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> With this type of technology, shipping supplies and people to > Mars will be so much cheaper than anyone has ever really > envisioned. I can't wait to

• baq 13y ago
  > I'm interested in why you'd be so keen to move there. tripadvisor badge. 'you visited 2 worlds!'
  • stcredzero 13y ago
    "Had to bake my own water out of the soil, and there's perchlorate everywhere! No shuffleboard on the trip over and internet was very laggy. Two stars, would not take trip 2nd time."
• jlgreco 13y ago
  > I'm interested in why you'd be so keen to move there. I don't think it is something that can be explained. Either it is something that you get, or it just isn't.
• el_zorro 13y ago
  >I'm interested in why you'd be so keen to move there. I am not the OP, but I'm very interested in moving to Mars at the first chance I get. Why? It certainly isn't about comfort, as you've pointed out. However, to many people, life is about a lot more than creature comforts. The chance to be among the first group of humans to leave our planet and live elsewhere is a unique opportunity that literally only comes once in the history of Earth. It is the first step to securing the universal survival of our species and genesis. It's about meeting new challenges, pushing limits, and proving that we are more than above-average apes beating each other with sticks and sharp objects. This is very much a philosophical journey as well as a physical one. It's about bringing terrestrial life into the greater universe. It's about realizing the best aspects of humanity, while hoping to discard many of our flaws. It's a new beginning, a new chance. Plus, being a founder of a new society is a chance few people will ever have. If having all of this means that I will have to live without as many baths, I am all for it.
  • pm90 13y ago
    I'm glad that people like you exist. I hope we have more people with such an adventurous spirit. It's one of the great things about the human race is that there are so many of us, each of who find different things fulfilling. You can do what you love, I can do what I love (staying firmly on earth), both of us are happy and we take humanity forward! I guess the point I'm trying to make is: having a lot of people is beneficial, because then there is likely to be someone who is happy to do the things that you aren't so excited about.
    • el_zorro 13y ago
      You are very right - I fully understand why people would want to stay behind! I'm very passionate about this, though, and I tend to get grouchy when people argue against doing it at all. If they don't want to go, that's fine, but when they start arguing that no one should do it, I see them as actively trying to hold back human progress for no good reason.
  • greeneggs 13y ago
    I know that everybody has different motivations, but a common one I am seeing is to go for the glory. However, that's only enough reason to go to Mars, not enough to move there. Glory won't sustain a long-term commitment. I worry that a lot of these volunteers will get tired of it after a short period. Day-to-day life never has much glory. And frankly, people who are motivated by glory rarely have the introspection needed to really understand their own motivations and sustain commitment. The people who do great things over long periods of time are self-motivated and do it for the love of the thing, not for a dream of glory from others. Furthermore, I really do think that glory is the most important motivation for moving there. If these people are really highly motivated by "meeting new challenges, pushing limits," well, they can try setting up self-sustaining colonies in deserts or Antarctica today. But no volunteers I know of for that.
    • el_zorro 13y ago
      Beyond glory is the incredible potential of the Martian gravity well for future commerce. Ease of access to orbit and the asteroid belt will make Mars a hub for space-based industry. In addition, prior hydrology on Mars means that it has mineral deposits untouched by any prospector. Once people start moving to collect these resources, Mars will become an industrial juggernaut, and will almost certainly be more influential in space industry than Earth could ever be.
• troymc 13y ago
  I can't speak for cryptoz, but here are some reasons why people might want to move to Mars: 1. It sure does sound like a lot of fun! And dangerous! And thrilling! 2. Fame and glory 3. The chance to explore and directly experience a place no other human has ever been. 4. The opportunity to stake a claim on some new land (and find out what that means). Maybe form a new government! Make new laws... I can see this being quite attractive for groups that feel stifled by Earth (e.g. religious groups, the far left, the far right). 5. The chance to spread humanity to a self-sustained place beyond Earth, as a backup (albeit a fragile one at first). You're right that Mars would not be a nice place to live, especially in the early days, but that's not why people would go!
  • mikeash 13y ago
    Regarding #5, what kind of disaster does Mars provide a backup for that, say, a self-reliant colony at the South Pole on Earth does not?
    • nawitus 13y ago
      Asteroid impact, global nuclear war etc.?
      • mikeash 13y ago
        A self-sufficient Antarctic colony should be able to survive those just fine.
        • rbanffy 13y ago
          It depends on the size of the asteroid and on a deliberate choice not to target the colony with a nuclear weapon. I'd prefer a self-sustaining colony on the Moon before attempting Mars. There we can perfect our tools because, on Mars, if you screw up, you'll have to wait at least six months for your rescue mission.
          • vitno 13y ago
• XorNot 13y ago
  This was America, or my home country - Australia - about 200 years ago. Its not Antarctica because Antarctica is very heavily claimed at this point. But Mars? You'd be amongst the first colonists of a new planet. You'd be helping build something which may outlast Earthbound habitation, and moves us out of the current resource paradigm (exactly 1 planet). And unlike LEO you'd have the possibility of the local resources to set up something permanent. But I mean hey, its not perfect - I'd move to the Asteroid belt or Jupiter system if I could. Though my real enthusiasm would be diverting comets to add water to Venus - since get the atmosphere well, out of the atmosphere and you're looking at Earth 2.
  • el_zorro 13y ago
    Unfortunately, the length of the Venusian day means that Earth-like conditions are almost certainly never going to arise on Venus. Plants don't take very kindly to baking in the sun for 116 days and then having a 116 day absence of light. Could this be overcome with some large-scale engineering? Perhaps, but there will never be open, lush fields on the surface there.
    • dwiel 13y ago
      116 days of no light is really not all that different than places which have a winter that gets below freezing. Most plants in places with a winter die, fall and spring back up every single year. Where I live, first frost to last frost is on average about 120 days. Also, you should see the size of the vegetables that grow near the poles where they have short summers but very long days,
    • stcredzero 13y ago
      > Plants don't take very kindly to baking in the sun for 116 days and then having a 116 day absence of light. Some of them don't mind that much, actually. There have even been experiments growing plants with 2 weeks of light followed by 2 weeks of darkness, as on the moon. It can work if the 2 weeks of darkness are also at lowered temperature, which is easy to achieve in the absence of sunlight. The exotic species of plant used in the experiment? The pea.
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Mars colonization will take off extremely rapidly, most likely. Making propellant on Mars is easy, all you need is Hydrogen and power and you can make 16x as much mass in propellant as the Hydrogen you bring along. And this is with mere kilograms of equipment to process the martian atmosphere. Make no mistake, this is a big deal in a lot of different ways. So that bootstraps you into being able to effectively explore Mars at all, because now you don't have to ship out all the propellant for the return trip, which is an exponential savings. Now add to that the fact that Mars has a day similar to Earth and substantial quantities of subsurface ice (and small amounts of water in the surface soil). That means you can use fairly modest capital equipment (stuff you can transport using the same vehicles you send people, and capable of being powered fairly easily) to start mining water ice within the first handful of trips to the planet. Which means that you can have local supplies of: potable water, propellant, fuel for equipment that runs on internal combustion engines, breathable oxygen, and carbon monoxide (which I'll explain the significance of later). With oxygen, abundant CO2, water, and inflatable structures you can start growing plants on Mars due to the light levels and day lengths. A colony could start supplying some of its own food within less than a decade. But wait, there's more. Given the low Martian gravity it would be almost trivially easy to create an SSTO RLV that could travel back and forth between the martian surface and orbit, refueling on the surface with locally produced propellant. You could build these on Earth and send them over without crews and just enough propellant to make a powered, parachute assisted landing before being put into service. They could visit a station in Mars orbit which would make it easier to make trips back and forth to Earth. Additionally, by using a cycler (a spacecraft which is on a permanent trajectory looping between Earth and Mars) you could significantly increase the amount of useful payload you could deliver to Mars and increase the comfort and safety of passengers. Although for bulk cargo you could use electric propulsion to push the cargo out of low Earth orbit over to Mars and then use aerocapture / aerobraking to bring the payloads within reach of an orbital tug at Mars that could bring it to a station where it could be ferried down to the surface. Back to Martian resources. With carbon monoxide available all you need is energy in order to be able to effectively smelt metals such as iron, copper, or aluminum. Some of the rocks and regolith on Mars are effectively high grade ores, especially of iron. It would not take much equipment to be able to start producing builk amounts of steel. This could be used for all sorts of purposes in expanding a base into a full fledged settlement. From there things accelerate quickly. It gets easier and easier to send things to Mars, to come back from Mars, and to build things on Mars. Capital investments on Mars start to make a huge amount of sense. A substantial power source on Mars (even just in the single megawatt range) is not merely a lifeline for a base it becomes the seed of a growing industrial base. With power and water you can process the atmosphere and bootstrap the chemical industry with all the products listed above. And with that you can smelt bulk metals, and make glass. You can also start making concrete and other building materials. You can start making buildings and farming structures where only a small fraction of the structure is composed of supplies shipped from Earth. And that's really just square 1. From there you can move on to more advanced industry, more robust farming, more advanced technology, and so on. The very first visitors to Mars will likely be scientists, but the second wave will be dominated by engineers. Imagine what will be built with the thousands of tonnes of steel, concrete, aluminum, copper, and so forth that will be produced within only the first decade of this primitive industrial capacity coming online. Certainly more than a trailer park in the skies, far more.
• hrvbr 13y ago
  Let's not forget the high risk of cancer from the solar radiations. Also an almost one-year travel can't be done in a ship that's like a crowded airplane. We'd go crazy without some more space and intimacy (and work to do). Not that it's impossible but escaping the Earth's gravity cheaply isn't the only challenge.
  • tg3 13y ago
    There are over 5,000 crew members of nuclear submarines in the USN. I think they currently only have 90-day deployments, but I don't think they would tell you that 1 year travel "can't be done." It's a matter of motivation/necessity I think.
• verytrivial 13y ago
  I recall a comparison being made about how very tenuous the atmosphere really is on Mars. The comparison was something like this: Consider how hostile the peak of Everest is to life. It has been climbed without oxygen masks only a handful of times. Then consider that to achieve an air pressure on Earth equivalent to the Martian surface, you would need to stand on a mountain around FIVE TIMES as high. "Living" on Mars will be akin to be parking the International Space Station in a frigid, red desert and cowering inside for 99% of the time. Not really living in my book.
• Shivetya 13y ago
  by that token living in earth orbit is not much different. The only question I have is, other than proving we can do it; living on Mars; what are our goals for being there? Do we truly expect people to establish a autonomous existence?
  • stcredzero 13y ago
    > Do we truly expect people to establish a autonomous existence? Yes.
• codex 13y ago
  For those who are keen to travel to Mars: may I suggest a stint in the Peace Corps first, or on a nuclear submarine, or a tour in Antarctica. If that's not ambitious enough, please try attempting to terraform a desert, or establishing a colony under the ocean or on top of K2, or constructing a city that's mostly buried underground. All of these are cakewalks compared to Mars, and may give you a taste for what the best of times will be like there after the excitement has worn off after the first month or so. Personally, I think Mars is a destination for robots and tourists, not permanent colonies, as it's basically a hostile shithole. Of all the hostile shitholes in the solar system, there are others I'd rather visit, like Europa or Io. But to each their own.
  • stcredzero 13y ago
    > For those who are keen to travel to Mars: may I suggest a stint in the Peace Corps first, or on a nuclear submarine, or a tour in Antarctica. If that's not ambitious enough, please try attempting to terraform a desert, or establishing a colony under the ocean or on top of K2, or constructing a city that's mostly buried underground. Actually, it would be like signing up for a Peace Corps tour in Antarctica, first travelling there for 6 months on a tiny 4-man nuclear submarine, then arriving to build then live in an underground city where the outside atmosphere is more rarefied than at the top of K2 and drier than most deserts. > it's basically a hostile shithole The only reason we think the Earth is so great is that we evolved to live there. Otherwise, it would be a shithole at the bottom of an annoyingly deep gravity well and annoyingly dense corrosive atmosphere. Technology changes everything, though.
    • mikeash 13y ago
      I don't see the impetus for colonizing Mars until we've started building serious cities in Antarctica. What does Mars buy you that Antarctica does not? Even the doomsday scenarios of "all your eggs in one basket" don't really seem to work; an Antarctic colony could be made self-sufficient and survivable in the event of an asteroid strike or nuclear war more easily than a Mars colony. I think it's a cool idea, but people seem to severely underestimate the difficulty.