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.
