Elon Musk Wants to Put Man on Mars in '12 to 15 Years'
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It is only a recent phenomenon in human history, in the last few hundred years, that all the places in the world are known. For hundreds of thousands of years, there have always been new lands and oceans for our kind to explore. Indeed, until the last ~20k years, we all existed in a near constant wandering state. Thats how we survived, and the lifestyle is still practiced today, albeit only in very tiny numbers in remote places.
Even with civilized life, i.e. villages, towns, and cities, for thousands of years people have jumped on ships or made years-long treks across oceans and continents to build new lives. Some of this was the desire to be free, or it was forced, or it was from desperation, or it was simply to explore.
Simply because we almost all live in a vastly interconnected world now doesn't mean that any of those reasons have disappeared, or that the kinds of people willing to take such risks have died out. We're still here, if latent, amongst the masses.
Many of us spend our youth traveling the world, climbing the next mountain. Many others lose themselves in vast game worlds where we can, for short times, satisfy the need to explore and build new lives. Some games such as WoW, Eve Online, Secondlife, and Civilization are so popular in part of because of these desires and needs.
So when you ask, "Why?", I say "Why not?". You are free to stay here. I want to go see what's out there.
It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots.
You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post-scarcity. Because that will mean that everyone gets to do what they're excited about.
Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.
The USSR planned on sending a man to mars to live, and die there. It was feasible during the cold war, and we still haven't done anything about it.
Research from a distance at first. Telescopes, and so on.
Send robots after that. Let them dip their toes in the water first.
Finally, send people where it makes sense.
"Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper?"
That is a question that is going to be very very interesting in the rapidly approaching future. Robotics is really a game changer. It has already changed out lives for the better and will only continue to do so. The answer to "Should robots do this?" should always be a resounding "Yes.", where it serves to improve our lives.
However I refuse to continue that answer with "...and humans should not." Some of us feel comfortable that our particular niche is safe from obsolescence. What those people are good at and what they want to do happen to overlap.. at the present. But what of the people for whom that is no longer the case? Should they, in a post-scarcity society, be denied the opportunity to do what they want to do?
I say let humans do what they are good at... and what they desire to do. If they want robots to help them or precede them, wonderful.
But I like walking around. I don't need or want a robot to do that for me. I am more than my brain; I am also my body.
Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.
In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died.
I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans.
Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails.
In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.
One thing I've not really heard talked about is orbital industry. What I envision would be factories in orbit that do everything from processing raw materials to making finished products. Typically people assume that those facilities would only support resources mined from the moon and asteroids.
But as an early step, what about just launching raw materials into orbit. Build cheap, reliable rockets. Stuff them full of cheap, bulk materials. Iron, aluminum, copper, etc. If 10% of launches fail, it's not cheap but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than losing high end equipment and people. In many cases, it might even be feasible to scavenge some of the raw materials on the ground after an accident.
This might be a good way to bootstrap a reliable orbital infrastructure. Build stuff in space so it can be cheaper, bigger, and more robust. If your ship to Mars doesn't need to land, and makes the trip many times, the lifetime cost of such vehicles drops dramatically.
Bootstrapping colonization is a slightly harder problem but there are some promising signs for that. First, research on reusable launch vehicles is coming along (at SpaceX for example), and if that works out it should lower launch costs by a factor of 10 to 100. Add to that the ability to use local resources on Mars and things start to get a lot easier. Within the earliest generation of manned missions to Mars we will likely have infrastructure for manufacturing rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) as well as producing building materials (concrete) and iron based materials (such as sintering iron rich regolith to manufacture rectenna arrays). That infrastructure will develop fairly rapidly and in a few years we'll start to see a real industrial and agricultural base develop on Mars. Of course the more mass we can throw at the problem early on the easier it will be to bootstrap.
One of the exciting things about Mars colonization is that it would likely serve as a proving ground for many technologies that could have applications on Earth. For example, solar power satellites are one of the best methods for providing power to a Mars base/colony. They're also one of the most promising technologies for Earth-based power generation, but the barrier to entry and the perceived financial risk has been too high.
You claim stone age people did a lot of exploration .... But yet you say early exploration was harder than Mars exploration. I find this humorous.
Stone age people could never explore Mars, we can explore Europe and Asia just fine. Which one is more difficult? I'm being serious ... You could say "oh but it was hard because they were stone age" or whatever, but the fact is, though it was hard, it was not so hard that it huge economic factors, advanced life support, contend with temperatures very extreme, etc, etc. When you say "it was amazing what they did in the bronze age with just sails," I say "Yes it was amazing and all they really needed was sails." Well, it's going to take much more than sails to explore Mars.
It is just an entirely different thing. It doesn't seem like a very controversial view.
Your examples are not very good comparisons. We can't breath Martian air, temperatures are extreme, radiation, etc, etc.
This is vastly different from "Oh, that's a strange plant" or scurvy or whatever you're coming up with.
Deep ocean exploration is an interesting point, we haven't really done much of that and I promise you Hernando Cortez didn't either.
The fact is, comparison to early explorers is misplaced, at least as put in what I responded to. I mean it's sort of funny. The explorers were going places that humans already lives. The inhabitants were more impacted than the explorers. I can poke holes in this all day. No hindsight, just common sense. :)
And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.
With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?
yet. Always tack on "yet." ;)
*Edit: Instead of sending tonnes of metal into Earth's orbit from Earth, would it be more efficient to set up shop on Mars? Mine Mars and build space vessels in Martian orbit. Launching materials into Martian orbit should be relatively trivial compared with Earth.
The end goal of the generation ship would be to colonize a planet in a far flung solar system. I would imagine that with the number of planets in existence, we could find one that was more hospitable than mars. This would also provide a more robust 'backup' for our species, in the case that the extinction event was solar system wide.
Once again, I think Mars is a good stepping stone (for reasons that you mention), but I also imagine that a lot of the technology that would allow us to establish a sustainable colony on Mars would also allow us to develop robust generation ships.
Same argument applies for life extension, or any other radical change like that. Nobody forces you to follow in the wake of the pioneers. You can always just stay behind.
Another reason to settle other places in the solar system is that we can do so without guilt. In America, we have remember the atrocities commited during the building of the USA. On Mars, the moon, and anywhere else it's all fresh and no one is there.
I don't have my own family yet, so the idea of literally building a new world where my kids and grandkids grow and thrive has a strong attraction too. Maybe they would hate that they were born on Mars with little or no chance of returning to Earth, but I have to hope that they see it as their world and their future.
Last time I checked SpaceX was a private company, either profitable already, or on track to become so pretty soon.
And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.
SpaceX is a private company, sure, but so is Boeing. Much of the funding for their current activities comes from NASA. The easiest business in the world to be profitable in is government contracting.
>And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.
Great. Why don't you pay for it then, and leave the rest of us out? There isn't any reason to send people to Mars, and the effort will cost over a trillion. It's hard to imagine a use for that money that wouldn't be more productive.
So, obviously we see what happened as we explored our own world and some of the benefits it has reaped (opening up new resources, etc.). So why WOULDN'T we want to explore other worlds?
Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots? For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do -- even golf -- and that would be valuable research toward developing the fully-autonomous robotic scientists which are definitely the only way we're going to have real long-term exploration of the outer solar system and beyond.
Basically, I can understand why someone might want to go to Mars, but I'm not sure why someone else would want to send them.
Forget the robots. We need the experience in sending actual humans there. This has to happen sooner or later if we want to ensure that our race lives on, after our planet becomes inhabitable.
With all this in mind, it's better to do this sooner rather than later. And why not start in 12-15 years? I hope you can see the value now.
Survival. We will go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.
In the more near term... Do we really need more motivation than "because it's there"?
A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.
The Earth is the perfect place for humans to live, out of the entire universe. If we can't figure out how to survive long-term on this planet, that's why we'll go extinct.
"Because it's there" is a great reason for an explorer to want to go somewhere. But that doesn't automatically have value for the future of humanity.
Terraforming Mars would prevent a 'puncture' or 'short circuit' from wiping out its population. The goal isn't to only spread human life but all of life.
Progress is progress. Choosing to make progress accelerates the process, especially when the progress we're talking about would be the first humans on another planet (and the first known life on Mars).
Motivation and inspiration.
Since you seem big on humans being good at art and culture, consider it the most impressive and daring pieces of performance art ever attempted.
> Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
Dead is dead, whether it is by the hands of a vacuum or starvation in the bitter cold.
The arguments I hear on this subject really sound more like a guy talking himself into buying that Porsche (or Tesla!) than anything else.
Keep sending the robots!
acomar was discussing extinction events and you seem relate that to billions of years in the future. I find that rather incredibly odd. Is it optimism?
Indeed. Think of it as a really good remote backup plan. Colonizing another solar system would be an even better one.
Surely it's fair to extrapolate our inability to succeed there into an inability to succeed in a far more harsh and remote locale.
Keep in mind that this isn't to say we could never succeed. Just that this is a very, very difficult problem that we don't even talk about seriously today, let alone study and pursue. Yet everyone just assumes it's somehow trivial and automatic once we decide to try.
What problem did it have that is unsolvable?
What if we found a bacteria that would spread on Mars and create an atmosphere? There are so many questions like that. Science for science sake, art for arts, because dammit, we are alive!
Honest question.
As Neil Tyson says, we can't even accurately predict the weather a week down the road, you want to terraform something?
Did he really say that? I'd think NDT would be acutely aware of the difference between short-term weather and long-term climate, given that he gets to fight climate change denialists using that absurd misunderstanding on a regular basis.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degras...
B: the Sahara desert is the biggest rain-shadow in the world. It's between the Atlas Mountains in Morrocco on the north, the Cameroon volcano chain in the southeast, and the Red Sea hills to the northeast. To make things worse, the year-round trade winds prevent Atlantic storm systems from going aground in Africa -- instead we get a hurricane season in Florida. The result is a magical place where it never rains:
Digging deeper than five inches?
No, we couldn't.
It's a common refrain, but there's no evidence of it. Where on Earth are these robots that are as productive as humans?
They simply do not exist.
Doing one pre-programmed thing, and they they can't automatically adjust the feed rate as the drill bit wears down, or pick up the bit they drop when their suction pump jams, or change their own electrodes when their spot weld quality drops.
Automated factories take vast human effort to set up and are extraordinarily sensitive (i.e. prone to breaking) to unexpected inputs or deviations in operating environments.
This is not a good line of reasoning when arguing for their suitability for exploring an unknown planet, though I appreciate you might just be specifically addressing your parent's point.
All of these things can be overcome with time, money, science, engineering, etc.
In the short term, for a relatively large amount of money -OR- the acceptance of deaths, we can put a human on that same surface who can cover miles per day, autonomously explore and discover, use new tools as soon as they arrive, can deal with unexpected circumstances, and make suggestions about what would be useful to have to do more science/work.
All that said - it is hard issue and I think it more likely a commercial effort will send a human before the government.
What is the value to humanity of inspiration?
Right now science is held almost in contempt, all its wonders are subtle - appreciable only to the trained mind. Such an accomplishment would be large and obvious. The peripheral effect in inspiring young minds cannot be overestimated. One of those may one day go on to develop powerful DNA repair mechanisms because their imagination was captured at a young age by space travel and wanted to do something useful to that. Let alone the boon to cancers.
They want to travel to and live on another planet with low gravity and scant atmosphere. How could they possibly do that without spurring the invention of a lot of amazing things as a side-effect?
I've mentioned my hypothesis that it would have positive effects on geopolitics by making it possible to view Earth as a locality. But.
Most of all it would at once be an incredible piece of science and the greatest piece of art ever created. For what is art but a celebration of humanity and human ability?
(You're wrong to think that the robotic missions can be justified instrumentally. The science being done by Curiosity is kinda interesting, but it's hardly $2.5 billion worth of interesting. We could do much more important science on Earth with that money.)
Why not both? Humans are infinitely more versatile than a robot, unless of course, you build the robotic equivalent of a human being.
Developing the future technology to accomplish this feat would be worth it already. Furthermore, being the first company/country to send a human to Mars would be an enormous achievement. The number of people this would inspire to pursue this field in our current and future generations is not something that can be measured.
Btw. the video in the report mentions Elon Musk designing the rocket himself, I assume that's BS?
If you realize that our destiny on this planet is to be wiped out then it seems prudent to be able to leave it and live elsewhere nearby. Sure there have been 5 mass extinctions and hundreds of smaller ones, not to mention almost doing ourselves in in the 60's over Cuba or perhaps in future due to climate change.
Humanity is like a software that's currently sitting on a single hard-drive. There is no backup. The clock is ticking.
However, the hopeful part of me thinks it's possible. In 10 years SpaceX has gone from nothing to launching capsules into space and docking them with a space station.
Even it it takes 40 years, it's good to have someone pushing things forward. I really hope I live to see the first human walk on Mars.
There are a lot of risks. NASA's attitude to human spaceflight has been to move into a state of permanently studying the risks. If Musk is going to face the risks, he may be able to pull it off.
SpaceX really needs to start launching some rotating craft.
Combine that capability plus R&D money and you have a potent mix.
Getting to Mars isn't actually that difficult, we already have a lot of the technical details worked out. The biggest element that adds cost and complexity is launch, which is precisely where SpaceX excels.
The reason SpaceX is in a perfect position here is because they've dropped the cost of space launch dramatically. So if it takes SpaceX fewer billions to get to Mars than it would anyone else then they are poised to get there sooner.
What I'm worried about aren't the mechanics of going there. It is the radiation. The Constellation program apparently planned to use high-density polyethylene to act as a shield in the case of a solar flare or any anomalous activity, but the trip would still expose any human being to large doses of radiation and the best methods for shielding are too heavy and hence cost too much right now.
Even if we set up a colony on mars that problem will be ever-present for anyone living there and constructing any long term colony would probably require large amounts of regolith, or maybe a tank of water repurposed as a shield (which might cause processing issues)
Hopefully solving for cost should make a lot of schemes possible, but I'm not so sure about that because there is an implicit requirement of other infrastructure that needs to be solved which no one seems to be tackling. (I might be wrong over here)
Beyond that we could look at other technologies such as artificial magnetospheres. That sort of thing would probably come into use by the time there are dedicated flights between Earth orbit and Mars orbit.
Re: artificial magnetospheres; Wouldn't there be side effects for humans to live within a powerful magnetic field? For starters blood is ferromagnetic... I'm guessing shielding with either something diamagnetic or something like mu-metal is an assumption, but either scenario would be difficult to implement if I'm picturing it right.
What do you think needs to exist to make it viable? Because there is this entire supply chain involved over here which people seem to assume will spring up for such a program. I think that for something so audacious it's a limiting reagent which needs to be taken into account and, hopefully, solved for.
I've read your comments and I hope you don't mind, but I have a silly question for you, do you think it's possible to make a launch system by pumping something cryogenic through a diamagnetic material and using a linear accelerator to accelerate a pellet(large or small) to escape velocity? Such a system would be extremely expensive to set up, but it would be very reusable and it should pay itself back...
The biggest requirement is power, though it's within the capabilities of a large sized solar array. In terms of exposure to the crew, the actual magnetic field experienced within the cabin would probably not be that high (since the magnet itself would likely be on an external boom).
As far as bulk material launch, I don't think there's a ton of value in launching unprocessed raw materials into orbit. There's only a narrow time window where that's actually useful, because once you have built up even a moderate off-Earth industrial base then it becomes easy to produce things like bulk metals and whatnot. The biggest need will always be in complete, manufactured items, and I suspect more or less conventional launch vehicles will probably be the way that happens well into the era where off-Earth colonization is underway.
Yet they will still do it joyfully.
This is especially true if Planetary Resources succeeds in mining asteroids. If we can get cheap resources from our asteroids, getting them from Mars will be out of the question.
Orbital mining and habitat construction is roughly similar level of difficulty and much more economically viable. If we go to Mars (and we should), it won't be for pure economic reasons.
Also, you can do a one way trip in 6 months if you're willing to spend a bit more fuel. So 12 months total in space.
A trip to Mars today, given our present state of knowledge, would be safer than Apollo was given our knowledge at the time.
"Our motto was 'Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970'", recalls Dyson. Orion would have been more akin to the rocket ships of science fiction than to the cramped capsules of Gagarin and Glenn. One hundred and fifty people could have lived aboard in relative comfort; the useful payload would have been measured in thousands of tons. Orion would have been built like a battleship, with no need for the excruciating weight-saving measures adopted by chemically-propelled spacecraft.
"He also laughs that the biggest payload on the Dragon Capsule that flew a mission to the International Space Station was a wheel of cheese."
I am pretty certain that capsule was stuffed. Didn't it take them days to unload it? Is this just a terribly worded sentence saying that the previous load was cheese?
If we can artificially replicate Earth's environment in space, then we're set, we could drift through space when our solar system becomes too hot and ensure our race can live on . We wouldn't need planets anymore.
So, instead of having to adapt to Mars' conditions (low gravity and little atmosphere), we would build something capable of sustaining life as we know it.
Much more valuable if you ask me.
But still, going to Mars is great science and will give us very valuable experience.
That's a few billion years off, so let's do the easier one first. Plenty of time to learn space habitats (and presumably a few billion years from now they'll seem pretty quaint).
Whilst creating and maintaining a Mars base would be one of humanity's crowning achievements, I don't the proposed journey would pass the moral and ethical objections from the general public.
You don't need many, you just need enough.
It's a claim that has the safety of there not actually being any plan or need for me to prove my claim. But for what it's worth, I've also taken the same attitude towards startups I'm impressed by. It's not really about me and what I want, so much as there's this big thing that I want to happen and if I can shovel some dirt and bring us a step closer, I'm in.
I have written a little bit more about that in this blog post: http://pioneersfestival.com/2012/04/contemporary-space-pione...
Airlines have always been subsidised by taxpayers, in fact air travel has never been super profitable even with the subsidies.
I mean it's possible by then the USA still doesn't have healthcare as a right, but the top 2% will always be able to do such trips as a lark (and write it off on their taxes?) however there will have to be a revolutionary leap in a powersource.
Personally I think the idea of hobbyists having their own bots on the moon by 2025 is more realistic and interesting.
I don't care about healthcare being a right. It's a meaningless gesture when we're talking about the most screwed up system of healthcare to ever evolve.
But I do care about healthcare improving to the point that everyone can afford it and everyone will survive. We need a Henry Ford, an Elon Musk, or anybody who's ambitious enough to transform the world's healthcare systems from mediocre to an unprecedented level of quality, scale, and cheapness. Then you can slap "healthcare is a right" because it doesn't really take much to care for sick human beings anymore.
Now, you could say they will change their mind when they run out of money, but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather despite the money.
"I do appreciate money and it is needed to invest in ventures, but I personally I'm not in it for the money. I can already buy everything I could want."
EDIT: I am just supporting parent post's claim that
"but frankly I would respond by pointing out that Elon really doesn't seem to be in it for the money, but rather despite the money."