28 ms·
Everything about Mars is the worst (2017)
- api 2y agoThe Moon is kind of glossed over but it’s not as bad as it sounds. There are peaks of (near) eternal light at the poles. Put up a tower there with solar collectors and you have power. Nuclear power works too and there is probably fissile material on the Moon if it can be found. It’s only a few days away, meaning it’s close enough for people to come and go and supplies to be sent in an emergency. It’s also close enough for tourism while Mars is definitely not barring fusion rockets or something. Magnetic or gun launch from the Lunar surface could export minerals from the Moon to Earth, another possible industry that could at least offset the cost. There are some compelling scientific and industrial possibilities. For science the Moon would make an amazing place to build massive telescopes. The low gravity would make huge structures easier to build too. Spacecraft could be built on the Moon and launched into space easily, making it an ideal place to construct really huge craft that would probably be needed for any serious forays elsewhere. Nuclear powered launch from the Moon is fine too unlike Earth where this would be an environmental disaster. The environment on the Moon is a bit harsher than Mars but not as much as it first appears. There is water and probably lots of minerals. A vacuum isn’t that much worse than the thin wispy Martian air. The dust may be more abrasive but otherwise is probably not much worse. Edit: peaks of eternal light: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_of_eternal_light https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_of_eternal_light
- piloto_ciego 2y agoAlso, it’s just a few days away from earth too.
- akira2501 2y ago> Nuclear power works too Moonquakes happen too.
- defrost 2y agotremors are typically weaker than the tremors that occur on the Earth, though they do tend to last longer. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-are-moonquakes-the-causes-and-different-types https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-are-moonq... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022JE007704 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022... https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experiment/display.action?id=1972-096C-06 https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experiment/display.action?id... Moonquakes don't seem to be showstopping events, more something that can be worked around by avoiding faults and steep slopes that might collapse.
- akira2501 2y agoIt's complicated enough that I don't think you could have something fully automated unless it's an RTG. It would all probably end like Antarctica, we had one reactor down there, but the cost of sending people there just to run it and the infeasibility of any repairs of upgrades ended the entire effort after one generation.
- defrost 2y agoMaintenance is a much better quibble, at least in my opinion. Real world non spherical cow technology has a pyramid of support issues that many tend to forget about.
- api 2y agoThat's the biggest reason I prefer the Moon to Mars for anything in the next 25-50 years at least. The Moon is close enough to Earth to get supplies quickly in a crunch. Mars is not. It's going to take a long time for anything off-world to be industrially self-sufficient because as you point out supply chains are longer and more complex than people realize.
- skissane 2y ago> It would all probably end like Antarctica, we had one reactor down there, but the cost of sending people there just to run it and the infeasibility of any repairs of upgrades ended the entire effort after one generation. The decision to close McMurdo Station's "Nukey Poo" nuclear power station in 1972 wasn't just due to cost of running it, it was also due to environmental concerns. On the Moon, those environmental concerns don't exist – there is no living environment to be harmed. Also, Nukey Poo was 1960s technology. State-of-the art nuclear reactors are more reliable and less maintenance-intensive than their 1960s forebears. So just because Nukey Poo required an on-site crew of 25 people, it doesn't necessarily follow a lunar reactor would. The reactor could be remotely monitored and controlled from Earth, and some maintenance tasks could likely be performed by robots–not possible in Nukey Poo's day. There would still likely be some maintenance tasks that would require humans on-site, but that might require significantly less than 25 people. For improved safety, a lunar reactor could be situated several kilometres away from the nearest human settlement, and left unattended most of the time. Humans (travelling in pressurised lunar rovers) could visit on those occasions when in-person maintenance was necesary. Another factor which added to the cost of Nukey Poo – under the Antarctic Treaty, it is prohibited to dispose of nuclear waste in Antarctica, so the whole site had to be disassembled and cleaned-up and all waste shipped back to the US via New Zealand, at great expense. By contrast, a disused lunar reactor could likely just be abandoned in-place. https://theconversation.com/remembering-antarcticas-nuclear-past-with-nukey-poo-99934 https://theconversation.com/remembering-antarcticas-nuclear-...
- piloto_ciego 2y agoI don’t see why people are so excited about Mars. 1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison. 2. After that, there’s pressure or I suppose the lack there of basically You might as well be in space. 3. Solar panels don’t work for shit on Mars, because it’s so much further away in the inverse square law is a bastard. 4. It’s a long ass way away. 5. The lower gravity has implications long term for having babies. Like, I think we should explore space, and become a multi planetary species, but I don’t know that Mars is the place for a viable long-term colony. I’m much more partial to Venus-cloud-cities or something similar.
- AdieuToLogic 2y agoPerhaps #6 could be that Mars does not currently have a magnetic field like this planet does[0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_Mars
- piloto_ciego 2y agoThis should be #6 - you’re right.
- ninkendo 2y agoYup, the only real way we could ever set up a long term habitat on mars would be to do it underground to shield from the radiation. The only way we could maybe justify the huge pain in the ass it would be to stay there long term, is if we treated it as a purposeful scientific mission with a goal of looking for signs of (potentially ancient) life, and accepted that there’s nothing else useful we could really do there. Whether this is worth it is questionable. What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.
- doctorhandshake 2y agoGranted it doesn’t look like low-hanging fruit but never, ever is a very long time.
- slimebot80 2y agoGreat! Let's trick everyone into giving us tax money for this MisSiOn tO sAvE hUmAnItY
- juancn 2y agoI think it's like all blue ocean endeavors, like Columbus first trip. He used the wrong earth circumference calculation to estimate his trip to the Indias to convince the queen (it was way off, that's why the Portuguese went around Africa instead), he got really lucky, and the end result was way better than what they set up on to obtain in the first place. Exploration is a bit crazy and a bit stupid, some people die and a few times we find something amazing that was in non way near what we thought we would find. I think Mars is - hopefully - going to be a bit like that. We go for one (maybe the wrong) reason, yet we stay for a different one.
- slimebot80 2y agoThe oceans connected us to regions with oxygen, food and resources.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThe mortality for interplanetary spaceflight, in the near future, will likely be an order of magnitude lower than it was of the Age of Exploration’s front line. The comparison is terrible for several reasons. But it’s one that speaks to spirit, not means. If the Americas were uninhabited, they would have been—to colonial-era Europe—of comparable difficulty to setting up a permanent Lunar or Martian. (Note: NOT permanent population. Reproduction is harder.)
- slimebot80 2y agoThe Americas have trees, meat, rivers, oxygen, grasslands, forests, birds. Your comparison is WAY more terrible than my own. A mission to a dusty rock while your own beautiful planet is dying is a weird way to help a tech bro claim more tax resources for himself.
- yaky 2y agoOn the same theme, A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC fame) is a humorous yet an in-depth pragmatic look at why space colonization will suck. Summarizing: space will kill you fast, moon will grind you down with the regolith, and Mars will poison you. There are some interesting bits about international/space laws and treaties too.
- senkora 2y ago+1, great book. Their recommended strategy is to 1) wait until technology improves and we have a better understanding of how to solve the fundamental problems of Mars colonization, then 2) go big and build a large settlement that has the scale to actually succeed.
- stoneman24 2y agoWasn’t that convincing for me. The hard science elements seemed a bit cherry-picked and the later sections on governance and laws seem to want almost a wide spread agreement across multiple countries on every detail before people are allowed to go. A multi-part review [1] is available which detailed more aspects quite well. In short, people will go for a multitude of reasons (whether it is sensible or not). [1] https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i
- gumby 2y agoLeave spaceflight to the robots. They don’t need to drag around a planetary environment.
- extheat 2y agoWhat's the point of it then? If humans are not consuming it then there is no point to doing anything at all out there is it?
- gumby 2y agoIt matters to you if a robot discovers something and tells you rather than some person you don’t know discovering it and telling you? All the exploration of space is being done by robots anyway. Then computers crunch the data and screens display it…all directed by humans. Where is your line between tool and tool wielder?
- atleastoptimal 2y agoWe will achieve artificial general intelligence before any sort of permanent Mars settlement is meaningfully viable. It would make sense to develop the capacity to terraform the Earth out of climate change before worrying about making Mars habitable anyway.
- Loughla 2y agoI believe artificial general intelligence is the only way our species survives. We may end up just as cleaners for the power supply, or as a collection of past oddities, but it will save us from destroying ourselves.
- yinser 2y agoThat’s the kind of attitude that leaves you caught with your pants down in the other dozen scenarios that wipe out humanity. No one, including Elon, is saying to write off earth. It’s just within our capability now to colonize and prepare mars as a plan B.
- atleastoptimal 2y agoThe resources needed to colonize Mars are best suited devoted to preventing the most probable threats to humanity. A large underground bunker with nuclear power would be more viable as a plan B than a Martian colony in a time frame of the next 30-50 years or so. For Mars to be a unique contingency in the event of complete destruction of every human on earth, thousands of problems would have to be solved to make Mars viable. The engineering force to solve those problems would make Earth 100x more resistant to catastrophe.
- yinser 2y agoLarge meteor strike. Your move.
- dredmorbius 2y agoWhat are the odds? What are the odds of a successful Mars mitigation?
- FredPret 2y agoI wonder if you could make a huge steel balloon float in the Venusian atmosphere. You'd run into problems with the atmospheric acid eating away at the skin, but I wonder if you can at least float high enough to have a pleasant outdoor temperature. At least the Sun wouldn't appear tiny and cold as from Mars! https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsts/14/1/14_1_11/_article/-char/ja/ https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsts/14/1/14_1_11/_arti...
- marcosdumay 2y agoYou'd make a tefflon balloon. Steel is not good for using there. Besides, you can mine the material for tefflon right from the atmosphere. You can't do that for steel.
- Teever 2y agoI love the idea of floating, self replicating factories on Venus that launch comets made of dry ice to Mars to build up an atmosphere on Mars and reduce the atmosphere on Venus.
- andrewflnr 2y agoI'd think you actually just use whatever plastic they use to make the container they ship sulfuric acid in?
- dredmorbius 2y agoAmong the chief arguments for a balloon-based Venus station is that the high atmosphere doesn't have (much?) sulfuric acid, as the surface does. So surviving H2SO4 isn't highly salient.
- andrewflnr 2y agoIt doesn't take a lot of acid to cause problems over time. You still wouldn't want to use steel, as mentioned above. But yeah, you don't need Teflon either. Honestly I'm pretty sure I remember HDPE showing up in real proposals for Venus missions, which is why it was top of mind.
- htrp 2y agohttps://science.nasa.gov/mission/insight/ https://science.nasa.gov/mission/insight/ > The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) was a NASA Discovery Program mission that placed a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. But InSight was more than a Mars mission. It addressed one of the most fundamental issues of planetary science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago. The mission ended in December 2022 after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars. In case you wanted to find out what happens next.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elzbardico 2y agoSome factual mistakes in the Article. The USSR landed a probe on mars, the unimagetivelly called Mars 3, it's mission was aborted in less than 2 minutes due to communication failure, but it acchieved a successful landing, and was actually the first one to do so succesfuly. Its predecessor, Mars 2 reached mars, but crash landed, but have the honor of being the first man made object to land on mars surface.
- anticodon 2y agoIt's forbidden to mention anything positive about USSR/Russia in Western media. It comes to the point that the first man in space now is Alan Shepard, not Yuri Gagarin (according to the US media).
- grishka 2y agoThis article is from 2017.
- ttyprintk 2y agoThe only top search results for Alan Shepard which claim he was first in space are fanfic alternative history, which I guess is popular. I feel it’s quite popular to hypothesize that a Russian secretly preceded Gagarin but didn’t survive.
- LUmBULtERA 2y agoIt's commonly mentioned in the US that the USSR had the first satellite and first man in space.
- beretguy 2y agoStop playing a victim.
- boxed 2y agoCitation needed
- arrowsmith 2y agoI have literally never heard anyone claim that Alan Shepard was th "first man in space."
- cletus 2y agoColonizing Mars makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believing otherwise just for the sci-fi trope of living on Mars. Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. It's just enough to complicate landing and to cover all your equipment in dust when there are planetary-wise dust storms. The ground is poison. Energy production is an issue. Low gravity is a problem. It's a long way from Earth. Terraforming Mars is a fantasy. Now compare this to the Moon. Inhabitants can remain in real-time contact with Earth. Getting there is far easier and quicker. You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. There's evidence of extensive lava tunnels that can be pressurized and inhabited without the need for massive excavation. The only real issue with the Moon where Mars actually wins is day length. Mars has almost a normal Earth-like day length. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth on a 28 day orbit so has... a 28 Earth day "Moon day". You see this same psychology at play every time some fringe scientist comes up with another completely unworkable idea for FTL travel (warp drives,, wormholes, etc). But really living in another gravity well doesn't mmake much sense in any case. It's further compolication for not a lot of gain. I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago- Lower gravity - 2x distance to Earth compared to Venus - No magnetosphere - Thinner atmosphere = you boil at room temperature
- avmich 2y agoSurely the best place in terms of hospitality is Earth. But Mars, with all its problems, is likely still second. Likely. We can deal with all martian problems. 1. Perchlorates in the soil? You can deal with them, say, chemically if you need some patch on Mars which is more Earth-like. After al you don't need to have the whole Mars immediately fertile. 2. Low pressure? Yes, but it's still better than vacuum, so spacesuits could be simpler, and also the cold atmosphere won't freeze you as much. 3. Far from Earth so Sun is too dim for solar batteries? Then take more of those batteries, they are becoming good, cheap and even light. 4. Far away from Earth? Yes, true - but we can survive for the year to get from here to there, and we routinely had ISS missions for half a year, comparing to ~9 months flight with today's technologies from Earth to Mars. 5. Low gravity on Mars and weightlessness in flight? Some are optimistic about artificial gravity during flights or even on the surface, and if we don't yet consider permanent settlements, it's imaginable to live a couple of years in that artificial gravity, and come back in a relatively good shape. 0. Radiation? How about better shielding for spacecrafts for the flights - both using e.g. water onboard and plasma clouds around, so different kinds of radiation would be at least reduced. Just like with artificial gravity, there are much more questions than answers in these areas, but at least we have physically plausible ideas. On the surface we can use underground houses - even with centrifuges.
- cenamus 2y agoAs for point 2, pressure on mars is a few millibars, so not even a percent of earths atmospheric pressure, way too little to simplify construction or anything
- SECProto 2y ago> pressure on mars is a few millibars, so not even a percent of earths atmospheric pressure Not strictly accurate - varies significantly with elevation, and the bottom of Hellas Planitia (which is 2300km across) is over 1% of earth's. But your overall point stands, nowhere on the surface of mars is above the armstrong limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit
- moffkalast 2y ago
- epicureanideal 2y agoWhat’s the theoretical minimum cost of travel to the moon, equivalent to a coach class airline ticket with no baggage?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> What’s the theoretical minimum cost of travel to the moon, equivalent to a coach class airline ticket with no baggage? Pennies. Seriously, this depends on the propulsion system. It’s like asking a Roman what it costs to ship silk from China.
- yareal 2y agoThey didn't even cover the chemical composition and harsh structure of the regolith, which makes converting it to soil impossibly difficult and probably a good source of novel lung diseases. Or the low gravity resulting in issues for long term habitants. Or the length of the Martian day being annoyingly close to but not exactly 24 hours which will fuck up some rhythms. Or the general mineral paucity. Or the distance. Or or or. Mars is incredibly cool as a science fiction destination, but I'd much rather see us target near earth asteroids as space habitats first.
- Animats 2y agoOperating in the asteroid belt may be more useful. Good access to water, carbon, some nitrogen, and metal resources, so all the basics are available. Robots are probably going to be doing most of the work. Maybe with some on-site human presence, maybe not. It's not clear anyone will live there, but mining operations are likely.
- anArbitraryOne 2y agoWhat about living in the atmosphere of Venus?
- arrowsmith 2y agoKeep burning fossil fuels and we'll get there.
- foreigner 2y agoMy favourite planet is this one.
- zamalek 2y agoNo fan of Elon, not by a long shot, but he's right on this one: all it takes is is one asteroid, one volcano, or one nuke party for this planet to become everyone's least favorite planet.
- atwrk 2y agoIsn't this exactly the moment where he is wrong? Even if all three of these would happen simultaneously, it would still be easier to ensure human continuity on earth, not on mars. A mars colony would have to be underground to escape the radiation and poisonous atmosphere - but of course you could also build an underground shelter on earth. And have better gravity, easier energy sources, endless amounts of water and so on for free. A mars outpost after a nuke party on earth would simply die, as it is completely unfeasable to both a) develop it so far that it becomes self-sufficient and b) not become a military target along the way simply because of its size.
- rglynn 2y agoThat's probably true with our current technology and understanding of a Mars colony. The idea would be to get to a point where we have (at least) a self-sufficient colony as a backup. As others have pointed out, it doesn't have to be Mars, it just needs to be not Earth. Long term we obviously need to escape the solar system too.
- zamalek 2y agoYou have fewer options without redundancy, no matter how ineffective the backup site is. The odds of getting many humans to collaborate on reaching a second planet is also greater than the odds of getting all humans to collaborate on saving this one (which, to be clear, is absolutely no chance at all).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]