... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in all that time, they've only ever been right about Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
Only one technology matters: that which enables transportation.
Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a chance on a better life?
You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica.
Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that.
It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs), raw materials that aren't locally available (which means almost all of them), and habitable structures.
At the end of that epic effort you'll have something that will barely have a toe-hold on long-term survivability. Possibly. If you're lucky.
Not only is Mars far colder, it also doesn't have air. Or surface water. So all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder.
And it's much much further away.
Rhetoric and wishful thinking are not going to give you a better life if you can't deal with the reality of the challenges.
Nobody has colonized Antarctica not because it's impossible, but because it's difficult enough and useless enough that we all agreed on a treaty prohibiting it.
In contrast, we constructed the 63 radars (some with bases) of the DEW line in the late 1950s in under 3 years, with part of the Air Force's budget. Because it was useful.
Establishing a Mars colony is not impossible, it's just extremely hard. Which means expensive. Which means it needs a justification. Which is what I think the knee-jerk is really about.
And is a fair opinion. You may think interplanetary colonization should not be a priority. I think it should.
Our basic priorities are not in order and that is true for a lot of the world.
Tons of people need solutions now to problems we can solve, and we do not solve them because those priorities are not in order.
And with that, there goes that justification.
Higher priority items include:
Not shitting where we eat,
A much reduced focus on killing one another.
There are many others.
I agree with the other commenter.
It may be very frustrating and disappointing to get married to those ideas. No one reading here is going to see them.
Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported.
> nuclear reactors
Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars.
> nuclear and other fuels
The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long time.
> machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs)
Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality but you know what they do it anyways because some things are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what they could create from local resources or do without. They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or Antarctica with a single expedition.
> raw materials
Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate sources here because they are too labour or energetically or materially expensive but when they are your only option price and effort become less of a concern.
> all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder
No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.
Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer).
I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"
I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means".
There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.
The only thing Mars has going for it is hype.
- 38% of Earth's gravity
- 24.5 hour days
- lots of resources such as iron, carbon, oxygen, water (ice)
- aerobraking in the atmosphere saves fuel
- it's big (same land mass as Earth's). There's enough room for growth.
- temperatures are better than elsewhere in space (-63°C to +20°C at the equator)
- Lava tubes that could offer protection against radiation and meteorites for habitats
- good potential of life / former life
If you want to go somewhere beyond Mars, stopping there and then starting again just sets you back. (Same goes for the moon, or lunar orbit.) "Stepping stones" have strongly negative value in space transport.
If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
If you will need extra fuel to get home with, sending it to Mars is completely useless, because where you need it to be is not at Mars, but at the place where you will be at the time when you need it. That place is not Mars.
Is this really so difficult? Stop, breathe, and think.
This simply isn't true. From Mars to Jupiter is a little over 6 km/s of delta-v. From Earth to Jupiter is almost 9. The latter is just barely possible with SpaceX's Starship. The former allows for not only some breathing room, but more payload.
If your true goal is to have crap on and in orbit around Mars, do that without pretending it has any other value. You don't fool anybody, but you make people wonder about you.
Versus, cannibalising several extremely expensive ships in order to get one ship to a destination it's never coming back from.
And this is just one example. The lower delta-v from Mars would allow extra payload to the belt, so if anyone ever intend to exploit those resources, starting from Mars will allow them to get heavy equipment there in less time and fewer trips (provided, of course, that they can manufacture that equipment on Mars).
Maybe my million tons of freight includes a liquid methane sump on Titan, where I don't even need to synthesize, never mind liquify the stuff; it is sloshing around in puddles everywhere. There is an interior liquid water ocean, and ice lava flows.
Seriously, if you need more delta-V for a Jupiter or Saturn trip than spaceship design A gives you, you are much better off making a spaceship design B with enough tankage to make the trip. (Maybe B is just A with an extra tank strapped on; or, a tug boosts A to escape velocity and then loops around Luna and back, aerobraking to LEO.) Park fuel depots at both low and high Earth orbits; you waste nothing by using those, unlike anything parked foolishly at Luna or Mars.
Luna, anyway, has stuff that is worth visiting, like craters in permanent shade at the south pole, and lava tubes where vapors have maybe drifted in and froze for hundreds of millions of years. Mars is the armpit of the Solar System.
> You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars
The equipment for generating the electricity to perform ISRU on Mars is supposedly within the payload capabilities of a single Starship, 100-150 tons, not a million, and this should be enough for a ton per day, enough to resupply in the 26 month launch window. The equipment for collecting water and CO2 is another matter, and I don't see estimates on that, but with the above and some engineering margin, it seems plausible that this operation can get off the ground in under ten ship-trips to Mars.
Any trip to the outer Solar System that stops at Mars is, energetically, much more costly that one which does not stop at Mars.
In addition, getting stuff to Mars is itself a huge expense that completely swamps any imagined benefit of extracting fuel and launching it to stop by for.
If you want to go to Mars, go without promoting obvious falsehoods about any value it has as a transport hub. It has none. Period.
If, to make sense, your Mars story needs for Mars to be a useful transport hub, then it fails, and you need a different story.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This is as asinine as saying, if you can't get somewhere without a stop at the gas station, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at the gas station. Stopping at the gas station costs extra.
After all, it costs fuel to take an exit on the freeway and go to the gas station. It costs fuel to leave and go back on the freeway. It costs extra! Energetically, any trip where you have to make a detour to a gas station, costs more than a trip where you don't make a stop there.
Source?
There may also be more carbon below the surface, see https://phys.org/news/2020-05-carbon-emissions-moon-theory-b...
You can argue from either the perspective of futility of attempt (no chance of success) or futility of outcome (success wouldn't be worth it), but I'm pretty convinced both would be weak arguments, both logically and historically.
And if it hasn't been required, then how are we to look at existing practice and say we're bad at or incapable of it?
The fact that random groups people from the Old World decided to start colonies without any prior experience or preparation precisely shows that they didn't consider America to be "super-hostile".
Is this tongue-in-cheek? I genuinely hope so.
My favorite moonshot project would be to create robotics that can clean up the environment and handle recycling. Having the technology to pick up dog poop and plastic bags in an efficient and affordable manner or separating recycling items would be a huge technological challenge that would create a ton of spin-off opportunities including a base on Mars. Or clean up the pacific garbage patch with robots.
We can build much better outside of gravity wells. Whatever you would land on Mars is more useful in solar orbit, parked next to any convenient asteroid.
And there's still the problem of ISRU.
"A stop" is not just useless, but is actively harmful in space transportation. You go, for free, until you get there, and then use up fuel stopping. Starting and stopping are exactly what costs. Stopping halfway makes the whole trip cost literally twice as much.
Until you understand this, everything you say about space travel will make zero sense, and furthermore will deeply embarrass you for long after you finally catch on. You make a fool of yourself by continuing in this vein.
However, it's likely that one task (going to Mars, even sending a couple rich bozos there) is small enough that you can probably do that and work on fixing things "at home".
In fact, one could argue that one set of big companies that exist this decade that didn't exist last decade is just a shopping list of "Crap I'll need for my martian condo"
https://blog.theclymb.com/out-there/because-its-there-the-qu...
Just don't stand in the way of those who chose to go.
Your "golly I'm on Mars!" euphoria would thin out very, very fast. "This place f'n sucks!" malaise would grow steadily and without bound.
Maybe that's a confusing distinction for some.
Basically, the tech you need to make a Mars colony truly self sufficient is something like a compact fusion powerplant.
Before we have that, no point in worrying about using Mars as a "backup plan", because if Earth was screwed, Mars would have a couple of years to live at most.
And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if Musk spent money on zero-emission large scale energy production, than on rockets.
- They don't need fusion. A StarShip can deposit hundreds of solar panels and put them on the ground. No, dust isn't an issue because they'll bring a roomba. No, this isn't a joke, NASA martian probes' solar panels were cleaned by a light Martian breeze.
- They will be able to become self-sufficient rapidly. They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan. SpaceX and Tesla have already demonstrated effective vertically integrated supply chains and manufacturing. They have the institutional knowledge to mine raw materials and build factories that build complex parts.
- There are plenty of other Earth-bound governments and billionaires that could devote funds to zero-emission large scale energy production projects. Musk, his companies and assets amount to a very small fraction of the global economy. Your ire is misdirected: your anger about the situation is properly directed at the rule of corrupt imbeciles and their questionable resource allocation decisions (Netflix, coal, etc.) here on Earth rather than one team of folks who seem extraordinarily mission driven and effective.
A large asteroid has only one of these problems, by virtue of not coming with any atmosphere, ionic or otherwise.
I kinda hope Elon is bluffing and actually plans to head to the Belt. I've penciled it out and and he'd have to be insane not to. Surely he has pencils as well.
So while it is a “storm” it isn’t like a tropical force hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over time.
Q: What does zero-g do to the human body?
A: It's really really unhealthy.
Can this happen? I imagine before we can settle on Mars we first should be comfortable flying there, and the latter should be sufficient for asteroid mining. But, right, our technology is just not at a comfortable level yet.
Just build bunkers here and staff them in shifts. Much cheaper.
Your remaining threats for which Mars would be better than "ruined" Earth are something like a grey goo event, or an asteroid so large that it liquefies much of the crust (killing everyone in all your bunkers). So, a fair bit bigger than the one that killed the Dinosaurs.
I am very interested in watching people try to colonize Mars, but find the "backup for Earth" argument ridiculous, especially if presented as something urgent.
Classic zero sum thinking. Spacex doesn't cost money, it makes it. How much money do you think Musk put into it? The answer is ~100 million seed. It is now worth 35,000 million.
How far do you think that 100m would go to develop fusion. The ITER project alone costs 65,000 million.
ITER is a dead end, no matter what, so not a useful data point.
There is a difference between buying something and putting in money. If I buy a cheeseburger, I can't say I "put in" $5 to McDonalds and should have some ownership. If I pay my contract plumber to fix my toilet, I don't own their business either.
I think you will be hard-pressed to find any substantial examples where the US gov wasn't buying something from SpaceX.
Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility.
As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say that we should instead spend resources on large zero-emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical, another problem that having a self-sustaining colony, outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.
Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined.
Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk?
We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path. Whether an alternative would have gotten the same outcome?
Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and the other the forces of nature.
Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area.
If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world.
As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_po...
Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).
Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state nuclear weapons development.
And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor technology works, especially with the limitations of the period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-resistance would have been to have some sort of global fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on the time period). Which sovereign countries would have likely felt some kind of way about.
It's not obvious to me that having more nuclear reactors in the US, Britain or Germany would had made it significantly easier for rogue states like Iraq, Iran or North Korea to developed nuclear weapons.
That seems... ethically dubious.
And I'm confused. Your reasoning around why more reactors wouldn't have increased nuclear weapon proliferation was contingent on only the US, USSR, Britain, and Germany (and presumably countries like them, to an approximation) having more reactors.
Either you get to say that (a) all countries, or (b) only "responsible" (for lack of a better word) countries should have used more nuclear power.
If (a), then you have increased proliferation risk. If (b), then you're establishing (and presumably militarily enforcing) a two-tier ability to access cheap energy, that favors developed nations.
But lets I assume you're right and 'a' is somehow correct (I don't agree with the premise that increase in global nuclear power generation capacity would somehow automatically result in a higher risk of nuclear weapons actually being used) that would still mean that the western world, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and all other countries in their sphere of influence or aligned to them would have access to cheaper power (which is at least 80-90% of the global population). And I don't consider 'because Iran does not have access to nuclear power then it would be unfair for anyone else to have' to be very good argument.
In fact even if only developed countries had access to nuclear power (which is obviously not fair and not realistic anyway, good luck preventing Russia and China export their reactor to whoever they want) I still think that would be preferably to nobody having it.
I mean, you would somehow have to make Earth less hospitable than Mars to make the effort worth it.
Perhaps in the near future life extension technology will become common place, people may continue to have kids, but natural deaths may be rare; the human population will increase exponentially and need somewhere to live and something to do -- terraforming Mars in exchange for property may be reasonable.
From a standpoint of reducing emissions on Earth, it would be cool to see Elon Musk's best take on how to build a practical fusion generator though. I've heard of a few potential paths that could lead to net power much faster and cheaper than ITER. Supposedly superconducting magnets have gotten considerably better since ITER was proposed, and since power output in a tokamak reactor is something like the third or fourth power of the magnet strength IIRC, there's potential for a newer and smaller reactor design to outdo it in both timeline and cost.
The 1950s-2000s NASA model for space exploration was unusual in its centralized approach.
In today's world, mega corporations have no defense if a government actor decides to use force against them.
This utter defenselessness against violence is the main difference between a modern corporation and a feudal actor.
They get the freedom to focus on their business, within the bounds of the law, by ceding violence authority to the government. And in return, the government establishes and enforces those laws.
"A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in around 50 years, with today's technology."
I was always under the impression that these vast distances were basically entire unreachable in several human lifetimes.
Let's see... Neptune's orbital diameter 8.3 light hours.
At 10% c (speed of light) you would need 83 hours. Yes, insane speed, yet hopefully enough time to take quite a few pictures.
Also the plan is not to send a single "disc", but many (thousands?). Together they could potentially provide a treasure trove of data from within the alien solar system.
So we have the ability today to move 50K tons of parts into orbit, and come up with vast quantities of helium-3?
I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to even start to think about getting to Mars in a reasonable timeframe and in reasonable numbers (to start a colony). We are not funding making our species multiplanetary for the last few decades because we were too lazy, how can anyone expect us sending anything to the closest star (other than the sun)... You can't.