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There's a phrase I'm fond of: The man who says it can't be done needs to get out of the way of the man who's doing it.
by brey 10y ago
There's a phrase I'm fond of:
The man who says it can't be done needs to get out of the way of the man who's doing it.
- ythl 10y agoAt least in my case, I see trying to start a Mars colony as a death trap. It's the illusion of carrying on the human race, but it's really just dooming a bunch of pioneers to a grim fate in an extremely hostile environment. I think making a south pole colony would be hard enough, let alone a Mars one.
- Osiris 10y agoWhy should your opinion dictate what other people try to accomplish?
- ythl 10y agoI'm not saying "don't try", I'm just saying "I think what you are attempting is foolish and that you are just going to kill a bunch of people", that's all. I can express an opinion about a potentially deadly venture, can't I?
- Osiris 10y agoI wasn't suggesting that you cannot have an opinion. It's a perfectly valid opinion. I was implying that as a society we have a tendency to impose our opinions on others through laws and social pressure.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoA lot of large engineering projects have killed a bunch of people before succeeding. It's fine, as long as the people accept the risk, and aren't deceived.
- goatlover 10y agoHow is an opinion dictating anything other than expressing someone's skepticism?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWhich immediately suggests a way to help with the Mars plan - in the time SpaceX and (hopefully) others are building the transportation architecture, someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert. Data and experience collected will be invaluable and directly useful for the Mars mission.
- mattbush 10y agoOne smaller but related effort in that direction is the year-long Mars habitat simulation in Hawaii that concluded a month ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/29/491794937/mars-mission-crew-emerges-from-yearlong-simulation-in-hawaii http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/29/491794937/...
- greglindahl 10y agoHere's one example, and references to several others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
- Grishnakh 10y ago>someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert. That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThat only says it needs to be tried again. And again. Until it works.
- dTal 10y agoHear, hear. I can't for the life of me understand why that experiment isn't being tried hundreds of times, all over the world. Learning how to create sustainable sealed ecosystems is one of the most important things we can do. Quite apart from the valuable knowledge we'll gain, once we get that nailed we can seed those suckers all over the place - South Pole, Sahara, orbit, Mars, upper atmosphere of Venus... The really weird thing is we already sort of know how - "bottle gardens" are a thing. It seems to be mainly a question of scale. So why aren't we building bigger and bigger bottle gardens?
- wyager 10y agoI don't understand the abject lack of imagination, or optimism, or whatever it is, that makes some people believe that mildly complicated engineering challenges are somehow impossible. Do you think no one in SpaceX has thought about this for more than five seconds? Obviously it's not completely trivial to sustain humans on Mars, but there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology, to say nothing about whatever we're going to invent over the next fifty years. Keeping humans alive on Mars starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950. I wonder how many armchair pessimists there were for the space program back then.
- jack9 10y ago> Keeping humans alive on THE MOON starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950 Fixed. Mars is impossible, for now. We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested. Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less (there's a few small pros and cons but being so far away is a major con). > there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it, any fantasy seems plausible in comparison. At least try to start a closed biological system with a rat and find out how hard that is, then add the lag-time to service problems and a low gravity high radiation environment, etc. The movies have really poisoned the reality for the US population, but maybe it's part of the PR to raise money. I can understand that, but I won't concede that it's doable yet.
- wyager 10y agoNope, I meant what I said. The moon was impossible in 1950. Actually impossible, not just expensive like getting someone to Mars in the very near future. The tech didn't exist. > We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested SpaceX claims to be able to do it in as little as 90 days. You can go a lot faster with more free fuel. We've kept someone in space for 4 times that. > Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less What are you referring to? Mars has available gasses, water, and more easily accessible useful solids than the moon. It will be easier to get radiation shielding on Mars, as the surface is more amenable to building underground structures. > Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it You are aware that we have sent probes to Mars, yes? The only difference between that and the human is how much money you're willing to spend to increase the chances of the journey being survivable.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y agoI mean, Musk himself is very upfront about the risks involved, especially for the first few waves of colonists. And indeed, there would likely be very little personal upside for them, even if they survived the grueling initial period. But you're making a false equivocation: considering the colonists personal risks in leaving against the species shared risk in staying. If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony off of Earth (and I don't think you can argue that success is inconceivable/vanishingly improbable), then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level perspective, which is precisely the perspective taken to justify the mission.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago> If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony [...] then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level No, the risk v reward curve has to be better than an equivalent risk v reward curve for a terrestrial species survival project to justify the mission. I would argue that just about any PhD in epidemiology, disaster relief, or geopolitics will have a risk/reward curve far better than any Mars mission. People keep making this argument that, absent any other information, a two planet species is more robust than a one planet species. But that's not the choice we're facing. The choice is a two-planet species versus a more prepared one-planet species.
- carleverett 10y ago> The choice is a two-planet species versus a more prepared one-planet species. That's not the choice. Those two options are not mutually exclusive.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoSure they are. Every engineer working on a Mars mission is not working on sustainability/stability engineering.
- Animats 10y agoThe most important part of a Mars colony program will be the team on Earth raising money for more supply runs.
- politician 10y agoRaising money? Just equip the colony with Go Pro's and stream the content back to Earth as a reality TV show.
- Animats 10y agoKeep those ratings up or your supplies are cut off. Anime reference: "Starship Operators".
- JabavuAdams 10y agoSounds great, let's try that. We're all doomed to death, anyway. Clearly we're not all doomed for greatness.
- dguest 10y agoYou say a south pole colony would be hard enough as though we don't have one. We have a south pole colony [0], and there are a half dozen multi-million dollar experiments there that must be manned year round. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen–Scott_South_Pole_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen–Scott_South_Pole_Stat...
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI believe under discussion is a self-sustaining colony. The south pole runs on imports.
- ericd 10y agoWe could do that too, we just don't have sufficient reason to.
- Fricken 10y agoWe live pretty cushy lives, so it's easy to forget just how difficult progress was at times. Read about David Thompson and what he went through to discover the northwest passage, or any of those guys who did things like that. Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.
- ViktorasM 10y agoThat might be true in this context, but otherwise a rather flawed generalization:)
- khattam 10y agoThere's a phrase I'm fond of: As long as you don't want my money for it, I'll be more than happy to help you get the fuck out. I hope you never return.