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A Planetary Scientist: 'I Do Not Want to Live on Mars'
- eesmith 9y agoIf you peek at the <title> on the top of the page, rather than the title given in the page itself, you'll see: "Saturn's Moon Titan Is More Compelling Than Mars As A Long-Term Human Destination" FWIW, the first book I read which proposed humans living on Titan was Clarke's "Imperial Earth" (1976).
- ggambetta 9y agoMe neither, but I would love to live there for, I don't know, a year. If living in a foreign country for some time can have a profound impact on you, imagine living in a foreign planet.
- joe_the_user 9y agoWell, even given a degree of habitation, visiting Mars would likely be similar to visiting Antarctica in winter, which is certainly a novel experience but not necessarily culturally expanding in the fashion that a year in tremendously different cultural climate might be.
- whatshisface 9y agoAfter about twenty years of habitation (and extremely bottlenecked social inheritance), I bet Mars would be a pretty interesting cultural climate itself. Could you even imagine what kind of self-parody our political groups could grow in to if their opposition just happened to not book a seat?
- gboudrias 9y agoI think it would mostly be about fending off senseless boredom.
- slimsag 9y agoLiving on a foreign planet would surely have a _much greater profound impact_ on you, but the profoundness isn't what is important. It's the type of a profound impact that matters. As an example, let's say you grew up only in the U.S. Visiting a foreign European country might have a profound impact of the type that is very eye-opening due to seeing and interacting with another culture. In contrast, visiting an active war-zone like Syria will surely have a _greater profound impact_ on you, but the type will be one that is very sad. The same would go for a foreign planet, where the type of a profound impact it would have on you would be one of loneliness, abandoned-ness, etc.
- timthelion 9y agoThis is why, I, as an environmentalist hope humans will colonize Mars. I firmly believe that a Mars colony is the best bet we have at forcing humans to finally see how precious our trees and our green and blue earth is.
- samstave 9y agoHas there been a single person ever who has determined how to grow anything on mars? We have freaking rovers there for decades. Not a single seed planted, not a single tiny green house or terrarium delivered to the surface. We have spent billions putting robots on mars and we have literally nothing to show for it. And by "something to show for it" that would mean an experiment to literally show that we can sustain life on mars. Have we even had a single person with the qualifications to state so, commented on this? Until then, mars is simply an expensive cemetery.
- timthelion 9y agoIt is currently "illegal" to bring life to Mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
- slimsag 9y agoThere is a good reading about greenhouses on Mars here by NASA[1], also this seems to (obviously) be an active area of research for them. There is talk of them trying to put a small greenhouse on Mars by 2021[2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/livingthings/25feb_greenhouses.html https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/livingthings/25feb_greenho... [2] https://www.space.com/25767-nasa-mars-greenhouse-rover-plant-experiment.html https://www.space.com/25767-nasa-mars-greenhouse-rover-plant...
- ogig 9y ago> A really fun (and potentially useful) thing is this: Thanks to the low gravity and thick atmosphere, people on Titan could easily fly under their own power if they strap wings to their arms! I'm sold.
- saagarjha 9y agoThat is until you realize that Titan is basically at the triple point of methane which means you'd have to lug around a bunch of thermal-regulating equipment.
- bwang29 9y agoThis almost occurs to me as funny. Why does it need to be a confession? It didn’t seem like Planetary Scientists have claimed as a group that they “want” to live on Mars. The confession only makes sense if Planetary Scientists are all presumed to want to live on Mars in the first place. And even that is true, it’s not a particularly strong confession as the simple fact of not wanting to live on Mars doesn’t imply a betrayal.
- fareesh 9y agoTitle seems like it was written for clickbait
- lsaferite 9y agoAs someone else pointed out, the <title> element for the post is "Saturn's Moon Titan Is More Compelling Than Mars As A Long-Term Human Destination"
- Animats 9y agoTime for a Titan rover.
- jagger27 9y agoRover, flyer, and submersible.
- dheera 9y agoOne of my biggest concerns for habitation on other worlds is not what the author mentions, but rather interplanetary communication. The mean distance between Earth and Mars is about 1338 light-seconds, or about 22 minutes. You wouldn't be able to have a meaningful phone call with your friends or relatives at Earth -- you'd be stuck with writing long e-mails or voice messages. That would suck. Building a CDN between Earth and Mars would also be a technical nightmare. Especially for whatever data-hungry VR and other content we'll have at that time. Everything else about making Mars habitable -- climate control, resources, food, water, medical, cultural, job opportunities, transportation, recreation, entertainment -- seems approachable to me in the next few thousand years of technological development. The speed of light will suck. Unless Einstein is wrong in some way we don't yet understand.
- devereaux 9y agoYou assume people who want to move to Mars in the first place would want to have meaningful contacts with friends or relatives in Earth. I believe a selection effect (the desire to go to Mars in the first place) may prove your assumption wrong.
- mrfusion 9y agoKeep in mind every (four?) years it gets close enough to earth to Snapchat.
- scandox 9y agoAs someone who has always been fascinated by Space, reads a lot of SF and generally feels quite positive about Space exploration, I nonetheless think manned Space exploration and human colonisation of other planets is really not a good goal. I know it's dramatic. I know many people concern themselves with the long term viability of the human species (as something important). Personally though it seems like robotic exploration is just much more sensible and useful. Humans are not going to thrive in any of these environments: they're absolutely horrific in every way. I mean maybe if we went down the "Man Plus" route (or the more fanciful bio-engineering of Clifford Simak's Desertion) then it would make some kind of sense. Also my feeling is that our interminable survival as a species is not necessarily that big a deal AND I don't really believe we have any viable strategy for keeping people out there... What else I am missing? Why do we spend so much energy on putting people into space?
- Nomentatus 9y agoMore available solar energy. More available minerals. Few pollution worries (sortofa problem just now on earth.) Supports a far larger population in time. Freeman Dyson's explanation (pre-Musk), that it gives us redundancy because humans make mistakes, is of course unappealing if you think that civilization and the earth's ecosystem is indestructible, but many don't think that anymore, and the number of ways we could put an end to ourselves or our civilization seems to be growing. There are whole books on this, of course.
- mr_monkeywrench 9y agoA Mars mission — even if you ignore the radiation danger has a massive engineering hurdles. How does one land — decelerate to a safe landing. The amount of fuel required to fire a mars retro rocket is many times that on earth. Then you need to lift off. Getting to mars is not the issue — landing and taking off is the major challenge.
- nbarbettini 9y agoI think you have that backwards? Taking off from Mars is significantly easier than earth because of lower gravity and a less-dense atmosphere.
- lawpoop 9y agoHow do you fuel the rocket on Mars?
- yellowapple 9y agoAll you need is oxygen and hydrogen. Both of those are actually plentiful on Mars.
- leksak 9y agoAnd the machinery to gather them etcetera etcetera... Just because the raw material is there doesn't rocket fuel make. And I'd be hard pressed to say that oxygen is plentiful on Mars. There is some oxygen.
- yellowapple 9y ago"And the machinery to gather them" That machinery can be sent gradually and ahead-of-time. "Just because the raw material is there doesn't rocket fuel make" No, but it means that such fuel is at least possible. "I'd be hard pressed to say that oxygen is plentiful on Mars" The current understanding is that there's millions of cubic meters of water ice on or near the Martian surface (with even more suspected further beneath the surface). Sounds pretty plentiful to me.
- btrask 9y agoIf you just think about it in terms of real estate values, Earth has all these great amenities that Mars doesn't (and won't for a long time, if ever). * Breathable atmosphere * Full gravity * Low radiation * Decent temperatures In a world of "location, location, location," Mars is going to be cheap beyond imagination. Perhaps it will be where all the poor people end up, after they're gentrified off Earth.
- marcell 9y ago> since the gravity is 14 percent of Earth's gravity, just a little less than at the moon Isn't this a non-starter? Low gravity can be harmful to humans over long time periods, due to it's effect on your bones and muscles.