Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

This topic is a bit of a sore spot for me.

I would agree that any notion of a large martian settlement (much less a comfortable one that people actually want to live in) on any shorter timeframe is not realistic and that Mars cannot be treated as a "plan B" in the case of climate change making Earth uninhabitable, but total dismissal of the idea (as well as the idea that humans will forever [and potentially should] be permanently Earth-bound) rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, it's an unfathomably difficult and complex project that should not be in any way underestimated. Realistically, it will take many decades at minimum and probably in excess of a century. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted however, and it's not as if any of it will magically get easier in all the time spent not trying. This could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of situation if it's allowed to be.

View on HN

I see this a lot too and it's frustrating to hear. Yes, it's clearly a near impossible problem, but when has that ever stopped us before?

The alternative I seem to see suggested most often is that we should be dedicating more of our resources to maintain the status quo as long as possible, which honestly sounds more insane to me.

Maybe the timeline is much longer out, but we don't have an infinite amount of resources on this rock and if we don't figure out how to get off it before we run out of those resources we may be stuck forever. Accepting that as inevitable feels wrong.

> Yes, it's an unfathomably difficult and complex project that should not be in any way underestimated. Realistically, it will take many decades at minimum and probably in excess of a century.

I think you've vastly underestimated the difficulty and the timeline, ironically. It's unrealistic to use the words "decades" or "a century". On the contrary, that's the delusion.

Consider: more than 50 years after putting a few people on the Moon very briefly, we're no closer to a colony on the Moon. And rocket technology won't help at all. Among the problems: the Moon has very little gravity, and we can't handwave like Q, "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."

Even if that's the case, I still don't think it does anything to validate taking the defeatist route and not even trying.

If you throw yourself off a cliff because only defeatists accept that they can't fly by flapping their arms, you aren't brave taking chances, you're committing suicide.

By the same token "we don't want to be defeated" isn't a good reason to create a planetary exploration timeline driven by false urgency. Mars isn't going anywhere.

There's a difference between something being extremely difficult and it being actually impossible.

And yes, Mars is not going anywhere, but the same cannot so confidently be said about our ability to get there. Our species has been capable of spaceflight for a tiny fraction of our existence and there is plenty of precedent for catastrophic loss of knowledge and capability.

Mars is not a safeguard against Earth going to hell, even in the most extreme Mars fantasies you don't end up with something independent of Earth for an indefinite period of time. We're also more than capable of exploring our Solar System in immense detail without sending people or colonists. Our greatest achievements on Mars have involved rovers, and frankly suggest that as a planet it has little to recommend it.

tl;dr There is no reality in which it's easier or more reliable to "back up the species elsewhere" than it is to act in our interests here. That doesn't imply shutting ourselves off from space, but it means treating it more like the deep ocean where rovers and drones are simply a better fit for such hostile environments. I'm hopeful that will change someday, but anyone who's thinking in terms of decades doesn't understand the scope and depth of the problem.

My recommendation is to read some of the books and articles suggested in this thread before imposing your wishes on reality.

As noted in the original post, I don't really buy into the "backup" theory so much. It's more that it would be a shame to have gained the ability to put people in space and then lose it having done practically nothing with it.

> I'm hopeful that will change someday

And part of my point is that these things don't just magically change on their own, but because a lot of smart people are actively working on changing them. Absent those efforts, the status quo remains.

If you're banking on "we will lose the knowledge to put people on Mars" as the reason for going to Mars, what exactly is the purpose of putting people on Mars? In this knowledge-loss scenario, we will lose any knowledge gained from putting people on Mars, and also if there are any people still on Mars they will all die when their support systems on Earth collapse.

I'm not banking on anything and I'm not even really that focused on Mars specifically. Mars is just a good first step in establishing self-sustenance outside of Earth's gravity well, feeding into the goal of greater spacefaring capabilities.

In the case that we don't lose our ability to get into space, cool, development in that field gets a bit of an earlier start. If we knock ourselves back into the Stone Age, well, at least we can say we tried our best in that small window of time. The worst outcome is losing the ability without having even tried.

What exactly does “trying” look like to you?

We have limited resources, and every investment is a tradeoff. We can play with rockets, but how does SpaceX solve the problem of humans living with much less gravity than Earth, for example? It seems to me that this is a vastly greater problem than traveling to another celestial body.

Has anyone ever conceived a child off the Earth, much less given birth or raised one? Don’t talk to me about space colonies until we’ve done that.

We regularly expend vastly more resources on things that are far more frivolous and questionable than anything related to spaceflight has ever been, but nobody bats an eye about any of that.

As for the problems, we solve them like we always have: one at a time. Additionally, some of these things haven't even yet been studied to the extent necessary to take a crack at solving them. Taking the humans in microgravity problem as an example, we know it's a problem but have done precious little in figuring out things like exactly where the minimum threshold sits for gravity, whether simulated gravity via centrifugal force is adequate, etc.

I do think that SpaceX is jumping the gun a bit. I'd rather take it a touch more slowly and first do things like put a centrifugal space station in orbit to perform studies on. That said, after how crewed spaceflight beyond earth's orbit came to a screeching halt with the end of the Apollo program, it feels like a miracle to be getting anything.

> We regularly expend vastly more resources on things that are far more frivolous and questionable than anything related to spaceflight has ever been, but nobody bats an eye about any of that.

This statement is too hand-wavy, and I doubt that "nobody" bats an eye. Do you have specific examples?

Also, there's no reason why overspending in some areas should be redirected to the space program rather than to vital, underfunded problems on Earth. Again, it's always a tradeoff.

The classic example is military spending. It's astronomical and in the US, higher than any other type, and much of that is owed to the cronyism in the military-industrial complex, regulatory capture by contractors, and endless chains of subcontractors with each link in the chain pocketing cash. The Pentagon can't even pass an audit.

Many things could be funded if that were cleaned up, and even if none of that cash goes towards space it reduces pressure to further cut existing funding toward it which would still be a massive win.

> The classic example is military spending.

No, because you said, "nobody bats an eye about any of that", which is not even remotely true of military spending.

It's worth noting that the Apollo space program was controversial in its day, simultaneous with prominent civil rights movements, because it was felt that the government was ignoring the economic problems of minorities, for instance, in order to put white guys on the Moon and play golf.

> No, because you said, "nobody bats an eye about any of that", which is not even remotely true of military spending.

I mean, it must not be taken that seriously because little has been done to change it. Instead, just about everything else gets constantly gets chipped away at to significant fanfare.

And yes I'm aware of the controversy that surrounded the Apollo program and to a large degree empathize, but even at that point in time we probably could've found a way to walk and chew bubblegum if we really wanted it.

People have been complaining about military spending for generations. There's a war happening right now that has generated significant controversy.

How much do you think is spent on Golf every year world wide? 100 Billion? 200?

I'm probably as skeptical as most about a Martian colony - to my mind it's 100's of years but will almost certainly happen in that time frame. That said the amount that's being spent on it happening today seems about right.

I would also say that the money being spent now is working at engineering problems. Most (All?) of the vital underfunded problems on Earth that you allude to are political problems. I'm not saying money can't solve them but they are way more complicated.

> How much do you think is spent on Golf every year world wide? 100 Billion? 200?

I don't know. Too much, probably. Certainly there's too much land devoted to golf courses. However, "humans should not spend money on leisure activities" would not be a serious proposal. Should we never enjoy life? I suspect that even people who are hungry and homeless also aspire to enjoy leisure activities in addition to having food and shelter.

If we could go to Mars only by abolishing fun then to hell with Mars.

> I'm probably as skeptical as most about a Martian colony - to my mind it's 100's of years but will almost certainly happen in that time frame.

No, you are definitely not as skeptical as most.

> figuring out things like exactly where the minimum threshold sits for gravity

Now there exists some evidence about that threshold.

Experiments with mice on the ISS have shown that at least for them a third of the terrestrial gravity is necessary for avoiding severe health problems and two thirds of terrestrial gravity is the threshold necessary for avoiding all health problems.

That means that even the gravity at the surface of Mars is likely to be insufficient for avoiding all health problems.

This does not mean that travel through the Solar System or life on Mars or on the Moon are impossible, but it means that for any of these it is necessary to use rotation to provide artificial gravity for the spaces where humans will spend most of the time.

This will increase costs for spaceships or for surface bases, but technically it is a relatively easy problem to solve in comparison with the efficient recycling of all materials.

I is lot less question of can we, but should we. The amount of time and resources needed are most likely so extreme that most other use cases would be better.

Sometimes it make lot of sense not to even try. I mean technically we could save a few lives in northern countries during winter by heating all roads in such a way that there is no ice or snow... Doable maybe... But not worth trying...

> we can't handwave like Q, "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."

We can't yet.

Why not fix Earth first? We've got plenty of room.

How will Mars be populated? Adam and Eve?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com