14 ms·

It can't be done. Technically you can do it but it's not practical. It is possible and practical but there's no reason to. Oh, look here we are. Well, sure

It can't be done. Technically you can do it but it's not practical. It is possible and practical but there's no reason to. Oh, look here we are. Well, sure anybody could have seen that this was where we would end up - we just didn't agree on when we'd be here.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gameswithgo 5y ago
Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible. Getting starship to work reliably still involves some never done before procedures that remain to be proven. But SpaceX has a plan that might work, if it doesn't there are many ways to adjust the plan. With enough time and money, they can do it. Colonizing mars is not so easy to show as feasible. Certainly we can launch a bunch of cans and digging equipment and get a few people living there. But anything like a self sustaining population? Don't know, we don't really have a concrete plan of how to do that. People often say, if you think you can colonize mars, colonize the Gobi Desert first, as it is 10,000 times easier.
- bob33212 5y ago
  Uninhabitable parts of Arizona have been made habitable already.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    I think the aim would be to show you can have a self sustaining colony in arizona. Which, probably not too hard since there are aquifers.
    - xfitm3 5y ago
      Biosphere and biosphere 2 were attempts at this. Track record isn't great
- anticristi 5y ago
  It's called Terraforming. Make a big fire to release enough CO2 until Mars gets warm. That will melt the ice caps, so you have water. Finally, plant plants and let them oxidize the atmosphere. Estimated 500 to 5000 years. Professor Dave Explains has a nicw YouTube video about it. I can totally imagine that Elin's dynasty will try it.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    A big fire burning what? How much ice is in the ice caps? will that be enough water? How do you keep the atmosphere there, given that mars has no magnetic field and less gravity keeping it in? How do things live on the surface without a magnetic field protecting them from radiation? I have of course read/seen many pie in the sky plans for how to make mars habitable, but they are not concrete plans with even napkin math backing them up.
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/ https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos... A NASA proposal that seemed rather cool to generate an artificial magnetosphere umbrella. It doesn't require any superscience to do, just willingness to build a really enormous generator. Which might be worth doing if the result is a 2nd Earth?
    - hparadiz 5y ago
      The atmosphere bleeds off in million year time scales. Humans can pump it up in hundred year time scales. Things growing in water will get less radiation and hopefully some radiation resistant crops will be bred.
    - nickik 5y ago
      The not having a magnetic field is a smaller problem then people think. The rate of reduction in the atmosphere is not very large. If you manged to create the atmosphere the radiation on the surface would already be reduced. The extra distance to the sun plus the atmosphere more then makes up for the missing magnetism. Also, medicine is advancing, if this is actually still the major issue in 30 years is questionable. But overall I agree, we are not there yet with plans but if we can build a research station there and have constant flights and constantly people living there, space technology will continue to improve and eventually we might reach that level.
- lumost 5y ago
  There are some pros of martian colonization efforts over comparable efforts in the Gobi desert. For one there is a compelling reason to colonize for at least a portion of the population. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime to study planetary geology up close, put terraforming theories to the test, and produce fuel/water for further space missions using the reduced gravity and atmospheric drag. On the other hand the fact that "going for a walk" will be extremely difficult will motivate increased focus on cavern excavation and other construction underground. These are "necessities" on mars but would be "interesting" in the gobi dessert.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  It makes much more sence to industrialise the Moon than to colonise mars. Moon materials can be used to produce ships and space structures, satellites, propellant, etc. You can have a space elevator on the moon today with a titanium cable. It will actually be profitable. Most importantly, colonising the moon is tractable in terms of emergencies: if someone on the moon suffers an accident and needs a surgery, they could be in a hospital on Earth in a day or two. If their shelter is damaged, or supplies are needed, we can send help to the Moon and have it arrrive before everyone is dead. You are on mars and suddenly are suffering from liver disease? You are probably dead. It's going to be like the life of iur first Abtarctic explorers, when they get in trouble, there is no help. Many don't return, and noone stays there to live. To this day noone 'colonised' Antarctica. Mars settlement is only viable when we have a spaceship factory on the moon, nuclear engines, and we could send the equivant of a large marine research vessel to mars, so 10,000 tons usefull payload, every month.
  - elihu 5y ago
    Mars has a few things in its favor. It has a (mostly) carbon-dioxide atmosphere that can be used as an ingredient to make methane. It has a normal day/night cycle so you can use solar panels without needing to store two weeks worth of energy in order to last through the night. It has higher gravity. In general, it's just a more hospitable place to live even though it's a lot further away.
    - hparadiz 5y ago
      We could start on Mars by building stuff in the canyons first at the lowest possible elevation to increase the air pressure. Then you can dome sections of the canyon and pump up the atmosphere allowing large "outdoor" area. Would also provide radiation shielding.
      - majkinetor 5y ago
        Sounds like a plan. GO GO GO!
      - elihu 5y ago
- btilly 5y ago
  Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible. Oh really? _The Innovator's Dilemma_, written 20 years ago, includes a chapter based on an industry analysis that said that on current technology trends, mass electric cars would come viable around 2020. Guess what? Around 2020 mass electric cars became viable! Elon Musk figured out that high end electric sports cars could become viable earlier, and built a company around it. How about those reusable rockets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system documents a history of attempts at making reusable systems literally from the dawn of the Space Age. Everyone knew that in theory it should be possible. The problem was that in practice they didn't work well enough. (For example the Shuttle wound up costing more per "reusable launch" than an expendable rocket would have.) What SpaceX perfected is a vertical suicide burn. It is called a suicide burn because there is no margin of error, and any mistakes /will/ kill you. But it is also the most efficient way to land the rocket. Nobody did it before Musk because nobody was willing to trust their software control system that much. And even still, when humans take a trip on Dragon we /don't/ trust their skills at a suicide burn for the return. We instead parachute into the ocean, just like Alan Shepherd did 60 years ago. (Elon hopes, of course, that Starship will change that.) So your comment critiquing humanity by critiquing all of the experts who failed to do back of the napkin math showed more about your ignorance than the ignorance of the experts.
- gopalv 5y ago
  > People often say, if you think you can colonize mars, colonize the Gobi Desert first, as it is 10,000 times easier. If we're talking about population living on earth, that argument makes sense - from a population pressure standpoint , there's no argument to go to mars. But if we're talking about civilization expanding from more resources, with some space where you can potentially crash land a few asteroids while trying to pull it into orbit for easier mining, then Earth is out of question.
- skissane 5y ago
  > Colonizing mars is not so easy to show as feasible. Certainly we can launch a bunch of cans and digging equipment and get a few people living there. But anything like a self sustaining population? Don't know, we don't really have a concrete plan of how to do that. Elon Musk doesn't have a concrete plan for a "self-sustaining population". I think all he is actually planning on doing in the medium term is working with NASA to establish a research station with a few dozen people, devoted to research into how to live on Mars. The research station is going to be dependent on continual resupply and funding from Earth. Growing to the point of being a self-sustaining colony capable of surviving without continual support from Earth is likely to be many centuries away. However, I think Musk is going to want to call it a "colony" from the start, because of the power of aspirational naming, to centre the hope that it will grow into that. But even if it eventually gets there, none of us are going to live to see it. And there's no point trying to even come up with a detailed plan – for a multi-century project, the only possible plan is to make it up as we go along. What is Elon Musk going to do with his immense wealth when he dies? Don't be surprised if he leaves a massive chunk of it to a charitable foundation devoted to paying for the settlement of Mars. Absent a new Space Race (which may yet happen at some point), governments are unlikely to want to pay for anything more than a few research stations, but ultra-wealthy private benefactors may be willing to pay for a lot more.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
"It always seems impossible until it's done."
- kirubakaran 5y ago
  "Then it seems obvious"
DecoPerson 5y ago
If a large meteor hits Earth, the humanity organism will be glad it spread itself to Mars.
- vkou 5y ago
  The humanity organism does not have feelings. People have feelings. Humanity does not. But if you're going to give it feelings, a far more likely outcome is that a life-ending meteor will not hit the earth, and that the humanity organism would be much happier if it didn't waste its efforts on chasing a fairy tale, instead of fixing problems here, on Earth. It boggles the mind that people worry about planet-killing meteors arriving over geological timescales, when the real danger - sustainability - is staring us in the face today, and needs action now.
  - tobmlt 5y ago
    Earth is a space ship and we have been mismanaging the resources on said ship. When we build our own spaceships, we rapidly develop in miniature the sustainable tech needed to really fix earth. We already have carbon dioxide scrubbers, we just need a vast clean source of energy in order to clean things up, and stop the pollution on net. Probably fission is a good enough stop gap. This will happen as soon as the incentive structures are there. Engineering progress is helping, even if indirectly. Who knows what more energy efficient environment cleansing tech will he developed for spacecraft next. Or power sources, batteries, etc. Technology development is cumulative and crosses over domains. Spacex is a spearhead rapidly innovating technology. Government mechanisms are a sort of discombobulated rising tide/ pasture of cows, or herd of scared sheep trying to stay on the grazing turf. Assuming gov’s do not get very much more organized, the better the tech, the easier choices the sheep have to make — win wins get things done. We could benefit greatly from tech advances such that gov gets win wins by making green choices. That way the incentives can tilt more favorably more quickly.
  - triceratops 5y ago
    You're being shortsighted. For all you know these Mars colonization efforts might throw off some sort of miracle discovery or technology - like cheap energy or cheap carbon capture. The problems of sustainability or climate change are about political will and priorities. They aren't something a single billionaire can solve. Focus on mobilizing, organizing, and educating voters if you want to do something about sustainability.
jsight 5y ago
Ha, that's a common pattern with Musk companies. EVs are impractical. Charging fast can't be done and the network won't exist until the cars get built anyway. But noone would buy them without the network so its impossible. Oh, you built EVs, 100KW+ chargers and the network yourself? Well, obviously that was inevitable if we had just given General Motors and Ford enough time. Its not a falsifiable position, so its interesting to think about too.
- m463 5y ago
  I had a friend who worked at GM around the volt time and it was "common knowledge" that it was all just a boondoggle/joke/exercise. I think a HUGE force for innovation in silicon valley was simply the graph of moores law. The practical and financial considerations had a "common knowledge" roadmap to reduce risk and people would race to keep up instead of plod along.
hinkley 5y ago
The moon is rotten with metal oxides. Powdered metal oxides. If you can work out how to do smelting and metallurgy in low G, then the moon as a manufacturing base for a stellar civilization has its attractions. We can't manage a Mars Colony (like capital C colony, not camping trip) from Earth. But from the moon? The physics is certainly better, but I'm not so sure about the logistics. Does anyone know if convection is a net positive or negative when smelting metal? I know that one way to remove impurities is to cast a billet and then saw off the bottom and top edge, where the heavy and the light contaminants tend to come out of suspension. But is that a boon or just making the most of a bad situation?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gameswithgo 5y ago

Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible. Getting starship to work reliably still involves some never done before procedures that remain to be proven. But SpaceX has a plan that might work, if it doesn't there are many ways to adjust the plan. With enough time and money, they can do it. Colonizing mars is not so easy to show as feasible. Certainly we can launch a bunch of cans and digging equipment and get a few people living there. But anything like a self sustaining population? Don't know, we don't really have a concrete plan of how to do that. People often say, if you think you can colonize mars, colonize the Gobi Desert first, as it is 10,000 times easier.

bob33212 5y ago
Uninhabitable parts of Arizona have been made habitable already.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  I think the aim would be to show you can have a self sustaining colony in arizona. Which, probably not too hard since there are aquifers.
  - xfitm3 5y ago
    Biosphere and biosphere 2 were attempts at this. Track record isn't great
anticristi 5y ago
It's called Terraforming. Make a big fire to release enough CO2 until Mars gets warm. That will melt the ice caps, so you have water. Finally, plant plants and let them oxidize the atmosphere. Estimated 500 to 5000 years. Professor Dave Explains has a nicw YouTube video about it. I can totally imagine that Elin's dynasty will try it.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  A big fire burning what? How much ice is in the ice caps? will that be enough water? How do you keep the atmosphere there, given that mars has no magnetic field and less gravity keeping it in? How do things live on the surface without a magnetic field protecting them from radiation? I have of course read/seen many pie in the sky plans for how to make mars habitable, but they are not concrete plans with even napkin math backing them up.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/ https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos... A NASA proposal that seemed rather cool to generate an artificial magnetosphere umbrella. It doesn't require any superscience to do, just willingness to build a really enormous generator. Which might be worth doing if the result is a 2nd Earth?
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    The atmosphere bleeds off in million year time scales. Humans can pump it up in hundred year time scales. Things growing in water will get less radiation and hopefully some radiation resistant crops will be bred.
  - nickik 5y ago
    The not having a magnetic field is a smaller problem then people think. The rate of reduction in the atmosphere is not very large. If you manged to create the atmosphere the radiation on the surface would already be reduced. The extra distance to the sun plus the atmosphere more then makes up for the missing magnetism. Also, medicine is advancing, if this is actually still the major issue in 30 years is questionable. But overall I agree, we are not there yet with plans but if we can build a research station there and have constant flights and constantly people living there, space technology will continue to improve and eventually we might reach that level.
lumost 5y ago
There are some pros of martian colonization efforts over comparable efforts in the Gobi desert. For one there is a compelling reason to colonize for at least a portion of the population. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime to study planetary geology up close, put terraforming theories to the test, and produce fuel/water for further space missions using the reduced gravity and atmospheric drag. On the other hand the fact that "going for a walk" will be extremely difficult will motivate increased focus on cavern excavation and other construction underground. These are "necessities" on mars but would be "interesting" in the gobi dessert.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
It makes much more sence to industrialise the Moon than to colonise mars. Moon materials can be used to produce ships and space structures, satellites, propellant, etc. You can have a space elevator on the moon today with a titanium cable. It will actually be profitable. Most importantly, colonising the moon is tractable in terms of emergencies: if someone on the moon suffers an accident and needs a surgery, they could be in a hospital on Earth in a day or two. If their shelter is damaged, or supplies are needed, we can send help to the Moon and have it arrrive before everyone is dead. You are on mars and suddenly are suffering from liver disease? You are probably dead. It's going to be like the life of iur first Abtarctic explorers, when they get in trouble, there is no help. Many don't return, and noone stays there to live. To this day noone 'colonised' Antarctica. Mars settlement is only viable when we have a spaceship factory on the moon, nuclear engines, and we could send the equivant of a large marine research vessel to mars, so 10,000 tons usefull payload, every month.
- elihu 5y ago
  Mars has a few things in its favor. It has a (mostly) carbon-dioxide atmosphere that can be used as an ingredient to make methane. It has a normal day/night cycle so you can use solar panels without needing to store two weeks worth of energy in order to last through the night. It has higher gravity. In general, it's just a more hospitable place to live even though it's a lot further away.
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    We could start on Mars by building stuff in the canyons first at the lowest possible elevation to increase the air pressure. Then you can dome sections of the canyon and pump up the atmosphere allowing large "outdoor" area. Would also provide radiation shielding.
    - majkinetor 5y ago
      Sounds like a plan. GO GO GO!
    - elihu 5y ago
btilly 5y ago
Electric cars and vertical rocket landings were ideas you could show would work eventually with a little napkin math. It is a good critique of humanity that so many "experts" neglected to do that napkin math and just declare it impossible. Oh really? _The Innovator's Dilemma_, written 20 years ago, includes a chapter based on an industry analysis that said that on current technology trends, mass electric cars would come viable around 2020. Guess what? Around 2020 mass electric cars became viable! Elon Musk figured out that high end electric sports cars could become viable earlier, and built a company around it. How about those reusable rockets? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_system documents a history of attempts at making reusable systems literally from the dawn of the Space Age. Everyone knew that in theory it should be possible. The problem was that in practice they didn't work well enough. (For example the Shuttle wound up costing more per "reusable launch" than an expendable rocket would have.) What SpaceX perfected is a vertical suicide burn. It is called a suicide burn because there is no margin of error, and any mistakes /will/ kill you. But it is also the most efficient way to land the rocket. Nobody did it before Musk because nobody was willing to trust their software control system that much. And even still, when humans take a trip on Dragon we /don't/ trust their skills at a suicide burn for the return. We instead parachute into the ocean, just like Alan Shepherd did 60 years ago. (Elon hopes, of course, that Starship will change that.) So your comment critiquing humanity by critiquing all of the experts who failed to do back of the napkin math showed more about your ignorance than the ignorance of the experts.
gopalv 5y ago
> People often say, if you think you can colonize mars, colonize the Gobi Desert first, as it is 10,000 times easier. If we're talking about population living on earth, that argument makes sense - from a population pressure standpoint , there's no argument to go to mars. But if we're talking about civilization expanding from more resources, with some space where you can potentially crash land a few asteroids while trying to pull it into orbit for easier mining, then Earth is out of question.
skissane 5y ago
> Colonizing mars is not so easy to show as feasible. Certainly we can launch a bunch of cans and digging equipment and get a few people living there. But anything like a self sustaining population? Don't know, we don't really have a concrete plan of how to do that. Elon Musk doesn't have a concrete plan for a "self-sustaining population". I think all he is actually planning on doing in the medium term is working with NASA to establish a research station with a few dozen people, devoted to research into how to live on Mars. The research station is going to be dependent on continual resupply and funding from Earth. Growing to the point of being a self-sustaining colony capable of surviving without continual support from Earth is likely to be many centuries away. However, I think Musk is going to want to call it a "colony" from the start, because of the power of aspirational naming, to centre the hope that it will grow into that. But even if it eventually gets there, none of us are going to live to see it. And there's no point trying to even come up with a detailed plan – for a multi-century project, the only possible plan is to make it up as we go along. What is Elon Musk going to do with his immense wealth when he dies? Don't be surprised if he leaves a massive chunk of it to a charitable foundation devoted to paying for the settlement of Mars. Absent a new Space Race (which may yet happen at some point), governments are unlikely to want to pay for anything more than a few research stations, but ultra-wealthy private benefactors may be willing to pay for a lot more.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

kirubakaran 5y ago
"Then it seems obvious"

DecoPerson 5y ago

If a large meteor hits Earth, the humanity organism will be glad it spread itself to Mars.

vkou 5y ago
The humanity organism does not have feelings. People have feelings. Humanity does not. But if you're going to give it feelings, a far more likely outcome is that a life-ending meteor will not hit the earth, and that the humanity organism would be much happier if it didn't waste its efforts on chasing a fairy tale, instead of fixing problems here, on Earth. It boggles the mind that people worry about planet-killing meteors arriving over geological timescales, when the real danger - sustainability - is staring us in the face today, and needs action now.
- tobmlt 5y ago
  Earth is a space ship and we have been mismanaging the resources on said ship. When we build our own spaceships, we rapidly develop in miniature the sustainable tech needed to really fix earth. We already have carbon dioxide scrubbers, we just need a vast clean source of energy in order to clean things up, and stop the pollution on net. Probably fission is a good enough stop gap. This will happen as soon as the incentive structures are there. Engineering progress is helping, even if indirectly. Who knows what more energy efficient environment cleansing tech will he developed for spacecraft next. Or power sources, batteries, etc. Technology development is cumulative and crosses over domains. Spacex is a spearhead rapidly innovating technology. Government mechanisms are a sort of discombobulated rising tide/ pasture of cows, or herd of scared sheep trying to stay on the grazing turf. Assuming gov’s do not get very much more organized, the better the tech, the easier choices the sheep have to make — win wins get things done. We could benefit greatly from tech advances such that gov gets win wins by making green choices. That way the incentives can tilt more favorably more quickly.
- triceratops 5y ago
  You're being shortsighted. For all you know these Mars colonization efforts might throw off some sort of miracle discovery or technology - like cheap energy or cheap carbon capture. The problems of sustainability or climate change are about political will and priorities. They aren't something a single billionaire can solve. Focus on mobilizing, organizing, and educating voters if you want to do something about sustainability.

jsight 5y ago

Ha, that's a common pattern with Musk companies. EVs are impractical. Charging fast can't be done and the network won't exist until the cars get built anyway. But noone would buy them without the network so its impossible. Oh, you built EVs, 100KW+ chargers and the network yourself? Well, obviously that was inevitable if we had just given General Motors and Ford enough time. Its not a falsifiable position, so its interesting to think about too.

m463 5y ago
I had a friend who worked at GM around the volt time and it was "common knowledge" that it was all just a boondoggle/joke/exercise. I think a HUGE force for innovation in silicon valley was simply the graph of moores law. The practical and financial considerations had a "common knowledge" roadmap to reduce risk and people would race to keep up instead of plod along.

hinkley 5y ago

The moon is rotten with metal oxides. Powdered metal oxides. If you can work out how to do smelting and metallurgy in low G, then the moon as a manufacturing base for a stellar civilization has its attractions. We can't manage a Mars Colony (like capital C colony, not camping trip) from Earth. But from the moon? The physics is certainly better, but I'm not so sure about the logistics. Does anyone know if convection is a net positive or negative when smelting metal? I know that one way to remove impurities is to cast a billet and then saw off the bottom and top edge, where the heavy and the light contaminants tend to come out of suspension. But is that a boon or just making the most of a bad situation?