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Colonizing Mars makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believi

by cletus 2y ago

Colonizing 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
- mathsmath 2y ago
  Lower gravity isn’t necessarily a con. It’s great for rockets!
  - fastball 2y ago
    It's definitely a con for human habitation. Our physiology evolved in 1g and without that many of our bodily processes behave poorly over extended timeframes.
    - skissane 2y ago
      We don’t actually know what the long-term health consequences of Martian or lunar gravity are. We know the long-term health consequences of microgravity (as in LEO) are significantly negative. But, we lack data on long-term health effects of Martian or lunar gravity. Pessimistically, humans really need close to 1g, and anything significantly less causes serious problems-lunar isn’t going to be much better than microgravity. Optimistically, humans just need “some gravity”, and while close to zero is harmful, lunar or Martian isn’t. The way things are going, we are likely to find out in the next 10-20 years, at least for the lunar case. If lunar gravity avoids most of the negative health effects of microgravity, Martian gravity will too. If it doesn’t there is still the chance that Martian gravity might be “just enough” even if lunar gravity isn’t
    - mathsmath 2y ago
      Long term yes, but people still go to the ISS in 0g. I was just pointing out that some things that are bad for humans actually make the rocketry problem for returning easier for this bullet point.
- pwatsonwailes 2y ago
  The second point isn't accurate. You're thinking they're all static, rather than orbiting. There's times when each is closer than the other.
  - stoperaticless 2y ago
    I assume we use distance as proxy for “how hard is to get there” (time and energy needed). Actual momentary distance is a bit tangential, because you never move in a straight line.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      From low Earth orbit, transfer orbits to Venus and Mars take 3.5 and 3.6 km/s of thrust respectively. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit
      - pwatsonwailes 2y ago
        The problem with a Hohmann transfer orbit is that you rely on launch windows. You can only do it when the two planets are in a straight line from the sun (or more accurately, and the same equivalent points in each of their orbits at the same time). This is a pain as Earth-Mars launch windows only come along every two years. If you want to launch without that issue, you're then into the world of using more delta-v, which is catastrophically expensive, unless you've got some form of propulsion for your craft beyond what we've got now. So yes, but with caveats. Obviously, there's a giant pile of detail beyond this in terms of the calculations for trading off time of flight vs distance between bodies, vs delta-v to accelerate towards the body, and then accelerate away from it to slow your descent into an orbital trajectory, but that's more depth than I'm going into for a quick HN comment.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        If you're jamming the throttle then the difference between Venus and Mars is also not very much.
mathsmath 2y ago
It doesn’t really make sense, but some childhood part of me likes to imagine us as a species of explorers. There are tons of things humans do that don’t make sense. IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense. We did end up benefitting in unforeseen ways from the technology developed by doing so. If people want to sign up to fly to Mars or send hardware there to terraform, why should we stop them? I take lots of unnecessary risks mountaineering, because it’s what fills my cup. You make great points about orbitals, and I do agree from a logical standpoint. Maybe Mars proves too impractical, but the technology developed leads us in that direction instead. I’m excited for the future either way.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  Suppose it was possible to travel to Mars and survive on its surface. Even if no-one ever moves there permanently, I'm sure that many people would visit, just like people currently seek adventure in remote and inhospitable locations on Earth. Maybe we'll even get a version of the show Alone that's set on Mars. "We dropped ten astronauts off in isolated locations on the Martian surface. Let's see who can survive the longest!" I'd tune in to that.
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    Very expensive snuff film
- api 2y ago
  Life doesn't make sense. It's a fantastic tower of complexity fighting against entropy. Just let hydrocarbon goo sit peacefully like it apparently does on other bodies in the universe and stop this self-replication and evolution madness.
  - devbent 2y ago
    > complexity fighting against entropy. Life helps entropy along! Humans are great at taking organized things and reducing their energy states. There's actually an argument that says life is inevitable as a result of it the universe trying to heat death itself sooner.
mdorazio 2y ago
Yes, but there is also nothing on the moon worth going there for. Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids. I’m of the opinion that if you want real space industry, leave the planets alone and go to the near-earth asteroids followed by the belt. If you want space tourism and money-sucking colonies then it doesn’t really matter which location you pick - they’re all bad.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids. More pertinently, when we actually develop a fusion reactor, the gas giants are a far easier place to get fusion fuel from than the parts-per-billion in regolith.
safety1st 2y ago
One of the big arguments for colonizing Mars is that a self-sufficient Mars colony could serve as a "backup" for the human race in case we screw things up so badly that we wipe ourselves out here on Earth. I always thought this was a specious argument and that despite a lot of social media threads and Elon ravings, no one is really taking it seriously. The reason I think this is because no one ever brings up the idea of having a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica. I mean to build a proper threat model you need to understand exactly what threats you're trying to mitigate I guess. But let's say it's the usual doom and gloom stuff, a) climate change, b) nuclear war/winter, c) meteor strike. If anything an Antarctic colony stands to benefit from climate change. A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole, and to be self-sufficient you had to solve your energy needs without much sunlight anyway (there are surely tons of undiscovered hydrocarbons down there waiting to be dug up and refined). A meteor strike, well as long as it doesn't land on the colony, the problems are similar to nuclear winter. So if you want to have a "backup" for the human race - the Antarctic Plateau is sufficiently remote, and about 10,000x easier than anything off-world. But we don't even talk about it because everyone knows life on Antarctica is pretty depressing and PEOPLE JUST WANT TO DO SCI-FI IN SPACE.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  > A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole The South Pole is within easy reach though, why wouldn't a colony on it get targeted as well?
  - once_inc 2y ago
    If there is a self-sufficient colony there, and it consists of people from a single nation, it will be targeted. Only a non-political, mixed-heritage colony of scientists and farmers might be overlooked.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      As of 1964, with the Mariner launches, the same rocket would be used to target either Antarctica or Mars.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Don't forget that there is more surface area on the asteroid belt than the rest of the solar system combined — and minimal gravity. Cheap — and resources to extract.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  This is important because an unmanned project could redirect asteroids to repeatably hit a chosen canyon on Mars. This increases the neighborhood metal value and begins the 50 km shaft you’d need to achieve survivable pressure underground.
- wruza 2y ago
  And you can prod asteroids so they accidentally fall on your enemies, either in the belt or on earth.
barnabee 2y ago
We do things that don’t make sense all the time. The idea that our lives and plans should be dominated entirely by rational decisions only itself makes sense if you’re willing to expand rational to include the likes of “because it’s there” and “because I felt like it”. That said, given the unknowns and uncertainties, I believe it’s rational to devote some small amount of our resources to trying to achieve multiple sustainable off-earth communities, including in orbit, on the Moon, and yes, on Mars.
- Uehreka 2y ago
  I think GP is referring to people like Elon Musk, who have a personal brand built around the idea that they’re “rational people who make data-driven decisions based on logic” and yet twist themselves into fascinating rhetorical shapes trying to argue that human colonization of Mars is possible, necessary and also imminent. I think they do this because they recognize that “some small amount of our resources” won’t actually be enough to do anything on Mars in the coming century, and they want to go to Mars in their lifetime.
grishka 2y ago
As far as terraforming goes, Venus would be a much better candidate for it than Mars.
ben_w 2y ago
Broadly I agree about Mars vs the moon. Two wrinkles, not really disagreements: > Low gravity is a problem It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem. > Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. Not directly, but it does mean (1) leaks can be represurised from outside, and (2) is a source of carbon, useful for plants and ISRU fuel manufacturing. The fuel point is useful for any initial colonisation creation, but by the time we seriously consider a million people we should be able to build a mass driver… which works better on the airless moon than the thin atmosphere of Mars. > 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. I understand the appeal, but I strongly suspect they only seem good due to the failure modes having not yet been deeply investigated.
- me_me_me 2y ago
  >> Low gravity is a problem >It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem. We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes. Our bodies evolved and adapted to live in 9.8m/s2 its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes Indeed, but the ISS is also zero gee. > its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7 I'm not suggesting it requires a leap of faith, merely that it is currently untested. Until we try, either hypothesis is plausible.
  - jgord 2y ago
    I t actually seems strange that the next 'step' isnt a spinning space science station, with simulated gravity. Is there an obvious reason this would not work ?
    - arrowsmith 2y ago
arrowsmith 2y ago
> Low gravity is a problem. Isn't it a bigger problem on the Moon?
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
> You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. Once there are regular landings on the Moon, dust management will be an issue, either at source on the landing pad, or where it lands, which will be just about everywhere on the moon. https://www.space.com/4956-lunar-landers-sandblasted-moon.html https://www.space.com/4956-lunar-landers-sandblasted-moon.ht... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunar-dust-could-sandblast-astronauts-on-the-moon-studies-warn https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunar-dust-could-... https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-solutions-for-managing-moon-landing-dust-cloud/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-solutio...
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  Isn’t the moon dust sharp too? Barbed like?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    Yes. From the 2nd link: > moon dust is nasty stuff. The jagged material It has never been smoothed by wind and water erosion or reacted chemically with the same.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot, having most people die in the process, not knowing if they was an end to that sand, felt the same. Why would you do that? Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now. That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing. But eventually something pays of big time. And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively. It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive. I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds. I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same. It's always a different situation. That's the point. That's what discovery is about.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > Why would you do that? Because there was fertile land on the other side. Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert. > I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never. Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert. Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG. Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas. > But eventually something pays of big time. There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.
  - hoseja 2y ago
    Sometimes being outside easy nuclear strike capabilities of the superpowers is a good on its own. Plus lot less annoying environmentalists and I imagine plentiful fissile material.
larsrc 2y ago
I very much agree that the moon is a better target. Being able to send help in a few days instead of months is a big deal. What I believe the moon is especially good for is as a launch pad for further exploration. Build mostly-automated factories in low but non-zero gravity and launch with a much smaller escape velocity. Lots of raw materials right there, easy energy from the sun (with solar panels in space for the night). Unfortunately, the moon is "old hat" now that we've walked on it, and people want exciting new goals, not just a space factory.
Chris2048 2y ago
> and won't get covered in dust I thought moon dust was a terrible problem, esp because with no atmosphere it's statically charged and so sticks to everything?
singularity2001 2y ago
>> Now compare this to the Moon. Colonizing the Moon 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 the Moon. Maybe in 50 years the Moon can be colonized by machines, but for humans if they really want to experiment with self sufficiency, they can try building Biosphere 3 in the Sahara and see if they can survive for a few weeks without constant support from the outside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
- api 2y ago
  A fully isolated colony anywhere isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. This would be true even if there were another Earth. It would require multiple revolutions in compact software-defined manufacturing and a rethink of supply chains around that core. McMurdo on the Moon is entirely possible and I think there's a good chance we'll see it. This would get us started trying to live elsewhere and we'd start learning how to deal with the challenges. We'd also find out about the challenges we don't know.
  - pdfernhout 2y ago
    Back in 1999 I worked on a (unfunded) pre-proposal to NASA on "OSCOMAK" (Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge) but, it did not go very far. https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix). We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository. You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web..." See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 "... So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical prototypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossiped about by academics.) ..."
joshuanapoli 2y ago
In general, life, if it is to endure, has to keep pushing its boundaries. Our current niche will surely end. Through stretching to build colonies in difficult places, hopefully we will become more robust. So it’s useful for explorers to go to places where they might just barely survive. As humans start moving beyond Earth, I think that it’s more likely that we change ourselves. We can probably make our bodies more tolerant of lower gravity and higher radiation.
ryandvm 2y ago
Mars makes sense to Elon Musk because it would be the culmination of his multi-decade strategy of pumping up companies on government largesse. Whether it's fat government contracts or tax credits and grants, every single one of his ventures have relied extensively on the taxpayer. Musk correctly has identified an international effort to Mars as the most lucrative, multi-governmental contract that ever existed.
marssaxman 2y ago
You're not wrong, but if we follow that logic, we might as well shut down all the bases in Antarctica; for that matter, people should probably stop living in Las Vegas, and what is up with that restaurant on top of the Jungfraujoch? Nobody can live there! Perhaps it's about more than mere practicality.

by cletus 2y ago

29athrowaway 2y ago

- Lower gravity - 2x distance to Earth compared to Venus - No magnetosphere - Thinner atmosphere = you boil at room temperature

mathsmath 2y ago
Lower gravity isn’t necessarily a con. It’s great for rockets!
- fastball 2y ago
  It's definitely a con for human habitation. Our physiology evolved in 1g and without that many of our bodily processes behave poorly over extended timeframes.
  - skissane 2y ago
    We don’t actually know what the long-term health consequences of Martian or lunar gravity are. We know the long-term health consequences of microgravity (as in LEO) are significantly negative. But, we lack data on long-term health effects of Martian or lunar gravity. Pessimistically, humans really need close to 1g, and anything significantly less causes serious problems-lunar isn’t going to be much better than microgravity. Optimistically, humans just need “some gravity”, and while close to zero is harmful, lunar or Martian isn’t. The way things are going, we are likely to find out in the next 10-20 years, at least for the lunar case. If lunar gravity avoids most of the negative health effects of microgravity, Martian gravity will too. If it doesn’t there is still the chance that Martian gravity might be “just enough” even if lunar gravity isn’t
  - mathsmath 2y ago
    Long term yes, but people still go to the ISS in 0g. I was just pointing out that some things that are bad for humans actually make the rocketry problem for returning easier for this bullet point.
pwatsonwailes 2y ago
The second point isn't accurate. You're thinking they're all static, rather than orbiting. There's times when each is closer than the other.
- stoperaticless 2y ago
  I assume we use distance as proxy for “how hard is to get there” (time and energy needed). Actual momentary distance is a bit tangential, because you never move in a straight line.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    From low Earth orbit, transfer orbits to Venus and Mars take 3.5 and 3.6 km/s of thrust respectively. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit
    - pwatsonwailes 2y ago
      The problem with a Hohmann transfer orbit is that you rely on launch windows. You can only do it when the two planets are in a straight line from the sun (or more accurately, and the same equivalent points in each of their orbits at the same time). This is a pain as Earth-Mars launch windows only come along every two years. If you want to launch without that issue, you're then into the world of using more delta-v, which is catastrophically expensive, unless you've got some form of propulsion for your craft beyond what we've got now. So yes, but with caveats. Obviously, there's a giant pile of detail beyond this in terms of the calculations for trading off time of flight vs distance between bodies, vs delta-v to accelerate towards the body, and then accelerate away from it to slow your descent into an orbital trajectory, but that's more depth than I'm going into for a quick HN comment.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        If you're jamming the throttle then the difference between Venus and Mars is also not very much.

mathsmath 2y ago

It doesn’t really make sense, but some childhood part of me likes to imagine us as a species of explorers. There are tons of things humans do that don’t make sense. IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense. We did end up benefitting in unforeseen ways from the technology developed by doing so. If people want to sign up to fly to Mars or send hardware there to terraform, why should we stop them? I take lots of unnecessary risks mountaineering, because it’s what fills my cup. You make great points about orbitals, and I do agree from a logical standpoint. Maybe Mars proves too impractical, but the technology developed leads us in that direction instead. I’m excited for the future either way.

arrowsmith 2y ago
Suppose it was possible to travel to Mars and survive on its surface. Even if no-one ever moves there permanently, I'm sure that many people would visit, just like people currently seek adventure in remote and inhospitable locations on Earth. Maybe we'll even get a version of the show Alone that's set on Mars. "We dropped ten astronauts off in isolated locations on the Martian surface. Let's see who can survive the longest!" I'd tune in to that.
- dwighttk 2y ago
  Very expensive snuff film
api 2y ago
Life doesn't make sense. It's a fantastic tower of complexity fighting against entropy. Just let hydrocarbon goo sit peacefully like it apparently does on other bodies in the universe and stop this self-replication and evolution madness.
- devbent 2y ago
  > complexity fighting against entropy. Life helps entropy along! Humans are great at taking organized things and reducing their energy states. There's actually an argument that says life is inevitable as a result of it the universe trying to heat death itself sooner.

mdorazio 2y ago

Yes, but there is also nothing on the moon worth going there for. Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids. I’m of the opinion that if you want real space industry, leave the planets alone and go to the near-earth asteroids followed by the belt. If you want space tourism and money-sucking colonies then it doesn’t really matter which location you pick - they’re all bad.

ben_w 2y ago
> Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids. More pertinently, when we actually develop a fusion reactor, the gas giants are a far easier place to get fusion fuel from than the parts-per-billion in regolith.

safety1st 2y ago

One of the big arguments for colonizing Mars is that a self-sufficient Mars colony could serve as a "backup" for the human race in case we screw things up so badly that we wipe ourselves out here on Earth. I always thought this was a specious argument and that despite a lot of social media threads and Elon ravings, no one is really taking it seriously. The reason I think this is because no one ever brings up the idea of having a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica. I mean to build a proper threat model you need to understand exactly what threats you're trying to mitigate I guess. But let's say it's the usual doom and gloom stuff, a) climate change, b) nuclear war/winter, c) meteor strike. If anything an Antarctic colony stands to benefit from climate change. A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole, and to be self-sufficient you had to solve your energy needs without much sunlight anyway (there are surely tons of undiscovered hydrocarbons down there waiting to be dug up and refined). A meteor strike, well as long as it doesn't land on the colony, the problems are similar to nuclear winter. So if you want to have a "backup" for the human race - the Antarctic Plateau is sufficiently remote, and about 10,000x easier than anything off-world. But we don't even talk about it because everyone knows life on Antarctica is pretty depressing and PEOPLE JUST WANT TO DO SCI-FI IN SPACE.

Aardwolf 2y ago
> A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole The South Pole is within easy reach though, why wouldn't a colony on it get targeted as well?
- once_inc 2y ago
  If there is a self-sufficient colony there, and it consists of people from a single nation, it will be targeted. Only a non-political, mixed-heritage colony of scientists and farmers might be overlooked.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    As of 1964, with the Mariner launches, the same rocket would be used to target either Antarctica or Mars.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Don't forget that there is more surface area on the asteroid belt than the rest of the solar system combined — and minimal gravity. Cheap — and resources to extract.

ttyprintk 2y ago
This is important because an unmanned project could redirect asteroids to repeatably hit a chosen canyon on Mars. This increases the neighborhood metal value and begins the 50 km shaft you’d need to achieve survivable pressure underground.
wruza 2y ago
And you can prod asteroids so they accidentally fall on your enemies, either in the belt or on earth.

barnabee 2y ago

We do things that don’t make sense all the time. The idea that our lives and plans should be dominated entirely by rational decisions only itself makes sense if you’re willing to expand rational to include the likes of “because it’s there” and “because I felt like it”. That said, given the unknowns and uncertainties, I believe it’s rational to devote some small amount of our resources to trying to achieve multiple sustainable off-earth communities, including in orbit, on the Moon, and yes, on Mars.

Uehreka 2y ago
I think GP is referring to people like Elon Musk, who have a personal brand built around the idea that they’re “rational people who make data-driven decisions based on logic” and yet twist themselves into fascinating rhetorical shapes trying to argue that human colonization of Mars is possible, necessary and also imminent. I think they do this because they recognize that “some small amount of our resources” won’t actually be enough to do anything on Mars in the coming century, and they want to go to Mars in their lifetime.

grishka 2y ago

As far as terraforming goes, Venus would be a much better candidate for it than Mars.

ben_w 2y ago

Broadly I agree about Mars vs the moon. Two wrinkles, not really disagreements: > Low gravity is a problem It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem. > Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. Not directly, but it does mean (1) leaks can be represurised from outside, and (2) is a source of carbon, useful for plants and ISRU fuel manufacturing. The fuel point is useful for any initial colonisation creation, but by the time we seriously consider a million people we should be able to build a mass driver… which works better on the airless moon than the thin atmosphere of Mars. > 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. I understand the appeal, but I strongly suspect they only seem good due to the failure modes having not yet been deeply investigated.

me_me_me 2y ago
>> Low gravity is a problem >It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem. We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes. Our bodies evolved and adapted to live in 9.8m/s2 its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
- ben_w 2y ago
  > We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes Indeed, but the ISS is also zero gee. > its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7 I'm not suggesting it requires a leap of faith, merely that it is currently untested. Until we try, either hypothesis is plausible.
- jgord 2y ago
  I t actually seems strange that the next 'step' isnt a spinning space science station, with simulated gravity. Is there an obvious reason this would not work ?
  - arrowsmith 2y ago

arrowsmith 2y ago

> Low gravity is a problem. Isn't it a bigger problem on the Moon?

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

> You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. Once there are regular landings on the Moon, dust management will be an issue, either at source on the landing pad, or where it lands, which will be just about everywhere on the moon. https://www.space.com/4956-lunar-landers-sandblasted-moon.html https://www.space.com/4956-lunar-landers-sandblasted-moon.ht... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunar-dust-could-sandblast-astronauts-on-the-moon-studies-warn https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunar-dust-could-... https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-solutions-for-managing-moon-landing-dust-cloud/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-solutio...

firesteelrain 2y ago
Isn’t the moon dust sharp too? Barbed like?
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  Yes. From the 2nd link: > moon dust is nasty stuff. The jagged material It has never been smoothed by wind and water erosion or reacted chemically with the same.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot, having most people die in the process, not knowing if they was an end to that sand, felt the same. Why would you do that? Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now. That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing. But eventually something pays of big time. And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively. It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive. I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds. I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same. It's always a different situation. That's the point. That's what discovery is about.

jiggawatts 2y ago
> Why would you do that? Because there was fertile land on the other side. Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert. > I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never. Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert. Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG. Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas. > But eventually something pays of big time. There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.
- hoseja 2y ago
  Sometimes being outside easy nuclear strike capabilities of the superpowers is a good on its own. Plus lot less annoying environmentalists and I imagine plentiful fissile material.

larsrc 2y ago

I very much agree that the moon is a better target. Being able to send help in a few days instead of months is a big deal. What I believe the moon is especially good for is as a launch pad for further exploration. Build mostly-automated factories in low but non-zero gravity and launch with a much smaller escape velocity. Lots of raw materials right there, easy energy from the sun (with solar panels in space for the night). Unfortunately, the moon is "old hat" now that we've walked on it, and people want exciting new goals, not just a space factory.

Chris2048 2y ago

> and won't get covered in dust I thought moon dust was a terrible problem, esp because with no atmosphere it's statically charged and so sticks to everything?

singularity2001 2y ago

>> Now compare this to the Moon. Colonizing the Moon 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 the Moon. Maybe in 50 years the Moon can be colonized by machines, but for humans if they really want to experiment with self sufficiency, they can try building Biosphere 3 in the Sahara and see if they can survive for a few weeks without constant support from the outside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

api 2y ago
A fully isolated colony anywhere isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. This would be true even if there were another Earth. It would require multiple revolutions in compact software-defined manufacturing and a rethink of supply chains around that core. McMurdo on the Moon is entirely possible and I think there's a good chance we'll see it. This would get us started trying to live elsewhere and we'd start learning how to deal with the challenges. We'd also find out about the challenges we don't know.
- pdfernhout 2y ago
  Back in 1999 I worked on a (unfunded) pre-proposal to NASA on "OSCOMAK" (Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge) but, it did not go very far. https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/ "The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix). We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository. You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web..." See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 "... So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical prototypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossiped about by academics.) ..."

joshuanapoli 2y ago

In general, life, if it is to endure, has to keep pushing its boundaries. Our current niche will surely end. Through stretching to build colonies in difficult places, hopefully we will become more robust. So it’s useful for explorers to go to places where they might just barely survive. As humans start moving beyond Earth, I think that it’s more likely that we change ourselves. We can probably make our bodies more tolerant of lower gravity and higher radiation.

ryandvm 2y ago

Mars makes sense to Elon Musk because it would be the culmination of his multi-decade strategy of pumping up companies on government largesse. Whether it's fat government contracts or tax credits and grants, every single one of his ventures have relied extensively on the taxpayer. Musk correctly has identified an international effort to Mars as the most lucrative, multi-governmental contract that ever existed.

marssaxman 2y ago

You're not wrong, but if we follow that logic, we might as well shut down all the bases in Antarctica; for that matter, people should probably stop living in Las Vegas, and what is up with that restaurant on top of the Jungfraujoch? Nobody can live there! Perhaps it's about more than mere practicality.