Why Not Mars

https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

by maxerickson • 4 years ago

815 1069 4 years ago

taneq• 4 years ago

I feel like this should be titled “why NASA should not go to Mars.” I would be astounded if SpaceX makes it there within 5 years of their original timeline, but even more astounded if they don’t have a crew within 10 years. I don’t see procrastinating with bone density studies etc. either - they treat it as a commercial venture, not an exercise in basic research.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

You need to go do the bone density (and radiation) studies to know if your passengers are going to die on Mars. This stuff isn't optional.

whatshisface6• 4 years ago

There are already a lot of those studies, and they all say that radiation is very bad for you and that you need gravity to maintain a healthy bone density.

djmips• 4 years ago

"life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease disease that spread across the early solar system" - wow what a way with words!

bottlepalm3• 4 years ago

Technology is inversely proportional to resources. If we can't get to Mars yet, that just means our technology isn't there. We need to work on that.

Just like working a few days at a job can afford may people a magical global communications device. That's technology so advanced it requires little resources to obtain. Mars can be the same, our tech just isn't there yet.

wilsonnb37• 4 years ago

The article spends quite a bit of space discussing why building the tech we do need to get to mars is a waste of time and resources.

Summed up by this line quite nicely:

“ Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it”

chii6• 4 years ago

Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator

and yet, humanity also does not "need" laser stablized, automatic orbital docking (, except it was built just for the ISS so that docking modules can be done).

However, the fact that you can now have safe, cheap and effective laser eye surgery is a result of such technology being explored for one purpose, repurposed for new applications.

We did not need to spend the research dollars to figure out safety grooving to prevent hydroplaning, except that it was needed for the space shuttle landing (it went too fast otherwise). Now this research is applied to a lot of roads, as well as airports, and prevents skidding that would've otherwise happened: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/40-years-of-nasa-spinoff/sa...

So the idea that "humans does not need blah" is not correct, because you don't know what humans need.

bottlepalm3• 4 years ago

Maybe AI will result in technology that will allow us to make that shit dehydrator for $100,000 instead of a billion.

That's what I mean when I say as technology increases, resources required decreases.

piyh• 4 years ago

Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

Without going full "We choose to go to the Moon", I disagree with these points. It would be fun. It would open a new era of spaceflight. It is no more destructive or wasteful than most anything else humanity decides to put resources into.

Mars is a whetstone against which humanity sharpens itself against.

kevinmchugh4• 4 years ago

Humanity has not demonstrated the ability to effectively sanitize spacecraft. The risk of intentionally bringing life to Mars is that we tromp all over evidence of extraterrestrial love.

The absolute most valuable science to be done on Mars is to determine how unique Earth is.

whatshisface6• 4 years ago

It would be a bummer if the sterilization techniques used on the unmanned landers hadn't worked, but if they didn't, then life is already multi-planetary.

brightball• 4 years ago

Something I’ve wondered…why not colonize the moon first? Why straight to Mars?

Seems like a moon base would make some sense, right?

stevenwoo• 4 years ago

This essay argues that a moon base is required to study the long term effects of low gravity and greater radiation exposure or test such systems to ameliorate those problems in situ before designing the systems for deploying on Mars, the space station is not enough for this and close to the end of life.

mortehu• 4 years ago

The Artemis program, which launched its first test flight recently, indeed intends to start with a moon base.

https://youtu.be/_T8cn2J13-4

TchoBeer7• 4 years ago

The moon has no atmosphere and is much less dense. Mars has some advantages which can potentially make it self sustaining in the long future.

kevinmchugh4• 4 years ago

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?

jeffparsons2• 4 years ago

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.

cmdli3• 4 years ago

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.

adastra223• 4 years ago

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.

fathyb4• 4 years ago

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?

fennecfoxy3• 4 years ago

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.

jackmott2• 4 years ago

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.

rockemsockem• 4 years ago

I mean, that's pretty easy, it's gotta be Buzz Aldrin.

skissane4• 4 years ago

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

idlewords21• 4 years ago

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.

whatshisface6• 4 years ago

Sample return missions would also be robotic.

tlb• 4 years ago

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.

thatjoeoverthr• 4 years ago

Empirically, congress has sent nobody to Mars but funds repeated successful probes.

ceejayoz3• 4 years ago

Each of those probes has been justified in part via “this will help get humans to Mars” to earn approval.

gary_02• 4 years ago

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?

eks391• 4 years ago

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

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

The Apollo mission that reached the moon was preceded by very rational steps to get there, and get back.

Prematurely shooting for Mars could literally bankrupt resources on Earth and still have worse odds than a more methodical approach.

8note4• 4 years ago

this seems likely to be ignorant of all the small steps needed in everything everywhere, to romanticize people that marketed themselves well.

runarberg3• 4 years ago

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.

cphajduk2• 4 years ago

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.

beepbooptheory• 4 years ago

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.

fsh2• 4 years ago

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.

inamberclad2• 4 years ago

Yes, but this is NASA's flagship mission. It's inevitably going to get special treatment from congress.

ivoras• 4 years ago

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.

kwhitefoot2• 4 years ago

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.

Edison and DC lost that battle.

tmsh• 4 years ago

+1.

"...not because it's easy, but because it's hard."

credit_guy• 4 years ago

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.

Dudelander3• 4 years ago

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?

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

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.

anthonypasq• 4 years ago

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.

kraig911• 4 years ago

Great article. I wish it would answer this question though. If we don't someone else will. How do we prevent that. Getting to Mars seems to be a political goal not a scientific one (for most). If the USA doesn't then China will.

whatshisface6• 4 years ago

China doesn't seem to go for the big ticket science projects, although anything can change in the future.

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

China is doing fine with big science projects.

https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-spacraft-suc...

https://www.space.com/china-expanding-optical-telescope-desi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

idlewords21• 4 years ago

Having China divert hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades to a Mars mission would be a real win for the US and Taiwan.

ethbr02• 4 years ago

Betting against other countries' investments in exploration hasn't historically worked out well.

yongjik2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure about that. America similarly diverted billions of dollars to land men on the Moon. It barely made a dent in the balance of the Cold War.

edflsafoiewq• 4 years ago

We must not allow a Martian gap!

chii6• 4 years ago

How do we prevent that.

why does that need to be prevented?

linuxftw• 4 years ago

Nobody is going to Mars. Not now, not in 100 years. Unless we invent some kind of teleportation or other sci-fi way of traveling there, it's just never going to take place.

Mars has essentially no energy sources. Everything people need to survive, and return, will have to be pre-stationed there.

If the Chinese all want to move to Mars, fine by me. I don't think it's a solid plan, but they're welcome to try.

BizarreByte• 4 years ago

If we don't someone else will. How do we prevent that.

This thought process alone shows me that we probably aren't even mature enough as a species to go to Mars. A mission like that will likely need global cooperation, effectively dooming it.

If China somehow went to Mars on their own they deserve whatever benefit they were to get from and we shouldn't aim to prevent space exploration because of who does it.

golemotron• 4 years ago

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon.

The thing that troubles me about these takes is the "we." There is no singular "we" in the world. Using the singular "we" deceives people into thinking that it is binary choice. In actuality, there are potentially many nations, many companies, and many people who can pursue resources and make a choice without impacting others.

It has no more impact on you than your neighbor deciding whether to buy an insurance policy or not.

Humanity is not a single mass of protoplasm, thank goodness.

wilsonnb37• 4 years ago

It is pretty clear to me that “we” in the article refers to NASA/the US Government rather than humanity.

komali25• 4 years ago

That still doesn't make sense - as the author writes, such a project would require several miracles to survive the multiple election cycles it would go through. Why do people consider themselves a "we" with their government when said government regularly goes against the polled preferences of its citizens. Clear examples in the USA include the fact that weed is criminalized in its country and a huge swath of its citizens are imprisoned for marijuana crimes despite the nation's citizenry as a whole not wanting this. Another example includes the citizens preference for a guaranteed right to women's healthcare, and the government's failure to enshrine this right, or in some local cases, to actively outlaw women's healthcare.

So when people use "we" and include their government despite not living in democracies, I get confused.

alehlopeh• 4 years ago

And yet every single discussion about space exploration (including this one) is full of people espousing the hypothetical “we, humanity” as though it were a singular entity capable of making decisions. This kind of fanciful thinking is a reliable tell that a person belongs to the “religion” mentioned in TFA.

hirundo2• 4 years ago

There is no goal our species can undertake that is more important than getting some of our eggs the heck out of this way too fragile basket of a planet. Learning to survive on Mars is one of the most practical ways to approach that goal. Mars is just a little less horrible than the other reachable potential incubators.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question.

hirundo2• 4 years ago

The value of our survival is entirely subjective. But if you value it up to the point of Earth's destruction, why would you stop valuing it afterwards?

dfee• 4 years ago

We found the nihilist. Thus, short of rehashing those debates, which is what you seem to desire, there is nothing here for you.

climech• 4 years ago

Apologies if I'm reading this wrong, but between this question, and casually comparing a possible origin of life on Earth to a venereal disease, it just all strikes me as very misanthropic.

My answer would be -- it's important if we deem it important, whether that's rational or not. If we start from the premise that life is good, that humans in particular are the most interesting thing out there as far as we can see, then it isn't totally bizarre that we should wish for the show to continue, extend it as far as we can. In that view, being bound to the fate of our home planet seems like an arbitrary restriction.

root_axis2• 4 years ago

getting some of our eggs the heck out of this way to fragile basket of a planet

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. If we cannot survive on earth it's impossible for us to survive anywhere else.

chii6• 4 years ago

If we cannot survive on earth it's impossible for us to survive anywhere else.

sure, this is the case right now, but by increasing technology (through research and development), making space (or mars, or moon) habitable is an achievable goal.

May be not in the short to medium term (as all of these habitats would require materials from earth to sustain), but in the long term, it should be possible to produce all required materials for survival and be independent from supplies send from earth.

rqtwteye3• 4 years ago

There are no foreseeable risks to Earth unless we fuck it up ourselves. Going to Mars right now would cost an insane amount of money we would better spend on Earth. And Mars is way more hostile to life than even a messed up Earth would be.

Tepix3• 4 years ago

What do you mean? There are several such risks, including the ongoing mass extinction event.

issa6• 4 years ago

Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity. Better than just about everything else we could do. To accomplish it, we will solve many problems along the way. I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.

VHRanger• 4 years ago

Better than just about everything else we could do

[citation needed]

palata10• 4 years ago

cough famine cough cough war cough poverty cough cough mass extinction

the_only_law• 4 years ago

I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.

Pfft these will just end up one and the same.

whatshisface6• 4 years ago

I do not know what weapons world war three will be fought with, but the one after it will be fought with water purifiers and air filters.

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

Just wait until we discover lost Martian technology.

fathyb4• 4 years ago

Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity.

I think you're underestimating how great Earth is, how awful other planets are, and how big the solar system is.

I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.

Colonization generally does not rhyme with peace. It's very likely there will be conflicts over territories. Space exploration and military production always have been tightly coupled. Where I live the space industry is dominated by "Airbus Defence and Space".

kiratp6• 4 years ago

We will continue to kill each other at a similar rate regardless of the outcome of colonization. At least, unlike “Manifest Destiny”, there are no innocent sentient beings we will be attacking.

issa6• 4 years ago

I am definitely not underestimating how great Earth is. But we will learn how to make other places comfortable too. The trick is to remember that technology will improve. Living in a tin can on Mars would suck. Living on Mars with fusion power, biological enhancement, nanobot construction, etc, etc, etc is an entirely different story. Personally, I'd love to live on a ship. I'm aware I was probably born 100 years too soon.

kevinmchugh4• 4 years ago

Mars may hold evidence of a greater extinction than any on Earth. Once we've been able to identify what life existed on Mars and how it ended - then it's free real estate.

Until then, it's the best source of evidence on the Great Filter Theory.

issa6• 4 years ago

Agreed. But Venus might be better. We'll see.

woodruffw5• 4 years ago

I can think of many, many things that are (1) better for humanity than going to Mars, and (2) somewhere between "exploring Mars" and "building weapons."

The pithy phrase I've seen before is "let's fix this planet up before we go and screw another one up."

sneak4• 4 years ago

There's nothing we can do to "fix" the risk of an unknown/unidentified space object hitting Earth at high speed and ending human civilization other than establishing self sufficient human cities on other objects.

divbzero2• 4 years ago

Even it is a fantastic goal—eventually—sending a human crew right now may not be the optimal approach.

palata10• 4 years ago

Wait, so you mean that not destroying Earth is a worse goal than going to Mars? I would love it if we managed to solve our current mass extinction problem. Probably more than the idea of going to Mars while happily destroying life on Earth, to be honest.

issa6• 4 years ago

Not destroying the Earth seems pretty critical to everything. Getting the technology to travel to and live on Mars would help that goal. Think of the benefits things like generating power in space and moving heavy industry off of Earth would create.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

The reason you were born on Earth and not on Mars is because Earth is hospitable to life and Mars is anything but. Put complex Earth lifeforms on Mars without a plan on how to terraform a good chunk of it in a way that it stays terraformed and with a large enough cycle that losses can be made up timely and you're merely sentencing them to a complicated form of death. The only earth creatures that can make it on Mars today are unicellar, maybe some exotic lichen or stuff like that. But humans? No, not for a long long time.

wilg5• 4 years ago

Entirely unconvincing to someone who thinks it would be cool to go to Mars. Honestly not even worth having the argument. Humans do things to explore or try to push ourselves to do something new all the time. That's the whole fun of being alive.

There's basically no real reason not to, despite this cynical laundry list of FUD. It's not trading off against any major Earth-based priorities. It's not that expensive. The only mildly compelling argument is the contamination one - but the only real alternative is simply never going anywhere but Earth in case there are microbes. No fun!

wilsonnb37• 4 years ago

There's basically no real reason not to, despite this cynical laundry list of FUD

You seem to be ignoring one of the main points of the article, which is that sending robots to explore the solar system rather than humans is cheaper, easier, and more effective. That alone is a very good reason to not focus on putting more humans in space.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

There's also the chance that those robots find something so compelling it reinvigorates human space flight.

wilg5• 4 years ago

That's not a reason not to. That's a reason to also send out robots.

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

Why not do both?

serverholic5• 4 years ago

My issue with it is that it distracts us from real problems. Obsession with Musk, NASA, and Mars keeps people's imaginations fixated on space instead of stuff that would really improve people's lives.

Instead of encouraging people to imagine how good life could be HERE, we are focusing people's imaginations on space where corporate profits aren't threatened.

In the article, the author quotes NASA on why we should go to mars and clearly it's an answer designed to tickle people's imaginations. Why aren't we hearing similar speeches about automating food production for example? Why can't we spend a trillion dollars on a mission to do THAT?

wilg5• 4 years ago

We can and should spend money on other exciting and useful problems!

chii6• 4 years ago

Why can't we spend a trillion dollars on a mission to do THAT?

because it's mostly a solved problem. It isn't really engineering, but economics that stops this from being a reality.

And to the contrary, i do think food production automation is being researched (by private entities, rather than gov't organizations) and slowly will become more common. You just don't hear about it, because it doesn't sound as exciting as space exploration.

recursive• 4 years ago

Advancing technology for space exploration purposes has shown to overlap significantly with "practical" applications.

viburnum3• 4 years ago

Remember that somebody is going to have to pay for it.

wilg5• 4 years ago

That's fine with me!

jccalhoun• 4 years ago

I think it would be great to send humans to mars but it is kind of hard to justify. I don't think there will be a colony there - there's no real reason unless you want to make the argument that we need people on another planet in case we destroy earth. But it would still be cool.

enkid• 4 years ago

There's no feasible way to destroy the Earth that wouldn't also destroy the survivability of Martian colony for the foreseeable future

zabzonk• 4 years ago

if we can't make it to mars (and,imho,we probably can't) then maybe we have the answer to the fermi paradox - it's to effing difficult.

maxerickson2• 4 years ago

What's the standard for "make it"?

A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.

alwillis• 4 years ago

A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.

Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission.

Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back.

And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option.

That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight.

It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple).

A trip to Mars and back is nearly 1000 days.

It’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

You do realize that unlike Kerbals, humans need to eat and breath during a space mission ? ;-)

On a more serious note, I'm really sure you could mount a very suicidal one way mission to Mars with current (and possibly 60s) technology.

Could be an interesting narrative in a SF book - Project Hail Mary from Andy Weir actually comes very close, but takes it even further.

rqtwteye3• 4 years ago

We can make it to Mars if we put enough effort into it. The question is whether now is a good time or if we should wait for progress in robotics and other areas. I think for now a permanent moon base makes way more sense.

Ekaros4• 4 years ago

I don't really understand the concept of jumping straight to Mars. With every complexity involved. First we should do sensible test runs on Earth, next Moon where we have chance to get anyone out in a few days. And only then when we have proven most aspect workable aim for Mars.

The costs probably aren't that much higher anyway.

ryandrake2• 4 years ago

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.

nonethewiser2• 4 years ago

That doesn't solve the scenario where everyone on earth gets wiped out.

thelamest• 4 years ago

Mars is on (or above) a wiped out Earth level of difficulty already

Retric3• 4 years ago

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.

_Microft• 4 years ago

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.

willis936• 4 years ago

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.

woodruffw5• 4 years ago

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.

titzer3• 4 years ago

The Moon is 100X closer. And orbit is 100X closer than that.

Dalewyn2• 4 years ago

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.

aivisol• 4 years ago

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.

mannykannot2• 4 years ago

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.

espadrine• 4 years ago

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.

justapassenger• 4 years ago

You need to learn how to crawl, and few other steps before you go win marathon at the Olympic Games.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

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.

esperent• 4 years ago

why aren't people doing this already on the Balleny Islands?

How would you make these islands habitable, including having a good atmosphere, without affecting the rest of Earth's ecosystem in undesirable ways?

That's one major difference. A goal of terraforming mars might actually be easier than terraforming remote islands on earth because:

A. It's an isolated system

B. We can afford to fail

bryanlarsen2• 4 years ago

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.

joe_the_user2• 4 years ago

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...)

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldl...

srinivgp• 4 years ago

Not easier. More awesome.

jackmott2• 4 years ago

Sustaining 20k people in Antarctica isn’t a problem people can’t solve, it just isn’t at all useful. Sustaining a colony on mars would be useful to mitigate planetary scale natural disasters. The problem is humans as we exist bow are not likely to either spend the resources necessary or take the risks necessary to colonize mars for a long term and uncertain risk mitigation.

We can’t even get a large % of humans to stop buying SUVs with vastly excess horsepower to avoid ruining our planet in a relatively short time frame.

The societal/political problems seem larger to me than the engineering ones, which are just a matter of effort.

moloch-hai27• 4 years ago

You are saying because we can't solve problems of magnitude x, we should count on solving hundreds of problems of difficulty 1000x, and also those x.

colechristensen3• 4 years ago

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.

moloch-hai27• 4 years ago

People who don't want to do it would be expected to pay for it. The people who want to try don't have enough money.

akiselev3• 4 years ago

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.

giantg2• 4 years ago

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.

Why should anyone do anything, really?

jcranmer2• 4 years ago

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.

baron8163• 4 years ago

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?

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

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.

nine_k10• 4 years ago

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.)

8n4vidtmkvmk7• 4 years ago

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.

rtpg• 4 years ago

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.

tasuki• 4 years ago

how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments

Mostly slave labour and infinite oil money?

antonvs3• 4 years ago

Your “why” questions apply just as much to sending humans into space.

Sending machines makes sense. Sending humans, not so much.

AngryData6• 4 years ago

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.

xnx• 4 years ago

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.

throwaway290• 4 years ago

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

kortilla• 4 years ago

Only because we don’t care to. What does a colony of 20k in Antarctica achieve? It still has all of the same shared fate issues by being on Earth.

strken• 4 years ago

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.

tsimionescu23• 4 years ago

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).

djur6• 4 years ago

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.

russdill• 4 years ago

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.

tsimionescu23• 4 years ago

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.

Quindecillion• 4 years ago

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.

imiric• 4 years ago

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.

cpsns• 4 years ago

The question remains, why not just do those things on the moon instead? It makes almost infinitely more sense when compared to mars.

djur6• 4 years ago

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".

bboygravity• 4 years ago

How does establishing a colony on Antartica help the survival of humans upon reset-level astroid impact/super vulcano/other?

tsimionescu23• 4 years ago

The technology for that colony would also be applicable to underground vaults, or we could first build those.

Either way, events such as these that would have wiped out humanity as it exists today have not yet happened in the ~1.6 billion years of eukaryotes existing on Earth, so there are good reasons not to worry too too much about it.

Note that the asteroid that "wiped out the dinosaurs" would still have left humanity as it exists today in a much better shape than a Mars colony is likely to ever be in.

Also, note that much smaller meteors/asteroids pose a huge risk to a Martian colony than they do to Earth, as they burn less in the almost non-existent Martian atmosphere, and since a Martian colony will be much less geographically spread out than the Earth. An asteroid wiping put all of the people in North America would still not destroy life on Earth, while a similar impact would easily destroy any human life on Mars for any kind of foreseeable future, if it happens to hit the colony itself.

nine_k10• 4 years ago

The point of building a colony in Mars is, to my mind, first and foremost in that it would not be under direct control of any Earth 's government. At least, eventually.

I think this will drive the proper colonization of Mars.

Science, of course, but it won't require a large self-sustained colony, much like Antarctica, or oil / gas fields of Siberia, or oil rigs in the ocean.

tsimionescu23• 4 years ago

Why do you think so, even in some far future? It's far more likely that Earth governments, having spent hundreds of years propping up such space colonies, would expect to rule them in perpetuity, and have easy means to do so (such as threatening to send nuclear bombardment or even troops - both far easier than actually establishing the colony in the first place). Especially since it seems very likely that colonists would not be allowed in any way to have access to weapons while they are still under Earth governments' control.

Not to mention, the Martian colony would forever be far far more frail to attack than any Earth society, since it has to spend so much of its nature wm resources just to keeping humans alive.

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

Lunar dust caused Apollo astronauts problems that they thought weren't chemical. They were wrong. [https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain....]

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 ...."

[https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals...]

bena3• 4 years ago

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.

ugh123• 4 years ago

Sounds like an opportunity to invest in advanced filtration and cleaning systems to solve the problem for Mars. Then bring that technology back home

8n4vidtmkvmk7• 4 years ago

how about let's figure out who to house and sustain 20K homeless people in established cities.

ly3xqhl8g93• 4 years ago

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.

[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/humanitarian-organisation...

[2] There are no rich gals https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-ric...

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/qatar-wo...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individua...

mlindner17• 4 years ago

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..

sneak4• 4 years ago

We haven't done so because it does not benefit us.

Establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars does benefit us, even if it is more difficult.

moloch-hai27• 4 years ago

Who, exactly, is this "us" who benefits?

In particular, does it include any of the people asked to pay for it?

holoduke• 4 years ago

Our destiny is total domination in the universe. Mars is most certainly part of those first steps.

dotnet003• 4 years ago

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.

moloch-hai27• 4 years ago

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.

lapcat30• 4 years ago

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.

wheelerof4te5• 4 years ago

"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?

bryanrasmussen6• 4 years ago

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.

uuvs810• 4 years ago

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).

hnbad3• 4 years ago

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.

coldtea• 4 years ago

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.

mlindner17• 4 years ago

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.

uuvs810• 4 years ago

Or even figuring out simpler things like how to avoid destroying rain forest to grow palm oil.

You know where palm trees don't grow? On mars.

balaji1• 4 years ago

Let’s figure out a solution to plastic. Oceans and rivers clean up. Sustainable agri. These are not cool tho.

I’m a fan of Mars and beyond also eventually. Expanse TV series does great at near future sci-fi and solar system scale humanity.

Buffout• 4 years ago

I can relate to this argument in principle. Building base here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_Inaccessibility_resear... for example would be a great exercise for building base on Mars.

We could learn great things, and maybe reuse technology for going on Mars.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

The Russian Vostok base base or the european Concordia base are already in quite similar environment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_Station

And IIRC Concordia already tested some water recycling technology from ESA for example.

ianai• 4 years ago

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.

4bpp• 4 years ago

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.

XorNot2• 4 years ago

This is what strikes me as notable: there are no Frontiers anymore (arguably there never were without massacring the existing inhabitants).

Space actually is one. And there are no (sentient) existing inhabitants.

IMO our current civilization has no way to account for, nor price, that reality - yet.

a28002764• 4 years ago

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.

wheelerof4te5• 4 years ago

I don't think the first people who visit Mars need to be there more than few hours. Just repeat what was already done on Moon.

We need to do some basic expreriments, take the soil samples and drill few meters down in order to check for water ice deposits.

But before all that, we need to send more rovers.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

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! ;-)

api2• 4 years ago

It’s illegal to settle Antarctica. If that were not the case someone would try.

There are really no frontiers left on Earth that are not locked up by existing states.

That point is missed by the whole “space makes no sense because nobody lives in Antarctica” argument.

That and settling another planet is much more interesting than trying to settle a less friendly area of Earth where people already can live.

ajmurmann• 4 years ago

"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.

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

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.

bratbag2• 4 years ago

You have this back to front.

The concentration of resources involved in getting people to and on Mars, will as a side effect also open up these areas on Earth for habitation.

The same effect occured with the space race. Instead of standing around saying it's impossible, our species rose to the challenge and as a side effect the technologies developed ended up altering our lives on earth in fundamental ways.

We are doing it because it is hard. Because we know the payoff for achieving difficult things.

philwelch9• 4 years ago

The primary reason Antarctica is uninhabited is because it’s effectively against international law. Unfortunately there are similar laws affecting outer space.

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

But there are no taxes on Mars!

https://taxfoundation.org/tax-court-antarctica-not-foreign-c...

nrclark• 4 years ago

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.

justsomeuser2• 4 years ago

I think Elon is betting on AGI, and is merely bootstrapping the initial delivery systems.

twelve403• 4 years ago

he's betting on adjusted gross income?

jerryzh• 4 years ago

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.

throwayyy479087• 4 years ago

Venusian cloud cities actually seem pretty doable lately. Mars soil is essentially bleach, and the rems are a show stopper without a lot of lead. Venus has neither of those problems - if you stay in the nearly-habitable layer 50km up.

kjs32• 4 years ago

Build and operate a cloud city right above your head for a couple of years without incident before you try and sell the idea of doing it a few tens of millions of miles a year on a planet that if you don't do it perfect, you get to drift down and get incinerated.

Apocryphon3• 4 years ago

Doesn't Venus's thick atmosphere make it different from trying to do it over Earth?

mwattsun2• 4 years ago

I've spent long periods of time underwater with about 120 others. I've seen how people slowly go mad under those conditions so I always come around to how they are going to keep people mentally fit during those long months in deep space. It's probably much lonelier out there between Earth and Mars vs the space station with it's constant view of Earth and of possibility of rescue.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

Do you have any recommended reading (maybe even something you wrote yourself) about what it's like to live like that?

mwattsun2• 4 years ago

I have written anything because it's hard to describe. I'm sort of working on it. As for books, I didn't think I had any but just realized I went through a phase where I read nothing but Arctic and Antarctic exploration books. I related to the extremes we find ourselves in and the fear we feel when we realize there is no hope of rescue should something go wrong and it seems highly likely something will go wrong.

This one is my favorite:

The Worst Journey in the World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World

But I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Shackleton's amazing expeditions

tacoooooooo• 4 years ago

NASA did a program/simulation of a Mars base on the Maura Loa volcano in Hawaii where they had a crew live for an extended period of time. There has been a lot of great writing about it as well as a good podcast (The Habitat)

jeffparsons2• 4 years ago

My recipe for success would be something like:

1. Send a lot of people (15?) and give people some flexibility in who they spend time with. 2. Give people a lot of space. I mean a _lot_ more than you think you need. Inflatable habs could be one approach, but if Starship gets going we might not even need that. 3. Let people escape. Loads of video games, books, creative projects, etc. 4. Help people anticipate the destination. Include remote control (obviously not real time) of robots at the landing site as one of the ongoing training exercises. Regularly simulate missions you'll be undertaking on the surface. 5. Give people lots of space at the destination. Cut and cover enormous living areas, and let people customise them. Give the crew something to look forward to.

People survive worse, and some people are better suited to it than others. We'll start by sending the people who are expected to fare best.

I suppose I am just some random on the internet, but I think a lot of people unjustifiably think "human factors" are insurmountable. Yes, it'll be hard, but the kind of people who plan these missions are used to solving hard problems.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

When I saw the "let people escape" part, I was thinking more escape pods :)

mpl• 4 years ago

Your comment reminded me of the podcast The Habitat (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-habitat) about a (real-life) Mars mission simulation.

Your last point, about the possibility of rescue, is really interesting and I wonder if there's any clever ethical way to control for that in a study like the one in the podcast.

siquick• 4 years ago

What were you doing underwater for long periods of time?

gwern• 4 years ago

He's alluding to nuclear submarines.

oceanplexian2• 4 years ago

If anyone gets the chance I’d challenge you to visit Biosphere II in Arizona. It has some mixed success and controversy associated with it back in the day, but anyone can visit and take a tour if you want to feel what it would actually be like to live in a domed space colony.

The reason I suggest doing it, is because it might inspire you. When you open the door to the main dome you walk into an overgrown tropical rainforest, complete with waterfalls, insects, exotic plants, and so on. It left me with a feeling that yeah, actually, we could live on other planets and it wouldn’t be half bad.

perardi5• 4 years ago

We are not even a teeny tiny bit close to being able to replicate an environment like that in space. Waterfalls? With what gravity? Insects and exotic plants? You mean the invasive species that came to dominate Biosphere 2?

And even if we could replicate that level of Biosphere 2…well guess what? Everyone still went nuts anyways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_ps...

They went bonkers in a sealed bubble on Earth, with Earth gravity and Earth diurnal cycles. How would that possibly be easier on a planet where you’d have the innate factionalism in human interactions combined with the grinding stress of living on a world that wants to kill you?

kagakuninja• 4 years ago

Yeah, other than the fact that Biosphere II completely failed to be self sustaining, then sure, it resembles what a space colony might look like.

And you are assuming there are no resource constraints on the sizes of those domes; Biosphere II was made by shipping machinery and raw materials across modest distances by truck, as opposed to shipping supplies from Earth by rocket.

I remember reading about Biosphere II in Omni magazine, in the late '70s. We still cannot create a self-sufficient sealed ecosystem here on Earth, 45 years later.

cphajduk2• 4 years ago

How long?

Consecutive stay in the ISS has been completed for 355 days (almost year) with less than 10 people onboard at that time.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Cumulative perperson record is currently 878 days, longest single flight personal record is 437 days. For more see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Mo...

fnordpiglet• 4 years ago

We just spent years in quarantine. Some people “went mad,” others thrived. Surely we can use that giant experiment to pick who fits best on a trip to mars.

The article quips that only incels will live on mars as a derision towards those that do better in solitude. I think what they meant was many people on the spectrum would be well placed in a place where solitude is the default situation and they can socialize in a well controlled environment via streaming video and audio with a delay. What I felt sad about was the derision, an almost musk like “pedo” comment, by a neurotypical about our neurodiverse.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

With as submarine, you can usually surface in a short order (pending failure or enemy action) or land from a space station in an orbit or two.

With a deep space mission, you simply don't have the option. I wonder how that would change the situation - if for better or worse.

MobiusHorizons2• 4 years ago

I believe you are describing working on a submarine. If so, is it possible that there are other factors? I have heard that it is hard to get enough sleep, air quality is poor, and the work schedule is relentless. All the information I have is second/third hand, but it seems like at least some of those stressors might contribute, and could probably be avoided in a mars mission. I would be very curious to hear your thoughts.

zwilliamson2• 4 years ago

Good read. Perhaps we need a competing Venus religion? Consider building a floating airship community in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Perhaps we could also control contamination easier being close to edge of space where we could put waste into an orbit for collection and disposal at a later time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...

Doesn't this seem like a much more exciting and compelling option compared to landing on Mars?

phaedryx• 4 years ago

I think that Venus makes more sense as a next step than Mars does.

Apocryphon3• 4 years ago

Thankfully this essay does discuss Venus, briefly, in a footnote. I'm a big proponent of exploring that planet, partly as contrarianism against the Martian cultists, mostly because of this discussion on HN alerted me to the idea - even Mercury colonization is worth considering!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734333

idlewords21• 4 years ago

I agree with you; I also wish Bezos would go all-in on Venus and make things fun.

elihu4• 4 years ago

What would people do there in their airships? It seems kind of anti-climatic to settle a planet without ever actually being able to descend to the surface.

zwilliamson2• 4 years ago

Perhaps fly around in personal size drone ships. Hop between different air ship settlements. I would find that more climatic than the barren Martian surface.

saberdancer3• 4 years ago

It may be more exciting and visually attractive but it misses all the things that make Mars colony interesting.

Venus airship will be unable to get raw materials - you are effectively making a space station in atmosphere of Venus. You can only capture gases and get energy from sunlight. You can't mine.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

The atmosphere is IIRC quite turbulent in places, so you might be able to get some energy from that as well, by exploiting wind speed in different places and heights. Or maybe if you can achieve a stable anchor in the hell down there, won't that turn your floating station into a forever running wind turbine ?

Or maybe exploit the huge temperature differences between the surface and much colder cloud layers ? Some sort of pipe or thermocouple or even winching materials with high thermal capacity up and down ? Now thinking about it I could imagine a "Venus forge" where you winch up and down batches of materials in heat resistant containers!

As for gas mining - most of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which is a good start - carbon for construction and food, oxygen for internal atmosphere and combustion engines and rockets. Then there is apparently a lot of nitrogen, so you could have a "real" atmosphere and not a pure oxygen flame fest. Looks like there is also water vapor, that gives you even more input for life support and hydrogen for combustion and rockets. Possibly for fusion tech in future as well.

Look like there is also a bunch of noble gases, chloride, fluoride - could be useful as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus

As for surface mining - that's actually an intriguing idea!

Two options come to mind:

1) Essentially strip mining using suspended grappling claws. Grab stuff, winch it up or dump it elsewhere.

Is the rock down below too solid ? Drop a well isolated liquid nitrogen dewar on it, the thermal stress from that should be enough to tear it apart. Or go the other way around and make the stuff melt & scoop it.

2) Underground mining - the biggest issue would be to get a mine running, but once underground, the main extremes of the Venus environment could be overcome provided rock temperature underground it sane (is it ? not sure :P). The main issue would likely be atmospheric intrusion from the surface - at 93 bars it like about 1 km under the ocean, so likely solvable.

POiNTx2• 4 years ago

I think there's value in doing 'cool' things. Besides the science and technology that would come out of something like this, humans are still intrinsically pushed by doing cool stuff. And there's nothing wrong with pursuing cool stuff. Not everything has to have a 'real world value' to it. Humans value cool stuff and sending humans to mars is extremely cool.

titzer3• 4 years ago

It'd be cool if we stopped building weapons that could kill 3 billion people within a couple hours.

wilsonnb37• 4 years ago

Not everything has to have a 'real world value' to it.

I agree with you but this is definitely one of the things that should have a real world value.

Many of the brightest minds in the world when it comes to space would be working on a project like sending humans to mars for decades. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost.

Plus it's not like the alternative of sending robots to every planet and large moon in the solar system is not cool.

POiNTx2• 4 years ago

I think you're right except that in this case it would not only be cool, there would definitely be some real world value too, overall I feel it is worth it.

And sending robots is definitely super cool :)

palata10• 4 years ago

Well, doing cool stuff is a matter of preference. NASA is paid by the public, not from donations, right?

dudeinjapan4• 4 years ago

"It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C."

That would have been AWESOME if it happened tho!

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Yeah, the same nonsense like Vikings landing in North America or people living behind the Arctic circle without modern technology. Completely impossible!

dgeiser13• 4 years ago

Speaking of Pinboard.

thangalin3• 4 years ago

"Some of the reasons for exploring space, when there are numerous social problems on earth, were described recently by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, Associate Director of Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. His beliefs were expressed in his reply to a letter from Sister Mary Jucunda, O.P., a nun who works among starving natives of Zambia, Africa."

Source: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730015241/downloads/19...

HTML: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/

"Space flight, without any doubt, is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."

idlewords21• 4 years ago

This is an excellent defense of space exploration. But the point I make in the article is that we should stop identifying the project of sending people to Mars with space exploration. There are other ways to do it that lead to cooler spinoff technologies and better science.

thangalin3• 4 years ago

Humanity has no back-up.

Compelling reasons to venture beyond this single, solitary rock include: Catastrophic volcanic eruptions. Devastating climate change. Extinction-level asteroid impact. Gravitational shifts from a rogue celestial body. Directed supernova blast. Coronal mass ejection. Unknown cosmic cataclysms. Loss of magnetosphere. All-out thermonuclear war. Unyielding plagues.

Back up your data, back up your species.

twothreeone• 4 years ago

The problem with your argument isn't lack of rationality, it's that it signals a lack of faith (destructive narrative). As others have mentioned, you can't "kill Mars" because who is going to be the hero then? You have to replace the idea of Mars with a better one, which allows for a constructive narrative in people's minds. BTW, that's essential in any constructive criticism of anything really. Simply saying "it's bad" isn't sufficient if you actually want people to think about alternatives - you have to present a better constructive narrative that could be accepted as "even cooler" by believers. I fully agree with almost everything you write in the article btw - IMO Pheobe, Titan, or Ceres could be a viable long-term goal for colonization after the moon. I'm sure there are many others, but we need to actively talk about and analyze these to identify the best option.

komali25• 4 years ago

However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."

I would be curious who believes that today we don't have the technological capability to feed, to well beyond basic sustenance, every human on earth today. I include both growth, storage, distribution, and preparation.

I would be curious who thinks insufficient technology is the reason people starve today, and why they think that, despite philosophers arguing since the mid 1800s (with numbers to back it up) that we have the means to ensure none should go hungry.

Invictus03• 4 years ago

However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation

How people are still fooled into believing this is beyond me

thangalin3• 4 years ago

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_ec...

stevep98• 4 years ago

If a single mission to mars cost $100b, then I would agree with the article that it would probably not be worth it.

SpaceX is focused on reducing the cost, and no matter what you think of Elon, you have to agree that spacex focus on reusability in the falcon 9 has reduced their cost of access to space

The problem is that reducing spacex’s cost doesn’t reduce the customer’s cost… until there are competitors that can push the price down.

The focus on starship ultimately will reduce costs an order of magnitude again, and will permit vast payloads to mars.

Why does this matter? Because much of the cost of engineering of space missions is in custom making things to be light, power efficient and reliable.

If you can take more mass into space for less cost, you can add more solar panels into your design, make things more rugged, use off-the-shelf materials and you can double or triple the quantity for redundancy. Not only the launch costs go down, but all the associated engineering.

colechristensen3• 4 years ago

The problem is that reducing spacex’s cost doesn’t reduce the customer’s cost…

SpaceX launches are way cheaper than competitors already. More competition would drive costs further down but it very much already exists.

A SpaceX launch costs 5% per kg of what a space shuttle launch cost. A 95% discount is pretty far away from “doesn’t reduce customers cost”.

DangitBobby2• 4 years ago

How does it compare to the cost of a comparable rocket launch, ie, one without the known-to-be-wasteful [1] shuttle attachment?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shutt...

osigurdson• 4 years ago

$500B over 25 years is $20B per year. This represents 0.05% of the G7 economy - basically noise. Let's get on with it.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Well, why waste money on probes? Why do basic research science that hasn't produced notable products? W

That's the slippery slope.

I do agree:

1) government funding won't produce the end result.

2) real space stationd or lunar stations make more sense

I think we should let the economics of the starship rocket play out before planning anything. The starship rocket, if it achieves it's goals, changes the equation of staging equipment in low orbit.

That will eventually filter through the industry.

gusgordon• 4 years ago

Given that there have been multiple mass extinction events in Earth’s history, it seems reasonable to spend a small fraction of GDP on colonizing another planet. How about something roughly equivalent to the amount we spend on chapstick?

morsecodist• 4 years ago

This always seemed an odd motivation to me. I am not really attached to the idea of the species continuing in the abstract, my concern about a mass extinction event would be all of the individual living humans that would die. It would be little solace to me that a handful of humans remain clinging to life on a distant rock. Investing in something like asteroid defense makes total sense to me but creating a colony as a sort of backup doesn't really.

controversial97• 4 years ago

There is also the issue that the average temperature on Mars is -60 celsius.

Keeping humans alive on Mars would require nuclear power sources much larger then any that have been flung into space so far.

If you are thinking of solar power then consider than the watts per square meter is about 40% of that on earth, that a big pile of batteries would be needed as well and how much work it would be to maintain a huge solar farm.

elihu4• 4 years ago

One of the arguments in favor of Mars versus the moon is that at least it has a normal Earth-like day/night cycle. Solar power on the moon means having to have batteries that last through the 14 day nights.

Mars is cold, but I don't think that's a huge problem. You just need an appropriate amount of insulation.

I imagine a typical Mars habitat to be either sealed section of an existing lava tube or some kind of dome structure built at the bottom of a hole and then covered with sand, except for a stairwell. Either way, you'd line the inside with something. Aerogel, polystyrene, whatever works in that environment and whose ingredients can be transported to Mars in a compact form.

hparadiz6• 4 years ago

I was thinking you could dome a large canyon with plain old glass and steel. Pump up the atmosphere inside and you'd be able to farm with day light and have a huge "outdoor" public space for people to enjoy. Buildings could be built into the canyon walls.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Heating stuff up is easier than cooling it down - it could be actually quite an issue on the moon during the 14 days of uninterrupted sunlight. Apollo was actually running of open cycle evaporative water coolers to dump all that heat & cooling was one of the main factors dictating surface mission duration. You are also in vacuum, so you either need that open cycle system or pretty massive radiative cooling.

And then of course you need to also survive 14 days of no sunlight at all. At least here vacuum helps to reduce heat loss. :)

xphos• 4 years ago

You don't go to Mars because it's easy. The biggest producer of technological advancements is pressure to solve hard problems. Not knowing is the whole point if you know how it's a worthless learning experience. It's always going to be hard to get a (the first?) human to Mars. It's 60 million of miles away. But one of the direct ways to solving this is to start working on them.

Plus Neil Degrassi Tyson has a great point on this in that robots can make discoveries and are low risk but they are way less inspiring. You know the Mars rovers names but the average person doesn't however the average person has a much higher chance of know Neil Armstrong because people inspire that.

c-cube2• 4 years ago

If we want hard problems to solve, surviving climate change is a good one that's definitely going to matter soon. It's a lot more important than putting boots on Mars.

lukeboi2• 4 years ago

While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated.

Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?

Ralfp• 4 years ago

Who would design and build experiments for those probes to run when they land on Mars? Are we sure economy of scale would apply to those?

lukeboi2• 4 years ago

I'm no expert but I don't think there's a shortage of experiments that people want to run on mars and the other solar system bodies, especially with sample return capabilities.

We've been launching things into low earth orbit for ~60 years and orbital launch demand still seems to outnumber supply. If we could get our martian surface payload capacity to even 1% of our LEO payload capacity I'm sure there would be many organizations that would want to send something.

wnkrshm2• 4 years ago

Partially, you can have lots of cheap instruments driving/flying/floating around to find something interesting to look at with the fewer expensive shots.

inamberclad2• 4 years ago

It's not fair to lump in the _entire_ ISS budget in with exploration. They do plenty of materials science, pharmaceutical development, earth observation, and subatomic physics as well.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

No, they do not. The entire station has about 40 hours/week free for research, and the priority now (according to NASA) is testing next-generation life support systems. The only useful experiments on there are the ones that are automated.

cardamomo• 4 years ago

I had to chuckle at this analogy: "If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets."

RagnarD• 4 years ago

This guy seems to live an alternate reality where SpaceX and Elon Musk don’t exist. Yes, a NASA abomination would cost a fortune and be a disaster. NASA isn’t going to establish a Mars outpost, SpaceX is. It’s literally what every one of Musk’s businesses support and why Starship is being developed.

paulcole2• 4 years ago

This guy literally devotes an entire section of the linked article to dismissing Mr. Elon’s Wild Martian Ride as the vaporware that it is.

holler3• 4 years ago

While he brings up valid and interesting points to consider, I thought the article was sabotaged by his obvious disdain for Musk. He tried to camouflage it with some initial flattery but then devolved into hyperbole about hyper tunnel and Tesla bot, both of which are real projects with real engineers and people working on them.

natch• 4 years ago

In the longer timeframe of frequent large-scale Mars travel we will have humans and transhumans and human successor robots with different body plans that are more adaptable to the Mars environment. Any article on this topic that is not built around this eventuality will be missing what is going on, as this article does.

snapplebobapple• 4 years ago

To me this article misses the main point for not going to mars, which is it is stupid vs the next best option of investing in building up our space infrastructure near Earth, ideally finding profitable niches (moon/asteroid mining, solar electricity? zero gravity manufacturing? I don't know what, but I am pretty sure something can be profitable up there) that support that effort so that the spend on point 1 and 2 of the article's argument is motivated by positive cash flow driving us towards whatever the feasible version of an O'Neil cylinder ends up being. Why would we ever want to go back down an expensive to escape gravity well to a barren wasteland that we would have to terraform when the opportunity to terraform more manageable chunks of space will probably exist at the same technology investment level and will almost certainly be much faster/easier/cheaper than doing a whole planet at once?

nimbius• 4 years ago

in my opinion as a blue collar fly on the wall at this site, we dont "mars" because it. is. hard.

i dont mean math hard or physics or biology i mean human species, everything hard. its interdisciplinary hard on a level that requires transcending class boundaries and race boundaries and if we cant even invite chinese taikonauts to our spacestation then we arent solving the real blockers.

mars is an every human effort.

SpaceLawnmower• 4 years ago

I got to ask Scott Kelly why we should send humans to Mars instead of sending up more robots. His response (paraphrased) was:

1. Humans are explorers by nature

2. Humans can do science 100x faster than robots.

3. People will be inspired by Mars missions to go into STEM and even if they don't end up working for NASA, they will likely do other great things.

4. It gives people jobs

The romantic explorers angle seems practically indefensible for the reasons listed in this article. I like the faster science angle the most in theory, but I didn't realize that contamination would be such a big deal.

komali25• 4 years ago

The article seems to argue that point 2 is strictly false, or a red herring: humans can do the science on earth, while robots collect data in space.

Point 4 seems more a political/economic failure than a valid reason to pour resources into a Mars project.

throw_pm232• 4 years ago

Yes, and Point 3 is a fancy version of the broken window fallacy, while Point 1 is a BS "appeal to nature" that can be used to justify anything, including some of the worst things.

modeless• 4 years ago

I think this boils down to three concerns. One, that if you can't accept any risk for the crew then you have to do an insane amount of basically non-transferable R&D before going to Mars. Two, you can get more research per dollar from robotic probes instead. And three, you'll contaminate Mars.

One, yes, there will be a lot of risk involved and it is infeasible to mitigate it all in our lifetimes. If we want to go to Mars in our lifetimes, we will need to accept more risk than possibly any manned space mission before. But would it be more risk than faced by, for example, sea explorers hundreds of years ago? Exploration has always been risky. I think it will be sad if we wait hundreds of years to mitigate every possible risk before trying to set foot on Mars. I think there are people out there willing to take on a relatively high level of risk; why deny them the opportunity?

Two, sure, you might have better "ROI" on research using robotic space probes, but be careful with that argument, because if you think about it any further you'll realize that you'll get even better ROI not exploring the solar system at all. If your goal is research for practical purposes then there's plenty of that to do here on and around Earth. If your goal is research for research's sake, then I submit that that's not inherently more virtuous than a goal of human space exploration. I personally prefer the latter and I think the public agrees. And if your goal is research to enable eventually sending humans out there, then we'll learn a whole lot more and faster by actually sending humans as soon as it is remotely feasible.

Three, contamination is inevitable unless you plan to make Mars off limits forever. And if by some chance there is actually life on Mars to contaminate, then I bet there's life elsewhere in the solar system to discover too. I doubt very much that Mars would be our singular chance in the solar system to investigate uncontaminated extraterrestrial life. Also, natural processes have likely already landed bits of Earth on Mars as meteorites, just as bits of Mars have fallen to Earth. If your thesis is that extremophile bacteria that we don't even know about are omnipresent on Earth and could survive on Mars, then they could certainly have contaminated Mars already. And if they did, millions of years of evolution would certainly enable them to outcompete anything we would accidentally introduce from Earth.

double_nan2• 4 years ago

My take on why mars: there is no countries and no established laws maintained by existing societal structures. There is just no any other power other than the nature itself. Any colony on earth is doomed to be captured by a larger power sooner or later. I think in the eyes on ppl who are dreaming about Mars, nature is a weaker foe than other man.

elihu4• 4 years ago

I think as soon as people are moving to Mars, you'd at a minimum at least need some kind of commonly agreed-to standard around land ownership. I.e. maybe each new settlement implicitly owns all the land in a twenty mile radius. If you want to settle closer than that to an existing settlement, that's fine as long you can work out an agreement with the original colony.

double_nan2• 4 years ago

That is true, but for several generations the first (if not the only) law will be survival of the colony, hence extreme meritocracy. That is very appealing for very many ppl.

ausbah3• 4 years ago

I love all the efforts humans put towards trying to understand and tame the wilds of space, but it makes me immensely sad that we choose not to put the same efforts towards vastly easier & simpler problems that would have a much more immediate positive impact. Food insecurity, medical access, climate change, etc. are all problems we know how to solve - but we don't.

perardi5• 4 years ago

While I think the idea of colonizing Mars is a fantasy, I also disagree that your problems are “easy”.

Because all those problems are human problems. Humans are short-sighted and selfish. Climate change stands out here. Sure, we know to fix that. Now make it happen. Get politicians to tell the fossil fuel extractors and refiners in their districts are out of a job. Now get people to give up their cars. Now tell people they can’t eat meat.

Oh, those are extreme examples, you might say. There are economic incentives and taxation that could ease the transition and provide incentives. We can develop better photovoltaics and a host of other green energy tech. Sure, we absolutely can! Now create those taxes so they don’t create perverse incentives, and we can have reduced tax spec…ah, and now it is way way way beyond easy.

ffwacom• 4 years ago

It's more up to Elon as the man in the arena, rather than Maciej Cegłowski who would be the timid soul in this case.

kiratp6• 4 years ago

Arguments against human colonization of the solar system (moon/Mars/etc) sound just like trying ot argue against the westward expansion from the 13 colonies.

We will have a Donner Party-like memorial on Mars. And there will be a McDonald’s next to it.

You’re not going to win this argument because it is an argument against the basic nature of humanity, the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain.

programmarchy2• 4 years ago

Yes, this. There’s a reason that Picard was the captain of Enterprise, rather than Data. Bio-nietzcheans will lead the way, not robo-nerds.

perardi5• 4 years ago

the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain

Is that a basic urge? The actual glory of exploration? Or is it the need for resources? You reference the Donner Party, which was on its way to California, which had actual useable and useful resources. So of course people wanted to go there—there’s an ocean and sunshine. Mars has…uh…corrosive dust?

programmarchy2• 4 years ago

Why do you think Alex Honnold free climbed El Cap? Why do people pay money to go skiing, sky diving, or scuba diving?

idlewords21• 4 years ago

It's doubly amusing since the conditions the Donner Party died in were like Hawaii compared to Mars.

yongjik2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, "the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain" does not lift a thousand ton of people and equipment to an interplanetary orbit. Money does. Well... money might do, we don't know for sure, because it's not tried before at the required scale.

Few will have an issue with a modern "Donner Party," who would buy interplanetary rockets out of their money, hop on them, never to be heard again. (Well, to be fair, if the party contains kids, people would object - consider that a sign of the society's progress since Donner's days.)

What people argue against is those quasi-Donners who demand that Washington DC fund their rockets.

lapcat30• 4 years ago

Arguments against human colonization of the solar system (moon/Mars/etc) sound just like trying ot argue against the westward expansion from the 13 colonies.

Did they claim that the American west had no atmosphere, water, food, topsoil, or life of any kind, and only 38% normal gravity?

Eji1700• 4 years ago

And could only be reached after a months long journey with 0 ability to resupply of ANY kind. No trees and fruit, no fish and desalination, no colonies along the way. Just months of nothing (and yes i'm aware that because of this the plan is to try and orbit resupply "drops" and I personally think that's insane).

If you want to see extra planetary colonization, the moon is the most obvious first step by a HUGE margin, and even if it was made of gold or some other precious material, it wouldn't be financially sane, but the advantages mars offers pale in comparison to the EXTREME disadvantages its immense distance offers.

IF we can get something going on the moon, it makes literally everything else magnitudes easier. Doing anything else is, at best, a pointless exploration mission, and at worst, suicide by government spending. None of the mars plans are remotely realistic or grounded in reality, and all have so many points of failure it's going to be more worrying if we actually think we can get someone there.

djur6• 4 years ago

Right. There isn't a stream of Donner parties headed into the middle of the Sahara, or north into Greenland, or for that matter onto the seafloor. Many of the heroes of the Age of Exploration were economically motivated, and certainly almost all historical colonists have been. If there's a Gold Rush waiting for us on Mars we haven't seen any indication of it yet.

rendall9• 4 years ago

The article does not argue against human colonization of the solar system.

The article argues that with current technology and capabilities, a manned mission to Mars would actually do more harm than good to space exploration itself.

Also, this is reasoning by analogy. Mars is not West America.

If you want to argue for a manned mission to Mars, the article makes some excellent points that, by refuting them directly, would strengthen your argument.

viburnum3• 4 years ago

You know that conquering territory on earth was profitable for the winners, right? There’s no profit on Mars.

ausbah3• 4 years ago

Arguments against human colonization of the solar system (moon/Mars/etc) sound just like trying ot argue against the westward expansion from the 13 colonies

if you're going from an moral perspective, European colonists had no right to colonize any part of the Americas. established civilizations already existed that were only driven out by mass death from foreign plagues and a desire for "we can so we will" mentality

divbzero2• 4 years ago

The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home.

Maybe the next fancy device we send to Mars should be a high-throughput sequencer to look for metagenomic Martian DNA.

perryizgr82• 4 years ago

There are many problems with this article, and this sort of thinking explains why mankind has been trapped in a counter-productive rut for the last half century when it comes to space exploration.

Contamination

Concerns around Mars contamination are hogwash. We want to contaminate the f out of Mars. We want microbes to infiltrate every nook and cranny of every crevice on the planet, just like it is on Earth. If there are indigenous species, they will compete, and the best will win out. If we discover something harmful to humans, we will develop vaccines or pesticides.

The author must keep in mind that this is real life, not Star Trek with high-minded Prime Directives and some deep philosophical mission. Our mission is to colonise a new planet and make it liveable for the next billion humans. There is no Prime Directive.

Research and engineering for life support

Yes, a lot of research is required to develop self-contained life support systems. It won't happen unless we do it. It won't happen if we focus only of robotics and automation. Human space exploration is the end goal. Dithering about with drones and robots is fun, but the real dream is a man (or 100) on Mars.

human physiology, physiological effects of partial gravity, risk the safety of the crew

You cannot embark on a planet terraforming mission and not take on risk. The whole endeavour is risky. Not doing is also risky, we might not have a pleasant Earth in 200 years. Choose people who are of strong, sound minds (as best we can evaluate) and who are willing to risk their lives for a chance of going to Mars. We definitely should not wait around until we are technologically capable of sending a foolproof 200% safe-for-humans capsule.

“Mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud”

Amen.

idlewords21• 4 years ago

We want to avoid contaminating Mars before we explore it so we can learn more about the origin of life on Earth, and the distribution of life in the universe. It's not like terraforming technology is ready to go and the researchers are holding it back with unreasonable demands. A Mars landing brings your dream of colonization no closer while potentially ruining a scientific dream that is just as valid, and far more achievable.

komali25• 4 years ago

The author must keep in mind that this is real life, not Star Trek with high-minded Prime Directives and some deep philosophical mission.

Speak for yourself. I want the continuation of the human species, I don't want to unnecessarily genocide another untold number of species to make that happen. I similarly don't like when we cause species here on earth to go extinct. I think space agencies should adopt a Prime Directive.

Do you believe the continuation of the human race requires genocide, here and on mars? That seems very zero-sum, I believe I can argue against this being necessary.

kiratp6• 4 years ago

Speaking for myself, the Prime Directive is the survival of humanity.

Any other altruistic Prime Directive (ala Star Trek) is a luxury affordable only by a species that has figured out a way past the eventual explosion of their system’s star.

perryizgr82• 4 years ago

Do you believe the continuation of the human race requires genocide, here and on mars?

No I don't think so. That's why I don't want to worry about "contaminating" Mars with our microbes. It's going to be ok. We should just do whatever it takes to fulfil our objective of settling on Mars. If our spaceship happens to land on a Martian anthill then too bad.

JoeyBananas• 4 years ago

I accept that human space flight to Mars is not optimal from a scientific perspective due to possibilities for contamination and cost. But I also think there is a better argument to be made for boots on Mars than what appears in this article.

For one, the new technology needed for manned space flight is more likely to have medical and defense applications. But mkre importantly, boots on Mars would be a huge political victory.

Think about it like this: corporations sponsor Formula 1 cars because the prestige and visibility they get has all sorts of benefits. A manned mission to Mars would be like the holy grail of marketing. It would be like putting a permanent ad in the history books that every literate human on Earth will see for the next thousands and thousands of years. It's not unreasonable to say that the good publicity from this will prolong the lifespan of the nation, and that's something that I'd expect Congress to pursue.

hristov• 4 years ago

Thank you for explaining clearly and thoroughly what I have been trying to get across in many HN comments here. Putting a Man on Mars promises to be the biggest non-military waste of tax money.

The problem is that it is a very well marketed waste of tax money. It came with its own hollywood movie and a very effective guerilla marketing campaign. When I see those "cool" people wearing NASA shirts in bars, it makes me sick ... it is as if they want to steal money from me.

And I actually thought NASA was pretty cool back when they were doing mostly robotic missions that had a lot of bang for the buck. But back then of course there wasn't a marketing campaign to make NASA cool, nobody was wearing a NASA shirt in a bar, and NASA got constantly criticized even for doing its cost effective robotic missions.

Now that they are on the verge of a really massive boondogle, all of a sudden everyone is a NASA fan.

beau_g• 4 years ago

Are there good records of opinions on 1400s Europeans thoughts on sea exploration or colonial Americans thoughts on exploring the West? Curious to see if these sorts of risk averse, "practical" arguments are mirrored in those times.

dj_gitmo• 4 years ago

I’m not sure, but traveling to mars would be a little different if there were already human beings living there.

Ekaros4• 4 years ago

Or we had the certainty that we could just plop stuff we took with us and it would provide us food. And that water rains from sky and we can keep breathing all the way...

Minor things really...

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

It depends - I think some of the early explorers would welcome just gathering the resources and going back instead of fighting hostile wildlife and local residents.

TheLoafOfBread• 4 years ago

Yeah there is: Spices which were not available in Europe because Ottoman Empire decided to cut off Christian Europe from silk road.

So Europeans weren't going on what if journey, but they were trying to find a way to India, bypassing Ottomans. Spanish found America and it's resources (sugar cane, tobacco, potato, corn) and Portuguese found a way around Africa to India to get back to the spice trade.

The thing is that European motivation was clearly defined, while motivation to go to Mars is not clear at all, because there is nothing valuable there at this point.

But imagine finding on the Mars an alien shipwreck from 200 milion years ago, there would be several outposts build within this decade, because technology is the spice trade of today.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

The recently released Terra Invicta grand strategy game captures this quite nicely - a credible alien invasion threat makes humans do some crazy things, like multiple Mars bases in 2028 & all the good spots on Ceres already occupied by outpost.

And there is even some alien technology salvage when Alien warships happen to have a human induced accident (read 240 converted naval anti-ship cruise missiles slam into them).

stonogo• 4 years ago

I guess you can take the boy out of the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia, but you can't ever take the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia out of the boy.

This whole article boils down to "I don't think we should go to Mars because I don't think we should, it would cost too much (limit not specified) money, it doesn't seem to benefit me immediately, and we should use robots instead, and it's all-or-nothing on the robot thing."

There are so many unstated assumptions, baked-in arbitrary limitations, and downright bizarre arguments that I'm struggling to understand what the point of the article is, if there is one beyond "stop it." I suppose if you really dislike the armchair-engineering hype factory of Elon Musk and you were looking for an armchair-engineering Space Eeyore, here's your boy?

masswerk• 4 years ago

As many are talking about inspiration and inspirational goals, it may be worth risking a view on this from a more cultural perspective. Mars is really the "what's next?" to the Apollo program and how it shaped our cultural perspective on space activities. It's the same thing, scaled up in distance, size, journey time, complexity, number of fundamental problems – and a fundamental lack of ideas what to do there, as it's all about going there. However, there had been other visions of space. We do not have to go further than the mid-century kids room: tin toy flying saucers zipping around asteroids (possibly making a fortune from mining), tin can shaped rovers stomping over the Lunar surface on their telescopic legs – and where there's a Lunar rover with perspex windows and some business to go about, there's probably also a vision of Moon bases and space ports now long forgotten, as these have dropped out of the popular imaginary. In a sense, Mars may not be that high hanging motivational fruit, it may be even the end of space inspiration, just the thing we clung to as we ran out of visions for space.

dboreham• 4 years ago

It's fine, as long as they call the ship the B Ark.

pizlonator• 4 years ago

I think that enough of us humans want to go to mars that it’ll happen regardless of what congress or bloggers have to say about it. Some of those who want to go there create arguments to justify it (exploration! science! profit! new technology! extinction if life on earth!), but I view these as post hoc rationalizations.

So yeah the best “why mars” argument is maybe just that someone will do it for the lulz.

Even if congress or musk don’t get around to it, someone eventually will.

tjpnz2• 4 years ago

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?

How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.

BHSPitMonkey2• 4 years ago

Talk of Starship carrying 100 people is in reference to the "Earth to Earth" transportation idea, i.e. carrying passengers on a short hop between continents.

tjpnz2• 4 years ago

When was that ruled out for Mars? According to this SpaceX source (first Google result) it's still 100.

https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf

moloch-hai27• 4 years ago

There is no possibility of a "Starship" can carrying 100 people to Mars.

NASA has figured the can has room for a maximum of 17 astronauts on such a trip. And, that is without spacesuits or anything else they would need once there. So figure another, cargo, can for the stuff they would need on the ground.

Maybe bring along a couple of spacesuits in the crew can, to wear while they fetch the rest. And, maybe just 9 crew so none kill each other on the way out.

elurg3• 4 years ago

Life support is not particularly difficult if you can just throw mass at it.

It's probably true that Starship would only be capable to support 10 colonists all the way to Mars and that's still pretty damn good. This number will grow if you have a separate life support system on the surface and don't have to rely on the ship but the first missions will indeed have a very small crew.

inkyoto• 4 years ago

Contamination risk is a real showstopper for Mars, one of those problems that gets worse the more carefully you look at it.

Not just Mars but anywhere humans choose to go to. Since

a) discovery of extremophiles; b) humans themselves are a living (and flourishing) bioweapon (from an extraterristrial world's perspective)

– we have to accept a simple fact that full decontamination or sanitation is not possible, at least not at the current level of the technological progress of our civilisation.

There will be microorganisms that will survive UV, α-, β-, γ- and X-rays albeit in reduced numbers. A single toilet flush in certain cirumstances can be a biological catastrophe even here on Earth today, and a single bowel movement might yield a unmitigated disaster in extraterrestrial worlds that could wipe alien biomes or civilisations out. And select extremophiles will absolutely take advantage of a new environment, adapt and evolve. What the extremophiles will evolve into and that might entail for an extreterrial world as well as ramifications for humans are the biggest unknowns.

Then, at the extreme end we have prions here on Earth that we do not understand, can't neutralise, can't decontaminate prion infected surfaces and tools, and – more generally – can't contain the prions in any way other than hurling them into a nearby star (not practically possible today). What the prions will be able to do in a unknown environment is a very uneasy thought at the very least.

So the actual question is: what is the solution? Should we stop the space exploration out of fears of infecting other worlds with terrestrial microbiomes, sit around and do nothing? We won't even be able to visit asteroids in our own solar system if we do not find a way to allay our own fears.

Or, should we keep the humans on Earth, send out robotic missions instead and deprive the humans of fun of exploring new worlds and satisfying our own curiosity? We are curious creatures.

We need a solution.

MicolashKyoka2• 4 years ago

I don't understand why that is a concern. Whether some microorganisms live or die because of us ultimately is of no importance. What we should concern ourselves however, is any risks posed by them to us.

scythe• 4 years ago

If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse.

Even if life on Mars miraculously stumbled upon the same four (five) nucleobases, the same twenty (-two) amino acids, glucose, glycerol esters, and (deoxy)ribose, it would still seem pretty unlikely that it chooses the same three-base sequences corresponding to the same amino acids in RNA translation. But maybe we're still holding out hope for panspermia? And adaptable though our microbes are on megayear time-scales, we're also talking about the same cells that mostly can't survive intentional cultivation, as the author himself notes, so outcompeting the life native to Mars would be a real feat — merely surviving cold and dryness through dormancy is a well-known microbial swindle. I suppose it isn't impossible, but I have yet to hear a good argument that it's feasible.

But overall I agree, Mars has nothing. It's not even very big: the surface of Mars is roughly the size of the Pacific Ocean, well below doubling what we started with. Meanwhile, the asteroids are full of palladium.

Tepix3• 4 years ago

That sounds pretty big to me. Earth's land surface is the same size as Mars':149 vs 144 million km².

mikewarot• 4 years ago

A human colony on Mars should be a point well along the way to a goal of having a complete self sustaining Martian supply chain.

We should approach this in stages, starting with the basics. A government funded, fully documented, publicly disclosed second supply chain for everything. Starting with dirt in the ground to finished materials. Materials, crops, electronics, the whole network of supplies and suppliers. Every single bit if this network should be documented and stored in the archives of that network.

We could then start a 3rd network with the goal of miniaturizing it, reducing complexity, and especially the physical volume of the entire system. Ideally, in the distant future, it could be reduced to a Von Neuman probe.

I think if we do that homework here a few times, we can then see if it could be implemented in other places on earth, in Antarctica, Above the "death line" in the Himalayas, etc.

It's my strong belief that having a true backup to human life on Mars requires this homework first. Then again on the Moon, then finally on Mars and other destinations.

Ekaros4• 4 years ago

Just thought of this a bit.

Take something fundamental, food? Now you need water, fertilizers and light. Okay, so either you have greenhouses or vertical farming. Either case you need some fertilizers, production of these could probably be done, just need to find inputs. Water is simple enough if you don't loose too much of it.

Light is big question. Go with leds or grow lamps, how do you make those and power for them? And by make I mean all components needed. And all components used to make stuff that makes them and so on. Not to forget generating the electricity.

SpacePortKnight• 4 years ago

I understand that the article is trying to promote robotic space explorations over human one. But we are humans, and even if a robot could do things better than us, people doing those things inspire more people.

Having said I do agree that going to Mars has lot of risks and would require decades of cooperation between different governments. Which is why I think it's better and feasible to build a moon base/city first.

The moon is only 3 days far which would make space tourism really feasible. The close proximity would be helpful in engineering, healthcare, entertainment etc. Lastly a proper city on moon can be a source of a lot of technological advancements and also a source of immense inspiration for all of humanity.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

I would put it in orbit around the Moon. There’s not much on the Moon, other than regolith at the bottom of a relatively shallow gravity well I guess. If you expect the Moon to be a stopover in space tourism, don’t make the people go down the gravity well, that’s a waste of energy for everyone who wants to visit it.

We could treat the Moon as a particularly large asteroid-mining process, don’t live on it, just extract resources.

I don’t think there’s much point in learning to live on all these different rocks. Most of space is space, we should focus on learning to live in space.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

At least the low lunar orbit is usually unstable due to Moon being chunky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)...

But there are exception & Lagrange points should be generally safe.

Ekaros4• 4 years ago

Currently and in near future sending colonist to Mars is either quick or slow death sentence. Something fails and they die fast, they get there and stay there. Slow starvation or systematic failure unless we keep shipping stuff in infinitely. And anything there will have myriad of fun and fantastic failure modes. Not to forget that even things like electronics here slowly fail...

First step really is to solve these issues here before we even attempt to kill people there...

Tepix3• 4 years ago

I agree with many of the points in this article, even if it is painful.

However, in the chapter "The Mars religion" the author fails to explain why he disagrees with the transhumanists who think mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Also Musk often states that the window of opportunity is open now and we don't know for how long.

Isinlor5• 4 years ago

The main challenge is rapid rockets reusability.

The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.

Whether we go with manned exploration or robot exploration. Whether we choose the Moon or Mars.

Nothing comes even close to the importance of rapid rockets reusability.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Definitely! But long term we need to start extracting resources in space, without that we still wont get far.

pavlov• 4 years ago

“At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere.”

To me this is the most exciting point. Why aren’t we already building half a dozen probes simultaneously to look for life in the clouds of Venus, icy caverns of Europa, and every other interesting place in the solar system?

A steady stream of beautiful pictures and — hopefully — revolutionary biological discoveries from these unique worlds would seem like a much better investment than human selfies on Mars whose dusty mountains the public has already seen many times.

sneak4• 4 years ago

The cost to orbit is, err, astronomical.

I'm sure that when Starship craters the cost per kilogram to Earth orbit (following it making some literal craters in development) we will be doing just that.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Yeah - it should not just be more probes, but faster probes & quicker pictures as a result, if you can put 1000 tons of fuel under every probe you send.

theteapot• 4 years ago

Shows picture of "Entrance to underground cavern on Pavonis Mons" then states "The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars ..". Your failing pretty hard so far.

friend_and_foe• 4 years ago

...a literal Venereal disease...

No, that would still be figurative.

The entire mars thing is discredited with NASA budgets and criticism of US government programs, then the criticism is taken as a given, the idea called a cult, and then and only then is private endeavor, the thing thats actually going to go to mars, even brought up. If anything the arguments are good ones, against bureaucracy.

When private endeavor is addressed, of course Musk is mentioned. Then all his marketing hype is mentioned, he's chocked up as a charlatan, the one thing conveniently, conspicuously left out being the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far. Talk about hand wavy.

The entire article is interspersed with unfunny jokes designed to make sure you don't think too much about what you just read. It's a weak "this is a dumb idea" argument after another that does a very good job of hiding the fact that it has almost no arguments of substance. It basically amounts to "we don't know how to recycle shit in a closed loop, the money could be used to send robots, we don't want to contaminate mars with coronavurus" (I can play the lame joke at the end of every important sentence game too).

You don't think people should go to mars? Too bad. People are going to go.

djur6• 4 years ago

Musk... [is chalked] up as a charlatan... [leaving out] the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far

There's no contradiction here. Musk has regularly made ludicrous claims about what SpaceX is going to achieve, while SpaceX is much more conservative in its official statements. The entire operating model of SpaceX makes it difficult to claim that they've ever failed -- the fact that they're now on their fourth brand of "interplanetary starship" (MCT, ITS, BFR, Starship) can be chalked up to "iterative development", as can the fact they abandoned their first planned moon flyby, etc. I think this is a reasonable way for SpaceX to operate, but Musk uses it as a kind of "credibility battery".

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Most of this is written from a US perspective, which ignores an important fact: it looks like it is going to be the Chinese that get boots back on the moon first and they might also move their eyes towards Mars soon. And they are not going to ask US congress for permission either. There's a new space race on with China. Mars is a prestigious target to nail that will vastly expand what's possible technically for whomever gets there first. It's going to be China unless the US stops navel gazing and gets its act together.

And love him or hate him but Elon Musk has built a pretty nice Starship that might help getting that mission done. The traditional route of slinging trillions at the likes of Boeing is indeed going to take decades. We know that because that's the past 50 years. It doesn't work. But Starship is nearly ready for operations and might cut that time frame short. And its a bar gain in comparison.

There was no point in going to the moon either in the late nineteen sixties. But it was preferable for the US to get there before the Russians. The moon program was really expensive and yielded a lot of indirect return on investment. Lots of fat government checks that went straight into the US economy. In the end, all it took was Kennedy telling people that we were going. Only took eight years or so from there. The Saturn 5 was way bigger than it needed to be because the people behind it were already looking at Mars. The Mars capable successor was already being developed until it was cancelled by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N

Anyway, Starship was designed for Mars, is going to the moon first, and might be flying there soonish. A bit over eight years from merely being a crazy idea. Sounds familiar? Only this time it won't be a one off. This thing is reusable and there might be quite few "flight-proven" ones flying towards the end of the decade. It will be very tempting to use one for what it was designed for.

tptacek• 4 years ago

This begs the question of the whole essay, doesn't it? So what if China gets "boots on Mars" first? They'll waste hundreds of billions of dollars (and likely many lives) doing it, and be no better off. If we're really worried, we can just counter them by sending killer robots to Mars.

djur6• 4 years ago

I hope China doesn't land on Mars because of the fragility of the Martian environment, but I see no geopolitical threat in them wasting a lot of money trying.

(Obligatory: Elon Musk did not build a Starship. SpaceX is building it.)

hackeraccount2• 4 years ago

Who would the hardest person at SpaceX to replace be if they left?

Saying it's Shotwell or Musk isn't indefensible. No one is irreplaceable anymore then any one person (as opposed to SpaceX as a whole) is building Starship but it isn't sycophancy to say that some people are more integral to the process.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

The current generation of mega rockets being built by SpaceX and Boeing will hopefully make the next generation of unmanned research far more compelling. They'll enable feats like drilling meters down under the topsoil.

If Mars does indeed happen to be a completely sterile wasteland (which it very likely is given that evidence of life contaminates every crevice of the earth), then human inadvertently depositing microbial hitchhikers on the surface of that world may be the most consequential legacy of humanity 10 million years from now

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

I think this post and many of comments here fail to grasp that a true full scale colonization mission of Mars would likely neccistate some sort of terraforming effort in the far future. Along really long timescales, you can even imagine the opposite effort to alter human biology. The major first step is simply getting there.

Another factor is that the civilization that is able to reach Mars is going to be the one that has achieved the capability to dominate Earth. The original purpose of the space race was war, and though people no longer think about it, mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons.

ausbah3• 4 years ago

mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons

if your goal is only destruction sure, the likes of ICBMs are great. for conventional warfare when you want to do things like topple regimes, annex resources, subjugate peoples, etc. not so much. it's exactly why Russia hasn't used nukes in the Ukrainian conflicts.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Still, optical and Radar satellites and possibly space based signal intelligence definitely play a huge role.

Not to mention artillery crews directing strikes via drone footage streamed over Google Meet running of their Starlink connection.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

Right now we are looking at the effects of HIMARS rocket artillery in Ukraine. Each rocket costs over $50,000. Cruise missiles cost over $1 million. Many nations can produce rockets, but cannot produce them cheaply. Despite the US and Russia having global strike capabilities, this stuff doesn't come cheap. If they were cheap (say via continued investment in space exploration), you basically have a win button for any global conflict. There's literally no reason rocket artillery has to cost over 50 grand in the grand scheme of things. In a total war, we could probably get it down to less than $2000.

verisimi4• 4 years ago

Some of the comments here are from true believers. It strikes me though how close this all is to religion. Reaching for Mars is equivalent to reaching for heaven.

Now, I know this is based in science etc. But looking at the effect on the emotions, from a cultural perspective, it's interesting.

There is religious fervour there, faith, heaven (Mars), hell (uninhabitable earth), lots of details, priests (NASA and other space agencies), but not much personally verifiable knowledge or experience.

hoseja3• 4 years ago

What a Red Martian take, ugh.

rmrf1002• 4 years ago

Go get it, inspire everyone!

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

One must ask the question: why bother exploring space at all? Don't tell me it's for the spinoff technologies, those are a fringe benefit at best, and have dubious return on investment compared to more direct funding. No, it's just because we're curious. We just want to.

Eventually logical arguments about how to acheive goals bottom out at raw, built-in desire. And no matter how many silly-sounding phrasings of the goal that you come up with, the fact remains that we want to go there. We just want to.

(This is no defense of any particular extant plan. OTOH I suspect OP underestimates the value of life support tech here on earth. But these are side questions.)

pnt122• 4 years ago

Maybe the fantasy is better than the reality, as it often is.

Dreaming of going to space makes some people happy and they won't let it go. Doesn't mean it's a good idea!

But sometimes it's productive to have an unreachable goal: it gives us the motivation to improve towards it and reap the benefits, even if we never hit it.

benreesman• 4 years ago

It would be simpler, cheaper, and easier to build a self-sufficient habitat orbiting Mars than to live on it. Even if you could build an atmosphere the lack of a magnetosphere would just see it blown away in the solar wind, if you even still cared after your cancer had cancer from the radiation.

If you want to figure out how to live and grow crops so far underground that solar radiation doesn’t bother you, Earth is a far easier place to do that, and equally resistant to asteroid impact and equally helpless to gamma ray burst.

When big houses became to common men built mansions, when mansions became too pedestrian men built castles on the sea in the form of yachts.

There are plenty of worthwhile reasons to explore and exploit the universe beyond our atmosphere, and in time I believe we will master not only the solar system but many others like it.

The ego of men is no longer a productive driving force for that. That works when the enemy is less powerful men. When the enemy is physics only a rational, long-term, consensual commitment can prevail.

jasmer• 4 years ago

Ego and hubris matter as much in physics as anything else.

The contention here I think is missing the possibility of a breakthrough or two.

We are making 'step functions' now and again in a lot of things, it's not entirely infeasible that a couple of step functions makes space just a lot easier. Maybe in superconducting or power generation or wireless energy transfer. Maybe if energy is super cheap and light, we really can haul a couple of orders of magnitudes more mass up into space, the 'close system' of keeping humans alive equation shifts enough to where it becomes much more feasible.

kimmk• 4 years ago

Regarding atmosphere loss: currently Mars is losing about 95 kt of atmosphere per year [1]. Actively offsetting that amount of loss is not that big of an effort. Also I guess if you would generate an ozone layer, part of this atmosphere loss due to UV radiation would be attenuated.

Obviously, generating an atmosphere on Mars would be immensely energy intensive and likely possible only after we level up on the Kardashev scale.

1. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4988

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Most of these issues can be avoided by incrementally constructing a Low World House:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/51f7d32f54b72

Also unlike planet scale terraforming, you get useful living space from the start & it expands as you go.

SunlightEdge• 4 years ago

How about we just continue to have robots colonize Mars? Just get increasingly sophisticated machines down there to build up the infrastructure. Maybe in 200 years they might have built some nice domes and have earth like gravity/atmosphere inside that animals and plants can be brought to Mars. And maybe then some humans might see it as an attractive destination.

In the mean time, we can colonize difficult places like under the ocean, the Sahara desert, Antarctica, maybe even the moon.

shmageggy• 4 years ago

I think this actually undersells the economic disparity between human and robotic exploration, particularly when extrapolated out to the next couple of decades. Yes, robots today are cheaper, more resilient, and more capable than us, but they are about to become vastly more so on the timeline of a manned Mars mission. AI is happening right now. Roboticists have not been ignoring the wild successes of large language and vision models. The already thin arguments for human presence will sound even weaker in a decade or two when the robots already there are vastly more capable in every way than they already are.

rlt7• 4 years ago

If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets
the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit

This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.

I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.

SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.

smcl• 4 years ago

So the door panels are questionable. But the other two are huge red flags, no? These are two supposedly moonshot-type projects that have turned out to be outright lies:

- Hyperloop was a sort of snake-oil to squash High-Speed Rail

- The robot as a guy in a suit dancing on a stage ... I've no idea where he was trying to with that. I see there's been some movement on their robot since it was "launched", but why on earth did they start off with the weird dancing suit guy?

rlt7• 4 years ago

Seriously? The robot dancing was an obvious joke. He was not trying to pass it off as a real robot and literally no one thought he was. Tesla is actually working on the real thing and they’ve demoed admirable progress 1 year after the initial announcement.

The hypertunnel reference seems to be conflating two (related) things: the Hyperloop concept and the Boring Company.

The Hyperloop thing is definitely questionable, but to steelman it: he truly believes the High Speed Rail is a waste of money and we should be more forward thinking with something like the Hyperloop, even if he didn’t personally intend to build it.

After all, if it was entirely fraud and then what did he have to gain from killing the High Speed Rail? I guess a small fraction of the taxes he pays not going to something he didn’t like?

Also, the origin story suggests it was not concocted as a means to kill the High Speed Rail:

“The recent plans for a version of vacuum train called Hyperloop emerged from a conversation between Elon Musk and Iranian-American Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar when they were flying together to Cuba on a humanitarian mission in January 2012. Pishevar asked Musk to elaborate on his hyperloop idea, which the industrialist had been mulling over for some time. Pishevar suggested using it for cargo, an idea Musk hadn't considered, but he did say he was considering open-sourcing the concept because he was too busy running SpaceX and Tesla. Pishevar pushed Musk to publish his ideas about the hyperloop, so that Pishevar could study them.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop_One

rendall9• 4 years ago

wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.

The underlying serious point of these light-hearted jokes is that Musk's demonstrated approach to technological questions will not solve the challenges of keeping people alive without access to the resources of our biosphere for years at a time. This challenge is arguably more difficult even than building rockets.

You inadvertently proved a point of the article: now we are arguing about Musk and not about the technological challenges of getting to Mars.

rlt7• 4 years ago

It’s certainly not an easy problem but neither are many of the other problems SpaceX has thrived solving. “Arguably harder” sounds like pretty good odds to me.

The author essentially dismissed SpaceX with ad hominem attacks on Musk, who in his critics minds is simultaneously incompetent and the embodiment of his demonstrably successful companies.

elurg3• 4 years ago

Only national space agencies have had a reason to invest in keeping humans alive for long periods of time so they are the only organizations that have demonstrated that capability. It doesn't follow that SpaceX couldn't do it - they just didn't have a reason for it so far.

This idea that "life support" is the most difficult aspect is unfounded. The most difficult problem is transportation and reducing the cost of transportation means that you can attempt to solve every other problem by simply throwing more mass at it.

NASA does much of its work through contractors anyway and there are several companies working on independent space stations. I'm confident that the "life support is too hard" argument will be proven false in a few years.

A similar argument is made that "cryogenic fuel transfer has never been demonstrated at scale therefore Starship can't work". But nobody has even seriously attempted this! And the reason is that without reusable rockets every refueling mission is unbelievably expensive and the business case never closed.

fullstackchris• 4 years ago

I agree entirely. Some of the stuff SpaceX has done is nothing short of incredible (regardless of the involvement of Musk). Imagine if just 20 years ago you said something like "You know, we should make a rocket reusable!" You would have been laughed out of the room, even at a place like NASA.

Humans have an extremely bad habit of discounting future tech.

moffkalast7• 4 years ago

I mean honestly, how can anyone still doubt SpaceX after seeing FH land two boosters at once, Starship doing retrofuturistic manoeuvres and Dragon being NASA's go to for all things ISS for years.

It is unfortunate that they're tied with Musk given his recent self implosion, but they will surely survive him.

Arn_Thor• 4 years ago

Reusable rockets were seriously discussed many decades before SpaceX, they were just considered too expensive. NASA was among the organizations that evaluated them before it ultimately settled on the space shuttle which was quite a bit cheaper.

It was not a far-fetched idea even back then.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

That's not a sign of Musk Derangement Syndrome but the sign of a working set of brains.

MrOwnPut4• 4 years ago

Group think does not make your syndrome go away, sorry.

Now if you would like to defend the statement "SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets", that'd be a start.

But simply saying "Musk = bad" just proves GPs point and makes you look... silly.

Personally SpaceX has blown me away (pun intended) with their advances in rockets. Now what's your take?

PicassoCTs• 4 years ago

Cause mars comes to us, not we to mars. Please redirect your scientific enthusiasm to the catastrophes at hand.

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

I know this isn't the point of the article.. but let's fix our climate problems at home first, before worrying about terraforming Mars.

fernandohur2• 4 years ago

Moving to Mars is analogous to a full app re-write.

Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate.

I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet.

Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.

vardump• 4 years ago

How about... do both?

fernandohur2• 4 years ago

IMO the cost

zopa3• 4 years ago

Except there’s no intention to deprecate Earth and replace it with Mars. Not a rewrite, just new parallel development. Should we never start new software projects at all? All the code ever written should be in one repo (probably in FORTRAN)?

palata10• 4 years ago

We'll we are accumulating bugs at such a pace that the app may become unusable in the near future...

867-5309• 4 years ago

however soundly damning this appears, our species depends on exploration for survival

at some point in time, the costs/risks/futility will be close enough to zero to warrant such exploration

we left the sea, we left the trees, we left the caves, we will inevitably leave the planet

daneel_w2• 4 years ago

Authors like this one previously also wrote poorly aged hit pieces like "Why not across the oceans", "Why not to the skies" and "Why not to space".

pnt122• 4 years ago

That's very dismissive. I don't agree that doing more of the same is good because it worked out before, even if the current goal is harder by many orders of magnitude.

Criticism is good! Let the best ideas prevail.

MicolashKyoka2• 4 years ago

Exactly, if we were to listen to such tales (or similar ones by penny pinchers), we would still be hitting rocks to make fire in our little caves. Venturing beyond is an amazing way to enrich our knowledge graph.

palata10• 4 years ago

Exactly, if we were to listen to such tales we may even still be living in a sustainable world! Luckily, we're steadily destroying life because we can. /s

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

This is exactly the kind of dismissal that the guidelines explicitly ask you not to make.

daneel_w2• 4 years ago

The entire article is a snarky dismissal of humanity's possibly grandest venture so far. Let us at least allow ourselves room for some "bilateralism".

ikrenji4• 4 years ago

why? he has a point. humanity is going to be around for a very long time and I don't think we will accept being limited to earth forever

mike_HGolang• 4 years ago

Hardly disagree with author, IMHO we should aim to colonise moon and mars asap.

neilv• 4 years ago

For deciding how to invest towards the future of humanity and science/technology, have we already given up on keeping the Earth habitable?

If Elon Musk wants to be jettisoned to Mars, I'll be the first to cheer him on.

But back on our current human planet, how do we avert apocalyptic scale of misery and deaths in a few decades?

eesmith2• 4 years ago

Nearly 20 years ago Bruce Sterling wrote:

I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.

https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004...

rippercushions• 4 years ago

Bruce better start believing then, since the Gobi Desert is inhabited and the Oyu Tolgoi copper & gold smack dab in the middle of it powers over one third of Mongolia's GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyu_Tolgoi_mine

eesmith2• 4 years ago

While it's true the Gobi desert has been sparsely populated for ages, saying that a mine is a colony is like saying an offshore oil platform is a colony.

A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+?

The entire Ömnögovi Province has 66K people.

That Wikipedia article links to https://web.archive.org/web/20140724131423/http://www.circle... from a decade ago which points out how the mine is taking water that was supplying the animals local herders used.

If that's still the case, and usable surface water is disappearing, that sounds like the opposite of a self-sustaining colony.

c_prompt• 4 years ago

"a glamorous effort led by a hype man"
"This has the effect of turning technical discussions into debates over the character and achievements of Elon Musk— just the way he likes it."
"But their founder is who he is, and what he has publicly shared is not so much a blueprint as an inspirational poster."

While I valued many of the thoughts in this post, it made me think of the meme "I choked on a carrot this afternoon and all I could think was 'I bet a donut wouldn't have done this to me.'" Putting aside the argument of whether or not scientific research, especially in space, is a proper role of government/politics, it is disappointing to see what I believe is an intellectual defect to undermine inspiration for human achievement with ad hominems in the context of a collapsing culture lacking meaningful debate on significant government war funding power delusions and destruction. Conquering technical achievements in any form (e.g., "port-a-potty chemistry," getting "to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena") vs. conquering people is, IMO, a more appropriate intellectual debate. I'll turn my computer speakers up to 100% for inspiration by Elon any day to drown out the human destructive philosophies of the politicians this author appears to support. [1]

I think Ayn Rand said it well [2]: "The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11's flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist's emphasis on the dimensions of reason's power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211003211306/https://techsolid...

[2] https://newideal.aynrand.org/ayn-rand-on-apollo-11/

Mikho• 4 years ago

We should think about colonizing Mars but not right away. It's like skipping 10 steps and trying to land on the 11th one without progressing naturally through all required evolutionary steps in the space tech development. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket in hopes that everything goes right from the first attempt. Iterations this way are way too expensive.

Instead, Mars colonization should be though as an option at the point when humanity already could sustain life in space close to Earth — like in a space habitat city of 1000s of people with an option for fast logistics to Earth.

But first, it should be a Moon colony (the mission Artemis) that could be made sustainable via many safe iterations close to Earth. Then we need to build a space habitat on Earth orbit and use the Moon base for the construction support. Not to mention learning how to build factories in Space to process asteroid mined ore.

And only at this point it's worth start thinking about Mars colonization. That's like in a couple of hundreds of years at best. Before that all conversation about Mars are just pure science fiction.

Only then when the habitat of 1000s of people could sustain life and travel in space independent from Earth it could be sent to Mars to ignite terraforming process and building a small base. The good thing is by this time we already could solve sustaining life without Earth in Space with no regards to Mars in general. In reality, by the time we start colonizing Mars there already could exist many Space habitats and human colonies beyond Earth.

The thing is Mars is a really hostile and hard place to be. There is no reason for people to be there unless it has at least some livable condition. It's very cold (43% of Sun light), it has radiation, its dust kills all equipment. There shouldn't be humans based on Mars without an option for a fast escape or access to supplies should anything happen — that's what Mars orbiting space habitat would be there for.

So, there is no reason to even talk about Mars colonization without achieving more reasonable progress closer to our home planet.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

It's like skipping 10 steps and trying to land on the 11th one without progressing naturally through all required evolutionary steps in the space tech development. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket in hopes that everything goes right from the first attempt.

So like Apollo, right ? :)

ed_balls• 4 years ago

So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative

All start to make sense when you look at it through geopolitics. Satellites have become one of the most critical components in the modern warfare. A lunar base helps you destroy enemy's satellites and you want humans in the loop.

pharmakom2• 4 years ago

The article makes some interesting points. It seems to me that a manned moon base fits the bill:

- little to no risk of contamination on moon

- inspirational goal

- achievable with current tech

- stepping stone to future projects (e.g. we can launch robotic missions from a lunar base)

Armisael162• 4 years ago

The Moon is not a useful launch site for projects elsewhere unless a lot of the mass comes from there (ie, lots of fuel or the mission itself).

You lose a lot of dv by stopping mid-trip; this isn’t like pulling off at a rest-stop.

pharmakom2• 4 years ago

Doesn’t the reduced gravity make a huge difference compared to launching from Earth? Is this not the biggest factor? (Zero expertise here, genuinely curious)

wheelerof4te5• 4 years ago

Whenever someone makes an interesting case about returning to the Moon, there is always someone else arguing why that would be boring or ininteresting or "we already did that".

I find that quite odd, since there is still so much we don't know about the Moon. If we have the technology, why wouldn't we send someone there to explore and make way for making of a lunar base?

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

Well, mass drivers should be relatively easy to construct on the moon & can be used to launch fuel and resources for ship construction. Also at least some terrestrial mining and refining techniques could likely be used on the Moon in modified form while we are still very early in zero-g mining and refining necessary for Asteroid resource extraction.

knorker3• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sick of all these "it's hard, so let's not even try to do it".

I can't put myself in the head of someone who doesn't understand inspiration, passion, or dreaming. It seems so short-sighted.

"Let's only do it once it becomes easy".

Would they say the same about climbing the highest mountain? About abolishing slavery? About sailing the high seas?

In my opinion I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that this sounds like the kind of argument people would use to be pro-slavery because of the economy. Practical? Maybe (though in retrospect not). Doing the right thing? Absolutely not.

To me shutting down these things is like dismissing the persuit of the meaning of life.

Aside from the Apollo program being maybe the most return on investment monetarily in the history of humanity, I wonder what the ROI is on worker and entrepreneur motivation in addition to that.

If we can put a man on the moon, then nothing is impossible. Every obstacle is conquerable. We need to know that science fiction is within our grasp, and we won't get there without taking any steps.

If humans can put a man on the moon, then surely we can get this factory 10% more effective while improving workers lives?

I bet at least one of the big tech companies would not exist without this motivation. "Humanity can't put a man on the moon, so maybe we should sell this 'google' company to yahoo". Google monopoly aside, without Google we may not have Hadoop, free email, or many other things. What's the ROI just in terms of having free email with more than 1MB of quota?

Nobody gets out of life alive. Why would you aim low just to attempt to? Not saying we should take needless chances, but as people and as a society we do need to actually… you know… live.

citizenpaul2• 4 years ago

If humans can put a man on the moon, then surely we can get this factory 10% more effective while improving workers lives?

This is one of the most depressing soul crushing sentences I have ever read. It fills me with dispair. Its basically the justification for every kind of oppression and atrocity ever committed. Yet it is said with true starry eyed belief by you.

knorker3• 4 years ago

Improving workers lives is depressing? I'm truly not following.

I'm saying literally "surely we can make this world better for everyone", and you see it as a negative?

poulpy1233• 4 years ago

very excellent points from the author. I would like just to correct him on one point: treaty are only valid as long as the main powers are agreeing. The minute it's inconveniencing the US the mars treaty will be thrown in the trashbin. And it's even worse for people like Musk.

api2• 4 years ago

I disagree quite strongly with the idea that robots are a substitute for human migration. The rationale is totally different.

That being said I think the Moon makes far more sense as a first off planet settlement. The transit time is short enough for a tourism industry among other things. It’s also short enough to permit relief flights and for people to quickly return if necessary. It would be a great place to basically prototype the technology and the social aspects.

Also the fact that it is more hostile in some ways is good from a prototyping point of view. If we can live with no atmosphere and 1/6 gravity we can surely make it with some atmosphere and 1/3 gravity.

Edit: and mining may be viable. Gravity is low enough to permit possible gun or mass driver launch from the moon back to Earth for raw materials. Probably wouldn’t make enough to make the whole venture profitable but could maybe offset it a bit along with tourism. Materials like gold, platinum, rare earths, etc might be found near the surface in concentrated deposits due to no weathering.

etothepii• 4 years ago

I cannot help but think that solving the problems of laundry and sanitation on a Mars trip could do wonders for the development of places that do not have adequate sanitation today.

ubercore• 4 years ago

I don't think sanitation problems on earth are generally technological ones, they're usually money/resource related. Not sure a super-expensive Mars trip solution would have a ton of impact on Earth (maybe though?)

viburnum3• 4 years ago

They won’t. Space problems are not earth problems.

LightG• 4 years ago

A "colony" on Mars is going to be about as extensive as the ISS for at least 100 years.

Or have you bought into Elon's nonsense?

papito• 4 years ago

Anybody who thinks they have the grit for Mars life, for your own good - try it here first. Take 3, or better 6 months of your life to spend in one of the remote Inupiat villages in Alaska. In a few weeks, you will be climbing up walls. Here on Earth frontier living sucks, but it’s Club Med compared to Mars.

Zigurd• 4 years ago

"Stunt" is the right word.

If humans are sent to Mars, the most vivid lesson will be not to send humans to Mars. The most valuable lesson is that life without the ecosystem it evolved to inhabit is unsustainable in some pretty horrifying ways, and humans need to take better care of their ecosystem.

There is already an indictment written in the Earth itself: That time we exploded nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. That time we put lead in gasoline. Those deadly mistakes left permanent evidence of stupidity and arrogance.

That said, if Elon can take a thousand libertarian techbros to a different planet, it will likely end up as an unintended monument to What Not to Do that will last for millennia. I'd give him the Nobel for that.

markphip• 4 years ago

Pretty interesting article.

I have always been a Mars-skeptic so this article reinforced much of that. That said, in reading this article I came to wonder why the author is even proposing we spend the money on more probes. Sooner or later, the probes only make sense if we intend to follow-up with human space travel. I suppose you could make the argument we are a century away from where we ought to consider that, but the author does not broach the subject of what the long term goals ought to be for space exploration and why.

From a science perspective, I am in favor of more things like JWST. More probes probably make sense for similar reasons. From a commercial and human standpoint, we should probably be focusing more on Low Earth applications with maybe some possibility that some of this ought to also focus on establishing a permanent base on the moon. But doing this on the moon assumes some really good reasons materialize for doing so. Whether it is the discovery of ice or minerals, or (maybe also) that there is an area we could setup beneath the surface the is shielded from radiation.

It would be great if we could find a practical reason for establishing a presence on the moon that then also laid the groundwork as an environment where some of these longer term problems could be tested and refined while we were also extracting some value from being there.

crazygringo• 4 years ago

At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere... Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee.
The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars.

This is the most shocking takeaway for me from the article. Is it true?

There are lots of citations attached but they're all to individual papers, and the "99.999%" figure appears to be hyperbole, not any kind of actual calculation. (Nor is it remotely clear whether it's attempting to refer to percentage of life by mass, by organism, or by species.)

If this is true, shouldn't there be some mainstream news articles? At least a mention on Wikipedia? Wikipedia describes the existence of extremophiles [1,2], but nothing about any recent discoveries that they make up nearly all of the life on earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microorganism#Extremophiles

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile

ceejayoz3• 4 years ago

It's probably true by species. Life in mile-deep rock is gonna be quite isolated - you're not wafting miles a day in the breeze - and that's gonna lead to quite a bit of speciation.

causality0• 4 years ago

Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for.

The purpose of setting foot on Mars is to ignite the human spirit, you soulless pedestrian.

Invictus03• 4 years ago

Get a jetski. Some people on Earth still need to eat.

drbojingle• 4 years ago

Why not Zoidberg?

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

There’s not a strong utilitarian reason to send humans to Mars, just like there is not a strong utilitarian reason to send people to the summits of high mountains.

But people still are enamored of the high mountains. I think that is basically because, at their core, most people’s deepest feelings about human life are also not utilitarian.

bogwog• 4 years ago

This was a really good, well-researched article that actually changed my (admittedly not very strong) opinion on going to Mars, but there are 740 comments in this thread so far and I doubt more than 5% of people posting comments actually read the entire thing.

We need a highly condensed version of the main bullet points, preferably in TikTok format, to reach more people.

jacquesm13• 4 years ago

I did read the entire thing, and as usually Maciej is on-point, but: since it isn't going to happen anyway as per his first couple of paragraphs it makes me wonder what the point is to having the many words following it.

Anybody that believes that we have the technology capable of setting up a self sufficient Mars base should be invited to demonstrate such on the Moon, where in case things inevitably go pear shaped at least there is a small chance of rescue, which in the case of Mars is impossible. Anybody that signs up for a Mars mission may well end up bringing life to Mars, but not in the way that they intend to. Either way it wouldn't be intelligent life.

roryisok• 4 years ago

Anybody that believes that we have the technology capable of setting up a self sufficient Mars base should be invited to demonstrate such on the Moon

Is this not exactly what we're doing with the Artemis Program? From its wiki page:

The program's long-term goal is to establish a permanent base camp on the Moon and facilitate human missions to Mars.

twic• 4 years ago

well-researched

In places.

There is a classic banger of a paper, "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1], which assembles evidence that human space exploration, while expensive, is more cost-effective than robotic. So when i saw Maciej write:

Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8]

I jumped straight to reference 7, and found:

[7] I know, no robot can reflect on the nature of the Sublime while looking at sunbeams dancing on the limb of Deimos or whatever. But when it comes to tasks like “look under this rock on Mars” or “fly through this plume and sample it”, robots are awesome.

This is not exactly what i would call a well-researched statement.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6250

fennecfoxy3• 4 years ago

I read the whole thing, but don't pretend we're all not guilty of that crime; you, me and everyone else.

dependsontheq• 4 years ago

I think this is a very utilitarian view. He is probably right, but we are in a late stage post material society where a huge part of the global population just wants to be entertained.

This will be great content and entertainment for billions. The endless travel time will actually be a key feature of it.

I can't decide if I am ironic, sarcastic or realistic.

valeg3• 4 years ago

Mars exploration has a wide presence in literature and movies which in turn backs Elon's (and Mars One etc.) grift. It is pointless and dangerous to send humans so far away on a dead planet without magnetosphere. Let's establish a base on the Moon first. This seems way more practical as a goal.

MrOwnPut4• 4 years ago

Yes lets establish a base on the moon with no resources, the same moon that was created from an asteroid impact like the one we're trying to avoid by being a multi-planet species.

We can create fuel on Mars. Mars is far enough away from Earth that it's a safe redundancy for humans.

Sure we can use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, but we can also train for Mars like conditions in Nevada...

Either way, Mars is the only viable goal if you want to remove the single point of failure of an asteroid impact.

valeg3• 4 years ago

It takes about 3 days for a spacecraft to reach the Moon. Mars takes months and not easy to reach. There is no magnetosphere and refueling idea is unrealistic. We need to find a new way to move in space. CSS[1] guys did a good rebuttal to all this nonsense:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeo...

PebblesRox• 4 years ago

"NASA has spent decades learning how to survive in the harsh environment of Congress, and that knowledge is bearing fruit today."

This is a great line.

Projectiboga• 4 years ago

Isn't Mars' gravity just 0.39 of ours, that alone makes me think it's a fool's errand. Yes getting of this rock is a necessary step to taking over the galaxy but that doesn't sound good for humans. Now sending ever better robots might work. They can harvest materials etc and send them back.

Animats• 4 years ago

Things worth doing in space that are more promising than Mars:

- A robotic Venus lander that can survive for a few days. The last lander to take pictures on Venus landed over 40 years ago, and it only operated for half an hour.[1] Venus Surface temperatures are around 475°C. The electronics overheated. Now we have silicon carbide semiconductors and laser welding, so continued operation at those temperatures might be possible. Here are most of the existing pictures of the surface of Venus.[2] It looks more interesting than Mars.

- A Europa lander. The recent Europa flyby shows much more interesting surface features than Mars. What are those long, thin features? Not rivers; rivers don't have right-angled intersections.

Mars is nearly airless and boring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14

[2] https://www.popsci.com/yes-weve-seen-surface-venus/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98cHbM1cRM

gorgoiler2• 4 years ago

Is it possible to operate a heat pump at 450C?

Compress a gas until it heats up to 880C; send it outside to “cool down” to 450C; bring it in and decompress it where it drops to 20C; and bathe on deliciously cool room temperature air?

gorgoiler2• 4 years ago

(For clarity, this question is more about seeking clarity on my own hazy understanding of how fridges work, rather than some random internet person suggesting “have you thought of this <obvious solution>?”.)

chrsw• 4 years ago

Colonizing is Mars unrealistic. Mars is too hostile for our type of life. Maybe machines can "live" there. Developing the science and technology to make Mars even slightly more viable is going to take a long time and we're going to need a healthy Earth while we work on the solutions anyway. So why not make sure we have a healthy Earth in the first place? We can keep an eye on Mars as a stretch goal but it's always going to be pretty far down the priority list. I know that's not the romantic view.

bckr2• 4 years ago

No mention in TFA of O'Neil cylinders or other near-earth space settlements. To me, these options must be mentioned in the same breath as "Not Mars", because we do need to escape the cradle.

trollerator23• 4 years ago

All I will say that the dismissal of SpaceX is extremely ignorant. Just that, ignorant, of what really goes inside.

I know for a fact that a lot of smart people there have been working on the Mars problem almost since SpaceX was created. I would not compare them with Hyperloop or the Boring Company with such a dismissive handwave.

pmarreck• 4 years ago

Make the funding for it a multi-country project, with whoever the main funder is getting ideological/representative credit for it over time. This will skirt both the "can this even survive multiple administrations" problem while also incentivizing continued participation via competition for international prestige.

m4rtink78• 4 years ago

The service module for the Orion deep space capsule is made in Europe - coincidence ? ;-)

difosfor• 4 years ago

Reminds me of some of the ideas from the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I can recommend it if you're interested.

ShredKazoo• 4 years ago

Seems to me that NASA needs to send probes to Mars pronto so they can do a thorough check for life before SpaceX gets there.

memetomancer• 4 years ago

(Hey so I apologize if this has been touched on in the main thread, but I didn't spot anything related so starting a new one).

We should consider even further: what about consequences of successfully colonizing Mars? I feel it would mean almost certain doom for both planets. I'll explain:

Imagine all of the hurdles mentioned in the linked blog are overcome. Improbable for the U.S. or EU, sure, but consider China. If everything goes well, they end up with a sustainable outpost with several hundred to several thousand inhabitants and a reliable supply line back to Earth. Everything is great, yeah?

But looking a bit further down the timeline, we will end up with generations of humans native to this outpost. All living deep underground, rarely seeing the surface. Sure there would be domes you could visit to check it out, but they'd probably see as much traffic as a planetarium or scenic vista - more apt for school trips than any part of daily life.

We know very little of the role of epigenetics in these conditions, but you might imagine that tunnel dwelling folk in weak gravity are probably going to express genes differently during development, than we see here on Earth. Different diets, different light exposure, different gravity and even different focal lengths will all have an impact. The forces of evolution will bear an increased impact here also - children that blossom into more Earth appropriate bodies will have increased pressure against their thriving in these conditions. Social forces will likely begin to exclude them from the gene pool, accelerating the occurrences of whatever Martian traits emerge.

These generations of inhabitants would eventually put pressure on the supply lines from Earth via the growing population. Or some enterprising politician will manipulate the supply lines in order to exercise despotic authority over them. Eventually the Martians will see pressure to become self sufficient. This will plainly lead to a revolution and independence - an intolerable insult the the patron government. Back on Earth, the strange look of the native Martians will stir racist hatreds and clamoring for subjugation with extreme prejudice. Recall that in the past few years we've seen extreme hatred rear up over the pettiest of differences, to the point where neo-nazis are flourishing and attempting coups in the most powerful nations. Hating weird gray/green skinned, 8 foot tall spider people from Outer Space would be reaaaal easy for these people.

The Earth will send their troops and bombers. The Martians will burrow deeper and humiliate those invading troops with relative ease. The Earth will maybe nuke the place? But that will have very little effect, even the aftermath of fallout and irradiated rock will be negligible to the Martians. But they will be angry. And it would take little effort to rig something up and launch Phobos at the Earth at 1% c.

But the Martians would soon learn that they were dependent on Earth for more than manufactured goods. Their delayed access to the internet would disappear, along with scientific advancements, intellectual culture, entertainment and archives going offline and leaving them with whatever had been cached/stored in their local cloud hardware. Would Mars have developed a chip fab (and the equally important thousands of suppliers for a chip fab) by this time? Medical knowledge? Would they have needed expertise in Computer Science? Imagine if some disaster left Earth with little more than a single hospital and a computer retailer, how would we recover?

Mars Colony may just soldier on for a while, but more than likely would ultimately succumb to genetic degradation, scientific stagnation, room to grow the civilization, lack of elements or molecules that are difficult to procure on Mars, etc.

Colonizing Mars is the worst idea. Just the worst.

Exendroinient00• 4 years ago

Base on moon is simply put much more rational choice. It would be just antarctica on steroids with possible resupply and relative proximity. Colony on mars needs to be entirely self-sustaining and we don't have any working equivalent here on earth. Putting material on the surface is one thing, but to actually have the infrastructure there to survive is much harder beast.

IG_Semmelweiss• 4 years ago

Its obviously hard to accept but we must come to terms that computers , and more specifically drones, should be doing the jobs that are too hazardous or too expensive for regular human labor to do.

We are slowly accepting it with cars, trains, and planes.

It doesnt make such sense that we still pushing for crewed missions when all other modes of transport and mobilization are going to automation / or remotely driven.

rmrf1002• 4 years ago

I think the super rich like Musk is working on it.

hackeraccount2• 4 years ago

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon.

How soon does anyone think we're going to send people to Mars? In the next 10 years? 20 years? Personally - and I wouldn't mind seeing it happen - I'd be shocked if it was in the next 30 years.

Everyone has a different time frame but I don't think of that as soon.

theshrike79• 4 years ago

It depends a lot on our ability to handle loss of life in the process of exploration.

We can most definitely get people on Mars by 2030. But we need to accept that some or all of them may die in the process. Are we as a civilisation ready for that?

The technology of actually getting someone BACK from Mars is a whole different thing.

In the worst situation we would have the world's most expensive reality survival show, watching when astronauts slowly die of starvation on Mars because hydroponics failed and they didn't bring enough dry rations.

fennecfoxy3• 4 years ago

Why anything?

samhuk• 4 years ago

There is a rather toxic political tone running through the article which really puts me off. Just one of the examples is they refer to Elon Musk as wanting to populate Mars with "subsistence farming incels", which is just a down-right stupid thing to say and spoils what could have been a very insightful read.

On a similar theme, calling those who support humans going to mars as being part of some Elon Musk-led culty "mars religion" is totally preposterous. There's a reek of "Everyone who disagrees with me doesn't have the truth'n'facts and have actually just tricked themselves into believing a religion".

Musk Derangement Syndrome is strong.

I actually support a lot of their statements though, e.g. about the rather silly lunar gateway that seems to have very little actual financial logic to it. It's just a shame.

Why Not Mars

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