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The push for humans on Mars is deeply misguided. The same resources should be used to send many more probes and for far longer durations. After 100 years of dee

by robg 3y ago

The push for humans on Mars is deeply misguided. The same resources should be used to send many more probes and for far longer durations. After 100 years of deeply mapping all available resources, then maybe send humans if a long-term colony is self-sustainable and necessary for deep space exploration with better propulsion technologies. Edit: Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Surprised people seem confused on the necessary and sufficient conditions. Show me that robots can set up a self-sustaining colony with self-generating resources to get to other worlds, and that’s a legit “backup” plan. Otherwise we’re just arguing about edge cases with no viable solutions. You don’t need humans on Mars to show what’s possible.

baq 3y ago
You're missing that a man with a shovel can find out in a day what a robotic probe cannot find out in a year, unless you're talking serious AI.
- robg 3y ago
  You’re telling me we can’t send, in the next 100 years, a fleet of remote controlled backhoes with the same sensors and assays the human would use?
  - runeofdoom 3y ago
    With no buried fiber to feed on, the backhoes will starve.
- macNchz 3y ago
  I don’t really see what a person with a shovel could accomplish that a robot can’t, other than consuming the vast majority of the project budget on life support systems.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Eyes.
    - macNchz 3y ago
      Are there things that someone can see with their eyes that can’t be picked up with an array of state of the art cameras / specialty sensors / microscopes, that would justify the overhead of everything required to get a human there? I’m genuinely curious.
    - throwaway5752 3y ago
      Human eyes are not good. We have a massive central void in our vision that we literally fill in with our imagination. We can't sense light polarity, we can't sense beyond infrared or ultraviolet, and our resolution is poor. I suspect you could put together and deliver to Mars a highly redundant system with all of those capabilities for less than the addition fuel cost to launch a 100kg human, supplies, and life-support systems out of Earth's gravity well.
    - usrbinbash 3y ago
      Cameras. Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust. And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to keep the cameras running!
      - tomrod 3y ago
        Eyes connect to one of the best diagnostic systems in the universe. IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper, to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly independent colony on Mars. At our stage, having that come from the private sector versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation of ancient cultures), governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled. People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things, in my opinion worth preserving across several planets, solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  The robotic probe is backed up by thousands of scientists, analyzing the data it sends back home, while the man with the shovel is unlikely to even survive long enough on Mars (if he even gets there alive) to discover anything the robot missed. If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive (for a time).
- nick_ 3y ago
  Find out what, though? That it's a dry, frozen wasteland? For tens of billions of dollars? No thanks.
tomrod 3y ago
The push for human on Mars is misguided in that we aren't taking enough risks. We are one bad cosmic event from total known life annihilation. That would be a bad day
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- soneca 3y ago
  What kind of cosmic event would transform Earth in a worse place to support life than Mars currently is?
  - FranOntanaya 3y ago
    In the long run an overheated planet Venus style is much harder to deal with than a cold, nearly airless one. Anything that triggered mass plant death and decomposition could do.
  - blue1 3y ago
    Impact with a rogue planet? Grey goo?
  - downvotetruth 3y ago
    A directed gamma ray burst could affect the solar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY A nuclear powered bunker seems much more pragmatic than generation ship(s) to another star system to survive one.
    - usrbinbash 3y ago
      I would argue that a civilization that is actually capable of building a generation spaceship, should be capable of defending their planet from GRBs. How? I have no idea. Then again, we also have no idea how to build an actually working generation ship :D
- roughly 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
It would really suck if, in the next 100 years, we see some extinction-level comet or asteroid crash into the Earth when we might have done the "not all our eggs in one basket". Some kinds of caution aren't very careful at all.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  What timeframe do we need to setup a fully independent colony on Mars, so that we survive if Earth is not there? If you asked me to guess, it would be somewhere between impossible and 1000 years of terraforming.
- jrd259 3y ago
  Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate, to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-term profit. Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel. Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose? We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?) I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.
- Mechanical9 3y ago
  Is it even remotely possible that a Mars colony could become self-sustaining within the next 100 years? It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    It certainly won't be if we don't build the infrastructure to send (temporarily, at least) people to Mars. Can we bootstrap up an energy economy there? Dunno, that's the first step. With a large enough energy budget, food's doable. Water is likely in situ. > It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless. Even longer if you wait to try.
maxlin 3y ago
100 years with ZERO humans on mars? You have no sense of risk or scale. We should be there already. We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. In 100 years your kind of thinking will be considered ludditean and playing russian roulette with 5 in the chamber for no reason.
- throwaway5752 3y ago
  Apply startup software ethos to interplanetary travel! It did well for deep sea exploration.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    I have no idea how you got that from the comment.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The middle ground you're ignoring (between #yolo startup culture and Boeing's defense contractor culture) has been done pretty well with SpaceX's Falcon 9.
    - maxlin 3y ago
      Well said. It's a bit disheartening that there's no other companies as capable as SpaceX, but man am I happy we have them. When the company I was a cofounder was still up an year ago I would have rather had it founder than SpaceX.
    - throwaway5752 3y ago
      The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. The benefits of doing so are dubious and the real viability of a human colony are almost nil. The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previously healthy, if unspectacular, social network. It is less exciting work, but we should make every effort to not reduce ourselves to a Paleolithic lifestyle on our home planet via accidental terraforming instead.
jklinger410 3y ago
We should map the ocean and available resources on earth along with future-proofing our atmosphere as a priority over colonizing Mars. Unless the cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is true, in which the solution is to get as many of us off this ticking time bomb before it happens next.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  I don't think the pole shift theory holds, but there still are all those rocks flying around solar system... as well as gamma bursts, but those would probably take out Mars too.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, a thick layer of soil would protect people from a GRB - if most of the Martian colony (or Lunar colony) lives underground, they would survive - and there is no large-scale biosphere that humans depend on for survival on Mars or the Moon. As long as those colonies are self sufficient (the biggest handwave of the whole deal), they would survive while the majority of Earth would have a rather bad time of things. Then again, it's likely that more humans would survive on Earth than elsewhere - nuclear submarines, underground government complexes, maybe even the Antarctica base depending on the angle.
keiferski 3y ago
People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies aren't about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions. Yes, it would be a better use of resources to set up a colony on Antarctica first. But who cares about that? It's not that interesting or inspiring to anyone that doesn't already care about space travel. A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history. It's exciting. That excitement is what inspires people to get involved (and governments to fund projects.) If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
- robg 3y ago
  Everything you say can be applied to the history of humans on the Earth’s moon. 50 years later you’ve been proven wrong. Robots are better and cheaper at space exploration and humans being in the loop have only made things more expensive and more risky. The failures of human space adventures have made things much harder on space budgets. See also the Shuttle program, after Apollo.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon since the initial landings, so it’s not surprising that interest has dried up. There’s no colony, no space casino resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.
    - robg 3y ago
      That’s neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.
      - keiferski 3y ago
huthuthike 3y ago
I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with robotics, and it's safer. However, we also need to factor in human psychology. It would inspire billions of people worldwide to see a person on Mars. This is not something that can be replicated by sending robotic missions. It's possible that this could increase public support for funding space exploration, and drive more people to go into careers in science. It's hard to predict the benefits of human exploration of space because we don't know how the world will react. But it's a lot more significant than just measuring the scientific output of the mission.
- robg 3y ago
  It’s been over 50 years since a human was on the moon. The need to replicate that psychological success has not been there for humanity given the costs and better use of resources. Mars is exponentially more expensive.
  - Quekid5 3y ago
    Also the whole... "they're very probably not coming back from Mars alive" thing :)
  - huthuthike 3y ago
    Doing something we've never done before is a lot more exciting to people than repeating our previous success. Think about it this way: who were the astronauts on the first lunar landing mission? Who were the astronauts on the last? Why do you think that we remember the first ones to do it better?
    - robg 3y ago
      Who were the astronauts that died with Challenger? Notoriety is hardly an index worth investing in. A colony on the moon is technically possible, albeit very expensive. Many nations could create one today. People are choosing to spend their limited resources on better forms of progress.
      - 3y ago
renewiltord 3y ago
Then you should build that space company. Show us how it's done.
Balgair 3y ago
To add on to the Edit: You can get humans on Mars with a big effort. Fine. Now get them back off. Simple hand waving shows it's a really really hard thing to do. Let's assume current rocket science. You somehow have to get a fueled launch vehicle off the surface. The gravity is less, ~3/5ths, so it's a lot less fuel than on Earth, but it is still a lot of fuel. Somehow, without nearly any infrastructure and in a near vacuum, this rocket has to successfully get off of the surface. We can see that it's really hard to do this just on Earth with huge hangers and loads of experts and tools on standby. Doing this on Mars with a few astronauts and lord knows what sort of repair and maintenance facilities is just going to be a lot harder to pull off. Fine, sure, now let's assume that we've somehow managed to have improved the science of reliability engineering to the point that we can just have fully fueled rockets just sitting on Martian dirt for years on end [0]. How do you get that rocket down from orbit? Like, how do you land that much fuel? That's a really hard problem to solve. Sure, fine, lots of little payloads all over the place. But then you have to have some sort of industrial machinery to go retrieve all those fuel pods and then load up the rocket. Who or what are going to drive all over Utopia Planitia to grab it all and then handle fueling? Astronauts? AI? Whatever it is, it's really expensive and has to be really safe. Why not build the rocket on Mars too? Any return from Mars requires sciences and industry that we currently do not have, full stop. Iterating our way to that future is possible, but is currently outside of our skill sets. A lot of money and time is going to be needed to get to return missions. Ideas that this mission requires also upset the state of current industrial manufacture, repair, and maintenance here on Earth. Not in a bad way, mind you, but those techniques are miles beyond what we currently can do and will very much change the future of Earth just as much as it changes Mars. [0] By the by, do you have any idea what that science will do to our Earth based industry? Nothing will ever break ever again!
- fastball 3y ago
  I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is exactly why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It requires doing things far beyond our knowhow, which historically is the best way to actually get something done – inspire towards an impossible goal and humanity can make it happen. You generally don't make technological leaps by pursuing things you know you can do already. Even if we don't make it happen, we are guaranteed to learn a plethora of useful things along the way. Needing "a lot of money and time" is irrelevant. Money is a fiction and time we have in spades. Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads? Or maybe it would be better if, instead of designing Martian space-suits, we spend more time designing fast-fashion clothing meant to be worn once or twice, basking in hitherto unimagined heights of navel-gazing.
at_a_remove 3y ago
We can't even swing a self-sufficient (emphasis added) colony on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone sent to Mars needs a handy supply of cyanide capsules for the inevitable disaster. In the next twenty years, arrival of human meat on Mars is just bragging rights. Want exploration? We could do more of that with robots. Backup civilization? Simply not going to happen until we can get that Antarctica colony rolling. Nobody in, nobody out, allowance of once every two years robot-guided payloads under ten tons, and it has to run for forty years ... that is a good example of a colony. Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation, and learn from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to do stats and discount one-offs. And we'll have to start tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns built by those boring machines. This isn't like a trip to a remote island.
- burnished 3y ago
  Sounds like a plan to put boots on mars.
nico 3y ago
We could be exploring the inside of our own planet. We have literally only scratched the surface and we barely know anything about the deeper parts of Earth, yet we are obsessed with places that are incredibly far away and hard to reach
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking about sending people to the moon. And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean. Humanity has to do grand projects like this that seem ridiculous, because once in a while, it changes everything. And even if it doesn't, the cheer amount of ingenuity it requires brings benefit on their own.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking about sending people to the moon. Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back. > And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean. Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    > Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back. And it changed the world forever. Probably contributed to avoid the cold war to turn hot. Not to mention we got diapers out of it, and a healthy space program that made amazing things possible like the GPS. > Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries. Nick picking. People didn't know that.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  I'm also pretty sure some people said things like "We will soon have colonies on the moon" shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped off that Lunar Lander ladder. Fun fact: No human has set foot on the Moon since 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 Also: When Columbus set sail, he could reasonably assume that he would see his home again. Big boats and long sea voyages were not a new technology in his time. When NASA started the Apollo Missions, they had them planned out from start to finish and knew exactly how that would work. So yes, once in a while, humanity does something amazing, that seems a bit far fetched, but still reasonable. What humanity usually doesn't do, is something that it has absolutely no plan on how to do it.
mikewarot 3y ago
If you want humans on Mars, first you need a self-sufficient logistics chain on Mars. We've made breathable Oxygen on Mars, and we should be able to make a Von Neuman probe to send, and set up that supply chain. Instead of having it manage itself, we simply make it remote control, and we don't have to worry about run-away issues. We should be able to go anywhere there's large enough of a fraction of the resources required for human life. For instance, if there's NO phosphorus, instead of just a smaller percentage, it's no-go, unless we're willing to live off a stockpile imported from elsewhere. So, ambient temperature and pressure, along with elemental composition, are really the only hard limits.
deleted 3y ago
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Projectiboga 3y ago
Mars only has 0.39 of our gravity. I don't see that as a viable place for humans to live.
- jayGlow 3y ago
  why not? we know microgravity has a negative effect on people but we haven't tested 1/3rd gravity. unless I missed something we don't know the threshold for negative effects from lowered gravity.
awongh 3y ago
I just watched this depressing video about the $130b dollars spent building a high speed rail in England (HS2). He actually mentions off-hand how many James Webb Space Telescopes that could buy. (the video is about the fact that the rail line will actually be 100% useless in the end, not just overpriced) https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8 https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8 So maybe it’s fine if we spend a bunch of money on getting to Mars. There are plenty of interesting arguments for doing it, and it would be a way better use of resources than just flushing it down the toilet on useless infrastructure. Could be much worse.
Qem 3y ago
> Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Actually there are elder scientists wanting to volunteer for such a mission. See https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG
mjan22640 3y ago
Self sustaining robots would be a cool project on Earth even.
simonebrunozzi 3y ago
Agreed with you. Relevant reading: "Why Not Mars" [0] [0]: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

by robg 3y ago

baq 3y ago

You're missing that a man with a shovel can find out in a day what a robotic probe cannot find out in a year, unless you're talking serious AI.

robg 3y ago
You’re telling me we can’t send, in the next 100 years, a fleet of remote controlled backhoes with the same sensors and assays the human would use?
- runeofdoom 3y ago
  With no buried fiber to feed on, the backhoes will starve.
macNchz 3y ago
I don’t really see what a person with a shovel could accomplish that a robot can’t, other than consuming the vast majority of the project budget on life support systems.
- tomrod 3y ago
  Eyes.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    Are there things that someone can see with their eyes that can’t be picked up with an array of state of the art cameras / specialty sensors / microscopes, that would justify the overhead of everything required to get a human there? I’m genuinely curious.
  - throwaway5752 3y ago
    Human eyes are not good. We have a massive central void in our vision that we literally fill in with our imagination. We can't sense light polarity, we can't sense beyond infrared or ultraviolet, and our resolution is poor. I suspect you could put together and deliver to Mars a highly redundant system with all of those capabilities for less than the addition fuel cost to launch a 100kg human, supplies, and life-support systems out of Earth's gravity well.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    Cameras. Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust. And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to keep the cameras running!
    - tomrod 3y ago
      Eyes connect to one of the best diagnostic systems in the universe. IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper, to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly independent colony on Mars. At our stage, having that come from the private sector versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation of ancient cultures), governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled. People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things, in my opinion worth preserving across several planets, solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
usrbinbash 3y ago
The robotic probe is backed up by thousands of scientists, analyzing the data it sends back home, while the man with the shovel is unlikely to even survive long enough on Mars (if he even gets there alive) to discover anything the robot missed. If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive (for a time).
nick_ 3y ago
Find out what, though? That it's a dry, frozen wasteland? For tens of billions of dollars? No thanks.

tomrod 3y ago

The push for human on Mars is misguided in that we aren't taking enough risks. We are one bad cosmic event from total known life annihilation. That would be a bad day

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
soneca 3y ago
What kind of cosmic event would transform Earth in a worse place to support life than Mars currently is?
- FranOntanaya 3y ago
  In the long run an overheated planet Venus style is much harder to deal with than a cold, nearly airless one. Anything that triggered mass plant death and decomposition could do.
- blue1 3y ago
  Impact with a rogue planet? Grey goo?
- downvotetruth 3y ago
  A directed gamma ray burst could affect the solar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY A nuclear powered bunker seems much more pragmatic than generation ship(s) to another star system to survive one.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    I would argue that a civilization that is actually capable of building a generation spaceship, should be capable of defending their planet from GRBs. How? I have no idea. Then again, we also have no idea how to build an actually working generation ship :D
roughly 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

It would really suck if, in the next 100 years, we see some extinction-level comet or asteroid crash into the Earth when we might have done the "not all our eggs in one basket". Some kinds of caution aren't very careful at all.

kzrdude 3y ago
What timeframe do we need to setup a fully independent colony on Mars, so that we survive if Earth is not there? If you asked me to guess, it would be somewhere between impossible and 1000 years of terraforming.
jrd259 3y ago
Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate, to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-term profit. Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel. Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose? We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?) I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.
Mechanical9 3y ago
Is it even remotely possible that a Mars colony could become self-sustaining within the next 100 years? It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  It certainly won't be if we don't build the infrastructure to send (temporarily, at least) people to Mars. Can we bootstrap up an energy economy there? Dunno, that's the first step. With a large enough energy budget, food's doable. Water is likely in situ. > It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless. Even longer if you wait to try.

maxlin 3y ago

100 years with ZERO humans on mars? You have no sense of risk or scale. We should be there already. We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. In 100 years your kind of thinking will be considered ludditean and playing russian roulette with 5 in the chamber for no reason.

throwaway5752 3y ago
Apply startup software ethos to interplanetary travel! It did well for deep sea exploration.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  I have no idea how you got that from the comment.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The middle ground you're ignoring (between #yolo startup culture and Boeing's defense contractor culture) has been done pretty well with SpaceX's Falcon 9.
  - maxlin 3y ago
    Well said. It's a bit disheartening that there's no other companies as capable as SpaceX, but man am I happy we have them. When the company I was a cofounder was still up an year ago I would have rather had it founder than SpaceX.
  - throwaway5752 3y ago
    The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. The benefits of doing so are dubious and the real viability of a human colony are almost nil. The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previously healthy, if unspectacular, social network. It is less exciting work, but we should make every effort to not reduce ourselves to a Paleolithic lifestyle on our home planet via accidental terraforming instead.

jklinger410 3y ago

We should map the ocean and available resources on earth along with future-proofing our atmosphere as a priority over colonizing Mars. Unless the cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is true, in which the solution is to get as many of us off this ticking time bomb before it happens next.

throwaway290 3y ago
I don't think the pole shift theory holds, but there still are all those rocks flying around solar system... as well as gamma bursts, but those would probably take out Mars too.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, a thick layer of soil would protect people from a GRB - if most of the Martian colony (or Lunar colony) lives underground, they would survive - and there is no large-scale biosphere that humans depend on for survival on Mars or the Moon. As long as those colonies are self sufficient (the biggest handwave of the whole deal), they would survive while the majority of Earth would have a rather bad time of things. Then again, it's likely that more humans would survive on Earth than elsewhere - nuclear submarines, underground government complexes, maybe even the Antarctica base depending on the angle.

keiferski 3y ago

People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies aren't about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions. Yes, it would be a better use of resources to set up a colony on Antarctica first. But who cares about that? It's not that interesting or inspiring to anyone that doesn't already care about space travel. A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history. It's exciting. That excitement is what inspires people to get involved (and governments to fund projects.) If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

robg 3y ago
Everything you say can be applied to the history of humans on the Earth’s moon. 50 years later you’ve been proven wrong. Robots are better and cheaper at space exploration and humans being in the loop have only made things more expensive and more risky. The failures of human space adventures have made things much harder on space budgets. See also the Shuttle program, after Apollo.
- keiferski 3y ago
  But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon since the initial landings, so it’s not surprising that interest has dried up. There’s no colony, no space casino resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial achievement. The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.
  - robg 3y ago
    That’s neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.
    - keiferski 3y ago

huthuthike 3y ago

I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with robotics, and it's safer. However, we also need to factor in human psychology. It would inspire billions of people worldwide to see a person on Mars. This is not something that can be replicated by sending robotic missions. It's possible that this could increase public support for funding space exploration, and drive more people to go into careers in science. It's hard to predict the benefits of human exploration of space because we don't know how the world will react. But it's a lot more significant than just measuring the scientific output of the mission.

robg 3y ago
It’s been over 50 years since a human was on the moon. The need to replicate that psychological success has not been there for humanity given the costs and better use of resources. Mars is exponentially more expensive.
- Quekid5 3y ago
  Also the whole... "they're very probably not coming back from Mars alive" thing :)
- huthuthike 3y ago
  Doing something we've never done before is a lot more exciting to people than repeating our previous success. Think about it this way: who were the astronauts on the first lunar landing mission? Who were the astronauts on the last? Why do you think that we remember the first ones to do it better?
  - robg 3y ago
    Who were the astronauts that died with Challenger? Notoriety is hardly an index worth investing in. A colony on the moon is technically possible, albeit very expensive. Many nations could create one today. People are choosing to spend their limited resources on better forms of progress.
    - 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago

Then you should build that space company. Show us how it's done.

Balgair 3y ago

To add on to the Edit: You can get humans on Mars with a big effort. Fine. Now get them back off. Simple hand waving shows it's a really really hard thing to do. Let's assume current rocket science. You somehow have to get a fueled launch vehicle off the surface. The gravity is less, ~3/5ths, so it's a lot less fuel than on Earth, but it is still a lot of fuel. Somehow, without nearly any infrastructure and in a near vacuum, this rocket has to successfully get off of the surface. We can see that it's really hard to do this just on Earth with huge hangers and loads of experts and tools on standby. Doing this on Mars with a few astronauts and lord knows what sort of repair and maintenance facilities is just going to be a lot harder to pull off. Fine, sure, now let's assume that we've somehow managed to have improved the science of reliability engineering to the point that we can just have fully fueled rockets just sitting on Martian dirt for years on end [0]. How do you get that rocket down from orbit? Like, how do you land that much fuel? That's a really hard problem to solve. Sure, fine, lots of little payloads all over the place. But then you have to have some sort of industrial machinery to go retrieve all those fuel pods and then load up the rocket. Who or what are going to drive all over Utopia Planitia to grab it all and then handle fueling? Astronauts? AI? Whatever it is, it's really expensive and has to be really safe. Why not build the rocket on Mars too? Any return from Mars requires sciences and industry that we currently do not have, full stop. Iterating our way to that future is possible, but is currently outside of our skill sets. A lot of money and time is going to be needed to get to return missions. Ideas that this mission requires also upset the state of current industrial manufacture, repair, and maintenance here on Earth. Not in a bad way, mind you, but those techniques are miles beyond what we currently can do and will very much change the future of Earth just as much as it changes Mars. [0] By the by, do you have any idea what that science will do to our Earth based industry? Nothing will ever break ever again!

fastball 3y ago
I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is exactly why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It requires doing things far beyond our knowhow, which historically is the best way to actually get something done – inspire towards an impossible goal and humanity can make it happen. You generally don't make technological leaps by pursuing things you know you can do already. Even if we don't make it happen, we are guaranteed to learn a plethora of useful things along the way. Needing "a lot of money and time" is irrelevant. Money is a fiction and time we have in spades. Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads? Or maybe it would be better if, instead of designing Martian space-suits, we spend more time designing fast-fashion clothing meant to be worn once or twice, basking in hitherto unimagined heights of navel-gazing.

at_a_remove 3y ago

We can't even swing a self-sufficient (emphasis added) colony on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone sent to Mars needs a handy supply of cyanide capsules for the inevitable disaster. In the next twenty years, arrival of human meat on Mars is just bragging rights. Want exploration? We could do more of that with robots. Backup civilization? Simply not going to happen until we can get that Antarctica colony rolling. Nobody in, nobody out, allowance of once every two years robot-guided payloads under ten tons, and it has to run for forty years ... that is a good example of a colony. Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation, and learn from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to do stats and discount one-offs. And we'll have to start tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns built by those boring machines. This isn't like a trip to a remote island.

burnished 3y ago
Sounds like a plan to put boots on mars.

nico 3y ago

We could be exploring the inside of our own planet. We have literally only scratched the surface and we barely know anything about the deeper parts of Earth, yet we are obsessed with places that are incredibly far away and hard to reach

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking about sending people to the moon. And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean. Humanity has to do grand projects like this that seem ridiculous, because once in a while, it changes everything. And even if it doesn't, the cheer amount of ingenuity it requires brings benefit on their own.

marcosdumay 3y ago
> I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking about sending people to the moon. Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back. > And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean. Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  > Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back. And it changed the world forever. Probably contributed to avoid the cold war to turn hot. Not to mention we got diapers out of it, and a healthy space program that made amazing things possible like the GPS. > Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries. Nick picking. People didn't know that.
usrbinbash 3y ago
I'm also pretty sure some people said things like "We will soon have colonies on the moon" shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped off that Lunar Lander ladder. Fun fact: No human has set foot on the Moon since 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 Also: When Columbus set sail, he could reasonably assume that he would see his home again. Big boats and long sea voyages were not a new technology in his time. When NASA started the Apollo Missions, they had them planned out from start to finish and knew exactly how that would work. So yes, once in a while, humanity does something amazing, that seems a bit far fetched, but still reasonable. What humanity usually doesn't do, is something that it has absolutely no plan on how to do it.

mikewarot 3y ago

If you want humans on Mars, first you need a self-sufficient logistics chain on Mars. We've made breathable Oxygen on Mars, and we should be able to make a Von Neuman probe to send, and set up that supply chain. Instead of having it manage itself, we simply make it remote control, and we don't have to worry about run-away issues. We should be able to go anywhere there's large enough of a fraction of the resources required for human life. For instance, if there's NO phosphorus, instead of just a smaller percentage, it's no-go, unless we're willing to live off a stockpile imported from elsewhere. So, ambient temperature and pressure, along with elemental composition, are really the only hard limits.

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Projectiboga 3y ago

Mars only has 0.39 of our gravity. I don't see that as a viable place for humans to live.

jayGlow 3y ago
why not? we know microgravity has a negative effect on people but we haven't tested 1/3rd gravity. unless I missed something we don't know the threshold for negative effects from lowered gravity.

awongh 3y ago

I just watched this depressing video about the $130b dollars spent building a high speed rail in England (HS2). He actually mentions off-hand how many James Webb Space Telescopes that could buy. (the video is about the fact that the rail line will actually be 100% useless in the end, not just overpriced) https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8 https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8 So maybe it’s fine if we spend a bunch of money on getting to Mars. There are plenty of interesting arguments for doing it, and it would be a way better use of resources than just flushing it down the toilet on useless infrastructure. Could be much worse.

Qem 3y ago

> Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Actually there are elder scientists wanting to volunteer for such a mission. See https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG

mjan22640 3y ago

Self sustaining robots would be a cool project on Earth even.

simonebrunozzi 3y ago

Agreed with you. Relevant reading: "Why Not Mars" [0] [0]: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm