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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

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.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > 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? If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood. But then, the great thing about markets is that they can see more broadly than me. (And the bad thing is that they can't see as far.) Anyway, if we decide to invest on space exploitation (instead of just exploration), I'd bet on asteroid mining much before planet colonization. Settling down on a planet seems to be a completely useless action.
  - fastball 3y ago
    We just established that we would need to invent a lot of new and useful things to make a Mars colony work. How is inventing new and useful things a useless action? > If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood. All of these things would probably be worked on as part of Mars colonization, no? It's just the Mars colony excites smart people. Working on solar on earth, with loads of fossil fuels and an associated lack of appreciation for your work, is much less exciting. Someone who fixes solar panels on Earth is making minimum wage. Someone who fixes the solar panel array at the Mars Colony is a hero.
- vkou 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 can say the same thing about literally any other hard problem, most of which have a far better ROI, and are still not getting much traction. There's a reason nobody's built a moon base.

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.

marcosdumay 3y ago
> 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? If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood. But then, the great thing about markets is that they can see more broadly than me. (And the bad thing is that they can't see as far.) Anyway, if we decide to invest on space exploitation (instead of just exploration), I'd bet on asteroid mining much before planet colonization. Settling down on a planet seems to be a completely useless action.
- fastball 3y ago
  We just established that we would need to invent a lot of new and useful things to make a Mars colony work. How is inventing new and useful things a useless action? > If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood. All of these things would probably be worked on as part of Mars colonization, no? It's just the Mars colony excites smart people. Working on solar on earth, with loads of fossil fuels and an associated lack of appreciation for your work, is much less exciting. Someone who fixes solar panels on Earth is making minimum wage. Someone who fixes the solar panel array at the Mars Colony is a hero.
vkou 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 can say the same thing about literally any other hard problem, most of which have a far better ROI, and are still not getting much traction. There's a reason nobody's built a moon base.