
Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars - artsandsci
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musk-publishes-plans-for-colonizing-mars/
======
adekok
The Sahara desert is infinitely more hospitable than Mars. It's easier to get
to. There's air to breath. There's water.

The main reason to terraform Mars (other than making humanity a multi-planet
species) is that no one cares about Mars. If we want more water on Mars, we
just throw a few hundred icebergs into it. And ignore the sonic booms,
devastation, craters, etc. They can be fixed later.

But living on Mars is another prospect entirely. It's expensive to get there.
Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day. If you
forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it.

It's sexy in science fiction, but the practicalities are pretty bad.

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's so easy to call out all the problems.

Let them die.

I'd go die on Mars. It's Mars.

I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some of us hear
"It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters.
Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities.

Your opinion is equally valid. But it's important to recognize the flipside.

On Mars, the frontier exists. I've wished for it all my life.

~~~
grondilu
> Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed.
> Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities.

You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Certainly. Our irrationality is why we're here. Launching a ship toward
America was irrational. The scientists of the time could tell you with
absolute certainty you'd die if your goal was to get to Asia by sailing west.

We won't be discovering any new land, nor will we be surprised by anything.
But that energy -- the fact that people want to go there, and want to colonize
it -- that's rare. That's why the Sahara isn't the frontier.

Love, in many ways, is completely irrational. There are countless advantages
to spending your life alone. You'd conserve resources, you'd avoid heartbreak.
If you want children, you can adopt. You could probably find someone to live
with you, if you just want companionship.

But the irrationality makes the experience.

~~~
grondilu
> Love, in many ways, is completely irrational

At least I know what love is. So when someone does something foolish for love,
I understand.

But when someone tells me he wants to spend billions to live in a small box on
a cold, airless desert planet constantly bombarded by lethal radiations, and
when he justifies that by "that's mars, and that's the only justification I
need", I tend to think that's quite an other level of irrationality.

~~~
irrational
Everyone is going to die, but few will be remembered. Those who first go to
Mars will be remembered long after their deaths. Whether they are remembered
as being crazy or colonizers, they will be remembered. For many that is
enough.

~~~
grondilu
Again, we're not talking about going to mars for the sake of it, like someone
climbing the Everest because nobody has ever done it.

There's even a saying : "nobody remembers the second person who climbed the
Everest".

We're talking about colonization, not Everest-like conquest. Most colonizers
will be anonymous. Whatever goals they'll have, fame will not be one of them.

~~~
irrational
I'm not even sure who the first person was, but I bet Wikipedia can tell me
their names. That's the kind of remembering I'm thinking of.

------
randomsearch
It seems to me that most of the negative attitudes towards this project stem
from the idea that we're going to colonise Mars with 2017 technology and
ideas.

That's the hard thing about reasoning about the future: by definition it
doesn't look like the present, but you're a product of the present.

Many people talk about terraforming as taking "thousands of years". Go back a
few thousand years and tell someone how you travelled to the other side of the
earth in less than a day.

Genetic engineering. AI. Nanotech. Quantum Computers. And that's just the next
100 years.

Ain't no way we're gonna have to wait that long to build sandcastles on Mars.

~~~
nxsynonym
This is why the world needs dreamers like Musk.

Nobody could have predicted the huge technological advances we've made in the
last 100 years, let alone the speed at which they were developed.

If we just keep brushing ideas like this off as "totally impractical right
now" then there's no goal to work towards.

It's no secret the our time on Earth is limited, and becoming more limited as
the human race expands and evolves.

It really comes down to weather or not you believe the human race is capable
of existing outside of Earth. I am in the camp of "we'll figure it out" just
like we have up to this point. My fear is that most people fall into the "I'll
die before it happens so why bother thinking about it" camp.

~~~
rmah
Lol, as if Musk is the first to dream of colonizing space. Please.

------
rndmize
I'm continually unsold on this. Mars is far away, inhospitable, and feels like
a run-before-we-walk kind of scenario to me. Merely _sending_ humans to Mars
seems like a huge task, let alone keeping them alive there.

I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of:

\- Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction
in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit,
makes space station construction practical?)

\- Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch
resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in
constructing human habitation away from Earth?)

\- Mars/Venus.

Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that
the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a
biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?

~~~
vtange
It's funny that with all this talk recently about the rise of AI and robots,
we continue to just assume that space exploration and colonization has to be
done with human beings.. As if we've already exhausted the most robots could
do with rovers and satellites.

From a economic and safety perspective, it would seem far more practical to
establish a foothold in non-Earth environments with robots that do the initial
habitat construction for humans. I fear we are hand-waving much of the risk
the first batch of humans we send to Mars have to shoulder - think the Roanoke
Colony of the 16th century

~~~
nojvek
This. Humans are a terrible space faring species. I'm sure in a 100 years
we'll figure out how to upload our consciousness into robots and build better
space faring bodies.

I always think about Von Neumann probes. May be in a 100 years we'll figure
out how to make them and we'll colonize the entire galaxy.

But first we need to figure out how to get to space in frequent reliable cheap
trips.

~~~
vtange
I kinda blame it on our sci-fi fiction: so far we cannot imagine a space
adventure where there are no humans at the frontier. Even the most recent
space-themed games and movies fall to this trope. It's almost an ego sort of
thing - the main characters have to be human, which comes with all the drama
of first-alien-contact, life support, etc.

With robots, all that risk is mitigated since there's no risk of loss of life.
At the worst we have our bots self-destruct or something.

------
Pigo
I'm glad when I see I'm not the only one who thinks living on Mars would be
awful. I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see any ideas on supplementing
the 62.5% less gravity. I can't imagine what that'd do to your body after
years of living in it. But the lack of nature (and Internet for that matter)
would drive me crazy. I'm already too old to enjoy my PlayStation for more
than an hour or so.

Maybe once we're able to terraform the planet to resemble the world we evolved
on, or build enough Bio-Domes for his million people to enjoy (keeping in mind
it only takes one Pauly Shore to ruin a dome), and compensate for the lack of
gravity somehow, then I'd consider going.

~~~
elihu
> I didn't see any ideas on supplementing the 62.5% less gravity. I can't
> imagine what that'd do to your body after years of living in it.

Another way of looking at it is that if you have medical problems that make it
hard to walk in full gravity, low gravity might make the difference between
being stuck in a wheelchair and being able to walk.

Ignoring for a moment the optics of sending our old people away to Mars, I
think a Martian old folks home could actually be quite popular and successful.

~~~
rcurry
There'd be a lot more flying triangle chokes in MMA, that's for sure.

------
tthayer
I love how his various ventures all seems to be pointing to this one goal. The
Boring Company? Makes sense that he would want to get experience with tunnel
boring considering no one is living on the surface of mars for very long
without exposing themselves to considerable radiation and near certain death.
A tunnel can be sealed and regulated. The first few generations of Martians
are going to be mole people.

------
passivepinetree
For all the complaining and pessimism I usually exhibit, this is a pretty
exciting time to be alive. This gets me excited in a giddy little-kid way. I
hope that I live to see the first human colonization of other planets.

------
LeifCarrotson
The plans: (pdf)

[http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900...](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu)

In the "Why Mars?" section, Musk writes:

> _It is a little cold, but we can warm it up._

In the very, very, long term we might be able to terraform Mars, but in the
next few hundred years I think it would be more accurate to say that heating
is a lot easier to manage than cooling.

We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more
than well-insulated clothing. But as Phoenix, AZ is discovering this week,
even a few degrees over body temperature is really bad.

In the section on the importance of reusability, he writes:

> _However, with frequent flights, you can take an aircraft that costs $90
> million and buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Vegas
> for $43, including taxes._

That's because the casinos subsidize it. Flights to and from Vegas from
anywhere are cheaper than others, even more frequent or shorter flights.

~~~
bradbatt
_That 's because the casinos subsidize it._

Vegas casinos subsidize public air travel? I didn't realize they did this...do
you have a source for this?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
You are correct, this is a remarkable claim...but it seems to be the simplest
explanation.

Even in the face of claims to the contrary:
[https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-
subsid...](https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-subsidies-to-
come-to-lv/) the difference between air fares to Vegas and comparable cities
and the difference in hotel rates clearly shows that there is something going
on.

It may not be a true subsidy; perhaps the airlines found that the high volume
of very price-sensitive travelers to Vegas justified thinner margins than to
other cities. But the point stands that it's disingenuous to use a $43 flight
to Vegas as a price point for the cost of air travel.

------
gehwartzen
While I think its extremely interesting and exciting to colonize Mars, both
out of curiosity and the trickle down of new technologies that would be
developed in the endeavor, I just don't personally feel any particular
emotional drive to do so because humans might otherwise go extinct. I have a
child and so have a very strong instinct of wanting to do everything I can to
help him to survive as well as his children and grandchildren. Similarly I
want people on the other side of the planet, whom I have never met, to survive
simply because I know they exist now. Once I start to think beyond maybe 300
years these feeling deteriorate rapidly. If I think about our species being
wiped out in 10,000 years I hardly have an emotional response at all.

Am I alone in feeling this way?

~~~
grondilu
I think nobody can deny that, all other things being equal, short-term
occurring events tend to matter more than long-term ones.

Therefore, no matter how bad one can feel about the prospect of humanity being
wiped out, that feeling can be made arbitrarily low by delaying the
expectation of its occurrence.

------
hutzlibu
"The threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars or a civilization would be a
million people. "

That number seems highly speculative ... But afaik, there is no self-
sustaining city on earth, so I doubt there are more solid numbers on that
topic. Economic cycles are quite complex, thats for fure.

But aside from that, I think the much more realistic plan, than building and
leaving in a huge fleet at once and then see how it goes, would be sending
robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine
resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance ... if that
works, we might be ready for colonisation.

And the needed technology is evolving right now on earth.

Maybe less spectacular, but more realistic in my opinion.

~~~
grondilu
> there is no self-sustaining city on earth

Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of.
Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth.
In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a
pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So
to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on
mars sounds quite ludicrous.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8)

~~~
obastani
Just because people collaborate from all over the planet to make the pencil,
doesn't mean that's the way it has to be. This kind of collaboration simply
enables economics of scale to kick in (and possibly improve quality as well).

~~~
grondilu
"doesn't mean that's the way it has to be"

Sure, but it does show how speculative Musk's plan for a "self-sustaining
city" is. There is no such city on Earth. What makes him think it would work
on mars?

~~~
sqeaky
Every group of people was self sufficient (or dead) at some point. We just
want to keep improving our quality of life at rate that demands more division
of labor. Scale that back a bit, of course colonists with have a lower quality
of life, they are colonists.

Then scale back from 100% self supporting and make a place on mars that is
most self-supporting or self-supporting in an emergency. They don't need to be
self sufficient from day 1, they need need to be self sufficient enough to
eventually get by without constant injection of resources. At some point that
can be part of this economy that makes it unprofitable to have self-
sufficiency on Earth, but because of trade costs the economics will look
different, but not impossible. Locally source will be 1% the cost so buying
from Earth with done only for the most valuable items. Things like seeds or IP
make perfect sense to buy across the gulf of space. Thing like bulk lumber and
toilet paper do not and probably never will.

------
not_that_noob
He made electric cars sexy. He made rockets that come back to earth for a
smooth landing. I'm betting that as crazy as this sounds he is the man to make
this happen.

Go Elon!

------
nbarbettini
FYI - this is a PDF version of Musk's presentation at IAC in 2016.

~~~
sajid
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8)

------
metaphorm
I interpret Musk's interest in this kind of thing as a form of ideological
futurism rather than a pragmatic goal. I think he presents the idea of
something very far out and very ambitious as a way to try and inspire people
to think big and think about developing technology the likes of which we've
never seen before.

It's an interesting strategy, but I think it has a major downside too. It
strikes many people (me included) as a bit detached from reality and even cold
to the concerns of the many people here on Earth that are struggling.

------
strin
PDF here:
[http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900...](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu)

Interesting Venn diagram in Fig 2. If "COST OF TRIP TO MARS" = "INFINITE
MONEY", shouldn't "CAN AFFORD TO GO" be an empty set?

------
yosyp
Don't print Musk's journal article in black and white: the copy editing is
bad. Table 4 distinguishes Good/OK/Bad using colored circles -- it's
undecipherable in black and white.

------
rayanm
Elon makes a good point that it is inevitable that Human should colonize
another planet. I don't think Mars is the planet. We are solving a hard
problem with the current technology, but we are missing the point that we may
have a technology in the future that enables us to explore less hostile far
planets that require one trip. Think about the first settlers who came to
North America before the Europeans.

~~~
perseusprime11
Let's reframe the problem for him. The main problem he is trying to solve is
the risk of being tied to one planet. So he wants to buy insurance for
humanity. How else can you solve this problem?

------
fapjacks
I wish so bad I had the luck to be born into the circumstances and opportunity
to create a company like SpaceX.

------
googletazer
The only hope for Mars is that a true libertarian society may arise. America's
21st century America.

