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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 n

by 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.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. But are being worked on. This statement would've been true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade ago. > The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular, social network. The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.
      - throwaway5752 3y ago
        https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mishap-investigation https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mish... I was not impressed by this incident and it gives me concerns for their safety culture. My comment is not limited to propulsion or delivery technology. I respect SpaceX, but I also respect the real challenges of responsibly sending a crew to Mars.
        maxlin 3y ago
        I find it silly saying that risk of a few settlers dying on the first tries outweighs the risk to the whole species when we arent' ready.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        Does the Apollo 1 accident report give you similar concerns about NASA's culture and ability to get to the moon?
      - runeofdoom 3y ago
        Musk is in the driver's seat at Twitter. At SpaceX he's a frontman, carefully managed by people who know both him and rocket science.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
- hn_version_0023 3y ago
  HN is unprepared for this level of sarcasm.
robg 3y ago
With no next gen propulsion system and no self-sustaining colony, humans on Mars are a resource sink with no added benefits. Lest you forget it took 300 years for North America to generate self-sustaining colonies from the first Europeans. And those didn’t require life support for oxygen and water for every second of survival.
- robotresearcher 3y ago
  North America had self sustaining human populations for thousands of years before they ever saw a European.
  - burnished 3y ago
    The point is the challenge that was involved sending a small group on the same planet out to be self sufficient, not commentary about the habitability of the americas. If anything that underlines their point.
    - robotresearcher 3y ago
      Agreed. It just irritates a little that an analogy was proposed between a lifeless planet and a continent with millions of people already living there.
disconcision 3y ago
While I think having people on mars would be neat, I'm not sure there's anything we could do to earth period, let alone in a year, that would make it less livable than mars
usrbinbash 3y ago
> We should be there already. Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have? Exploratory activity can, is and should be done by robotic drones. Mars has zero resources Earth doesn't already have in abundance, is inimical to almost every lifeform on earth and confers no advantage as a launch platform for furture space exploration over the moon or a space station. > We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. Fun fact: Even after a full-scale thermonuclear war, Earth would still be a more liveable planet than Mars. So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
- thehappypm 3y ago
  My sad take is that if we ruin Earth, we don’t deserve a second chance. We would just ruin Mars too.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    > We would just ruin Mars too. Well, considering that Mars is currently a frozen, low-gravity, toxic, airless, irradiated, soil-less desert with barely any water, no nitrogen to speak of, very few options for energy generation, no protection from cosmic radiation and constantly wrecked by planet-wide duststorms, I honestly cannot imagine how we could possibly make it worse, even if we actively tried.
    - maxlin 3y ago
      This is the thing. Living on mars is something for the strong. Something that forces us to focus on what's important. With earth we may quickly swing from paradise to a total catastrophe. Which would be worse than mars and only reach mars-level after some time. Things that incentivize lazing away do not incentivize progress.
      - usrbinbash 3y ago
        > Something that forces us to focus on what's important. Primarily, it would be something that forces us to send rocket after rocket of supplies there, wasting countless resources in the process for very little, if any, practical benefit. Because, no, there is nothing to be gained on Mars that can't be gained much more effectively via robotic probes, and no, a Mars colony will not be self-sufficient. Investing resources for no good reason, is to me the exact opposite of "focusing on the important".
hotnfresh 3y ago
> We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. Nuked Earth that's also climate-changed so bad that only the poles are temperate is still a whole lot better than Mars. Why is the solution for this "establish a colony somewhere already 100x worse than a multi-catastrophe-stricken Earth would be, and is also very-expensive to get back to Earth from" ? It makes no sense. Asteroid strike? There are (much) cheaper ways to guard against that—hardened, distributed bunkers with paid inhabitants, increasing asteroid-hunting programs and interception research. Orbital habs or even the Moon if you're worried about a whole-crust-liquifying event that you can't stop in time. And we're not doing those. Why would we do Mars? It's worse than those options in basically every way. It's a really really bad place. Most the other threats those measures couldn't guard against, would probably also take out Mars. Going to Mars is cool and romantic and I hope to see it, but I think people trying to pin some practical reason for colonization other than "because it was there" (romantic) are misguided.
- maxlin 3y ago
  It's not just romantic, it's literally the only way to live in the case where this good place to live turns bad. We absolutely have the technology, even immediate capability to turn on nuclear winter. There is simply no argument against just not having all your eggs in one basket.

by maxlin 3y ago

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.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. But are being worked on. This statement would've been true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade ago. > The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular, social network. The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.
    - throwaway5752 3y ago
      https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mishap-investigation https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-mish... I was not impressed by this incident and it gives me concerns for their safety culture. My comment is not limited to propulsion or delivery technology. I respect SpaceX, but I also respect the real challenges of responsibly sending a crew to Mars.
      - maxlin 3y ago
        I find it silly saying that risk of a few settlers dying on the first tries outweighs the risk to the whole species when we arent' ready.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        Does the Apollo 1 accident report give you similar concerns about NASA's culture and ability to get to the moon?
    - runeofdoom 3y ago
      Musk is in the driver's seat at Twitter. At SpaceX he's a frontman, carefully managed by people who know both him and rocket science.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
hn_version_0023 3y ago
HN is unprepared for this level of sarcasm.

robg 3y ago

With no next gen propulsion system and no self-sustaining colony, humans on Mars are a resource sink with no added benefits. Lest you forget it took 300 years for North America to generate self-sustaining colonies from the first Europeans. And those didn’t require life support for oxygen and water for every second of survival.

robotresearcher 3y ago
North America had self sustaining human populations for thousands of years before they ever saw a European.
- burnished 3y ago
  The point is the challenge that was involved sending a small group on the same planet out to be self sufficient, not commentary about the habitability of the americas. If anything that underlines their point.
  - robotresearcher 3y ago
    Agreed. It just irritates a little that an analogy was proposed between a lifeless planet and a continent with millions of people already living there.

disconcision 3y ago

While I think having people on mars would be neat, I'm not sure there's anything we could do to earth period, let alone in a year, that would make it less livable than mars

usrbinbash 3y ago

> We should be there already. Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have? Exploratory activity can, is and should be done by robotic drones. Mars has zero resources Earth doesn't already have in abundance, is inimical to almost every lifeform on earth and confers no advantage as a launch platform for furture space exploration over the moon or a space station. > We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. Fun fact: Even after a full-scale thermonuclear war, Earth would still be a more liveable planet than Mars. So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?

thehappypm 3y ago
My sad take is that if we ruin Earth, we don’t deserve a second chance. We would just ruin Mars too.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  > We would just ruin Mars too. Well, considering that Mars is currently a frozen, low-gravity, toxic, airless, irradiated, soil-less desert with barely any water, no nitrogen to speak of, very few options for energy generation, no protection from cosmic radiation and constantly wrecked by planet-wide duststorms, I honestly cannot imagine how we could possibly make it worse, even if we actively tried.
  - maxlin 3y ago
    This is the thing. Living on mars is something for the strong. Something that forces us to focus on what's important. With earth we may quickly swing from paradise to a total catastrophe. Which would be worse than mars and only reach mars-level after some time. Things that incentivize lazing away do not incentivize progress.
    - usrbinbash 3y ago
      > Something that forces us to focus on what's important. Primarily, it would be something that forces us to send rocket after rocket of supplies there, wasting countless resources in the process for very little, if any, practical benefit. Because, no, there is nothing to be gained on Mars that can't be gained much more effectively via robotic probes, and no, a Mars colony will not be self-sufficient. Investing resources for no good reason, is to me the exact opposite of "focusing on the important".

hotnfresh 3y ago

> We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. Nuked Earth that's also climate-changed so bad that only the poles are temperate is still a whole lot better than Mars. Why is the solution for this "establish a colony somewhere already 100x worse than a multi-catastrophe-stricken Earth would be, and is also very-expensive to get back to Earth from" ? It makes no sense. Asteroid strike? There are (much) cheaper ways to guard against that—hardened, distributed bunkers with paid inhabitants, increasing asteroid-hunting programs and interception research. Orbital habs or even the Moon if you're worried about a whole-crust-liquifying event that you can't stop in time. And we're not doing those. Why would we do Mars? It's worse than those options in basically every way. It's a really really bad place. Most the other threats those measures couldn't guard against, would probably also take out Mars. Going to Mars is cool and romantic and I hope to see it, but I think people trying to pin some practical reason for colonization other than "because it was there" (romantic) are misguided.

maxlin 3y ago
It's not just romantic, it's literally the only way to live in the case where this good place to live turns bad. We absolutely have the technology, even immediate capability to turn on nuclear winter. There is simply no argument against just not having all your eggs in one basket.