9 ms·

Why Not Mars (2023)

24 points by simonebrunozzi 2y ago

Koshkin 2y ago
From today's perspective, sending people to Mars will be, more than anything, part of a new space race.
- nine_k 2y ago
  A race suggests the presence of at least two participants that are running at the same time. As of now, I only see one contender with any chance to make it to the start line. Maybe in 30-50 years there will be a race to build and sustain Mars bases, and attain some control of the territory there.
  - thegrim33 2y ago
    China just built their own space station and is racing the US to be the first to put boots back on the moon. Then there's the militarization of space and everything that's been going on there. The US wouldn't have its current moon plans and timeline if China wasn't also trying to put humans back there; it's all been timed to beat China by a year or so.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Certainly there is a space race, but it's mostly around Earth and somehow around Moon. I don't see anyone but Mr Musk seriously trying to settle on Mars, so no race there. OTOH the Starship is also going to be a major player in the Earth and Moon business. Even just on Earth, it's basically capable of landing a few hundred tons of cargo and passengers anywhere on the planet within an hour or so. Or will be, once the landing gear is attached. It may have interesting military consequences.
genericspammer 2y ago
What do we have to gain by going to mars?
- mathgeek 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars was (is?) one of the more in depth works making such an argument
- myfurends 2y ago
  [dead]
- traverseda 2y ago
  New wotlds seem to have a way of getting humanity out of a local maxima. Personally I'm hoping for luxury space communism.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    This is one of my reasons. I also believe that compared to the Moon, Mars is more likely to both give crewed spaceflight and human habitation of other bodies the big boost it needs and make it more of a permanent fixture — the Moon’s relative convenience is a problem in that it makes it just as easy to mothball as it is to get to. Lingering too long on the Moon as the focal point brings substantial risk of backsliding into Shuttle-era stagnation.
    - dudinax 2y ago
      Can you explain your thinking? Why would Mars be harder to mothball?
      - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
        It’s a result of the much higher level of commitment required to undertake crewed Mars missions. You can’t lean on Earth being nearby and contingencies have to include e.g. uncrewed resupply missions failing… it’s the sort of thing you have to go all-in on, after which pulling out is costly and looks stupid. By contrast, backing out of the moon is comparatively trivial. At worst it’d take a couple weeks and the expenses quickly lost in the noise. With Mars, there’s also the possibility of a “Wild West” element once things are established enough where groups of people simply refuse to return and cutting off support from them would have really bad optics.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
(2023) Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549
benkuykendall 2y ago
Phew. The pessimism here is kinda... exhausting. But frankly I don't have any material objections """ The Mars Religion When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program. At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail. Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave. """
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone. While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.
dapf 2y ago
[dead]
credit_guy 2y ago
This article makes no sense whatsoever once you know that there is such a thing as the SpaceX Starship. And it’s not like in 2023 nobody had a clue that the Starship will be built.
- skulk 2y ago
  The entire last section deals with this. It would be helpful if you could point to which of the author's objections are invalidated by Starship's existence.
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    The cost.
natch 2y ago
It's bizarre that an article this detailed would not delve into the likelihood that the word "human" can reasonably be stretched to include "future human-like technically evolved conscious beings who can easily thrive in a Mars environment, e.g. human 2.0, Mars version." In the timeframe we are talking about, this is far more likely than having to worry about life support for humans with current-generation bodies. As early as 2012 or 2013 Elon was in an interview where he said, instead of humans, sending conscious beings to Mars. Then later he switched to using the word human, presumably because he didn't want to freak people out and complicate the conversations.
- lproven 2y ago
  No, it really is not, because that is a quasi-religious belief based on a hope for a particular future event at the end of a long chain of very improbable events. (Don't get me wrong: I've been reading science fiction for half a century and I wish it may happen. I devoutly hope it might. I want it to happen. The difference is, I don't think it will.) Whereas the article is attempting to be factual.
  - natch 2y ago
    Your point was well put and would have landed well five years ago, but today the unstoppable (short of global, civilization-ending catastrophe) march toward ubiquitous smart robots refutes that this is a chain of unlikely events. The built in incentives for technology to improve will continue after we get smart robots. This will change things. In a couple of decades it will be very hard to argue that they aren’t human 2.0 or <n>.0. And if we still insist, they might decide for us. I don’t fervently hope for this but I am very curious how it plays out. The opposite view to yours is valid: Us not arriving at human 2.0 would only be possible by a long chain of improbable events. And in this view those who think we will continue as we are (cancer-susceptible meat bags) are the ones taking a quasi religious position.
    - lproven 2y ago
      No, it's not, and your point continues your faith-based belief. I am 57. I've been working in this industry for 36 years. The computer world is no closer to machine intelligence today than it was in 1988 when I walked into my first job. It's no closer than in 1981 when I touched my first microcomputer. LLM bots are not in any way intelligent, but they do expose a type of flawed non-analytical thinking in humans that is easily persuaded that a machine is intelligent if it can emit coherent sentences. I think you are totally wrong and that this will be abundantly apparent in a decade, perhaps in half a decade. The next few years will usher in the latest AI winter, just as they did a generation ago and a generation before that.

Why Not Mars (2023)

Koshkin 2y ago

From today's perspective, sending people to Mars will be, more than anything, part of a new space race.

nine_k 2y ago
A race suggests the presence of at least two participants that are running at the same time. As of now, I only see one contender with any chance to make it to the start line. Maybe in 30-50 years there will be a race to build and sustain Mars bases, and attain some control of the territory there.
- thegrim33 2y ago
  China just built their own space station and is racing the US to be the first to put boots back on the moon. Then there's the militarization of space and everything that's been going on there. The US wouldn't have its current moon plans and timeline if China wasn't also trying to put humans back there; it's all been timed to beat China by a year or so.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Certainly there is a space race, but it's mostly around Earth and somehow around Moon. I don't see anyone but Mr Musk seriously trying to settle on Mars, so no race there. OTOH the Starship is also going to be a major player in the Earth and Moon business. Even just on Earth, it's basically capable of landing a few hundred tons of cargo and passengers anywhere on the planet within an hour or so. Or will be, once the landing gear is attached. It may have interesting military consequences.

genericspammer 2y ago

What do we have to gain by going to mars?

mathgeek 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars was (is?) one of the more in depth works making such an argument
myfurends 2y ago
[dead]
traverseda 2y ago
New wotlds seem to have a way of getting humanity out of a local maxima. Personally I'm hoping for luxury space communism.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  This is one of my reasons. I also believe that compared to the Moon, Mars is more likely to both give crewed spaceflight and human habitation of other bodies the big boost it needs and make it more of a permanent fixture — the Moon’s relative convenience is a problem in that it makes it just as easy to mothball as it is to get to. Lingering too long on the Moon as the focal point brings substantial risk of backsliding into Shuttle-era stagnation.
  - dudinax 2y ago
    Can you explain your thinking? Why would Mars be harder to mothball?
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      It’s a result of the much higher level of commitment required to undertake crewed Mars missions. You can’t lean on Earth being nearby and contingencies have to include e.g. uncrewed resupply missions failing… it’s the sort of thing you have to go all-in on, after which pulling out is costly and looks stupid. By contrast, backing out of the moon is comparatively trivial. At worst it’d take a couple weeks and the expenses quickly lost in the noise. With Mars, there’s also the possibility of a “Wild West” element once things are established enough where groups of people simply refuse to return and cutting off support from them would have really bad optics.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

(2023) Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549

benkuykendall 2y ago

Phew. The pessimism here is kinda... exhausting. But frankly I don't have any material objections """ The Mars Religion When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program. At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail. Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave. """

cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone. While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.

dapf 2y ago

[dead]

credit_guy 2y ago

This article makes no sense whatsoever once you know that there is such a thing as the SpaceX Starship. And it’s not like in 2023 nobody had a clue that the Starship will be built.

skulk 2y ago
The entire last section deals with this. It would be helpful if you could point to which of the author's objections are invalidated by Starship's existence.
- credit_guy 2y ago
  The cost.

natch 2y ago

It's bizarre that an article this detailed would not delve into the likelihood that the word "human" can reasonably be stretched to include "future human-like technically evolved conscious beings who can easily thrive in a Mars environment, e.g. human 2.0, Mars version." In the timeframe we are talking about, this is far more likely than having to worry about life support for humans with current-generation bodies. As early as 2012 or 2013 Elon was in an interview where he said, instead of humans, sending conscious beings to Mars. Then later he switched to using the word human, presumably because he didn't want to freak people out and complicate the conversations.

lproven 2y ago
No, it really is not, because that is a quasi-religious belief based on a hope for a particular future event at the end of a long chain of very improbable events. (Don't get me wrong: I've been reading science fiction for half a century and I wish it may happen. I devoutly hope it might. I want it to happen. The difference is, I don't think it will.) Whereas the article is attempting to be factual.
- natch 2y ago
  Your point was well put and would have landed well five years ago, but today the unstoppable (short of global, civilization-ending catastrophe) march toward ubiquitous smart robots refutes that this is a chain of unlikely events. The built in incentives for technology to improve will continue after we get smart robots. This will change things. In a couple of decades it will be very hard to argue that they aren’t human 2.0 or <n>.0. And if we still insist, they might decide for us. I don’t fervently hope for this but I am very curious how it plays out. The opposite view to yours is valid: Us not arriving at human 2.0 would only be possible by a long chain of improbable events. And in this view those who think we will continue as we are (cancer-susceptible meat bags) are the ones taking a quasi religious position.
  - lproven 2y ago
    No, it's not, and your point continues your faith-based belief. I am 57. I've been working in this industry for 36 years. The computer world is no closer to machine intelligence today than it was in 1988 when I walked into my first job. It's no closer than in 1981 when I touched my first microcomputer. LLM bots are not in any way intelligent, but they do expose a type of flawed non-analytical thinking in humans that is easily persuaded that a machine is intelligent if it can emit coherent sentences. I think you are totally wrong and that this will be abundantly apparent in a decade, perhaps in half a decade. The next few years will usher in the latest AI winter, just as they did a generation ago and a generation before that.