Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like to believe in Zubrin's plan more than anyone (I still have a well-highlighted copy of his "Mars Direct - Humans to the Red Planet by 1999" Acta Astronautica paper amongst my many cabinets of the stuff) but that plan is built on assumption.

  >However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial
  >biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!

  Where do you get that from?

From the fact that no one has done it yet. Ever.

We just don't know how to live on other worlds. We are almost completely ignorant of the complexities involved in the process and have a whole bunch of unpleasant discoveries to make yet. That's not to say it _can't_ be done and that we don't know what should happen in theory, but we have never done it before. Ever. There is no experience to build upon.

If you want another flags and footprints mission to plant a candelabra of pennants on Mars and then scurry back after a few days of visiting, by all means piss away hundreds of billions of dollars and go to Mars direct for a quick visit. However, if you want to learn the actual skills required to live and work on other worlds, you should focus on building missions which demonstrate and refine the skills required to live and work on other worlds.

Doing so on our Moon and near-Earth asteroids (the nearest locations to support and safety) is the best way to do that and will give us the tools needed to move outwards permanently.

However, if you want to learn the actual skills required to live and work on other worlds, you should focus on building missions which demonstrate and refine the skills required to live and work on other worlds.

So, as soon as possible, start on agriculture. If you're going to prioritize that, then you need to prioritize the knowledge and skills for the most productive environment. If you had to settle North America from scratch, would you first try to figure out how to farm in North Ontario? No, you'd try to figure out how to farm in places like Virginia, for the toehold, then as quickly as possible move out to the midwest, where the really big yields are possible.

Mars is probably going to be the off-Earth agricultural power, like the American midwest. The Moon, with its lack of resources, including suitable forms of sunlight, is going to be like North Ontario.

Doing so on our Moon and near-Earth asteroids (the nearest locations to support and safety) is the best way to do that and will give us the tools needed to move outwards permanently.

Near-Earth asteroids are a good rehearsal for expeditions to Mars. Any techniques useful to Mars that we might learn from the Moon, we would also learn from Near-Earth asteroid exploration. I am all for this. They will also yield information relevant to preventing asteroid collisions. I say we save the Moon for when we have a use for He3.

However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!...no one has done it yet. Ever.

I don't think you need a reliable artificial biosphere to get started. All you really need is life support for growing plants. I'm sure there's some grow houses out there in extreme northern latitudes that qualify as exactly this. If you can reduce the weight of supplies by a factor of 10 or 20, then this is enough.

We routinely build completely self-contained environments in which dozens of ordinary people with a few months training live and work for months at a time with very, very low casualty rates. They're called nuclear submarines.

They are self-contained but not self-sustaining.

The ISS is also self-contained.

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