Elon Musk has pledged to settle Mars. Prize-winning book offers a reality check | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk has pledged to settle Mars. Prize-winning book offers a reality check

cnn.com

11 pointspseudolus10 comments

I've always responded to Mars ambitions with, first try a colony on the top of Mt Everest. There's more water there, more oxygen, and it's nine months closer to supplies, spare parts and emergency services.

If you can't keep Camp Mt. Everest going, then you definitely won't have a snowball's chance on Mars.

Don't forget how the lack of magnetic field and low gravity means even if by some scifi feat of giga-engineering you create an atmospheric on Mars, it'll boil off into space (like the previous one did). Mars loses approximately a few kilotons a year, while Earth loses approx 3kg/yr.

Compared to the rate a which some cosmic Santa Claus would have to be pouring a human-compatible atmosphere onto Mars in order to (say) provide a human-friendly surface pressure within 1,000 years, a few kilotons of loss per year is not even a rounding error.

Figure that you gotta have five-ish psi for people. (Top of Mt. Everest, roughly.) In Mars' lower gravity, you'll need 12.5 pounds(mass) of air per square inch, pressing down, to get that. So about 10 tons per sq. meter...vs. Mars has a radius of ~3,400km.

That's a lot of tons.

I'm a fan of Antarctica myself, for similar reasons. Also a much bigger space that fewer people (though, not "nobody") will get offended about colonizing.

Personally, I think that if they were serious about this, it is something they should be doing right now. I don't see a reason not to do it. It is simply insane from an engineering perspective to think you can just "design" an entire off-world colony without working your way up. The knowledge you would gain is incredibly cheap compared to its value. But it's not happening, which leads me to believe, they're not serious.

Heck, even just a "colony" in some California mountains would be a good start. You shouldn't even try to work up to full Biodome in one shot, especially given how those were generally "meh" at best. Much faster iteration cycles if you're close to infrastructure. Do something so you're not betting multiple expensive lives on "we can design an off-planet colony correctly on a computer in one shot".

Antartica is a lower difficulty level, I think. Small permanent antarctic bases are borderline feasible, and manage to exist, just about. Everest would be considerably more difficult (though, obviously, not remotely as impractical as Mars).

Space hype is nothing new. Werner von Braun was doing it. It is very likely that astronauts could go to Mars, walk around, maybe even stay in some kind of shelter for weeks to months, and we'll benefit in the form of some technology and engineering spinoffs. But it will be as if Earth's colonizers landed on a barren rock and tried to build a "colony" there. Without people and resources, it isn't a colony. That's not how colonies work. It wouldn't make humaniity multiplanetary. It would just create the longest, most expensive, Earth-based supply chain evar. If Earth suffered a civilizational collapse, the Martians would be dead a few months later.

Plus there is a high chance that some die because of radiation sickness on the flight. And if some come back the chance is very that they are sterile.

Once you start thinking about how to live on Mars, you really appreciate the Earth's biosphere.

I was hoping to read something about "Martian Time-slip".

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