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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time seeing any benefit to colonizing Mars without coupling it with a large-scale attempt at terraforming. If we're going to just put a domed colony somewhere, the moon makes far more sense.

I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.

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You have to think beyond immediate practical applications and consider what an event like this would mean to our species as a whole. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes this argument better than anyone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlGemHL5vLY

I'm against that plan though, because we tried the grand gesture approach and it didn't really lead anywhere. We don't need grand gestures, we need infrastructure and profitable things to do in space. For example, if somebody captures an asteroid rich in rare earths and begins mining it, they'll have every incentive to build a permanent station. We should build our way up and figure out how to make it work as we go, rather than trying to solve the hardest problem in human history with Big Up Front Design.

On Mars, you're surrounded by easily processed carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, and you have close to a 24-hour day/night cycle. Bring hydrogen with you, and you can quickly start producing air, water, fuel, and food. On the Moon, you're stuck having to import the full weight of all of the above.

Discovering feasibly concentrated pockets of ice in polar craters on the Moon would help, but still not with carbon or nitrogen, and whether any ice could be found in useful concentrations is an open question.

A Mars settlement could quickly become largely self-sustaining, without having to wait to be able to terraform first.

Without magnetic shielding I'm not sure how far large scale terraforming is going to get us. Any atmosphere we try to build up will just blow off into space. But I agree, put the dome on the moon.

As a life-long of reader "hard" sci-fi, making me a renown expert, IMHO:

How will humans survive the radiation?

How will humans remain mentally healthy?

I don't think we can feasibly become space faring until those challenges, and probably some others, are addressed.

Edit: Oh, I just had an idea. How do people with Asperger's deal with isolation, boredom, continuous contact with a handful of other people? Maybe there's a subgroup of people who are mentally perfectly adapted for space travel.

You read hard sci fi and you don't have answers to these questions?

Q: How will humanity survive the radiation?

A: Build igloos or inhabit caves or just plain dig into the ground. Problem solved.

Q: How will humans remain mentally healthy?

A: The Internet and social interaction with other colonists. Also, there is a lot of work to be done growing plants, managing systems, exploring robots, documenting and cataloging all that we find.

People, today, already live in extreme isolation for extended periods of time by choice.

Those aren't even the hard problems to solve.

I'm projecting. As an extrovert, I'd go nuts. So clearly I'm not making the trip.

I'm more worried about the time in transit.

For sanity, my assumption is that humans will need the ability to easily increase / decrease metabolism. So that 6 month, year, century trip would seem like a few days.

For radiation, I think space faring humans will need to be radiation hardened somehow.

I have Aspergers, and I can attest to this... I spend most of my time on my PC connecting to the world. I work from home as a programmer and I have maybe 4-5 friends that I see often (once every few weeks, I go for a walk to the store with one every day) but I spend the majority of time in my space, designing, building and deploying things online and reading to try to gain more knowledge of the world. Now, the question is, how would a personal space on Mars be any different from a personal space here? (I wouldn't go unless it was feasible and viable, and I could return within 10 years - just to be one of the first humans on another planet - I'm pretty comfy on Earth as it is, but I see the point you're trying to make here)

Fast-forward to the point of actual space colonization. Should mental stability be a factor in survival in space I can imagine that it'll introduce a rather strong darwinistic filter. It's difficult to fathom but realistic that folks with a short fuse have a severe disadvantage. Would it be required to undergo a psychiatric test before you can buy a ticket to an off-world colony and settle? Will people with a genetic predisposition be advised not to have kids? Will earth be a safe-haven for loonies?

I remember reading that it would take 1000s of years for the atmosphere to blow off.

Ah, yes. Just long enough for the population of the colony to reach hundreds of thousands before they all face miserable death by slow suffocation or radiation poisoning.

If you had an advanced civilization living there for thousands of years, without continuing the labors of terraforming, doing absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening (even when they know what will happen, while measuring the atmospheric levels slowly dropping)... maybe they'd deserve to die. I mean, that could only mean that they actually wanted to die!

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