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Serious question: Why are we so focused on Mars? We haven't even made it back to the Moon once. We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self r

Serious question: Why are we so focused on Mars? We haven't even made it back to the Moon once. We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?

swarnie 4y ago
Timeframe, this planet is dead. Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a rocket company kicking around.
- bumby 4y ago
  It’s would be orders of magnitude easier to make this “dead” planet more hospitable than to do the equivalent to Mars.
  - dijit 4y ago
    this is the conclusion I keep coming to also; anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth. I guess that's not sexy but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it terribly if leaving became the only option. So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars as longingly as we do.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth This experiment turns CO2 into oxygen and expels CO. How is that “infinitely more effective and eas[y] here on Earth”?
      - dijit 4y ago
        Because we don’t have to ship the equipment to another celestial body where it cannot be maintained or debugged? If you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth then… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per operating cycle [2], it also means you aren’t superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has no use on Earth. It’s tremendously useful on Mars. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636
        dijit 4y ago
        From my perspective anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth habitable. If you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth habitable This is fundamentally false for the device this article highlights. Different chemistries. > you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars It’s not. There isn’t oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense. Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth [2] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-monoxide https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-mono...
    - ballenf 4y ago
      We should look at it about as longingly as as an offsite backup for critical data. If you only have one habitable planet, you have none. There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity. There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
  - swarnie 4y ago
    I'll text that to my Pakistani mate, presumably he can get SMS underwater
    - bumby 4y ago
      Are you implying he’d prefer to migrate to Mars than for humans to address climate change on Earth?
- im_down_w_otp 4y ago
  I don't know if you've taken a look at Mars yet, but it's already dead. It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
    - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
      Perhaps. The problem of course is that as soon as there's a human on Mars... it becomes a human problem too. There's the dynamics between the humans there. The dynamics between the humans there & here. The dynamics between the people left here supporting the humans there. Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs. :shrug:
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
- clhodapp 4y ago
  The thing I don't get is: I have to imagine that no matter how badly we screw up Earth, any technologies that we build to allow us to survive on Mars could just as well be used to make Earth "livable" again for less cost. Worst-case, it's pretty much the same thing without a rocket launch. I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to colonize Mars.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > no matter how badly we screw up Earth, Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up. I think we should be focusing on establishing a space industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars. And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find that we don't need planets anymore.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  Mars is more dead than earth will become in the next centuries. And even if they were in the same state, earth would still be the better candidate for fixing up, simply because it's in the habitable zone. And this all ignores the fact that we won't be able to bring a significant amount of humans away from earth, ever. Even transporting a village-amount of people will be still absurd expensive in the next decades.
- sevenf0ur 4y ago
  Escaping to Mars is just living in caves with extra steps.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? You can’t get to the Moon by climbing successfully higher trees. This experiment might as well be Exhibit A. Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This device would be useless in Death Valley or on the Moon. There is also a realistic chance of establishing an industrial base on Mars in a way that’s more challenging on the Moon and worthless in Death Valley.
Fiahil 4y ago
> We haven't even made it back to the Moon once. you mean other than the 6 times we landed a crew there ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  I don't think we need to split hairs here, the last manned moon mission was 50 years ago. A manned mission haven't been back a single time since.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    But we are planning on going back to the Moon before we send humans to Mars. We haven't neglected the Moon for Mars, we just haven't done any human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit for the past 50 years.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    We'll be back there in three years.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      *unless it gets cancelled again Constellation was supposed to be back to the moon 2 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
      - wongarsu 4y ago
        I'd call that more of a design review than a cancelation. Obama tried to cancel the Constellation program, but because it provides a lot of jobs it was un-canceled and resurrected as the Artemis program. At that opportunity some changes were made: the Orion capsule got carried over, but the Ares V was downscaled to the SLS, but uses the same basic design; the lunar gateway was added and the landers were turned into a contract more like Commercial Resupply. But at it's core it's still the same "let's get to the moon on spare shuttle parts" concept, with many contracts simply carried over.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I think it's a dream that's basically held over from the days when technology used to solve problems and we imagined using it to advance humanity.
JauntTrooper 4y ago
I think it's mainly that Mars has an atmosphere, which helps shield it from radiation and asteroids, regulates the temperature, and creates weather like wind and even carbon-dioxide snow. The Moon basically doesn't have an atmosphere, which makes it a much harsher place to survive. Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be very important to a long-term human colony.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bnralt 4y ago
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on demand a self-contained and functioning society is _extremely_ hard, even if we're trying to do it in pleasant environment where we don't have to deal with almost any environmental hazards. If we were able to do it successfully, allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer. But Mars colonies are probably so far off that a lot of the difficulties are easy to ignore. NASA seems to do something similar to what a lot of tech companies do, where they tease tech seems to be just around the corner, but which they know actual implementation is very far away (remember Amazon drone delivery?).
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer It wouldn’t be super productive if it were self contained. Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_ difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment, dealing with the extreme lack of raw materials, and dealing with any specialized materials or equipment being months/years away and costing an exorbitant amount of money just to ship it over. Any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony. Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are able to overcome the numerous technical issues.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment…any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony I’m arguing those constraints are what will drive ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart, ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on the history of settler civilisations outperforming their home countries.
gpm 4y ago
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like [...] the Arctic? The primary barrier to doing this is politics, not the environment. Colonizing the artic would be a major violation of international treaties, and would certainly see you detained (or killed) by a hostile country. Wars have been started over much less. People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting. > Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). We already have research stations in the arctic. We don't get to experience a different amount of gravity, different geology, different atmospheric chemistry, different (primarily a lack of) biosphere, or pretty much any interesting feature of either mars or space. Nor do we get any of the "backup population of humans" we would get from mars if we manage to make it self sufficient (admittedly a very tall goal), because the arctic isn't really isolated from the earth. Nor we do get the inspirational effects of going places we haven't before.
- hguant 4y ago
  >People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting. _Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with them, or traded for, to survive.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  >> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? > No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). This is a remarkable claim. Virtually space projects have involved considerable rehearsals of different sorts on earth. Human survival in extreme environments isn't an easy or solved problem. It makes me sad if many people believe we have nothing to learn in these circumstances.
wongarsu 4y ago
The easy answer is because Mars has all the mindshare. Just as the USSR always had their ambitions of a Venus colony, the US always had ambitions of a Mars colony, which is reflected in popular culture. The other reason is that humans closer to Mars would be scientifically useful. We don't have that many open questions about the moon. We had a couple manned moon missions doing lots of science, and with the moon being only a lightsecond away, you can drive rovers almost like RC cars. Mars is many lightminutes away, making rovers complex, costly and slow. Opportunity took 15 years to drive 45km. Manned lunar rovers have driven roughly twice that distance over just two years (Apollo 15/16/17). The amount of science we could do with boots on the ground would be incredibly valuable.
ccozan 4y ago
Actually yes, I am more excited with Venus. Good pressure,nice temperature, all kinds of gases in the atmosphere, metal is missing, but this could be sent from Earth. We get floating cities!
- kardos 4y ago
  The energy cost of air conditioning everything down by 450 degrees is going to be a bit of an obstacle
  - elihu 4y ago
    Not in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and atmospheric densities are close to Earth-normal. I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need to go down to the surface you don't need extreme cooling systems. If you did want people to be able to live on the surface it is kind of an interesting question how you'd manage it. Presumably there'd be ample wind energy available if you can just build a wind turbine that doesn't melt in that environment. Either way I'd rather go to Mars.
    - kardos 4y ago
      Keeping things aloft is costly too! But the solar radiation should be favourable there, there might be a solution where you have a solar powered aircraft that always stays on the illuminated side of the planet.
      - mr_toad 4y ago
        Venus has very strong winds even at high altitude. I’m not sure that staying on the sunlit side is technically feasible.
- outworlder 4y ago
  Yikes. How are we supposed to construct the floating cities? Mining Venus is out of the question with non sci-fi tech, even if all we wanted was to make, say, concrete. If something happens to the floating cities, the "fall" would be a horrendous fate. Temperature isn't "nice", would still be around 160F high up. Importing materials... at that point why not just make space stations? No water.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
It's Mars + the Moon + a lot of other places. Just because NASA is looking at Mars doesn't mean they are not looking at the Moon or anywhere else. If you actually don't know why Mars might be an interesting place to test on, then you should do some research about the topic.
WorldMaker 4y ago
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? McMurdo Station [1] in the Antarctic is generally self-reliant/self-contained. Regular shipments of things like diesel, of course, but it also sees a sometimes surprisingly large residency (Wikipedia points out it can support around 1200 people at times) for what people generally consider a "small" science installation, and it has been in perpetual, year-round operation for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station
- rmah 4y ago
  McMurdo is not at all self-reliant. Everything from food to fuel, from clothing to electronics, from tools to entertainment comes from outside. It is the exact opposite of self-reliant, it is completely dependent on the outside world.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    It's always going to be a semantics battle over details of how often those shipments occur. We aren't going to build a moon base or Mars base without some expectation of regular shipments either. We aren't going to string them along without at least some basic lifelines in place. "100%" "pure" self-reliance of a "colony" has never happened in the history of humanity and likely never will. We're too social of a species to do that. McMurdo is about as self-reliant as we might reasonably expect any moon base or Mars base to be in the short term. The details of shipping schedules among the closest on this planet to those thrust upon us by the economics of orbital mechanics in space projects. It's absolutely not perfect self-reliance. It's still more self-reliance as an example than we are likely to find elsewhere on the planet and "good enough" for complaints that we aren't "ready" for space colonies because we haven't done enough of the homework. We've collectively done at least some of the homework.
    - clhodapp 4y ago
      I think the question is: would McMurdo (or the space colony) find a way to survive if severed from the rest of humanity?
rmah 4y ago
It is not possible for any modern technological society to be "perpetually self reliant" with a population of less than a few hundred million people. And that's with access to a planet's worth of resources. Hell, it wasn't even possible to have a bronze-age civilization without international trade. One of the reasons the transition to iron/steel based civilizations was so widespread was that there's a lot of iron ore and it's spread out all over the place. It turns out that resources are not evenly distributed. There are only a handful of locations where it is economically feasible to gather or mine some elements. And until we have techno-magic replicators that can turn energy into matter, this problem will remain. No colony 100's of thousands of people is going to be self-sustaining on Mars. It's simply not possible. They will always be dependent on Earth.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Sorry to pile on, but "we", as a civilization, are extremely unfocused on travelling to Mars.
AstralStorm 4y ago
Artemis-I is slated to correct this problem. Last time the launch was scrubbed though.
bee_rider 4y ago
I don't think NASA is all that focused on a Mars colony. The general public has some interest because Elon Musk is "good" at twitter and advertising, but not a ton of interest. I'm not sure why Musk is focused on Mars, I think you need to do a ton of drugs to get into his head. Or it might just be that he needs a big picture goal to help motivate SpaceX. Mars is not a good target for colonization. It is just an inhospitable rock. A big pointless gravity well. Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. Plus the view is better, and you can go fly to somewhere more interesting like the Asteroid belt.
- elihu 4y ago
  > Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make building materials and rocket fuel. The asteroid belts are probably worth visiting too, but I can understand wanting to go to Mars. It's probably the most Earth-like environment in the solar system excepting the Earth itself.
colechristensen 4y ago
The Mars ambition, when it works, has a future. It is possible with long time spans to make Mars a livable planet with a sizable civilization. The Moon isn't quite so favorable for this, the end result wouldn't be as nice and would be more because it would be useful than desirable.
smm11 4y ago
We couldn't even stay in our own houses a week or two early in Covid days. There's absolutely zero chance more than four or five people can be on a rocket ship long enough to get somewhere and do something. Numerous TV shows have proven that to be true.
godshatter 4y ago
I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on expanding industry into LEO and to the surface of the moon? We have no mining capability and no capacity to gather resources off-Earth with the intent to build anything with them. We can't even make fuel that I know of. We haven't even increased our LEO population beyond the ISS and Tiangong, with the capacity of at most a dozen people living in space at any one time. If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess. Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.
- abecedarius 4y ago
  > I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars Wasn't that Bezos's goal already? It's unfortunate that the best execution is aimed at a less productive goal (imo).
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    If Starship works as well as it'll need to work for a Mars mission, it'll effectively have enabled Bezos's approach as well. That much mass to orbit that cheaply changes the game entirely. Bezos may chafe at having to buy rides on someone else's rocket.
mr_toad 4y ago
You can’t make oxygen out of atmospheric CO2 on the moon.

swarnie 4y ago

Timeframe, this planet is dead. Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a rocket company kicking around.

bumby 4y ago
It’s would be orders of magnitude easier to make this “dead” planet more hospitable than to do the equivalent to Mars.
- dijit 4y ago
  this is the conclusion I keep coming to also; anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth. I guess that's not sexy but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it terribly if leaving became the only option. So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars as longingly as we do.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth This experiment turns CO2 into oxygen and expels CO. How is that “infinitely more effective and eas[y] here on Earth”?
    - dijit 4y ago
      Because we don’t have to ship the equipment to another celestial body where it cannot be maintained or debugged? If you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth then… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > you’re suggesting that it has no use on earth Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per operating cycle [2], it also means you aren’t superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has no use on Earth. It’s tremendously useful on Mars. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636
        dijit 4y ago
        From my perspective anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth habitable. If you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth habitable This is fundamentally false for the device this article highlights. Different chemistries. > you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars It’s not. There isn’t oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense. Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth [2] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-monoxide https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-quality/carbon-mono...
  - ballenf 4y ago
    We should look at it about as longingly as as an offsite backup for critical data. If you only have one habitable planet, you have none. There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity. There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
- swarnie 4y ago
  I'll text that to my Pakistani mate, presumably he can get SMS underwater
  - bumby 4y ago
    Are you implying he’d prefer to migrate to Mars than for humans to address climate change on Earth?
im_down_w_otp 4y ago
I don't know if you've taken a look at Mars yet, but it's already dead. It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
  - im_down_w_otp 4y ago
    Perhaps. The problem of course is that as soon as there's a human on Mars... it becomes a human problem too. There's the dynamics between the humans there. The dynamics between the humans there & here. The dynamics between the people left here supporting the humans there. Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs. :shrug:
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
clhodapp 4y ago
The thing I don't get is: I have to imagine that no matter how badly we screw up Earth, any technologies that we build to allow us to survive on Mars could just as well be used to make Earth "livable" again for less cost. Worst-case, it's pretty much the same thing without a rocket launch. I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to colonize Mars.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > no matter how badly we screw up Earth, Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up. I think we should be focusing on establishing a space industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars. And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find that we don't need planets anymore.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
Mars is more dead than earth will become in the next centuries. And even if they were in the same state, earth would still be the better candidate for fixing up, simply because it's in the habitable zone. And this all ignores the fact that we won't be able to bring a significant amount of humans away from earth, ever. Even transporting a village-amount of people will be still absurd expensive in the next decades.
sevenf0ur 4y ago
Escaping to Mars is just living in caves with extra steps.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? You can’t get to the Moon by climbing successfully higher trees. This experiment might as well be Exhibit A. Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This device would be useless in Death Valley or on the Moon. There is also a realistic chance of establishing an industrial base on Mars in a way that’s more challenging on the Moon and worthless in Death Valley.

Fiahil 4y ago

> We haven't even made it back to the Moon once. you mean other than the 6 times we landed a crew there ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon

micromacrofoot 4y ago
I don't think we need to split hairs here, the last manned moon mission was 50 years ago. A manned mission haven't been back a single time since.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  But we are planning on going back to the Moon before we send humans to Mars. We haven't neglected the Moon for Mars, we just haven't done any human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit for the past 50 years.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  We'll be back there in three years.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    *unless it gets cancelled again Constellation was supposed to be back to the moon 2 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      I'd call that more of a design review than a cancelation. Obama tried to cancel the Constellation program, but because it provides a lot of jobs it was un-canceled and resurrected as the Artemis program. At that opportunity some changes were made: the Orion capsule got carried over, but the Ares V was downscaled to the SLS, but uses the same basic design; the lunar gateway was added and the landers were turned into a contract more like Commercial Resupply. But at it's core it's still the same "let's get to the moon on spare shuttle parts" concept, with many contracts simply carried over.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I think it's a dream that's basically held over from the days when technology used to solve problems and we imagined using it to advance humanity.

JauntTrooper 4y ago

I think it's mainly that Mars has an atmosphere, which helps shield it from radiation and asteroids, regulates the temperature, and creates weather like wind and even carbon-dioxide snow. The Moon basically doesn't have an atmosphere, which makes it a much harsher place to survive. Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be very important to a long-term human colony.

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bnralt 4y ago

> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on demand a self-contained and functioning society is _extremely_ hard, even if we're trying to do it in pleasant environment where we don't have to deal with almost any environmental hazards. If we were able to do it successfully, allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer. But Mars colonies are probably so far off that a lot of the difficulties are easy to ignore. NASA seems to do something similar to what a lot of tech companies do, where they tease tech seems to be just around the corner, but which they know actual implementation is very far away (remember Amazon drone delivery?).

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer It wouldn’t be super productive if it were self contained. Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.
- bnralt 4y ago
  Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_ difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment, dealing with the extreme lack of raw materials, and dealing with any specialized materials or equipment being months/years away and costing an exorbitant amount of money just to ship it over. Any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony. Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are able to overcome the numerous technical issues.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment…any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony I’m arguing those constraints are what will drive ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart, ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on the history of settler civilisations outperforming their home countries.

gpm 4y ago

> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like [...] the Arctic? The primary barrier to doing this is politics, not the environment. Colonizing the artic would be a major violation of international treaties, and would certainly see you detained (or killed) by a hostile country. Wars have been started over much less. People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting. > Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). We already have research stations in the arctic. We don't get to experience a different amount of gravity, different geology, different atmospheric chemistry, different (primarily a lack of) biosphere, or pretty much any interesting feature of either mars or space. Nor do we get any of the "backup population of humans" we would get from mars if we manage to make it self sufficient (admittedly a very tall goal), because the arctic isn't really isolated from the earth. Nor we do get the inspirational effects of going places we haven't before.

hguant 4y ago
>People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting. _Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with them, or traded for, to survive.
joe_the_user 4y ago
>> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars? > No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). This is a remarkable claim. Virtually space projects have involved considerable rehearsals of different sorts on earth. Human survival in extreme environments isn't an easy or solved problem. It makes me sad if many people believe we have nothing to learn in these circumstances.

wongarsu 4y ago

The easy answer is because Mars has all the mindshare. Just as the USSR always had their ambitions of a Venus colony, the US always had ambitions of a Mars colony, which is reflected in popular culture. The other reason is that humans closer to Mars would be scientifically useful. We don't have that many open questions about the moon. We had a couple manned moon missions doing lots of science, and with the moon being only a lightsecond away, you can drive rovers almost like RC cars. Mars is many lightminutes away, making rovers complex, costly and slow. Opportunity took 15 years to drive 45km. Manned lunar rovers have driven roughly twice that distance over just two years (Apollo 15/16/17). The amount of science we could do with boots on the ground would be incredibly valuable.

ccozan 4y ago

Actually yes, I am more excited with Venus. Good pressure,nice temperature, all kinds of gases in the atmosphere, metal is missing, but this could be sent from Earth. We get floating cities!

kardos 4y ago
The energy cost of air conditioning everything down by 450 degrees is going to be a bit of an obstacle
- elihu 4y ago
  Not in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and atmospheric densities are close to Earth-normal. I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need to go down to the surface you don't need extreme cooling systems. If you did want people to be able to live on the surface it is kind of an interesting question how you'd manage it. Presumably there'd be ample wind energy available if you can just build a wind turbine that doesn't melt in that environment. Either way I'd rather go to Mars.
  - kardos 4y ago
    Keeping things aloft is costly too! But the solar radiation should be favourable there, there might be a solution where you have a solar powered aircraft that always stays on the illuminated side of the planet.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      Venus has very strong winds even at high altitude. I’m not sure that staying on the sunlit side is technically feasible.
outworlder 4y ago
Yikes. How are we supposed to construct the floating cities? Mining Venus is out of the question with non sci-fi tech, even if all we wanted was to make, say, concrete. If something happens to the floating cities, the "fall" would be a horrendous fate. Temperature isn't "nice", would still be around 160F high up. Importing materials... at that point why not just make space stations? No water.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

It's Mars + the Moon + a lot of other places. Just because NASA is looking at Mars doesn't mean they are not looking at the Moon or anywhere else. If you actually don't know why Mars might be an interesting place to test on, then you should do some research about the topic.

WorldMaker 4y ago

> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? McMurdo Station [1] in the Antarctic is generally self-reliant/self-contained. Regular shipments of things like diesel, of course, but it also sees a sometimes surprisingly large residency (Wikipedia points out it can support around 1200 people at times) for what people generally consider a "small" science installation, and it has been in perpetual, year-round operation for decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station

rmah 4y ago
McMurdo is not at all self-reliant. Everything from food to fuel, from clothing to electronics, from tools to entertainment comes from outside. It is the exact opposite of self-reliant, it is completely dependent on the outside world.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  It's always going to be a semantics battle over details of how often those shipments occur. We aren't going to build a moon base or Mars base without some expectation of regular shipments either. We aren't going to string them along without at least some basic lifelines in place. "100%" "pure" self-reliance of a "colony" has never happened in the history of humanity and likely never will. We're too social of a species to do that. McMurdo is about as self-reliant as we might reasonably expect any moon base or Mars base to be in the short term. The details of shipping schedules among the closest on this planet to those thrust upon us by the economics of orbital mechanics in space projects. It's absolutely not perfect self-reliance. It's still more self-reliance as an example than we are likely to find elsewhere on the planet and "good enough" for complaints that we aren't "ready" for space colonies because we haven't done enough of the homework. We've collectively done at least some of the homework.
  - clhodapp 4y ago
    I think the question is: would McMurdo (or the space colony) find a way to survive if severed from the rest of humanity?

rmah 4y ago

It is not possible for any modern technological society to be "perpetually self reliant" with a population of less than a few hundred million people. And that's with access to a planet's worth of resources. Hell, it wasn't even possible to have a bronze-age civilization without international trade. One of the reasons the transition to iron/steel based civilizations was so widespread was that there's a lot of iron ore and it's spread out all over the place. It turns out that resources are not evenly distributed. There are only a handful of locations where it is economically feasible to gather or mine some elements. And until we have techno-magic replicators that can turn energy into matter, this problem will remain. No colony 100's of thousands of people is going to be self-sustaining on Mars. It's simply not possible. They will always be dependent on Earth.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Sorry to pile on, but "we", as a civilization, are extremely unfocused on travelling to Mars.

AstralStorm 4y ago

Artemis-I is slated to correct this problem. Last time the launch was scrubbed though.

bee_rider 4y ago

I don't think NASA is all that focused on a Mars colony. The general public has some interest because Elon Musk is "good" at twitter and advertising, but not a ton of interest. I'm not sure why Musk is focused on Mars, I think you need to do a ton of drugs to get into his head. Or it might just be that he needs a big picture goal to help motivate SpaceX. Mars is not a good target for colonization. It is just an inhospitable rock. A big pointless gravity well. Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. Plus the view is better, and you can go fly to somewhere more interesting like the Asteroid belt.

elihu 4y ago
> Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make building materials and rocket fuel. The asteroid belts are probably worth visiting too, but I can understand wanting to go to Mars. It's probably the most Earth-like environment in the solar system excepting the Earth itself.

colechristensen 4y ago

The Mars ambition, when it works, has a future. It is possible with long time spans to make Mars a livable planet with a sizable civilization. The Moon isn't quite so favorable for this, the end result wouldn't be as nice and would be more because it would be useful than desirable.

smm11 4y ago

We couldn't even stay in our own houses a week or two early in Covid days. There's absolutely zero chance more than four or five people can be on a rocket ship long enough to get somewhere and do something. Numerous TV shows have proven that to be true.

godshatter 4y ago

I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on expanding industry into LEO and to the surface of the moon? We have no mining capability and no capacity to gather resources off-Earth with the intent to build anything with them. We can't even make fuel that I know of. We haven't even increased our LEO population beyond the ISS and Tiangong, with the capacity of at most a dozen people living in space at any one time. If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess. Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.

abecedarius 4y ago
> I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars Wasn't that Bezos's goal already? It's unfortunate that the best execution is aimed at a less productive goal (imo).
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  If Starship works as well as it'll need to work for a Mars mission, it'll effectively have enabled Bezos's approach as well. That much mass to orbit that cheaply changes the game entirely. Bezos may chafe at having to buy rides on someone else's rocket.

mr_toad 4y ago

You can’t make oxygen out of atmospheric CO2 on the moon.