Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs
The article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I'd love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that's absolutely not how it works.
The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.
Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don't dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don't take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can't make headlines don't get billions from Congress.
We're not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that's true, but who knows what we'll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?
Actually - It doesn't get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, "[1]", the author says:
"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."
With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)
The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.
> The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold.
And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.
Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.
Love your perspective. It reminds me of the technological advances from the space race to the moon as well. We aren't taking casual trips up there ever, but the tech that came from it was revolutionary
i feel like this is all propaganda to convince tax payers to fund this stuff. it's like we never invented anything worthwhile at all if it wasn't used for war or space. maybe we should just try? try spending some money on good for a change and we'll see if good comes out of it.
Yeah, the obvious reason why funding spaceflight yields useful technology is that we also fund e.g. laser technology. We can fund science research without also spending billions of dollars going to the moon.
If it is propaganda, it is to detract from the fact that we could actually be on Mars already, if we hadn't spent a Trillion dollars a year bombing the shit out of everyone for the last two - or so - decades ..
People tend to forget that we are still murdering each other over this planet.
Getting to Mars would either be a solution to that problem, or just an extension.
I guess, therefore, it matters who gets there first.
The Apollo program was insane for the 1960's. It was announced by JFK just one year after NASA's first successful manned space rocket. Engineering was still primarily done with pencils and slide-rules, the US had only just achieved widespread household electrification, and the first supersonic flight was only 15 years earlier.
NASA's budget during the Apollo era was about 10 times that of the Manhattan Project, about 1% of the entire US government budget. It could have turned into history's largest money incinerator if things had gone bad organizationally. I can't really think of any project like it that has been attempted before or since--not at such a huge scale and on such a short timeline.
The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster, and it was only diligence and commitment (and luck) at every level of NASA that allowed them to succeed given such a monumental goal. But the goal itself was very close to madness.
"The Soviet Union's own moonshot ended up a gigantic disaster..."
For All Mankind on Apple TV+ has a lot of fun extrapolating from the premise of the Soviet moonshot succeeding and beating the US to the moon. Then presenting an alternate history of how events unfold differently because of it.
Basically extrapolating the insanity of the Apollo program up until the present day, as USA and Soviet Union continually try to one up each other in the space race.
Beside that, it did not seem to result any direct advancements in technology. We can't even build a Saturn-V any more. (But we can build SLS and Falcon Heavy though, after 50+ years.)
It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.
It's not that we can't, we just decided to redirect those resources to other areas (i.e. the Space Shuttle) and now those designs are very out of date.
It's like saying we can't build the pyramids anymore just because we can't build them the exact same way the Egyptians did. Is the goal to get to the moon or is the goal to build a faithful replica of the rocket along with a faithful replica of the tools that built the rocket?
We developed a particular pinnacle of tech and lost it through disuse. This happens in aerospace and high-end weapon-making areas regularly, because the runs are small, and much of the knowledge and technology is uniquely purpose-built, with thick layers of secrecy protecting the know-hows.
Speaking of military technology, humans lost the secret of "Greek fire" [1], which apparently was a medieval form of napalm, not extinguishable by water. All the current knowledge of chemistry did not help restore the recipe yet (because history studies have a smaller budget than the actual military, of course).
We haven't lost the ability to fly to the Moon, of course, because the principles remain the same, and the technologies advance. But we had to build completely different rockets, not reusing many, if any, bits of Saturn-V.
> It did result in a number of smaller-scale advancements across the field, AFAICT, from radiation-hardened electronics to material science.
Has it though? These are requirements for our normal earth orbit satellites, surely these would have advanced at a similar pace without the moon mission.
> We can't even build a Saturn-V any more.
Isn’t that a demonstration of the fact that the moon mission was an engineering dead end?
It succeeded because the Saturn V had enough heavy-lifting capablity that we could do the entire mission with one launch vehicle for the complete round-trip.
It was the power of the Saturn V being sufficient to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, plus the cleverness of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous mission plan that allowed us to pull it off. Once those two things were worked out and understood, the rest was just a matter of executing. But it was pure happenstance that the laws of Physics and the Earth/Moon orbital mechcanics lined up to make it possible.
And the Saturn V only had enough lifting capacity because the Air Force had issued a requirement to Rocketdyne back in 1955 for an engine powerful enough to deliver the huge H-bombs in use at the time. Within a few years, nuclear weapons researchers had figured out how to build lighter weapons so the huge F-1 engine was no longer needed for ICBMs, but fortunately it was ready for use in the Apollo program. The USSR had nothing comparable.
I doubt anyone is actually going to “shoot prematurely for the Mars”. I expect what SpaceX is going to do, is once they get Starship up and running, and tick off some intermediate goals such as Artemis III and DearMoon, they’ll start launching demo Mars missions-no crew, but demonstrating some of the technologies a crewed mission will need-and NASA will probably pay for some of it. And that’s likely to take a lot longer than all their optimistic estimates suggest. But they’ll continue to dangle those timelines in front of everybody to create buzz which increases the odds of Congress/NASA paying for some of it. SpaceX might be a bit less risk-averse than NASA, but no way are they sending humans (even privately) to Mars unless they have reasonable odds of surviving, and there is a lot of further technology development and demonstration required to have reasonable confidence in that.
Like with reusable rockets before, its very important to a do real world demonstration that this is possible. This way a lot of the naysayers blocking Mars related projects in other companies/organizations/countries will be much less of a problem.
And in general will make more people consider to get involved as this is real now, not another power point, computer model or study.
i think musk has basically said he doesn't mind risking/losing some lives. and people have volunteered. whether or not the world allows him to actually do that is another story though
Musk is prone to speak in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, and may well be more risk-averse when it actually comes time to actually decide whether to put human lives at risk, than he is when talking about that decision as an abstract future. It also isn't entirely up to him–it is also what the rest of the SpaceX executive team feels comfortable with (especially Gwynne Shotwell), and also the comfort level of the regulators and lawyers.
Even NASA "doesn't mind risking/losing some lives", in that while they drive the "probability of loss of crew" as low as feasible, they never can get it to zero. Possibly, a private SpaceX mission might have a higher go/no-go threshold for that probability – but if it adds up to (say) 50%, I really doubt they'll go ahead with the mission, they'll likely instead delay so they can invest further engineering resources in reducing it to a more reasonable level.
Haha, not really - the original Apollo program was reasonable - lets doe a low Earth orbit space station or two, build some space infra, improve and ideally reuse launchers...
Then Kennedy came with "LETS DO A LUNAR LANDING LIKE RIGHT NOW, LOL!" & then got himself killed so it could not be taken back.
What followed was an ultimately successful mad dash with great emphasis on cost-is-not-an-option which did bring us some nice inventions but did not really help to build any real space infra or to lower the launch costs.
And arguably also entrenched the bad idea that space needs to be horrendously expensive and always will be. Not really, until you are on a mad dash with a singular unrelated objective.
But hey, it might still be useful experience next time a killer asteroid or hostile aliens show up.
As long as people need to worry about things like their own financial ruin, need to worry about their investors each quarter, people aren't going farther than the earths orbit, and if they do, it will surely be a one way ticket to death. Doing it right now its like asking someone to play an impossible chess game where your side only has pawns and you lose $100 billion everytime one is taken.
I can give you a concrete counterexample to that. The Perserverance rover is carrying an entire experiment (MOXIE, which makes oxygen from CO2) whose only purpose is to serve a future human mission. NASA is encouraging more of this stuff, and it means automated Mars rovers will go to the boring sites that we need to prep rather than look at the phenomena of highest scientific interest on Mars.
That said, I'd love to hear what people who work at JPL and NASA have to say to your point.
Oxygen production is also useful for sample return missions.
The biggest flaw with the rovers is that they’re terribly slow, so they can only explore a small range around a landing site. If they could cover even 100km/day, which seems plausible on RTG or solar power, we could explore many sites.
Probably an unpopular opinion around here, but honestly I think defense, healthcare, and food security to be more practical than human space exploration. I know that major advances in computing were made during the Apollo mission, but that was 60 years ago. What have you done for us lately?
Maybe Starlink ? That already showed serious defense implications for example. And while not in-your-face visible I'm sure all the remote sensing sats launched in the last two decades improved our weather forecast, disaster monitoring and agricultural production significantly.
Yeah, but those aren't related to human space exploration. Not saying we should get rid of the space program 100% - just reduce it's cost by cancelling all the human spaceflight projects.
there are too many existential threats when looking on a long enough timeline to not justify making humanity interplanetary. It just has to happen at some point and i'd like to get moving before i giant asteroid comes hurtling at the planet, or the yellowstone volcano decides to erupt.
I see this as an AM/FM problem. If one of these disasters happen, then we should rely on "actual machines" to mitigate or avoid them, and not rely on "F*ing Magic" like interplanetary colonization.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to expand what's possible with "actual machines", but that should be up to academia - and they're pretty clear that human space exploration isn't worth the money.
Yeah, but that's kind of how human progress works. For each Edison or SpaceX which successfuly commercialised a technology, there are Nicola Teslas and Apollo programs which did it way before both the tech and the society were ready for it, in a one-shot way that's a bit difficult to replicate.
What did Tesla do that was so far ahead of time that was difficult to replicate? Surely Tesla, together with Westinghouse, is why we have AC power distribution and polyphase AC motors and neither of those things are difficult once they are properly described.
Usually governments have some kind of plan how much they want to spend on science. A big, but ultimately useless project can kill the funding for a lot of other research.
It's silly to do things just because they are hard. Extraordinarily silly.
What Kennedy did not say, was "it's just hard enough". Hard enough that we can pull it off, and the Soviets can't, and the world can see that. Much better to gain a space upmanship victory than a shooting nuclear missile victory.
Now we are in a different place. Well, maybe not for too long, you never know. China has its own space ambitions, and military ambitions too.
But just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things makes no sense.
Listen: I am still reading this - it is delightfully long - but this is the takedown I've been waiting for for years. Maciej has been particularly critical of the idea of extra Earth colonization while an entire continent goes uncolonized.
In the interest of discourse, who is the greatest proponent of Mars colonization who has been to Antarctica?
Antarctica is not "uncolonized" due to a lack of interest; there are relatively few people there because we have collectively agreed not to allow more. If there were no such restrictions, there would be people building tourist hotels all over it, and everything that comes with that.
Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
The Mars-Antarctica connection isn't particularly strong.
Not to mention the massive amount of unexploited natural resources below the 80th parallel. There would be huge oil rigs and mining companies all over Antarctica if it were allowed.
> Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
I'm sure colons back in the day thought something similar about "the new world". There are so many questions we need to answer first.
How are we going to terraform Mars? What kind of technology are we going to use to change the thermo-chemical properties of an entire planet? What impact is it going to have with its magnetic fields, its gravity, and its orbit? How are humans going to evolve to live there? Slight endocrine disruptors are making people infertile, what would living in another planet cause?
The solar system is an ecological system, just like Earth. Introducing massive changes like that is bound to come back to bite us. This kind of mindset in the past caused tremendous damages to our current ecosystem. Are we really ready to play god with the solar system?
I’m on the fence about astrobiology, but I’ll go out on a limb and say the solar system is not a connected ecosystem “like Earth”.
Any actions we take that ruin parts of the quite likely ecosystem that lives on Mars will have zero effect on Earth’s.
I think a more likely threat is that we may bring something nasty back with a human mission to Mars, as unlike a sample return, you can’t keep the crew and every part of the returning spacecraft in a NASA biocontainment lab indefinitely.
My head canon is that South Park episode [0] were they find out our planet is actually an alien reality show:
> A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great!
> To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
I would 100% disagree with that. If you explained to people that Mars was a habitat untouched by humanity, possibly filled with life, most people would absolutely be against anything that would ruin it. People value preserving nature because they find it beautiful, not because they find it useful.
To preserve environments as they exist without (further) human interventions. There are plenty of examples of that right here on Earth, let alone outer space.
Personally, part of me hopes humanity never figures out how to get away from Earth and spread to other planets. An untouched rest of the universe seems far more valuable than one tainted with humans, at least to this particular jaded homo sapien.
> An untouched rest of the universe seems far more valuable than one tainted with humans
This seems like a silly worry given the rate of expansion of the universe. We couldn't "taint" the universe even if we wanted to. At least nothing outside of our galaxy (but more likely outside of just our solar system).
The universe is essentially infinite. With essentially infinite planets, moons, stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Humans are unique (until proven otherwise). I say let the humans have their fun in their 0.000000000000000001% of the universe. In both best and worst case scenarios, there is still plenty of "untainted" universe left.
There are an estimated 10^22 to 10^24 stars, or in the many sextillions range. So really, don't worry, we wouldn't have the capability to taint any significant amount of the universe even if that was our sole purpose.
The point is to not kill everything there. So that, one, it gets to live to become whatever it's going to be, and two, it's still there for us to visit if we can ever figure out how to do so without killing it.
Not only that but there's nobody there bc who tf actually wants to LIVE there? That's why.
But research stations in the poles are exactly why it's useful to have research stations on other planets. It solves the "if only we could..." problem.
As for his other points, microbial contamination can still happen with robots. I definitely agree that we should be sending more robots/rovers out to Mars before we send people as well as experiments like sending something to produce and store oxygen there just so we know it can be done. Hell, the rovers weren't even able to clean their own solar panels - at one point they had the fortune of a dust devil blowing the dust off the panels.
That is a strange psychological state. Being unaware of why something is impossible but desperately waiting for someone to tell you why it is.
History is full of millions of examples of things that were asserted as impossible by smart people in eloquent speeches and essays that we do today regularly without a thought.
We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people. I'm not sure how we expect to establish any kind of working colony on Mars, where there is no atmosphere or accessible oxygen, food or accessible water, magnetic field to keep radiation away, reliable supply chain for delivering anything else we need.
Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
> We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people.
That’s because there are places on Earth that similarly better than e.g. Antarctica or some desert.
The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.
The Moon or even something in LEO make several orders of magnitudes more sense than Mars given our current technological and geopolitical capabilities.
I get it, colonizing other planets is romantic and awesome. I love science fiction too. But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.
Let's figure out how to get permanent LEO human habitation going first, then figure out how to do that on the Moon. Then we can talk about colonizing other planets.
So far we've gotten short-term LEO habitation figured out, albeit with issues concerning expenses and trying to justify it all to the taxpayers.
Permanent (self-sufficient) LEO human habitation doesn't make sense because there's no source of material there. Mars has the major benefit that we know that there are raw materials and enough sunlight to turn those materials into various required inputs like methane. LEO definitely doesn't have that, and it's less clear whether anyplace on the Moon has that than it is Mars. Mars is further away in travel time, but not much further in fuel costs, and it's far better than the Moon for living off the land.
> Mars is further away in travel time, but not much further in fuel costs, and it's far better than the Moon for living off the land.
The prospect of an inhabited Martian colony living off the land is dismal, for anything except extremely far-future timeframes (thousands of years or more). Any extraplanetary colony is going to be invariably tethered to Earth and highly dependent on imports for survival. The moon has the advantage of not just being closer, but having a launch window of "whenever you feel like it", in contrast to Martian launch windows that occur 26 months apart.
On the other hand, I'm curious how the delta-V numbers hold up for landing on the Moon, where aero-braking is impossible. Launch and landing require by far the most delta-V between either of the two bodies, much more than the difference between lunar transfer orbit and Martian transfer.
It's about 1.7km/s delta-v to land on the moon from LLO. If you are assuming an orbital station in the lunar gateway, that's another ~0.7km/s. From LEO that's another ~3.6km/s (3.2 to TLI and 0.4 to gateway). That gives you around 6km/s delta-v flat. Of course you can optimize this a bit by using a more direct route but it's probably cheaper if you leverage existing infra like the gateway.
Compare this to anything on mars. It'll be 3.6-4.0km/s to mars injection. Then 2.0km/s to low orbit (can be optimized with clever aerobreaking down to 1.0km/s). To the surface will be a minimum of another 0.4km/s (no engine, parachute only) and closer to 1km/s if you want a soft landing. So you can expect 5km/s at the bare minimum and ~7km/s along established "routes" leveraging to-be-existing infra.
So then the question becomes whether lower delta-v returns, regular launch opportunities, and shorter comms delay are more or less important than 1km/s delta-v savings.
I'd argue the delta-v savings aren't worth it on their own. Mars will eventually be worth exploring and it's a valuable opportunity but by every measure other than raw "throw it at the orbital body with no support or return plan" delta-v savings, the moon is a better site for initial extraterrestrial habitation studies.
>> It'll be 3.6-4.0km/s to mars injection. Then 2.0km/s to low orbit (can be optimized with clever aerobreaking down to 1.0km/s).
Except that all that delta at mars is done with aerobraking/aerocapture. Inbound probes can crash strait into the mars atmosphere without slowing down for orbital insertion. That's why it takes far less fuel to get to surface of mars than the moon, at least with objects car-sized or smaller. Only with larger/heavier objects is mar's atmosphere so thin that fuel must be used for capture prior to descent.
In the following deltaV map, much of the trip to mars is a free ride so long as you follow the red arrows. There are no free rides on the way to the moon.
For the record we have not done aero capture at Mars just yet - but aerobraking has been used a lot, after first capturing into a high eccentric orbit with an engine burn.
In any case, bodies with atmosphere do enable you to effectively shave up to half of the delta-v for a transfer when you know what you are doing. :)
I was just illustrating the path along the lunar gateway (LEO -> TLI -> Gateway -> LLO -> surface). Even if you do a direct (LEO -> TLI -> LLO -> surface) route, you still have to go through LLO as you'll need to be able to pick your landing spot and potentially even delay a landing (which is not possible if LLO is not budgeted in).
Actually now that I think about it, if you want to save delta-v, you can get an extra 25% off the TLI leg of the direct route with a low energy transfer using weak stability boundary trajectories. These savings however come at the cost of a significantly longer flight time and far slimmer margins for failure.
OTOH, we can build a lunar space elevator with existing materials because of the lower gravity (even despite the longer distance to L1). Not sure, can we manage that with Mars?
The physics works for Earth too. In all cases, you make the top of the cable bigger than the bottom to support all of the weight hanging from it. From what I've read, in the case of Earth and with current materials technology, we end up with the top of the cable having a diameter comparable to that of the Earth. Clearly, that's not feasible.
For Luna or Mars, gravity is reduced and the required diameter is less. Maybe it would even be feasible to build such an elevator if it were above the Earth. But now you're building above an alien plant, so you trade one set of potentially insurmountable obstacles for another.
I mean, that's a fair point. The total volume of the elevator cable would be greater than that of the Earth. The mass might still be less since we're not building it out of iron here, but effectively we'd have a binary planet with the centre of mass well outside the Earth's surface.
I'm not sure that that system would be unstable in human timeframes since the two would be tidally locked, although it would certainly alter the engineering stresses in ways that I'm grossly unqualified to calculate. I think a portion of the cable might be under compression rather than tension? I guess it depends on the rotational speed of the whole system.
Speaking of which, substantial amounts of energy would need to be spent accelerating the spin of the Earth/space elevator system to maintain a 24-hour day/night cycle.
However, Luna's presence would perturb the whole system, either tearing it apart with tidal stresses or being ejected from the system before that could happen.
I appreciate the correction. I'm not sure where I heard that particular piece of information, nor in that case what material was being examined. Perhaps that one was steel.
On planets, a space elevator goes to (geo)stationary[0] so that the cable doesn't wind up around the planet, but you can't do that on the Moon, because luna-stationary is occupied by the Earth, which inconveniently is too massive and spinning too fast to anchor the other side of the cable. However, the L1 point is also stationery relative to the lunar surface, and is the place where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon balance out.
[0] IIRC, geostationary specifically means Earth, but there's going to be some more general term for the same idea over generic parent objects and not just Earth
Lunar stationary orbit is around 88,400 km, which would be unstable for a satellite due to the Earth's gravity, but might allow for a space elevator pointed right at Earth to efficiently launch crates of helium-3 or hydroponic grain back to the planet.
Indeed. I've not even played with this in one of the many simulators, but I believe the suggestion is to put the counterweight a tiny bit closer to Earth than the L1 to stabilise it.
Although (and I wish I could find this again), I've read that lunar He3 is so diffuse that getting it out would incidentally give us so much purified aluminium, silicon, and oxygen, that sending all that back to Earth and magnetically decelerating it on arrival would give us more energy than the He3, as would burning those ingots with that oxygen.
Lunar stationary orbit is not 88,400 km, it's 384,000 km, i.e. the distance from the Moon to the Earth. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth.
Though you could equivalently try and go for Earth-Moon L1 with a counterweight on the other side of L1. It would be significantly more unstable though.
Even if I expected to be able to collect, I wouldn't give good odds on a bet that the moon or mars will physically still exist 1000 years from now.
Von Neumann machines have an existence proof in ourselves, and make it fairly fast to disassemble planets into a Dyson swarm. (I think Dyson swarms are a bad idea, and will grind to dust that blows away to interstellar space in the solar wind in geologically short timescales, but that's a different problem).
There is absolutely no reason to beleive that any kind of machine will ever exist that can "make it fairly fast" to disassemble an entire planet. You're probably entirely ignoring any kind of wear and tear on the machine itself, which could easily be outpaced by the rate of creating new machines for anything approaching the billions of years this would actually take using any imaginable fuel.
Assume humans are the VN machine. We can make space suits and greenhouses etc., so it's not crazy.
Assume reproduction such that population doubles every 25 years. Fast, but not insane.
(1000/25) = 40 doubling periods
8e9 * 2^40 * 100kg = 2.7 Mercury masses, or 12 lunar masses, or 1.3 Mars masses
That's a worst-case bound using a biological anchor. Dedicated VN machines can plausibly be faster: even if it's something weird like staying with biology and uplifting dogs, that's now 75 years, a plausible but currently hypothetical self-replicating 3D printer could make the timescales even shorter.
The sun provides enough power to do it in a week or two, though anything less than decades may have thermodynamics issues.
I'm not sure where your 8e9 number is coming from. Population doubling every year but the parents leaving the planet after mating?
In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
However, these numbers are meaningless - you are assuming that doubling the size of a population that's 2^39 individuals will take roughly the same time as a population that's 64 individuals individuals, which is not even close to plausible - especially when we reach ideas like a population weighing as much as half a planet.
You're also assuming that it's even possible for a mahcine to convert a significant proportion of a planet's crust to copies of itself - which is obviously false, as the crust is mostly rock, and machines require plenty of liquids and water to be produced (whether biological or mechanical or electronic). And that doing so will not affect the growth rate at all, even as the planet starts being formed of molten magma once all of the crust has been used up. And not to mention the gigantic earthquakes and supervolcaones they would have to deal with as a significant portion of continental mass gets shifted around.
Overall, you are only extrapolating some numbers to a completely absurd conclusion, and calling it plausible. There is nothing even close to realistic in your scenario, and indeed we have no idea if it's even close to possible to strip a planet down to create a Dyson swarm. I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
> I'm not sure where your 8e9 number is coming from. Population doubling every year but the parents leaving the planet after mating?
That's the current human population.
> In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
You start with one human, I didn't. What are you even imagining that I'm describing, Adam-only parthenogenesis?
> Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
Even with Adam-only parthenogenesis, log2(8e9)*25 years is 822 years, less than one, definitely not plural, millennia.
Material science isn't my field, though it doesn't need to be given how many other places there are for whichever chemicals we want. Water? Oxides in the local rock, and four massive hydrogen gas giants (don't need much proportionally as H2O is 89% oxygen by mass).
> I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
Gravitational binding energy of Earth: 2.2e32 J; Mercury: 1.8e30 J; Mars: 4.9e30 J; Luna: 1.2e29 J
Luminosity Sol: 3.8e26 W
Time required to explosively disassemble (i.e. each part reaching escape velocity) each object: Earth: 6.6 days; Mercury: 1.3 hours; Mars: 3.6 hours; Luna: 313 seconds.
To preempt the obvious, yes I know that's the number for total luminosity and not the power available at any given moment given how many space habs have been built part way through the process, but that makes very little difference: Given the way the functions behave, you don't need most of the power of the sun until you can harness a significant percentage of it anyway.
I mean, this toy model also assumes that the only thing these humans do with their lives is reproduction, with the average individual adding only a little more than their own body mass to the VN swarm each generation, and not, e.g., building themselves a nice little space hab that's unlikely to mass less than 10,000 kg/person even if I make the grossly simplifying assumption of just adding life support to a tiny house or a camper van. It makes very little difference to exponential growth.
You haven't addressed the most important points at all, and keep coming up with toy models based on exponential growth. All of the models ignore the realities of how mechanical things work and how they can break and how they actually operate (just for a basic example, there is no mechanical system we have any idea how to build that could move any amount of the Earth's mantle in any way, since the mechanisms would simply melt) and rely on the ridiculous idea that this exponential growth can actually be maintained indefinitely to paper over various other omissions.
You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra. The amount reaching the earth is significantly less - 1.73e15 W, or about 10^9 times less - and the amount that can realistically be captured is far less than that.
Overall, don't worry: there is exactly 0 chance that any human advancement will disassemble even a dwarf planet in the next millennium in the real world. Just because Freeman Dyson could write some back of the napkin computations it doesn't mean this is actually possible in any meaningful way.
> just for a basic example, there is no mechanical system we have any idea how to build that could move any amount of the Earth's mantle in any way, since the mechanisms would simply melt
You know stuff cools down, right? Power loss to radiation is proportional to T^4.
> You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Good thing you're putting words into my mouth, then. Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
> Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra
I know, and I said as much with different words.
Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That's why I preemptively made the point that you're ignoring here.
> You know stuff cools down, right? Power loss to radiation is proportional to T^4.
It only took around 160 million years for the Earth's crust to form, so yeah, sure, stuff cools down, eventually.
> Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
Ok, mechanical was my idea - but chemical extraction of oxygen requires some other compounds to form, potentially making the whole thing even less usable for future conversion into more copies. Plus, it requires an input of some other materials, which may not be easy to create.
> Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That still only gives you the 10^15 watts that reach the Earth, not the 10^26 number you were citing. Also, covering the whole planet with mirrors or PVs is again not nearly as trivial as you make it out to be, and this "launch loop" idea is just some abstract design, not something we can actually build (despite what the author would have you believe).
> Assume reproduction such that population doubles every 25 years. Fast, but not insane.
This is already completely implausible given everything we know about human behavior, but it reaches impossibility very quickly when you consider the possibility of humans becoming more than a negligible fraction of the mass of their single host planet. We aren't machines that can trivially reproduce ourselves from commonly available materials and then eject into space. Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder. And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
> We aren't machines that can trivially reproduce ourselves from commonly available materials and then eject into space.
Nah, we use plants to turn raw materials into what we can consume. And in the other direction, we can only make stuff on this scale with factories that take a while to build. But in both cases, that's a distinction without a difference. A farm and a factory rather than a spacesuit, makes no difference on this scale, so long as they feed themselves while growing their families.
> Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder.
Feeding ourselves is about 1% of our current labour. Getting into space is only hard because we use rockets, but at this scale we'd use launch loops, atlas towers, orbital rings, or similar. Those are extremely cheap, like "$300 to LEO" cheap for this thought experiment's ("spherical cow in a vacuum" model of a) 100 kg human.
> And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
There's lots of ways I've seen suggested. Even without the exotic options like the Dyson Motor (would take too long, at 40k years for Earth, not seen the numbers for Luna or Mars) or redirecting Kupier Belt Objects to blow off percentage points of the target planet mass at a time, even just with traditional digging, at that scale it's "how fast can you drill vertically?" and "how many launch loops can you wrap the target planet in?", followed by "how fast does the deep ground cool down when exposed?" — the latter being why I said thermodynamics probably gets in the way when the timeline gets down to decades; this is radiative-dominated cooling in a better vacuum (insulator!) than most laboratories let alone thermos-flasks.
Interestingly, rocky planet disassembly isn't horribly complicated and is a well solved problem. Just need large scale rail and satellite manufacturing.
Only requires more structures and geoengineering larger than humans have bever done before.
We know how, and we know it doesn't require more than operating at higher scales of industry than ever before. Any interplanetary or kardishev 1+ venture makes those assumptions.
If you break you neck in LEO you could be in a real hospital in a few hours. From the moon it's a couple days, comparable to like an arctic base dueing a storm.
From Mars your family will only get ashes because your body will have been deconposing for months.
There is steel, aluminium and oxygen on the moon,'it can host heavy indstry and peoduce ships, space stations, equipment. It can host a space elevator today,'made of normal kevlar. You could build an aircraft carrier and lift it into orbit.
The difference today is that the astronaut with the broken neck would be front page news for every minute of the hours/days/weeks it took to get them home, and far longer if they die. Bad press is bad for funding, especially in a democratic country.
A brave explorer dying the martyr death to advance humanity. Give him a hero's funeral and give generous pensions to his relatives. Suddenly it sounds like a sales pitch. Well, to some.
This meme comes from people who've watched too many bad sci-fi shows and don't have a good grasp of history. The people going to space will be the intersection of those who can afford it and those who want and are capable of going. The first people who traveled the oceans were not the lower class. They were the upper class who could afford to fund or pay for the journey by pooling money or independently pay for it.
The poor you refer to didn't come until much later in the age of discovery.
Many inland Antarctic bases are effectively unreachable for months in Winter. Flying a plane to the station in total darkness many thousand of kilometres in -80 C is a good way to end up with more people killed than you are trying to save.
> You could build an aircraft carrier and lift it into orbit
No you can’t. You still need to spend the same amount of energy per ton to escape earth’s gravity. An elevator does not magically violate laws of physics
Edit: As pointed out below I probably misunderstood the comment I was replying too. My bad
> Permanent (self-sufficient) LEO human habitation doesn't make sense because there's no source of material there
Whole books have been written on the raw materials available in space, both from the moon and from Near Earth Objects.[]
Mars is a bad idea that needs to go away before we lose the opportunity to perform the actual next step, which O'Neill and others mapped out decades ago.
15 days of continuous darkness followed by 15 days of continuous sunlight is rather difficult to deal with operationally, biologically and mechanically. This causes lots of mechanical stresses. Also there's micrometeorites that you need to protect against in LEO or on the Moon. The temperature extremes on Mars are nowhere near what they are on the Moon or in LEO.
In LEO further you have no gravity and no materials so the only going there is bringing whatever you want to do there with you. There's no resources that can be used. With no gravity also many things simply can't work. For example you can't run any pumps that pump liquids built in a normal manner. You can't rely on gravity to separate or settle liquids.
As the article points out, that's not even in the top 100 things.
Having a self-sustaining living space is by far the biggest problem (one where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows).
The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
Each of these problems is fractally more complex than I make it out to be, and none of them would be fixable if rockets were very cheap. And these are just problems for a limited time Martian outpost, similar to a trip to the ISS. Thinking about an actual colony with some prospect of perpetual habitation being in orders of magnitude more issues, some of which may not even be solvable without biologically altering humans to make a new Mars-adapted species of hominid.
None of issues you listed matter at all if launching stuff to space is cost prohibitive.
Without cheap space access they are not even worth properly researching.
> One where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows.
None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
I personally think we should intentionally seed all celestial bodies with life as soon as possible anyway.
If we find life in our solar system (especially life independent from Earth) we should become a lot more aggressive with space settlement, because it would make "great filter" ahead of us hypothesis a lot more likely. Settlement outside solar system should become one of humanity priorities as a matter of survival.
> Without cheap space access they are not even worth properly researching.
On the contrary - these are all useful technologies to the goal of preserving human life. If we had the ability to create self-sustaining colonies in the most extremely harsh conditions on Earth (a necessary step to being able to colonize any other place), we would have a much greater guarantee that humanity would survive a disaster like a huge asteroid/super volcano/deadly plague/etc. We could probably also use the technologies developed for other uses - better homes, more sustainable agriculture etc.
We could also work on miniaturizing the things and then start thinking about sending them in space, perhaps even with currently existing rockets.
> None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all, given the hard physical constraints on rocket masses and available fuels.
> We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.
What would be the goals of the mission? Why do you think people desperate enough to accept certain death will be able to achieve said goals or even care about them once they reach the surface?
> First things first.
Exactly my (and the article's) point. First you send robots to Mars while developing colony technologies on Earth, then you start thinking about sending humans to Mars.
Showing that's it's possible right now within reasonable budget.
That's the fundamental difference in logic here.
The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible.
> Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
> The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible.
To what end? We could send a few suicidal people to Mars today for little more than the cost of a satellite launch if we don't care about their survival - hell, they don't even have to be suicidal, get some people who recently died, strap them in a rocket, and send them to Mars.
Instead, you have to set an actual short term and longer term mission goal - say, you want a mission that can prove that X people can survive for Y months on Mars without external help, with a longer term goal of hauling them back to Earth at the next launch window or something.
But for this type of mission, you actually need extremely sane people who greatly value their lives and those of their colleagues, otherwise you'll just have a few corpses sitting on Mars like in my initial example.
And more importantly, again, given current technologies, the actual result of the experiment is already known: those people will simply die if sent to Mars with currently known life preservation methods.
> This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
Then never send people to Mars - at least not until we have a very clear path to actually establishing a self-sufficient colon on Mars, for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
> Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes.
Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
And even if Starship achieves all of its goals, it will be nowhere near the ability to send resources to Mars outside the existing launch windows in anything approaching economic efficiency.
You are arguing against strawman. I'm telling you that there is willingness to accept as high risk as it is necessary. Not that we should be aiming at sending suicide squads to Mars.
> for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research some 100x cheaper.
$100B for ISS vs. ~$1B for Starship in a pessimistic scenario. ISS and Starship have similar usable internal volume.
> Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything.
SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago. Give them some time.
> Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions.
It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.
> Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
That's not how people work. People will go to Mars for curiosity, greed, fame, or some higher level desire (possibly religious) not necessarily in that order.
Odds of Mars being explored à la Star Trek are infinitesimal, I'd give that hope up.
We can explore how life appeared on planets in other solar systems.
It has worked due to the treaty being worked out in early cold war, when both East and West were already planning military operations and bases in Antarctica - that way, neither side could have it and they were fine with it, sparing a considerable expense.
It has held in place since then by both inertia & similar "if I can't have the resources, no one can" and other resource sources still being usually cheaper to mine.
> Having a self-sustaining living space is by far the biggest problem (one where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows).
That problem gets a lot easier and cheaper when you don't have to design for margins of 1.2 to or so to save on weight. When you can throw extra weight at a problem to overbuild it for reliability you can solve these problems cheaper and more reliably.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
Planetary Protection is the new version of treating Earth as "gaia". It's a form of regressive environmentalism. This is not an important goal. Mars is not a very good candidate for supporting life now that we know how many geothermally active ice moons with undersea oceans exist in our solar system.
If hypothetical life on Mars is similar to life on Earth then it's not that valuable of a thing to learn and anything found would vary drastically from life on Earth from billions of years of separate evolution. If it's very different from life on Earth then it will still be easy to find even with plentiful human contamination.
Finally, with additional mass you can bring substantially heavier and more complex analysis and remote robotic equipment with you. (Or on a completely separate mission before humans arrive.)
> The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
This is overrated given that there's plentiful human experience throughout the history of humanity where humans suffered significantly worse isolation and hardship. Some projects will fail from human psychological issues, and the risk from them should be minimized (bring plants along, allow spaces for people to self-isolate, etc) but a single failure should not be taken as a reason that the entire concept is doomed. For sickness, you try to minimize possible issues by bringing significant medication and medical equipment, but sometimes there will be inevitable deaths. As mentioned, having additional mass that you can bring for human comforts and medical equipment saves a lot of potential deaths and issues
I think of starship works well permanent LEO habitation is next. Once space access is cheap enough…space hotels are an obvious first move to commercialization.
I'm not following the reasoning here: we should explore Mars because, unlike the Mars-like places on Earth, we stand no chance of rescuing explorers on another planet?
The GP's point, as I understood it, is that we haven't even figured out how to make missions 1/1000th as complex as a Mars mission on our own planet viable.
The reason people want to colonize Mars is because it solves the problem of an extinction event on earth wiping out all of humanity (assuming the Mars colony eventually becomes self sustaining). Populating Antarctica doesn't solve that problem.
From what I can tell people are talking about two different things here. Group 1 is talking about how we prevent humans from going extinct in the long term by setting up a Mars colony. Group 2 is talking about doing something easier before we jump to something harder (Antarctica -> LEO -> Moon -> Mars). I don't know why these two groups always feel so at odds with each other online, as it seems like both philosophies end up in the same place.
Group 3 are the people who think we should save Earth INSTEAD of going to Mars, and I think they miss the point entirely.
It's difficult to think of extinction events that satisfy both of the following criteria:
1. An event that affects the Earth without affecting Mars.
2. An event that leaves the Earth more uninhabitable than Mars, even temporarily.
A gamma ray burst or rogue star that destroys the Earth would just as easily destroy Mars. Meanwhile, even a colossal meteor strike such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, despite leaving the Earth a shattered ruin for millenia, would still result in a planet that is more habitable than Mars.
The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.
> The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.
In the near term, absolutely. But the long term goal is to colonize multiple planets/moons. Eventually, Mars will be one of many worlds on which life finds a foothold, which is perhaps the best backup for life that humanity can currently deliver. But we still need to take that first step.
I think it's easy to imagine how something like a meteor or nuclear war could end our civilization without killing all humans on earth. A new civilization would almost certainly arise, and it could be better or worse, but it would probably be very alien to us. At least as alien as Ancient Rome. A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.
> A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.
huh. most honest answer I've seen so far. "We're going to mars so we can later to go war with Earth, ideally when they are weak"
BTW Do you guys think building big chemical rockets just automatically advances your matsci/chem/bio timeline? It doesn't. That's the effect of massive government cheese.
Fun fact about the age of discovery: shit was already discovered. Domesticated food, fresh water, and abundant friends were already there.
The universe is bored of generating new challenges for your particular kind of aggressive. It has lots of fun new problems for people who are willing to work together though. Sorry.
I'm not suggesting Mars should go to war with or colonize Earth after such an event, just that there may be value in our cultures and civilization continuing to exist somewhere. I could imagine how Mars may choose to do that, but I would consider that to be a bad thing.
Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?
Why would a nuclear war or a similar cataclysm produce an "alien civilization"? Even if it wiped out 90% of humanity, that leaves 800 million people, all of whom carry their respective cultures.
Chance of an asteroid hitting Mars is tens or even hundreds times greater than it hitting Earth. Not to mention that Mars has barely any atmosphere, so even a relatively small meteor (5-15 meters across) will be able to penetrate it and cause chaos.
If we have to terraform anything, why not first learn to do it here on Earth? Plenty of inhospitable space that we can turn green, no need to go to Mars.
Doing that will almost double the amount of living space for the human population. Earth is a big planet. There is also ample space deeper underground. Why not make entire high-tech undergound cities?
Doing it will allow us to plan similar projects on Mars, or even some day, on Titan. Conditions underground on very cold planets should be much more "habitable", than those on freezing surface.
While we are at it, even the Moon has cave systems where various research can be made and where people can get shelter from radiation.
>Chance of an asteroid hitting Mars is tens or even hundreds times greater than it hitting Earth. Not to mention that Mars has barely any atmosphere, so even a relatively small meteor (5-15 meters across) will be able to penetrate it and cause chaos
With no ocean and barely any atmosphere the damage would also be much more localized.
Most of the damage from the Chelyabinsk meteor was caused by the shock wave as it exploded high in the atmosphere:
I never bought that argument. It's like some secularized version of America as a City Upon a Hill. The isolationism works for like 50 years or something, but afterwards the entire system is just going to be integrated, just like any new settlement on Earth was that served as a temporary refuge. Distance that seemed to provide safety is going to go from large to small to non-existent very quickly as technology develops, and probably much faster than in the past.
Any global extinction event is then just going to be a solar-system extinction event, Expanse style. To save enough humans from extinction in case of catastrophy probably some vaults are enough.
> The reason people want to colonize Mars is because it solves the problem of an extinction event on earth wiping out all of humanity (assuming the Mars colony eventually becomes self sustaining).
Life on Earth survived the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, obviously, otherwise we wouldn't be here now. The dinosaurs were wiped out, but the dinosaurs had nowhere to hide and were completely unprepared for the asteroid impact. It's important to keep in mind that the Earth after the asteroid hit was still vastly more livable and conducive to life than Mars is now. Mars is more hostile to life than a big asteroid impact, because Mars has no habitat to start with. Mars has no benefit whatsoever to humans as far as Earth disaster survival is concerned, except for the fact that Mars is not Earth.
A much better plan to avoid extinction is multifold: (1) Stop destroying our own environment, duh. (2) Get rid of nuclear weapons. (3) Stop killing each other in general. (4) Invest in asteroid detection and deflection. (5) Build shelters on Earth capable of surviving disaster, such as underground. It also wouldn't hurt to (6) Stop being afraid of vaccination.
We've got everything we need here already: normal gravity, breathable atmosphere, food, water, raw materials, people. It would be sooooooo much easier to build disaster shelters on Earth than to permanently populate Mars. The difference in difficulty level makes Mars a total joke in comparison.
As a species, if we can't even get our shit together on Earth enough to stop polluting, stop killing, stop the threat of nuclear war, and vaccinate against contagious diseases, then we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity. You can forget living on Mars, a massively hostile environment, if we can't do it right here on Earth, which was practically made for us.
This is tricky. Both because for better or for worse, they do provide a certain military equilibrium, and also because you know, it's probably a good idea to have them around, at least to a certain degree, if the Xel'naga decide that creating us was a bad idea. Not that nuke might not be sort of like throwing rocks at an advanced civilization, but it's not like we'd have anything better...
Not as of now. The outer space treaty[1] forbids nuclear explosions in space. I don’t think this treaty will be revised until it is made obsolete by a total elimination of these weapons of horror (e.g. by another treaty[2]). So if you want to see nuclear explosions used as propellant in space (which honestly isn’t such a bad use for them) then I recommend you petition your government to sign and implement the UN ban on these world ending weapons, if they haven’t already.
I kinda feel this would be worked out one way or another when someone is in possession of a fully fueled Orion space ship with couple thousand nuclear charges on board.
To this day I'm terrified by this concept - so much that I would frankly rather have nukes detonated behind a ship for propulsion. :P But yeah, if it could be made to work, it has some serious benefits!
On a related note, lets also look at the nuclear salt-water rocket - arguably the king of crazy (yet theoretically viable) on the nuclear rocket field right now:
What is so terrifying about that? It could be the middle way between fission as we know it, and fusion as we can't do reliably/practically(as of now). Just need some superconducting magnets to tame and stop the fusing uranium hexaflouride from touching the fused silica walls :-)
The exhaust is clean, because the system is closed.
Also it reminds me of some descriptions of so called 'Vimanas' which occur in old Indian scriptures, and nerdy people from today tried to reconstruct/reverse engineer/remimagine what's described in there.
And this fits, perfectly so.
Edit: I think of this as even more terrifying thant that saltwater thing:
Indeed, this is also very clever and actually sounds quite doable (still I wonder about how much radiation it will give off when running - probably quite a bit! :D) when compared to some of the other concepts.
Actually, I kinda think it demonstrates we really are not done with nuclear engines & even better, more crazy and higher performance propulsion methods will show up. And also, we really need to finally start building some of them them! :)
Like, even some simple NERVA or NEP would be at least a start. :)
It seems easier because Mars proponents often focus on the technological challenges (which are indeed great, if not insurmountable), while ignoring the human challenges. The challenges from human nature are going to exist on Mars just as much as they do on Earth; things like warfare don't suddenly stop existing just by shifting people to Mars. People act like Mars would be a place to keep people safe from nuclear war, but destroying a Mars colony from Earth is trivial compared to creating one.
If one looks at the history of colonies (attempts to colonize the new world, for instance), we see that they often fall apart socially even in situations where they're in a place with much more resources than they had back home. Humans aren't dwarf fortress type automatons that can simply be handed whatever necessary job is needed and mindlessly go about their day for the rest of their lives.
No one has been able to manufacture a functioning mini-society, and every attempt has ended in spectacular failure. It seems crazy to think things will suddenly work if we drop the people in a place devoid of almost all resources and entirely hostile to life from Earth.
How can you bring humans to Mars without also bringing human nature, i.e., human flaws? We'll wreck Mars quicker than Earth, because Mars is already a wreck.
It's not a question of starting or stopping; whether we start or stop seems irrelevant to me. The point is that humanity has been "coddled" by the Earth, because we were born and evolved here, but we won't be coddled by Mars, and thus the Mars project is doomed to failure, since we're already failing on Earth, in a vastly more favorable environment.
What's the point of a "backup plan" when the primary plan isn't even working?
Humans will still be the ones colonizing Mars, the same humans who would theoretically make Earth uninhabitable. If we humans can't stop destroying Earth, we have no chance in making a Mars colony successful.
> A much better plan to avoid extinction is multifold: (1) Stop destroying our own environment, duh. (2) Get rid of nuclear weapons. (3) Stop killing each other in general. (4) Invest in asteroid detection and deflection. (5) Build shelters on Earth capable of surviving disaster, such as underground. It also wouldn't hurt to (6) Stop being afraid of vaccination.
That all sure sounds simple enough if you handwave over all the inherent complexity, but by that standard so does colonizing Mars, and yet colonizing Mars also sounds like a fun adventure.
In particular, (2) and (3) are working at cross purposes here—nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945. Also, (4)—asteroid deflection—could provide a safeguard for earth, but could just as easily be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
(1) is a slogan and not a concrete plan. How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people? Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits. Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish, solar and batteries require mining rare earth metals, and so forth.
> That all sure sounds simple enough if you handwave over all the inherent complexity
I didn't say it was simple. I believe what I said: "we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity."
> nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945.
A sad statement about humanity. Which is why I said we need to get our shit together.
Do we bring nationalism and nuclear weapons to Mars? How soon after settlement until the first Martian war starts? Could a Martian colony even survive a war, if the life-sustaining infrastructure is attacked? Or do they do it in the style of Star Trek "A Taste of Armageddon", with simulations and disintegration chambers?
> How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people?
How do you plan it? Hunger, power outages, homelessness, and lack of access to health care already exist.
> Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish
We're already killing birds and fish in many other ways more deadly.
> I didn't say it was simple. I believe what I said: "we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity."
Then give up and cede the floor to the people who are actually trying to do something about the future of humanity. If you're really this defeatist about the whole thing, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation.
Also, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation in general. You've managed to quote almost everything I wrote in my post except for one of the central points, which was: "Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." You ignore that while quoting just about everything else to provide snippy and dismissive comments that aren't really engaging with anything. Of course, why would you contribute anything of value if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
> If you're really this defeatist about the whole thing, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation.
The truth? Are you concerned with truth, or just wishful thinking?
Let's say you have a terminal illness, for example, ALS. Would you lie to everyone, including yourself, and say you're fine, that everything is going to be ok? Or would you admit the truth, and try to come to grips with it?
Of course we would love to have a cure. Nobody welcomes a terminal illness. But the reality and gravity of the situation cannot be honestly denied.
> Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits
In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant. The livability of the Earth's environment is a precondition for every other human endeavor. You can't have economic activity without ecological activity. And if you aim to convince me to be quiet about that, then the last thing you want to do is claim that we can "trade" the environment for something else. This kind of attitude only reaffirms my pessimism about whether we can, as I put it, get our shit together.
I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish when we're currently facing a period of mass animal species extinction due to human effects on the environment, such as global warming, chemical and physical pollution, deforestation, overfishing, etc.
> if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
I'm not philosophically committed to it, just empirically convinced of it.
I don't know how it's going to go down in the end. What I do know is that humans are essentially less hairy, more talkative apes, and as a group we can't responsibly handle the technology that the cleverest (but not necessarily wisest) among us were able to create. We're like the sorcerer's apprentice, except there's no sorcerer to show up at the last minute to save ourselves from the disaster we created.
We've known about global warming for many decades, yet we've done practically nothing about it, and now hardly anyone can deny that the consequences of it are starting to show. We're already past the point of no return. We allow amoral madmen to control world-threatening nuclear arsenals. We put anything and everything into the water, into the air, into the ground, without any apparent concern for the future. Millions of people are in near total denial of science, believing among other things that the world was literally created a few thousand years ago, and evolution did not occur. And by the way, these people dominate at least one of the two major political parties of the most powerful nation on Earth. I don't know why exactly I should be hopeful about all this. To whom am I supposed to cede the floor? The "pedo guy" guy?
> Let's say you have a terminal illness, for example, ALS. Would you lie to everyone, including yourself, and say you're fine, that everything is going to be ok? Or would you admit the truth, and try to come to grips with it?
In 1963, a graduate student was diagnosed with ALS. Instead of deciding that his life was pointless and meaningless, he completed his doctorate and spent the rest of his life contributing to scientific research and to educating the public. His name was Stephen Hawking and he passed away at age 76, in 2018.
> In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant.
Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable. This kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the issue is counterproductive and useless.
> I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish
I'm not saying not to build the windmills and dams. I'm saying that the benefits of doing so outweighs the ecological costs. I'm not concern trolling here; I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with. You're just so worked up that you missed the point.
> In 1963, a graduate student was diagnosed with ALS. Instead of deciding that his life was pointless and meaningless
1) I didn't say my life is pointless and meaningless. Moreover, I obviously care, otherwise I wouldn't bother to argue about all of this.
2) You're seriously going to pull unusual anecdotal data about a condition that has well known scientific statistics?
3) I think it's fair to say that Hawking's physics talent resulted in greater caretaking effort put into his life than the average case.
> Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable.
Of course nobody suggests it. They're not going to do it on purpose, they're going to do it by accident, due to carelessness and neglect.
> I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with.
Why? If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
You asked about my plan to provide the essentials, such as food and housing, but that's a bit of misdirection, because we do vastly more than just provide the essentials. We have rampant, insatiable consumerism, not to mention planned obsolescence, driven by zombie non-human entities called "corporations" that lack ethics and exist for nothing except unfettered growth. We have the military-industrial complex whose appetite for war and weaponry is never ending. And now people want to massively ramp up the space program again and constantly launch (polluting) rockets into space, even littering our orbit with satellites that block our own view of it that we so admire from a distance. I don't think the problem is the essentials. Rather, I want to know what the plan is for cutting back on the non-essentials.
> You're just so worked up
Please refrain from personal comments, which are unnecessary and uninformed. You don't know me, and you're certainly not in the room with me, so you don't have the slightest clue about my present mental or emotional state. At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
> I didn't say my life is pointless and meaningless.
No, you said human civilization is doomed, and then you mentioned an ALS diagnosis as an analogy between an individual life and the fate of human civilization.
> If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
The point is that tradeoffs exist. It's not "tangential" to provide examples of tradeoffs when making the point that tradeoffs exist.
> At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
As far as I can tell, you are rattling this off in your sleep, because you aren't constructively responding to my points in any way. It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up, as opposed to having poor reading comprehension or some sort of apocalyptic monomania. At this point I'm content just dismissing you as a fanatical doomsayer with no interest in what anyone else has to say, because that's how you've conducted yourself thus far.
> No, you said human civilization is doomed, and then you mentioned an ALS diagnosis as an analogy between an individual life and the fate of human civilization.
Yes. That doesn't mean human life isn't worth living. After all, the Earth itself is ultimately doomed, billions of years in the future. And it should go without saying that each of us is mortal. You and I are both going to die someday. Everyone acknowledges that, scientifically. What we do with that knowledge is a different matter.
If there's a way for humanity to avoid its sorry fate, I believe that the solution is not inherently technological. Technology may be needed, but the solution has to start with our acknowledging the truth, acknowledging reality, and becoming self-aware, self-reflective, especially of our own human flaws. We can't attempt to overcome our flaws if we don't even admit that we have those flaws.
The first step is to look inward, to human nature, not look outward to Mars. We'll never be able to govern the space outside of Earth unless we can govern the space between our ears. Rationality, ethics, cooperation, these are the keys to long-term survival of the species. And perhaps biological evolution would bring us to that eventually. But evolution works painfully slowly, so I fear that the combination of technology and self-destructiveness will get us first.
If humans even need something like "nuclear deterrence", for example, that's an inherently unstable and extremely dangerous situation. It's no way to live. Which is why I keep asking if we're going to bring that crap to Mars with us. Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.
> The point is that tradeoffs exist.
Ok. And 1+1=2. You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
> It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up
No, it wasn't. Try coming up with something other than your two uncharitable interpretations, the second of which isn't even worth repeating.
> If there's a way for humanity to avoid its sorry fate
You don't think there is, though. You've admitted as much. So why are you wasting your time?
> Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.
That's always been one of the benefits of settling a frontier--any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form.
> Ok. And 1+1=2.
So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
> You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
It's certainly more nuanced than the statement of yours I was responding to, which was "stop destroying our own environment, duh". It doesn't take very much light to illuminate the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Because I've got time to waste? And because I'm not happy about the situation.
Honestly, aren't most HN commenters mostly just wasting time here?
> any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form
This does not seem true to me.
> So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
No, I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention. There are some obvious, massive environmental problems in the world, such as global warming, air pollution, water pollution, ground pollution, etc. I'm not seeing a serious global effort to stop, undo, or prevent these problems. In that respect, I'm not interested in "tradeoffs", which sound to me like a justification or excuse to continue to destroy our one planet for the sake of short-term profit. But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish, which as you can probably guess, doesn't impress me or justify doing nothing about the environment.
> In that respect, I'm not interested in "tradeoffs", which sound to me like a justification or excuse to continue to destroy our one planet for the sake of short-term profit. But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish, which as you can probably guess, doesn't impress me or justify doing nothing about the environment.
I mentioned those things as examples of tradeoffs where the benefit outweighs the ecological impact. “Doing nothing about the environment” is a complete strawman that you made up for some reason, it certainly has nothing to do with anything I mentioned.
I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either, but you’re still not really grasping it or coherently responding to it, so I have no reason to think you’re willing and capable of engaging with anything more nuanced.
> I mentioned those things as examples of tradeoffs where the benefit outweighs the ecological impact. “Doing nothing about the environment” is a complete strawman that you made up for some reason, it certainly has nothing to do with anything I mentioned.
I keep asking, over and over, for you to give examples of tradeoffs where the cost/benefit goes the other way, but you steadfastly refuse to elaborate. All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view. If doing nothing about the environment is a strawman, then why don't you go ahead and explain your non-strawman position?
> I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either
You're not making any point. That's my point. You apparently just want me to say "You were right, Phil, and I was wrong", despite my not even knowing what the heck you're supposed to be right about, except the totally vague, handwavey "tradeoffs exists".
Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You asked, "How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people?" Can we feed and house an unlimited number of humans? No. Can we feed and house the current number of humans? Yes, I believe so. We already produce vastly more consumer goods than is necessary for this basic purpose, but we refuse to distribute them equitably. In any case, if for some reason we can't adequately feed and house the current number of humans, the answer is certainly not Mars, which doesn't support human life at all and wouldn't help even a tiny bit to feed or house current Earth humans. The cost of feeding and housing a human on Mars is, as it were, astronomically greater than the cost of feeding and housing a human on Earth.
One answer would be population control, strictly limiting new births. There's a tradeoff for you. But as I already said, I don't think the basics are really our biggest problem: "We have rampant, insatiable consumerism..."
> I keep asking, over and over, for you to give examples of tradeoffs where the cost/benefit goes the other way, but you steadfastly refuse to elaborate.
You haven't, actually. But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
More generally, carbon taxes and similar measures, like the cap-and-trade systems used for other emissions, are IMO a good policy mechanism for controlling ecological costs according to cost-benefit tradeoffs. I don't think anyone is smart enough to centrally plan these kinds of economic decisions, so it's good to use these policies to make the market work for us in these instances.
> All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view.
When you keep misrepresenting what I've already said, I'm going to go back and try and clarify the points that you missed instead of moving on. If you're going to continue making the same misunderstandings, I'm going to get frustrated and give up.
> Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point. I'd say that's progress, and I'm going to leave it at that because I don't think you're engaging in good faith here, and I suspect that if we continue, you're just going to circle back to claiming that I was "concern trolling" about renewable energy again even though I've clarified that point more than once.
Me: "How do you plan it?" "If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?" "You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way." "I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention." "But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish"
> But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
> You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point.
From my perspective, you've spent the past three days hiding your real views in order to get me to get me to concede a point that in most circumstances would not be worth even mentioning, like 1+1=2. Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist", unless you believed that my conceding the point commits me to other things that are favorable to your own argument and views? There's a rather simple and obvious reason why I've been resisting what you called "one of the central points, which was Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." The reason I've resisted is that I want to know exactly what I'm agreeing to by conceding that point, and you've refused to say until now. And guess what, I do not agree about coal. So I think I was justified in resisting your point. I definitely don't agree with a laissez-faire market-based approach that always leads to the tragedy of the commons. I think "carbon offsets" are a joke and nothing more than a system to pay to pollute, as usual allowing the wealthiest to do nothing and get away with murder.
> Me: "How do you plan it?" "If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?" "You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way." "I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention." "But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish"
None of these quotes actually contain the question, “what are some tradeoffs that would go the other way?”.
> Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist"
Because your apocalyptic rants are very, very absolutist and seem to exclude the very possibility of tradeoffs. You are right that it’s a 1+1=2 type point, but you were passionately ranting that 1+1=11. I was trying to introduce some nuance into the conversation, and then you freaked out.
> And guess what, I do not agree about coal.
You don’t agree with me that we should phase out coal power plants? That makes absolutely no sense given your doomsday ranting.
Oh, I think I see what happened here. We agreed, I think, on hydroelectric dams as a case where the tradeoff favors building or maintaining the power plant. You asked for a tradeoff that went the other way, and that’s when I mentioned coal. See, hydroelectric goes the way of “let’s keep the power plant running” while coal goes the other way—i.e. not keeping that power plant operational. Or do you think we should phase out hydroelectric? You’re not making any sense here.
>Do we bring nationalism and nuclear weapons to Mars? How soon after settlement until the first Martian war starts? Could a Martian colony even survive a war, if the life-sustaining infrastructure is attacked?
Would a small Mars colony survive a single jilted lover aiming for the ultimate murder-suicide?
> A much better plan to avoid extinction is multifold
I don't think going extinct from the effects of any human capability is much of a concern. Humans have lived in stone age for tens of thousands of years. It's more that we wouldn't have nice things like houses, cars, and computers.
It is flippant. "Net zero" has already been an ally to the Russian government in their war on Ukraine.
Energiewende was the renewable transition that primarily offshored responsibility to Russian natural gas and coal when plants weren't running, assuming that the renewables would grow and balance out.
That didn't work so well, and now a European heat wave is saving European lives.
People need heat, and light, and to compute.
The developing world cannot wait for net zero carbon energy, and the developed world cannot just stop all useful human activity to pursue climate goals.
The rhetoric around this is if we "just" had better politics, if the oil and gas lobby weren't such villains, if conservatives weren't sticking their heads in the sand we would be able to make it to net zero while "only" sacrificing things we don't care about, like big gas guzzling pickup trucks.
We are finding out that no, we can't.
Continuing down this line of rhetoric is flippant, or perhaps glib.
There's hope though, even if you believe that climate change will end humanity (it won't) - the status symbol cars are electric, more consumer cars are electric, renewable deployment is proceeding apace and we even have developments in fusion and SMRs.
That's how we win - not with the Extinction Rebellion, but with new people doing diligent work to produce higher and higher standards of living at less and less cost.
Fuel costs money, and nobody wants to use it if they don't have to - economics will eventually win, because the best low or no carbon energy sources require almost no operational cost due to lack of constant fuel input.
"The reason people want to colonize Mars is because it solves the problem of an extinction event on earth wiping out all of humanity (assuming the Mars colony eventually becomes self sustaining). Populating Antarctica doesn't solve that problem."
> The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth
The main reason cited is usually one of species resilience. “Not Earth” is an arbitrary requirement bolted on.
The main risk is that of an extinction-level event, such as large meteor impacts, substantial tectonic activity, or a worldwide nuclear disaster.
All of those would likely have minimal impact on an autonomous underground city with a complete, mostly hermetic air filtering system, with three redundant power sources (say, nuclear, solar, and geothermal). That would also be substantially easier to build than a >1K self-sustaining Martian base.
Being possible for us to make a habitat is also a requirement. You can't just drop that requirement because being somewhere other than Earth sounds nice. A successful Mars colony attempt is centuries away.
> The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.
Reading the article I think the author tries to figure why this requirement cannot be dropped and gets no rational answer.
Declaring "not on Earth" to be a requirement is certainly an effective way to avoid considering all the arguments against it being a good goal at this time. It is known as begging the question.
But it is the primary requirement of Mars colony advocates, so it cannot be dropped. It is perfectly legit to argue that their goals are useless and terrible and wasteful, if you want, but arguing "there are more habitable spots on Earth" isn't on point. Their goal is not to colonize "some difficult, hostile environment" - their goal is to colonize another planet.
The argument here is, at least in part, that achieving it on Earth would likely increase the chances of succeeding on Mars. To rule that out on the basis that one's goal is to colonize another planet (as opposed to, for example, showing that achieving it on Earth would not help with the ultimate goal) is a way to avoid considering that argument, not a refutation of it.
1) many Mars advocates want to colonize Mars to provide more resources and land to alleviate overpopulation. In that regard, it being of Earth does not matter.
2) even if it does, the point of GP's counterargument is not "if you want to colonize a hostile environment we have those here on earth" it's "your goal is extremely far outside of our current technological capabilities. We can't even colonize hostile environments in our own backyard."
But that Martian dust that gets all over the solar panels is also loaded with toxic perchlorates. Every time they wear a suit out, they have to absolutely insure that none of it gets into the living space. Good luck.
"Anybody who is saying they want to go live on the surface of Mars better think about the interaction of perchlorate with the human body. At one-half percent, that's a huge amount. Very small amounts are considered toxic ...."
Right there. That's the issue we're facing with any extraplanetary excursion. It's not the stuff we know. It's not even the stuff we're aware we don't know.
It's the infamous "unknown unknowns". Stuff we're not even aware we should be aware of. Stuff that will fuck us up in new and interesting ways.
If we ever do make it to colonizing any other planet, the road will be paved with the bones of the dead we sacrificed to find out what we shouldn't have fucked around with.
It also goes the other way. Antibiotics, which have likely saved more lives than any discovery - ever, were developed less than 100 years ago, by accident. A guy accidentally left his bacterial cultures exposed on a holiday. He came back and noticed one had grown a type of fungus that was repulsing the bacteria. That fungus was penicillium.
In another fun example, the idea of using microwaves to heat things up was also discovered completely accidentally. A [self taught] engineer working on an active-radar system noticed the system he was working on was melting a Hershey's Mr. Goodbar in his pocket. He then used it on a few other foods to confirm, and the microwave oven was born.
I think one of the biggest benefits of colonizing Mars will be things we can't even imagine. We'll find all sorts of great new ways to kill and maim ourselves, but we'll also discover plenty of new amazing tools we can use to do awesome things with. Over time the former will be mitigated and the latter exploited. Colonizing, as always, will be a game for those who are willing to accept a few decades being lopped off their average life expectancy in exchange for making way for a greater life for those to come.
> Over time the former will be mitigated and the latter exploited.
Have we mitigated ways to kill and maim ourselves?
> Colonizing, as always, will be a game for those who are willing to accept a few decades being lopped off their average life expectancy in exchange for making way for a greater life for those to come.
I'm not sure that's an accurate description of colonist motivations.
This is such a good point. Whenever I read about a technology that's supposed to make Mars livable, I ask myself "why aren't people doing this already on the Balleny Islands?" (a lovely but remote as hell archipelago off of Antarctica). Usually there's no good answer; something about the exoticism of Mars makes people think problems that are hard on Earth get easier to solve there.
I think a common answer to "Why Mars" is that human beings need a last resort should earth become uninhabitable.
I'd turn that around, "We need to start thinking about how human beings are utterly dependent on Earth for the forseeable future and how we're destroying her, because there's no planet B in the time frame global warming is unfolding". Start working on protecting what we have. Don't flatter yourself into thinking there's an alternative.
I'm sure many have read William Shatner's narrative of his trip to real space but if you haven't, you should.
"I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her." (and continues...)
What could possibly make Earth as uninhabitable as Mars, without destroying Mars as well? And why not invest in technology that could keep people alive on Earth in Martian-style conditions (without all the extra problems of logistics and low gravity)?
Let's first create a self-sustaining vault that can house a million people for indefinite amounts of time on Earth, and then let's revisit sending humans to Mars with all the new technology we developed doing so.
In the meantime, let's actually spend space program resources on actual useful exploration, such as finding out if there is life on Mars or on other liquid-water worlds in the Solar System (such as Europa). Confirming or denying this would be a much much much bigger boon to scientific understanding than getting an ISS-style outpost to last a few years on Mars, and it would also be far cheaper.
What could possibly make Earth as uninhabitable as Mars, without destroying Mars as well?
Almost nothing. I agree the Mars colonialization idea is absurd in any foreseeable timeframe. My point is mostly fantasy seems serve to numb people to the damage to Earth that's now going. If someone is worried about the future of the human, they should be working on climate change. Especially if they have enough money and influence to make themselves widely heard, as do many of the people hocking the Mars-boondoggle.
The odds of a storm of asteroids hitting Earth are pretty much the same as them hitting Mars. Except the atmosphere protects us against smaller asteroids, where they burn up in the air and on Mars would impact the surface.
The chances of humans surviving on Mars after such an event is extremely less than humans surviving on Earth. We know the Earth has remained hospitable to life after many instances, Mars hasn't been hospitable to complex multi-cellular life in its entire existence, or at least the last billion years or so.
Even if the worst case events were definitely going to happen tomorrow (killer asteroids, Yellowstone erupting, massive airborne contagion) I would still rather be on Earth than on Mars. Earth is more habitable before, during, and after these extinction-level events than Mars is on Mars’s best day.
> I think a common answer to "Why Mars" is that human beings need a last resort should earth become uninhabitable.
This is such a common viewpoint - that earth will become uninhabitable - but I think you've been watching too many cataclysmic films. In your experience, what makes it so bad?
In my experience, this place is pretty decent. The worst of it is the strong governance systems we have - all these nonsense laws that are really there for someone else's benefit. But, while the strong governance will make/is making our culture unpleasant, there are no worries about the physical matter.
The problem is all the unfounded, unverified stories people believe, despite the evidence of their own senses, if you ask me.
If we discovered something quite valuable on the Balleny Islands, a viable colony would be established to exploit it very quickly.
Hard problems on Earth get solved regularly, but they only get solved when there is sufficient payback to justify the costs of finding those solutions.
What are you going to find on mars to justify a colony? Best answer I've heard is "a portion of the raw materials you'd need to build a colony", which isn't even a circular justification - it's an incomplete circle!.
Without the added justification of "because it's another planet, and that's so cool", I don't think a mars colony makes a lick of sense.
Mars has a weaker gravity well, so getting to space is a lot easier than it is from Earth. And while the moon might sound better, unlike the Moon, it has enough gravity where the human body might be able to adapt without crippling bone and muscle loss.
This makes Mars pretty ideal as a home base, if you assume that in the future we are planning to mine and process asteroids for rare minerals and metals.
why do we even care about all this. establishing a space station on mars to make it easier to travel the rest of the galaxy.. is already circular logic but we're 100s of years away from achieving that now. 20 to get a human there. 30 more to build anything habitable and then we don't even know if its self sustainable but if it is.. 20 or 30 more to build a viable space center anddddd... we haven't actually improved life at all, just explored a sliver more of the galaxy and none of us will even get to witness it .
Don't forget that "self sustainable" would be a pipe dream - there's no conceivable possibility of producing advanced machinery such as electronics on Mars given current or near-future technology.
Also, there's a very good chance that this type of exploration of Mars will forever contaminate it preventing us from using Mars to explore the origins of biological life, a much more important and achievable goal than space colonization, and one that doesn't shut out the other one in a farther future.
It's a lovely dream though. Lots of people have grown up with that dream - it's going to be hard to give up. Surely we can spend a few bucks on it to show willing and satisfy the dreamers?
Lots of people have grown up dreaming their Hogwarts letter would arrive - I don't think that justifies spending any money to try to build a school of magic.
> establishing a space station on mars to make it easier to travel the rest of the galaxy..
Considering that the "rest of the galaxy", aka the Milky Way is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km give or take across, the 250,000,000 km to Mars aren't going to provide much of a head start.
We have 8.x billion people on Terra, an environment with circa 4.x billion years of evolution for eukaryotes to thrive, and still we have about 1.x billion people undernourished with around 20,000 people dying of hunger each day [1], not to mention the other eukaryotes.
Our species has proven again and again it's inability to care for the extended tree of life, heck, we still believe there are sharp and crisp delimitations inside our own species (the blacks, the Jews, etc.). Why then this gaslighting about "we must save civilization"? Just because some of the billionaires, those who our system lets to own the world, are afraid of dying? Hey, rich guy [2], got news for you: we don't have a civilization, we are barely a bunch of pseudo-evolved tribes, infighting for trivial resources and perceived boundaries.
Let's figure out how to have a civilization, then, maybe, we can try to save it.
However, as it stands, "we must save civilization" is doublespeak for "you, hoi polloi, go and build an Elysium for me and my friends", just as the Qataris said to the slaves to build them stadiums [3]. And if you own less than $30 million [4], don't kid yourself, you are still hoi polloi.
> However, as it stands, "we must save civilization" is doublespeak for "you, hoi polloi, go and build an Elysium for me and my friends", just as the Qataris said to the slaves to build them stadiums [3]. And if you own less than $30 million [4], don't kid yourself, you are still hoi polloi.
This is farcical on the face of it. There is no situation where the "hoi polloi" are going to be building colonies. This is a creation of science fiction with no basis on reality. You need fundamentally significant amounts of money to leave the planet. We're talking hundreds of thousands per person. Some rich person is not going to ship off people who are unwilling or don't want to go..
Where are you going to find the legal system under which these "slaves" will exist? This is silly. No one anywhere is advocating for "slavery on Mars". You're just arguing in bad faith to create straw men for you to burn down.
How about in the US? "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States" [1].
However, if you are willing to regress the definition of slave to a 19th century understanding: are you being paid a wage to sell your time to build an Elysium for someone else?, do you have to wake up at a certain hour to go to work?, do you have to eat/urinate/defecate at certain hours provided by your work environment?, do you have to sleep at a certain hour to prepare for work?, do you have to work or suffer hunger -> homelessness -> death? You, me, we are the slaves already, only the whip is different. But if you own over $30 million, it's fine, you are on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog here.
The problem with running a colony of 20k in Antarctica is a human/political one, not a technological one. We have been running one of over 2k on Spitsbergen, which is not terribly different in terms of climate and accessibility, for a long time. Assuming you even get your hypothetical Antarctic colony past whatever international treaties that apply, good luck resisting the inevitable backlash from environmentalists who will find the potential disturbance to a dozen penguins in a 100-kilometer radius of your proposed site an unacceptable risk.
One of the advantages of a Mars colony is that the argument for it infringing upon any existing interests is much weaker than for anywhere on Earth. Of course, to some people, the idea that someone could just go somewhere and do a thing without anyone (who those people of course claim to speak on behalf of) being in a position to claim injury is disturbing in itself.
There are regularly scheduled flight from e.g. London and Oslo for ~$100 to Spitsbergen. Plants grow there and it's inhabited by native mammals, not just "a dozen penguins". Apart from the adjectives "snowy" and "cold" being used to describe it, it has little in common with Antarctica.
The oceans are all owned by various parties. They're use is governed by treaties and governments aggressively militarize development there (see how fishing boats are tracked and monitored).
>Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
Finally, what do you think will be the effect on climate change of at minimum quadrupling the people in Antarctica and providing them some sort of economically viable reason for being there?
What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison. Aside from all the other arguments that we CAN put people in Antarctica the complexity and side effects for our environment are more dangerous than putting them on Mars.
> What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison.
If you are seriously saying that getting 20k people to Mars is impacting Earths climate less than getting them to Mars then you need a reality check.
Hint: You can't not just not walk there, but anything apart from sunlight to support life isn't there which even Antarctica has in abundance (oxygen and water).
Emissions per human on a Falcon 9 (assuming 4) : 106
Emissions for a Starship launch: 2700
Emissions per human on a Starship launch (assuming 100) : 27
Emissions per year for America: 5,000,000,000
Emissions per year for a single American: 15
Emissions per for for a single American over an 80 year lifespan: 1200
----
I don't know if people don't really appreciate how many people there are, overestimates rocket pollution, or just like some person reads something on the internet, somebody else repeats it, and nobody at any point bothers to see if what anybody is saying makes any sense. Rocket launches are such a nothing-burger in terms of emissions that yes sending people to Mars (assuming they stay for a while) would definitely be a net reduction in emissions.
For some fun tangential data, to match the current emissions of the US, alone, you'd need to launch about 12 million Falcon 9s. Last year was the biggest year, for space, by far with a whopping global total of 178 orbital launches. So the entire global pollution impact, for that record breaking year, was equivalent to ~5,000 Americans.
> seriously saying that getting 20k people to Mars is impacting Earths climate less than getting them to Mars
It impacts the pristine nature of Antarctica less. You’re also ignoring motivation. There are smart people motivated to see Mars. (Maybe not to settle. But to visit. The same way one may be curious to visit Antarctica without wanting to live there.)
>If you are seriously saying that getting 20k people to Mars is impacting Earths climate less than getting them to Mars then you need a reality check.
no I'm saying their excess heat generated in a polar region will be more detrimental than the excess heat generated on Mars will be. Among other things.
Basically that the day to day living in the area being damaged is going to be more damaging than the one off transportation. That said I haven't done the calculation, but since I was the first one to even bring it up I doubt anyone has done it either.
> no I'm saying their excess heat generated in a polar region will be more detrimental than the excess heat generated on Mars will be
This is not how climate works, not at all. The issue isn't “the amount of excess heat”, it's about how many shit-tons of greenhouse gases we would put in our atmosphere by sending those people to those two places.
And given you need to send more stuff on Mars to make it livable than on Antarctica + the fact that you'd send them with freaking rockets instead of boats, it's going to be several orders of magnitude more damaging.
That's the problem tho: we are operating on definitions of economic viability, not socio-ecological viability. Humanity on Earth is currently unsustainable because we're crashing face-first into a climate catastrophe and pulling any stops is not an option because it's not "economically viable".
I don't think there's any point in making life in Antarctica sustainable for now. But there's even less of a point in making life on Mars sustainable until we have made life on Earth sustainable first. Burning through resources on Earth to chase a pipedream of maybe having a self-sustaining colony on Mars a few hundred years from now is a luxury we can't afford at the moment -- and because we can't afford it it's doomed to fail even if we try.
There's a theory that these kinds of hard problem solving creates new technical solutions to similar, albeit easier problems, so sustainability of life on Mars may provide solutions for sustainability of life on Earth. As it happens I believe in this theory so I think developing for making a self-sustaining colony on Mars may be worth the extra effort.
that's often the retort to that theory, true, to which the comeback is generally something along the lines about every enemy of progress having said the same thing about every major discovery ever.
I mean I suppose you are familiar with these things, it's not like the history of this debate should be new and strange to readers of HN.
We’re not solving climate change because the solutions endanger the wealth of powerful interests and because getting large groups of people to agree to do things is hard. But the overall cost of solving the problem is quite modest: a few percent of world GDP for a few decades should do it. Not small, but a much smaller effort than war mobilizations.
Meanwhile NASA costs 0.15% of US GDP. I might want to bump that up to 0.3% or so, so that we can do Mars. Much more than that and I agree that we have other priorities (like climate change).
>you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Whereas the 100x more costing and 100x logistically harder case for Mars is?
>Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what?
That at least this level is realistic, and we're not jumping to conquer Everest when we aren't even fit to climb our 2% incline hill next to our house.
And that we can coordinate, invest, invent, build, and deploy, the infrastructure to make living there more livable and have an actual community there - even at "baby steps" level.
If anything that would make the idea of setting up anything more permanent and not a repeat of the moon-visits on Mars more viable: Lots of much simpler problems would have to be solved in a place like Antarctica first before one can even pretend to be able to solve the 100x bigger issues on Mars.
>What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change?
Hugely detrimental, if not for anything else, for the false hope that climate change doesn't matter, we can always go to Mars if push comes to shove.
> Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
This is besides the fact that we've mandated by international law that Antarctica is forbidden from being "economically viable" because of the restriction on any economic activity. Plentiful (more than 20K) people live and work in the far northern arctic on the European and the North American continent with conditions roughly equivalent to those seen in the less extreme portions of Antarctica.
That is because there is something to exploit. Be it gas, oil, diamonds, some ore, or having a military presence with sensor platform (radar, whatever). What they all have in common is constant resupply, or at least the possibility there of, if need be. Or bailing out.
This comes off as extremely disingenuous. We aren't unable to inhabit Antarctica for the long term, we just aren't interested in doing so. We don't have much left to learn about living in space from living in Antarctica that we haven't already learned from the people who live in the various other parts of the world which do have permanent settlements and experience extreme cold for large parts of the year. Thus there is no real point to doing much else there in terms of human spaceflight.
Just like how America hasn't outright been unable to develop the means to go to the Moon again for the past 60 years, it just has had other priorities.
In fact, following your logic, Artemis also should be cancelled until we've spent the arbitrary duration of 100 years sitting around in Antarctica just to prove that we can do it.
An additional point being missed is that when we started talking about going to the Moon the first time around, we didn't really know how to do it, we sent out several impactors just to learn enough about the surface to decide where to go. By setting that goal we gathered data for the purpose and eventually managed to do it. Similarly, there will never be a time where we are 'ready' to go to Mars or any other distant celestial body if we just keep waiting for arbitrary requirements to be met. Right now it's living in Antarctica for 100 years, then it'll be something more ridiculous and arbitrary like maintaining an artificial atmosphere for 1000 years.
Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo. We've been studying the surface for decades now, have got rovers storing away reference samples and testing oxygen production, we've even been testing how much mileage we can get with less conservative choices in hardware (eg Ingenuity's processor being much more modern than Perseverance's and Perseverance's landing footage being mostly off-the-shelf industrial cameras made possible by the more modern coprocessors being used to compress the video onboard before transmission).
A stated goal of Artemis is to use the Moon as a step to Mars, which it's turning out to be given that the only vehicle remotely capable of making the trip survivable is on the critical path of establishing a long-term presence on the Lunar surface. Everything that has to be developed for missions to Mars will end up tracing back to something tested or learned from Artemis, just as many aspects of Artemis are based on things tested on, developed for or learned from the ISS.
> Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo.
We're not. The longest Moon landing was 12 days. The goal of the Apollo mission was not to colonize the Moon. There's no Moon colony or any current plans for one.
If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable. But the goal of "let's make life interplanetary" is currently a pipe dream at best, a religious cult at worst.
Because nobody wants one. That’s not an understatement. We have the resources to begin colonising the Moon. But nobody wants to. People want to colonise Mars.
> there are people working on rockets and talking about Mars…it’s 100% vaporware
Methane engines and atmosphere-agnostic propulsive recovery are far from vapourware. It’s not a launch schedule. But that’s a straw man requirement for “working on” something.
> not a straw man when you don't trust the word and good faith
Then don’t.
Do you dispute that those technologies exist, and were developed by people dreaming of colonising Mars? The “when is the Mars launch” standard for “working on” something is a straw man because, by that definition, nobody is working on fusion energy or Alzheimer’s disease.
You're talking about rocket technology. I already said, "If the goal was simply to visit Mars, that might be viable." The question is a permanent, self-sustaining Mars colony, where the biggest problem is not "Methane engines" but rather breathing oxygen, drinking water, eating food, not getting irradiated, not getting poisoned, not having circulatory problems, reproducing, and surviving in general.
I've been dreaming about getting dirty with young Cleopatra. Expect a working time machine any day now. All I'm currently missing are a flux capacitor and working out some details.
Intentionally. Hackers dream. I have a background in aerospace engineering. That doesn’t mean I know how to solve the problems of permanent habitation. But it gives me a sense of where the edges are, and while some problems are super difficult (toxicity) others are wildly exaggerated (radiation) and none are blocking. Moreover, many of the processes we’ll need to develop have obvious counterparts on Earth, most interestingly, energy and fuel generation.
The author of the article wants an annual JWST or Cassini. I’d love that. But we aren’t getting it. De-funding Mars means going back to a post-Apollo NASA budget.
SpaceX doesn't seem to have done any work on actually living day to day on Mars. Not even colonizing, just living. Where's the airlock that will reliably blow the perchlorate filled dust off spacesuits? A toilet that will work reliably and not fill a ship with aerosolized feces? Shit how about an actual static demonstrator for a Martian lander version of Starship? A working model methane processor demonstrating that fuel could be generated from Mars' atmosphere and stored for the duration of a launch window.
I'm sure they've got some engineering schematics for some of those things or re-warmed NASA papers about those topics floating around. But talking about Martian colonies without talking about the things that would just keep a couple of people alive is just bullshitting.
You're serious about an endeavor when you want to talk about the boring aspects of it. Talking up the exciting aspects is just bullshitting.
> SpaceX doesn't seem to have done any work on actually living day to day on Mars
Agreed. Most of the serious work on establishing visits is at NASA. But getting there and back sustainably is a big part of the problem. To borrow another comment’s analogy, we’re not going to establish a permanent presence (whether with a rotating cast of astronauts or permanent population) with the astrophysical equivalent of triremes.
This is yet another SpaceX, or rather a Musk, problem when it comes to Mars. Even the mission profile of Starship is talking about as-yet unproven claims about sustainability. The current profile for Starship is to launch an unmanned refueler and a trans-Mars ship. They rendezvous in Earth orbit, refuel, and the trans-Mars ship flies off for a Mars injection orbit.
Not only is Starship not currently flying but there's been no demonstrations of their in-orbit refueling, not even between two Dragon capsules. There's also been no demonstration of in-orbit engine reignition. No demonstration of multiple engine reignitions. These are all necessary components of any Starship mission. Starship must always have fuel for landing as there's no capability for it to do an unpowered landing.
This means without an in-orbit refueling its payload lift is massively compromised. It also doesn't have the fuel to get out of LEO without refueling.
Starship is currently making tiny baby steps towards launching while people talk it up like it's doing regularly scheduled launches. There are a lot of major unknowns in the Starship mission profile and there's no guarantee it can or will work as advertised. Even if it technically works the idea there's going to be daily launches is currently a pipe dream.
They're still working on the means to get there - which will set the limits on everything else - so it's pretty ridiculous to be arguing that they aren't serious because they haven't gotten to the rest of the work.
> so it's pretty ridiculous to be arguing that they aren't serious because they haven't gotten to the rest of the work
Not in the slightest. SpaceX's proposed Starship design has known mass and envelope limits. All of the required support systems can be designed with those limits (or subset thereof) as part of the constraints. In fact now is the best time to start designing those because it can inform design criteria or mission profiles for Starship. Having those as handwave-y unknowns while talking about colonies is just absurd.
A manned landing on Mars requires they have months worth of reliable support infrastructure available. None of that is just going to appear. It all needs to be built and landed with or before humans. It needs to be repairable with tools on hand. It must power on an be functional on Day 1. You're not serious about landing people on Mars let alone building a colony without talking about the "boring" infrastructure that will keep everyone alive.
Even Starship's exact payload capability isn't set in stone just yet (the stated numbers are targets requiring optimization of the design beyond what the current prototypes have), nor is the amount of refueling needed. Even the fuel transfer system hasn't been concretely settled on yet. While they are working on catching, there isn't enough certainty on its reliability (particularly for the ships).
Hell, as it stands it isn't even clear if initial vehicles will need auxiliary thrusters to avoid digging up a hole upon landing. Even NASA seems to be uncertain about that one.
So yes, it is ridiculous to argue that they aren't serious about setting up a colony based on what they're doing right now.
Beyond that though, they're working on the spacesuits (granted, they're so early into that they're nowhere near ones usable on Mars) and they have demonstrated the ability to perform some amount of important maintenance on the Starship vehicles without needing machinery that isn't easy to bring along.
> They're still working on the means to get there - which will set the limits on everything else
It doesn't. The Martian environment sets the limits on everything else. You could drag the entire Earth over next to Mars, and people still couldn't live there.
The irony is that the hypothetical "What if the Earth became uninhabitable?" is effectively the same as "What if the Earth became just like Mars?"
People want to colonize mars because they don’t grasp how much it would utterly suck to go to mars. Mars missions make the Apollo program look like a luxury cruise.
The majority of the population on Earth doesn't need to want to go to Mars, only a small minority does. That small minority has to overlap with those who can actually fund it.
Much of the small minority would change their mind when faced with the reality of it. Assuming you actually make it there alive, it will be physically and mentally grueling to continue to exist there. Colonization is a significantly different scenario than manned mission to plant a flag in the ground.
If you asked the early Europeans coming over from Europe to North America if they regretted leaving I'm sure many would say that they did, and in fact many did return. That doesn't change the fact that a substantial number of those early arrivers did stay for the long run.
There may even be failed attempts where everyone dies in an accident as there were failed colonies.
So imagine you're a European in the new world... but also you can't breathe the air, go outside your tiny room, and are constantly being bombarded with radiation.
More like stay and die there. How are you going to refuel on mars? You aren't going to build an entire pipeline of industries in just a couple years to get off Mars, and shipping that much fuel to Mars would be ridiculous. They better start sending fuel now if they expect to have enough to make it back.
The only reasonable method of shipping rocket fuel to Mars or anywhere else in the solar system is to mine and refine it off the moon or an asteroid, which means a moon base or mostly self-sustained asteroid colony would need to exist first.
And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
You are going to need to produce 10,000x more energy than your fuel contains to make the fuel, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
> And where is that raw methane going to come from? Its not like there is a lake of methane you can just suck up on Mars. What about the oxygen needed to burn that methane?
Are you even attempting to Google these questions before posting them here with such an aggressive tone? Manufacturing oxygen on Mars is demonstrated engineering [1]. Manufacturing methane, theoretically sound and demonstrated in the lab [2].
This is what I meant by the aggressive strain of ignorance having overtaken the science with popular astronautics [3]. Some folks read a hot take on Musk and what Hawthorne hasn't done, ignore the thousands of scientists demonstrating actual technology a hundred million miles away, and then assume they're vindicated when the rest of us get tired of arguing with willful denseness.
Even your sources are giving multiple years of 24/7 operation under ideal conditions to produce what is necessary for a single launch, that doesn't seem very reasonable to me. How much energy are we able to actually generate on Mars? From what I understand solar panels are not that great in the Mars environment. And any sort of material processing is going to take a whole lot of energy.
I just don't see a Mars colony as a reasonable goal without sending potentially thousands of rockets full of tools and materials, which is too expensive to do without an already existent space mining and processing industry.
> > and not on say crypto or ad serving or military pursuits, is still a net win
We are not in the 1960s anymore, the US should do better than just an Apollo program 2.0, going into crazy Mars expenditures without a plan would guarantee you just that.
The inspiration should be the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan.
In both instances the super-geniuses with type-A personality got you to the Promised Land, but then what happens? They move on the next shiny thing. Nonetheless The Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan were able to continue because once the super-geniuses got the US to the Promised Land there were operators who got to keep the project going.
Generals, admirals, ambassadors were more than willing to dedicate their lives as operators to make sure that the U.S. Govt and its citizens would actually get a ROI on the 2 endeavours. You can say it's patriotism, status-seeking, the thrill to have authority over powerful weapons, borders and huge economic resources. Whatever the reason there were operators at the helm once the super-geniuses got out of the picutre.
The Apollo Program had the same amount of super-geniuses but no operators to take the helm to secure ROI, that's the reason why the U.S. Govt. had to pull the plug on the whole program.
Operators are not interested in writing their name in history books, they need enemies and competition to beat and take resources away from them. Said resources would then be paraded around and shown to citizens in order to both show the competence of said operators and improve the quality of life of American citizens.
What resources can be extracted from Mars and given to citizens in order to propel their quality of life?
If you think the infamous "We are there for the oil!" was bad then I guarantee you that "We don't know why we are there at all!" is much worse.
The former people will understand the rationale and even accept it, while being openly critic about it in public they'd be at peace with it while in the privacy of their homes with the curtain closed. The latter, not so much.
This 1960:moon :: 2022:Mars idea is a convenient assumption, but gets less plausible the closer you look. Mars is just way, way harder, and we have not improved our capability by anything like the difference.
"Just like how America hasn't outright been unable to develop the means to go to the Moon again for the past 60 years, it just has had other priorities."
What would those priorities be?
Other than arming itself and expanding NATO to the borders of Russian Federation? Bombing Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia and other nations to the Stone Age?
Honestly, I want to know which priorities made the trip back to the Moon impossible?
> Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.
What we have on Antarctica is an outpost, not a colony. It's made up of habitats, not homes. It has virtually no local industry, and cannot support itself. The only way it could endure for longer than its food reserves is by fishing, which is obviously not an option on Mars.
We haven't even solved the easy case where water and oxygen are available in unlimited quantities, let alone the much harder scenario of space or another planet.
No. It's because it's not economically worthwhile yet to do anything significant in Antarctica given the costs of doing something. Treaties will get renegotiated if there is enough economic value and in any case, treaties need to have millitary might ultimately to get enforced. The Budapest treaties never got enforced as an example and that's why we are where we are in Ukraine
I'm fairly certain there would be major mining, commercial fishing, and oil drilling operations in Antarctica today it weren't for the Antarctic Treaty. (Also, wars.) It's a geopolitical accident that everything worked out so well with the treaty. I doubt it will hold forever.
Perhaps you're forgetting that the initial detailed resource assessment (exploratory drilling etc.) is also prohibited, which stops investment from getting a foothold.
(I spent a lot of time down there)
Edit: thinking a bit more... Why do you say the treaty isn't enforced? I've been under federal investigation for what some people thought was a violation of the Antarctic Conservation Act (US law enforcing the treaty). I don't think anyone has ever been charged under that law so you could be right, but I was scared and I assure you people take the ACA seriously.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes indeed the treaties prevent "privateer" operations. They don't prevent major nation state level economic operations backed by millitary force it one decides it needs the resources. You can see some of this playing out in Ukraine, South China Sea etc. This is even true for large scale private organisations Vs smaller countries though setting aside Antarctic treaty will require more millitary might - see squid fishing off Chile or drug cartel control of central America as examples.
Your argument seems to be "treaties between nations are violated whenever it becomes expedient." This might be true in some cases, but I think a the Antarctic Treaty is a great counterexample.
Do you know about the overlapping territorial wedge claims in Antarctica and how they were suspended by the treaty? If not I think you would find it quite interesting.
While it looks like there are resources (oil, gas and coal being mentioned) it does not seem they have been mined before the current treaty cam into effect, most likely due to the 19/early 20 century technology.
But there certainly were substantial whaling stations in Antarctica for a while, with quite a lot of people & much more primitive technology compared to what we have now.
The Budapest Memorandum was specifically not a treaty. The US and UK did enforce the terms as written by raising Russia's invasion as an issue in the UN Security Council. The memorandum didn't require them to do anything more.
Given that there's laws and international treaties forbidding mining, resource extraction or resource exploration, of course it's not economically worthwhile.
The northernmost part of Canada is Ellesmere Island. Which is almost as large as Great Britain. There is no "you may not settle here" international treaty.
Wikipedia gives the entire island's population as 144 - all of them at a military base. [Edit: Vs. a population of ~61 million for Great Britain.]
Actual daily life in the high arctic/antarctic is nowhere near so desirable as many people want to believe.
I don't think that's true. What is the alleged treaty called? The Antarctic Treaty binds the contracting states to prohibit individuals from doing various things in Antarctica, the Outer Space Treaty doesn't really do that, and arguably does the opposite by prohibiting territorial claims. Regardless, I don't think any treaty should be taken very seriously. They will both be violated whenever it's expedient to violate them.
That's true, but it's defined (and kept up to date) in practice by COSPAR, who have a pretty elaborate set of definitions in place for Mars in particular.
COSPAR is (officially speaking) a private body, and as such their Planetary Protection Policy is not legally binding. They propose their policy as an interpretation of Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, but as a private body they lack the legal authority to make binding interpretations of an international treaty. The standard approach in international law would be to look at the intentions and understanding of the States Parties at the time the Treaty was originally concluded in order to interpret it - which would likely support a far weaker understanding of “harmful contamination” than what COSPAR proposes.
The rules for Mars aren't based in the treaty but instead on "planetary protection" an abstract policy coming from no law other than forms of regressive environmentalism that tries to limit contamination so that it's easier to find potential microbes. It's already actively harming site selection for Mars exploration by preventing sending of rovers that might discover life to actual areas that might have life.
To save the possibility of finding life we are preventing ourselves from finding life.
The treaty doesn't prevent Mars settlement. It just prevents claiming of territory. Antarctic treaty is actually significantly stricter than the outer space treaty in many ways.
By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
> Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
Ridiculous, given that flight is entirely about swimming through the air, while space rocketry is mostly about how to get through and out of the atmosphere ASAP.
(Not to mention, rocketry as a field was already making better progress than flight back then.)
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
This is how we've always been learning, though. Even Leonardo and other early pioneers of flight constantly attempted things impossible at their level. It's those attempts that led to progress - the theory and methods to solve such problems on paper came about only in the century.
Incidentally, it also turned out that studying bird flight was a waste of time - bird flight is too complicated for us to replicate even these days, and we mostly don't bother, because simpler systems yield better results for the kind of needs we have now.
We already know all the basics about agriculture for example. Hardly any of the problems we need to solve to do agriculture in Antarctica are the same as the problems we need to solve to do it in Mars. The soil medium is different, the processing needed to make it useful for agriculture is different, the light levels are different, the atmospheric environment is different.
Ultimately Antarctica is so similar to, say, a mountaintop in the USA, or even a lab in a US city compared to Mars that I dont really see the added value. The unknown problems we will face on Mars are there on Mars, not here.
Will a city on Mars ever be viable, let alone self sufficient? I have my doubts, but there’s only one way to find out.
Now try growing grain indoor with lights instead of just lettuce with no caloric value for multiple years with no outside input. And also balancing crop carbon needs against human breathing needs in a closed capsule without having something like mold or algae or other bacteria from throwing everything off balance because you lack 99.99% of the ecological diversity of anywhere on Earth. Or having access to fossil-fueled derived fertilizers which takes massive amounts of energy to produce without natural gas.
It sure as hell doesn't make sense to ship fertilizer from the surface of the Earth to Mars, or water, or really anything other than handfuls of extremely specialized equipment like computer chips or extremely difficult to obtain or rare chemicals or elements. You are going to need sustainability of all your basic resources for years, if not decades, before you ever have a chance of assaying and mining and processing such materials for yourself.
How much enriched nuclear material can we really send up in a rocket at a time in order to fuel the massive energy requirements of such a colony? We sure as hell don't want to send up multiple tons of enriched material at a time in a rocket to potentially fail during launch, and we would need that much energy to build any sort of functioning industry on Mars so it is anything more than a glorified emergency bunker where we send people to die.
Knowing the basics is still far removed from demonstrating self-sufficient capability at civilizational time scales. How many successful, isolated biodome projects are there? My understanding is that every one so far has failed. Theory ain't practice.
Of course, my point is that Antarctica is insufficiently different from e.g. Boston to make any difference to any research we might perform on earth. Meanwhile there will be conditions on Mars we can’t anticipate or fully simulate anywhere on earth. We need to do both.
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
Engineering advances fundamentally by trying to do things you haven't done before. If you already know how to do it, you higher a technician and hand him the instructions. (Many software developers for example are closer to trades people/technicians than actual engineers.)
>By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about cultivating apples by cultivating oranges.
I think this whole argument boils down to "people need to be inspired to do something great". Settling Antarctica isn't as inspiring as colonizing Mars.
But in my estimation, colonizing Mars would run out of steam really quickly. Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring. There isn't that much geological diversity, and there's no life. You wouldn't want to take a vacation there. I know there's going to be a lot of people here who are going to say "No! Mars is really cool!" The people here aren't normal. Living in a cave underground without being able to go outside and see the sun or take a walk is a nightmare for most people.
Landing on Mars could inspire lots of people. But once it's done, its mystique is just going to wear off. People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
The "Terra Ignota" series really gets into this question in a way that finally broke me out of what I agree to be a sort of "faith" in the Idea of Mars. For me, Mars has always been an obvious target for the reasons discussed here re: inspiration, but also because I feel terror at the idea of all of our species on one planet with no backup.
In Terra Ignota, there's a "nation" (the novel has a radically different concept of sovereign states an nationhood than our world today) composed of people who many here I think would identify with: they take a vow both of productivity and leisure so as to maximize their potential ability to contribute to the betterment of the human race, and their national obsession is the eventual (500 year timeline) colonization of Mars.
(spoilers)
A critical ideological revelation in the novel is that despite the fact that basically the entire nation is obsessed with the eventual colonization of Mars (they send their bodily remains there so as to increase the organic biomass), when push came to shove for the idea of actually putting people on the planet, it was realized by many in the nation that they don't actually want to abandon all of humanity on Earth for a life sentence of scrabbling out a hard life on Mars. Not because they don't want to put in the work, they are arguably the hardest working society in the series, but more like, it would just separate them for the remainder of their lives from all of humanity, and they have to acknowledge to themselves that they don't want that.
As cool as you can make Mars with improving colonization technologies,I think that for a ticket to Mars to be economical from a labor, safety, equipment, and resources standpoint, it has to be one way. It has to be you telling yourself that you will die on Mars, away from all of humanity but the smallest slice. I think that's a pill too bitter to swallow.
And what a fate to impose on your children. You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter, and those future children would be essential to a permanent colony.
Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Mars (if that's even medically viable) decide that Mars totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Earth?
Do we build a wall around Earth and stop them as "illegal aliens"?
Seriously, life on Earth is likely to be much better, much easier than life on Mars, so there's going to be a desire among a significant number of Martians to leave, just as there's a desire among Earthlings to move for a better life. Then what? In order to keep the Mars colony sufficiently "staffed", do you turn it into a totalitarian regime, where nobody can leave? No personal freedom?
How many of us want to sacrifice our lives and our happiness just to be a "backup plan"?
I rarely if ever hear space enthusiasts talk about the morality of a Mars colony. They act like it's just a technological problem, and it's somehow a given that we can put large numbers of humans wherever we want, whether or not the humans themselves would want that.
> Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Mars (if that's even medically viable) decide that Mars totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Earth?
This is essentially the plot of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (albeit on a generation ship heading mission to another solar system(
Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Earth decide that Earth totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Mars?
Do we build a wall around Mars and tell them their shitty life on earth is all they get, and they should be happy with antarctica?
I think your moral argument can easily be flipped, why do you get to decide that we shouldnt do something because there exist people who dont want to do it? What of the the people who do?
> Do we build a wall around Mars and tell them their shitty life on earth is all they get, and they should be happy with antarctica?
I'm not personally in favor of the "colonize Antarctica" approach. It's true that if we can't figure out how to colonize someplace like Antarctica first, then it's unlikely we'd be successful on Mars, but I'm not advocating the colonization of Mars anyway.
> If you dont want to go, then dont go...
This completely ignores what I said, which was "You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter".
> I guess i see children having to deal with choices their parents made a part of life.
Most responsible parents strive to make the lives of their children better rather than worse. Not always successfully of course, but it's the goal, and going to Mars is predictably worse.
> Would the offer of a trip back to earth for any child born on mars go any way to overcoming your concerns?
It might allay the moral dilemma, but it would increase the concerns about the long-term viability of the colony.
Would you also say "shame on you" to anyone who procreates in a country with a lower standard of living than the wealthier countries on this planet? After all, aren't those parents subjecting their children to a life with more hazards / less opportunities?
Only very few places on Earth are truly that shitty that I would doubt people's sanity for raising children there. Active war zones and areas affected by climate change for example, and to no one's surprise people risk their lives to escape from those. Even in a refugee camp, their children would still lead a life that is magnitudes easier and more pleasurable than on a Mars colony.
> Would you also say "shame on you" to anyone who procreates in a country with a lower standard of living than the wealthier countries on this planet?
I would not hesitate to do so to any parents that leave a perfectly functional society to raise children as subsistence farmers in an smog-choked, irradiated, arid clime. Opting to raise your children under worse conditions than those one grew up under, and has access to is despicable and selfish.
> I feel terror at the idea of all of our species on one planet with no backup.
While I would like to live out the rest of my life as best as I could, and I hope everyone alive and not yet alive gets that chance too, I don't think it would be that great a tragedy if humankind no longer existed. Imagine a world where everyone is hooked up to a simulation that feels as real as real life and everyone gets to live out the best possible life (or even lives) for them. They can have as many (AI) children they want in the simulation and never even know they weren't real. In that world, where no one ever had real children again and humanity naturally died out, would that be a bad thing? Humanity is not providing any benefit except to itself.
That seems pretty bad, yeah.
I care about humanity. I care about myself! You're welcome to sterilize yourself, but i don't think I'll follow.
The scenario you describe doesn't involve pain, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad. An empty, dead universe seems worse to me than one teeming with thought.
The thought experiment wasn't to end sentient life in a glorious generation of virtual hedonism, just humanity. Let the octopi build their ~own VR escapism pods.
I think people really underestimate resources needed to run these VR paradises - it needs mass and energy!
I can fully imagine a totally disconnected VR dwelling civilization that still has hordes or self replicating bots of doom that dismantle planets and stars only to make more memory and compute.
Might very well be more dangerous than a "normal" space faring civilization.
It's really not required to be one-way. Starship is explicitly designed to refuel and return. It's way harder (in rocketry terms) to go from Earth to Mars than the other way around.
Anybody who volunteers for a one-way trip is not sane enough to want to have along.
They might not object to going with equally insane incels, but do I want to spend to send and maintain them? The best that could be said is they wouldn't be here anymore.
So what is the legality? AFAIK, euthanasia and assisted suicide are not legal in a lot of jurisdictions. An actual Mars mission may set a precedent, for, uhm, voluntary short-term underwater scientific missions for geriatrics and hospice patience with challenging pain management situations.
For the law, intent usually matters. If you help someone who has the intention to die, then that's assisted suicide. But people can accept any level of danger they please, as long as they intent to survive the ordeal. The actions might be the same, but the intent is different.
they applied for a training program that will give them a ton of exposure.
I doubt they will leave Earth to go dying on a desert planet with no oxygen, water and Instagram after they eventually gained the "Mars space program" status at home.
> Settling Antarctica isn't as inspiring as colonizing Mars.
> Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring
Yep, exactly.
Mars is fundamentally retro futurism promoted by a bored billionaire who ran out of ideas to impress the news.
edit: for reference. this is how Musk really ignited the public interest around SpaceX, whose goal is primarily reusable rockets, not missions to Mars.
> Uh no, this has been one of his passions for a very long time. It’s the reason SpaceX exists:
How does that contradicts the premise?
SpaceX is primarily (emphasis on is) in the business of reusable rockets.
Musk launched the Mars colonization idea as a self promotional venture.
There are many things Musk said about Mars which are borderline retarded
Starting from the fact that he wants to colonize Mars, I am much more interested in the exploration and I believe it defines human nature much more than simply being a billionaire with a colonialist mindset.
For example
- Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess he believes that his life (and other billionaires like him) must be preserved. I'm not sure about regular folks like most of us...
- “I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me” this is from 2018, it hasn't aged very well
- I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. Why???
- Musk said there's 70 percent chance he’ll get to Mars within his lifetime, with plans to permanently resettle on the Red Planet. No, he won't. We all know he wouldn't do it. He's never gonna be an astronaut, at best he can be a Bezos.
- in 2021 he said he would send humans to Mars by 2026, now it's become 2029 (it's always five years away). He also said that by 2050, there will be 30,000 to 50,000 people who choose a one-way trip to Mars to begin a new life. Everyone's free to form an opinion on this, I simply call them BS.
I’m refuting that he’s “a bored billionaire who ran out of ideas to impress the news”.
He wasn’t a billionaire when he started working on it, and he’s been working on it for 20+ years, so I don’t think he’s bored.
The rest of your complaints boil down to his overly optimistic timeframes, and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
> The rest of your complaints boil down to his overly optimistic timeframes
it boils down to the fact that he's lying. And he probably already knows it.
> and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
Please refrain from interpreting what I say and write.
I do not necessarily disagree with Musk on that, I simply can differentiate from day dreaming and reality.
Mars is a worthy goal as much it is going to live on the top of Mauna Loa.
Or deep down the Marianas Trench.
Musk said it: he would like to go because it's a challenge, like climbing mount Everest.
That's all he cares about.
But lets also be absolutely real: he means send someone to die, he will never be fit to be an astronaut, let alone a space colonist. He's also not stupid enough to go towards certain death after having accumulated an enormous amount of money here on Earth. That he could actually use for the good, but, who cares, buying Twitter is more fun.
It's also honestly quite depressing to listen someone with so much money say that humans are worth only if they waste their enormous wealth on macho challenges.
He literally said that humanity will be much less interesting if we don't become a multiplanetary society, which, assuming it will be possible (I seriously doubt it) will take millenia, if not more. And once it happens, Martians won't be able to come back to Earth, because our gravity would crush their body.
How splendid.
p.s. I'm a fan of retro futurism. I grew up watching movies like Forbidden Planet and reading Asimov.
> People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
Sports! Imagine playing basketball (or football, etc.) on a dome on Mars with less than half the gravity of Earth. People back on Earth would love to watch it. People on Mars would love to play it.
I actually think this would be a great idea...for the Moon. Pro-athletes making millions of dollars per year won't want to spend their whole lives in a desolate, extremely remote desert. The Moon has a much more reasonable commute.
And I think some new sport would need to be invented.
Why would you assume it'd be a dome on the surface of mars, given there's no radiation protection? You'd need to play it in underground rooms or wearing bulky radioactive protection suits.
The case where Mars becomes very interesting is if Earth becomes uninhabitable for some reason, maybe nuclear war or a runaway climate problem or big enough asteroid impact. (I'm not pushing any of that alarmism, but on a long term time scale of 10^6 to 10^10 years, almost anything could happen eventually.)
I really don't buy this argument though. It you want a colony that can survive almost any planetary-scale catastrophe, build a colony at the bottom of the ocean. Kilometres of water will shield you from literally any amount of radiation, the surface of the earth could be a scorched wasteland and you'd be fine. And you'd have access to ocean floor resources as well as limitless resources still on the surface, even if you need to use robots to get them.
And yes I mean sure - colonizing another planet is the ultimate backup plan. But like this article(and many others) have said, it feels like jumping the shark - we can barely keep people alive for a prelonged period of time on a space station, and we are jumping straight to mars outpost from there? Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?
> Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?
Yes. This.
I hope that we piggyback on Mars exploration for building infrastructure on the Moon.
The Moon is a much better target for a first self sustainable colony and also could become economically interesting.
There is nothing on Mars that is economical interesting AFAIK.
Well, its the gate to the Asteroid belt & even has two asteroids full of resources in low orbit! Not to mention having and a (thin) atmosphere and usable gravity, that also opens a lot of opportunities (aerocapture, no micrometeoroids, easier thermal control, etc.).
Why do you need to be on Mars to do that? It's simpler to do everything in orbit, which is the real gate to the asteroid belt. Or directly establish bases in the belt, if we knew how.
Yes, that's also certainly an option. Still, it seems to me that a lot of people still can't really think in terms of space only infra and "a hight tech city, but on Mars/Moon" gets them to a more familiar context.
So I think it makes sense to talk also about surface bases, to get more people on board, even if those are potentially quite inefficient.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think it's actually more difficult to keep an airbubble under the ocean from flooding than it is to keep an air bubble around yourself in thin atmosphere.
Not really - we now have the technological and resource window and we should use it. Wasting this opportunity could otherwise doom us forever if we can't get back to this level of capability again.
We have literally millions of years to prepare for that. Mars isn't a stepping stone, Mars is a stretch goal. A few hundred or even thousand years sooner or later is a rounding error in the kind of timeframe you're talking about.
At the current rate we don't have to wait for the sun to kill us, climate change will do that first. Sure, it might not be an extinction level event but societal collapse requires much less than that. Disruption of the supply chains needed to maintain a Mars colonization program requires even less than that.
> We have literally millions of years to prepare for that.
So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
You can have billions of years of spare time. If you only concern yourself with Earth and never move beyond it, you'll end up just like anemones
> Mars is a stretch goal.
If Mars is a stretch goal, we're fucked. By time of red giant sun Mars will also be toasted.
> climate change will do that first
It probably won't. Devastate and depopulate anything outside arctic circle? Yes.
Nuclear winter has a good chance but even that's not a certainty..
> societal collapse requires much less than that
I don't care about societies I care about totality of humans. All societies exist while their energy/work production can ballance the expanding complexity, or are knocked out of balance by another society.
What do you think where your Mars rockets come from? Who mines the raw materials? Who refines them? Who builds the tech? Who does the assembly? Who does the research to actually make Mars colonization possible?
"Societal collapse" is another way of saying you will not go to space today (or ever). I'm not talking about a society. I'm talking about our entire global economical and political system. Unchecked climate change will wipe out food production and make vast swathes of land uninhabitable.
For someone who seems to focused on human survival and creating self-sustaining life on Mars, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of supply chains (and in case you're unaware: everything has a supply chain, even modern agriculture can't function without entire industries producing its resources and equipment). You'll have a hard time establishing let alone maintaining that on Mars in the next million years if we can't maintain it on Earth in the next hundred.
If you want to ensure human survival, fix climate change first, then we can worry about Mars colonization.
>>So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
We were nothing more than sea anemones once too. In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight. The timeframe is just so unfathomably long thah it's impossible to predict what could happen.
We had common ancestors with sea anemones. We weren't necessary anemones no more than anemones being humans. Parallel evolution led us here and anemones where they are.
> In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight.
That depends on how likely is human-level intelligence to arise, so far only one species arrived there and no other. Then you add expectations of being able to build a spaceship capable of escaping Earth's gravity well.
Hoping some future intelligence can do job we can do now is ultimate form of procrastination.
There are probably at least 20 stereotypes/organizations objectively more dangerous than "crazy MAGA freak with a gun", but congratulations, you've contributed to political divisiveness on a tech-oriented forum!
By the time Earth becomes this uninhabitable, we don't have the resources anymore for a Mars shot, much less a full-scale evacuation or, dare I say, colonization. And Earth would have to turn into a Venus-like hellscape to truly become uninhabitable. Even an iceball Earth is ten times as hospitable to life than Mars.
The idea is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars during a time of prosperity on Earth, not evacuate anyone when things fall apart. The humans already at the colony would continue the existence of our kind.
Please name one other sentient, human-equivalent intelligent species.
Animals are awesome and I am indeed amazed by how smart some of the species are. Not a single one is near human level, though, and won't be for millions of years, if ever - which is not at all guaranteed, it's very much possible that human-level intelligence is evolutionary mistake/accident.
Let me know when you find an animal that can do e.g. lambda calculus and relational algebra like a human can. Since this has nothing to do with anthropocentrism, the same argument will be made - we have to preserve this species on another planet to ensure that intelligence doesn't disappear from the observable universe in case something happens to Earth/its biosphere.
> we have to preserve this species on another planet to ensure that intelligence doesn't disappear from the observable universe in case something happens to Earth/its biosphere
And why would such disappearence be bad? Really, honest question. Is there some inherent greater good to adher to by preserving intelligence, no matter how narrow it's being defined in this thread?
It could just cease existing. I don't see the problem.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much --- the wheel, New York, wars, and so on --- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man --- for precisely the same reasons."
Yeah sure. If they had the ability to learn math but chose not to, it might be true. They don't, though - and I bet there is more than a few dolphins that'd like to do more if they could.
All living creatures have genes, why humans in particular?
Don't dogs and dolphins have offspring?
Aren't they intelligent?
And why not plants, which are the real reason why Earth life forms can exist on the surface of the planet?
But most of all, if you have children, would you really want for them an horrible life on a Mars colony where they would grow up in a labor camp like life and develop such weak bones that they could never live the red planet to visit Earth?
Well, a cat should live just fine on say an O,Oeill cylinder[0] or a surface level Lunar or Martian hab (possibly a large dome or huge cavern). They might have to adapt to the low gravity or the side effect of spin gravity, but the environment should eventually be pretty similar otherwise.
> Well, a cat should live just fine on say an O,Oeill cylinder[0] or a surface level Lunar or Martian hab
sounds pretty sad for a lion or a moose and frankly impossible for a shark or a whale.
Science fiction is nice, but transporting wild animals for months in a spaceship to a desert planet with no water and oxygen?
Forget about it!
Hard sci-fi actually addressed the issue and the outcome is always the same: there are no animals in space, except some domesticated small ones. There are no wild animals in Asimov works, no wild animals in Dick, no wild animals in Lem or Clarke, no animals either in recent works, the Expanse for example.
There are humpback whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home though :)
The myth of the Noah's arc is just a myth, if we'll really move into space because our planet cannot sustain humanity anymore, we'll be the only species to survive. We, some plants we'll use as food and viruses/bacteria living inside us. Maybe we'll have perfected cloning technology and will try to resurrect them if the conditions arise.
But even then, how many people do you think could live in such a dome?
1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
Would we share the little precious oxygen with rats or mosquitos?
How do your scifi stories solve social issues like the breakdown of civilization following events like civil wars caused by events like the Capitol storming?
In other words, isn't the threat to the human species mostly within itself, and finding solutions to those issues much more impactful (and attainable) than dreaming of building such fantasy structures?
Aside from the realization that society wouldn't work differently on Mars either. Look around you. The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth.
"In other words, isn't the threat to the human species mostly within itself, and finding solutions to those issues much more impactful (and attainable) than dreaming of building such fantasy structures?"
Society will break down, once there is no more hope.
Good sci-fi stories, like a colonisation of mars (like in the mars trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinsons) gives people hope, that a different world is possible, therefore (helping) preventing that breakdown in the first place.
This is the reason, why so many otherwise smart people ignored reality and signed up for Mars One for example. It is the dream of having the chance to start over in a clean way.
"The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth. "
And when you have colonists with that altruistic mindset, then yes - the idiot rate of that society has the potential to be significantly lower. This is why people would sign up for one way tickets - exactly to get away from the idiots here on earth.
But yes, a real mars colony is very far away and would likely stay a hellhole for a long time, until either terraforming becomes realistic, or big domes, that protect enough from radiation, but gives people freedom to move in sunlight.
No one wants to go to mars, to become a mole in a bunker, even though this is what the beginning most likely will be. It is the dreams, that attract us Mars enthusiast. I would argue, if there would be more people dreaming, instead of mindlessly watching netflix over and over, there would be a better chance to make those dreams real. Also here on earth.
Ok, but you do care about their well-being. And their well-being will depend on their offspring, etc.
I would not be comfortable knowing, that the children I helped bring into this life are doomed in the long run. That would be pointless to me, there needs to be a way forward, whether it is mars or something else.
1000 generations into the future? People to whose genome you contributed 2^-1000, i.e. almost nothing? Who know neither your name nor care about it? Like you don't really care about your ancestors 1000 generations ago? Or 100,000 generations?
I don't get it.
Basically: Let's face it, when we're dead then we're dead. That's it. You have your life. Trying to achieve some sort of immortality or higher purpose by creating offspring is just as futile as praying or paying some quack to help you with afterlife matters.
"Basically: Let's face it, when we're dead then we're dead. That's it."
If you feel that unconnected, than yes, that was it to you.
And sure, I will be dead one day, too and my name forgotten. That doesn't mean, my life was without purpose nor significance, because I do feel part of something bigger. Progress of humankind and the spreading of life and consciousness in general.
I don't know the names of my ancestors, but they are of significance, as without them, I wouldn't exist and without me, neither would the 1000. generation after me.
For the colony to be truly self-sustaining it would have to replicate the entire industrial supply chain for its technological and material needs. Without it, the colony and its infrastructure would slowly crumble apart. In such a situation, we could always go back to basic agriculture and hunter-gatherer lifestyles on Earth. Most humans would perish, but the species would survive. That option does not exist on Mars before self-sustaining terraforming.
Putting boots on Mars doesn't help solving the above problem. As TA explains, the first humans would be mostly busy surviving and would be dependent on permanent resupply from Earth. It's a pure prestige project.
The effort would be better spent on engineering a streamlined and automated version of our technological base that can be deployed with minimal effort and supervision to set up a colony or a mining base. Once we have achieved that, we are on the way to become a post-scarcity civilization and can easily push much farther than Mars.
Any of those leaves Earth thousands of times more habitable than Mars. They even leave Antarctica and the sea floor thousands of times more habitable than Mars.
What plants would resist the massive amounts of radiation, or perchlorate soil?
Note that we don't even know if any plants today would actually be able to fruit in the low gravity environment (nevermind if any animal would be able to successfully procreate).
You would generate a magnetic field at the center of the colony to deflect solar energetic particles and galactic cosmic rays. The colony would produce compost with biowaste and use that for soil. There are various ways to remove perchlorates from soil. One avenue of research is to find an optimal mix of martian soil and compost to allow plants to thrive.
The points you are making are excellent but I believe solvable. Also we do know if plants can fruit in space. We've already grown tomatoes in space and they are fruits of the tomato plant. And that was zero G.
You are going to run into energy generations REALLY fast trying to generate such a massive magnetic shield, Not to mention all the other massive energy needs for mining and processing material.
Also nobody has yet produced a self-sustained biodome.
I'm not really sure farming will work on Mars with sunlight alone given the distance from the Sun. Still, you have gravity and reasonable day length and even some atmospheres, not to mention a lot of mass available - that already makes a lot of things easier.
And why would anybody care? Will you or anybody who will know about you be alive at that point?
There are millions if not billions alive today who are suffering from war, famine, dictatorships. And climate change is just making that worse. It would be more reasonable to help those souls instead.
mankind is heading for space ~ this is unstoppable. colonising mars makes a lot of sense as its the only other semi habitable planet in the solar system. short term ~ there might be some interesting mineable ores on mars. medium term ~ lower gravity makes it easier to launch ships into space / build a space elevator. long term terraformation of mars is a possibility.
It's not unstoppable at all. It's 54 years since we landed on the Moon and we're only just getting around to considering another visit. The ISS, amazing as it is, is a glorified shed in orbit. We're still getting into orbit by throwing giant fireworks at the sky. (Is there a better way? Possibly. We really haven't spent a lot of time looking for it.)
But none of that is the problem. The real problem is that we haven't learned how to do reality-based politics and economics, and possibly never will. We're so bad at this we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.
The idea that we might somehow get better at planning rationally by moving to a planet that has none of the above is really quite strange.
> we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.
Haven’t we? I guess it could always be more stable. Where is the line for you? Is there any point where you’d consider this problem solved?
Besides, if things feel unstable to you, why would that be an argument against attempting to set up a secondary living environment on another planet?
If we had stability issues in our primary datacenter, would this be a reason not to create an offsite backup?
I think that what happened since the industrial revolution is pretty much a definition of unstable. We are living a mass extinction right now (not even caused by global warming, which will just make it worse).
Since the industrial revolution, we have become excellent as destroying life. Not the opposite.
Citation needed, because real-world experience shows otherwise.
Mankind is heading for a larger capacity for information processing, this is the unstoppable arc of history. Mars or space doesn't figure into this equation at all.
The only unstoppable thing is human imagination. Unfortunately physically and economically it's not worth it to pursue this dream unless we generate unlimited power.
> > mankind is heading for space ~ this is unstoppable. colonising mars makes a lot of sense
Yes, it makes a lot of sense for mankind, no doubt about it. Does it make sense for men and women though?
It's easy to say mankind. Flight makes a lot of sense for mankind too, but less than a third of the global population has ever been on a plane because for the remaining 2/3 it doesn't make sense to do so given their economic constraints.
> We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on.
The reason why is because you will learn a lot more by doing that stuff. The things that are going to doom a first Mars colony attempt isn't necessarily something like "we don't know how to grow plants on Mars" but "we don't know how to build a proper door for the Martian environment" (inspiration for this is taken from https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo, which has appeared on HN recently). If your ultimate goal is to build a self-sustaining interplanetary colony, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that maybe we should start by trying to figure out how to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere inhospitable first because it's never been done before, and all previous attempts have failed.
I love that blog! I think that door post is a perfect example of why we won't learn anything useful on Antarctica:
> Most (but not all!) doors open inward. There is a huge amount of snowdrift during the winter, and if the doors opened outward, they would be impossible to open without a lot of digging. This could be a life safety issue if the building is occupied.
On a Mars there is no "inward" like there is in McMurdo because swinging doors only work between sections with equalized pressure. Going outside requires an airlock that slowly normalizes the pressure to avoid shooting the colonist out the door with a blast of air. Going between sections requires doors that can slam shut in either direction to seal away damaged sections in case of emergency, like the sliding doors in almost every scifi movie/series/book - which we still haven't tested in the real world because there's nowhere to test that kind of pressure differential on Earth and our space station technology is still based on Cold War submarine hatches.
I'd expect such vacuum chambers to be relatively easy to build. The hull only has to hold one atmosphere of pressure difference, and it's pushing inward, so existing pressure tanks should be more than adequate with at most slight modifications. Generating the vacuum is mostly handling the sheer volume of air to evacuate because the quality of vacuum is irrelevant -- leaving 1% of air is as good as 0.001% of air when you are pushing doors against that pressure.
I mean in the context of actual use by humans in the day to day operation of a colony or other off-world facility.
There's obviously plenty of large vacuum chambers than can fit a door mechanism or even a small test room (the ones JPL uses to test spacecraft thermals was the first to come to mind for me, didn't know about the Plum Brook facility).
There are a couple (…um yeah…) of things different between Moon and Mars: lunar day is about 2 weeks long, which basically rules out solar-only colonies and lack of any sort of atmosphere makes radiation a significantly worse problem (not that it isn’t one on Mars…)
The Martian atmosphere provides almost no protection against the heavy ion component of galactic cosmic radiation, which is the dangerous stuff. The Moon more than makes up for its lack of atmosphere by being deeper inside the Sun's magnetic field than Mars.
The lack of atmosphere also means a risk of micrometeoroid strike on the surface & makes thermal control harder.
But for some industries this could be a benefit & even if the lunar dust is abrasive, at least it won't move itself that much without wind (though there could apparently be some electrostatic effects in play sometimes).
Also can't do aerobraking/aerocapture, but there is Earth next door for that.
> […] how to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere inhospitable first because it's never been done before, and all previous attempts have failed.
Hmm? It’s been done lots of times: it’s just that once people start living somewhere, we stop calling it “inhospitable.” But c.f. the Inuit, who’ve been living above the Arctic Circle for more than a thousand years.
But we... have already mostly done that in Antarctica already. There's not a lot more to learn by moving a few thousand more people to a particularly unpleasant place to live.
That's not even remotely true. For one, we have barely scratched the surface of the psychology of living in an Antarctic outpost, and already what we've seen doesn't suggest long-term viability (decades instead of months). Perhaps with more people, the problems could go away, perhaps not - there's no reason to find out on Mars.
No, but there's also little we gain from trying to make it so. We know how to operate all sorts of things in Antarctica, and anything else we bring there just... needs to be operated pretty much the same way.
That's the wrong approach, though. "We can't" is the default state. The thing we need to find out is how to make it so. The goal is to be able to say, after all the finding out, that yes, we can now.
> We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization
We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible. People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate. Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts, but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
People said just over 100 years ago that we'd never be able to fly, yet here we are. We're welll aware of the issues but there are solutions. I mean, we happen to exist in space, so it's not impossible, is it.
I'm not so sure - I have this slab of crystal I can use to talk talk to people on the other side of the Earth, see things from above and make things do my bidding without touching them. And apparently it can transfer ideas in text form to your head.
Also looks like I can fly if I book the right tickets.
They could be though, at current tech level. It's the infrastructure that doesn't support it. Smartphones are as close as we got, but they reveal couple unfortunate things about the real world, such as:
- In a competitive market economy, everything ends up sucking as much as it can get away with;
- Magic wands would offer individuals more autonomy than the market, and possibly civilization, can sustain without self-destructing.
> wizards don't exist
Within constraints of the above, sure they do.
> Magic still doesn't exist.
_joel already provided the obligatory quote, but to expand on it, most of the magic in fantasy literature could be made possible with current technology, but would require supporting infrastructure to avoid breaking rules of thermodynamics. If you want to go less conspicuous, we'll have to wait for molecular nanotech ;).
> We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible.
Not with that attitude. ISS would like to differ, anyway.
> People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate.
Yes. But that's not because space is evil or haunted or a domain gods reserve themselves. It's because of weightlessness. We know how to solve this problem - it's precisely the kind of things GP is talking about: an engineering challenge we know how to solve on paper, but need to actually do it, to a) learn all the little peculiarities that always come with something new, b) actually have this working on some piece of space infrastructure.
> Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
There's lots of stuff in space. Within the distances past manned missions already covered, there's way more of everything than on Earth itself - except life. That one is on us to get there, you can view this as a natural process of life evolving to settle other niches :). And while space itself by volume is mostly empty, the reason you're talking about is just gravity.
> People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts
On the contrary, people treat these as equivalent and considering them just fantasy entertainment, instead of realizing that most aspects of sci-fi are somewhere between artist's concept (soft end of sci-fi) to engineering blueprints (hard end of sci-fi, which often literally describes real engineering blueprints in prose!).
People used to take inspiration from softish sci-fi; for all my love of Star Trek, it's as soft a sci-fi as it gets, and it managed to drive a couple generations of people to STEM, and predict, inspire and/or pre-market plenty of new technologies. Would iPhone and iPad become so popular so quickly if not for a large part of US population, and Western culture itself, having been familiar with those concepts for two decades already, thanks to Star Trek: TNG? You got a whole generation there, growing to await stationary and portable touchscreens.
Point being, people used to look up to sci-fi ideas, and stuff happened. Now they don't, stuff doesn't happen, and even sci-fi gets sadder and more boring year by year. It's like the whole culture advanced from energetic young adult stage into a depressed, bored middle-aged suburbanite stage.
(Also, a lot of Middle Earth / Harry Potter stuff is doable too, you just need a sprinkle of molecular nanotechnology and a post-scarcity economy where people can afford spending an order of magnitude more effort on showing off than on utility aspects.)
> but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
There's an abundance of evidence that human body is not capable of existing for years anywhere but on specific terrain in a small latitude band on the planet. Everywhere else, we exist thanks to technology. That's literally the story of humanity: inhabiting the previously inhospitable areas by building tools we need to survive. Space is no different.
Hate to break it to you, but ISS is not technically in space. There is still some athmosphere, a ton of gravity (comparing to "actual space"), and plenty of protection from the earth's magnetic shield.
Its actually quite the equivalent of "lets try this in antartica first".
> Hate to break it to you, but ISS is not technically in space. There is still some athmosphere
There's still some atmosphere quite high away from Earth, the transition from "not space" to "space" is asymptotic.
> a ton of gravity (comparing to "actual space")
It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
> plenty of protection from the earth's magnetic shield
Fair enough.
But I reserve my right to hold ISS as being in space, to counterbalance the parent's claim: "We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible.".
>There's still some atmosphere quite high away from Earth, the transition from "not space" to "space" is asymptotic.
Not saying otherwise; however, 400km above surface and eg. Stationary orbit are quite different things.
>It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
Actually, we don't know that. From a perception perspective, you are right;From a biological perspective, we actually don't know if there is any biological process that may be affected by the free-falling effect, specifically.
>"We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible."
The op's assertion seems to be right - most of what we know to date seems to confirm it. Maybe "not possible" is a strong statement, but certainly not feasible, and that is not going to change anytime soon.
You need a big centrifuge where you can live or at least sleep and do physical exercises. It should eliminate the health problems caused by low gravity.
Near-Earth asteroid mining? Is there anything close and worth mining? AFAIK most asteroids, including those containing valuable heavy metals like platinum, are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter orbits. Which is significantly farther than Mars.
I more easily believe in mining rocks on Moon as cool souvenirs. (And as a first step in developing the technology.)
Just as with scientific research, asteroid mining will be the domain of robots. There's no economic case for sending humans for that job, and AI is improving year on year. So sadly no Belters, whatever the value of mining space rocks.
Even a completely useless piece of rock is already a piece of rock in space. It can be used for shielding, counterweight for a spinning habitat, melted into simple shapes to support your habitats, etc.. You can even use it for propulsion - fling it away with a mass driver or vaporize with an arc-jet through a thruster nozzle!
The obvious answer to "why" is that you can use Antarctica as a low(er) cost, low risk, practice run. Similar to space tech of the 60s, the tech developed this way could have a big impact on many areas of life. And yes, it won't solve everything, nor give us a second planet.
Raising radiation levels is not a problem here on earth at all. Not sure about gravity and health effects, maybe it can be simulated with some amphetamine + sedative cocktails.
Hard thing in living on Mars is not the cold, it is the lack of oxygen or easily accessible water. All of these are abundant on Antarctica so it is not really a practice run.
I see little point in exploring this on Antarctica which is why I believe no one really is entertaining idea of this type of test run on Antarctica.
Becoming a multi-planetary species is a fantasy which only seems plausible when you’ve watched too much science fiction, and don’t have a good understanding of the physical, biological, technological, economic, and political challenges that prevent it from happening.
we haven't solved vertical farming yet. it's not energy efficient. i imagine its even harder/more expensive in Antarctica to keep the plants warm enough.
cheap and clean energy production is where we should spend our money.
Plus, the comparison shouldn't be "open farmland vs. PV+LED", it should be "for the resources cost of PV+LED, what can you build in the way of polytunnel or greenhouse?"
It would provide proof of concept and troubleshooting for many technologies which Mars colony proponents seem to think already exist and they can just buy or slap together on short notice. If nobody can manage a self-sufficient biodome on Earth, there is basically no chance of it working in a much harsher and demanding environment.
Mars is a harsher environment than actual empty space, you can't just toss a space capsule onto the surface and expect to live in it for the next 2 years even if you had the food and power and extra parts.
Trying to escape the confines of Earth in our fragile meat-bag bodies is probably 100x less practical than escaping the confines of our fragile meat-bag bodies.
We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people.
Exactly this. It has been tried many times and every time the project ultimately fails. There have been many greenhouse / biodome projects that tried to simulate living on mars or the moon and they always go sideways. These projects also assume everyone involved has passed a physical and mental health screening. Society as a whole does not align with such tests. One bad neighbor will cause an atmospheric loss and take everyone out.
If we are going to spend a lot of money in space ventures I would rather see that effort put into something that could save life on Earth from real risks such as getting really good at mining asteroids and controlling the trajectory of asteroids and even that should be 99%+ robots. Humans should be hanging out in near-by spacecraft to have a low latency control and monitoring of the robots and have smaller rescue ships that could be used to extract people from the control spacecraft when things ultimately go wrong. Rescue and maintenance drones should also be robots.
Mars should be a distant stretch goal when our technology advances to the point where we can transform the land and the atmosphere in one or two human lifetimes. We are obviously not there yet as we can not even clean up our own atmosphere here on Earth.
Has anyone come out and said "we should deliberately avoid sticking a colony in Antarctica or the Sahara or on the moon, and going to Mars with no trial runs is a great idea"?
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.
> Has anyone come out and said "we should deliberately avoid sticking a colony in Antarctica or the Sahara or on the moon, and going to Mars with no trial runs is a great idea"?
Yes, at least with their wallets (and quite possibly worth words too, though I can't be bothered to trawl through interviews to see if anyone asked).
As the article mentions, NASA talks about landing on Mars in the next 2 decades. Elon Musk has suggested even shorter timelines. Who else is working on Mars missions? It's not unreasonable for Maciej to limit his criticism to the foolish Mars missions that people are actually spending money on, not the wise ones we wish existed.
Just to be pedantic, Mars is absolutely covered in oxygen. It's the most abundant element in the atmosphere and second most abundant in the crust. It's part of the reason they planet is red.
To some extent that is true, but it's important to note that it's a sliver of Oxygen in absolute terms. Thee is more CO2 in Earth's atmosphere (by weight) than all of the gases in the Martian atmosphere combined, if I remember correctly.
What about the very remote villages in the colder/harsher parts of the world? Ie the disputed islands north of Japan, the easternmost parts of Russia, the vast northern parts of Canada, etc? Figuring a way to make those worthy/capable of growth to cities seems still lower lying fruit than Antarctica.
Basically, an Earth that’s capable of colonizing the moon or mars is probably already capable of further settling those conditions on Earth. That stage of humanity probably needs to have a stronger sense of community than current, too.
"Can we do it" is only part of the question, the other is "what's to gain compared to other options?". I'm not sure I know the answer for Mars, but am pretty sure properly colonizing Antarctica compared to more densly settling Siberia or Alaska has no advantages. Settling Mars might though. Besides research, there might be good mining or advantages from let gravity. These might be better though on the moon or astroids.
Agreed 100%. The worst places on Earth are still better than the best places on Mars because you have free gravity and oxygen here. Even for a self-sustaining colony, it would be nice for a dome-crack to not be immediately fatal.
Once we have thriving biodomes in the Outback, then talk to me about trying to do it on Mars.
Because learning how to do it in the inhospitable environment of Mars will teach us lots about how to do it better on Earth.
> We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
> Because learning how to do it in the inhospitable environment of Mars will teach us lots about how to do it better on Earth.
That seems backwards. I would switch Mars and Earth in this sentence. Doesn't it make more sense to take the easier steps first, which will prepare us for eventually taking bigger steps?
I'm not against Mars exploration. There's no reason we couldn't do both: keep sending probes to Mars, maybe even humans in a decade or two, but make a Lunar base the priority. Then apply the lessons we learn on the Moon to establishing a colony on Mars. And literally use the Moon as a springboard for Mars missions.
I think this is pretty much universally agreed to be the sequence of events. A lot of discussion about this seems to imply we'll just proceed with some Mars colonization mission before we understand the challenges it poses, and before we're certain we can tackle them.
BTW, that JFK quote seems out of place in this context, considering it was made at the height of the space race. The speech was politically motivated, and was meant to inspire a nation to not "lose" the race, while instilling fear in the enemy.
We will inevitably learn more about adapting our environment to our needs, as well as what our needs are when we are challenged by life on Mars, similarly to when we were challenged by life in LEO, on the ISS.
I do not know a space equivalent, but in medicine, treating severe diseases teaches us a lot more about treating their mild cases than the mild cases alone could.
As for space races and political motivations, if you look at China's advancements in space recently, both in terms of launches per year and the pace of their construction capability in LEO, it is clear that we are in a race. On both counts (launch count and construction in LEO, demonstrated by Tiangong SS missions), the US is losing it. There indeed does not seem to be political motivation to do much about it.
To clarify, I meant that we would inevitably do so when we live on Mars. But good observation - it is certainly not inevitable overall at this point in time.
Sure, but "given that we succeed, we will inevitably know more than today" is pretty tautological. I could say the same for winning a chess match against Magnus Carlsen.
If success is a premise, and learning is the conclusion, then it is not tautological. But yes, while not the only possible, it is a very likely result.
And tautologically or not, it is important to recognize the value of how much we could learn from a Mars colony that can't be learned on Earth, in LEO, or on the Moon.
I don't really think there is one true best sequence of events. For example:
1) Luna first, send stuff to space with mass drivers.
2) Gravity well is lava, mine asteroids (near Earth, then Belt) and build massive space colonies to your liking (O'Neill Cylinders, etc.).
3) Lets build balloon cities in the atmosphere of Venus!
4) Settle (likely after doing nr. 2) the ocean worlds of the kerbal-scale Solar System analog around Jupiter.
But most likely, some mix of those will likely happen, with different organizations having different needs and aims (eq. massive free flying factories and scientific instruments vs self sustained city building).
Can you cite any historical examples of this phenomenon? It sounds intuitively correct, but my understanding of the history of technology is that the vast majority of progress was made by finding increasingly effective solutions for increasingly difficult problems, not by "jumping in the deep end".
Based on their Earth->MArs trajectory, they might have to stay for possibly a terrestrial year or more, waiting for the next launch window to Earth.
Provided you want to get the crew back to Earth of course, if not then "don't need to be there more than few hours" takes a whole another meaning & makes mass optimization of the mission much easier! ;-)
What about preserving what we have left and trying to not expand humanity footprint on the planet? Barren landscape of Mars is unremarkable compared to Earth's ecosystem which we still mostly don't understand but keep ravaging nonetheless
the "eggs in one basket" argument only makes sense if Martian colonization is itself just step 1 on a list of dozens of similarly-difficult leaps to get us to terraforming and interstellar colonization.
It's a very exciting, multi-generational project to think about. Though frankly I think we're going to get AGI + brain/computer interfaces + cloud mind uploads before we get martian terraforming; and dropping the bag-of-meat related requirements would make extraterrestrial colonization much easier.
It's not irrelevant. Virtually the only conceivable thing that could make Earth even temporarily as inhospitable to humans as Mars is today is an impact close to the one that created the Moon. For any other scenario, some places on Earth will continue to be more inhabitable to humans even during the event itself than Mars is today.
So, having humans on Earth + Mars at best only marginally improved the chances of humanity surviving long term than only having humans on Earth, by a tiny amount.
Mars is more habitable than Earth would be during an extinction event. After the event the wiped out Earth would certainly be more habitable, but if there aren't any humans available to repopulate...
There is a broad range of possible human extinction events, e.g. asteroid impact, large-scale volcanism, viral epidemic, nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, ecological collapse, and autonomous robots [1].
Humans actively monitor and defend against each threat. In the U.S., NASA is committed to detecting asteroids, and recently successfully altered the course of one [2].
I believe we are most powerful to overcome extinction events as a united species on the planet we’ve evolved to live on over billions of years.
Depends on what would kill everyone on earth. More importantly, if everyone on earth dies having a 100,000 people living on Mars isn’t enough they also all die.
Are we sure that getting to 100,000 self-sufficient humans on Mars will take less time than getting to 100,000 self-sufficient humans on the Moon? The conditions on the Moon are harsher, but our ability to move people and supplies there seems much greater. And what exactly is the extinction event that would threaten both Earth and a self-sufficient Moon colony?
Self-sufficient seems like quite the bar though. I guess they wouldn't need fancy electronics etc, but I imagine they'd still need non-trivial metallurgy, chemistry and similar in order to survive.
That is, they can bring a lot of fancy stuff with them, but to be self-sufficient they'd have to be able to maintain, repair and ideally rebuild what they need indefinitely without resupplies from Earth.
I’d say 100k self-sufficient humans isn’t enough to support postindustrial civilization even on Earth without a hazardous scenario. Imagine aliens extracting all cities and all signs of technology except one town and dropping off some automated libraries, datacenters, labs, factories and other important equipment in a working condition around there. These 100k people wouldn’t be able to maintain it and pass it down the next generation. On anything non-Earth they would go extinct in one lifetime.
this is a pretty fascinating question. Yes, they definitely wouldn't be able to create say Intel fabs, since the "market" cannot sustain it. But, being a very adaptable species, could they gracefully scale down the tech to keep making what's needed for survival? It's similar to time travel, if you got dropped into the middle ages, would your knowledge be useful to them? here it's like the reverse: having seen everything in an advanced civilization, can a resource-constrained team pick out and keep the most important core?
Not for long I guess. Maintaining advanced hardware is hard because it sits on top of a technological pyramid, and the next layer is also advanced hardware, which sits on top of a… you get the idea.
I think that it could be possible for them to focus on few important/key paths, in theory. But, unless they research and prepare for exactly that scenario and chances that it works would be strictly in their favor and they all would work hard, learn hard and motivate themselves through their entire life, I don’t see how it could work. Not to mention political, social, religious risks with the next generation.
I’m not 100% sure ofc, that would be no doubt an interesting “experiment”.
If we ever get to the point where thousands of people are moving to Mars, thousands will also be moving to the Moon, and vice versa. I don't see it as being just one or the other because the problems that need to be solved are approximately the same, and the cost of shuttling people and supplies is far from the hardest.
It is because no one would invest same as much money to do a pointless habitat challenge. Given same funding as used in Mars plan, of course we can manage to habitat in Antarctica.
The primary reason Antarctica is uninhabited is because it’s effectively against international law. Unfortunately there are similar laws affecting outer space.
There’s no great point to having 20k in Antarctica. Becoming a multiplanet species does have a great long term point, but it’s more of a thousand year vision than a five year vision. Many of Mars’ shortcomings can be improved upon but they’re slow and take a lot of scale. Open bodies of water and a breathable atmosphere are entirely possible and more of an challenge of developing the scale than solving a scientific obstacle.
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t stand in the way of people who want to try.
