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I think we absolutely can travel to another star system. But more critically, this argument strikes me as goal post moving by space settlement skeptics: mass tr

I think we absolutely can travel to another star system. But more critically, this argument strikes me as goal post moving by space settlement skeptics: mass transport to Mars is increasingly appearing to be feasible, so we’ll put the goal posts on Proxima b. The exploitation argument doesn’t make any sense because Mars doesn’t have any resources that would really make sense to ever bring back to Earth, except as a side product. It’s a new home like an island in the Pacific for the Polynesians. I don’t consider Polynesians settling uninhabited new islands to be objectionable at all, but instead an expression of what makes humanity wonderful. Preservation of a dead rock for preservation’s sake makes no sense. It’s treating stasis as better than life, and I just can’t get behind that.

OmicronCeti 5y ago
I said this elsewhere in this thread, but I study surface processes on Mars, so to me the planet is still alive and active. Things change, mysteries unfold, new environmental conditions come and go. I'm sure you wouldn't object to national parks or wilderness areas, it's just that in the case of Mars there is no (known) life. How much each of us values the presence of life will differ, but in my view it's worth preserving Mars.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Pick a different planet to preserve.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Venus is very easy to preserve.
    - domnomnom 5y ago
      Then he would have to do another PhD!
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    Thoughtful response, thanks for your participation.
- ianai 5y ago
  To me, if mars had life in its past and no longer does then we could consider it one huge grave. Lost in the terraforming debate I read is that any atmosphere we managed to kick up would be temporary. It might take a long time to leak off, but they’re not discussing any means to reverse the trend. As I understand, Mars doesn’t have an active core and thus magnetic field holding its atmosphere in place. There’s no way we’re going to fire up a core… Turning choice, large asteroids into liveable habitats seems an infinitely more productive task.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Firing up a core is hard, but laying superconducting cables around the equator is not particularly hard (probably easier than terraforming). It could replicate a magnetosphere just fine, while also functioning as a planet wide electricity grid and a decade-long battery.
  - valuearb 5y ago
    “Temporary” == millions of years.
- thaumaturgy 5y ago
  I'm a lot less educated on the subject and my views are diametrically opposed to yours. Commentary like yours is mostly what has kept me hanging around HN all these years. I'm surprised that a researcher wouldn't be enthusiastic about being able to do science directly on the planet's surface. Sure, an extended human presence there will require a lot of supporting infrastructure, and sure, that will all have a direct effect on whatever might already be there -- or might not be, and in either case, changing that environment might not be desirable. But even at the current faster speed of remote exploration of the planet, you can expect, what, like 3 more robotic missions to Mars before you retire? And each one will be an iterative improvement over the last. There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. What's your position on that?
  - domnomnom 5y ago
    He is a Mars researcher, as in he finds it very appreciable it’s current state. Basically a Martian, you are suggesting we develop and add malls to his beloved nature homeland.
    - thaumaturgy 5y ago
      Please stop contributing to the recent HN trend of putting words in other people's mouths just so you can ridicule them. I'm not "suggesting" any such thing, and if you aren't professionally in ~OmicronCeti's field of study, then I'm not interested in your opinion anyway.
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    Hey! Sorry I took so long to reply. The commenter below you is somewhat correct that I would identify as a 'Red' in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy. I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life. Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying. To your question: >There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.
- lmm 5y ago
  I think national parks have value, but not infinite value. We should weigh up using somewhere as a preserve against other potential uses. There are millions of Mars-like planets out there in the galaxy. I'd be more than happy to preserve, say, 10% of them. But there's only one that's in the right place to be the next step for humanity.
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    As I said elsewhere, I do not believe we will ever travel beyond our own solar system so we should preserve what we already have close by, instead of counting on pristine worlds elsewhere.
dheera 5y ago
Also honestly I think it's extremely fortunate that we have Proxima Centauri only 4 light years away as our nearest star. It's a red dwarf, and will continue to shine for at least another 4 trillion years, a thousand times longer than the sun will shine. Of course, granted it's habitability zone and other things are different, but that does not preclude us redefining habitability by inventing another life form to be our successor. Proxima Centauri will outlive the vast majority of stars in the galaxy.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It’s worth pointing out that an a long time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands (not to mention millions) of years, the stars move around quite a bit. The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years. But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.
medstrom 5y ago
One reason not is: we're directly responsible for any suffering that then happens on that rock. A biosphere full of life means horror and suffering every day for so many living things it potentially eclipses all humanity's past crimes combined.
- beckingz 5y ago
  By that logic we should take responsibility for the suffering on earth. Seems like the winning move is to go double or nothing and try and make life more sufferable (containing less suffering) on both planets.
  - medstrom 5y ago
    Mars is a single easily avertable project, still actually free for discussion unlike profit-motivated matters like the ongoing deforestation here. Until there's a clear profit to be made from Mars, it's politically possible to make a "ok, let's not" pact. Why not make it more sufferable here on Earth first, build all sorts of guardrails on existence, e.g. modify biology such that we all have a certain maximum to which the pain knob can be turned. And only then terraform other planets? Why be premature?
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      You should read medical studies about people born with or who acquired a lessened sense of pain. It’s quite horrific. I’m not saying all pain is necessary but any pain that indicates damage is. It would be wiser to engineer biology to be more robust and to recover from damage more completely so that chronic pain is not a thing.
      - medstrom 5y ago
        Give me some credit, I just said put some maximum on pain, not remove it. Yes it'd be nice to recover from damage better but that doesn't help when you are being predated on, like when there is a torturer to make sure you don't recover or when a parasite like the Ichneumon wasp has its whole lifecycle dependent on eating a paralyzed creature alive from the inside out. If you want a discussion please be charitable, it's no fun if you seem to assume I didn't think at all.

OmicronCeti 5y ago

I said this elsewhere in this thread, but I study surface processes on Mars, so to me the planet is still alive and active. Things change, mysteries unfold, new environmental conditions come and go. I'm sure you wouldn't object to national parks or wilderness areas, it's just that in the case of Mars there is no (known) life. How much each of us values the presence of life will differ, but in my view it's worth preserving Mars.

kortilla 5y ago
Pick a different planet to preserve.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Venus is very easy to preserve.
  - domnomnom 5y ago
    Then he would have to do another PhD!
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  Thoughtful response, thanks for your participation.
ianai 5y ago
To me, if mars had life in its past and no longer does then we could consider it one huge grave. Lost in the terraforming debate I read is that any atmosphere we managed to kick up would be temporary. It might take a long time to leak off, but they’re not discussing any means to reverse the trend. As I understand, Mars doesn’t have an active core and thus magnetic field holding its atmosphere in place. There’s no way we’re going to fire up a core… Turning choice, large asteroids into liveable habitats seems an infinitely more productive task.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Firing up a core is hard, but laying superconducting cables around the equator is not particularly hard (probably easier than terraforming). It could replicate a magnetosphere just fine, while also functioning as a planet wide electricity grid and a decade-long battery.
- valuearb 5y ago
  “Temporary” == millions of years.
thaumaturgy 5y ago
I'm a lot less educated on the subject and my views are diametrically opposed to yours. Commentary like yours is mostly what has kept me hanging around HN all these years. I'm surprised that a researcher wouldn't be enthusiastic about being able to do science directly on the planet's surface. Sure, an extended human presence there will require a lot of supporting infrastructure, and sure, that will all have a direct effect on whatever might already be there -- or might not be, and in either case, changing that environment might not be desirable. But even at the current faster speed of remote exploration of the planet, you can expect, what, like 3 more robotic missions to Mars before you retire? And each one will be an iterative improvement over the last. There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. What's your position on that?
- domnomnom 5y ago
  He is a Mars researcher, as in he finds it very appreciable it’s current state. Basically a Martian, you are suggesting we develop and add malls to his beloved nature homeland.
  - thaumaturgy 5y ago
    Please stop contributing to the recent HN trend of putting words in other people's mouths just so you can ridicule them. I'm not "suggesting" any such thing, and if you aren't professionally in ~OmicronCeti's field of study, then I'm not interested in your opinion anyway.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  Hey! Sorry I took so long to reply. The commenter below you is somewhat correct that I would identify as a 'Red' in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy. I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life. Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying. To your question: >There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.
lmm 5y ago
I think national parks have value, but not infinite value. We should weigh up using somewhere as a preserve against other potential uses. There are millions of Mars-like planets out there in the galaxy. I'd be more than happy to preserve, say, 10% of them. But there's only one that's in the right place to be the next step for humanity.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  As I said elsewhere, I do not believe we will ever travel beyond our own solar system so we should preserve what we already have close by, instead of counting on pristine worlds elsewhere.

dheera 5y ago

Also honestly I think it's extremely fortunate that we have Proxima Centauri only 4 light years away as our nearest star. It's a red dwarf, and will continue to shine for at least another 4 trillion years, a thousand times longer than the sun will shine. Of course, granted it's habitability zone and other things are different, but that does not preclude us redefining habitability by inventing another life form to be our successor. Proxima Centauri will outlive the vast majority of stars in the galaxy.

Robotbeat 5y ago
It’s worth pointing out that an a long time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands (not to mention millions) of years, the stars move around quite a bit. The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years. But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.

medstrom 5y ago

One reason not is: we're directly responsible for any suffering that then happens on that rock. A biosphere full of life means horror and suffering every day for so many living things it potentially eclipses all humanity's past crimes combined.

beckingz 5y ago
By that logic we should take responsibility for the suffering on earth. Seems like the winning move is to go double or nothing and try and make life more sufferable (containing less suffering) on both planets.
- medstrom 5y ago
  Mars is a single easily avertable project, still actually free for discussion unlike profit-motivated matters like the ongoing deforestation here. Until there's a clear profit to be made from Mars, it's politically possible to make a "ok, let's not" pact. Why not make it more sufferable here on Earth first, build all sorts of guardrails on existence, e.g. modify biology such that we all have a certain maximum to which the pain knob can be turned. And only then terraform other planets? Why be premature?
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    You should read medical studies about people born with or who acquired a lessened sense of pain. It’s quite horrific. I’m not saying all pain is necessary but any pain that indicates damage is. It would be wiser to engineer biology to be more robust and to recover from damage more completely so that chronic pain is not a thing.
    - medstrom 5y ago
      Give me some credit, I just said put some maximum on pain, not remove it. Yes it'd be nice to recover from damage better but that doesn't help when you are being predated on, like when there is a torturer to make sure you don't recover or when a parasite like the Ichneumon wasp has its whole lifecycle dependent on eating a paralyzed creature alive from the inside out. If you want a discussion please be charitable, it's no fun if you seem to assume I didn't think at all.