At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion.
Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.
I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.
I disagree that there is “nothing to gain” and in fact I think there’s a lot humanity could gain from the development of regular space travel and settlement of other planets.
Overall, I believe that there is 0 reason to even attempt it for now. The Earth is in the middle of an existential crisis for human civilization as we know it, and all of our resources are required at home. We need to rebuild the global economy from the ground up in a way that will reduce global warming. Mars is no escape from this, certainly not in the next centuries.
Any cent that goes to a Mars colony would be better spent on Earth. If not for combating global warming, then at least for building self-sustaining colonies on Earth that could become a refuge for humanity if all else fails, or if we get struck by some asteroid. And this would not only buy us guaranteed survival, it would also act as a perfect model for a Mars colony is some far future - if we had actually built one on Earth, with all its requirements, building one on Mars would certainly become much easier.
Until and unless we know for sure that we could build truly permanent high-tech human settlements on Earth, there is no point in trying to in space. There is nothing to be gained from Mars if we can't build a permanent colony there not dependent on Earth resources, and we will not be able to build a permanent colony there unless we first build one on Earth.
There is the prestige of having your nation expand, while others don’t. It is hard for democratic states to maintain long-term goals because power changes hands every election cycle, but it's not impossible that a stable and developed authoritarian country like China could launch such a venture just to cement its status as the leading superpower. That is not to claim, of course, that that colony would be self-sustaining anytime soon.
The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion.
This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from.
It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).
Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard.
Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around.
And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?
Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.
Radiation: interpose some matter.
Temperature: heater.
Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.
Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.
Musk is purportedly dreaming of a colony on Mars that would survive if the Earth were destroyed. That means that not only do they need to grow food, get water and generate electricity from Mars, but they will also have to have the manufacturing capacity to make everything from tunnel boring machines to microprocessors. An actually self-sustaining colony on Mars would likely have to be closer in size to a large city on Earth than to a permanent base in Antarctica.
So I would look at it the other way: even a large city on Earth isn't entirely self sustainable. How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?
Or, that sort of area.
SpaceX has done wonders for getting the cost of moving a kilo of matter into orbit. From a tech point of view it is a very large but still incremental step from where we were before.
A self sustaining Mars colony is science fiction.
This to me seems like an immense number of mental hoops, when you can’t even make people wear a piece of cloth over their face literally for the sake of humanity.
There are many reasons an independent settlement makes sense. Earth could get stalled in political deadlock, have a nuclear war, or fall under the control of autocratic regimes.
But there are direct benefits to humanity even without these worst case scenarios. Independent thought and political control at a time when the countries on earth become ever more intertwined (China’s Belt and Road) will probably serve some benefit in our future.
And then regular rockets between Earth and Mars would pave the way for asteroid mining, which would allow construction of massive solar energy harvesters.
That’s 200-500 years out but if we’re capable of starting now I’m not opposed to folks trying!
Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.
I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.
Elon Musk may end up going to Mars, I don't think after the last decade anybody will bet against that. He could very well be this generations Neil Armstrong in being the first person to set foot on another planet. Which would be a stupendous achievement in and of itself, even if he dies in the attempt to land there itself.
But after that he'll either die there anyway when his resources run out or he'll run right back to mamma earth assuming they can manage to resupply their fuel and make it back here somehow.
Now, if we were to think of a colony ship or a colony on a distant planet light years away, that would make some sense, but that is probably a project for the year 5000, not 2000.
Yes, I'll be surprised if they manage a crewed mission at all by 2029.
When the moonlandings first happened the papers and popular science writers (and SF writers) were all over what would happen next. What happened next is nothing. Sure, we have the ISS, it's been a neat little testbed and good PR for space development.
But colonizing another planet is a lot harder than it may seem. I'll challenge anybody that believes that this can be done to 10 30 ton semis full of gear, food and oxygen, then to set up shop right off the coast somewhere and prove that within a decade they can be self sustaining. That's many orders of magnitude easier than doing the same thing on Mars and it is still very much this side of impossible.
The 'self sustaining' bit is the nasty part here, as long as you can ship in food, oxygen, water, toilet paper and whatever else you think you might need on your faraway planet you'll be fine within your little environmental cocoon. But another planet without a breathable atmosphere is so incredibly hostile to life that your first mistake will be your last.
60 years is the interval between Zuse's first Turing-complete relay computer and the popping of the dotcom bubble. Or between the Wright flyer and Project Gemini. Outer space has ridiculously more resources available than Earth surface, making it economically irresistible. Powerful economics plus 60 years of development can equal... a lot, as I said to start this subthread. Mars itself is not very attractive, but if space happens bigtime then even a sideshow can also happen.
100% self-sustaining would be unlikely (there's no real point in the last increment towards that), but colonies on Earth always had trade too.
Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.