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Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
- t0mbstone 7y agoWell yeah, because if they colonized Mars, that would make them Martians
- java-man 7y ago"will never" is probably an overstatement, but the article does discuss some interesting points, gestation in lower gravity environment, for example.
- forgotmypw 7y agoI think "guests on a robot-colonized Mars" is the more likely scenario. Humans are poorly adapted to space travel, and it takes a great deal of effort to keep humans alive in space. It's a shame about what's happening to our habitat, when you think about it that way.
- java-man 7y agoMankind is basically too poor and too stupid at the moment. Building a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require not only tremendous amount of resources, both material and intellectual, but also a transfer of knowledge - which will be impeded by the current legal framework, i.e. copyright laws, for example. But I do agree with Musk: we must colonize Mars in order to survive the next extinction event.
- loceng 7y ago"Poor" and "stupid" aren't helpful terms. The reality is we're heavily disorganized and stagnant, stuck in a scarcity mindset - leading the majority into lower level survival mode behaviour. Leaving it up to capitalism to advance innovation has been interesting, successful, however that doesn't specifically create leaders or organization necessary to solve holistic issues; it certainly has lead to creating pools of wealth especially as automation has occurred, and not being distributed well or fairly. This mess is quickly fixable with the right policies, leadership - educating the population to vote for that, while making sure elections are secure, are foundational supports of that happening; I hope for the world Andrew Yang wins US election, and that the FBI's warnings, along with Mitch McConnell's efforts to block measures securing elections, aren't realized into "Trump" being placed.
- AstralStorm 7y agoMostly too poor and perhaps lacking better engines - we really need nuclear propulsion at the very least (with concomitant big amounts of radioactive material) to not spend a year in space just getting there, which could cause damage, physical and psychological. Or maybe some form of suspended animation. We cannot really build city sized ships, not yet. That'd require huge space stations. Self sustaining architecture is one thing, getting it scaled up is another - and relatively hard. Plus design so as to not cause problems related to living in confinement or in dreary space. This necessitates at least village scale if not a bigger city.
- lukifer 7y agoOther than higher gravity, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't? Both would need highly artificial habitats, with either a steady supply chain or a closed ecosystem, to support human life.
- kaiju0 7y agoGestation can be solved with the use of spin gravity creating earth normal.
- AstralStorm 7y agoBut is it really an issue? Were there experiments in low and microgravity on animals? Even then, a third of G is nowhere near as much of a problem as say microgravity or even lunar one sixth. I'd expect this specific thing to not be a problem - birth may need some assistance which we already know how to do.
- zeristor 7y agoHow good an analogy are marine mammals? Whales gestate in water, I’m assuming neutral buoyancy isn’t the same as weightlessness when one gets down to the details. Perhaps aquatic creatures might adapt better to an extraterrestrial environment: Squids in Space!
- lazyjones 7y agohttps://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8MAAAAIBAJ&dq=all-that-constitutes-a-wild-dream-worthy-of-jules-verne&pg=3288%2C6595098 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KXhfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=my8M...
- nolok 7y agoThe way I see it, there are two goals to human space travels. The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event. The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoWe can just let our machines carry our legacy after humanity is gone.
- mr_crankypants 7y agoI honestly think that both of those are weak reasons. The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own time scale. The second is just not compelling; space exploration is hardly the only endeavor that produces spinoff technology, and it's far from certain that it's the best or most productive way to do so. There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure. As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
- nolok 7y agoChallenge ? For the individual and its patrons, sure. The country or company ? Its lured by the competition and wanting to be the one winning the prize. But as a society ? When the inevitable "why fund space travel / fundamental physics / ..." question is asked ? Side gains is where it's at.
- ashtonbaker 7y ago> Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. > The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. > Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes. Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.
- 693471 7y agoPoor understanding of physics are exemplified everywhere these days. It's tiring seeing so many armchair experts trying to take over the discourse with their incessant posturing.
- paulcole 7y agoI'm not sure that's a fair characterization of Elon Musk.
- nolok 7y agoHonestly talking about him and his companies is very controversial on HN between the for and against, but I would disagree with you; on almost every PR and marketing pieces and talks he tends to take insane shortcuts.
- paulcole 7y ago> he tends to take insane shortcuts Here on HN we say that is a feature not a bug lol.
- nolok 7y agoIsn't convection against conduction high school level physics though ? I know it was here in France a decade and a half ego when I was there ...
- tectonic 7y agoYes, and 640K of memory should be enough for anybody.
- alanfranz 7y agoBut the 640k limit was imposed by the cpu, not the os. It was a widespread nonsense that Gates invented it.
- timbit42 7y agoThe memory limit of a CPU is based on the address lines. The 8088 and 8086 have 20 address lines permitting 1 MB of RAM. Of course more can be banked utilizing an MMU. So the 640K limit was not imposed by the CPU. The system designers needed some memory for ROMs, video memory and other I/O. They decided 384K was needed for those things, leaving 640K for user RAM.
- alanfranz 7y agoBut the 1MB limit for address space was the hard constraint. 640kb was not a number invented out of the blue by some MS designer. It could have been 800kb or 900kb, would that make a difference? Also, 8086 and 8088 had no MMU afaik.
- nolok 7y agoDifference being that one was not actually said by Gates: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
- david-gpu 7y agoBesides, it's a reasonable thing to say in specific contexts. Never understood why it is used to ridicule.
- squirrelicus 7y agoUnderground is the only way to live on Mars. So if you can find people on Earth who want to spend all their time underground (with no external food/water/air supply network to fall back on), you have a start. The next step is finding people who want to live in a permanent totalitarian technodictatorship, given that one small act, say a minor hvac compromise, is all that it would take to kill everyone in the Mars colony within hours. Seriously, on Mars, the consequence of the smallest criminal action is colony genocide. Think of the social and legal consequences of that. Presumption of innocence is too expensive when the consequence of crime is everybody dies.
- alexgmcm 7y agoIsn't this quite similar to the scientific bases that exist on the Antarctic though? I mean I imagine any Mars colony could be incredibly selective about who to take.
- Filligree 7y agoYou can be selective about who you take, but only so long as it's a small group. I'd hesitate to call it a proper colony if there's no way they can ever raise children there.
- squirrelicus 7y agoSome people barely want to birth on Earth, where there's freedom and opportunity and sights to see and a very vague threat of potential modest temperature increase where you can just walk away at a snail's pace from the climate change threats. I wonder what kind of people would want to raise a child in underground technodictatorial Mars colonies
- squirrelicus 7y agoNot quite because you can still go outside where there's air and water and you can bring fire with you to keep warm.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
- Gravityloss 7y agoProbably closest are antarctic station or long nuclear powered submarine tours. People don't do it for years continuously. How does the radiation environment on asteroids compare to Mars? Asteroids are extremely interesting targets for many reasons.
- rndmize 7y agoThe fastest and easiest way to colonize space is to advance cybernetics to being able to transfer a human brain into a machine one. At that point, you can custom-build any kind of machine body designed for pretty much any environment, saving the trouble of adapting to the new environment through genetics (messy, slow, difficult to test) or bringing the environment with you (terraforming, purpose-build earth-like facilities). Good on the article for outlining a lot of the issues with this, though I don't think enough time was spent on the mental aspects. We're adapted to live in a certain environment - a different one with different, more boring light, minimal plants, extreme temperatures, no area to roam, etc., is most likely going to be a miserable experience for all involved.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago"Transfering" a human mind isn't necessary. If we can create a machine mind capable of similar cognition to a human one, then that's close enough. It will effectively be our offspring.
- skybrian 7y agoHeadline is speculative and unprovable since "never" is a very long time and there's no reason to think we are any good at predicting the far future. But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.
- adamsb6 7y agoOne possible motive for large numbers of people to colonize Mars: escaping the control of Earth governments. It’s like seasteading except that when you get up to something the governments really don’t like the cost of intervening is extraordinarily high. On Mars we can build our society of genetically engineered supermen that engage in plural marriage, ritual funerary cannabilism, and telekinesis.
- jandrese 7y agoI'm not sure I want to live in a colony that's some 1%er Libertarian's personal playground with no rule of law beyond what he sets. Turns out most laws were written for a reason, and going through the pain of re-discovering the reason for said laws over and over again doesn't sound like much fun.
- jonathlee 7y agoThat was a reference to Robert Heinlein's book, "Stranger in a Strange Land".
- Mikeb85 7y agoOnly problem is that the only entities that will be able to colonize Mars as well as project power will be those same Earth governments.
- randyrand 7y agoThe USA was colonized by the British but is no longer ruled by it.
- docker_up 7y agoI mean, I think it's fairly obvious that we will never be able to colonize Mars perfectly. It would require constantly sending massive amount of supplies from Earth to Mars. The atmosphere is too thin, and the planet itself is too small to maintain a real atmosphere. Even if we terraformed it using science fiction technology, most of the atmosphere would escape into space so it would require constantly producing this atmosphere, requiring a lot of off-planet resources, which is fundamentally impossible. In addition, the lack of strong magnetic fields and Van Allen belts means that cosmic rays would kill everything eventually.
- dahdum 7y agoIt brings up many interesting challenges and unknowns of living on Mars, but it comes across as a naysayer's rant. Humans are capable of (and perhaps wired for) incredible personal sacrifices for the sake of exploration and progress. Nothing in the article will stop individuals from trying, only government policy can stop that.
- Mikeb85 7y agoHonestly, I agree with the author. We'll set up a few bases, it'll take decades, and by the time we come close to having the technology to make Mars somewhat inhabitable we'll have discovered a more hospitable planet and have the spaceship tech to get there.
- aidenn0 7y agoAssuming you are talking about extrasolar planets: Outer space is far less hospitable than mars, and the timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard the ships traveling there for an extended period of time.
- Mikeb85 7y ago> timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard the ships traveling there for an extended period of time At our current level of technology. Colonizing Mars is likely 50-100 years away, within that time frame it's very conceivable that we might develop the ability to travel between stars quickly.
- aidenn0 7y agoThere are only 11 stars within 10 light years. None of the exoplanets yet discovered around them are expected to be more habitable than Mars. This puts a hard lower boundary of 10 years for travel to an earth-like exoplanet. If we limit the craft's acceleration to 1g, add a couple of extra years (about a year to hit 0.9c at 1g acceleration, and then the same amount of time to slow down on the other end).
- jseliger 7y agoIf you think about all the things that were likely considered improbably or impossible in 1800, I think it is clear that the possibilities of life in 2219 are not to be assumed from present conditions.
- jpm_sd 7y agoThis is a really well-written, thorough article. Here's another way to think about it: Before we try to colonize Mars, we should try colonizing Canada. It's warmer than Mars! It has air and water, so it should be easy! And yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/File:Canada_Population_density_map.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...
- jandrese 7y agoOr we could colonize the southern Pacific ocean. It's virtually empty of human habitation and although a permanent colony will be difficult to establish, it's still orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than Mars.
- antisthenes 7y agoJust gotta wait another 50 years or so for the free terraforming effects of AGW!
- bvanderplaats 7y agoIf you watch the opening credits of The Expanse, you'll see the moon is almost entirely populated, yet if you look closely at the Earth shot, Tibet is basically dark. Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!
- crimsonalucard 7y agoWhat is less far fetched but also unlikely to happen is global warming will be fixed.
- antisthenes 7y agoGoing off a tangent here, but global warming is pretty much our alpha-version of terraforming other planets. We also have to be clear what the end goal is for being on Mars. Is it to have a permanent research base or an actual livable planet where you can go outside and not die without a spacesuit. They're radically different.
- pgcj_poster 7y agoIf this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us.
- perardi 7y ago"If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better." Really? There's collaborative editing, but in the end it's still just a writing tool. It's not like Google Docs can write my progress report for me. "now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us." So we have machine learning that can do decent image recognition if you feed it massive dataset. How does that get to general AI? What, exactly, is the dataset I'm feeding a neural network to…live on Mars?
- pgcj_poster 7y agoMachine learning is exactly like human intelligence, only less powerful. We know this because GPT-2 can't count, and babies can't count either. It follows that all we have to do is use more powerful hardware, and then we'll have general intelligence, which is the same as super-intelligence. Intelligence is the only thing necessary to accomplish any task. We left the the so-called laws of Physics behind at around the turn of the 20th century. Medieval peasants would call cell phones impossible, so it logically follows that actually nothing is impossible.
- p1esk 7y agoSarcasm, or just trolling?
- lleolin 7y agoThis article was illuminating for me because it makes me second-guess my own projections of the future; the idea of getting so lost in the hows and whens of a conceptual challenge that you forget to ask why.
- thisisbrians 7y agoSomething that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our environmental issues here on Earth into an even bleaker perspective. Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
- markonen 7y agoGetting, say, a million people to escape velocity would not be significant in terms of greenhouse emissions, compared to the ~8 trillion revenue passenger kilometres flown annually (which itself is a tiny fraction of global emissions). Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
- bsmith 7y agoExcellent points. I want to follow up with some back-of-the-envelope math on this later, if I have time. My intuition was that it takes a whole heck of a lot of fuel to get someone to even LEO velocity. Would love to see how that corresponds with air travel.
- rland 7y agoThis is the true reason. Although, we should have the ideological goal of colonization, as a failsafe option to prevent extinction. Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)
- gnode 7y agoI see no technical reason for why Mars could not be home to humans, or even an economically self-sufficient society, in the future. That said, it is inhospitable, and once the first people have set foot there, I see little reason why it would be more attractive a place to live than Antarctica. A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self-sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nuclear energy and hydroponics, yet even this isn't being done.
- kazinator 7y ago> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes. Okay, but that's the experience in an atmosphere that is 100X thicker than that of Mars. :)
- s_r_n 7y agoThe author is listing facts about Mars that are pretty basic and well-known in the first two paragraphs and proceeds to talk in generalized terms about how we will never get around these obstacles. These are all basic facts about Mars that the engineers working on these problems know very well. Simply listing these facts as proof that colonizing Mars will never work seems overly pessimistic.
- solveit 7y agoI agree. This is basically every pessimistic article on every subject by a non-expert and almost all of them should be ignored.
- frabbit 7y agoAbsolutely: there is literally _nothing_ about blockchain in this article.
- keiru 7y agoWell, I agree there is not that much merit in the article for pointing out the obvious, but if the emperor has no clothes someone needs to say it. The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable. PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.
- La-ang 7y agoWell for fact, humans shouldn't colonize any other planet until they clean up this one damn it..
- thinkpad20 7y agoNot to be "that guy," but I think the real reason we'll never colonize Mars is simply that we're going to run out of time. Climate collapse and/or nuclear war will probably set in long before we have the technology or wherewithal to terraform a planet millions of miles away. We may be only a decade or two from severe environmental catastrophe, which makes the prospect of Mars colonization pretty far-fetched at best. To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.
- stcredzero 7y agoVery wrong: https://www.amazon.com/CASE-MARS-Robert-Zubrin-dp-0684827573/dp/0684827573/ https://www.amazon.com/CASE-MARS-Robert-Zubrin-dp-0684827573... Everything they object to can be dealt with, including radiation and low gravity. If close to 1 G turns out to be necessary for human health, we could build cities as inclined racetrack centrifuges. Given enough energy, we could not only make fuel in-situ, we could even make plastics out of the Martian atmosphere. In addition, Mars had geologic processes which would produce mineral ores. An entire human civilization could be started on Mars. Historically, this would be analogous to the founding of the United States, just without the smallpox and killing-off the people already there, also starting from more desolate conditions. (Instead of just starting agriculture and industry, we would have to start biospheres.)
- gumby 7y agoWhy are people so obsessed with sending people to do a machine's job? Let the machines colonize space (and let them create a paradise on earth)
- jnurmine 7y agoRobert Zubrin figured out a plausible plan to put a colony on Mars, yet the article fails to mention Zubrin and his Mars (Semi-)Direct plans. Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so. However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place. "Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely. Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth. These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools. Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning. As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such. So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
- keiru 7y ago>Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization. >The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor. Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.
- just_myles 7y agoI will say that there are +7 billion human beings on this planet all requiring their share of resources. We need to do this. Nothing wrong with a dissenting pov in good faith. That is part of the process and how these kinds of things work.
- cvaidya1986 7y agoJust posting this comment for future Martians to look at. Hi! How's the weather?
- lmilcin 7y agoI will overlook bad physics in the article. The title should really read "Humans Will Never Colonize Mars (using current technology, that is)" Just imagine what happens if, finally, we are able to set off a bunch self replicating drones that will collect materials and fuel from across solar system and set it off to deliver raw materials in the direction of Mars. We might not even need Mars, we would just build platforms in space. It is not really that inconceivable. The solution isn't outside the realm of physics. It really is just a bit of programming (not even AI) and kind of technological moonshot program (ie create a system of space factories that can gather and process raw materials up to the point where they can replicate themselves, creating also a bunch of drones that can scour solar system for raw materials and deliver variety of them to the factories).