhat like this, but worse.

A lunar base might simulate it. An undersea base (as you suggested) might work too if you put it deep enough. But again, you're entering unethical territory here by making something exceedingly dangerous just for the sake of increasing the risk/stress.

Mars' environment is extremely hostile to life, with no breathable air, temperatures more extreme than what's found in Antarctica, and no water or food resources that can be foraged. As if all this were not enough, radiation levels on its surface are also 20 times higher than what's found on Earth.

Adding to the difficulties imposed by the harshness of the environment and the paucity of its resources, a habitat there will be more remote than any human habitat that has existed in centuries, perhaps in history, in terms of difficulty of resupplying it.

Simply surviving without the vast support network of civilization at hand is a constant struggle on Earth, and all of this will be exponentially more challenging on Mars.

Yeah I think humans living on Mars is a complete fantasy, at least in this century. Will humans visit Mars? We'll probably attempt it. But living there permanently? Not going to happen.

It would certainly be difficult, but if we do manage to create viable permanent settlements on Mars that would massively expand the space where humans can live, since it would require significant upgrades in a whole suite of technologies necessary for human colonization of extraterrestrial environmens.

Even a technology as seemingly unrelated to Mars settlement as autonomous robots I believe would see significant advances as part of any effort to create a permanent human presence on Mars.

Best case, the technology will allow us to continue to live on a warmer earth, which will still be vastly easier than living on Mars.

You make a good case for why being on Mars is dangerous.

My point is not that it's safe, but that there isn't much to do there, and very little unforeseen happens.

I assume no one goes to Mars without the resources to live safely and feed themselves. If we're talking about some adventurers hijacking a Starship, I fully agree that they're in for a world of stress :)

Just like Phoenix suburbs --- yet they allegedly support life.

Trying to survive and dealing with the inevitable crisis situations that will come up (critical life support machinery breaks down etc) and the efforts to actually establish a colony will make life far from boring. After 100 years yeah maybe.

Colonization will entail a pretty large population of people across all fields of expertise. You will also have all supplies and materials necessary for any sort of contingencies. You're not going to have the electrician trying to improv as a doctor. I think it's highly probable that many people will die, but not in particularly grueling ways, but far more mundane. Around 600 people have gone to space (which I'll define as at least LEO). During this (including training), about 30 people have died. A death ratio of 5% is ridiculously high, and most of the incidents have been far from remarkable. Fire in a capsule, oxygen valve failure, heat shield failure, don't use solid rocket boosters, and so on.

It'll be the same stuff with Mars, except the death ratio will likely be substantially higher. It'll again be from just incidents that will look stupid in hindsight. And they will have been, but when you're working to prevent a billion bad outcomes, a few will always manage to wiggle through the cracks. All things considered I think Mars colonization will probably be far easier than the guys who were engaging in civilization building in the past. Settlers in times past were dealing with hostile natives, hostile waters, unknown diseases, unpredictable weather, even mundane things like rats getting into your rations, and had very little ability to measure or adapt to what they were dealing with. For instance Vasco de Gama (Europe to India guy) took 3 weeks to cross the Indian ocean the first time. On his way back, it took 3 months. By the time he returned, about 70% of his crew was dead.

Colonizing Mars will be absolutely brutal but we will have quite far fewer unknowns. Of course the issues will will have to deal with will be far harsher than anything anybody else ever had to manage, but they are known - and so that really simplifies the process.

People arguing in favour of mars colonisation always kind of skip the time between now and a future in which we’re able to ship an entire populace to another planet.

We will need to send smaller crews first. Not just to do the science and validation necessary, but also because it would be plain unethical to send a large group of people without knowing what effect that kind of travel will have on them. And all of that in spite of knowing how that venture would even be technologically feasible.

If you haven’t, I can highly recommend reading A city on mars by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith.

Well this is literally the point of Starship, so the timeframes are probably quite a lot closer than many may realize. And due to the extensive amount of labor involved, a fairly large group will be absolutely necessary. But I'd emphasize that colonizing Mars, or anywhere, will likely literally never be safe, and no amount of "science and validation" can really change that. Huge numbers of people still regularly die in the most mundane of things, like roofing - where about 1 in 2000 workers lose their lives per year. Over a career of a few decades, those are some pretty unpleasant odds.

And on Mars roofing would look like the safest job imaginable. We're going to be doing absolutely everything from scratch - industry, construction, manufacturing/processing, and more. And doing it all in conditions unlike anything on Earth, and where if you're exposed to atmosphere - even briefly, you're dead. There's going to be an unavoidably high death rate. If you want to wait until things are safe then I think that's perfectly understandable. But in turn you should also understand that people have different perspectives on life.

> will likely literally never be safe, and no amount of "science and validation" can really change that.

This is not how engineering works. You can’t just hand wave all practical problems away and throw adventurers with a death wish at them until a few stick to Mars.

A single failed Starship mission with a full crew is going to be the death sentence for any further exploration of a mars colony. I would very much like to see this happening, but not at the cost of entirely avoidable deaths.

Work smarter, not harder.

It's not about a death wish at all, but about being aware of the inherent risks, which most people are not. For instance internal estimates of the Moon landings were extremely stark. The prevailing mindset at NASA was around 50/50 - James Webb himself was quoted saying as much. Neil Armstrong was optimistic and thought they had about a 90% chance of survival, Aldrin felt they had about a 66% chance. This is why eulogies for these astronauts were written before they even set foot on the launch pad.

The fact that we nailed each Moon landing was thanks largely to good fortune. There's just so many unknown unknowns that you simply cannot get risk down to levels where failure is not a very real possibility. And in fact even the original Moon landing very nearly ended in catastrophe and only succeeded due to some superhuman piloting and good luck on top. The autopilot was going to set them down in a boulder strewn area so Armstrong took manual control and ended up landing with less than a minute of fuel remaining. And even when landing, he failed to carry out a process (immediate shut down) that was thought necessary to avoid a catastrophic failure by NASA. But with ever-recurring good fortune, they were wrong.

I would highly recommend "Failure Is Not An Option" [1] by chief flight director Gene Krantz. What I am talking about is an acceptance that substantial risk is simply going to be involved in space flight for the foreseeable future, and very possibly forever. And now space flight to distances further than ever, with the goal of starting an entirely new civilization, for the first time ever? I think it's extremely important to accept and acknowledge that this will involve plenty of death, so as to ensure that those who do sign up are fully aware of the risks. Armstrong was probably lying to himself there thinking they had a 90% chance of survival, and that's not good for anybody.

[1] - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Failure-Is-Not-an-Opt...

I see, and I agree that this simple is a very dangerous venture. But I stand by my opinion that we should try to eliminate all risk we can, anything else would be negligence. And that includes incrementally scaling up missions once were reasonably confident in the general primitives, like how does a human being behave if they're trapped in a tin can for a year with others, how bad is radiation during the journey and on Mars for squishy bodies, or does being exposed to microgravity for a prolonged amount of time fuck with people's reproductive abilities, none of which we have answers for, or a way to collect them, without sending small and controlled missions.

I'm adding that to my library, thanks!

Well we do have answers to many of these questions already. For instance the longest ISS stay is 437 days, contrasted against the ~100 days to get to Mars. And the ISS is a claustrophobic cave contrasted against the Starship. The ISS is made of various modules. The zvezda/"star" module is a major support and living module, with a total habitable volume of 47m^3. Starship has 1000m^3 (which is equal to the volume of the entire ISS). Of course lots of that will be used for supplies, but the nature of the planned missions (multiple ships, supplies/fuel/etc distributed among other ships in the fleet) means a very sizable chunk of it will be available for habitation.

There's also a lot of misconceptions about things like radiation. In general short extremely high energy bursts of solar weather can be quite dangerous. But it turns out that the Starship will already have a rather large volume of appropriate shielding - water! That shield can be used on an as-needed basis because you can see these events coming from far away (yet again, advantages the earlier colonists would not have had).

The ambient radiation is much less of a concern. The worst case scenario is you end up shaving some years off your average life expectancy with a higher overall chance of cancer, but there are some super interesting studies in places like Ramsar, Iran [1]. Ramsar is the most naturally radiated habitated location on Earth, with orders of magnitude higher radiation levels than generally recommended as safe. According to contemporary radiation-cancer models, increased cancer rates should be trivially detectable. Instead they actually seem to be showing a slightly reduced rate of cancer, which some have posited may be attributable to radio-adaptive effects in play! Presumably this would not be true of the first generation(s), but it suggests some extremely exciting generational possibilities.

Basically I would say here that anything a small mission can do, a larger one could do - more safely, more reliably, more efficienctly, with more data, and just generally better chances of success. The costs when you do fail will be higher, but the chances of failure will be lower, and the overall rate of progress will be dramatically higher.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity

The settlers were ipso facto the hostile group, as they were settling another people’s land. Otherwise, we’d call them visitors.

(edit) My intention wasn’t political correctness but that words are important. “unwanted” is more fitting than “hostile,” as it matches the intention of the settlers.

“ All things considered I think Mars colonization will probably be far easier than the guys who were engaging in civilization building in the past.”

Those explorers of eras past were going places that not only sustained ample plant and animal resources (in quantities that would surprise modern people) but entire human populations. There is almost nothing on Mars that will sustain us.

Not entirely. I'd look up things like the 'Starving Time' at Jamestown. [1] Jamestown lost 90% of its population in a single winter, and was left resorting to cannibalism and other such things. In the past you were constantly preparing for winter. And if something went wrong, either with your crops, water, surprise weather, or whatever else - you died. And that's if disease, natives, weather, or a million other issues didn't get you.

And that's after you got there. Crossing the sea meant you were completely subject to the whims of the weather, often sailing into the literal unknown, all the while your rations were slowly dwindling and your crew was starting to rot from the inside out dying rather unpleasant deaths - scurvy wouldn't be entirely resolved until the 20th century! With Mars we won't really have to deal with any of this, because the issues and variables will be mostly known ahead of time, and the supplies per settler will also be dramatically higher meaning a far greater window of time to reach self sustainability.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_Time

Jamestown is notable because of the deprivation, not because every settlement was a Jamestown. Certainly, we understand the variables and an identical journey on earth would be dramatically safer (though still not without peril).

Even still, these explorers were able to harvest resources during their journey as well as immediately upon arrival at the destination.

With Mars, there’s nothing there. No fertile soil. No potable water. No known life. It’s an actively hostile environment. Colonizers to Mars will be exceptionally reliant on carrying the totality of their survival resources. Sure - if we spend the next centuries terraforming Mars robotically (or some other scheme), we could change the math on this - but I have a hard time swallowing the argument that crossing to, and colonizing, Mars is anything but orders of difficulty harder than the feats of those explorers. I’m a nerd and want to believe, but it’s fanatical thinking for… a long time.

Consider it this way - I would say that scaling Mt. Everest now a days is relative easier than it was for early adventurers and explorers to scale far lesser mountains, in the past. Of course Everest is far more difficult, yet modern supplies, knowledge, sherpas/guides, and more have enabled even 80+ year olds to scale it. It's still a huge achievement nonetheless, but modern competencies have really enabled us to minimize the dangers. Though of course there's still substantial danger - many people find their final resting place there.

And I think it will be similar on Mars. What is being done is, itself, far more difficult than what was done in the past. Yet in this case we have a far better idea of what we need to do, what we will be facing, and so on. There will be unknown unknowns, and those will get people killed, but I think the frequency of such unknowns will probably be quite a bit lower, which I would claim makes it overall "easier."

In the past even "just" doing a transatlantic crossing was basically accepting that a good chunk of your crew weren't going to make it. In the early Age of Sail, you'd be lucky if you were left with half your crew. The grand explorers like Magellan fared even worse. For his circumnavigation, he left with 5 ships and 270 men. "He" returned with one ship and 18 men, a 93% death rate. "He" in quotes as he was not one of those 18.

I was commenting on a colonization effort, not merely exploration. I’ll happily concede that exploring Mars is perilous but also realistic.

As was I. The analog was more about the overall shifting in risk profile where something that is, in objective terms, more difficult than something else can, over time, become relatively easier than the easier thing was in the past.

Dust on Mars is quite problematic. Perhaps worse than lunar dust. Even exploring Mars and returning --without a dust hazard--is unlikely to succeed in this century.

I think they found the soil actually has quite a bit of water.

This is why people argue for fixing the earth. We already have a planet we're perfectly adapt to. We just need to keep it habitable.

My favorite fact about Mars is the soil fucks with our hormones. Children born on Mars won't be able to survive because the dust will literally destroy their ability to develop. Shit is haaaard.

I don't know what you're talking about re: hormones, but in general I think the best idea is to do both things, though I don't think the risk to humanity comes from damaging Earth, so much as damaging each other. Over the past 2 years I think we came far closer to nuclear apocalypse than most people realize. Certainly far closer than anytime besides the Cold War. And over the 2-3 years before that a global disease spread and seems to have infected basically 100% of humanity. And this disease was most likely created by humanity, and released by accident. We're only fortunate that it was relatively harmless compared to what it could have been.

Now that's happened all over just the past 4 years. What do you think of our chances 20, 50, 100, and more years in the future hold hold? It's pretty easy to see plenty of timelines where we do eventually manage to kill ourselves, and so expanding beyond Earth is critical. Of course that doesn't mean we should neglect Earth in any way, shape or fashion. But with 8 billion people on this planet, we can manage to do more than one thing at a time to quite a high degree of competence.

Just one of the fun ones https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/perchlorate-in-martian-...

Wiki has other details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_soil

In any case, point is: We need to stop being a threat to ourselves, and hoping that another planet, for which we're not evolved to survive on, is a better choice feels like the wrong path. Humans are amazing at surviving... on earth. Because we evolved to survive here.

Having a "plan B" is not a bad choice, because a lot can happen that we cannot prevent. However we can't resettle everyone. Most will die. Plan B is to continue the species, but not necessarily to actually save us.

Interesting article. Thanks. And yeah I strongly agree that there are a lot of questions about how childbirth outside of Earth will work. Another simple issue is would people born on Mars even be able to ever return to Earth (assuming they're otherwise healthy)? How the body will evolve and adapt when all you've known is 1/3rd g is an interesting and open question that we're only going to be able to completely answer by doing.

I also completely agree with everything re: Earth. But one thing I'd add there is that I think humanity actually starting to settle Mars will dramatically shift the mindset of both people and countries. Imagine China was engaging in mass transit to populate and build up New Beijing. It's not like the US would simply stand by. And today I think many people are not so interested in these ideas, because they think it's simply impossible. I'm thinking more like New World parallels rather than Space Race.

Are there any stories or examples you could provide of what you described with arctic work? That sounds quite interesting!

Buy me a beer in person and you can have as many as you want until you're bored. Post them publicly on the internet for anyone to recall at any moment? Absolutely not, under no circumstances, no.

Which is an important and relevant boundary for this discussion. Any space extended space travel is going to be mind numbingly public. Which is not a good thing

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