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Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. We won't know the ben

by anindha 10y ago

Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it.

chamakits 10y ago
This is a great analogy. It was Indigenous People Day yesterday in the US (aka Columbus Day), and it made me think what an interesting time it must have been to be alive at a time where there were widely mostly unexplored areas in the world, and how incredulous and shocked people must have felt when they found out of these unexplored lands (putting aside the fact that it had been explored and lived by other cultures they did not know of). Then I realized I do live in a time like that, with space exploration being that next frontier. What a time to be alive. I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.
- btown 10y ago
  Only this time without that unfortunate collateral damage to indigenous peoples!
  - cossatot 10y ago
    That's my biggest fear about Mars. We don't have a great record on Earth and might not recognize the damage done until it's irreversible.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      It is a dead rock.
      - cossatot 10y ago
        1- Probably but not certainly, and a little caution (say, 100 more years of remote sensing exploration as technology improves) will go a long way. 2- I'm not so anthropocentric as to think that the only value in the universe is human value. It's not our universe; we're an infinitesimal fraction of it. Other life has inhabited earth for billions of years, and maybe other places too. The terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments have value for existing and future life, regardless of whether that is human life. And most of life isn't human, and won't be in the future either.
        kobeya 10y ago
        There is no sentient life in Mars. If there is microbial life on Mars, it is not making efficient use of its resources. I will not trade the billions of future people that might call a terraformed Mars home for some scum on the bottom of a rock.
        stordoff 10y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but I do wonder if life exists somewhere in the Universe that would view humanity in the same way.
        kobeya 10y ago
        No doubt. We'd best be ready. Thankfully astronomical data makes this unlikely at least in our stellar neighborhood, so we have some time to grow in both power and maturity.
        Can_Not 10y ago
        We have a small chance of exploiting 1% of Mars in less than 100 years. The sooner we get our first factory there, the sooner we'll know if there is any reason not to build the millionth factory.
    - 2AF3 10y ago
      afraid we are going to mess up a lifeless rock
      - more_corn 10y ago
        It doesn't need to be alive to be beautiful. There is great peace and beauty in empty places. Mars has grand and majestic vistas: canyons and plains, dunes and mountains. Reducing it in your mind to a lifeless rock obscures the awe and wonder. It is the opposite of appreciation, it makes the idea small in you, worthless and not deserving of respect.
        friendlygrammar 10y ago
        There are infinite similarly dead rocks in the universe.
        drdeca 10y ago
        Similar [dead rocks], or [similarly dead] rocks ? Also, I think there are only finitely many eventually observable planets in the universe?
        kobeya 10y ago
        All of that requires an observer there to appreciate it. Messing up the scenery of Mars with industry is a champagne problem.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        noobermin 10y ago
        That is your perspective that it is beautiful. What if my perspective is that it is more beautiful inhabited, alive, and sustaining an ecosystem it probably hasn't for millions of years? Beauty is really subjective.
        krisroadruck 10y ago
    - noobermin 10y ago
      "Ruining a mountain side" is one thing when it sustains an ecosystem of life. It's harder to argue we are ruining something like a planet with no life.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility until man-kind had achieved 20th century medical technology. Even then it would have extremely struggled to handle 30+ million new cases of Small Pox, TB, Bubonic Plague, etc. Luckily as far as modern technology can show we're extremely certain Mars has no life we'll accidentally genocide while exploring/terraforming.
    - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
      > Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America.
      - noobermin 10y ago
        I wouldn't call a slow migration that has no written record on the same scale as the exploration of the new world.
      - valarauca1 10y ago
        >Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans. This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
      - sqeaky 10y ago
        And Europeans had no trouble crossing Europe. A single smallpox laden explorer would have started a plague in the Americas and a single native American would likely have died of one of the many plagues in Europe that Europeans had grown up with (and still often died from). The problem of safety is not always placed on the explorer, sometimes the explorer is the danger to his environment.
      - crooked-v 10y ago
        The point is that entire classes of extremely common diseases in Europe basically didn't exist in all or most of the Americas, and many of those diseases spread very easily once even a handful of people had carried them across the ocean.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I think you mean intelligent life, as I'm pretty sure there are no people inhabiting Mars, native or foreign, at this time.
    - dtparr 10y ago
      I think that's his point. If they're not there, they're not able to be collaterally damaged. If there is intelligent life (or, any life as we define it generally), there's a pretty high likelihood our arrival could damage it, especially if we don't discover it until after arrival. (And "really especially" if we go the terraforming route)
      - mc32 10y ago
        Gah, you're right. I read it as we mustn't... rather than there aren't any so we can't. My mistake.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further. You've got to be kidding. What "wonderful discoveries" do you think there's going to be out there? There might really be alien civilizations and worlds with lush vegetation out there somewhere, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be limited to our own Solar System. The worlds here are not unknowns: we've been observing and probing them for many years now, and we know pretty well what's on them. There's all kinds of interesting things on these worlds, from a scientific perspective: gas/ice giants, oceans of methane on Titan, a weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn's atmosphere, ice mountains on Pluto/Charon, etc. But we're finding all this out just fine using robotic probes. I'm sure we'll find out more, and refine our knowledge further, with continued robotic missions. But if you're thinking that there's any good reason for humans to fly around the solar system and live on other worlds here, there just isn't any good case for it: none of the other habitats are remotely livable (the closest is the upper atmosphere of Venus of all places, if you really like the idea of living in a dirigible), and so the only real economic case to be made is mining. Most likely, we'd get a lot more mineral resources out of asteroids rather than planets or moons. But this isn't like Star Trek with all kinds of fantastical worlds out there to discover, plus alien cultures to make contact with. They might be out there, way out there, but we're still struggling with the idea of how to travel to our very nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri), which is about 4 light-years away. Maybe this will all change if Zephram Cochrane invents the warp drive, but for now, there just isn't much reason for humans to do anything more than basic science missions in space, and hopefully asteroid-mining missions in the near future. We're not going to make any huge new discoveries any time soon, just more thing like "ooh, look at these weird ice mountains on this dwarf planet!". That's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and a great reason to send a robotic probe, but it's not like we're going to discover anything truly groundbreaking here in our own system. According to all our data, all the other worlds here are lifeless rocks or frozen wastelands or gas giants. This isn't such a great "time to be alive"; that time was back in the 60s-70s when they were first discovering stuff in space with the Apollo missions and various probes like Voyager, Mariner, etc. (and maybe in the 2000s when all the pictures from the Mars rovers started coming in; but how many pictures of red rocks on a red sky do you need to see before you realize there's nothing more to Mars than that?). It just isn't like the days when "the New World" was discovered, and Europeans were able to learn of and bring back fantastic new foods like cocoa/chocolate, maize/corn, learn about new cultures and brutalize them and steal their gold, etc. It's much more like exploring Antartica: it's a very interesting place for scientists, and absolutely worthwhile to do science missions on, but for everyone else the only possible reason you'd go there is as a tourist for a very short time because it's uninhabitable (though far more easily inhabited than Mars; at least there's breathable air there, and plenty of water just lying on the ground, there's even penguins and fish if you get hungry).
yolesaber 10y ago
I hate this analogy. Not only does it enforce the bullshit teleology of the White European as "discoverer" (you know people inhabited these continents, right?) but it also fails to take into account the massive technological shifts that have taken place. We can send probes to Mars, we are able to run mass spectrometry on it, we can analyze and monitor it from affair. The only reason to go there is hubris.
- witty_username 10y ago
  I think GP is saying the explorers "discovered" it from their perspective. But otherwise, I agree, we already know tons about Mars.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  You say hubris, I say practice.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Second this wholeheartedly. The "explorers" did not have the ability to observe to any real degree the rest of the world before setting out. Not only that, but it wasn't just exploration it was expansion.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  Robots are great for running pre-planned experiments, but they're limiting. There are many experiments that the research community would love to perform but would necessarily require a human presence.
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  Hmm. I'd like to understand this, but I have questions. I've imagined that we could do a lot more science with a human and some basic instruments than we could with a billion dollar Rover sent every ten years. I mean, just to sample a rock probably takes a week. A geologist on site could do that in an hour. Historically, when we can do something much faster we tend to do things with that we didn't do when it was very slow. For example when it took months to cross the country, it was a once in a lifetime thing for some and most never did it. Now we do it all the time, and generations of West Coast students have seen the Smithsonian. I think that there will be more value in sending humans to Mars than just hubris. I think we will learn a lot more about our cosmic origins, about the value of life and our healthy planet, and about ourselves as a species and culture. In fact, I think sending man to Mars is a key factor in getting us to appreciate this planet and the destruction we're causing here. I don't think Musk's end goal is to leave Earth, but to save it by making us value it again. Perhaps, on this scale, for the first time. To me, that's a lot more than just hubris. What do you think of all that?
maxerickson 10y ago
What on Mars is worth $500 a pound (in bulk) on Earth (this is something like the silly low price proposed by Elon Musk for transport)? People will probably pay a lot more than that for the first few thousand pounds of dust, but they certainly won't keep paying that just to have the same dust millions of others have. The vast resources of the Americas paid for the continuous trips back and forth and attracted settlers. What pays for going to Mars? What attracts (large numbers of) settlers to Mars? I get that there are people attracted to the "freedom" they would have outside of the established political realms of Earth, but what a terrible airless bargain that is.
- doc_holliday 10y ago
  It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other. I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th Century vs the cost per kg of payload shipping from Mars to the Earth in 21st Century. I suspect the Mars in current day is much greater, but ships and crew back then were not cheap.
  - mortenjorck 10y ago
    It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous. To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever. We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.
- 10y ago
tdaltonc 10y ago
I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. I don't know what the analogous economic engine could possible be on Mars. If Mars is going to grow, we need to be able to imagine someone saying "I'm moving my family to Mars in search of a better life. I just don't see that happening. Series or L2 station? Sure, someone has to refine the iridium before we send it down the gravity well. But why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars?
- personjerry 10y ago
  > I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. But it did! There were very basic, underfunded French colonies in North America for example for at least a hundred years before they really sent a lot more people and realized the wealth that could be had. At the same time the colonizing countries also had great internal issues, but had they known how much profit could've been made from investment, undoubtedly they would've been colonizing in full force much earlier.
- ipince 10y ago
  > why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars? ? New environment, new markets, new needs = lots of new and potentially huge opportunities. I'm asking myself the complete opposite question.
  - eropple 10y ago
    We know what's on Mars and there isn't much there that isn't better sourced here, unless you want to use what you source on Mars itself. And there won't be a significant consumption base there for literally centuries, if ever. I'm in favor of human off-world activities, but I think it's a joke to make some kind of free-market argument. We should do it because we should do it, not because of invisible hands.
viach 10y ago
> History has shown it was a good idea How so? For who?
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
Agreed. The Native American Indians knew how great America was.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
timehastoldme 10y ago
I agree, for the most part. But can you explain why this is a valid equivalence? On the surface, sure, but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason. Also, some would argue that the disadvantages (e.g. disruption of local cultures, ambiguity of meaning in modern life) have outweighed the advantages.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  The natives might differ on good idea or not. ;) We'll start to know some of the benefit of getting there almost immediately. We'll know the benefit of Mars itself only decades or centuries later. > but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason Yes, it IS. Really. In choosing to do something difficult we focus on something that will need answers to questions we don't even know to ask yet. Some will produce answers that seem so specialised to have no reuse. Give it 5 years and some will be commercial successes. Others will lead to new ideas, branches of science, tech or products, and a steady stream of improvements to earthly things. Some will only be utilised years later, or ignored. Just as exploring the ocean's surface made it clear we needed marine chronometers (a life's work) and an understanding of scurvy. Those would take years to answer. Scurvy led to the first clinical trial, that the Navy ignored for 40 years. Or from the golden age of aircraft: SR-71[1], Concorde, XB-70 Valkyrie[1]. Just 3 examples, of dozens, each of which led to enough advances to fill a book. Two military, one prestige. Doesn't matter that the B-52 is still flying and the XB-70 was a dead end, we learnt lots of stuff, and it almost gave the US their own SST (Concorde). Aviation is mostly drilled out now. I'm a big believer in prestige projects - whether they work or not. Governments don't like that sort of thing any more. So unless other rich cashed out founders want to take the place of government and give us magic thing of the future... We're left with exploration and major wars (cold or hot) to hurl technology forward. With current mil tech I'd rather not have major wars, so, exploration it must be. Oh, why haven't we properly explored under the seas yet? Or, for a longer and far more eloquent version of this, see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html written in 1970 by NASA Director of Science. Mars, Tesla, Solar, Hyperloop. That's a lot on Mr Musk. I hope he crosses roads carefully. We need a few more crazy engineering imaginations. -- [1] If anyone is interested in aircraft, and can get to Dayton, Ohio, go to the USAF museum - they have the only Valkyrie, many of the X planes, a Blackbird and a huge inventory. Decent space and missile area too.
freyr 10y ago
> Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. Except that explorers in the 1500-1700s didn't have unmanned ships or remote sensing capabilities, and manned travel was their one and only option for exploration. We've come a long way since then.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people already living on those continents it wasn't. For them, it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. >We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it. This is speculation, and if you're implying that explorers to the Americas didn't foresee the benefits, you're completely and factually wrong. They might not have predicted, for instance, the discovery of cocoa/chocolate, but they did think there was gold there (and there was; the Spanish brought back huge quantities of it), plus many other resources like furs, plus the ability to grow many crops there like tobacco. With Mars, we've already sent a bunch of probes there and learned a lot about it. It's not some big unknown land any more. And there simply isn't any good reason for people to go there except for basic science. You sure as hell can't grow stuff there (and even if you could, getting it back to Earth would cost a fortune; we're not really short on arable land here on Earth, and we're constantly developing ways of more efficiently using what we have, with the next big thing being vertical farming): there's little atmosphere, little water, and it's cold and too far from the Sun. The lack of a magnetosphere and too much radiation probably isn't going to be all that great for your crops either (not to mention any inhabitants). The only foreseeable thing that could be done there is mining. But we don't need to go to Mars to get minerals; we have asteroids passing close to the Earth all the time which could be mined, and have very valuable ores in them. It's also possible to mine on the Moon, which probably has mineral resources thanks to all the asteroid impacts and lack of geological activity. Both of these are far closer and more feasible than Mars. I'm sorry, but "build it and they will come" isn't a law of the universe, it's a line from a silly movie.

by anindha 10y ago

chamakits 10y ago

This is a great analogy. It was Indigenous People Day yesterday in the US (aka Columbus Day), and it made me think what an interesting time it must have been to be alive at a time where there were widely mostly unexplored areas in the world, and how incredulous and shocked people must have felt when they found out of these unexplored lands (putting aside the fact that it had been explored and lived by other cultures they did not know of). Then I realized I do live in a time like that, with space exploration being that next frontier. What a time to be alive. I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.

btown 10y ago
Only this time without that unfortunate collateral damage to indigenous peoples!
- cossatot 10y ago
  That's my biggest fear about Mars. We don't have a great record on Earth and might not recognize the damage done until it's irreversible.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    It is a dead rock.
    - cossatot 10y ago
      1- Probably but not certainly, and a little caution (say, 100 more years of remote sensing exploration as technology improves) will go a long way. 2- I'm not so anthropocentric as to think that the only value in the universe is human value. It's not our universe; we're an infinitesimal fraction of it. Other life has inhabited earth for billions of years, and maybe other places too. The terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments have value for existing and future life, regardless of whether that is human life. And most of life isn't human, and won't be in the future either.
      - kobeya 10y ago
        There is no sentient life in Mars. If there is microbial life on Mars, it is not making efficient use of its resources. I will not trade the billions of future people that might call a terraformed Mars home for some scum on the bottom of a rock.
        stordoff 10y ago
        I don't necessarily disagree, but I do wonder if life exists somewhere in the Universe that would view humanity in the same way.
        kobeya 10y ago
        No doubt. We'd best be ready. Thankfully astronomical data makes this unlikely at least in our stellar neighborhood, so we have some time to grow in both power and maturity.
      - Can_Not 10y ago
        We have a small chance of exploiting 1% of Mars in less than 100 years. The sooner we get our first factory there, the sooner we'll know if there is any reason not to build the millionth factory.
  - 2AF3 10y ago
    afraid we are going to mess up a lifeless rock
    - more_corn 10y ago
      It doesn't need to be alive to be beautiful. There is great peace and beauty in empty places. Mars has grand and majestic vistas: canyons and plains, dunes and mountains. Reducing it in your mind to a lifeless rock obscures the awe and wonder. It is the opposite of appreciation, it makes the idea small in you, worthless and not deserving of respect.
      - friendlygrammar 10y ago
        There are infinite similarly dead rocks in the universe.
        drdeca 10y ago
        Similar [dead rocks], or [similarly dead] rocks ? Also, I think there are only finitely many eventually observable planets in the universe?
      - kobeya 10y ago
        All of that requires an observer there to appreciate it. Messing up the scenery of Mars with industry is a champagne problem.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - noobermin 10y ago
        That is your perspective that it is beautiful. What if my perspective is that it is more beautiful inhabited, alive, and sustaining an ecosystem it probably hasn't for millions of years? Beauty is really subjective.
        krisroadruck 10y ago
  - noobermin 10y ago
    "Ruining a mountain side" is one thing when it sustains an ecosystem of life. It's harder to argue we are ruining something like a planet with no life.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility until man-kind had achieved 20th century medical technology. Even then it would have extremely struggled to handle 30+ million new cases of Small Pox, TB, Bubonic Plague, etc. Luckily as far as modern technology can show we're extremely certain Mars has no life we'll accidentally genocide while exploring/terraforming.
  - fail2fail2ban 10y ago
    > Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      I wouldn't call a slow migration that has no written record on the same scale as the exploration of the new world.
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      >Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans. This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      And Europeans had no trouble crossing Europe. A single smallpox laden explorer would have started a plague in the Americas and a single native American would likely have died of one of the many plagues in Europe that Europeans had grown up with (and still often died from). The problem of safety is not always placed on the explorer, sometimes the explorer is the danger to his environment.
    - crooked-v 10y ago
      The point is that entire classes of extremely common diseases in Europe basically didn't exist in all or most of the Americas, and many of those diseases spread very easily once even a handful of people had carried them across the ocean.
- mc32 10y ago
  I think you mean intelligent life, as I'm pretty sure there are no people inhabiting Mars, native or foreign, at this time.
  - dtparr 10y ago
    I think that's his point. If they're not there, they're not able to be collaterally damaged. If there is intelligent life (or, any life as we define it generally), there's a pretty high likelihood our arrival could damage it, especially if we don't discover it until after arrival. (And "really especially" if we go the terraforming route)
    - mc32 10y ago
      Gah, you're right. I read it as we mustn't... rather than there aren't any so we can't. My mistake.
Grishnakh 10y ago
>I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further. You've got to be kidding. What "wonderful discoveries" do you think there's going to be out there? There might really be alien civilizations and worlds with lush vegetation out there somewhere, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be limited to our own Solar System. The worlds here are not unknowns: we've been observing and probing them for many years now, and we know pretty well what's on them. There's all kinds of interesting things on these worlds, from a scientific perspective: gas/ice giants, oceans of methane on Titan, a weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn's atmosphere, ice mountains on Pluto/Charon, etc. But we're finding all this out just fine using robotic probes. I'm sure we'll find out more, and refine our knowledge further, with continued robotic missions. But if you're thinking that there's any good reason for humans to fly around the solar system and live on other worlds here, there just isn't any good case for it: none of the other habitats are remotely livable (the closest is the upper atmosphere of Venus of all places, if you really like the idea of living in a dirigible), and so the only real economic case to be made is mining. Most likely, we'd get a lot more mineral resources out of asteroids rather than planets or moons. But this isn't like Star Trek with all kinds of fantastical worlds out there to discover, plus alien cultures to make contact with. They might be out there, way out there, but we're still struggling with the idea of how to travel to our very nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri), which is about 4 light-years away. Maybe this will all change if Zephram Cochrane invents the warp drive, but for now, there just isn't much reason for humans to do anything more than basic science missions in space, and hopefully asteroid-mining missions in the near future. We're not going to make any huge new discoveries any time soon, just more thing like "ooh, look at these weird ice mountains on this dwarf planet!". That's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and a great reason to send a robotic probe, but it's not like we're going to discover anything truly groundbreaking here in our own system. According to all our data, all the other worlds here are lifeless rocks or frozen wastelands or gas giants. This isn't such a great "time to be alive"; that time was back in the 60s-70s when they were first discovering stuff in space with the Apollo missions and various probes like Voyager, Mariner, etc. (and maybe in the 2000s when all the pictures from the Mars rovers started coming in; but how many pictures of red rocks on a red sky do you need to see before you realize there's nothing more to Mars than that?). It just isn't like the days when "the New World" was discovered, and Europeans were able to learn of and bring back fantastic new foods like cocoa/chocolate, maize/corn, learn about new cultures and brutalize them and steal their gold, etc. It's much more like exploring Antartica: it's a very interesting place for scientists, and absolutely worthwhile to do science missions on, but for everyone else the only possible reason you'd go there is as a tourist for a very short time because it's uninhabitable (though far more easily inhabited than Mars; at least there's breathable air there, and plenty of water just lying on the ground, there's even penguins and fish if you get hungry).

yolesaber 10y ago

I hate this analogy. Not only does it enforce the bullshit teleology of the White European as "discoverer" (you know people inhabited these continents, right?) but it also fails to take into account the massive technological shifts that have taken place. We can send probes to Mars, we are able to run mass spectrometry on it, we can analyze and monitor it from affair. The only reason to go there is hubris.

witty_username 10y ago
I think GP is saying the explorers "discovered" it from their perspective. But otherwise, I agree, we already know tons about Mars.
oldmanjay 10y ago
You say hubris, I say practice.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Second this wholeheartedly. The "explorers" did not have the ability to observe to any real degree the rest of the world before setting out. Not only that, but it wasn't just exploration it was expansion.
noobiemcfoob 10y ago
Robots are great for running pre-planned experiments, but they're limiting. There are many experiments that the research community would love to perform but would necessarily require a human presence.
TaylorAlexander 10y ago
Hmm. I'd like to understand this, but I have questions. I've imagined that we could do a lot more science with a human and some basic instruments than we could with a billion dollar Rover sent every ten years. I mean, just to sample a rock probably takes a week. A geologist on site could do that in an hour. Historically, when we can do something much faster we tend to do things with that we didn't do when it was very slow. For example when it took months to cross the country, it was a once in a lifetime thing for some and most never did it. Now we do it all the time, and generations of West Coast students have seen the Smithsonian. I think that there will be more value in sending humans to Mars than just hubris. I think we will learn a lot more about our cosmic origins, about the value of life and our healthy planet, and about ourselves as a species and culture. In fact, I think sending man to Mars is a key factor in getting us to appreciate this planet and the destruction we're causing here. I don't think Musk's end goal is to leave Earth, but to save it by making us value it again. Perhaps, on this scale, for the first time. To me, that's a lot more than just hubris. What do you think of all that?

maxerickson 10y ago

What on Mars is worth $500 a pound (in bulk) on Earth (this is something like the silly low price proposed by Elon Musk for transport)? People will probably pay a lot more than that for the first few thousand pounds of dust, but they certainly won't keep paying that just to have the same dust millions of others have. The vast resources of the Americas paid for the continuous trips back and forth and attracted settlers. What pays for going to Mars? What attracts (large numbers of) settlers to Mars? I get that there are people attracted to the "freedom" they would have outside of the established political realms of Earth, but what a terrible airless bargain that is.

doc_holliday 10y ago
It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other. I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th Century vs the cost per kg of payload shipping from Mars to the Earth in 21st Century. I suspect the Mars in current day is much greater, but ships and crew back then were not cheap.
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous. To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever. We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.
10y ago

tdaltonc 10y ago

I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. I don't know what the analogous economic engine could possible be on Mars. If Mars is going to grow, we need to be able to imagine someone saying "I'm moving my family to Mars in search of a better life. I just don't see that happening. Series or L2 station? Sure, someone has to refine the iridium before we send it down the gravity well. But why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars?

personjerry 10y ago
> I don't think it took 100's of years for people to figure out that a continent teaming cod, timber, and beavers might be a good place to set up trade. Grated, early on, they thought it was a continent full of gold and spices. But it did! There were very basic, underfunded French colonies in North America for example for at least a hundred years before they really sent a lot more people and realized the wealth that could be had. At the same time the colonizing countries also had great internal issues, but had they known how much profit could've been made from investment, undoubtedly they would've been colonizing in full force much earlier.
ipince 10y ago
> why would an entrepreneur want to set up shop on Mars? ? New environment, new markets, new needs = lots of new and potentially huge opportunities. I'm asking myself the complete opposite question.
- eropple 10y ago
  We know what's on Mars and there isn't much there that isn't better sourced here, unless you want to use what you source on Mars itself. And there won't be a significant consumption base there for literally centuries, if ever. I'm in favor of human off-world activities, but I think it's a joke to make some kind of free-market argument. We should do it because we should do it, not because of invisible hands.

viach 10y ago

> History has shown it was a good idea How so? For who?

fail2fail2ban 10y ago

Agreed. The Native American Indians knew how great America was.

deleted 10y ago

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timehastoldme 10y ago

I agree, for the most part. But can you explain why this is a valid equivalence? On the surface, sure, but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason. Also, some would argue that the disadvantages (e.g. disruption of local cultures, ambiguity of meaning in modern life) have outweighed the advantages.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
The natives might differ on good idea or not. ;) We'll start to know some of the benefit of getting there almost immediately. We'll know the benefit of Mars itself only decades or centuries later. > but exploration-for-it's-own-sake isn't a good enough reason Yes, it IS. Really. In choosing to do something difficult we focus on something that will need answers to questions we don't even know to ask yet. Some will produce answers that seem so specialised to have no reuse. Give it 5 years and some will be commercial successes. Others will lead to new ideas, branches of science, tech or products, and a steady stream of improvements to earthly things. Some will only be utilised years later, or ignored. Just as exploring the ocean's surface made it clear we needed marine chronometers (a life's work) and an understanding of scurvy. Those would take years to answer. Scurvy led to the first clinical trial, that the Navy ignored for 40 years. Or from the golden age of aircraft: SR-71[1], Concorde, XB-70 Valkyrie[1]. Just 3 examples, of dozens, each of which led to enough advances to fill a book. Two military, one prestige. Doesn't matter that the B-52 is still flying and the XB-70 was a dead end, we learnt lots of stuff, and it almost gave the US their own SST (Concorde). Aviation is mostly drilled out now. I'm a big believer in prestige projects - whether they work or not. Governments don't like that sort of thing any more. So unless other rich cashed out founders want to take the place of government and give us magic thing of the future... We're left with exploration and major wars (cold or hot) to hurl technology forward. With current mil tech I'd rather not have major wars, so, exploration it must be. Oh, why haven't we properly explored under the seas yet? Or, for a longer and far more eloquent version of this, see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html written in 1970 by NASA Director of Science. Mars, Tesla, Solar, Hyperloop. That's a lot on Mr Musk. I hope he crosses roads carefully. We need a few more crazy engineering imaginations. -- [1] If anyone is interested in aircraft, and can get to Dayton, Ohio, go to the USAF museum - they have the only Valkyrie, many of the X planes, a Blackbird and a huge inventory. Decent space and missile area too.

freyr 10y ago

> Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. Except that explorers in the 1500-1700s didn't have unmanned ships or remote sensing capabilities, and manned travel was their one and only option for exploration. We've come a long way since then.

Grishnakh 10y ago

>Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people already living on those continents it wasn't. For them, it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. >We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it. This is speculation, and if you're implying that explorers to the Americas didn't foresee the benefits, you're completely and factually wrong. They might not have predicted, for instance, the discovery of cocoa/chocolate, but they did think there was gold there (and there was; the Spanish brought back huge quantities of it), plus many other resources like furs, plus the ability to grow many crops there like tobacco. With Mars, we've already sent a bunch of probes there and learned a lot about it. It's not some big unknown land any more. And there simply isn't any good reason for people to go there except for basic science. You sure as hell can't grow stuff there (and even if you could, getting it back to Earth would cost a fortune; we're not really short on arable land here on Earth, and we're constantly developing ways of more efficiently using what we have, with the next big thing being vertical farming): there's little atmosphere, little water, and it's cold and too far from the Sun. The lack of a magnetosphere and too much radiation probably isn't going to be all that great for your crops either (not to mention any inhabitants). The only foreseeable thing that could be done there is mining. But we don't need to go to Mars to get minerals; we have asteroids passing close to the Earth all the time which could be mined, and have very valuable ores in them. It's also possible to mine on the Moon, which probably has mineral resources thanks to all the asteroid impacts and lack of geological activity. Both of these are far closer and more feasible than Mars. I'm sorry, but "build it and they will come" isn't a law of the universe, it's a line from a silly movie.