So for Mars, I don't think merely the opportunities for _any_ innovation, are a convincing enough argument, at least for those investing in Mars. For them the specific innovations around spaceflight and non-earth construction are indeed valuable, because of future expansions into space and first mover benefits, using Mars as a stepping stone.
As for the colony on Mars itself, I speculate that having somewhere outside of existing jurisdictions is also attractive for a lot of people; the new unclaimed West. Some may imagine this to become a scientist utopia, free from the restraining politics of Earth; others might be more cynical.
We will see.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130930-can-we-build-und...
Fundamentally that is how it is different from colonizing the ocean floor.
They’ll have the same or worse technology we already have on earth. They’ll have far fewer people and far less access to things to solve problems they didn’t plan for. But nah they’ll innovate and make great innovations, more than could ever be done here. I don’t wish to be rude but I honestly cannot understand for the life of me the rationale of this argument.
Solving interplanetary space travel is the most expensive form of procrastination I have ever seen.
(Myself I think we'll go when it's easy. The best way to make it easy is to work on relevant technology like nuclear fusion, automated manufacturing, CRISPR, and so on.)
There would have been indications in wave pattern. And they knew how to read these, as well as meteorological hints and knowledge of tides.
Nevertheless, in the context of this discussion, landing up on an inhabited island thousands of kilometres from here is a huge shot in the dark, and most hopeful colonists would have missed.
But on Mars, you don't have proper air and you don't have wild life for food. And you cannot easily leave for other better places.
Good point. It would make sense to send robots in advance to manufacture huge stockpiles of air and food. Which is of course beyond present technology.
Once the location is established, regular trade becomes much more feasible.
With enough money you could set up 1000s of semi-autonomous robots to mine, mill, farm, .. and make more robots to help.
They win on arbitrarily long timelines, but they start to look a lot worse if you want ROI in under 10 years. It takes a ton of energy to reach and return from most asteroids in a sensible period of time. With unlimited time you can use various slow tricks to park them in accessible orbits, but this is a gold rush not a 100 year infrastructure project.
O'Neill had it right IMO, Lunar and Martian mass drivers firing up to Lagrange points are going to win. In the early days those bodies win because you can iterate on your mining tech way, way, way faster and keep up with the falling cost curve. In the later days economies of scale win the day.
So should we spend trillions more on military? Well maybe it is just that spending trillions on research towards anything tend to lead to some useful inventions on the side. But what if we spent the same amount of resources on researching something actually useful for humanity? We might still get the side inventions.
Building a colony on Mars is a useless waste of money.
Isn’t that a bit like saying if you toss a 10-year-old off a boat, he has no choice but to swim?
The focusing effects of a clear goal are real and powerful. But lets not pretend that the default option isn’t death.
Trivia question: did you know that most of the Mayflower colonists died? Ahem, I mean, all of them died. All of us will die sooner or later, some people find it meaningful to go where no one has gone before, even if that means danger of death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
Arkady wouldn't like this article.
While solar + batteries will last an Earth night or a Mars night, for something with a big enough population to be called a “colony” rather than a “base”, you suddenly find you need either a nuclear reactor, or some very big orbital mirrors, or a circumlunar powergrid.
None of these options are impossible, but they might make people prefer Mars.
Although not “eternal” in the original sense, they are sunlit for extended periods, well beyond the typical lunar day-night cycle.
What is the significance of such features? Permanently lit areas of the Moon are important for future habitation and use of the Moon for two principal reasons. First, these sunlit areas are prime locations for the establishment of solar photovoltaic arrays. The constant sunlight here means continuous generation of electrical power using solar panels. This solves one of the most difficult problems of lunar habitation, survival during the 354-hour lunar night. Prior to the discovery of the quasi-permanently lit areas, we imagined that the only feasible power source to survive this long night was nuclear reactors. Such a power system does not exist and would require several tens of billions of dollars to develop. So sunlit zones allow us to go to the Moon and stay there without this expense and technology development.
The second advantage of a sunlit area is that it is thermally benign. The surface temperatures at the lunar equator and mid-latitudes depend almost entirely upon incident solar illumination and range from less than -150° to over 100° C, a 250° temperature-swing over the course of a day. In contrast, the surface temperature of these quasi-permanent lit areas is nearly constant – a nice, toasty -50° ± 10° C. This simplifies the thermal design of surface habitats and equipment and greatly relieves the energy required for thermal control at an outpost.
The sunlit areas of the poles occur in close proximity to high concentrations of water ice and other volatiles at the poles of the Moon. Their presence indicates the lunar poles are the best places we have found off-planet for human habitation. Constant sunlight, benign temperatures, near the water and a great view – that’s prime real estate.
[]: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the-lu...
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos...
The benefit is that a colony on Mars would be an engine of innovation. People keep pointing out that NASA has produced hundreds of useful innovations (like space blankets). Imagine how many innovations would a colony of 500 people come up with when stranded there for months and years. It's not that we send them there with only sticks and stone tools, they'll have the most advanced technology we can fit them with, but they'll still find themselves in thousands of situations where their tools will be puny compared to their problems.
Some in this thread mention boring machines. Well, just after a boring machine cuts a few meters of tunnel, someone lines that tunnel with some concrete elements. Where's the concrete coming from on Mars? Oh, I guess they can make it locally. Great, where are the components coming from? I guess you can mine them locally, but you'd need to bore some tunnels for that. A bit of a chicken and egg. What if the concrete does not set exactly like on Earth, because, you know, there's not enough humidity in their air (and there's not enough air either).
These guys will face millions of problems. And they'll have no choice but solve them.
It's going to be awesome.