35 ms·

Why Not Mars

• samhuk 4y ago
  There is a rather toxic political tone running through the article which really puts me off. Just one of the examples is they refer to Elon Musk as wanting to populate Mars with "subsistence farming incels", which is just a down-right stupid thing to say and spoils what could have been a very insightful read. On a similar theme, calling those who support humans going to mars as being part of some Elon Musk-led culty "mars religion" is totally preposterous. There's a reek of "Everyone who disagrees with me doesn't have the truth'n'facts and have actually just tricked themselves into believing a religion". Musk Derangement Syndrome is strong. I actually support a lot of their statements though, e.g. about the rather silly lunar gateway that seems to have very little actual financial logic to it. It's just a shame.
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• taneq 4y ago
  I feel like this should be titled “why NASA should not go to Mars.” I would be astounded if SpaceX makes it there within 5 years of their original timeline, but even more astounded if they don’t have a crew within 10 years. I don’t see procrastinating with bone density studies etc. either - they treat it as a commercial venture, not an exercise in basic research.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    You need to go do the bone density (and radiation) studies to know if your passengers are going to die on Mars. This stuff isn't optional.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      There are already a lot of those studies, and they all say that radiation is very bad for you and that you need gravity to maintain a healthy bone density.
      • idlewords 4y ago
        This is true. But there are no studies about the effect of partial gravity, and how much is enough to maintain bone and eye health.
        • dudeinjapan 4y ago
          Maybe the people going there aren't overly concerned with bone and eye health. Perhaps the goal in life isn't to do everything in one's power to stave off death.
          • whatshisface 4y ago
            The government's $80 billion dollar extreme sports program.
• djmips 4y ago
  "life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease disease that spread across the early solar system" - wow what a way with words!
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Technology is inversely proportional to resources. If we can't get to Mars yet, that just means our technology isn't there. We need to work on that. Just like working a few days at a job can afford may people a magical global communications device. That's technology so advanced it requires little resources to obtain. Mars can be the same, our tech just isn't there yet.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    The article spends quite a bit of space discussing why building the tech we do need to get to mars is a waste of time and resources. Summed up by this line quite nicely: “ Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it”
    • chii 4y ago
      > Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator and yet, humanity also does not "need" laser stablized, automatic orbital docking (, except it was built just for the ISS so that docking modules can be done). However, the fact that you can now have safe, cheap and effective laser eye surgery is a result of such technology being explored for one purpose, repurposed for new applications. We did not need to spend the research dollars to figure out safety grooving to prevent hydroplaning, except that it was needed for the space shuttle landing (it went too fast otherwise). Now this research is applied to a lot of roads, as well as airports, and prevents skidding that would've otherwise happened: https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/40-years-of-nasa-spinoff/safety-grooving https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/40-years-of-nasa-spinoff/sa... So the idea that "humans does not need blah" is not correct, because you don't know what humans need.
      • cmdli 4y ago
        > So the idea that "humans does not need blah" is not correct, because you don't know what humans need. Thing is, we do know what humans need. We need better battery technology, improved drugs and mental health, better power generation (such as nuclear fusion), and much more. Why spend so much time developing technology that may be useful but probably not, instead of developing something that is desperately needed right now?
• piyh 4y ago
  > Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun. Without going full "We choose to go to the Moon", I disagree with these points. It would be fun. It would open a new era of spaceflight. It is no more destructive or wasteful than most anything else humanity decides to put resources into. Mars is a whetstone against which humanity sharpens itself against.
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  • kevinmchugh 4y ago
    Humanity has not demonstrated the ability to effectively sanitize spacecraft. The risk of intentionally bringing life to Mars is that we tromp all over evidence of extraterrestrial love. The absolute most valuable science to be done on Mars is to determine how unique Earth is.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      It would be a bummer if the sterilization techniques used on the unmanned landers hadn't worked, but if they didn't, then life is already multi-planetary.
      • m4rtink 4y ago
        No way in hell was everything we dropped on Mars 100% sterilized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_... Also I really don't get this fixation to "not contaminating Mars" - like, why ? Its one of the few usable planets in the Solar System! Of course we will contaminate it all over with life, possibly turn it terrestrial one way or another. Anyone advocating against using one of the most important next stepping stones for Humanity must really live in a weird bubble. Sure, pick some Kuiper belt object or some extrasolar planet and declare it a reserve and we will make sure we won't touch it when we get there. But doing the same with Mars is insane and almost seems like some weird irrational religion.
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• kevinmchugh 4y ago
  Listen: I am still reading this - it is delightfully long - but this is the takedown I've been waiting for for years. Maciej has been particularly critical of the idea of extra Earth colonization while an entire continent goes uncolonized. In the interest of discourse, who is the greatest proponent of Mars colonization who has been to Antarctica?
  • jeffparsons 4y ago
    Antarctica is not "uncolonized" due to a lack of interest; there are relatively few people there because we have collectively agreed not to allow more. If there were no such restrictions, there would be people building tourist hotels all over it, and everything that comes with that. Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs. The Mars-Antarctica connection isn't particularly strong.
    • cmdli 4y ago
      > To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs. I would 100% disagree with that. If you explained to people that Mars was a habitat untouched by humanity, possibly filled with life, most people would absolutely be against anything that would ruin it. People value preserving nature because they find it beautiful, not because they find it useful.
      • titzer 4y ago
        > most people would absolutely be against anything that would ruin it Until there's a dollar to be made exploiting it.
      • adastra22 4y ago
        What's the point if no one is allowed to visit?
        • 4y ago
• skissane 4y ago
  Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs
  • idlewords 4y ago
    I can give you a concrete counterexample to that. The Perserverance rover is carrying an entire experiment (MOXIE, which makes oxygen from CO2) whose only purpose is to serve a future human mission. NASA is encouraging more of this stuff, and it means automated Mars rovers will go to the boring sites that we need to prep rather than look at the phenomena of highest scientific interest on Mars. That said, I'd love to hear what people who work at JPL and NASA have to say to your point.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      Sample return missions would also be robotic.
      • kiratp 4y ago
        https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ Sample return step 1 (collect samples) is already underway.
      • MobiusHorizons 4y ago
        I think the assertion was that oxygen would be used to fuel the trip back to earth.
    • 4y ago
• kraig911 4y ago
  Great article. I wish it would answer this question though. If we don't someone else will. How do we prevent that. Getting to Mars seems to be a political goal not a scientific one (for most). If the USA doesn't then China will.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    China doesn't seem to go for the big ticket science projects, although anything can change in the future.
    • WillPostForFood 4y ago
      China is doing fine with big science projects. https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-spacraft-successfully-lands-moons-far-side-and-sends-pictures-back-home https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-spacraft-suc... https://www.space.com/china-expanding-optical-telescope-design https://www.space.com/china-expanding-optical-telescope-desi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
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  • idlewords 4y ago
    Having China divert hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades to a Mars mission would be a real win for the US and Taiwan.
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    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Betting against other countries' investments in exploration hasn't historically worked out well.
• golemotron 4y ago
  > The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. The thing that troubles me about these takes is the "we." There is no singular "we" in the world. Using the singular "we" deceives people into thinking that it is binary choice. In actuality, there are potentially many nations, many companies, and many people who can pursue resources and make a choice without impacting others. It has no more impact on you than your neighbor deciding whether to buy an insurance policy or not. Humanity is not a single mass of protoplasm, thank goodness.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    It is pretty clear to me that “we” in the article refers to NASA/the US Government rather than humanity.
    • komali2 4y ago
      That still doesn't make sense - as the author writes, such a project would require several miracles to survive the multiple election cycles it would go through. Why do people consider themselves a "we" with their government when said government regularly goes against the polled preferences of its citizens. Clear examples in the USA include the fact that weed is criminalized in its country and a huge swath of its citizens are imprisoned for marijuana crimes despite the nation's citizenry as a whole not wanting this. Another example includes the citizens preference for a guaranteed right to women's healthcare, and the government's failure to enshrine this right, or in some local cases, to actively outlaw women's healthcare. So when people use "we" and include their government despite not living in democracies, I get confused.
  • alehlopeh 4y ago
    And yet every single discussion about space exploration (including this one) is full of people espousing the hypothetical “we, humanity” as though it were a singular entity capable of making decisions. This kind of fanciful thinking is a reliable tell that a person belongs to the “religion” mentioned in TFA.
• hirundo 4y ago
  There is no goal our species can undertake that is more important than getting some of our eggs the heck out of this way too fragile basket of a planet. Learning to survive on Mars is one of the most practical ways to approach that goal. Mars is just a little less horrible than the other reachable potential incubators.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    Why is it important that our species survive longer than Earth? Honest question.
    • hirundo 4y ago
      The value of our survival is entirely subjective. But if you value it up to the point of Earth's destruction, why would you stop valuing it afterwards?
      • ffssffss 4y ago
        What's a situation where Earth is destroyed and Mars is habitable? It isn't climate change, since we could just use whatever Terraforming Magic Technology we used on Mars to fix Earth. It isn't an alien attack, since they'd notice us on Mars too. It isn't war, since landing people on Mars also means we could send weapons. What exactly are we solving for here?
        • dragonwriter 4y ago
          Chicxulub.
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          • sio8ohPi 4y ago
            Earth remains more habitable than Mars even following staggeringly large asteroid impacts. As evidence, note that 25% of species on earth survived Chicxulub; those species would not have survived transportation to Mars. And humans are well situated to be one of the survivors of a future large impact, by virtue of our tendency to burrow in the ground and to cache food. Indeed, one silver lining of the cold war is that major powers spent tremendous sums of money building fortifications with independent power and life support, as well as substantial food stockpiles, as well as numerous nuclear submarines which would weather the impact. Another Chicxulub might kill 8 billion people, and would be an immense humanitarian tragedy -- putting people on Mars won't save us from that. But we have the technology for survivors to ride it out today.
• issa 4y ago
  Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity. Better than just about everything else we could do. To accomplish it, we will solve many problems along the way. I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.
  • VHRanger 4y ago
    > Better than just about everything else we could do [citation needed]
    • palata 4y ago
      cough famine cough cough war cough poverty cough cough mass extinction
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war. Pfft these will just end up one and the same.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      I do not know what weapons world war three will be fought with, but the one after it will be fought with water purifiers and air filters.
    • dudeinjapan 4y ago
      Just wait until we discover lost Martian technology.
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  • fathyb 4y ago
    > Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity. I think you're underestimating how great Earth is, how awful other planets are, and how big the solar system is. > I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war. Colonization generally does not rhyme with peace. It's very likely there will be conflicts over territories. Space exploration and military production always have been tightly coupled. Where I live the space industry is dominated by "Airbus Defence and Space".
• wilg 4y ago
  Entirely unconvincing to someone who thinks it would be cool to go to Mars. Honestly not even worth having the argument. Humans do things to explore or try to push ourselves to do something new all the time. That's the whole fun of being alive. There's basically no real reason not to, despite this cynical laundry list of FUD. It's not trading off against any major Earth-based priorities. It's not that expensive. The only mildly compelling argument is the contamination one - but the only real alternative is simply never going anywhere but Earth in case there are microbes. No fun!
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  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > There's basically no real reason not to, despite this cynical laundry list of FUD You seem to be ignoring one of the main points of the article, which is that sending robots to explore the solar system rather than humans is cheaper, easier, and more effective. That alone is a very good reason to not focus on putting more humans in space.
    • idlewords 4y ago
      There's also the chance that those robots find something so compelling it reinvigorates human space flight.
    • dudeinjapan 4y ago
      Why not do both?
      • wilsonnb3 4y ago
        Because there is no benefit of sending a human rather than a robot. The article disuses this at length. This quote is a reasonable summary, I think. "The crew will not live in a Martian pueblo, but something resembling a level 4 biocontainment facility. And even there, they’ll have to do their lab work remotely, the same way it’s done today, raising the question of what exactly the hundreds of billions of dollars we’re spending to get to Mars are buying us."
• jccalhoun 4y ago
  I think it would be great to send humans to mars but it is kind of hard to justify. I don't think there will be a colony there - there's no real reason unless you want to make the argument that we need people on another planet in case we destroy earth. But it would still be cool.
  • enkid 4y ago
    There's no feasible way to destroy the Earth that wouldn't also destroy the survivability of Martian colony for the foreseeable future
• zabzonk 4y ago
  if we can't make it to mars (and,imho,we probably can't) then maybe we have the answer to the fermi paradox - it's to effing difficult.
  • maxerickson 4y ago
    What's the standard for "make it"? A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.
    • alwillis 4y ago
      > A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline. Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission. Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back. And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option. That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight. It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple). A trip to Mars and back is nearly 1000 days. It’s not gonna happen anytime soon.
      • kiratp 4y ago
        > And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. If we cannot, at a nation-state level, apply ourselves to 30-50 year goals, we might as well just give up on the survival of humanity.
      • maxerickson 4y ago
        From an economic capacity and technological perspective, we absolutely could build a vessel that had enough radiation shielding and thrust to get some people there (and probably even back). No need for a 1,000 day time frame. That's not enough to ensure the health and safety of the crew of course, but "marginal" is different than "ensure". Of course that isn't politically possible, but the other poster seemed to be talking about our capacity as a civilization in their comment, and really, the NASA outline presented in the article doesn't do much more to demonstrate it than my silly mission above. The "interesting" level for a civilization would be to build an actual self sustaining colony on Mars, and we probably don't currently have the capacity to do that (the challenges go from having the equipment needed to being able to manufacture it).
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• ryandrake 4y ago
  We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people. I'm not sure how we expect to establish any kind of working colony on Mars, where there is no atmosphere or accessible oxygen, food or accessible water, magnetic field to keep radiation away, reliable supply chain for delivering anything else we need. Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    That doesn't solve the scenario where everyone on earth gets wiped out.
    • thelamest 4y ago
      Mars is on (or above) a wiped out Earth level of difficulty already
      • bryanlarsen 4y ago
        Mars is more habitable than Earth would be during an extinction event. After the event the wiped out Earth would certainly be more habitable, but if there aren't any humans available to repopulate...
        • droopyEyelids 4y ago
          What extinction event could possibly make Earth less habitable than Mars?
        • legel 4y ago
          There is a broad range of possible human extinction events, e.g. asteroid impact, large-scale volcanism, viral epidemic, nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, ecological collapse, and autonomous robots [1]. Humans actively monitor and defend against each threat. In the U.S., NASA is committed to detecting asteroids, and recently successfully altered the course of one [2]. I believe we are most powerful to overcome extinction events as a united species on the planet we’ve evolved to live on over billions of years. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction [2] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2022/9/22/the-science-behind-nasas-first-attempt-at-redirecting-an-asteroid/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2022/9/22/the-science-behi...
• throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Venusian cloud cities actually seem pretty doable lately. Mars soil is essentially bleach, and the rems are a show stopper without a lot of lead. Venus has neither of those problems - if you stay in the nearly-habitable layer 50km up.
  • kjs3 4y ago
    Build and operate a cloud city right above your head for a couple of years without incident before you try and sell the idea of doing it a few tens of millions of miles a year on a planet that if you don't do it perfect, you get to drift down and get incinerated.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      Doesn't Venus's thick atmosphere make it different from trying to do it over Earth?
      • 8note 4y ago
        Yeah, it's harder because you'd be floating on acid rain
        • Apocryphon 4y ago
          Isn't the acidity normal in the upper atmosphere? Though I suppose up there the advantage of greater buoyancy might be lost.
          • idlewords 4y ago
            At about 55 kilometers (where it's close to 25 degrees C and maybe 2/3 of standard air pressure) there are clouds of sulfuric acid. I believe you can avoid them by going higher, but then you lose the appeal of having earthlike temperature and pressure.
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• mwattsun 4y ago
  I've spent long periods of time underwater with about 120 others. I've seen how people slowly go mad under those conditions so I always come around to how they are going to keep people mentally fit during those long months in deep space. It's probably much lonelier out there between Earth and Mars vs the space station with it's constant view of Earth and of possibility of rescue.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    Do you have any recommended reading (maybe even something you wrote yourself) about what it's like to live like that?
    • mwattsun 4y ago
      I have written anything because it's hard to describe. I'm sort of working on it. As for books, I didn't think I had any but just realized I went through a phase where I read nothing but Arctic and Antarctic exploration books. I related to the extremes we find ourselves in and the fear we feel when we realize there is no hope of rescue should something go wrong and it seems highly likely something will go wrong. This one is my favorite: The Worst Journey in the World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_World But I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Shackleton's amazing expeditions
    • tacoooooooo 4y ago
      NASA did a program/simulation of a Mars base on the Maura Loa volcano in Hawaii where they had a crew live for an extended period of time. There has been a lot of great writing about it as well as a good podcast (The Habitat)
  • jeffparsons 4y ago
    My recipe for success would be something like: 1. Send a lot of people (15?) and give people some flexibility in who they spend time with. 2. Give people a lot of space. I mean a _lot_ more than you think you need. Inflatable habs could be one approach, but if Starship gets going we might not even need that. 3. Let people escape. Loads of video games, books, creative projects, etc. 4. Help people anticipate the destination. Include remote control (obviously not real time) of robots at the landing site as one of the ongoing training exercises. Regularly simulate missions you'll be undertaking on the surface. 5. Give people lots of space at the destination. Cut and cover enormous living areas, and let people customise them. Give the crew something to look forward to. People survive worse, and some people are better suited to it than others. We'll start by sending the people who are expected to fare best. I suppose I am just some random on the internet, but I think a lot of people unjustifiably think "human factors" are insurmountable. Yes, it'll be hard, but the kind of people who plan these missions are used to solving hard problems.
• zwilliamson 4y ago
  Good read. Perhaps we need a competing Venus religion? Consider building a floating airship community in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Perhaps we could also control contamination easier being close to edge of space where we could put waste into an orbit for collection and disposal at a later time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operational_Concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa... Doesn't this seem like a much more exciting and compelling option compared to landing on Mars?
  • phaedryx 4y ago
    I think that Venus makes more sense as a next step than Mars does.
  • Apocryphon 4y ago
    Thankfully this essay does discuss Venus, briefly, in a footnote. I'm a big proponent of exploring that planet, partly as contrarianism against the Martian cultists, mostly because of this discussion on HN alerted me to the idea - even Mercury colonization is worth considering! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734333
    • idlewords 4y ago
      I agree with you; I also wish Bezos would go all-in on Venus and make things fun.
  • elihu 4y ago
    What would people do there in their airships? It seems kind of anti-climatic to settle a planet without ever actually being able to descend to the surface.
    • zwilliamson 4y ago
      Perhaps fly around in personal size drone ships. Hop between different air ship settlements. I would find that more climatic than the barren Martian surface.
• POiNTx 4y ago
  I think there's value in doing 'cool' things. Besides the science and technology that would come out of something like this, humans are still intrinsically pushed by doing cool stuff. And there's nothing wrong with pursuing cool stuff. Not everything has to have a 'real world value' to it. Humans value cool stuff and sending humans to mars is extremely cool.
  • titzer 4y ago
    It'd be cool if we stopped building weapons that could kill 3 billion people within a couple hours.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > Not everything has to have a 'real world value' to it. I agree with you but this is definitely one of the things that should have a real world value. Many of the brightest minds in the world when it comes to space would be working on a project like sending humans to mars for decades. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars it will cost. Plus it's not like the alternative of sending robots to every planet and large moon in the solar system is not cool.
    • POiNTx 4y ago
      I think you're right except that in this case it would not only be cool, there would definitely be some real world value too, overall I feel it is worth it. And sending robots is definitely super cool :)
  • palata 4y ago
    Well, doing cool stuff is a matter of preference. NASA is paid by the public, not from donations, right?
• dudeinjapan 4y ago
  "It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C." That would have been AWESOME if it happened tho!
  • m4rtink 4y ago
    Yeah, the same nonsense like Vikings landing in North America or people living behind the Arctic circle without modern technology. Completely impossible!
• dcj4 4y ago
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• dgeiser13 4y ago
  Speaking of Pinboard.
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• thangalin 4y ago
  "Some of the reasons for exploring space, when there are numerous social problems on earth, were described recently by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, Associate Director of Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. His beliefs were expressed in his reply to a letter from Sister Mary Jucunda, O.P., a nun who works among starving natives of Zambia, Africa." Source: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730015241/downloads/19730015241.pdf#page=129 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730015241/downloads/19... HTML: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ "Space flight, without any doubt, is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."
  • idlewords 4y ago
    This is an excellent defense of space exploration. But the point I make in the article is that we should stop identifying the project of sending people to Mars with space exploration. There are other ways to do it that lead to cooler spinoff technologies and better science.
    • thangalin 4y ago
      Humanity has no back-up. Compelling reasons to venture beyond this single, solitary rock include: Catastrophic volcanic eruptions. Devastating climate change. Extinction-level asteroid impact. Gravitational shifts from a rogue celestial body. Directed supernova blast. Coronal mass ejection. Unknown cosmic cataclysms. Loss of magnetosphere. All-out thermonuclear war. Unyielding plagues. Back up your data, back up your species.
      • 8note 4y ago
        Putting your backups in a garbage can doesn't do much for you. Most of the issues are already a problem on Mars, and the rest would affect earth and Mars at the same time. No less, the earthlings would be more likely to survive each of those situations because earth is way better in a general case.
• stevep98 4y ago
  If a single mission to mars cost $100b, then I would agree with the article that it would probably not be worth it. SpaceX is focused on reducing the cost, and no matter what you think of Elon, you have to agree that spacex focus on reusability in the falcon 9 has reduced their cost of access to space The problem is that reducing spacex’s cost doesn’t reduce the customer’s cost… until there are competitors that can push the price down. The focus on starship ultimately will reduce costs an order of magnitude again, and will permit vast payloads to mars. Why does this matter? Because much of the cost of engineering of space missions is in custom making things to be light, power efficient and reliable. If you can take more mass into space for less cost, you can add more solar panels into your design, make things more rugged, use off-the-shelf materials and you can double or triple the quantity for redundancy. Not only the launch costs go down, but all the associated engineering.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    > The problem is that reducing spacex’s cost doesn’t reduce the customer’s cost… SpaceX launches are way cheaper than competitors already. More competition would drive costs further down but it very much already exists. A SpaceX launch costs 5% per kg of what a space shuttle launch cost. A 95% discount is pretty far away from “doesn’t reduce customers cost”.
    • DangitBobby 4y ago
      How does it compare to the cost of a comparable rocket launch, ie, one without the known-to-be-wasteful [1] shuttle attachment? 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shutt...
      • colechristensen 4y ago
        SpaceX got contracts to launch a couple of GPS satellites for ~$80 and ~$90 million, compatible ULA launches were in the military budget for ~$420 million. It’s not like buying a bus ticket so pricing is complex and difficult to compare but spacex is all around dramatically cheaper than the competition.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  $500B over 25 years is $20B per year. This represents 0.05% of the G7 economy - basically noise. Let's get on with it.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Well, why waste money on probes? Why do basic research science that hasn't produced notable products? W That's the slippery slope. I do agree: 1) government funding won't produce the end result. 2) real space stationd or lunar stations make more sense I think we should let the economics of the starship rocket play out before planning anything. The starship rocket, if it achieves it's goals, changes the equation of staging equipment in low orbit. That will eventually filter through the industry.
• gusgordon 4y ago
  Given that there have been multiple mass extinction events in Earth’s history, it seems reasonable to spend a small fraction of GDP on colonizing another planet. How about something roughly equivalent to the amount we spend on chapstick?
  • morsecodist 4y ago
    This always seemed an odd motivation to me. I am not really attached to the idea of the species continuing in the abstract, my concern about a mass extinction event would be all of the individual living humans that would die. It would be little solace to me that a handful of humans remain clinging to life on a distant rock. Investing in something like asteroid defense makes total sense to me but creating a colony as a sort of backup doesn't really.
• controversial97 4y ago
  There is also the issue that the average temperature on Mars is -60 celsius. Keeping humans alive on Mars would require nuclear power sources much larger then any that have been flung into space so far. If you are thinking of solar power then consider than the watts per square meter is about 40% of that on earth, that a big pile of batteries would be needed as well and how much work it would be to maintain a huge solar farm.
  • elihu 4y ago
    One of the arguments in favor of Mars versus the moon is that at least it has a normal Earth-like day/night cycle. Solar power on the moon means having to have batteries that last through the 14 day nights. Mars is cold, but I don't think that's a huge problem. You just need an appropriate amount of insulation. I imagine a typical Mars habitat to be either sealed section of an existing lava tube or some kind of dome structure built at the bottom of a hole and then covered with sand, except for a stairwell. Either way, you'd line the inside with something. Aerogel, polystyrene, whatever works in that environment and whose ingredients can be transported to Mars in a compact form.
    • hparadiz 4y ago
      I was thinking you could dome a large canyon with plain old glass and steel. Pump up the atmosphere inside and you'd be able to farm with day light and have a huge "outdoor" public space for people to enjoy. Buildings could be built into the canyon walls.
      • elihu 4y ago
        I'm not sure if structures like that can be made that would also provide adequate protection from radiation. My default assumption is that any early Mars colony would be doing almost everything underground, because that's the safest place to be.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      Heating stuff up is easier than cooling it down - it could be actually quite an issue on the moon during the 14 days of uninterrupted sunlight. Apollo was actually running of open cycle evaporative water coolers to dump all that heat & cooling was one of the main factors dictating surface mission duration. You are also in vacuum, so you either need that open cycle system or pretty massive radiative cooling. And then of course you need to also survive 14 days of no sunlight at all. At least here vacuum helps to reduce heat loss. :)
• xphos 4y ago
  You don't go to Mars because it's easy. The biggest producer of technological advancements is pressure to solve hard problems. Not knowing is the whole point if you know how it's a worthless learning experience. It's always going to be hard to get a (the first?) human to Mars. It's 60 million of miles away. But one of the direct ways to solving this is to start working on them. Plus Neil Degrassi Tyson has a great point on this in that robots can make discoveries and are low risk but they are way less inspiring. You know the Mars rovers names but the average person doesn't however the average person has a much higher chance of know Neil Armstrong because people inspire that.
  • c-cube 4y ago
    If we want hard problems to solve, surviving climate change is a good one that's definitely going to matter soon. It's a lot more important than putting boots on Mars.
• lukeboi 4y ago
  While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated. Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?
  • Ralfp 4y ago
    Who would design and build experiments for those probes to run when they land on Mars? Are we sure economy of scale would apply to those?
    • lukeboi 4y ago
      I'm no expert but I don't think there's a shortage of experiments that people want to run on mars and the other solar system bodies, especially with sample return capabilities. We've been launching things into low earth orbit for ~60 years and orbital launch demand still seems to outnumber supply. If we could get our martian surface payload capacity to even 1% of our LEO payload capacity I'm sure there would be many organizations that would want to send something.
      • m4rtink 4y ago
        Definitely! Just look at all the Cubesat payloads people fly these days - all of that only really possible by the cost of individual satellite mission coming down. Before that one had to build and launch one big expensive satellite or beg another project to have their technology or experiment included on their mission, with a very limited number of available "slots".
    • wnkrshm 4y ago
      Partially, you can have lots of cheap instruments driving/flying/floating around to find something interesting to look at with the fewer expensive shots.
• inamberclad 4y ago
  It's not fair to lump in the _entire_ ISS budget in with exploration. They do plenty of materials science, pharmaceutical development, earth observation, and subatomic physics as well.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    No, they do not. The entire station has about 40 hours/week free for research, and the priority now (according to NASA) is testing next-generation life support systems. The only useful experiments on there are the ones that are automated.
• cardamomo 4y ago
  I had to chuckle at this analogy: "If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets."
• RagnarD 4y ago
  This guy seems to live an alternate reality where SpaceX and Elon Musk don’t exist. Yes, a NASA abomination would cost a fortune and be a disaster. NASA isn’t going to establish a Mars outpost, SpaceX is. It’s literally what every one of Musk’s businesses support and why Starship is being developed.
  • paulcole 4y ago
    This guy literally devotes an entire section of the linked article to dismissing Mr. Elon’s Wild Martian Ride as the vaporware that it is.
    • holler 4y ago
      While he brings up valid and interesting points to consider, I thought the article was sabotaged by his obvious disdain for Musk. He tried to camouflage it with some initial flattery but then devolved into hyperbole about hyper tunnel and Tesla bot, both of which are real projects with real engineers and people working on them.
      • paulcole 4y ago
        Theranos was a real project with real engineers and people working on it, too.
        • holler 4y ago
          That's not really a fair comparison and you know it. Elon Musk, Tesla, etc have proven track records.
• natch 4y ago
  In the longer timeframe of frequent large-scale Mars travel we will have humans and transhumans and human successor robots with different body plans that are more adaptable to the Mars environment. Any article on this topic that is not built around this eventuality will be missing what is going on, as this article does.
• snapplebobapple 4y ago
  To me this article misses the main point for not going to mars, which is it is stupid vs the next best option of investing in building up our space infrastructure near Earth, ideally finding profitable niches (moon/asteroid mining, solar electricity? zero gravity manufacturing? I don't know what, but I am pretty sure something can be profitable up there) that support that effort so that the spend on point 1 and 2 of the article's argument is motivated by positive cash flow driving us towards whatever the feasible version of an O'Neil cylinder ends up being. Why would we ever want to go back down an expensive to escape gravity well to a barren wasteland that we would have to terraform when the opportunity to terraform more manageable chunks of space will probably exist at the same technology investment level and will almost certainly be much faster/easier/cheaper than doing a whole planet at once?
• nimbius 4y ago
  in my opinion as a blue collar fly on the wall at this site, we dont "mars" because it. is. hard. i dont mean math hard or physics or biology i mean human species, everything hard. its interdisciplinary hard on a level that requires transcending class boundaries and race boundaries and if we cant even invite chinese taikonauts to our spacestation then we arent solving the real blockers. mars is an every human effort.
• SpaceLawnmower 4y ago
  I got to ask Scott Kelly why we should send humans to Mars instead of sending up more robots. His response (paraphrased) was: 1. Humans are explorers by nature 2. Humans can do science 100x faster than robots. 3. People will be inspired by Mars missions to go into STEM and even if they don't end up working for NASA, they will likely do other great things. 4. It gives people jobs The romantic explorers angle seems practically indefensible for the reasons listed in this article. I like the faster science angle the most in theory, but I didn't realize that contamination would be such a big deal.
  • komali2 4y ago
    The article seems to argue that point 2 is strictly false, or a red herring: humans can do the science on earth, while robots collect data in space. Point 4 seems more a political/economic failure than a valid reason to pour resources into a Mars project.
    • throw_pm23 4y ago
      Yes, and Point 3 is a fancy version of the broken window fallacy, while Point 1 is a BS "appeal to nature" that can be used to justify anything, including some of the worst things.
• modeless 4y ago
  I think this boils down to three concerns. One, that if you can't accept any risk for the crew then you have to do an insane amount of basically non-transferable R&D before going to Mars. Two, you can get more research per dollar from robotic probes instead. And three, you'll contaminate Mars. One, yes, there will be a lot of risk involved and it is infeasible to mitigate it all in our lifetimes. If we want to go to Mars in our lifetimes, we will need to accept more risk than possibly any manned space mission before. But would it be more risk than faced by, for example, sea explorers hundreds of years ago? Exploration has always been risky. I think it will be sad if we wait hundreds of years to mitigate every possible risk before trying to set foot on Mars. I think there are people out there willing to take on a relatively high level of risk; why deny them the opportunity? Two, sure, you might have better "ROI" on research using robotic space probes, but be careful with that argument, because if you think about it any further you'll realize that you'll get even better ROI not exploring the solar system at all. If your goal is research for practical purposes then there's plenty of that to do here on and around Earth. If your goal is research for research's sake, then I submit that that's not inherently more virtuous than a goal of human space exploration. I personally prefer the latter and I think the public agrees. And if your goal is research to enable eventually sending humans out there, then we'll learn a whole lot more and faster by actually sending humans as soon as it is remotely feasible. Three, contamination is inevitable unless you plan to make Mars off limits forever. And if by some chance there is actually life on Mars to contaminate, then I bet there's life elsewhere in the solar system to discover too. I doubt very much that Mars would be our singular chance in the solar system to investigate uncontaminated extraterrestrial life. Also, natural processes have likely already landed bits of Earth on Mars as meteorites, just as bits of Mars have fallen to Earth. If your thesis is that extremophile bacteria that we don't even know about are omnipresent on Earth and could survive on Mars, then they could certainly have contaminated Mars already. And if they did, millions of years of evolution would certainly enable them to outcompete anything we would accidentally introduce from Earth.
• double_nan 4y ago
  My take on why mars: there is no countries and no established laws maintained by existing societal structures. There is just no any other power other than the nature itself. Any colony on earth is doomed to be captured by a larger power sooner or later. I think in the eyes on ppl who are dreaming about Mars, nature is a weaker foe than other man.
  • elihu 4y ago
    I think as soon as people are moving to Mars, you'd at a minimum at least need some kind of commonly agreed-to standard around land ownership. I.e. maybe each new settlement implicitly owns all the land in a twenty mile radius. If you want to settle closer than that to an existing settlement, that's fine as long you can work out an agreement with the original colony.
    • double_nan 4y ago
      That is true, but for several generations the first (if not the only) law will be survival of the colony, hence extreme meritocracy. That is very appealing for very many ppl.
• ausbah 4y ago
  I love all the efforts humans put towards trying to understand and tame the wilds of space, but it makes me immensely sad that we choose not to put the same efforts towards vastly easier & simpler problems that would have a much more immediate positive impact. Food insecurity, medical access, climate change, etc. are all problems we know how to solve - but we don't.
  • perardi 4y ago
    While I think the idea of colonizing Mars is a fantasy, I also disagree that your problems are “easy”. Because all those problems are human problems. Humans are short-sighted and selfish. Climate change stands out here. Sure, we know to fix that. Now make it happen. Get politicians to tell the fossil fuel extractors and refiners in their districts are out of a job. Now get people to give up their cars. Now tell people they can’t eat meat. Oh, those are extreme examples, you might say. There are economic incentives and taxation that could ease the transition and provide incentives. We can develop better photovoltaics and a host of other green energy tech. Sure, we absolutely can! Now create those taxes so they don’t create perverse incentives, and we can have reduced tax spec…ah, and now it is way way way beyond easy.
• ffwacom 4y ago
  It's more up to Elon as the man in the arena, rather than Maciej Cegłowski who would be the timid soul in this case.
• kiratp 4y ago
  Arguments against human colonization of the solar system (moon/Mars/etc) sound just like trying ot argue against the westward expansion from the 13 colonies. We will have a Donner Party-like memorial on Mars. And there will be a McDonald’s next to it. You’re not going to win this argument because it is an argument against the basic nature of humanity, the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain.
  • programmarchy 4y ago
    Yes, this. There’s a reason that Picard was the captain of Enterprise, rather than Data. Bio-nietzcheans will lead the way, not robo-nerds.
  • perardi 4y ago
    the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain Is that a basic urge? The actual glory of exploration? Or is it the need for resources? You reference the Donner Party, which was on its way to California, which had actual useable and useful resources. So of course people wanted to go there—there’s an ocean and sunshine. Mars has…uh…corrosive dust?
    • programmarchy 4y ago
      Why do you think Alex Honnold free climbed El Cap? Why do people pay money to go skiing, sky diving, or scuba diving?
      • djur 4y ago
        > Why do you think Alex Honnold free climbed El Cap? Not to live on it!
      • hospadar 4y ago
        To carry a single raisin to the top, then he climbed it a million more times to bring more raisins, then he made a jet engine from the raisins. Then he started bringing more raisins so that he could make a raisin plane for the amazing raisin engine. In the intervening thousand years, other climbers learned to cybernetically modify their bodies to be able to climb every rock face on the planet. The resulting boom in cybernetic technology granted immortality and immunity to all diseases to humanity. Humans never did master the raisin jet though (because they learned to transfer their conciseness over the internet so honestly jet engines seem kinda silly). /S
• JoeyBananas 4y ago
  I accept that human space flight to Mars is not optimal from a scientific perspective due to possibilities for contamination and cost. But I also think there is a better argument to be made for boots on Mars than what appears in this article. For one, the new technology needed for manned space flight is more likely to have medical and defense applications. But mkre importantly, boots on Mars would be a huge political victory. Think about it like this: corporations sponsor Formula 1 cars because the prestige and visibility they get has all sorts of benefits. A manned mission to Mars would be like the holy grail of marketing. It would be like putting a permanent ad in the history books that every literate human on Earth will see for the next thousands and thousands of years. It's not unreasonable to say that the good publicity from this will prolong the lifespan of the nation, and that's something that I'd expect Congress to pursue.
• divbzero 4y ago
  > The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home. Maybe the next fancy device we send to Mars should be a high-throughput sequencer to look for metagenomic Martian DNA.
• perryizgr8 4y ago
  There are many problems with this article, and this sort of thinking explains why mankind has been trapped in a counter-productive rut for the last half century when it comes to space exploration. > Contamination Concerns around Mars contamination are hogwash. We want to contaminate the f out of Mars. We want microbes to infiltrate every nook and cranny of every crevice on the planet, just like it is on Earth. If there are indigenous species, they will compete, and the best will win out. If we discover something harmful to humans, we will develop vaccines or pesticides. The author must keep in mind that this is real life, not Star Trek with high-minded Prime Directives and some deep philosophical mission. Our mission is to colonise a new planet and make it liveable for the next billion humans. There is no Prime Directive. > Research and engineering for life support Yes, a lot of research is required to develop self-contained life support systems. It won't happen unless we do it. It won't happen if we focus only of robotics and automation. Human space exploration is the end goal. Dithering about with drones and robots is fun, but the real dream is a man (or 100) on Mars. > human physiology, physiological effects of partial gravity, risk the safety of the crew You cannot embark on a planet terraforming mission and not take on risk. The whole endeavour is risky. Not doing is also risky, we might not have a pleasant Earth in 200 years. Choose people who are of strong, sound minds (as best we can evaluate) and who are willing to risk their lives for a chance of going to Mars. We definitely should not wait around until we are technologically capable of sending a foolproof 200% safe-for-humans capsule. > “Mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud” Amen.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    We want to avoid contaminating Mars before we explore it so we can learn more about the origin of life on Earth, and the distribution of life in the universe. It's not like terraforming technology is ready to go and the researchers are holding it back with unreasonable demands. A Mars landing brings your dream of colonization no closer while potentially ruining a scientific dream that is just as valid, and far more achievable.
  • komali2 4y ago
    > The author must keep in mind that this is real life, not Star Trek with high-minded Prime Directives and some deep philosophical mission. Speak for yourself. I want the continuation of the human species, I don't want to unnecessarily genocide another untold number of species to make that happen. I similarly don't like when we cause species here on earth to go extinct. I think space agencies should adopt a Prime Directive. Do you believe the continuation of the human race requires genocide, here and on mars? That seems very zero-sum, I believe I can argue against this being necessary.
• hristov 4y ago
  Thank you for explaining clearly and thoroughly what I have been trying to get across in many HN comments here. Putting a Man on Mars promises to be the biggest non-military waste of tax money. The problem is that it is a very well marketed waste of tax money. It came with its own hollywood movie and a very effective guerilla marketing campaign. When I see those "cool" people wearing NASA shirts in bars, it makes me sick ... it is as if they want to steal money from me. And I actually thought NASA was pretty cool back when they were doing mostly robotic missions that had a lot of bang for the buck. But back then of course there wasn't a marketing campaign to make NASA cool, nobody was wearing a NASA shirt in a bar, and NASA got constantly criticized even for doing its cost effective robotic missions. Now that they are on the verge of a really massive boondogle, all of a sudden everyone is a NASA fan.
• beau_g 4y ago
  Are there good records of opinions on 1400s Europeans thoughts on sea exploration or colonial Americans thoughts on exploring the West? Curious to see if these sorts of risk averse, "practical" arguments are mirrored in those times.
  • dj_gitmo 4y ago
    I’m not sure, but traveling to mars would be a little different if there were already human beings living there.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Or we had the certainty that we could just plop stuff we took with us and it would provide us food. And that water rains from sky and we can keep breathing all the way... Minor things really...
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      It depends - I think some of the early explorers would welcome just gathering the resources and going back instead of fighting hostile wildlife and local residents.
  • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Yeah there is: Spices which were not available in Europe because Ottoman Empire decided to cut off Christian Europe from silk road. So Europeans weren't going on what if journey, but they were trying to find a way to India, bypassing Ottomans. Spanish found America and it's resources (sugar cane, tobacco, potato, corn) and Portuguese found a way around Africa to India to get back to the spice trade. The thing is that European motivation was clearly defined, while motivation to go to Mars is not clear at all, because there is nothing valuable there at this point. But imagine finding on the Mars an alien shipwreck from 200 milion years ago, there would be several outposts build within this decade, because technology is the spice trade of today.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      The recently released Terra Invicta grand strategy game captures this quite nicely - a credible alien invasion threat makes humans do some crazy things, like multiple Mars bases in 2028 & all the good spots on Ceres already occupied by outpost. And there is even some alien technology salvage when Alien warships happen to have a human induced accident (read 240 converted naval anti-ship cruise missiles slam into them).
• stonogo 4y ago
  I guess you can take the boy out of the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia, but you can't ever take the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia out of the boy. This whole article boils down to "I don't think we should go to Mars because I don't think we should, it would cost too much (limit not specified) money, it doesn't seem to benefit me immediately, and we should use robots instead, and it's all-or-nothing on the robot thing." There are so many unstated assumptions, baked-in arbitrary limitations, and downright bizarre arguments that I'm struggling to understand what the point of the article is, if there is one beyond "stop it." I suppose if you really dislike the armchair-engineering hype factory of Elon Musk and you were looking for an armchair-engineering Space Eeyore, here's your boy?
• masswerk 4y ago
  As many are talking about inspiration and inspirational goals, it may be worth risking a view on this from a more cultural perspective. Mars is really the "what's next?" to the Apollo program and how it shaped our cultural perspective on space activities. It's the same thing, scaled up in distance, size, journey time, complexity, number of fundamental problems – and a fundamental lack of ideas what to do there, as it's all about going there. However, there had been other visions of space. We do not have to go further than the mid-century kids room: tin toy flying saucers zipping around asteroids (possibly making a fortune from mining), tin can shaped rovers stomping over the Lunar surface on their telescopic legs – and where there's a Lunar rover with perspex windows and some business to go about, there's probably also a vision of Moon bases and space ports now long forgotten, as these have dropped out of the popular imaginary. In a sense, Mars may not be that high hanging motivational fruit, it may be even the end of space inspiration, just the thing we clung to as we ran out of visions for space.
• dboreham 4y ago
  It's fine, as long as they call the ship the B Ark.
• pizlonator 4y ago
  I think that enough of us humans want to go to mars that it’ll happen regardless of what congress or bloggers have to say about it. Some of those who want to go there create arguments to justify it (exploration! science! profit! new technology! extinction if life on earth!), but I view these as post hoc rationalizations. So yeah the best “why mars” argument is maybe just that someone will do it for the lulz. Even if congress or musk don’t get around to it, someone eventually will.
• tjpnz 4y ago
  >The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat? How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.
  • BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
    Talk of Starship carrying 100 people is in reference to the "Earth to Earth" transportation idea, i.e. carrying passengers on a short hop between continents.
    • tjpnz 4y ago
      When was that ruled out for Mars? According to this SpaceX source (first Google result) it's still 100. https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf
      • once_inc 4y ago
        It probably isn't. Most mission critical problems and bottlenecks are resource depletion problems, and those can be easily solved by just sending a shitload of resources to Mars before sending people. Need to scrub CO2 from the air? Nope, I'll just send over 10 extra cargo starships filled with Oxygen. Food for 100? Coming right up! The whole plan hinges on making enough money with starship that sending up 100 rockets with triple-redundant resources becomes economically viable. At that point, you can slowly start building a somewhat self-sustaining infrastructure. But until you get there, the plan will just look foolish.
  • moloch-hai 4y ago
    There is no possibility of a "Starship" can carrying 100 people to Mars. NASA has figured the can has room for a maximum of 17 astronauts on such a trip. And, that is without spacesuits or anything else they would need once there. So figure another, cargo, can for the stuff they would need on the ground. Maybe bring along a couple of spacesuits in the crew can, to wear while they fetch the rest. And, maybe just 9 crew so none kill each other on the way out.
• inkyoto 4y ago
  > Contamination risk is a real showstopper for Mars, one of those problems that gets worse the more carefully you look at it. Not just Mars but anywhere humans choose to go to. Since a) discovery of extremophiles; b) humans themselves are a living (and flourishing) bioweapon (from an extraterristrial world's perspective) – we have to accept a simple fact that full decontamination or sanitation is not possible, at least not at the current level of the technological progress of our civilisation. There will be microorganisms that will survive UV, α-, β-, γ- and X-rays albeit in reduced numbers. A single toilet flush in certain cirumstances can be a biological catastrophe even here on Earth today, and a single bowel movement might yield a unmitigated disaster in extraterrestrial worlds that could wipe alien biomes or civilisations out. And select extremophiles will absolutely take advantage of a new environment, adapt and evolve. What the extremophiles will evolve into and that might entail for an extreterrial world as well as ramifications for humans are the biggest unknowns. Then, at the extreme end we have prions here on Earth that we do not understand, can't neutralise, can't decontaminate prion infected surfaces and tools, and – more generally – can't contain the prions in any way other than hurling them into a nearby star (not practically possible today). What the prions will be able to do in a unknown environment is a very uneasy thought at the very least. So the actual question is: what is the solution? Should we stop the space exploration out of fears of infecting other worlds with terrestrial microbiomes, sit around and do nothing? We won't even be able to visit asteroids in our own solar system if we do not find a way to allay our own fears. Or, should we keep the humans on Earth, send out robotic missions instead and deprive the humans of fun of exploring new worlds and satisfying our own curiosity? We are curious creatures. We need a solution.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • MicolashKyoka 4y ago
    I don't understand why that is a concern. Whether some microorganisms live or die because of us ultimately is of no importance. What we should concern ourselves however, is any risks posed by them to us.
• scythe 4y ago
  >If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse. Even if life on Mars miraculously stumbled upon the same four (five) nucleobases, the same twenty (-two) amino acids, glucose, glycerol esters, and (deoxy)ribose, it would still seem pretty unlikely that it chooses the same three-base sequences corresponding to the same amino acids in RNA translation. But maybe we're still holding out hope for panspermia? And adaptable though our microbes are on megayear time-scales, we're also talking about the same cells that mostly can't survive intentional cultivation, as the author himself notes, so outcompeting the life native to Mars would be a real feat — merely surviving cold and dryness through dormancy is a well-known microbial swindle. I suppose it isn't impossible, but I have yet to hear a good argument that it's feasible. But overall I agree, Mars has nothing. It's not even very big: the surface of Mars is roughly the size of the Pacific Ocean, well below doubling what we started with. Meanwhile, the asteroids are full of palladium.
  • Tepix 4y ago
    That sounds pretty big to me. Earth's land surface is the same size as Mars':149 vs 144 million km².
• mikewarot 4y ago
  A human colony on Mars should be a point well along the way to a goal of having a complete self sustaining Martian supply chain. We should approach this in stages, starting with the basics. A government funded, fully documented, publicly disclosed second supply chain for everything. Starting with dirt in the ground to finished materials. Materials, crops, electronics, the whole network of supplies and suppliers. Every single bit if this network should be documented and stored in the archives of that network. We could then start a 3rd network with the goal of miniaturizing it, reducing complexity, and especially the physical volume of the entire system. Ideally, in the distant future, it could be reduced to a Von Neuman probe. I think if we do that homework here a few times, we can then see if it could be implemented in other places on earth, in Antarctica, Above the "death line" in the Himalayas, etc. It's my strong belief that having a true backup to human life on Mars requires this homework first. Then again on the Moon, then finally on Mars and other destinations.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Just thought of this a bit. Take something fundamental, food? Now you need water, fertilizers and light. Okay, so either you have greenhouses or vertical farming. Either case you need some fertilizers, production of these could probably be done, just need to find inputs. Water is simple enough if you don't loose too much of it. Light is big question. Go with leds or grow lamps, how do you make those and power for them? And by make I mean all components needed. And all components used to make stuff that makes them and so on. Not to forget generating the electricity.
• SpacePortKnight 4y ago
  I understand that the article is trying to promote robotic space explorations over human one. But we are humans, and even if a robot could do things better than us, people doing those things inspire more people. Having said I do agree that going to Mars has lot of risks and would require decades of cooperation between different governments. Which is why I think it's better and feasible to build a moon base/city first. The moon is only 3 days far which would make space tourism really feasible. The close proximity would be helpful in engineering, healthcare, entertainment etc. Lastly a proper city on moon can be a source of a lot of technological advancements and also a source of immense inspiration for all of humanity.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    I would put it in orbit around the Moon. There’s not much on the Moon, other than regolith at the bottom of a relatively shallow gravity well I guess. If you expect the Moon to be a stopover in space tourism, don’t make the people go down the gravity well, that’s a waste of energy for everyone who wants to visit it. We could treat the Moon as a particularly large asteroid-mining process, don’t live on it, just extract resources. I don’t think there’s much point in learning to live on all these different rocks. Most of space is space, we should focus on learning to live in space.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      At least the low lunar orbit is usually unstable due to Moon being chunky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)#Effect_of_lunar_mascons_on_satellite_orbits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)... But there are exception & Lagrange points should be generally safe.
• Isinlor 4y ago
  The main challenge is rapid rockets reusability. The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times. Whether we go with manned exploration or robot exploration. Whether we choose the Moon or Mars. Nothing comes even close to the importance of rapid rockets reusability.
  • m4rtink 4y ago
    Definitely! But long term we need to start extracting resources in space, without that we still wont get far.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Currently and in near future sending colonist to Mars is either quick or slow death sentence. Something fails and they die fast, they get there and stay there. Slow starvation or systematic failure unless we keep shipping stuff in infinitely. And anything there will have myriad of fun and fantastic failure modes. Not to forget that even things like electronics here slowly fail... First step really is to solve these issues here before we even attempt to kill people there...
• Tepix 4y ago
  I agree with many of the points in this article, even if it is painful. However, in the chapter "The Mars religion" the author fails to explain why he disagrees with the transhumanists who think mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Also Musk often states that the window of opportunity is open now and we don't know for how long.
• pavlov 4y ago
  > “At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere.” To me this is the most exciting point. Why aren’t we already building half a dozen probes simultaneously to look for life in the clouds of Venus, icy caverns of Europa, and every other interesting place in the solar system? A steady stream of beautiful pictures and — hopefully — revolutionary biological discoveries from these unique worlds would seem like a much better investment than human selfies on Mars whose dusty mountains the public has already seen many times.
  • sneak 4y ago
    The cost to orbit is, err, astronomical. I'm sure that when Starship craters the cost per kilogram to Earth orbit (following it making some literal craters in development) we will be doing just that.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      Yeah - it should not just be more probes, but faster probes & quicker pictures as a result, if you can put 1000 tons of fuel under every probe you send.
• theteapot 4y ago
  Shows picture of "Entrance to underground cavern on Pavonis Mons" then states "The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars ..". Your failing pretty hard so far.
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• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  > ...a literal Venereal disease... No, that would still be figurative. The entire mars thing is discredited with NASA budgets and criticism of US government programs, then the criticism is taken as a given, the idea called a cult, and then and only then is private endeavor, the thing thats actually going to go to mars, even brought up. If anything the arguments are good ones, against bureaucracy. When private endeavor is addressed, of course Musk is mentioned. Then all his marketing hype is mentioned, he's chocked up as a charlatan, the one thing conveniently, conspicuously left out being the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far. Talk about hand wavy. The entire article is interspersed with unfunny jokes designed to make sure you don't think too much about what you just read. It's a weak "this is a dumb idea" argument after another that does a very good job of hiding the fact that it has almost no arguments of substance. It basically amounts to "we don't know how to recycle shit in a closed loop, the money could be used to send robots, we don't want to contaminate mars with coronavurus" (I can play the lame joke at the end of every important sentence game too). You don't think people should go to mars? Too bad. People are going to go.
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  • djur 4y ago
    > Musk... [is chalked] up as a charlatan... [leaving out] the fact that SpaceX has delivered on everything it has set out to do so far There's no contradiction here. Musk has regularly made ludicrous claims about what SpaceX is going to achieve, while SpaceX is much more conservative in its official statements. The entire operating model of SpaceX makes it difficult to claim that they've ever failed -- the fact that they're now on their fourth brand of "interplanetary starship" (MCT, ITS, BFR, Starship) can be chalked up to "iterative development", as can the fact they abandoned their first planned moon flyby, etc. I think this is a reasonable way for SpaceX to operate, but Musk uses it as a kind of "credibility battery".
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Most of this is written from a US perspective, which ignores an important fact: it looks like it is going to be the Chinese that get boots back on the moon first and they might also move their eyes towards Mars soon. And they are not going to ask US congress for permission either. There's a new space race on with China. Mars is a prestigious target to nail that will vastly expand what's possible technically for whomever gets there first. It's going to be China unless the US stops navel gazing and gets its act together. And love him or hate him but Elon Musk has built a pretty nice Starship that might help getting that mission done. The traditional route of slinging trillions at the likes of Boeing is indeed going to take decades. We know that because that's the past 50 years. It doesn't work. But Starship is nearly ready for operations and might cut that time frame short. And its a bar gain in comparison. There was no point in going to the moon either in the late nineteen sixties. But it was preferable for the US to get there before the Russians. The moon program was really expensive and yielded a lot of indirect return on investment. Lots of fat government checks that went straight into the US economy. In the end, all it took was Kennedy telling people that we were going. Only took eight years or so from there. The Saturn 5 was way bigger than it needed to be because the people behind it were already looking at Mars. The Mars capable successor was already being developed until it was cancelled by Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_C-5N Anyway, Starship was designed for Mars, is going to the moon first, and might be flying there soonish. A bit over eight years from merely being a crazy idea. Sounds familiar? Only this time it won't be a one off. This thing is reusable and there might be quite few "flight-proven" ones flying towards the end of the decade. It will be very tempting to use one for what it was designed for.
  • tptacek 4y ago
    This begs the question of the whole essay, doesn't it? So what if China gets "boots on Mars" first? They'll waste hundreds of billions of dollars (and likely many lives) doing it, and be no better off. If we're really worried, we can just counter them by sending killer robots to Mars.
  • djur 4y ago
    I hope China doesn't land on Mars because of the fragility of the Martian environment, but I see no geopolitical threat in them wasting a lot of money trying. (Obligatory: Elon Musk did not build a Starship. SpaceX is building it.)
• LarsDu88 4y ago
  The current generation of mega rockets being built by SpaceX and Boeing will hopefully make the next generation of unmanned research far more compelling. They'll enable feats like drilling meters down under the topsoil. If Mars does indeed happen to be a completely sterile wasteland (which it very likely is given that evidence of life contaminates every crevice of the earth), then human inadvertently depositing microbial hitchhikers on the surface of that world may be the most consequential legacy of humanity 10 million years from now
• LarsDu88 4y ago
  I think this post and many of comments here fail to grasp that a true full scale colonization mission of Mars would likely neccistate some sort of terraforming effort in the far future. Along really long timescales, you can even imagine the opposite effort to alter human biology. The major first step is simply getting there. Another factor is that the civilization that is able to reach Mars is going to be the one that has achieved the capability to dominate Earth. The original purpose of the space race was war, and though people no longer think about it, mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons.
  • ausbah 4y ago
    >mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons if your goal is only destruction sure, the likes of ICBMs are great. for conventional warfare when you want to do things like topple regimes, annex resources, subjugate peoples, etc. not so much. it's exactly why Russia hasn't used nukes in the Ukrainian conflicts.
    • m4rtink 4y ago
      Still, optical and Radar satellites and possibly space based signal intelligence definitely play a huge role. Not to mention artillery crews directing strikes via drone footage streamed over Google Meet running of their Starlink connection.
    • LarsDu88 4y ago
      Right now we are looking at the effects of HIMARS rocket artillery in Ukraine. Each rocket costs over $50,000. Cruise missiles cost over $1 million. Many nations can produce rockets, but cannot produce them cheaply. Despite the US and Russia having global strike capabilities, this stuff doesn't come cheap. If they were cheap (say via continued investment in space exploration), you basically have a win button for any global conflict. There's literally no reason rocket artillery has to cost over 50 grand in the grand scheme of things. In a total war, we could probably get it down to less than $2000.
• verisimi 4y ago
  Some of the comments here are from true believers. It strikes me though how close this all is to religion. Reaching for Mars is equivalent to reaching for heaven. Now, I know this is based in science etc. But looking at the effect on the emotions, from a cultural perspective, it's interesting. There is religious fervour there, faith, heaven (Mars), hell (uninhabitable earth), lots of details, priests (NASA and other space agencies), but not much personally verifiable knowledge or experience.
• hoseja 4y ago
  What a Red Martian take, ugh.
• rmrf100 4y ago
  Go get it, inspire everyone!
• andrewflnr 4y ago
  One must ask the question: why bother exploring space at all? Don't tell me it's for the spinoff technologies, those are a fringe benefit at best, and have dubious return on investment compared to more direct funding. No, it's just because we're curious. We just want to. Eventually logical arguments about how to acheive goals bottom out at raw, built-in desire. And no matter how many silly-sounding phrasings of the goal that you come up with, the fact remains that we want to go there. We just want to. (This is no defense of any particular extant plan. OTOH I suspect OP underestimates the value of life support tech here on earth. But these are side questions.)
  • pnt12 4y ago
    Maybe the fantasy is better than the reality, as it often is. Dreaming of going to space makes some people happy and they won't let it go. Doesn't mean it's a good idea! But sometimes it's productive to have an unreachable goal: it gives us the motivation to improve towards it and reap the benefits, even if we never hit it.
• benreesman 4y ago
  It would be simpler, cheaper, and easier to build a self-sufficient habitat orbiting Mars than to live on it. Even if you could build an atmosphere the lack of a magnetosphere would just see it blown away in the solar wind, if you even still cared after your cancer had cancer from the radiation. If you want to figure out how to live and grow crops so far underground that solar radiation doesn’t bother you, Earth is a far easier place to do that, and equally resistant to asteroid impact and equally helpless to gamma ray burst. When big houses became to common men built mansions, when mansions became too pedestrian men built castles on the sea in the form of yachts. There are plenty of worthwhile reasons to explore and exploit the universe beyond our atmosphere, and in time I believe we will master not only the solar system but many others like it. The ego of men is no longer a productive driving force for that. That works when the enemy is less powerful men. When the enemy is physics only a rational, long-term, consensual commitment can prevail.
  • jasmer 4y ago
    Ego and hubris matter as much in physics as anything else. The contention here I think is missing the possibility of a breakthrough or two. We are making 'step functions' now and again in a lot of things, it's not entirely infeasible that a couple of step functions makes space just a lot easier. Maybe in superconducting or power generation or wireless energy transfer. Maybe if energy is super cheap and light, we really can haul a couple of orders of magnitudes more mass up into space, the 'close system' of keeping humans alive equation shifts enough to where it becomes much more feasible.
  • kimmk 4y ago
    Regarding atmosphere loss: currently Mars is losing about 95 kt of atmosphere per year [1]. Actively offsetting that amount of loss is not that big of an effort. Also I guess if you would generate an ozone layer, part of this atmosphere loss due to UV radiation would be attenuated. Obviously, generating an atmosphere on Mars would be immensely energy intensive and likely possible only after we level up on the Kardashev scale. 1. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4988 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4988
  • m4rtink 4y ago
• SunlightEdge 4y ago
  How about we just continue to have robots colonize Mars? Just get increasingly sophisticated machines down there to build up the infrastructure. Maybe in 200 years they might have built some nice domes and have earth like gravity/atmosphere inside that animals and plants can be brought to Mars. And maybe then some humans might see it as an attractive destination. In the mean time, we can colonize difficult places like under the ocean, the Sahara desert, Antarctica, maybe even the moon.
• shmageggy 4y ago
  I think this actually undersells the economic disparity between human and robotic exploration, particularly when extrapolated out to the next couple of decades. Yes, robots today are cheaper, more resilient, and more capable than us, but they are about to become vastly more so on the timeline of a manned Mars mission. AI is happening right now. Roboticists have not been ignoring the wild successes of large language and vision models. The already thin arguments for human presence will sound even weaker in a decade or two when the robots already there are vastly more capable in every way than they already are.
• rlt 4y ago
  > If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets > the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real. I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff. SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.
  • smcl 4y ago
    So the door panels are questionable. But the other two are huge red flags, no? These are two supposedly moonshot-type projects that have turned out to be outright lies: - Hyperloop was a sort of snake-oil to squash High-Speed Rail - The robot as a guy in a suit dancing on a stage ... I've no idea where he was trying to with that. I see there's been some movement on their robot since it was "launched", but why on earth did they start off with the weird dancing suit guy?
    • rlt 4y ago
      Seriously? The robot dancing was an obvious joke. He was not trying to pass it off as a real robot and literally no one thought he was. Tesla is actually working on the real thing and they’ve demoed admirable progress 1 year after the initial announcement. The hypertunnel reference seems to be conflating two (related) things: the Hyperloop concept and the Boring Company. The Hyperloop thing is definitely questionable, but to steelman it: he truly believes the High Speed Rail is a waste of money and we should be more forward thinking with something like the Hyperloop, even if he didn’t personally intend to build it. After all, if it was entirely fraud and then what did he have to gain from killing the High Speed Rail? I guess a small fraction of the taxes he pays not going to something he didn’t like? Also, the origin story suggests it was not concocted as a means to kill the High Speed Rail: “The recent plans for a version of vacuum train called Hyperloop emerged from a conversation between Elon Musk and Iranian-American Silicon Valley investor Shervin Pishevar when they were flying together to Cuba on a humanitarian mission in January 2012. Pishevar asked Musk to elaborate on his hyperloop idea, which the industrialist had been mulling over for some time. Pishevar suggested using it for cargo, an idea Musk hadn't considered, but he did say he was considering open-sourcing the concept because he was too busy running SpaceX and Tesla. Pishevar pushed Musk to publish his ideas about the hyperloop, so that Pishevar could study them.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop_One https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop_One
• PicassoCTs 4y ago
  Cause mars comes to us, not we to mars. Please redirect your scientific enthusiasm to the catastrophes at hand.
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  I know this isn't the point of the article.. but let's fix our climate problems at home first, before worrying about terraforming Mars.
• fernandohur 4y ago
  Moving to Mars is analogous to a full app re-write. Instead of dealing with the "technical debt" that we've built on earth over the past couple thousand years, the proposal is that we start off with a clean slate. I'm not saying it can't work, but if software engineering has thought us anything at all it's that full app re-writes are generally a terrible idea. The sheer complexity and vast amount of unknown unknowns is what generally kills these projects and what would also kill any attempt at re-building civilisation in a foreign planet. Don't re-write, refactor and fix the bugs on earth.
  • vardump 4y ago
    How about... do both?
    • fernandohur 4y ago
      IMO the cost
  • zopa 4y ago
    Except there’s no intention to deprecate Earth and replace it with Mars. Not a rewrite, just new parallel development. Should we never start new software projects at all? All the code ever written should be in one repo (probably in FORTRAN)?
    • palata 4y ago
      We'll we are accumulating bugs at such a pace that the app may become unusable in the near future...
• 867-5309 4y ago
  however soundly damning this appears, our species depends on exploration for survival at some point in time, the costs/risks/futility will be close enough to zero to warrant such exploration we left the sea, we left the trees, we left the caves, we will inevitably leave the planet
• daneel_w 4y ago
  Authors like this one previously also wrote poorly aged hit pieces like "Why not across the oceans", "Why not to the skies" and "Why not to space".
  • pnt12 4y ago
    That's very dismissive. I don't agree that doing more of the same is good because it worked out before, even if the current goal is harder by many orders of magnitude. Criticism is good! Let the best ideas prevail.
  • MicolashKyoka 4y ago
    Exactly, if we were to listen to such tales (or similar ones by penny pinchers), we would still be hitting rocks to make fire in our little caves. Venturing beyond is an amazing way to enrich our knowledge graph.
    • palata 4y ago
      Exactly, if we were to listen to such tales we may even still be living in a sustainable world! Luckily, we're steadily destroying life because we can. /s
      • ikrenji 4y ago
        space exploration is not responsible for the poor state of the current environment, nor will forgoing on space exploration fix our planet...
        • palata 4y ago
          Not directly, like most things. What is responsible is essentially the use of fossil fuels, and space exploration would not be possible without them. Now, not only fossil fuels are limited (we have passed peak oil), but we don't remotely have an alternative. So I believe that there is an argument to make that insanely expensive, hard, and pretty much useless engineering projects (w.r.t. solving the biodiversity problem, which is actually about survival on Earth) could possibly be questioned. Some will say that "if you don't spend all that money into inhabited space exploration, you won't necessarily spend it wisely. But I would disagree there: we should really start spending money (and fossil fuels) wisely because we are running out of time.
• mike_HGolang 4y ago
  Hardly disagree with author, IMHO we should aim to colonise moon and mars asap.
• neilv 4y ago
  For deciding how to invest towards the future of humanity and science/technology, have we already given up on keeping the Earth habitable? If Elon Musk wants to be jettisoned to Mars, I'll be the first to cheer him on. But back on our current human planet, how do we avert apocalyptic scale of misery and deaths in a few decades?
• eesmith 4y ago
  Nearly 20 years ago Bruce Sterling wrote: > I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.” > On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense. https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004-Bruce-Sterling-State-of-page03.html#post63 https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004...
  • rippercushions 4y ago
    Bruce better start believing then, since the Gobi Desert is inhabited and the Oyu Tolgoi copper & gold smack dab in the middle of it powers over one third of Mongolia's GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyu_Tolgoi_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyu_Tolgoi_mine
    • eesmith 4y ago
      While it's true the Gobi desert has been sparsely populated for ages, saying that a mine is a colony is like saying an offshore oil platform is a colony. A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+? The entire Ömnögovi Province has 66K people. That Wikipedia article links to https://web.archive.org/web/20140724131423/http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2013/world/mongolia-copper-mine-oyu-tolgoi-tests-water-supply-young-democracy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140724131423/http://www.circle... from a decade ago which points out how the mine is taking water that was supplying the animals local herders used. If that's still the case, and usable surface water is disappearing, that sounds like the opposite of a self-sustaining colony.
• c_prompt 4y ago
  > "a glamorous effort led by a hype man" > "This has the effect of turning technical discussions into debates over the character and achievements of Elon Musk— just the way he likes it." > "But their founder is who he is, and what he has publicly shared is not so much a blueprint as an inspirational poster." While I valued many of the thoughts in this post, it made me think of the meme "I choked on a carrot this afternoon and all I could think was 'I bet a donut wouldn't have done this to me.'" Putting aside the argument of whether or not scientific research, especially in space, is a proper role of government/politics, it is disappointing to see what I believe is an intellectual defect to undermine inspiration for human achievement with ad hominems in the context of a collapsing culture lacking meaningful debate on significant government war funding power delusions and destruction. Conquering technical achievements in any form (e.g., "port-a-potty chemistry," getting "to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena") vs. conquering people is, IMO, a more appropriate intellectual debate. I'll turn my computer speakers up to 100% for inspiration by Elon any day to drown out the human destructive philosophies of the politicians this author appears to support. [1] I think Ayn Rand said it well [2]: "The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11's flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist's emphasis on the dimensions of reason's power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211003211306/https://techsolidarity.org/resources.html https://web.archive.org/web/20211003211306/https://techsolid... [2] https://newideal.aynrand.org/ayn-rand-on-apollo-11/ https://newideal.aynrand.org/ayn-rand-on-apollo-11/
• Mikho 4y ago
  We should think about colonizing Mars but not right away. It's like skipping 10 steps and trying to land on the 11th one without progressing naturally through all required evolutionary steps in the space tech development. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket in hopes that everything goes right from the first attempt. Iterations this way are way too expensive. Instead, Mars colonization should be though as an option at the point when humanity already could sustain life in space close to Earth — like in a space habitat city of 1000s of people with an option for fast logistics to Earth. But first, it should be a Moon colony (the mission Artemis) that could be made sustainable via many safe iterations close to Earth. Then we need to build a space habitat on Earth orbit and use the Moon base for the construction support. Not to mention learning how to build factories in Space to process asteroid mined ore. And only at this point it's worth start thinking about Mars colonization. That's like in a couple of hundreds of years at best. Before that all conversation about Mars are just pure science fiction. Only then when the habitat of 1000s of people could sustain life and travel in space independent from Earth it could be sent to Mars to ignite terraforming process and building a small base. The good thing is by this time we already could solve sustaining life without Earth in Space with no regards to Mars in general. In reality, by the time we start colonizing Mars there already could exist many Space habitats and human colonies beyond Earth. The thing is Mars is a really hostile and hard place to be. There is no reason for people to be there unless it has at least some livable condition. It's very cold (43% of Sun light), it has radiation, its dust kills all equipment. There shouldn't be humans based on Mars without an option for a fast escape or access to supplies should anything happen — that's what Mars orbiting space habitat would be there for. So, there is no reason to even talk about Mars colonization without achieving more reasonable progress closer to our home planet.
  • m4rtink 4y ago
    >It's like skipping 10 steps and trying to land on the 11th one without progressing naturally through all required evolutionary steps in the space tech development. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket in hopes that everything goes right from the first attempt. So like Apollo, right ? :)
• ed_balls 4y ago
  > So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative All start to make sense when you look at it through geopolitics. Satellites have become one of the most critical components in the modern warfare. A lunar base helps you destroy enemy's satellites and you want humans in the loop.
• pharmakom 4y ago
  The article makes some interesting points. It seems to me that a manned moon base fits the bill: - little to no risk of contamination on moon - inspirational goal - achievable with current tech - stepping stone to future projects (e.g. we can launch robotic missions from a lunar base)
  • Armisael16 4y ago
    The Moon is not a useful launch site for projects elsewhere unless a lot of the mass comes from there (ie, lots of fuel or the mission itself). You lose a lot of dv by stopping mid-trip; this isn’t like pulling off at a rest-stop.
    • pharmakom 4y ago
      Doesn’t the reduced gravity make a huge difference compared to launching from Earth? Is this not the biggest factor? (Zero expertise here, genuinely curious)
      • Armisael16 4y ago
        A mission from the surface of the Moon would cost ~3 km/s of delta-v to get an intercept with Mars (and more from there, but that depends on how much aerobraking you can manage). A mission from the surface of Earth would cost ~13 km/s to get that same intercept - so, yes, it’s considerably more expensive. The majority of that is just making earth orbit in the first place (~9 km/s). The big problem is that the mission on the moon has to come from somewhere. If you can fabricate your mission entirely at your moon base then the numbers above are accurate. However, if you have to ship stuff in from Earth - well, the Earth -> Moon -> Mars trajectory is more like 17-18 km/s. You’ve lost horrendously. There are certainly perks to things like off-Earth fueling and assembly, but unless you’re getting a lot of the mass from somewhere other than Earth you’d be much better of doing that in low earth orbit (just from a fuel efficiency perspective, and there would of course be lots of other benefits to being so close to home).
      • moffkalast 4y ago
        Yes it reduces the gain you get from accelerating in a deep gravity well, so you lose efficiency in your transfer, plus you need to actually get there first. It's a lose-lose situation. If there is anything to pick up from the moon it makes more sense to deliver it to LEO first and continue from there.
• knorker 4y ago
  I'm pretty sick of all these "it's hard, so let's not even try to do it". I can't put myself in the head of someone who doesn't understand inspiration, passion, or dreaming. It seems so short-sighted. "Let's only do it once it becomes easy". Would they say the same about climbing the highest mountain? About abolishing slavery? About sailing the high seas? In my opinion I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that this sounds like the kind of argument people would use to be pro-slavery because of the economy. Practical? Maybe (though in retrospect not). Doing the right thing? Absolutely not. To me shutting down these things is like dismissing the persuit of the meaning of life. Aside from the Apollo program being maybe the most return on investment monetarily in the history of humanity, I wonder what the ROI is on worker and entrepreneur motivation in addition to that. If we can put a man on the moon, then nothing is impossible. Every obstacle is conquerable. We need to know that science fiction is within our grasp, and we won't get there without taking any steps. If humans can put a man on the moon, then surely we can get this factory 10% more effective while improving workers lives? I bet at least one of the big tech companies would not exist without this motivation. "Humanity can't put a man on the moon, so maybe we should sell this 'google' company to yahoo". Google monopoly aside, without Google we may not have Hadoop, free email, or many other things. What's the ROI just in terms of having free email with more than 1MB of quota? Nobody gets out of life alive. Why would you aim low just to attempt to? Not saying we should take needless chances, but as people and as a society we do need to actually… you know… live.
  • citizenpaul 4y ago
    >If humans can put a man on the moon, then surely we can get this factory 10% more effective while improving workers lives? This is one of the most depressing soul crushing sentences I have ever read. It fills me with dispair. Its basically the justification for every kind of oppression and atrocity ever committed. Yet it is said with true starry eyed belief by you.
    • knorker 4y ago
      Improving workers lives is depressing? I'm truly not following. I'm saying literally "surely we can make this world better for everyone", and you see it as a negative?
• poulpy123 4y ago
  very excellent points from the author. I would like just to correct him on one point: treaty are only valid as long as the main powers are agreeing. The minute it's inconveniencing the US the mars treaty will be thrown in the trashbin. And it's even worse for people like Musk.
• api 4y ago
  I disagree quite strongly with the idea that robots are a substitute for human migration. The rationale is totally different. That being said I think the Moon makes far more sense as a first off planet settlement. The transit time is short enough for a tourism industry among other things. It’s also short enough to permit relief flights and for people to quickly return if necessary. It would be a great place to basically prototype the technology and the social aspects. Also the fact that it is more hostile in some ways is good from a prototyping point of view. If we can live with no atmosphere and 1/6 gravity we can surely make it with some atmosphere and 1/3 gravity. Edit: and mining may be viable. Gravity is low enough to permit possible gun or mass driver launch from the moon back to Earth for raw materials. Probably wouldn’t make enough to make the whole venture profitable but could maybe offset it a bit along with tourism. Materials like gold, platinum, rare earths, etc might be found near the surface in concentrated deposits due to no weathering.
• etothepii 4y ago
  I cannot help but think that solving the problems of laundry and sanitation on a Mars trip could do wonders for the development of places that do not have adequate sanitation today.
  • ubercore 4y ago
    I don't think sanitation problems on earth are generally technological ones, they're usually money/resource related. Not sure a super-expensive Mars trip solution would have a ton of impact on Earth (maybe though?)
  • viburnum 4y ago
    They won’t. Space problems are not earth problems.
• LightG 4y ago
  A "colony" on Mars is going to be about as extensive as the ISS for at least 100 years. Or have you bought into Elon's nonsense?
• papito 4y ago
  Anybody who thinks they have the grit for Mars life, for your own good - try it here first. Take 3, or better 6 months of your life to spend in one of the remote Inupiat villages in Alaska. In a few weeks, you will be climbing up walls. Here on Earth frontier living sucks, but it’s Club Med compared to Mars.
• stevespang 4y ago
  [dead]
• Zigurd 4y ago
  "Stunt" is the right word. If humans are sent to Mars, the most vivid lesson will be not to send humans to Mars. The most valuable lesson is that life without the ecosystem it evolved to inhabit is unsustainable in some pretty horrifying ways, and humans need to take better care of their ecosystem. There is already an indictment written in the Earth itself: That time we exploded nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. That time we put lead in gasoline. Those deadly mistakes left permanent evidence of stupidity and arrogance. That said, if Elon can take a thousand libertarian techbros to a different planet, it will likely end up as an unintended monument to What Not to Do that will last for millennia. I'd give him the Nobel for that.
• markphip 4y ago
  Pretty interesting article. I have always been a Mars-skeptic so this article reinforced much of that. That said, in reading this article I came to wonder why the author is even proposing we spend the money on more probes. Sooner or later, the probes only make sense if we intend to follow-up with human space travel. I suppose you could make the argument we are a century away from where we ought to consider that, but the author does not broach the subject of what the long term goals ought to be for space exploration and why. From a science perspective, I am in favor of more things like JWST. More probes probably make sense for similar reasons. From a commercial and human standpoint, we should probably be focusing more on Low Earth applications with maybe some possibility that some of this ought to also focus on establishing a permanent base on the moon. But doing this on the moon assumes some really good reasons materialize for doing so. Whether it is the discovery of ice or minerals, or (maybe also) that there is an area we could setup beneath the surface the is shielded from radiation. It would be great if we could find a practical reason for establishing a presence on the moon that then also laid the groundwork as an environment where some of these longer term problems could be tested and refined while we were also extracting some value from being there.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  > At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere... Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee. > The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. This is the most shocking takeaway for me from the article. Is it true? There are lots of citations attached but they're all to individual papers, and the "99.999%" figure appears to be hyperbole, not any kind of actual calculation. (Nor is it remotely clear whether it's attempting to refer to percentage of life by mass, by organism, or by species.) If this is true, shouldn't there be some mainstream news articles? At least a mention on Wikipedia? Wikipedia describes the existence of extremophiles [1,2], but nothing about any recent discoveries that they make up nearly all of the life on earth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microorganism#Extremophiles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microorganism#Extremophiles [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    It's probably true by species. Life in mile-deep rock is gonna be quite isolated - you're not wafting miles a day in the breeze - and that's gonna lead to quite a bit of speciation.
• causality0 4y ago
  Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. The purpose of setting foot on Mars is to ignite the human spirit, you soulless pedestrian.
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    Get a jetski. Some people on Earth still need to eat.
• drbojingle 4y ago
  Why not Zoidberg?
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  There’s not a strong utilitarian reason to send humans to Mars, just like there is not a strong utilitarian reason to send people to the summits of high mountains. But people still are enamored of the high mountains. I think that is basically because, at their core, most people’s deepest feelings about human life are also not utilitarian.
• bogwog 4y ago
  This was a really good, well-researched article that actually changed my (admittedly not very strong) opinion on going to Mars, but there are 740 comments in this thread so far and I doubt more than 5% of people posting comments actually read the entire thing. We need a highly condensed version of the main bullet points, preferably in TikTok format, to reach more people.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    I did read the entire thing, and as usually Maciej is on-point, but: since it isn't going to happen anyway as per his first couple of paragraphs it makes me wonder what the point is to having the many words following it. Anybody that believes that we have the technology capable of setting up a self sufficient Mars base should be invited to demonstrate such on the Moon, where in case things inevitably go pear shaped at least there is a small chance of rescue, which in the case of Mars is impossible. Anybody that signs up for a Mars mission may well end up bringing life to Mars, but not in the way that they intend to. Either way it wouldn't be intelligent life.
    • roryisok 4y ago
      > Anybody that believes that we have the technology capable of setting up a self sufficient Mars base should be invited to demonstrate such on the Moon Is this not exactly what we're doing with the Artemis Program? From its wiki page: > The program's long-term goal is to establish a permanent base camp on the Moon and facilitate human missions to Mars.
  • twic 4y ago
    > well-researched In places. There is a classic banger of a paper, "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1], which assembles evidence that human space exploration, while expensive, is more cost-effective than robotic. So when i saw Maciej write: > Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable[7] than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less [8] I jumped straight to reference 7, and found: > [7] I know, no robot can reflect on the nature of the Sublime while looking at sunbeams dancing on the limb of Deimos or whatever. But when it comes to tasks like “look under this rock on Mars” or “fly through this plume and sample it”, robots are awesome. This is not exactly what i would call a well-researched statement. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6250 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6250
• dependsontheq 4y ago
  I think this is a very utilitarian view. He is probably right, but we are in a late stage post material society where a huge part of the global population just wants to be entertained. This will be great content and entertainment for billions. The endless travel time will actually be a key feature of it. I can't decide if I am ironic, sarcastic or realistic.
• valeg 4y ago
  Mars exploration has a wide presence in literature and movies which in turn backs Elon's (and Mars One etc.) grift. It is pointless and dangerous to send humans so far away on a dead planet without magnetosphere. Let's establish a base on the Moon first. This seems way more practical as a goal.
  • MrOwnPut 4y ago
    Yes lets establish a base on the moon with no resources, the same moon that was created from an asteroid impact like the one we're trying to avoid by being a multi-planet species. We can create fuel on Mars. Mars is far enough away from Earth that it's a safe redundancy for humans. Sure we can use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, but we can also train for Mars like conditions in Nevada... Either way, Mars is the only viable goal if you want to remove the single point of failure of an asteroid impact.
    • valeg 4y ago
      It takes about 3 days for a spacecraft to reach the Moon. Mars takes months and not easy to reach. There is no magnetosphere and refueling idea is unrealistic. We need to find a new way to move in space. CSS[1] guys did a good rebuttal to all this nonsense: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeoWEfSK9mjKe4E67IK1-1vZxB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDYt-phUAxY&list=PL-eVf9RWeo...
      • MrOwnPut 4y ago
        > It takes about 3 days for a spacecraft to reach the Moon. Mars takes months and not easy to reach. That's a bonus. The farther from the Earth, the farther from the explosion from a world ending event. The moon is not far enough. > There is no magnetosphere and refueling idea is unrealistic. Please explain how it's unrealistic. There's water and c02. You don't need anything else. Oh and you get oxygen as a byproduct. > CSS[1] guys did a good rebuttal to all this nonsense: Pointing to a Youtube video is not really a debate. Put it in your own words if you understand it. I wouldn't dismiss SpaceX with a Youtube video. The great thing is, who cares about the people negging, it'll get done anyway, and just like landing rockets upside down, people will find another thing to neg and say "impossible!"
• PebblesRox 4y ago
  "NASA has spent decades learning how to survive in the harsh environment of Congress, and that knowledge is bearing fruit today." This is a great line.
• Projectiboga 4y ago
  Isn't Mars' gravity just 0.39 of ours, that alone makes me think it's a fool's errand. Yes getting of this rock is a necessary step to taking over the galaxy but that doesn't sound good for humans. Now sending ever better robots might work. They can harvest materials etc and send them back.
• Animats 4y ago
  Things worth doing in space that are more promising than Mars: - A robotic Venus lander that can survive for a few days. The last lander to take pictures on Venus landed over 40 years ago, and it only operated for half an hour.[1] Venus Surface temperatures are around 475°C. The electronics overheated. Now we have silicon carbide semiconductors and laser welding, so continued operation at those temperatures might be possible. Here are most of the existing pictures of the surface of Venus.[2] It looks more interesting than Mars. - A Europa lander. The recent Europa flyby shows much more interesting surface features than Mars. What are those long, thin features? Not rivers; rivers don't have right-angled intersections. Mars is nearly airless and boring. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14 [2] https://www.popsci.com/yes-weve-seen-surface-venus/ https://www.popsci.com/yes-weve-seen-surface-venus/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98cHbM1cRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98cHbM1cRM
  • gorgoiler 4y ago
    Is it possible to operate a heat pump at 450C? Compress a gas until it heats up to 880C; send it outside to “cool down” to 450C; bring it in and decompress it where it drops to 20C; and bathe on deliciously cool room temperature air?
    • gorgoiler 4y ago
      (For clarity, this question is more about seeking clarity on my own hazy understanding of how fridges work, rather than some random internet person suggesting “have you thought of this <obvious solution>?”.)
      • sbierwagen 4y ago
        Physics-wise, if there's a useful working fluid in the temperature and pressure range you want, it can be done. The problem then is power. Refrigerators are power hungry. Space exploration tends to be desperately short on power-- there's not a lot of sources of electricity that are happy to spend ten years at -100C and then spring forth to produce volts at quantity and with minimal mass. A heat engine is right out. (Where would the cold sink come from?) Batteries are tough. RTGs have terrible engineering challenges-- plus they'll use up a lot of half-life during the coast phase to Venus. Given that design space, a Venus lander (that isn't built to operate at Venus temps) would probably have a battery and a store of internal coolant that undergoes phase change and is dumped overboard. A big block of water ice, or depending on the constraints, something more exotic. >drops to 20C Don't have to get that cold, fortunately. There is a considerable domestic demand for ultrahot electronics for wellhead sensors in oil exploration. (The head of a drill string needs to have some smarts for remote sensing-- figuring out if the rock you're drilling through has any oil in it. If you've got the money, you can buy a microcontroller than can run all day and night at 220 Celsius! https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/SM470R1B1MHFQS/2353584 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments... Fun fact: one of the handful of commercial applications for nuclear fusion reactors, today, is as a source for downbore neutron excitation gamma spectroscopy https://www.slb.com/-/media/files/drilling/brochure/neoscope-br.ashx https://www.slb.com/-/media/files/drilling/brochure/neoscope... )
• chrsw 4y ago
  Colonizing is Mars unrealistic. Mars is too hostile for our type of life. Maybe machines can "live" there. Developing the science and technology to make Mars even slightly more viable is going to take a long time and we're going to need a healthy Earth while we work on the solutions anyway. So why not make sure we have a healthy Earth in the first place? We can keep an eye on Mars as a stretch goal but it's always going to be pretty far down the priority list. I know that's not the romantic view.
  • bckr 4y ago
    No mention in TFA of O'Neil cylinders or other near-earth space settlements. To me, these options must be mentioned in the same breath as "Not Mars", because we do need to escape the cradle.
• trollerator23 4y ago
  All I will say that the dismissal of SpaceX is extremely ignorant. Just that, ignorant, of what really goes inside. I know for a fact that a lot of smart people there have been working on the Mars problem almost since SpaceX was created. I would not compare them with Hyperloop or the Boring Company with such a dismissive handwave.
• pmarreck 4y ago
  Make the funding for it a multi-country project, with whoever the main funder is getting ideological/representative credit for it over time. This will skirt both the "can this even survive multiple administrations" problem while also incentivizing continued participation via competition for international prestige.
  • m4rtink 4y ago
    The service module for the Orion deep space capsule is made in Europe - coincidence ? ;-)
• difosfor 4y ago
  Reminds me of some of the ideas from the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I can recommend it if you're interested.
• ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Seems to me that NASA needs to send probes to Mars pronto so they can do a thorough check for life before SpaceX gets there.
• memetomancer 4y ago
  (Hey so I apologize if this has been touched on in the main thread, but I didn't spot anything related so starting a new one). We should consider even further: what about consequences of successfully colonizing Mars? I feel it would mean almost certain doom for both planets. I'll explain: Imagine all of the hurdles mentioned in the linked blog are overcome. Improbable for the U.S. or EU, sure, but consider China. If everything goes well, they end up with a sustainable outpost with several hundred to several thousand inhabitants and a reliable supply line back to Earth. Everything is great, yeah? But looking a bit further down the timeline, we will end up with generations of humans native to this outpost. All living deep underground, rarely seeing the surface. Sure there would be domes you could visit to check it out, but they'd probably see as much traffic as a planetarium or scenic vista - more apt for school trips than any part of daily life. We know very little of the role of epigenetics in these conditions, but you might imagine that tunnel dwelling folk in weak gravity are probably going to express genes differently during development, than we see here on Earth. Different diets, different light exposure, different gravity and even different focal lengths will all have an impact. The forces of evolution will bear an increased impact here also - children that blossom into more Earth appropriate bodies will have increased pressure against their thriving in these conditions. Social forces will likely begin to exclude them from the gene pool, accelerating the occurrences of whatever Martian traits emerge. These generations of inhabitants would eventually put pressure on the supply lines from Earth via the growing population. Or some enterprising politician will manipulate the supply lines in order to exercise despotic authority over them. Eventually the Martians will see pressure to become self sufficient. This will plainly lead to a revolution and independence - an intolerable insult the the patron government. Back on Earth, the strange look of the native Martians will stir racist hatreds and clamoring for subjugation with extreme prejudice. Recall that in the past few years we've seen extreme hatred rear up over the pettiest of differences, to the point where neo-nazis are flourishing and attempting coups in the most powerful nations. Hating weird gray/green skinned, 8 foot tall spider people from Outer Space would be reaaaal easy for these people. The Earth will send their troops and bombers. The Martians will burrow deeper and humiliate those invading troops with relative ease. The Earth will maybe nuke the place? But that will have very little effect, even the aftermath of fallout and irradiated rock will be negligible to the Martians. But they will be angry. And it would take little effort to rig something up and launch Phobos at the Earth at 1% c. But the Martians would soon learn that they were dependent on Earth for more than manufactured goods. Their delayed access to the internet would disappear, along with scientific advancements, intellectual culture, entertainment and archives going offline and leaving them with whatever had been cached/stored in their local cloud hardware. Would Mars have developed a chip fab (and the equally important thousands of suppliers for a chip fab) by this time? Medical knowledge? Would they have needed expertise in Computer Science? Imagine if some disaster left Earth with little more than a single hospital and a computer retailer, how would we recover? Mars Colony may just soldier on for a while, but more than likely would ultimately succumb to genetic degradation, scientific stagnation, room to grow the civilization, lack of elements or molecules that are difficult to procure on Mars, etc. Colonizing Mars is the worst idea. Just the worst.
• Exendroinient00 4y ago
  Base on moon is simply put much more rational choice. It would be just antarctica on steroids with possible resupply and relative proximity. Colony on mars needs to be entirely self-sustaining and we don't have any working equivalent here on earth. Putting material on the surface is one thing, but to actually have the infrastructure there to survive is much harder beast.
• IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  Its obviously hard to accept but we must come to terms that computers , and more specifically drones, should be doing the jobs that are too hazardous or too expensive for regular human labor to do. We are slowly accepting it with cars, trains, and planes. It doesnt make such sense that we still pushing for crewed missions when all other modes of transport and mobilization are going to automation / or remotely driven.
• rmrf100 4y ago
  I think the super rich like Musk is working on it.
• hackeraccount 4y ago
  > The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. How soon does anyone think we're going to send people to Mars? In the next 10 years? 20 years? Personally - and I wouldn't mind seeing it happen - I'd be shocked if it was in the next 30 years. Everyone has a different time frame but I don't think of that as soon.
  • theshrike79 4y ago
    It depends a lot on our ability to handle loss of life in the process of exploration. We can most definitely get people on Mars by 2030. But we need to accept that some or all of them may die in the process. Are we as a civilisation ready for that? The technology of actually getting someone BACK from Mars is a whole different thing. In the worst situation we would have the world's most expensive reality survival show, watching when astronauts slowly die of starvation on Mars because hydroponics failed and they didn't bring enough dry rations.
• fennecfoxy 4y ago
  Why anything?