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You’re right about it not being habitable, but since when has that stopped humans? Logistically speaking the only “op-ex” we couldn’t really bank on getting pl

You’re right about it not being habitable, but since when has that stopped humans? Logistically speaking the only “op-ex” we couldn’t really bank on getting plenty of from Mars itself is Hydrogen. Not because it’s not on Mars but because it’s clearly unevenly distributed. So obviously it would be foolish to not have plans for that. But hydrogen is bloody everywhere in the solar system. Yes it’s not convenient but it’s cheap. If we’re talking about 10 and 20 year plans, then you just harvest icy asteroids or tow a convenient comet in place. Fundamental issue is rebuilding infrastructure on earth. Beyond that it’s all doable with current technology and a solid commitment to make it happen, I don’t see a financial case, I see a potential social one. Yea your going to be living under meters of regolith and breathing recycled air, drinking recycled water and the place might smell like Body odour more than most like due to limited water supply…. But it sounds no worse to me than the sort of hardships faced by early settlers on the American frontier. With re-established infrastructure we get to manufacturing essential equipment chains, I’m assuming starship level logistics so that’s a million tons to Mars. A million tons of equipment designed to and this is critical… oversupply the needs of the people to come, because there will be losses on all fronts, energy has resistance, plumbing has leaks, people make mistakes, all of this is realistic. I have to be clear. I’m not picturing some fancy space tourist thing, I’m picturing a technologically dependent hard scrabble life of constant vigilance against life and death failure scenarios. But we have the technology to do this right now if we can put enough mass on the surface of mars to oversupply the losses we know our systems currently have. Only water supply makes that tricky… but we continue to be surprised by how much water is spread around mars in frozen pockets and there’s always the comet option. Cut it up in orbit and ship it down with a cheap but good enough spray on heat shield and a strap on parachute if you have to in order to minimise losses, we developed prototype systems for emergency re-entry in the early space age, sure it probably wasn’t safe enough for people, but frozen chunks of water don’t care if you jostle them too hard, they have no bones to break just can’t let it get too hot. Yes the need for a comet might push the start date beyond the point where I’m young enough, but it might not because we’re not exactly surveying for likely mars water supply comets and we might not even need it at all if we keep finding frozen water and brine under the surface.

gregjor 5y ago
Uninhabitable environments have stopped humans so far. We do not inhabit any environment even close to Mars-level hostile for any duration, or at scale. Antarctica has gravity, atmosphere, water, protection from radiation, and a workable way to transport supplies. The ISS supports a handful of people for short rotations, and is within reach of resupply from Earth. We don’t have colonies under the ocean, where there’s gravity, radiation shielding, food, water, oxygen, transportation. We don’t have colonies on the moon or anywhere else that informs us we can sustain colonies on Mars. We don’t have the technology to “harvest” elements from space, or to tow asteroids around. Mars is lacking nitrogen, which plants need to grow, and in any case we aren’t close to “terraforming” Mars, we can’t do that on our own hospitable planet. The payload capacity of the SpaceX Starship, if that’s what you refer to, is 150 tons, not a million, and that’s to low earth orbit, where it requires multiple refuelings to plausibly get to Mars one-way. Rocket fuel is heavy. 150 tons is not sufficient for the large amounts of equipment we need on Earth for mining operations, nor will the equipment we use now for mining, agriculture, construction fit into any spaceship we have. The “logistics” of the Starship collapse under scrutiny. See the Common Sense Skeptic videos on YouTube for hours of thoughtful analysis. We don’t have the technology to move the required mass to Mars now. We don’t have the technology to extract raw elements from space, or asteroids, or the Martian surface. We don’t have the technology to give Mars a magnetosphere (it doesn’t have one), much less a breathable atmosphere. We don’t have the technology to keep humans alive and healthy in 0.4 Earth gravity. We can’t get birds to lay eggs in space, or plants to grow at scale, or any of that stuff that just gets waved away as if all of the sci-fi tech exists because we saw it in movies. The SpaceX Mars plans are artist’s renderings, not working technology. All of this may happen in the distant future, with better propulsion systems, factories in orbit to avoid the Earth gravity well problem getting lots of mass into space, asteroid mining, terraforming, etc. But today and for the foreseeable future Mars is inhospitable and not a viable destination for human colonies, not even a hard-scrabble existence.

gregjor 5y ago

Uninhabitable environments have stopped humans so far. We do not inhabit any environment even close to Mars-level hostile for any duration, or at scale. Antarctica has gravity, atmosphere, water, protection from radiation, and a workable way to transport supplies. The ISS supports a handful of people for short rotations, and is within reach of resupply from Earth. We don’t have colonies under the ocean, where there’s gravity, radiation shielding, food, water, oxygen, transportation. We don’t have colonies on the moon or anywhere else that informs us we can sustain colonies on Mars. We don’t have the technology to “harvest” elements from space, or to tow asteroids around. Mars is lacking nitrogen, which plants need to grow, and in any case we aren’t close to “terraforming” Mars, we can’t do that on our own hospitable planet. The payload capacity of the SpaceX Starship, if that’s what you refer to, is 150 tons, not a million, and that’s to low earth orbit, where it requires multiple refuelings to plausibly get to Mars one-way. Rocket fuel is heavy. 150 tons is not sufficient for the large amounts of equipment we need on Earth for mining operations, nor will the equipment we use now for mining, agriculture, construction fit into any spaceship we have. The “logistics” of the Starship collapse under scrutiny. See the Common Sense Skeptic videos on YouTube for hours of thoughtful analysis. We don’t have the technology to move the required mass to Mars now. We don’t have the technology to extract raw elements from space, or asteroids, or the Martian surface. We don’t have the technology to give Mars a magnetosphere (it doesn’t have one), much less a breathable atmosphere. We don’t have the technology to keep humans alive and healthy in 0.4 Earth gravity. We can’t get birds to lay eggs in space, or plants to grow at scale, or any of that stuff that just gets waved away as if all of the sci-fi tech exists because we saw it in movies. The SpaceX Mars plans are artist’s renderings, not working technology. All of this may happen in the distant future, with better propulsion systems, factories in orbit to avoid the Earth gravity well problem getting lots of mass into space, asteroid mining, terraforming, etc. But today and for the foreseeable future Mars is inhospitable and not a viable destination for human colonies, not even a hard-scrabble existence.