7 ms·

It’s completely ridiculous to think that humans could live on Mars

56 points by markmassie 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
tl;dr: Its hard, and most folks wouldn't want to do it.
- baking 11y ago
  Of course, that doesn't rule out that some folks might.
NickM 11y ago
The author's main argument seems to be that nobody will want to do it. But historically, there have been numerous cases of colonists giving up a safe, easy life to go live somewhere inhospitable and dangerous. When I think about the first settlers that sailed across the Atlantic to colonize America, it seems amazing to me that people were willing to give up so much and endure such risks and hardships, but there have always been people that will go to great lengths to conquer new frontiers. I expect the first Martians will be no different in this respect.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  The difference is that pioneers in the past had been able to survive in boats for long periods of time for thousands of years. At the moment we aren't able to keep a self-sustained environment on the Earth orbit, which is relatively cheap to get to, or on the Moon, which is still on the Earth's gravity well and relatively cheat to arrive compared with Mars. So we aren't able to keep people alive in a lake at 100m from the shore without resupplying them every week, which means that sending somebody to the center of the ocean and expecting them to survive without any help for years is nowhere near our reach. Looking at the past we can think that all achievements just took brave people that tried, but actually those achievements took place on a confluence of many favorable material and social conditions.
- rwc 11y ago
  Seems like you're glossing over the whole religious persecution thing.
- fluxquanta 11y ago
  The difference between the "inhospitable" New World and Mars is that Mars is actually inhospitable.
- yongjik 11y ago
  No, settlers weren't willing to give up so much, those people went on to colonize America precisely because they had so little to lose. They were already enduring poverty, hardship, and (in many cases) discrimination to such a degree that crossing the ocean and starting a new life in an unknown land inhabited with hostile indigenous tribes seemed a good enough deal in comparison. In other words, imagine a developer in India who wants to move to SV but can't get a visa. Can he instead apply for a ship bound to Mars, and agree to work as an IT technician in lieu of paying for the trip (and all the food, water, and oxygen he will need in Mars)? Until that is economically feasible, colonization of Mars will not happen, at least not in the same way colonization of America happened.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    There's a bunch of people right now who are willing to risk death at sea to try to get from Syria to Europe. A fair number of them would probably accept a one-way ticket to Mars, even with the risk it involves.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - yongjik 11y ago
      It's the other side of the equation that's missing. Somebody has to be making money selling a one-way ticket to Mars to a desperate refugee. As for now, I doubt even Bill Gates' whole wealth could buy a single ticket to Mars.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Europeans explored the New World to find faster shipping routes for existing trade. And they colonized it because it had proven resources (gold, furs, etc). They didn't do it for the romanticized reasons you suggest. In contrast, exploring and colonizing Mars is only justified by romantic reasons.
- dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  The first martians will be religious fundamentalists/social conservatives who pool their last few dollars to buy transportation and initial supplies for settlement of mars due to economic and social persecution on earth? Other than economic ventures such as the Spanish stuff (pillaging) in south America and Jamestown (where the wasn't actually any gold, but "hey, tobacco grows pretty well") early colonization of the new world was basically driven by persecution. The inquisition or some local form thereof was present in pretty much all of western Europe at the time. England and other protestant areas were equally tolerant of anyone that didn't pray the way they did. Pooling your money to buy a one way ticket far as hell away and enough food to hopefully last the winter was a pretty good option. Possibly starving because you aren't a good farmer doesn't seem all that bad when a change of regime could mean that everyone in your community was at risk of imprisonment/death. At least you can kind of control whether or not you starve.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Driven by persecution - correlation and causation? Colonies were funded; people volunteered to go. The volunteers were often persecuted people looking for a new life. I'd say colonization was driven by money.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    No matter what religion you follow, there's at least one place closer than Mars (i.e. somewhere on Earth) where you won't be persecuted.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  When I think about the first settlers that sailed across the Atlantic to colonize America, it seems amazing to me that people were willing to give up so much and endure such risks and hardships, but there have always been people that will go to great lengths to conquer new frontiers. How romantic. And incorrect. Folks explored the new world for a very obvious reasons: Money. Land. Resources. Think spices. Gold. Slave labour. That's it. There's none of that on Mars.
dsjoerg 11y ago
Good points comparing colonizing Mars to colonizing places on Earth such as Antarctica, the Sahara, or the bottom of the oceans.
- nkrisc 11y ago
  I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think it's a fair comparison given that those Earth-based locations are easier to colonize, yet haven't been.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    We have permanent bases in Antarctica. Could we establish a colony there? Very likely. Given we have some people live there nearly year round, I'm sure we could, actually. But why would we? The "why?" for Mars is "What happens if Earth is fucked Completely, royally, and absolutely fucked." What happens when a catastrophic event wipes out all life on Earth? Colonizing Antarctica or the Sahara does nothing to ensure human survival in that case. But putting people on Mars and creating a self-sufficient colony? As long as Mars isn't fucked too - humans might live on. There are plenty of people who are interested in human survival.
- davidw 11y ago
  I was driving around near Oregon's lake Abert a month or so ago, and got to thinking "if people can live here, Mars shouldn't be that hard". Kidding, but... not too much. That's some desolate, high, dry, hot and cold country out there. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Abert,+Oregon+97630/@43.0558282,-119.9780806,3a,75y,18.92h,93.57t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sJkbX7zeow2I6loPiy-5-6Q!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DJkbX7zeow2I6loPiy-5-6Q%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D279.49475%26pitch%3D0!7i3328!8i1664!4m2!3m1!1s0x54b62a9e9e47ccbd:0x704ecbcb17545725!5m1!1e4!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Abert,+Oregon+97630/@...
GeorgeOrr 11y ago
Think of all the great innovations that have come from people who realized that doing hard stuff is hard so don't try.
- mitchtbaum 11y ago
  And what of those men and women wise enough to work on what was good and needed rather than what they had in their _wildest_ dreams?
  - GeorgeOrr 11y ago
    I'm sure those wise people you mentioned would also be wise enough to see through a false choice like that. Good thing for us all that it isn't an either/or. Fortunately some people can work on the good and needed. And some people can work on the hard, maybe even the too hard to see at first that it's even possible.
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    Good and needed better mousetraps.
    - mitchtbaum 11y ago
      And a better Earth?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Think of all the great innovations that came from people who didn't realize that stuff was hard so they tried anyway.
WildUtah 11y ago
Interesting usage here. "Alphabet's (formerly Google's)" calls back to the headline yesterday about Alphabet's Google's search engine. Some speculated that soon we'd be talking about Alphabet's Google's Youtube's Youtube Red. Now we can talk about Alphabet's (formerly Google's) Google's Youtube's Youtube Red.
luchadorvader 11y ago
It is ridiculous but at the same time tackling a problem of this size will provide so many new solutions to other problems as well innovations for new things that we might have not thought of. What we can gain from trying might be worth doing.
- Retric 11y ago
  That depends on approach. If we try and use plants to supply most of the oxygen then that's innovative and risky, just sending lots of oxygen tanks far less so.
transfire 11y ago
> But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity. It is no where near the limits of our reach. We already have people living in space year round without any local resources. What we do seem to lack however is any faith in ourselves.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  > We already have people living in space year round without any local resources. You're joking, right? The ISS gets everything from Earth, even its water, and they're so bad at self-sustainability that they are not able to wash their own dirty clothes (I shit you not). Oh, and they throw away their feces and only recently were able to grow some lettuce on board. That's the state of the art right now.
  - michaelmrose 11y ago
    You realize that although LEO is cheaper to resupply it is actually more inhospitable right? There is by definition no resources available save sunlight.
    - mannykannot 11y ago
      > You realize that although [the thing that makes all the difference]...
- mannykannot 11y ago
  Compared to what is available on Mars, Earth counts as a local resource for living in LEO.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  I am not sure what you trying to pointing out. Current people in space are being re-supplied from Earth all the time, and they aren't completely our of our gravity well, so the energy required to get stuff there is lower and still very expensive. If you want to re-supply people on Mars you would have to escape Earth's gravity well completely, which is crazy expensive.
ChicagoBoy11 11y ago
RemindeMe! 50 years
adrianN 11y ago
Yeah, let's just sit here on our planet, posting cats on the internet and wait for the next extinction event.
- vectorpush 11y ago
  If your concern is the possible extinction of humanity, I don't see how an arduous journey to a barren and inhospitable wasteland is of any use to the cause. If we can manage to survive on Mars, certainly we can manage to survive on the most life-friendly planet known to man.
  - michaelmrose 11y ago
    I can imagine a variety of extinction events that could touch one world and not the other. I'm sure you can too.
    - vectorpush 11y ago
      I can't really imagine an extinction event that could touch a world that cannot support life as we know it.
      - michaelmrose 11y ago
        We are talking about a hypothetical scenario in which we have colonized mars. A meteor could take out earth but not mars for example
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > If your concern is the possible extinction of humanity, I don't see how an arduous journey to a barren and inhospitable wasteland is of any use to the cause. I'm perplexed by this statement as the journey would be the exact opposite of what you purport. Are you saying that, unless we can travel to someplace that is very hospitable to life, that we shouldn't bother? How are we ever going to develop the technology to go to such a theoretical place if we're not working on the technology already and constantly iterating on it? Let's say we're going to be hit with an asteroid that will kill all / most life on Earth. There is no way we can stop it. Having colonies on other planets and moons within our solar system means all of those people, in their self sustaining habitats, will live through the extinction event. Humans would not go extinct. > If we can manage to survive on Mars, certainly we can manage to survive on the most life-friendly planet known to man. Are you saying there is no such thing as an extinct level event for humans simply because we can live on Mars? I'm not sure what the point is that you're trying to convey here.
PaulHoule 11y ago
If you ever want to go to Mars, establish a base on the Moon first and develop the ability to mine water, rock, and metal from the moon and close asteroids. If you can make propellant tanks and fill them up the trip to Mars will be a snap and there will be a lot of human experience in deep space so the first visitors won't be setting endurance records
wwwdonohue 11y ago
And yet Google has invested almost a billion dollars in SpaceX.
nkrisc 11y ago
I agree with the title; for now. In the near term, perhaps even the next couple hundred years, it is likely that a colony on Mars would make zero sense aside from scientific research (even that could be done without people on the surface themselves). Beyond that, I won't try to predict what will and won't make sense 500 years from now, 1000 years from now. Mars may not have a lot of resources, but it does have one thing that could be useful to a much larger and much more space-capable human population in the future: room. There's a lot of room there for people. We can argue all day whether that's realistic or not, but we should never assume that it will never make sense in the future based solely on the resources and problems of today.
bane 11y ago
One thing I think is important when considering colonizing another planet is that we have to drop certain expectations for the first few waves of colonists: e.g. the expectation that your lifespan will be as long as your Earth brethren. By all accounts, the first colonists to the New World lived short, miserable, brutish lives and it was only well after sufficient infrastructure was established and European style civilization was properly bootstrapped could the average American expect to live as long as the average European. Several early American colonies failed to last even a handful of years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Every year, tens of thousands of people visit Antarctica, a place with nothing besides cold deserts and penguins.[1] We are not making the Earth less inhabitable. More people live on the planet now than ever before. In fact, many really smart people over the years have told us that the planet would never be able to support the current population. There's an undercurrent in this article that's extremely dour, depressing, and bleak. I take issue with that, but we can save that conversation for another day. People will visit Mars. In fact, for many decades it looks like tourism will be the prominent industry. Mars has water. Mars has CO2. We can make a breathable atmosphere and support ourselves, although it looks like living mostly underground is our best option for the foreseeable future. In my mind, what we need is cheap/free energy. Nuclear batteries look like the best option, at least initially. Also a modular, standardized deployment system where things plug into each other. It'd be good if for a while we equip every piece of gear going to Mars with power and an O2/water generator. No matter how it plays out it'll be interesting to watch. Too bad it will probably take a long time before we see a sizable population there. [1] Tourism in Antarctica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Antarctica
drvortex 11y ago
It has always been ridiculous to think about something ambitious, until it gets done. Ref: History of Humanity.
nabla9 11y ago
I think the article is not fully exploring the economic argument. Triumph of the city/network effect argument: Networking and connectedness into other people and increasingly into computer services around the world provide more intellectual satisfaction than surviving in the desert does. Mass of humanity produces more variety when it clumps together physically. Urbanization on the earth is driven by productivity growth from cities. Immigration to distant colonies could be justified with farmland and resources in pre-industrial society and industrial society. If post-industrial society with deceasing population builds distant colonies, it wastes resources. After the thrill of interplanetary space travel wears off, Mars may have small outpost for geologists, geochemists etc. I think colonizing moon will be far more likely when technology allows it. You can have access to Earth and communication lag is acceptable. Moon colony may be economically profitable.
crabasa 11y ago
I don't buy the author's arguments in general, but I think the comparison to Antarctica is probably the weakest. First of all, people have actually made a point of traveling to and setting-up permanent base stations in Antarctica. Second, although the raw temperatures might be similar it is the weather in Antarctica that is brutal. Bryd Station exists in blizzard-like conditions 65% of the year [1]. Obviously this would not be a concern on Mars. [1]: http://antarcticconnection.com/information/storms-and-blizzards/ http://antarcticconnection.com/information/storms-and-blizza...
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Overall however establishing a habitat on Antarctica is vastly easier than on Mars, assuming we won't be able to source complex materials in situ or fabricate for at least 50 yr. The atmospheric pressure, atmospheric composition and water availability being the main advantages. If the snowfall is particularly intense solar power might be troublesome, but it's still vastly easier to settle. Proof: we reached the south pole in 1911 and have a station there since 1956.
rayiner 11y ago
> Our 12-year-old daughter who, like us, is a big fan of The Martian by Andy Weir, said, “I can’t stand that people think we’re all going to live on Mars after we destroy our own planet. Even after we’ve made the Earth too hot and polluted for humans, it still won’t be as bad as Mars. At least there’s plenty of water here, and the atmosphere won’t make your head explode.” Kid has a good head on her shoulders. She sounds like an engineer. I grew up dreaming about humanity exploring space. I majored in aerospace engineering in college. It was incredibly educational--it taught me we're not going to Mars. Not in my lifetime, probably not in the lifetime of any of my descendants who still remember my name. It would be fantastically expensive and there would be no point. There are no resources out there that would justify the kind of economic investment necessary. Committing that money here on Earth would be transformative far beyond what it could be if spent on Mars. Moreover, the technology has plateaued, leaving us with wildly unfavorable physical realities. You know how progress in CPUs has stalled? How the last several generations of Intel processors hasn't really gotten faster, and all the focus is on making them cheaper and more power efficient? That happened to aerospace technology around 1970. Now we spend billions of dollars to eke out 0.5% gains in efficiency.
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  We have burned more money for less reason also make your head explode?
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  I'd rather they spend that money on Mars than turning Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, [enter unfortunate country here], into a hole in the ground with cell service to feed the MI complex for the same amount.
cryoshon 11y ago
I agreed with the author somewhat, up until here: "There is nothing wrong with being excited about exploring space. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming about setting up colonies in space either. But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity." It's completely within our reach if we prioritize it over other things, namely the financial cost. There's also the "things sometimes don't make sense" aspect of space exploration. Do we NEED a space station doing space research? No. Did we need to go to the moon? Some would say yes, but if you look at the economic incentives, the answer is no. Not everything can be boiled down to cash in versus cash out. I think space travel is worthwhile to invest in right now. To everyone squabbling that the money could be used to help people here on earth: no, it could not, because money does not flow around in the earth in a utilitarian fashion, it flows based off of where people think they can make more money or do something cool. The people investing their time and money in spaceflight are not going to be buying rice for the hungry no matter how much of a "moonshot" space projects are.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  Even if we ignore the financial cost, we are nowhere near being technically able to build a self-contained environment. We have never done it in Earth's orbit, or in the Moon, or in Earth. So the problem with sending people to Mars is that it is not just a huge one time money sink. It is a permanent money sink, that would have to be constantly re-supplied. People didn't just get in a boat one day and suddenly discovered America. They had been able to survive in a boat for months or years for a long time before they even got there. Nobody is saying that we should never get to Mars, just that there are previous technological goals that we are nowhere near solving yet. Solve those goals one by one, and at some point you'll be able to get to Mars. But don't expect to stuff some people in a ship with a few lettuces and some water and send them to Mars without having worked out first all the boring little details of what such a travel would actually entail.
krapp 11y ago
You have to die somewhere, why not die on Mars?
sebringj 11y ago
Its entertaining and has some truth in it but arguments about "we should be focusing on [blah] instead..." miss out on the benefits of the tech that exploration will bring. Going to Mars will help solve issues here and issues being solved here will help us succeed in living at Mars, eventually.
- mitchtbaum 11y ago
  I agree with your point in a sense; we can focus on multiple aims and plan according to their overlapping and synergistic benefits.. Yet, and if this irritates some please forgive me for prodding, what might happen if we work on what we want out of order, out of sequence? ~~??~~ imho, to assure a good future for what we already have (and hope to have), to make sure we will even have a launchpad so to speak, we need to preserve our treasure here and set it on a good path beforehand.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Wow, that was a sad read. I general tone was "My god, our planet is on fire and you want to spend time and resources going somewhere else?" Which I understand, after all we're spoon fed that message every day, but if you think critically about it you realize that the species as a whole will have to figure out how to live on Mars or its doomed anyway. I get the emotional angst, many people will remember that point where they realized "Hey my parents aren't going to be here forever, if I don't get job and stuff I'm dooooooomed." It's a scary thing because it involves doing something you may have never done before or may have tried to do and failed a couple of times. But once you internalize the fact that your parents are mortal and of finite resources and you can't change that, you put that fear aside and start figuring out life "for real." The same thing is true with this planet. Our ability to monitor it and study it has reached a point where we realize the environment we currently live in is going to change, and change harshly. While we're currently the proximate cause of that change we know there are many things that can cause that change and have in the past. Perhaps not in the living memory of our species but we've certainly seen the humans frozen in glaciers right? So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why the climate changes, we must evolve our thinking so that we can live on an airless moon, or a chilly planet far from oceans and abundant greenery. And getting serious about it means picking a problem to solve and solving it. If we can create a self sustaining colony on Mars for example I have no trouble believing we can create cities on earth that survive what ever changes come in the climate. And if we have self sustaining cities on Mars and Earth then if one gets blasted by an asteroid (known to happen) the other one can help out instead of everyone just dying. Its the difference between moving forward into the future knowing what you have to over come, and hiding in the past hoping to somehow prevent the future you fear.
- carapat_virulat 11y ago
  The thing is following a feasible set of milestones to actually achieve the goal of reaching Mars and surviving there. The current romantic view of stuffing a few people on a spaceship with vegetables and sending them there doesn't seem to be anywhere in our current reach, seeing that we aren't able to keep people alive in orbit or in the Moon without re-supplying them all the time. A better solution are robots, robots are way better at surviving in space than we are, they have survived in Mars for years without any supply. So a more feasible set of milestones could be: - Engineer self-replicant robots in Earth. We are still far from doing something like that but it seems something that we should be able to achieve at some point. Seeing that we humans are able to extract energy and resources from Earth, and build robots, there's nothing indicating that robots shouldn't be able to follow the same steps once they are advanced enough. - Modify those robots to be able to self-replicate in Mars. Seeing that current robots are already able to survive in there, they have a much better chance than we have to build a sustainable environment for themselves. - Once robots have a self-sustainable environment for themselves, put them to burn resources to pave our way there so that once people get there they are able to survive comfortably. Yes, people made great discoveries by sea, but people had been surviving for long periods of time on the sea, and they were great at it. The same can't be said for space in current times.
btkramer9 11y ago
The idea is not to abandon Earth for Mars, rather it is to ensure that human life does not cease to exist. It's very unlikely for a meteor or nuclear war to kill us all, but why risk it when we are capable of starting a colony now? Everything I've said is much better summed up in this article. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...
rndmize 11y ago
No, its not ridiculous. What's ridiculous is our approach to the problem. Reconstructing Earth's ecosystem away from Earth is a monumental task in any situation, whether you want to terraform a planet, build a orbital colony or just have a universe ship to send somewhere. These are decades or centuries long efforts which are solely for the purpose of catering to the current, Earth-optimized human form. If you want to head out into the universe, develop a new form. Adapt humanity to the place you want to colonize, rather than the place to humanity.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
They threw in the usual one-or-the-other red herring. We can go to Mars, and learn to treat our own planet better.
cjsthompson 11y ago
I stopped reading when "human nature and economics" was mentioned.

56 points by markmassie 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

tl;dr: Its hard, and most folks wouldn't want to do it.

baking 11y ago
Of course, that doesn't rule out that some folks might.

NickM 11y ago

The author's main argument seems to be that nobody will want to do it. But historically, there have been numerous cases of colonists giving up a safe, easy life to go live somewhere inhospitable and dangerous. When I think about the first settlers that sailed across the Atlantic to colonize America, it seems amazing to me that people were willing to give up so much and endure such risks and hardships, but there have always been people that will go to great lengths to conquer new frontiers. I expect the first Martians will be no different in this respect.

carapat_virulat 11y ago
The difference is that pioneers in the past had been able to survive in boats for long periods of time for thousands of years. At the moment we aren't able to keep a self-sustained environment on the Earth orbit, which is relatively cheap to get to, or on the Moon, which is still on the Earth's gravity well and relatively cheat to arrive compared with Mars. So we aren't able to keep people alive in a lake at 100m from the shore without resupplying them every week, which means that sending somebody to the center of the ocean and expecting them to survive without any help for years is nowhere near our reach. Looking at the past we can think that all achievements just took brave people that tried, but actually those achievements took place on a confluence of many favorable material and social conditions.
rwc 11y ago
Seems like you're glossing over the whole religious persecution thing.
fluxquanta 11y ago
The difference between the "inhospitable" New World and Mars is that Mars is actually inhospitable.
yongjik 11y ago
No, settlers weren't willing to give up so much, those people went on to colonize America precisely because they had so little to lose. They were already enduring poverty, hardship, and (in many cases) discrimination to such a degree that crossing the ocean and starting a new life in an unknown land inhabited with hostile indigenous tribes seemed a good enough deal in comparison. In other words, imagine a developer in India who wants to move to SV but can't get a visa. Can he instead apply for a ship bound to Mars, and agree to work as an IT technician in lieu of paying for the trip (and all the food, water, and oxygen he will need in Mars)? Until that is economically feasible, colonization of Mars will not happen, at least not in the same way colonization of America happened.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  There's a bunch of people right now who are willing to risk death at sea to try to get from Syria to Europe. A fair number of them would probably accept a one-way ticket to Mars, even with the risk it involves.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - yongjik 11y ago
    It's the other side of the equation that's missing. Somebody has to be making money selling a one-way ticket to Mars to a desperate refugee. As for now, I doubt even Bill Gates' whole wealth could buy a single ticket to Mars.
rayiner 11y ago
Europeans explored the New World to find faster shipping routes for existing trade. And they colonized it because it had proven resources (gold, furs, etc). They didn't do it for the romanticized reasons you suggest. In contrast, exploring and colonizing Mars is only justified by romantic reasons.
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
The first martians will be religious fundamentalists/social conservatives who pool their last few dollars to buy transportation and initial supplies for settlement of mars due to economic and social persecution on earth? Other than economic ventures such as the Spanish stuff (pillaging) in south America and Jamestown (where the wasn't actually any gold, but "hey, tobacco grows pretty well") early colonization of the new world was basically driven by persecution. The inquisition or some local form thereof was present in pretty much all of western Europe at the time. England and other protestant areas were equally tolerant of anyone that didn't pray the way they did. Pooling your money to buy a one way ticket far as hell away and enough food to hopefully last the winter was a pretty good option. Possibly starving because you aren't a good farmer doesn't seem all that bad when a change of regime could mean that everyone in your community was at risk of imprisonment/death. At least you can kind of control whether or not you starve.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Driven by persecution - correlation and causation? Colonies were funded; people volunteered to go. The volunteers were often persecuted people looking for a new life. I'd say colonization was driven by money.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  No matter what religion you follow, there's at least one place closer than Mars (i.e. somewhere on Earth) where you won't be persecuted.
zzalpha 11y ago
When I think about the first settlers that sailed across the Atlantic to colonize America, it seems amazing to me that people were willing to give up so much and endure such risks and hardships, but there have always been people that will go to great lengths to conquer new frontiers. How romantic. And incorrect. Folks explored the new world for a very obvious reasons: Money. Land. Resources. Think spices. Gold. Slave labour. That's it. There's none of that on Mars.

dsjoerg 11y ago

Good points comparing colonizing Mars to colonizing places on Earth such as Antarctica, the Sahara, or the bottom of the oceans.

nkrisc 11y ago
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think it's a fair comparison given that those Earth-based locations are easier to colonize, yet haven't been.
- Nadya 11y ago
  We have permanent bases in Antarctica. Could we establish a colony there? Very likely. Given we have some people live there nearly year round, I'm sure we could, actually. But why would we? The "why?" for Mars is "What happens if Earth is fucked Completely, royally, and absolutely fucked." What happens when a catastrophic event wipes out all life on Earth? Colonizing Antarctica or the Sahara does nothing to ensure human survival in that case. But putting people on Mars and creating a self-sufficient colony? As long as Mars isn't fucked too - humans might live on. There are plenty of people who are interested in human survival.
davidw 11y ago
I was driving around near Oregon's lake Abert a month or so ago, and got to thinking "if people can live here, Mars shouldn't be that hard". Kidding, but... not too much. That's some desolate, high, dry, hot and cold country out there. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Abert,+Oregon+97630/@43.0558282,-119.9780806,3a,75y,18.92h,93.57t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sJkbX7zeow2I6loPiy-5-6Q!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DJkbX7zeow2I6loPiy-5-6Q%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D279.49475%26pitch%3D0!7i3328!8i1664!4m2!3m1!1s0x54b62a9e9e47ccbd:0x704ecbcb17545725!5m1!1e4!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Abert,+Oregon+97630/@...

GeorgeOrr 11y ago

Think of all the great innovations that have come from people who realized that doing hard stuff is hard so don't try.

mitchtbaum 11y ago
And what of those men and women wise enough to work on what was good and needed rather than what they had in their _wildest_ dreams?
- GeorgeOrr 11y ago
  I'm sure those wise people you mentioned would also be wise enough to see through a false choice like that. Good thing for us all that it isn't an either/or. Fortunately some people can work on the good and needed. And some people can work on the hard, maybe even the too hard to see at first that it's even possible.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  Good and needed better mousetraps.
  - mitchtbaum 11y ago
    And a better Earth?
jacquesm 11y ago
Think of all the great innovations that came from people who didn't realize that stuff was hard so they tried anyway.

WildUtah 11y ago

Interesting usage here. "Alphabet's (formerly Google's)" calls back to the headline yesterday about Alphabet's Google's search engine. Some speculated that soon we'd be talking about Alphabet's Google's Youtube's Youtube Red. Now we can talk about Alphabet's (formerly Google's) Google's Youtube's Youtube Red.

luchadorvader 11y ago

It is ridiculous but at the same time tackling a problem of this size will provide so many new solutions to other problems as well innovations for new things that we might have not thought of. What we can gain from trying might be worth doing.

Retric 11y ago
That depends on approach. If we try and use plants to supply most of the oxygen then that's innovative and risky, just sending lots of oxygen tanks far less so.

transfire 11y ago

> But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity. It is no where near the limits of our reach. We already have people living in space year round without any local resources. What we do seem to lack however is any faith in ourselves.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> We already have people living in space year round without any local resources. You're joking, right? The ISS gets everything from Earth, even its water, and they're so bad at self-sustainability that they are not able to wash their own dirty clothes (I shit you not). Oh, and they throw away their feces and only recently were able to grow some lettuce on board. That's the state of the art right now.
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  You realize that although LEO is cheaper to resupply it is actually more inhospitable right? There is by definition no resources available save sunlight.
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    > You realize that although [the thing that makes all the difference]...
mannykannot 11y ago
Compared to what is available on Mars, Earth counts as a local resource for living in LEO.
carapat_virulat 11y ago
I am not sure what you trying to pointing out. Current people in space are being re-supplied from Earth all the time, and they aren't completely our of our gravity well, so the energy required to get stuff there is lower and still very expensive. If you want to re-supply people on Mars you would have to escape Earth's gravity well completely, which is crazy expensive.

ChicagoBoy11 11y ago

RemindeMe! 50 years

adrianN 11y ago

Yeah, let's just sit here on our planet, posting cats on the internet and wait for the next extinction event.

vectorpush 11y ago
If your concern is the possible extinction of humanity, I don't see how an arduous journey to a barren and inhospitable wasteland is of any use to the cause. If we can manage to survive on Mars, certainly we can manage to survive on the most life-friendly planet known to man.
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  I can imagine a variety of extinction events that could touch one world and not the other. I'm sure you can too.
  - vectorpush 11y ago
    I can't really imagine an extinction event that could touch a world that cannot support life as we know it.
    - michaelmrose 11y ago
      We are talking about a hypothetical scenario in which we have colonized mars. A meteor could take out earth but not mars for example
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > If your concern is the possible extinction of humanity, I don't see how an arduous journey to a barren and inhospitable wasteland is of any use to the cause. I'm perplexed by this statement as the journey would be the exact opposite of what you purport. Are you saying that, unless we can travel to someplace that is very hospitable to life, that we shouldn't bother? How are we ever going to develop the technology to go to such a theoretical place if we're not working on the technology already and constantly iterating on it? Let's say we're going to be hit with an asteroid that will kill all / most life on Earth. There is no way we can stop it. Having colonies on other planets and moons within our solar system means all of those people, in their self sustaining habitats, will live through the extinction event. Humans would not go extinct. > If we can manage to survive on Mars, certainly we can manage to survive on the most life-friendly planet known to man. Are you saying there is no such thing as an extinct level event for humans simply because we can live on Mars? I'm not sure what the point is that you're trying to convey here.

PaulHoule 11y ago

If you ever want to go to Mars, establish a base on the Moon first and develop the ability to mine water, rock, and metal from the moon and close asteroids. If you can make propellant tanks and fill them up the trip to Mars will be a snap and there will be a lot of human experience in deep space so the first visitors won't be setting endurance records

wwwdonohue 11y ago

And yet Google has invested almost a billion dollars in SpaceX.

nkrisc 11y ago

I agree with the title; for now. In the near term, perhaps even the next couple hundred years, it is likely that a colony on Mars would make zero sense aside from scientific research (even that could be done without people on the surface themselves). Beyond that, I won't try to predict what will and won't make sense 500 years from now, 1000 years from now. Mars may not have a lot of resources, but it does have one thing that could be useful to a much larger and much more space-capable human population in the future: room. There's a lot of room there for people. We can argue all day whether that's realistic or not, but we should never assume that it will never make sense in the future based solely on the resources and problems of today.

bane 11y ago

One thing I think is important when considering colonizing another planet is that we have to drop certain expectations for the first few waves of colonists: e.g. the expectation that your lifespan will be as long as your Earth brethren. By all accounts, the first colonists to the New World lived short, miserable, brutish lives and it was only well after sufficient infrastructure was established and European style civilization was properly bootstrapped could the average American expect to live as long as the average European. Several early American colonies failed to last even a handful of years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Every year, tens of thousands of people visit Antarctica, a place with nothing besides cold deserts and penguins.[1] We are not making the Earth less inhabitable. More people live on the planet now than ever before. In fact, many really smart people over the years have told us that the planet would never be able to support the current population. There's an undercurrent in this article that's extremely dour, depressing, and bleak. I take issue with that, but we can save that conversation for another day. People will visit Mars. In fact, for many decades it looks like tourism will be the prominent industry. Mars has water. Mars has CO2. We can make a breathable atmosphere and support ourselves, although it looks like living mostly underground is our best option for the foreseeable future. In my mind, what we need is cheap/free energy. Nuclear batteries look like the best option, at least initially. Also a modular, standardized deployment system where things plug into each other. It'd be good if for a while we equip every piece of gear going to Mars with power and an O2/water generator. No matter how it plays out it'll be interesting to watch. Too bad it will probably take a long time before we see a sizable population there. [1] Tourism in Antarctica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Antarctica

drvortex 11y ago

It has always been ridiculous to think about something ambitious, until it gets done. Ref: History of Humanity.

nabla9 11y ago

I think the article is not fully exploring the economic argument. Triumph of the city/network effect argument: Networking and connectedness into other people and increasingly into computer services around the world provide more intellectual satisfaction than surviving in the desert does. Mass of humanity produces more variety when it clumps together physically. Urbanization on the earth is driven by productivity growth from cities. Immigration to distant colonies could be justified with farmland and resources in pre-industrial society and industrial society. If post-industrial society with deceasing population builds distant colonies, it wastes resources. After the thrill of interplanetary space travel wears off, Mars may have small outpost for geologists, geochemists etc. I think colonizing moon will be far more likely when technology allows it. You can have access to Earth and communication lag is acceptable. Moon colony may be economically profitable.

crabasa 11y ago

I don't buy the author's arguments in general, but I think the comparison to Antarctica is probably the weakest. First of all, people have actually made a point of traveling to and setting-up permanent base stations in Antarctica. Second, although the raw temperatures might be similar it is the weather in Antarctica that is brutal. Bryd Station exists in blizzard-like conditions 65% of the year [1]. Obviously this would not be a concern on Mars. [1]: http://antarcticconnection.com/information/storms-and-blizzards/ http://antarcticconnection.com/information/storms-and-blizza...

darkmighty 11y ago
Overall however establishing a habitat on Antarctica is vastly easier than on Mars, assuming we won't be able to source complex materials in situ or fabricate for at least 50 yr. The atmospheric pressure, atmospheric composition and water availability being the main advantages. If the snowfall is particularly intense solar power might be troublesome, but it's still vastly easier to settle. Proof: we reached the south pole in 1911 and have a station there since 1956.

rayiner 11y ago

> Our 12-year-old daughter who, like us, is a big fan of The Martian by Andy Weir, said, “I can’t stand that people think we’re all going to live on Mars after we destroy our own planet. Even after we’ve made the Earth too hot and polluted for humans, it still won’t be as bad as Mars. At least there’s plenty of water here, and the atmosphere won’t make your head explode.” Kid has a good head on her shoulders. She sounds like an engineer. I grew up dreaming about humanity exploring space. I majored in aerospace engineering in college. It was incredibly educational--it taught me we're not going to Mars. Not in my lifetime, probably not in the lifetime of any of my descendants who still remember my name. It would be fantastically expensive and there would be no point. There are no resources out there that would justify the kind of economic investment necessary. Committing that money here on Earth would be transformative far beyond what it could be if spent on Mars. Moreover, the technology has plateaued, leaving us with wildly unfavorable physical realities. You know how progress in CPUs has stalled? How the last several generations of Intel processors hasn't really gotten faster, and all the focus is on making them cheaper and more power efficient? That happened to aerospace technology around 1970. Now we spend billions of dollars to eke out 0.5% gains in efficiency.

michaelmrose 11y ago
We have burned more money for less reason also make your head explode?
selimthegrim 11y ago
I'd rather they spend that money on Mars than turning Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, [enter unfortunate country here], into a hole in the ground with cell service to feed the MI complex for the same amount.

cryoshon 11y ago

I agreed with the author somewhat, up until here: "There is nothing wrong with being excited about exploring space. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming about setting up colonies in space either. But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity." It's completely within our reach if we prioritize it over other things, namely the financial cost. There's also the "things sometimes don't make sense" aspect of space exploration. Do we NEED a space station doing space research? No. Did we need to go to the moon? Some would say yes, but if you look at the economic incentives, the answer is no. Not everything can be boiled down to cash in versus cash out. I think space travel is worthwhile to invest in right now. To everyone squabbling that the money could be used to help people here on earth: no, it could not, because money does not flow around in the earth in a utilitarian fashion, it flows based off of where people think they can make more money or do something cool. The people investing their time and money in spaceflight are not going to be buying rice for the hungry no matter how much of a "moonshot" space projects are.

carapat_virulat 11y ago
Even if we ignore the financial cost, we are nowhere near being technically able to build a self-contained environment. We have never done it in Earth's orbit, or in the Moon, or in Earth. So the problem with sending people to Mars is that it is not just a huge one time money sink. It is a permanent money sink, that would have to be constantly re-supplied. People didn't just get in a boat one day and suddenly discovered America. They had been able to survive in a boat for months or years for a long time before they even got there. Nobody is saying that we should never get to Mars, just that there are previous technological goals that we are nowhere near solving yet. Solve those goals one by one, and at some point you'll be able to get to Mars. But don't expect to stuff some people in a ship with a few lettuces and some water and send them to Mars without having worked out first all the boring little details of what such a travel would actually entail.

krapp 11y ago

You have to die somewhere, why not die on Mars?

sebringj 11y ago

Its entertaining and has some truth in it but arguments about "we should be focusing on [blah] instead..." miss out on the benefits of the tech that exploration will bring. Going to Mars will help solve issues here and issues being solved here will help us succeed in living at Mars, eventually.

mitchtbaum 11y ago
I agree with your point in a sense; we can focus on multiple aims and plan according to their overlapping and synergistic benefits.. Yet, and if this irritates some please forgive me for prodding, what might happen if we work on what we want out of order, out of sequence? ~~??~~ imho, to assure a good future for what we already have (and hope to have), to make sure we will even have a launchpad so to speak, we need to preserve our treasure here and set it on a good path beforehand.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Wow, that was a sad read. I general tone was "My god, our planet is on fire and you want to spend time and resources going somewhere else?" Which I understand, after all we're spoon fed that message every day, but if you think critically about it you realize that the species as a whole will have to figure out how to live on Mars or its doomed anyway. I get the emotional angst, many people will remember that point where they realized "Hey my parents aren't going to be here forever, if I don't get job and stuff I'm dooooooomed." It's a scary thing because it involves doing something you may have never done before or may have tried to do and failed a couple of times. But once you internalize the fact that your parents are mortal and of finite resources and you can't change that, you put that fear aside and start figuring out life "for real." The same thing is true with this planet. Our ability to monitor it and study it has reached a point where we realize the environment we currently live in is going to change, and change harshly. While we're currently the proximate cause of that change we know there are many things that can cause that change and have in the past. Perhaps not in the living memory of our species but we've certainly seen the humans frozen in glaciers right? So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter why the climate changes, we must evolve our thinking so that we can live on an airless moon, or a chilly planet far from oceans and abundant greenery. And getting serious about it means picking a problem to solve and solving it. If we can create a self sustaining colony on Mars for example I have no trouble believing we can create cities on earth that survive what ever changes come in the climate. And if we have self sustaining cities on Mars and Earth then if one gets blasted by an asteroid (known to happen) the other one can help out instead of everyone just dying. Its the difference between moving forward into the future knowing what you have to over come, and hiding in the past hoping to somehow prevent the future you fear.

carapat_virulat 11y ago
The thing is following a feasible set of milestones to actually achieve the goal of reaching Mars and surviving there. The current romantic view of stuffing a few people on a spaceship with vegetables and sending them there doesn't seem to be anywhere in our current reach, seeing that we aren't able to keep people alive in orbit or in the Moon without re-supplying them all the time. A better solution are robots, robots are way better at surviving in space than we are, they have survived in Mars for years without any supply. So a more feasible set of milestones could be: - Engineer self-replicant robots in Earth. We are still far from doing something like that but it seems something that we should be able to achieve at some point. Seeing that we humans are able to extract energy and resources from Earth, and build robots, there's nothing indicating that robots shouldn't be able to follow the same steps once they are advanced enough. - Modify those robots to be able to self-replicate in Mars. Seeing that current robots are already able to survive in there, they have a much better chance than we have to build a sustainable environment for themselves. - Once robots have a self-sustainable environment for themselves, put them to burn resources to pave our way there so that once people get there they are able to survive comfortably. Yes, people made great discoveries by sea, but people had been surviving for long periods of time on the sea, and they were great at it. The same can't be said for space in current times.

btkramer9 11y ago

The idea is not to abandon Earth for Mars, rather it is to ensure that human life does not cease to exist. It's very unlikely for a meteor or nuclear war to kill us all, but why risk it when we are capable of starting a colony now? Everything I've said is much better summed up in this article. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...

rndmize 11y ago

No, its not ridiculous. What's ridiculous is our approach to the problem. Reconstructing Earth's ecosystem away from Earth is a monumental task in any situation, whether you want to terraform a planet, build a orbital colony or just have a universe ship to send somewhere. These are decades or centuries long efforts which are solely for the purpose of catering to the current, Earth-optimized human form. If you want to head out into the universe, develop a new form. Adapt humanity to the place you want to colonize, rather than the place to humanity.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

They threw in the usual one-or-the-other red herring. We can go to Mars, and learn to treat our own planet better.

cjsthompson 11y ago

I stopped reading when "human nature and economics" was mentioned.