16 ms·

Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars

155 points by artsandsci 9y ago

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
The plans: (pdf) http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900... In the "Why Mars?" section, Musk writes: > It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. In the very, very, long term we might be able to terraform Mars, but in the next few hundred years I think it would be more accurate to say that heating is a lot easier to manage than cooling. We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But as Phoenix, AZ is discovering this week, even a few degrees over body temperature is really bad. In the section on the importance of reusability, he writes: > However, with frequent flights, you can take an aircraft that costs $90 million and buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Vegas for $43, including taxes. That's because the casinos subsidize it. Flights to and from Vegas from anywhere are cheaper than others, even more frequent or shorter flights.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  >We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But we need pressurized suits to survive on Mars. Mars is really not a smart place to colonize. Clouds of Venus are much nicer.
  - rory096 9y ago
    An atmosphere full of sulfuric acid and no ground (with all the resources you can extract from it) is far worse than a low-pressure environment.
    - 6d6b73 9y ago
      It's full of carbon dioxide, and amount of sulfuric acid is negligible, plus that acid can be used to extract water. On Mars you have sand storms, which are more dangerous to people and equipment. Resources can be brought from asteroids. Mars is not only low pressure,but also low gravity, high radiation environment. Venus colony could be powered by solar power, as it's much closer to Sun, on Mars it would be much harder to generate power.
      - baq 9y ago
        It's going to be a tad more difficult to be a launch pad on Venus to get back home, though.
        6d6b73 9y ago
        Care to explain why? You are 50 km above the surface all the time, so half the trip (when compared to Earth) is already behind you.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
        Sure, but you're taking off in a rocket from a balloon.
        maxerickson 9y ago
        What does that matter? It's not like rockets launched from the surface spend a long time pushing on the planet.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
        You wouldn't be even the littlest bit dubious of taking off from an inflatable balloon with a big fiery rocket where the launch abort is liable to drop you into lead-melting temperatures and nine atmospheres of pressure?
        maxerickson 9y ago
        Probably not any more uncomfortable than I'd be with the prospect of aborting a surface launch. There's probably some trick to do with the crew portion of the rocket too, where it could be buoyant before it got down to 9 atmospheres.
      - carleverett 9y ago
        Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of Venus's water was lost to space a long time ago :(
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    It's much easier to maintain an internal pressure against an external vacuum than it is to maintain an internal low pressure against an external high pressure. Mechanically, the former is much stronger - tension is easier to manage than compression, so catastrophic failures are less likely. Also, if you suffer a minor failure, it's fairly easy to maintain pressure just by releasing a little more air into the system. On Venus, a small puncture will hiss with sulfuric acid. Forced to choose between fighting cold and low pressure or fighting heat, high pressure, and fighting gravity that wants you to plummet 50 km through the acid clouds....I'd pick the Martian colony, thank you very much!
    - tangent128 9y ago
      You don't have to maintain a pressure differential on Venus- oxygen is a lifting gas in the comfortable sections of Venus's atmosphere. Hot air balloons are a well-understood technology.
    - sampo 9y ago
      They wrote "clouds of Venus". Meaning floating cities high in the atmosphere of Venus, at a level where the air density is about one Earth atmosphere.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- grondilu 9y ago
  I think pressure is much more of a problem than temperature. Thermal insolation does not fail catastrophically. Pressure regulation kind of does.
  - Pigo 9y ago
    I only skimmed the article, but Mars doesn't have a protective magnetic field either. Does that make electronics, and well us, it vulnerable to the sun?
    - m-j-fox 9y ago
      Yes.
- bradbatt 9y ago
  That's because the casinos subsidize it. Vegas casinos subsidize public air travel? I didn't realize they did this...do you have a source for this?
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    Doesn't matter if Vegas does it or not the Casino I set up on Mars will!
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    You are correct, this is a remarkable claim...but it seems to be the simplest explanation. Even in the face of claims to the contrary: https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-subsidies-to-come-to-lv/ https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-subsid... the difference between air fares to Vegas and comparable cities and the difference in hotel rates clearly shows that there is something going on. It may not be a true subsidy; perhaps the airlines found that the high volume of very price-sensitive travelers to Vegas justified thinner margins than to other cities. But the point stands that it's disingenuous to use a $43 flight to Vegas as a price point for the cost of air travel.
nbarbettini 9y ago
FYI - this is a PDF version of Musk's presentation at IAC in 2016.
- sajid 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8
passivepinetree 9y ago
For all the complaining and pessimism I usually exhibit, this is a pretty exciting time to be alive. This gets me excited in a giddy little-kid way. I hope that I live to see the first human colonization of other planets.
adekok 9y ago
The Sahara desert is infinitely more hospitable than Mars. It's easier to get to. There's air to breath. There's water. The main reason to terraform Mars (other than making humanity a multi-planet species) is that no one cares about Mars. If we want more water on Mars, we just throw a few hundred icebergs into it. And ignore the sonic booms, devastation, craters, etc. They can be fixed later. But living on Mars is another prospect entirely. It's expensive to get there. Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day. If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it. It's sexy in science fiction, but the practicalities are pretty bad.
- le-mark 9y ago
  I'm certain this will be downvoted to hell, but it's absolutely correct. Even Antarctica is more appealing. There has to be a money making, gold rush, get rich reason why anyone would settle Mars. My pet theory is that Mars, a much more shallow gravity well than Earth could serve as an industrial base for processing material from the rest of the Solar System.
  - rimunroe 9y ago
    If reduced gravity is the goal, then what would be the advantage of doing things on Mars versus in orbit, or just on the Moon?
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      The reason that reduced gravity helps is that after processing, you can loft it back into orbit. You can't manufacture fuel in orbit (it's a vacuum), and you can't manufacture fuel on the Moon (oxygen can be extracted with a lot of heat, but we can't make rockets without a fuel). But you can manufacture fuel with Martian atmospheric CO2 and frozen water.
      - rimunroe 9y ago
        Those are all reasons for not manufacturing fuel in orbit, but the person I was replying to was talking about processing materials from other planets. I get the desire of Mars-as-a-gas-station/space-oil-field, but don't see a benefit to manufacturing other things there specifically because of gravity. If we have the ability to ship materials from planet to planet for processing, then I don't see how you get much benefit flying them down to Mars's surface for processing versus just staying in orbit and shipping fuel/whatever you get from Mars up to you, just like with the other planets.
Pigo 9y ago
I'm glad when I see I'm not the only one who thinks living on Mars would be awful. I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see any ideas on supplementing the 62.5% less gravity. I can't imagine what that'd do to your body after years of living in it. But the lack of nature (and Internet for that matter) would drive me crazy. I'm already too old to enjoy my PlayStation for more than an hour or so. Maybe once we're able to terraform the planet to resemble the world we evolved on, or build enough Bio-Domes for his million people to enjoy (keeping in mind it only takes one Pauly Shore to ruin a dome), and compensate for the lack of gravity somehow, then I'd consider going.
- Lambdanaut 9y ago
  > I wonder if I'm the only person who thinks living on Mars would be awful. It'd be awful if you're a person who is concerned with physical comfort/health. The drive for those that wish to go is the big transcendent picture and goal. It's beyond those desires for self preservation and comfort.
- sirtimbly 9y ago
  Elon has said repeatedly that he is not concerned with how people will live on Mars, he's just interested in how to get people there en-masse. Living, surviving, and making it economically, and ecologically feasible is beyond the scope of what he can plan for.
  - grondilu 9y ago
    That sounds like a morally questionable attitude. Like people selling drugs or weapons. "I'm just selling the stuff, whether it's good or not for my customers is none of my business".
- Sangermaine 9y ago
  The kind of people who would want to do this are the kind who would be willing to put up with discomfort and danger. Even on Earth many people voluntarily participate in sports or other activities that involve extreme risk or danger, or visit and live in dangerous and challenging places. It sounds like this experience isn't something you'd want, but that's not true of everyone.
not_that_noob 9y ago
He made electric cars sexy. He made rockets that come back to earth for a smooth landing. I'm betting that as crazy as this sounds he is the man to make this happen. Go Elon!
- bjl 9y ago
  Musk's PR team at work ladies and gentleman.
  - not_that_noob 9y ago
    No, just an admirer. Those are facts. And I generally cast a skeptical eye. But he's got the ambition and that rare combo of design-engineering creativity to see how an impossible task can be achieved by rearranging existing technologies in new combinations. It's a rare combination of skill and art.
    - bjl 9y ago
      You're an admirer because you've bought in to the absurd idea that a ruthless capitalist is somehow the savior of humanity. Which is exactly the image his (very expensive) PR team wants you to have.
      - not_that_noob 9y ago
        Sometimes one needs a ruthless capitalist to act as the midwife of innovation.
      - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
        Wild speculation is wild.
      - castis 9y ago
        It's really a shame that all you intend to bring to the table is negativity and doubt. Most of your post history seems to hum the same tune. The only absurd thing here is that you seemingly enjoy informing people on facts about themselves despite knowing nothing about them.
yosyp 9y ago
Don't print Musk's journal article in black and white: the copy editing is bad. Table 4 distinguishes Good/OK/Bad using colored circles -- it's undecipherable in black and white.
tthayer 9y ago
I love how his various ventures all seems to be pointing to this one goal. The Boring Company? Makes sense that he would want to get experience with tunnel boring considering no one is living on the surface of mars for very long without exposing themselves to considerable radiation and near certain death. A tunnel can be sealed and regulated. The first few generations of Martians are going to be mole people.
rndmize 9y ago
I'm continually unsold on this. Mars is far away, inhospitable, and feels like a run-before-we-walk kind of scenario to me. Merely sending humans to Mars seems like a huge task, let alone keeping them alive there. I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of: - Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit, makes space station construction practical?) - Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in constructing human habitation away from Earth?) - Mars/Venus. Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?
- placeybordeaux 9y ago
  I agree that asteroid capture and in space refining/construction seems like the way to go. Once you show that you can make a profit in space other than pointing satellites at the earth you grow the # of people that are interested in participating by a huge amount.
- felippee 9y ago
  As with all complex matters there are numerous considerations and issues with all of these. Moon is close, we've already been there, escape velocity is low but there appears to be very little water, not very accessible at least. The day/nigh cycle is 28 days long, so there are issues with overheating during the "day" and lack of power during the "night". Solar radiation induces static charge on dust, which makes it go everywhere, particularly difficult condition to run mechanical devices for long periods of time. That said an air-sealed cavern on the Moon could be a great intermediate solution for making humans interplanetary. Electromagnetic launcher could also make our interplanetary ambitions more sustainable. Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere (faint but still), better day/night cycle, more accessible water and carbon dioxide - allowing to manufacture rocket fuel and many chemicals needed for agriculture. Ultimately it seems better then the Moon in many respects, but it is very far away. In case of emergency there is very little that can be done to evacuate, transporting anything there will be more expensive (though not that much more expensive than the moon actually). There is the danger of irradiating astronauts during the trip, so crew missions should take faster transfer windows and trade more fuel for speed. Cargo missions could take longer, with better fuel efficiency. Asteroids would be great but they are hard to work with because of the very low gravity (and electrostatic dust as on the Moon). Capturing one, though perhaps theoretically possible, would require enormous amount of force to change the orbit in any meaningful way. Perhaps detonating a hydrogen bomb near one could provide enough thrust, but likely not enough precision (we would not want such asteroid to accidentally hit the Earth). It would take many years to tow one any close to Earth with regular propulsion, so that is probably out of the question for now.
randomsearch 9y ago
It seems to me that most of the negative attitudes towards this project stem from the idea that we're going to colonise Mars with 2017 technology and ideas. That's the hard thing about reasoning about the future: by definition it doesn't look like the present, but you're a product of the present. Many people talk about terraforming as taking "thousands of years". Go back a few thousand years and tell someone how you travelled to the other side of the earth in less than a day. Genetic engineering. AI. Nanotech. Quantum Computers. And that's just the next 100 years. Ain't no way we're gonna have to wait that long to build sandcastles on Mars.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  This is why the world needs dreamers like Musk. Nobody could have predicted the huge technological advances we've made in the last 100 years, let alone the speed at which they were developed. If we just keep brushing ideas like this off as "totally impractical right now" then there's no goal to work towards. It's no secret the our time on Earth is limited, and becoming more limited as the human race expands and evolves. It really comes down to weather or not you believe the human race is capable of existing outside of Earth. I am in the camp of "we'll figure it out" just like we have up to this point. My fear is that most people fall into the "I'll die before it happens so why bother thinking about it" camp.
  - rmah 9y ago
    Lol, as if Musk is the first to dream of colonizing space. Please.
hutzlibu 9y ago
"The threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars or a civilization would be a million people. " That number seems highly speculative ... But afaik, there is no self-sustaining city on earth, so I doubt there are more solid numbers on that topic. Economic cycles are quite complex, thats for fure. But aside from that, I think the much more realistic plan, than building and leaving in a huge fleet at once and then see how it goes, would be sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance ... if that works, we might be ready for colonisation. And the needed technology is evolving right now on earth. Maybe less spectacular, but more realistic in my opinion.
- grondilu 9y ago
  > there is no self-sustaining city on earth Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of. Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth. In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on mars sounds quite ludicrous. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
  - obastani 9y ago
    Just because people collaborate from all over the planet to make the pencil, doesn't mean that's the way it has to be. This kind of collaboration simply enables economics of scale to kick in (and possibly improve quality as well).
    - grondilu 9y ago
      "doesn't mean that's the way it has to be" Sure, but it does show how speculative Musk's plan for a "self-sustaining city" is. There is no such city on Earth. What makes him think it would work on mars?
      - 9y ago
rayanm 9y ago
Elon makes a good point that it is inevitable that Human should colonize another planet. I don't think Mars is the planet. We are solving a hard problem with the current technology, but we are missing the point that we may have a technology in the future that enables us to explore less hostile far planets that require one trip. Think about the first settlers who came to North America before the Europeans.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  Let's reframe the problem for him. The main problem he is trying to solve is the risk of being tied to one planet. So he wants to buy insurance for humanity. How else can you solve this problem?
metaphorm 9y ago
I interpret Musk's interest in this kind of thing as a form of ideological futurism rather than a pragmatic goal. I think he presents the idea of something very far out and very ambitious as a way to try and inspire people to think big and think about developing technology the likes of which we've never seen before. It's an interesting strategy, but I think it has a major downside too. It strikes many people (me included) as a bit detached from reality and even cold to the concerns of the many people here on Earth that are struggling.
strin 9y ago
PDF here: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900... Interesting Venn diagram in Fig 2. If "COST OF TRIP TO MARS" = "INFINITE MONEY", shouldn't "CAN AFFORD TO GO" be an empty set?
fapjacks 9y ago
I wish so bad I had the luck to be born into the circumstances and opportunity to create a company like SpaceX.
gehwartzen 9y ago
While I think its extremely interesting and exciting to colonize Mars, both out of curiosity and the trickle down of new technologies that would be developed in the endeavor, I just don't personally feel any particular emotional drive to do so because humans might otherwise go extinct. I have a child and so have a very strong instinct of wanting to do everything I can to help him to survive as well as his children and grandchildren. Similarly I want people on the other side of the planet, whom I have never met, to survive simply because I know they exist now. Once I start to think beyond maybe 300 years these feeling deteriorate rapidly. If I think about our species being wiped out in 10,000 years I hardly have an emotional response at all. Am I alone in feeling this way?
- grondilu 9y ago
  I think nobody can deny that, all other things being equal, short-term occurring events tend to matter more than long-term ones. Therefore, no matter how bad one can feel about the prospect of humanity being wiped out, that feeling can be made arbitrarily low by delaying the expectation of its occurrence.
googletazer 9y ago
The only hope for Mars is that a true libertarian society may arise. America's 21st century America.

155 points by artsandsci 9y ago

The plans: (pdf) http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900... In the "Why Mars?" section, Musk writes: > It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. In the very, very, long term we might be able to terraform Mars, but in the next few hundred years I think it would be more accurate to say that heating is a lot easier to manage than cooling. We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But as Phoenix, AZ is discovering this week, even a few degrees over body temperature is really bad. In the section on the importance of reusability, he writes: > However, with frequent flights, you can take an aircraft that costs $90 million and buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Vegas for $43, including taxes. That's because the casinos subsidize it. Flights to and from Vegas from anywhere are cheaper than others, even more frequent or shorter flights.

6d6b73 9y ago
>We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But we need pressurized suits to survive on Mars. Mars is really not a smart place to colonize. Clouds of Venus are much nicer.
- rory096 9y ago
  An atmosphere full of sulfuric acid and no ground (with all the resources you can extract from it) is far worse than a low-pressure environment.
  - 6d6b73 9y ago
    It's full of carbon dioxide, and amount of sulfuric acid is negligible, plus that acid can be used to extract water. On Mars you have sand storms, which are more dangerous to people and equipment. Resources can be brought from asteroids. Mars is not only low pressure,but also low gravity, high radiation environment. Venus colony could be powered by solar power, as it's much closer to Sun, on Mars it would be much harder to generate power.
    - baq 9y ago
      It's going to be a tad more difficult to be a launch pad on Venus to get back home, though.
      - 6d6b73 9y ago
        Care to explain why? You are 50 km above the surface all the time, so half the trip (when compared to Earth) is already behind you.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
        Sure, but you're taking off in a rocket from a balloon.
        maxerickson 9y ago
        What does that matter? It's not like rockets launched from the surface spend a long time pushing on the planet.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
        You wouldn't be even the littlest bit dubious of taking off from an inflatable balloon with a big fiery rocket where the launch abort is liable to drop you into lead-melting temperatures and nine atmospheres of pressure?
        maxerickson 9y ago
        Probably not any more uncomfortable than I'd be with the prospect of aborting a surface launch. There's probably some trick to do with the crew portion of the rocket too, where it could be buoyant before it got down to 9 atmospheres.
    - carleverett 9y ago
      Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of Venus's water was lost to space a long time ago :(
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  It's much easier to maintain an internal pressure against an external vacuum than it is to maintain an internal low pressure against an external high pressure. Mechanically, the former is much stronger - tension is easier to manage than compression, so catastrophic failures are less likely. Also, if you suffer a minor failure, it's fairly easy to maintain pressure just by releasing a little more air into the system. On Venus, a small puncture will hiss with sulfuric acid. Forced to choose between fighting cold and low pressure or fighting heat, high pressure, and fighting gravity that wants you to plummet 50 km through the acid clouds....I'd pick the Martian colony, thank you very much!
  - tangent128 9y ago
    You don't have to maintain a pressure differential on Venus- oxygen is a lifting gas in the comfortable sections of Venus's atmosphere. Hot air balloons are a well-understood technology.
  - sampo 9y ago
    They wrote "clouds of Venus". Meaning floating cities high in the atmosphere of Venus, at a level where the air density is about one Earth atmosphere.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
grondilu 9y ago
I think pressure is much more of a problem than temperature. Thermal insolation does not fail catastrophically. Pressure regulation kind of does.
- Pigo 9y ago
  I only skimmed the article, but Mars doesn't have a protective magnetic field either. Does that make electronics, and well us, it vulnerable to the sun?
  - m-j-fox 9y ago
    Yes.
bradbatt 9y ago
That's because the casinos subsidize it. Vegas casinos subsidize public air travel? I didn't realize they did this...do you have a source for this?
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Doesn't matter if Vegas does it or not the Casino I set up on Mars will!
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  You are correct, this is a remarkable claim...but it seems to be the simplest explanation. Even in the face of claims to the contrary: https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-subsidies-to-come-to-lv/ https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/1997/nov/17/no-airline-subsid... the difference between air fares to Vegas and comparable cities and the difference in hotel rates clearly shows that there is something going on. It may not be a true subsidy; perhaps the airlines found that the high volume of very price-sensitive travelers to Vegas justified thinner margins than to other cities. But the point stands that it's disingenuous to use a $43 flight to Vegas as a price point for the cost of air travel.

nbarbettini 9y ago

FYI - this is a PDF version of Musk's presentation at IAC in 2016.

sajid 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Uyfqi_TE8

passivepinetree 9y ago

For all the complaining and pessimism I usually exhibit, this is a pretty exciting time to be alive. This gets me excited in a giddy little-kid way. I hope that I live to see the first human colonization of other planets.

adekok 9y ago

The Sahara desert is infinitely more hospitable than Mars. It's easier to get to. There's air to breath. There's water. The main reason to terraform Mars (other than making humanity a multi-planet species) is that no one cares about Mars. If we want more water on Mars, we just throw a few hundred icebergs into it. And ignore the sonic booms, devastation, craters, etc. They can be fixed later. But living on Mars is another prospect entirely. It's expensive to get there. Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day. If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it. It's sexy in science fiction, but the practicalities are pretty bad.

le-mark 9y ago
I'm certain this will be downvoted to hell, but it's absolutely correct. Even Antarctica is more appealing. There has to be a money making, gold rush, get rich reason why anyone would settle Mars. My pet theory is that Mars, a much more shallow gravity well than Earth could serve as an industrial base for processing material from the rest of the Solar System.
- rimunroe 9y ago
  If reduced gravity is the goal, then what would be the advantage of doing things on Mars versus in orbit, or just on the Moon?
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    The reason that reduced gravity helps is that after processing, you can loft it back into orbit. You can't manufacture fuel in orbit (it's a vacuum), and you can't manufacture fuel on the Moon (oxygen can be extracted with a lot of heat, but we can't make rockets without a fuel). But you can manufacture fuel with Martian atmospheric CO2 and frozen water.
    - rimunroe 9y ago
      Those are all reasons for not manufacturing fuel in orbit, but the person I was replying to was talking about processing materials from other planets. I get the desire of Mars-as-a-gas-station/space-oil-field, but don't see a benefit to manufacturing other things there specifically because of gravity. If we have the ability to ship materials from planet to planet for processing, then I don't see how you get much benefit flying them down to Mars's surface for processing versus just staying in orbit and shipping fuel/whatever you get from Mars up to you, just like with the other planets.

Pigo 9y ago

I'm glad when I see I'm not the only one who thinks living on Mars would be awful. I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see any ideas on supplementing the 62.5% less gravity. I can't imagine what that'd do to your body after years of living in it. But the lack of nature (and Internet for that matter) would drive me crazy. I'm already too old to enjoy my PlayStation for more than an hour or so. Maybe once we're able to terraform the planet to resemble the world we evolved on, or build enough Bio-Domes for his million people to enjoy (keeping in mind it only takes one Pauly Shore to ruin a dome), and compensate for the lack of gravity somehow, then I'd consider going.

Lambdanaut 9y ago
> I wonder if I'm the only person who thinks living on Mars would be awful. It'd be awful if you're a person who is concerned with physical comfort/health. The drive for those that wish to go is the big transcendent picture and goal. It's beyond those desires for self preservation and comfort.
sirtimbly 9y ago
Elon has said repeatedly that he is not concerned with how people will live on Mars, he's just interested in how to get people there en-masse. Living, surviving, and making it economically, and ecologically feasible is beyond the scope of what he can plan for.
- grondilu 9y ago
  That sounds like a morally questionable attitude. Like people selling drugs or weapons. "I'm just selling the stuff, whether it's good or not for my customers is none of my business".
Sangermaine 9y ago
The kind of people who would want to do this are the kind who would be willing to put up with discomfort and danger. Even on Earth many people voluntarily participate in sports or other activities that involve extreme risk or danger, or visit and live in dangerous and challenging places. It sounds like this experience isn't something you'd want, but that's not true of everyone.

not_that_noob 9y ago

He made electric cars sexy. He made rockets that come back to earth for a smooth landing. I'm betting that as crazy as this sounds he is the man to make this happen. Go Elon!

bjl 9y ago
Musk's PR team at work ladies and gentleman.
- not_that_noob 9y ago
  No, just an admirer. Those are facts. And I generally cast a skeptical eye. But he's got the ambition and that rare combo of design-engineering creativity to see how an impossible task can be achieved by rearranging existing technologies in new combinations. It's a rare combination of skill and art.
  - bjl 9y ago
    You're an admirer because you've bought in to the absurd idea that a ruthless capitalist is somehow the savior of humanity. Which is exactly the image his (very expensive) PR team wants you to have.
    - not_that_noob 9y ago
      Sometimes one needs a ruthless capitalist to act as the midwife of innovation.
    - noobiemcfoob 9y ago
      Wild speculation is wild.
    - castis 9y ago
      It's really a shame that all you intend to bring to the table is negativity and doubt. Most of your post history seems to hum the same tune. The only absurd thing here is that you seemingly enjoy informing people on facts about themselves despite knowing nothing about them.

yosyp 9y ago

Don't print Musk's journal article in black and white: the copy editing is bad. Table 4 distinguishes Good/OK/Bad using colored circles -- it's undecipherable in black and white.

tthayer 9y ago

I love how his various ventures all seems to be pointing to this one goal. The Boring Company? Makes sense that he would want to get experience with tunnel boring considering no one is living on the surface of mars for very long without exposing themselves to considerable radiation and near certain death. A tunnel can be sealed and regulated. The first few generations of Martians are going to be mole people.

rndmize 9y ago

I'm continually unsold on this. Mars is far away, inhospitable, and feels like a run-before-we-walk kind of scenario to me. Merely sending humans to Mars seems like a huge task, let alone keeping them alive there. I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of: - Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit, makes space station construction practical?) - Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in constructing human habitation away from Earth?) - Mars/Venus. Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?

placeybordeaux 9y ago
I agree that asteroid capture and in space refining/construction seems like the way to go. Once you show that you can make a profit in space other than pointing satellites at the earth you grow the # of people that are interested in participating by a huge amount.
felippee 9y ago
As with all complex matters there are numerous considerations and issues with all of these. Moon is close, we've already been there, escape velocity is low but there appears to be very little water, not very accessible at least. The day/nigh cycle is 28 days long, so there are issues with overheating during the "day" and lack of power during the "night". Solar radiation induces static charge on dust, which makes it go everywhere, particularly difficult condition to run mechanical devices for long periods of time. That said an air-sealed cavern on the Moon could be a great intermediate solution for making humans interplanetary. Electromagnetic launcher could also make our interplanetary ambitions more sustainable. Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere (faint but still), better day/night cycle, more accessible water and carbon dioxide - allowing to manufacture rocket fuel and many chemicals needed for agriculture. Ultimately it seems better then the Moon in many respects, but it is very far away. In case of emergency there is very little that can be done to evacuate, transporting anything there will be more expensive (though not that much more expensive than the moon actually). There is the danger of irradiating astronauts during the trip, so crew missions should take faster transfer windows and trade more fuel for speed. Cargo missions could take longer, with better fuel efficiency. Asteroids would be great but they are hard to work with because of the very low gravity (and electrostatic dust as on the Moon). Capturing one, though perhaps theoretically possible, would require enormous amount of force to change the orbit in any meaningful way. Perhaps detonating a hydrogen bomb near one could provide enough thrust, but likely not enough precision (we would not want such asteroid to accidentally hit the Earth). It would take many years to tow one any close to Earth with regular propulsion, so that is probably out of the question for now.

randomsearch 9y ago

It seems to me that most of the negative attitudes towards this project stem from the idea that we're going to colonise Mars with 2017 technology and ideas. That's the hard thing about reasoning about the future: by definition it doesn't look like the present, but you're a product of the present. Many people talk about terraforming as taking "thousands of years". Go back a few thousand years and tell someone how you travelled to the other side of the earth in less than a day. Genetic engineering. AI. Nanotech. Quantum Computers. And that's just the next 100 years. Ain't no way we're gonna have to wait that long to build sandcastles on Mars.

nxsynonym 9y ago
This is why the world needs dreamers like Musk. Nobody could have predicted the huge technological advances we've made in the last 100 years, let alone the speed at which they were developed. If we just keep brushing ideas like this off as "totally impractical right now" then there's no goal to work towards. It's no secret the our time on Earth is limited, and becoming more limited as the human race expands and evolves. It really comes down to weather or not you believe the human race is capable of existing outside of Earth. I am in the camp of "we'll figure it out" just like we have up to this point. My fear is that most people fall into the "I'll die before it happens so why bother thinking about it" camp.
- rmah 9y ago
  Lol, as if Musk is the first to dream of colonizing space. Please.

hutzlibu 9y ago

"The threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars or a civilization would be a million people. " That number seems highly speculative ... But afaik, there is no self-sustaining city on earth, so I doubt there are more solid numbers on that topic. Economic cycles are quite complex, thats for fure. But aside from that, I think the much more realistic plan, than building and leaving in a huge fleet at once and then see how it goes, would be sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance ... if that works, we might be ready for colonisation. And the needed technology is evolving right now on earth. Maybe less spectacular, but more realistic in my opinion.

grondilu 9y ago
> there is no self-sustaining city on earth Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of. Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth. In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on mars sounds quite ludicrous. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
- obastani 9y ago
  Just because people collaborate from all over the planet to make the pencil, doesn't mean that's the way it has to be. This kind of collaboration simply enables economics of scale to kick in (and possibly improve quality as well).
  - grondilu 9y ago
    "doesn't mean that's the way it has to be" Sure, but it does show how speculative Musk's plan for a "self-sustaining city" is. There is no such city on Earth. What makes him think it would work on mars?
    - 9y ago

rayanm 9y ago

Elon makes a good point that it is inevitable that Human should colonize another planet. I don't think Mars is the planet. We are solving a hard problem with the current technology, but we are missing the point that we may have a technology in the future that enables us to explore less hostile far planets that require one trip. Think about the first settlers who came to North America before the Europeans.

perseusprime11 9y ago
Let's reframe the problem for him. The main problem he is trying to solve is the risk of being tied to one planet. So he wants to buy insurance for humanity. How else can you solve this problem?

metaphorm 9y ago

I interpret Musk's interest in this kind of thing as a form of ideological futurism rather than a pragmatic goal. I think he presents the idea of something very far out and very ambitious as a way to try and inspire people to think big and think about developing technology the likes of which we've never seen before. It's an interesting strategy, but I think it has a major downside too. It strikes many people (me included) as a bit detached from reality and even cold to the concerns of the many people here on Earth that are struggling.

strin 9y ago

PDF here: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900... Interesting Venn diagram in Fig 2. If "COST OF TRIP TO MARS" = "INFINITE MONEY", shouldn't "CAN AFFORD TO GO" be an empty set?

fapjacks 9y ago

I wish so bad I had the luck to be born into the circumstances and opportunity to create a company like SpaceX.

gehwartzen 9y ago

While I think its extremely interesting and exciting to colonize Mars, both out of curiosity and the trickle down of new technologies that would be developed in the endeavor, I just don't personally feel any particular emotional drive to do so because humans might otherwise go extinct. I have a child and so have a very strong instinct of wanting to do everything I can to help him to survive as well as his children and grandchildren. Similarly I want people on the other side of the planet, whom I have never met, to survive simply because I know they exist now. Once I start to think beyond maybe 300 years these feeling deteriorate rapidly. If I think about our species being wiped out in 10,000 years I hardly have an emotional response at all. Am I alone in feeling this way?

grondilu 9y ago
I think nobody can deny that, all other things being equal, short-term occurring events tend to matter more than long-term ones. Therefore, no matter how bad one can feel about the prospect of humanity being wiped out, that feeling can be made arbitrarily low by delaying the expectation of its occurrence.

googletazer 9y ago

The only hope for Mars is that a true libertarian society may arise. America's 21st century America.