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I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here. One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by year
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here.
One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of "Tomorrow's World" and "Horizon" telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I'm a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Command and global cooperation (which always seemed a big ask as we were at the height of the cold war).
However, I can't help thinking if we do become a multiplanetary species before resolving the issues of this one a few things are just a matter of time. That some politician claims we don't need to care about emissions as we now have a spare, so he's going to build loads of new coal. That Esso wants to know if there's oil. That we have an interplanetary falling out (OK that's probably a while away). That we start littering and buggering up the rest of the solar system.
- maerF0x0 10y agoThis brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?
- cbau 10y agoMusk just addressed this. Mars has an atmosphere of CO2 and Nitrogen, so we can grow plants, a day length similar to Earth's (24.5 hours), and is larger.
- maerF0x0 10y agooh ok, i'm 30 mins behind live.
- dogma1138 10y agoMars has no magnetic field so you get cooked with radiation. Mars' soil contains tons of perchlorate at levels which are very toxic to humans. TBH Venus seems like a better candidate for long term terraforming. You can build floating complexes in it's upper atmosphere, and it has enough oxygen and water locked in it's atmosphere and we might be able to fix the rotation and the density of the atmosphere in one go by using the atmosphere to speed up the rotation of Venus. While both of these are quite "far fetched" technically, as far as terraforming goes we aren't any closer to terraforming mars than Venus, and at least for Venus we don't need to figure out how to give it a magnetic field.
- skykooler 10y agoVenus also has no magnetic field. It has much stronger gravity as well, requiring larger rockets to take off from it, and it is quite difficult to mine resources from due to the high temperatures and pressures at the surface, meaning all materials for a colony would need to be sent from Earth.
- dogma1138 10y agoVenus has an induced magnetic field which while isn't as good as what we got on Earth, is better than what you have on Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Induced_magnetosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Induced_ma... Additionally the current theory is that if Venus will be sped up to below 56h per rotation it would regenerate it's intrinsic magnetic field which should be near earth levels. And while Venus does have higher gravity than Mars, it's still lower than Earth's, and overall the delta V for venus insertion orbit is slightly lower than what you need for Mars.
- raverbashing 10y agoEasier to live in Mars with some radiation and lower temperatures (and pressure) as opposed to 400C and acid rains of Venus
- dogma1138 10y agoNo one is suggesting living on the surface until it's terraformed, the dense atmosphere allows for easy construction of floating platforms. As far as terraforming goes, Venus is just a better candidate for long term colonization.
- FireBeyond 10y ago"Additionally the current theory is that if Venus will be sped up to below 56h per rotation it would regenerate it's intrinsic magnetic field which should be near earth levels." That's great and all, but how exactly do we realistically speed up the rotation of a _planet_?
- chriswarbo 10y ago> and is larger I see this as a disadvantage; the major difficulty of space exploration is getting out of the Earth's gravity well. I don't think it's wise to fall back into another one.
- Zikes 10y agoOnce you've solved dealing with Earth's gravity, Mars will be a cakewalk by comparison.
- ygra 10y agoElon actually addressed this, you only need the booster from Earth. For all interesting targets the spacecraft can launch by itself and get back to Earth. The point of the booster for Earth is both to get out of Earth's gravity well and through its atmosphere (both of which are far less of a problem on Mars).
- ncallaway 10y agoWhat if that gravity well has the resources you need to get out of it? The moon also has a small gravity well, but no real resources to help you escape it. Mars has a bit of a gravity well, but has many more resources to help you escape that gravity well.
- BurningFrog 10y agoTo me, the 2 day vs 6 months commute outweigh that. Then again I haven't done the math. In the long run, there should of course be settlements on both bodies.
- lallysingh 10y agoOnce you get there, what do you do? Just go back?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 10y agoI assume different people do different things... Tourism would be an obvious sustainable Moon industry. That does fit your description :)
- andygates 10y agoWhat do people do on Earth? Live, thrive, expand, explore. All that stuff.
- cbhl 10y agoWhen the pilgrims originally sailed to North America from England, it took on the order of two or three months. A six month trip to Mars seems reasonable in that context.
- optforfon 10y agoIt has an "atmosphere" It's 0.00628 atm according to Wikipedia. That's effectively a vacuum. You can't have liquid water on Mars. So you can grow plants in some kind of transparent pressurized place... Just like on the Moon.. or on a space station
- ncallaway 10y agoYou can pressurize a chamber using the thin atmosphere, rather than being restricted to the gasses you bring with you. You can use ISRU and atmosphere resource extraction to generate rocket fuel on the surface of mars, rather than being restricted to the rocket fuel you bring with you. Ultimately, the answer is Mars has the necessary resources and when you look into the details just makes more sense and is easier.
- aggie 10y agoYou can produce fuel from lunar regolith as well. http://www.wickmanspacecraft.com/lsp.html http://www.wickmanspacecraft.com/lsp.html
- zardo 10y ago>That's effectively a vacuum. That depends entirely on the effect in question. You'd have a hard time pressurizing the moon's atmosphere to harvest it for propellent.
- Symmetry 10y agoBut it's still much easier to grab even a thin gas than it is to mine anything. An extremely convenient source of both carbon and nitrogen is going to be a huge benefit in terms of trying for long term sustainability. The Moon does have plenty of oxygen in various minerals and hydrogen in the polar ice but you need more than that.
- baq 10y agothis effective vacuum gives a 10m column of water equivalent of radiation protection. you'll really like it compared to the moon.
- winter_blue 10y ago> and is larger Mars is much smaller than Earth. From Wikipedia: "Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of Earth's mass, resulting in about 38% of Earth's surface gravity." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars
- skrause 10y agoIt's still much larger than the moon.
- brianlweiner 10y agoParent was making a size comparison to the moon.
- freehunter 10y agoLarger than the moon.
- lallysingh 10y agoI wonder if the 1-way ticket to mars would appeal to older folks who can survive the trip, but don't have the physical strength for much adventure on earth. Ref: Old man's war.
- jpindar 10y agoNice idea, but I assume anyone recruiting for space travel is going to insist on people who are very fit and in 100% good health, which usually means fairly young people. Certainly there could be some older people, but probably not a majority.
- azeotropic 10y agoWhich is why the ISS is populated by PhDs in their 40s? Of course you want the first colonists to not be sickly, but they won't need to be Olympic decathletes in their 20s. Equipment for lifting heavy objects can be sent more cheaply than people (it can go slowly and doesn't need life support). I think for a venture like this maturity and patience is going to be more important than physical strength. There will be a lot of tedious tasks with long checklists that need to be followed near exactly to succeed. There will be a lot of disappointment and frustration when things fail or timelines slip. There will be the irritations of being stuck in a small social circle with a few people you intensely dislike but have to depend on for survival. Add in the fact that your sperm or eggs will probably get exposed to large doses of radiation until they figure out how to get to Mars faster, and it will be far less attractive to anyone who is planning to have kids someday.
- Udo 10y agoThere are other important reasons for this that don't make such a great subject for a public presentation, such as getting away from Earth's political and military sphere of influence and achieving greater redundancy in case a large asteroid impact event happens on the Earth/Moon system.
- dev1n 10y agoSome possible reasons; Mars has a c02 atmosphere, water ice, it has a ~24 hour day as opposed to the moons 28 day-day, Earth and Mars have similar sizes.
- marvindanig 10y agoBesides, it wouldn't exclude the possibility of an extinction level event that disables the earth-moon system. Moon seems more suited for the role of an outpost, re-fuelling station and the final flight to Mars/elsewhere.
- orky56 10y agoWhy does the Mars 24.5 hr day versus the Moons 28 day-day matter? What are the consequences of this big difference between Earth day and the moon/Mars day?
- skykooler 10y ago24.5 hours matches our circadian cycle. On the Moon extra power would be necessary for artificial lighting.
- aetherson 10y agoI don't think that lighting is going to be the difference between a viable and unviable non-terran colony.
- ygjb-dupe 10y agoI think you underestimate the importance and cost of the artificial lighting :P On the moon it means you need enough solar power in batteries to power your gear, and to power appropriate spectrum lighting for plant growth. If you can rely on solar power more reliably, then you can construct (significantly more complex than those required on earth) green houses which still benefit from natural light.
- 10y ago
- humanfromearth 10y agoBetter yet, why not asteroids first? If we really want to be living in space, don't switch one gravity well for a much shittier one.
- zaphar 10y agoWell for one thing living in a gravity well is healthier for humans. We don't do very well long term in 0 gravity. Our systems work best when gravity is helping things along.
- abecedarius 10y agoYou spin up your station. You're not limited to whatever accidental value holds on the planetary surface. This was all studied back in the 1970s and 80s, and free-space development makes way more sense: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/ http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/
- andygates 10y agoAnd this adds a whole new set of engineering challenges and project risk. Nobody's spun up anything bigger than a rocket stage to date.
- abecedarius 10y agoOf course space settlement is many steps away; so is a permanent settlement on Mars. You need to analyze the payoffs and costs and intermediates and uncertainties for each.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoTo me the moon would be the obvious place to start, especially as the NASA plans I've seen for Mars have been based on using a space station at a Earth-Lunar Lagrange point, and associated moonbase, as ideal staging post. That and I might one day afford a ticket. I guess direct to Mars is sexier. :) (I'm behind live too.)
- imglorp 10y agoGo to the moon for its own rewards--a lunar base or whatever--but don't go there as a stepping stone. The challenges of landing on the two bodies are vastly different and you'd throw away half your effort reworking for Mars after you got some moon landings.
- david-given 10y agoI agree --- Mars is a pit. It's a barren desert at the bottom of a great big hole. Its biggest, and perhaps only, advantage is that it has an atmosphere, and gas is so much easier to deal with for ISRU than anything else, as you don't need to mine it: just open a valve and suck it in. I notice Musk's ISRU plan is to mine ice; I do wonder how he's going to do that, as it won't be easy. But... you know what... if you can get to Mars, you can get anywhere. If you can get to Mars, getting to the Moon is so trivial you might as well build and maintain a base there just to test the equipment. If you can get to Mars, you can get to near-Earth asteroids with enough spare capacity to take a whole a mining plant in tow. If you can get to Mars, Ceres is only 400 m/s further away. (And Ceres is interesting.) If you can get to Mars, then the outer solar system is reachable (with preparation and some disposable boosters). If you can get to Mars, anyone who can afford a IST ship can have a space station. So, hell yes, let's go to Mars. (And I'll cheerfully wave goodbye to you from my ice-mining cometary habitat.)
- anexprogrammer 10y agoI've nothing against Mars, more surprise that it's not via lunar orbit staging as the last several explanations of how we'd get there that I've seen. Like it was a big obvious advantage. Mars first has the enormous advantage that it's tangibly in progress, however early, rather than being a great NASA idea that isn't getting funded. So I don't actually care which if only one is having rockets built. I saw enough artist impressions in the 80s. ;) My recollection of the NASA idea was a Mars voyage would reconfigure/refuel at the space station but never land on the moon. The moonbase is the warehouse, fuel and whatever else would be needed to keep space station fed, and gets developed into manufacturing. Lower G meaning larger vehicles, lower launch cost and so forth. The station at L2 was supposed to be a good jumping off point for anywhere - Mars, asteroids, rest of solar system - supposedly the most fuel efficient way to all(?) of them from here. It's a while since I last read about that, so I may be mistaken on details.
- r00fus 10y agoI wonder if silicosis is a major concern on Mars (as it is for lunar colony considerations).
- randallsquared 10y agoThe moon is high ground from anywhere on Earth, which makes state action involving colonization efforts very likely. It's easy to point out that there will be no bombardment or invasion from Mars in the next half century, regardless of how things go for settlements there.
- agumonkey 10y agoPardon the cynicism, I'm a bit tired of tomorrows. It's the same story over and over. I believe we don't need a new "next". So much is unused or wasted here.. I can't stop thinking we're just gonna spread human absurdity further. ps: I heard Musk incentive to research interplanetary escape as a safety measure. But this is not what's sold here IMO, it smells too much of space travel tech infused greener (sic) heaven.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoWith so much that happens on this planet I agree. We're doing an appalling job of keeping our only planet viable or leaving a better place for our children. Our species is not fit to be let out. But... On space and Mars we must agree to disagree. Apart from the exploration and new discoveries that may arise from another planet, like the space race of the 60s many new technologies will arise. By introducing research on other planets (as we have done on ISS) there'll be a lot of basic and blue sky research that's hard to fund down here as it's not thought commercial. Some will be commercial, some might help save the planet. We don't know what we might discover, but it'll be vastly more than staying here arguing about fracking. That commerce is getting us there and NASA hasn't in 50 years is telling. But it's as telling that there's a willingness to fund ridiculous wars on drugs and terror, and ill-conceived adventures in many places than develop the species with global missions to our home system, or alleviating hunger. I suspect for a fraction of the cost. If Mars were a threat we'd have been there decades ago. Having an escape route, or at least the start of viable interplanetary travel, even if most wont get to use it might be handy too.
- moosey 10y agoI find it interesting that when watching old movies, few got the communications networks of the future right (edit: meaning that they are always behind the curve. We've advanced a lot more than expected). Other than perhaps "Ghost in The Shell". But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline. "Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I'm not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space (or any other scientific/technical endeavor for that matter).
- dragonwriter 10y ago> But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. "Expected" may be the wrong word. People that have the capacity to travel through space but basically interact in familiar ways may just be a better fit for the medium than people who interact in unfamiliar ways.
- Grishnakh 10y ago>I find it interesting that when watching old movies, few got the communications networks of the future right There's some old video made in the mid-1960s showing "a view of the future", which basically depicts every home as having a home computer connected to some kind of communications network, where people would be able to read news, send messages, and even do shopping. While a lot of sci-fi really seemed to miss the bus as far as communications go, there were some people who really did see what was coming. For some odd reason, they never got involved with anyone who made movies. But the internet really is pretty simple and easy to understand to an intelligent person from before the internet: they had news programs and TV, they had newspapers, they had magazines, the had snail-mail, they had telephones, and they had mail-order (and telephone-order) shopping. All the internet did was tie it all together and make it easily accessible to everyone, which had gigantic network effects that were unexpected. >But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the 'space' end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline. That's because those movies were all extrapolating, accurately many times (like with 2001: A Space Odyssey), based on then-current trends in aerospace technology. Just look at the progress of aerospace between ~1900 and 1970: we went from just figuring out the airfoil wing to making airplanes that decided a world war (II, they had a good part in I too), to making supersonic planes, to making rockets and then landing men on the Moon. That's pretty remarkable progress for 70 years. After that, what have we done for the last 45 years? We've sent out some neat deep-space probes and rovers, we've had a few rickety space stations in LEO, and we've made passenger aviation much more ubiquitous and inexpensive, and (related) improved fuel economy. We haven't progressed remotely as much. We've made huge strides in computers and electronic networking though... We've also made some big strides in medicine. If we had kept up our attention and funding in the space program like we had in the 1960s, we would have a rotating space station and a Moon base by now. >"Seveneves" by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I'm not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space I will. We cut back our funding for space exploration long before the Internet became publicly known. The Internet was conceived in the early /mid1970s IIRC, and only become commonly-used in the 1980s in academia. It only became known to the general public in 1989 thanks to Robert Tappan Morris and his worm, and only become generally used by regular people in the mid/late 1990s after the invention of the WWW and the HTML browser. By contrast, the funding for space exploration was cut in the early 1970s, before the Apollo missions were even done. There were a bunch more Moon missions planned; they never happened because Congress cut their funding and redirected what was left to the bloated and ill-conceived STS (Space Shuttle). Things went downhill from there. In a nutshell, once the US landed men on the Moon, the "space race" was considered done and won by the Americans, so the Soviets mostly gave up on such highly-ambitious goals, and both space programs instead turned to much more practical matters, namely coming up with ways of more cheaply launching spy satellites, navigation systems (GPS, Glonass), etc., instead of giant national-prestige projects that served no military use whatsoever (but instead advanced science and civilian technology tremendously). The US had given up on things like a real space station or a Moon base long before the Internet was something people had any serious interest in using.
- hoorayimhelping 10y agoI was so inspired by Elon saying "people have this expectation that technology just continues to improve on it's own," before going on to talk about ancient civilizations reaching peak technology and backsliding hard.
- chrismarlow9 10y agoif you dont try, you already failed
- worldsayshi 10y agoWhere is this from? I'd really like to see this part. It's an idea that bugs me too. It's like "well the others are going to cure cancer, fix the internet, make it so that machines can talk with us and make gold fall out of the sky".
- f_allwein 10y agoThere is a line in the film “Interstellar” that stuck with me: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” Now the film plays in a dystopian future, but I think the quote is still appropriate for us as a civilization. If Elon can change that, all the better.
- Brakenshire 10y agoHonestly, the quote is a reflection of a distorted understanding of reality transposed over from utopian science fiction. The stars are incredibly far away, and are overwhelmingly utterly hostile to human life. The 'dirt' is one of the very few places in the galaxy, perhaps the only place, actually well suited to human life, and the ecosystems that support it. If our understanding of fundamental physics is correct, there will never be an interstellar civilization of the sort that sci fi depicts. Only balkanized civilizations separated by many decades of travel. Within a solar system, no doubt interplanetary colonies will happen, but the conditions for life on other planets within our solar system are overwhelmingly harsh, difficult, and expensive. Most of the work that needs to go into making either of those things happen will occur here on Earth. Although a Mars colony could help, if there was some economic imperative which could sustain and drive it.
- saiya-jin 10y agoit's rather about dreaming beyond our current situation rather than trying to just get over this day to get to tomorrow and repeat. as for physics - we don't have even standard unifying theory that would work in all situations, so there is some room to grow our knowledge. we observe a lot of powerful and strange stuff happening in cosmos, but these are natural things - matter seems to be doing couple of variations of same cycle - group by gravity till planet/star is born, exist for some time, explode/die slowly/collapse/go exotic. who can say what will happen when we literally take matter, energy and spacetime into our hands? But before we will reach these situations, our society will change completely, probably many times. implants, prolonging life endlessly, going completely into digital existence and who knows what. why would inter-galaxy travel matter if we would exist in endless sea of some data banks?
- AdamJacobMuller 10y ago> One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. One of my earliest memories was the challenger explosion. I've basically missed out on any of the truly revolutionary space accomplishments.
- IndianAstronaut 10y ago>I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here You can help make it happen. The Planetary society is actively lobbying Congress to increase funding for space research.
- facepalm 10y agoYou were told the moon landing was about human progress and exploring frontiers. In reality it was just about beating the Russians in the cold war. Sorry.