Buzz Aldrin calls for humans to colonise Mars
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It'd be agonizing to read or watch daily reports (if we're allowed to see them) about colonists dying of starvation, thirst or asphyxiation (or something else!), one by one until the transmissions simply stopped. I know these are the risks but that doesn't lessen the dread when it happens.
One thing that reminds me is The Lady Be Good, a WW2 plane crashed in the Libyan desert. A few of the crew members wandered off. The co-pilot's last diary entry is kind of chilling (http://ladybegood.net/diaries/index.htm): " No help yet, very (unreadable) cold nite."
I don't think (hopefully avoided) disasters will keep future colonists from following in the footsteps of their predecessors. After all, look how many people perished reaching the poles or climbing Everest. They do it because want to, not necessarily because they can or because it's safe.
I think they'd do it for the money some how. In the Americas, that was mostly the motivation for the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company were commercial ventures. People went to Jamestown hoping to find gold. Eventually word got out that the survival rate was in the very low double-digit percentage and they had to start offering people large tracts of land. Eventually the colonies started to export tobacco back to Europe and the tax revenues generated was always welcome.
If those colonists go, it'll because they're dying to get rich.
I'm not sure if awesome puns are allowed on HN, but I upvoted you anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing#Manned_Moon_landi...
Mars does have a risk that the early settlers didn't have though, which is an instantaneous death of the entire community due to some type of life support system failure. That would be extremely heartbreaking.
http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...
Someday when 90 people die on Mars, people will say we should never have gone. The incredible loss of life...
There are 7 billion people on the planet and we're all going to be dead in about 100 years. Stop being afraid.
I'm pretty sure the number of deaths doesn't matter either. Only a few people died in the boston bombings and that didn't stop the entire country from turning upside down over it for a few weeks.
Just because governments may be willing to advance on a wave of bodies, does not make it something the population will tolerate, or for long.
I think this could be applied to a lot of things. Great little nugget of wisdom.
I stopped riding motorcycles because the knowledge of the risk I was taking became too much. But if we simply say "well, people die, we'll all be dead soon enough," not only do we give ourselves license to simply ignore a whole lot of awful things that either should change or could change our perspective, we throw out the logic we'd otherwise sensibly apply to our own lives.
Most of us make enough poor decisions as it is without the additional rationalization "none of it matters in the long term anyway."
I never said we shouldn't go. You did not refute my central point. Instead, you seem to be implying that I am saying we shouldn't go because of my fear of the danger which is tantamount to calling me a coward. I don't know why you would say such a mean thing. :(
But we already know that Mars can't naturally sustain human life, and that colonists will need to build and maintain self-contained systems to grow food, clean water, recycle/dispose of waste, protect them from the elements, etc. And we already know how Mars differs from Earth in available solar energy and atmospheric composition; we understand in advance what resources might be extracted from Martian rock and soil.
So we can prototype Martian survival systems in advance, and simulate them, prior to actually going to Mars, something that seventeenth-century colonists not only lacked the means to do, but which likely never even occurred to most of them in the first place.
I'm sure there will still be "unknown unknowns" for the colonists to deal with, but I doubt that the risk exposure will be quite as life-or-death as the Jamestown or Roanoke colonists' was.
Flying that close to the sun would multiply the radiation problem considerably. Then you'd have to land and drill underground and build enough to get a foothold before you died.
Finally, there's the fact that you'd have to live underground. You could never really live on the surface.
For Venus, yes, you could float around in the atmosphere, but where would you get raw materials? The surface is too hostile to mine.
http://www.chicagospace.org/tyson_space.html
A notable quote : "We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly..." from Dec. 10, 1903
NASA puts out a wonderful publication of the branches and side products, services and technologies that has come about as a result of the space program thus far (this is since the moon landing). Hint: It's more than just "Velcro".
Space programs of Mars exploration caliber stimulates all, read that word again please, all branches of sciences. All branches of engineering. All branches of mathematics. All branches of biology and medicine. The benefit to society is nearly incalculable, but if you must put a dollar amount, it's well above a paltry $trillion (the actual cost will be in the billions, far less than the monthly consumption of the pointless war in Iraq).
The tragedy that plagues all of our generations, it seems, is that great feats that suddenly leaps in progress in all areas of our lives have to fight through an insurmountable myopia. Similar to what happened soon after landing on the moon.
Part of me hopes China colonizes Mars first. America is long overdue for a lesson in hubris. Maybe they'll appreciate the new breakthroughs in the above mentioned fields more than the American populace can.
If China colonizes Mars, Americans will almost certainly reap the benefits you describe, at little cost. It wouldn't be a lesson in hubris so much as smart to step aside.
What really triggered growth afterwards, setting the stage for the early 80's boom, was the space program. Specifically the myriad of branch industries, technologies and services it spawned both directly and indirectly.
In plain words: Space builds jobs and we really can't afford not to do it.
Once Russia lost the moon, they were already in sour shape. They had arguably better technology to do what they did (the N1, though ridiculed for being overly complex, was actually based on proven technology and in-house innovation), they were safer and more cautious. The U.S. "won" not just because the N1 failed, but the agency and the political sphere took grave risks (costing 3 astronauts their lives).
But as Tyson himself says, there are only three main drivers for exploration:
1) The "I don't want to die" driver. Apollo falls under this since those damn Commies were involved.
2) The "I don't want to die poor" driver. The Columbus voyages fall under this
3) The praise of royalty and deities (don't see much of this except for the 700 Club and Scientology; are they building spaceships?)
If the jobs create more benefit than not, you're right. But space programs don't do that, not today anyway. Nowadays they are closer to melting pans to create new pans than they are to mining ore to make new pans.
Suppose we got our laptops today because of the Apollo program. Will we get 10X faster computers because of a Mars colony? Unlikely. And even if we could, it's more efficient to get that benefit from investment directly into computers rather than indirectly through a Mars colony. I don't buy the argument that we must have a super lofty goal to get the side benefits we really wanted.
This is all academic anyway. The US really can't afford a Mars colony, as in people won't loan us the money at sufficiently low interest. The interest rates the US pays have been creeping up. Things may seem rosy at the moment but the house of cards is actually crumbling. The US now spends $220 billion annually on interest on debt, projected to reach $1 trillion in just 7 years. Even without added debt for Mars colonization the consequences of our borrowing will surely be severe within a decade. Paying down our debt is the best big investment we can make.
Building self-sustaining habitats in a zero-g, irradiated environment where resupply is extremely infrequent is very different from building Apollo or the Space Shuttle. You could argue that the ISS is a stab at this, but it's not self-sustaining at all. Maybe someday, but we haven't done it.
The construction of a colony on Mars wouldn't be a PR or purely scientific exercise, either. If it's enabled by having jumpoff points near the Earth and Mars, there will be enormous advances in robotics, because the potential payoff will be huge. The first company to successfully mine asteroids will reap a huge windfall in platinum and other metals that are rare on Earth. These metals becoming cheaper and more abundant will have large effects on the terrestrial economy because suddenly, whole new classes of devices become cost-effective (fuel cells, for example).
There will be other advances in science from this, beyond the pedestrian "make existing tech faster" stuff, and it's not make-work. What you're saying now is exactly the myopia he's referring to, and the costs involved are not even on the scale of a pointless war.
There are plenty of organizations that could successfully fund a Mars colony, and I'm sure there are many, many people who would donate to a crowdfunding campaign to make it happen outside the scope of any existing formalized organization.
Yet the select few that were lucky enough to get up there — and not even as far as Aldrin — really have ulterior motives[0] quite different than selling a few printed pages.
For something this challenging, it has to be your primary goal. You can't be picky about secondary issues.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1267759...
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"I was very sad to see that," Musk tells "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley. "Those guys are heroes of mine, so it's really tough … I wish they would come and visit … see the hard work that we're doing here and I think that it would change their mind."
http://www.space.com/14936-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-60-minutes-i...
If we're talking about sending people to Mars to live for long periods of time, and worrying about whether in doing so we're consigning them to miserable deaths, it seems like spending the money to work out the bugs in a non life-and-death situation might be a prudent idea. We've sent people to orbit the moon, we've landed people on the moon and robots on Mars, but we've never had people spending time on another world without relying entirely upon supplies they brought with them.