However, I struggle to see a reason to oppose the concept of terraforming Mars. I don't study the planet for a living so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
The exploitation argument doesn’t make any sense because Mars doesn’t have any resources that would really make sense to ever bring back to Earth, except as a side product. It’s a new home like an island in the Pacific for the Polynesians. I don’t consider Polynesians settling uninhabited new islands to be objectionable at all, but instead an expression of what makes humanity wonderful. Preservation of a dead rock for preservation’s sake makes no sense. It’s treating stasis as better than life, and I just can’t get behind that.
I'm sure you wouldn't object to national parks or wilderness areas, it's just that in the case of Mars there is no (known) life. How much each of us values the presence of life will differ, but in my view it's worth preserving Mars.
I'm surprised that a researcher wouldn't be enthusiastic about being able to do science directly on the planet's surface. Sure, an extended human presence there will require a lot of supporting infrastructure, and sure, that will all have a direct effect on whatever might already be there -- or might not be, and in either case, changing that environment might not be desirable.
But even at the current faster speed of remote exploration of the planet, you can expect, what, like 3 more robotic missions to Mars before you retire? And each one will be an iterative improvement over the last.
There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. What's your position on that?
I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life.
Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying.
To your question:
>There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around.
I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.
There are millions of Mars-like planets out there in the galaxy. I'd be more than happy to preserve, say, 10% of them. But there's only one that's in the right place to be the next step for humanity.
Turning choice, large asteroids into liveable habitats seems an infinitely more productive task.
Proxima Centauri will outlive the vast majority of stars in the galaxy.
The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years.
But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.
Seems like the winning move is to go double or nothing and try and make life more sufferable (containing less suffering) on both planets.
Why not make it more sufferable here on Earth first, build all sorts of guardrails on existence, e.g. modify biology such that we all have a certain maximum to which the pain knob can be turned. And only then terraform other planets? Why be premature?
If we sit on our hands and do nothing then life on earth is doomed to extinction and we will be directly responsible. Our duty as rational beings is to preserve and spread life. If you really want to be anti suffering then figure out a way to improve things so nothing needs to suffer. We’re already on a trajectory for doing that for humans so there’s no reason to think we couldn’t do it for all life.
Even if the odds are slim it’s cowardly to not even try.
This is the most astounding perspective on the value of life that I can imagine. Like the argument of a genocidal supervillain.
Death is death whether caused by direct action or neglect.
As for me, I'm bowing out, thanks for the perspectives so far. Downvotes drain my energy.
But on the other side, what is really the point to this?
In a couple of million years, none of this really matters.
It must be very different to you, having studied it. Like how a biologist may have a fondness for a particular nemotode worm which means nothing to most of us. It makes me feel shortsighted thinking of it in this way. Reminds me of pro-colonial/imperialist rhetoric like this[0].
Will our descendents see us the same way? Is there a good reason we want to extend our empire into the stars other than... seeing it a lot in sci-fi media?
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
The ingenious people across the world are the original colonialist. Should we condemn them for what they did?
As a Polish person who inherited an extremely difficult history, I feel fine with my Slavic ancestors.
What I know is that The Sun will destroy the Solar System. The time will most likely destroy everything else with the heat death.
So, I would want to explore to learn the answer to The Last Question - does everything has to die in ever increasing entropy?
You can read the short hard science-fiction story "The Last Question" here: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
We could turn mars into a sweet art project.
This is assuming that worst case scenarios are possible on Earth as on any planet… I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
I don't care about Mars' surface processes. If I had a button to blast its outer layer off and replace it with a habitable one I would press it without hesitating - yet I imagine if I spent years studying the planet academically I would act differently, based on an amalgam of my concepts of "studying" and "Mars" I came up with on the spot and am ignoring anyway. Empathy is a poor substitute for understanding.
There's a philosophical difference here too. I don't see a problem with pulling resources from as much of the galaxy as we can reach if it prolongs Earth life, assuming we don't find other lifeforms. The galaxy only has mystique when we assign it, which we can't do if we're dead.
We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies in the past half century without any mimicry.
Maybe you don't, but I have very strong optimism for technological advancement, and also for modifying our life form to rid ourselves of our tendency to destroy things before heading to other stars. When I say "we" will go to other stars, it won't be Homo sapiens, but another species that we will create as our successor.
We may get humans to Mars. It's technically possible. But I don't think we will ever live there.
>We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies
You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.
I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel.
We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor.
We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy.
Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.
If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.
Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.
This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.
I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).
Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.
Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.
Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.
Reaching 10% would be enough to visit nearby stars within a lifetime.
And once we can extend human life spans to many hundreds of years these journeys become even more achievable.
As I said elsewhere, I think the disconnect here is between potential and probable. Homo sapiens have twice come to the edge of nuclear oblivion already (being saved only by luck essentially), and I would wager we are are speeding much faster towards nuking each other than reaching the stars.
Submarines work well because we didn’t bother making them anything like fish.
There is, but extrasolar objects don't have engines and do very low energy transits.
We'd need a large habitat, a power source that can last for a couple thousand years and a lot - and I mean a LOT - of reaction mass to accelerate it and to brake it when it arrives at its destination. Ideally, it'd be preceded by numerous robotic probes that'd chart the worlds ahead for possible refueling stops (that could add a couple thousand years to the mission) and have a number of possible targets lined up on a reasonable trajectory so that if the next system is not really that hospitable or doesn't have anything worth doing a very large delta-v for, it can just press ahead to the next destination.
Another thing it'd need is a lot of determination to build it, to seal it with a population, test it for generations to make sure the ecosystem works and is stable, and then send it out into the unknown without any possibility of returning to Earth. It's very long term engineering we rarely do.
For some reason there are a lot of people around today that believe life is suffering and that the universe would be a better place with fewer humans in it.
It's a hard position to argue with because it's just so full of holes and lunacy you don't know where to start.
I think you can’t argue with it because it’s like an unexpected emotional vacuum. You can’t really convince someone who doesn’t like food that the carnival is an enjoyable place. They’re operating on a fundamentally separate plane.
Why not? It would seem that's something we're going to have to master in order to populate the galaxy. Seems like it would make sense to figure it out somewhere close to home so we can have all the appropriate gear onboard a flight out into the cosmos.
We will figure it out.
You are extremely optimistic about having several hundred million years left on Earth, when the longest living hominid existed for only ~2 million years.
I firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct long before that point, as we have greatly overstressed the planet in only 200,000 years, mostly in the last 200.
My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend.
Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. It’s so strange to me that folks seem to have this backwards.
>Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Not sure how that's the case given the staggering emissions of Falcon 9 for example.
> However, even if slower, terraforming Mars remains a great long-term goal; but long-term meaning like ten thousand years. Which means we have to get our relationship to our own planet in order for anything interesting to happen on Mars…
> The main project for civilization now is creating a sustainable way of life here on Earth. That’s the necessary first step; anything beyond would rely on that succeeding, so exploring space is less important now. That said, space science is an earth science. What we learn around the solar system can often illuminate the project we have here of keeping this planet’s biosphere healthy. So I like the space program, and feel it is not funded out of proportion to its importance. Robotic missions are already doing a lot of what we need done, but humans are better at many things than robots, and it’s more exciting to see humans on the other planets than it is to see robots. So, on balance, I’d like to see more investment in space science and less in areas like weaponry. Our taxpayer bailout of the banker gamblers who lost their bets in 2008 cost us about ten thousand times the entirety of what we’ve spent on NASA.
https://www.publicbooks.org/earth-first-then-mars-an-intervi...
This interview in particular is worth reading for this whole topic being discussed here.
Hydrogen is one of the most common rocket fuels, and Starship will need to used synthesized methane (which we actually make on board ISS using direct cabin air carbon capture and the Sabatier process using hydrogen made from water split with solar electricity) on Mars to return to be reused, and Musk said SpaceX would eventually use synthesized methane for Earth-side refueling of Starship as well.
How does that work, exactly?
This hand waves away all the accomplishments in seafaring prior to the 19th century.
There were loads of innovations around the shape and profiling of ship hulls depending on conditions in which they operated. Same for sails and stuff, not to mention doing away with rowers. This improved speed quite a lot on top of range.
Not simply, but mostly: progress started before the steam engine. But yeah, pop sci is hyping a lot of things that are very, very unlikely in the near future, and it looks like we won’t have much beyond that.
There's so many engineering and scientific advancements needed to make space-based sustainable colonies using materials sourced solely from Earth that your position would delay any colonization of space past a few great filters.
I was enjoying your takes on preserving Mars, but saying that humanity should only be allowed to change Earth is nihilistic in the extreme.
It would take those nukes three days to reach earth, which is a huge amount of time for countermeasures to target and destroy them. And a handful of responding nukes could easily wipe out all lunar military sites and personnel, while lunar weapons could barely nick Earths military capabilities.
I think the unstated premise here is that populating the galaxy is something we should do. Looking around at what we're doing here on Earth, I think humanity populating the galaxy would be a net negative for the galaxy.
You know how the aliens from Independence Day are portrayed as a race that goes from planet to planet draining its resources until there's a husk left? That's exactly what humanity would do. There's no question about that.
https://independenceday.fandom.com/wiki/Harvesters
"The Harvesters are a race of highly intelligent and incredibly technologically advanced hive-mind extraterrestrial beings. They are a threat of universal proportions that seeks to harvest and destroy planets to refuel their ships, to grow, and to perfect their technology at the expense of driving indigenous races to extinction."
We are the Harvesters in this story.
200 years ago nobody would even think of flying on Earth, and yet here we are, taking it for granted that you can get almost anywhere on this planet within 24 hours for a couple thousand dollars, and within a century of inventing the car we landed a robot on freaking Mars.
Now I do think that we will take charge of evolution and invent a form of life that will be our successor to withstand a much harsher range of conditions and absent from the "bugs" of current life such as cancer and heart disease, rather than our current unreliable meat bags, but we'll make it happen nonetheless.
All that said -- I do want to see more attention toward terraforming Earth as well. Even with zero global warming, the sun's brightness will increase such that our oceans will boil away within 1 billion years, even though it won't actually engulf the Earth for another 4 billion. I would think it's realistic to extend the habitable period of life on Earth from ~300 million years to maybe 2 billion years with some terraforming tricks. That will buy us more time to terraform Mars or Saturn's moons in preparation for the red giant phase of the sun.
Also, learning to terraform the Earth can reverse global warming, because, you know, politicians don't give a fuck about stopping it, so we should attempt to learn to reverse it as a backup plan while the political environmental efforts continue in parallel.
And if we can cure cancer in the next 50 years (I think realistic), we'll have even better odds of surviving an event, as a species.
While we have the theoretical capability to destroy all plant life, I think realistically we'd end up obliterating a few cities before war would cease, and a full-on nuclear winter is unlikely.
I mean it's not really about what you think. See the top two links here about the devastating effects of small-scale conflicts
- https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00794-y
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919049117
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.222.4630.1283
- https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD030509
This sounds wildly optimistic, considering our chronic inability to fix our behaviour before it results in excessive damage. Never mind the occasional asteroid.
> 200 years ago nobody would even think of flying on Earth, and yet here we are, taking it for granted that you can get almost anywhere on this planet within 24 hours for a couple thousand dollars, and within a century of inventing the car we landed a robot on freaking Mars.
The myth of Icarus is a bit older than 200 years. So are Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. Plenty of people did in fact think of flying, most probably before they had any way of writing it down for us to read.
That out of the way, McKay comes off as overly aggressive at times, and wishy-washy in others. It seems contradictory to call Jakosky's model ridiculous and absurd while also claiming we don't have enough data to know for sure. Jakosky is a well-known and respected Mars researcher, and I would much rather trust his 2018 paper over a paper or two written in the early '90s before we had detailed observations of the Martian atmosphere or surface.
At the very least, I appreciate Jakosky planting an empirical stake in the ground for his position.