I get it, colonizing other planets is romantic and awesome. I love science fiction too. But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.
Let's figure out how to get permanent LEO human habitation going first, then figure out how to do that on the Moon. Then we can talk about colonizing other planets.
So far we've gotten short-term LEO habitation figured out, albeit with issues concerning expenses and trying to justify it all to the taxpayers.
The prospect of an inhabited Martian colony living off the land is dismal, for anything except extremely far-future timeframes (thousands of years or more). Any extraplanetary colony is going to be invariably tethered to Earth and highly dependent on imports for survival. The moon has the advantage of not just being closer, but having a launch window of "whenever you feel like it", in contrast to Martian launch windows that occur 26 months apart.
On planets, a space elevator goes to (geo)stationary[0] so that the cable doesn't wind up around the planet, but you can't do that on the Moon, because luna-stationary is occupied by the Earth, which inconveniently is too massive and spinning too fast to anchor the other side of the cable. However, the L1 point is also stationery relative to the lunar surface, and is the place where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon balance out.
[0] IIRC, geostationary specifically means Earth, but there's going to be some more general term for the same idea over generic parent objects and not just Earth
Although (and I wish I could find this again), I've read that lunar He3 is so diffuse that getting it out would incidentally give us so much purified aluminium, silicon, and oxygen, that sending all that back to Earth and magnetically decelerating it on arrival would give us more energy than the He3, as would burning those ingots with that oxygen.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZteJmg1TfM (10 minute video, relevant around 4:00)
Though you could equivalently try and go for Earth-Moon L1 with a counterweight on the other side of L1. It would be significantly more unstable though.
For Luna or Mars, gravity is reduced and the required diameter is less. Maybe it would even be feasible to build such an elevator if it were above the Earth. But now you're building above an alien plant, so you trade one set of potentially insurmountable obstacles for another.
I'm not sure that that system would be unstable in human timeframes since the two would be tidally locked, although it would certainly alter the engineering stresses in ways that I'm grossly unqualified to calculate. I think a portion of the cable might be under compression rather than tension? I guess it depends on the rotational speed of the whole system.
Speaking of which, substantial amounts of energy would need to be spent accelerating the spin of the Earth/space elevator system to maintain a 24-hour day/night cycle.
However, Luna's presence would perturb the whole system, either tearing it apart with tidal stresses or being ejected from the system before that could happen.
See Isaac Arthur's video about it here: https://youtu.be/dc8_AuzeYKE?t=470
Compare this to anything on mars. It'll be 3.6-4.0km/s to mars injection. Then 2.0km/s to low orbit (can be optimized with clever aerobreaking down to 1.0km/s). To the surface will be a minimum of another 0.4km/s (no engine, parachute only) and closer to 1km/s if you want a soft landing. So you can expect 5km/s at the bare minimum and ~7km/s along established "routes" leveraging to-be-existing infra.
So then the question becomes whether lower delta-v returns, regular launch opportunities, and shorter comms delay are more or less important than 1km/s delta-v savings.
I'd argue the delta-v savings aren't worth it on their own. Mars will eventually be worth exploring and it's a valuable opportunity but by every measure other than raw "throw it at the orbital body with no support or return plan" delta-v savings, the moon is a better site for initial extraterrestrial habitation studies.
Except that all that delta at mars is done with aerobraking/aerocapture. Inbound probes can crash strait into the mars atmosphere without slowing down for orbital insertion. That's why it takes far less fuel to get to surface of mars than the moon, at least with objects car-sized or smaller. Only with larger/heavier objects is mar's atmosphere so thin that fuel must be used for capture prior to descent.
In the following deltaV map, much of the trip to mars is a free ride so long as you follow the red arrows. There are no free rides on the way to the moon.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/delta-v-chart...
In any case, bodies with atmosphere do enable you to effectively shave up to half of the delta-v for a transfer when you know what you are doing. :)
Looking at it from LLO isn't the number you should be using. It's the number from Lunar intercept orbits to landing.
Actually now that I think about it, if you want to save delta-v, you can get an extra 25% off the TLI leg of the direct route with a low energy transfer using weak stability boundary trajectories. These savings however come at the cost of a significantly longer flight time and far slimmer margins for failure.
Von Neumann machines have an existence proof in ourselves, and make it fairly fast to disassemble planets into a Dyson swarm. (I think Dyson swarms are a bad idea, and will grind to dust that blows away to interstellar space in the solar wind in geologically short timescales, but that's a different problem).
Assume reproduction such that population doubles every 25 years. Fast, but not insane.
(1000/25) = 40 doubling periods
8e9 * 2^40 * 100kg = 2.7 Mercury masses, or 12 lunar masses, or 1.3 Mars masses
The sun provides enough power to do it in a week or two.
In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
However, these numbers are meaningless - you are assuming that doubling the size of a population that's 2^39 individuals will take roughly the same time as a population that's 64 individuals individuals, which is not even close to plausible - especially when we reach ideas like a population weighing as much as half a planet.
You're also assuming that it's even possible for a mahcine to convert a significant proportion of a planet's crust to copies of itself - which is obviously false, as the crust is mostly rock, and machines require plenty of liquids and water to be produced (whether biological or mechanical or electronic). And that doing so will not affect the growth rate at all, even as the planet starts being formed of molten magma once all of the crust has been used up. And not to mention the gigantic earthquakes and supervolcaones they would have to deal with as a significant portion of continental mass gets shifted around.
Overall, you are only extrapolating some numbers to a completely absurd conclusion, and calling it plausible. There is nothing even close to realistic in your scenario, and indeed we have no idea if it's even close to possible to strip a planet down to create a Dyson swarm. I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
> I'm not sure where your 8e9 number is coming from. Population doubling every year but the parents leaving the planet after mating?
That's the current human population.
> In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.
You start with one human, I didn't. What are you even imagining that I'm describing, Adam-only parthenogenesis?
> Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.
Even with Adam-only parthenogenesis, log2(8e9)*25 years is 822 years, less than one, definitely not plural, millennia.
Material science isn't my field, though it doesn't need to be given how many other places there are for whichever chemicals we want. Water? Oxides in the local rock, and four massive hydrogen gas giants (don't need much proportionally as H2O is 89% oxygen by mass).
> I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
Gravitational binding energy of Earth: 2.2e32 J; Mercury: 1.8e30 J; Mars: 4.9e30 J; Luna: 1.2e29 J
Luminosity Sol: 3.8e26 W
Time required to explosively disassemble (i.e. each part reaching escape velocity) each object: Earth: 6.6 days; Mercury: 1.3 hours; Mars: 3.6 hours; Luna: 313 seconds.
To preempt the obvious, yes I know that's the number for total luminosity and not the power available at any given moment given how many space habs have been built part way through the process, but that makes very little difference: Given the way the functions behave, you don't need most of the power of the sun until you can harness a significant percentage of it anyway.
I mean, this toy model also assumes that the only thing these humans do with their lives is reproduction, with the average individual adding only a little more than their own body mass to the VN swarm each generation, and not, e.g., building themselves a nice little space hab that's unlikely to mass less than 10,000 kg/person. It makes very little difference to exponential growth.
You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra. The amount reaching the earth is significantly less - 1.73e15 W, or about 10^9 times less - and the amount that can realistically be captured is far less than that.
Overall, don't worry: there is exactly 0 chance that any human advancement will disassemble even a dwarf planet in the next millennium in the real world. Just because Freeman Dyson could write some back of the napkin computations it doesn't mean this is actually possible in any meaningful way.
You know stuff cools down, right? Power loss to radiation is proportional to T^4.
> You also don't need to be a materials scientist to know that you can't get water or oxygen out of rock with sheer mechanical force.
Good thing you're putting words into my mouth, then. Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
> Your estimate for the energy of the sun takes into account all of the energy sent in all directions in all spectra
I know, and I said as much with different words.
Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That's why I preemptively made the point that you're ignoring here.
It only took around 160 million years for the Earth's crust to form, so yeah, sure, stuff cools down, eventually.
> Hint 1: How do we do this for aluminium? Hint 2: I didn't say "mechanical" for this.
Ok, mechanical was my idea - but chemical extraction of oxygen requires some other compounds to form, potentially making the whole thing even less usable for future conversion into more copies. Plus, it requires an input of some other materials, which may not be easy to create.
> Do you perchance know what a mirror is? Or how light they are? How little of (insert-planet-here)'s mass you need to turn into PV and/or mirrors to get to covering the planet, how little time it takes to use those to gather the energy needed to run a launch loop to get a second planet-tiling-quantity to orbit?
That still only gives you the 10^15 watts that reach the Earth, not the 10^26 number you were citing. Also, covering the whole planet with mirrors or PVs is again not nearly as trivial as you make it out to be, and this "launch loop" idea is just some abstract design, not something we can actually build (despite what the author would have you believe).
This is already completely implausible given everything we know about human behavior, but it reaches impossibility very quickly when you consider the possibility of humans becoming more than a negligible fraction of the mass of their single host planet. We aren't machines that can trivially reproduce ourselves from commonly available materials and then eject into space. Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder. And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
Nah, we use plants to turn raw materials into what we can consume. And in the other direction, we can only make stuff on this scale with factories that take a while to build. But in both cases, that's a distinction without a difference. A farm and a factory rather than a spacesuit, makes no difference on this scale, so long as they feed themselves while growing their families.
> Feeding ourselves is hard, getting to space (alive) is harder.
Feeding ourselves is about 1% of our current labour. Getting into space is only hard because we use rockets, but at this scale we'd use launch loops, atlas towers, orbital rings, or similar. Those are extremely cheap, like "$300 to LEO" cheap for this thought experiment's ("spherical cow in a vacuum" model of a) 100 kg human.
> And once the overwhelming majority of us are in space because there's no more room down below, how are we supposed to meet up to keep up the 25 year doubling rate. How are we supposed to keep up the rate of resource extraction from Earth?
There's lots of ways I've seen suggested. Even without the exotic options like the Dyson Motor (would take too long, at 40k years) or redirecting Kupier Belt Objects to blow off percentage points of the target planet mass at a time, even just with traditional digging, at that scale it's "how fast can you drill vertically?" and "how many launch loops can you wrap the target planet in?", followed by "how fast does the deep ground cool down when exposed?" — the latter being why I said thermodynamics probably gets in the way when the timeline gets down to decades; this is radiative-dominated cooling in a better vacuum (insulator!) than most laboratories let alone thermos-flasks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090616110337///www.aeiveos.com...
It's about what you'd call "hard SF" and one side calls their argument a "solved problem" :-)))
We know how, and we know it doesn't require more than operating at higher scales of industry than ever before. Any interplanetary or kardishev 1+ venture makes those assumptions.
From Mars your family will only get ashes because your body will have been deconposing for months.
There is steel, aluminium and oxygen on the moon,'it can host heavy indstry and peoduce ships, space stations, equipment. It can host a space elevator today,'made of normal kevlar. You could build an aircraft carrier and lift it into orbit.
No you can’t. You still need to spend the same amount of energy per ton to escape earth’s gravity. An elevator does not magically violate laws of physics
Edit: As pointed out below I probably misunderstood the comment I was replying too. My bad
We shouldn't be judging these things by the standards of generally risk averse people on this discussion board. It won't be people like us going.
Only while the thing is rare.
Is it gonna be disposable lower-class people?
In age of doscovery shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on a major voyage.
TThe past is fireign land, executions were a public holiday and children came to watch. We used to gove cocaine to children to stop them crying.
This meme comes from people who've watched too many bad sci-fi shows and don't have a good grasp of history. The people going to space will be the intersection of those who can afford it and those who want and are capable of going. The first people who traveled the oceans were not the lower class. They were the upper class who could afford to fund or pay for the journey by pooling money or independently pay for it.
The poor you refer to didn't come until much later in the age of discovery.
Many countries import the majority of food / material inputs, but output high quality manufacturing, technical, and entertainment goods.
Whole books have been written on the raw materials available in space, both from the moon and from Near Earth Objects.[]
Mars is a bad idea that needs to go away before we lose the opportunity to perform the actual next step, which O'Neill and others mapped out decades ago.
> But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.
In either case, the main challenge, is rapid rockets reusability.
Nothing comes even close to the second place.
The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.
Having a self-sustaining living space is by far the biggest problem (one where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows).
The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
Each of these problems is fractally more complex than I make it out to be, and none of them would be fixable if rockets were very cheap. And these are just problems for a limited time Martian outpost, similar to a trip to the ISS. Thinking about an actual colony with some prospect of perpetual habitation being in orders of magnitude more issues, some of which may not even be solvable without biologically altering humans to make a new Mars-adapted species of hominid.
Without cheap space access they are not even worth properly researching.
> One where all of the waste we produce can be reused to create new drinkable water, air and food, and to reliably continue to do so between Mars launch windows.
None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
I personally think we should intentionally seed all celestial bodies with life as soon as possible anyway.
If we find life in our solar system (especially life independent from Earth) we should become a lot more aggressive with space settlement, because it would make "great filter" ahead of us hypothesis a lot more likely. Settlement outside solar system should become one of humanity priorities as a matter of survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
> The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology
Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.
Not a showstopper for the willing.
> Thinking about an actual colony with some prospect of perpetual habitation being in orders of magnitude more issues
First things first.
On the contrary - these are all useful technologies to the goal of preserving human life. If we had the ability to create self-sustaining colonies in the most extremely harsh conditions on Earth (a necessary step to being able to colonize any other place), we would have a much greater guarantee that humanity would survive a disaster like a huge asteroid/super volcano/deadly plague/etc. We could probably also use the technologies developed for other uses - better homes, more sustainable agriculture etc.
We could also work on miniaturizing the things and then start thinking about sending them in space, perhaps even with currently existing rockets.
> None of that is as big of an issue if you can launch often and a lot of stuff. In the limit you don't need to recycle anything and everything has multiple spares. You can also launch outside direct constraints of Hohmann transfer orbit. Again, payload limitations and time are the main reasons we use Hohmann transfer orbits.
It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all, given the hard physical constraints on rocket masses and available fuels.
> We will not avoid contamination. It's impossible to do. Where humans go our microbiome will follow.
Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission and you will still find people who will be willing to go.
What would be the goals of the mission? Why do you think people desperate enough to accept certain death will be able to achieve said goals or even care about them once they reach the surface?
> First things first.
Exactly my (and the article's) point. First you send robots to Mars while developing colony technologies on Earth, then you start thinking about sending humans to Mars.
That's not how people work. People will go to Mars for curiosity, greed, fame, or some higher level desire (possibly religious) not necessarily in that order.
Odds of Mars being explored à la Star Trek are infinitesimal, I'd give that hope up.
We can explore how life appeared on planets in other solar systems.
It has held in place since then by both inertia & similar "if I can't have the resources, no one can" and other resource sources still being usually cheaper to mine.
Showing that's it's possible right now within reasonable budget.
That's the fundamental difference in logic here.
The goal is to get people to Mars as soon as possible. Not to delay it for as long as possible.
> Exactly - hence why humans shouldn't be going to Mars until we have studied the hell out of any possible local life and become convinced we have learned all we can on the subject.
This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere
> It's far less likely that it's possible to reach the level of cheapness you talk about at all
Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes. Starship HLS allows to take 50x spares of everything NASA thought would be required for Moon landing.
To what end? We could send a few suicidal people to Mars today for little more than the cost of a satellite launch if we don't care about their survival - hell, they don't even have to be suicidal, get some people who recently died, strap them in a rocket, and send them to Mars.
Instead, you have to set an actual short term and longer term mission goal - say, you want a mission that can prove that X people can survive for Y months on Mars without external help, with a longer term goal of hauling them back to Earth at the next launch window or something.
But for this type of mission, you actually need extremely sane people who greatly value their lives and those of their colleagues, otherwise you'll just have a few corpses sitting on Mars like in my initial example.
And more importantly, again, given current technologies, the actual result of the experiment is already known: those people will simply die if sent to Mars with currently known life preservation methods.
> This is never going to happen. Even on Earth people are not 100% convinced that "shadow biosphere" doesn't exists.
Then never send people to Mars - at least not until we have a very clear path to actually establishing a self-sufficient colon on Mars, for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
> Starship HLS right now is being build with aim at 100 metric tonnes to the Moon vs. NASA requirement of 2 metric tonnes.
Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions. Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
And even if Starship achieves all of its goals, it will be nowhere near the ability to send resources to Mars outside the existing launch windows in anything approaching economic efficiency.
> Let's also see it actually successfully do orbital refueling, which would be a prerequisite for even getting to the moon with the proposed design, not to mention Mars.
Exactly. Working hardware silences detractors better than anything. SpaceX won that contract including all the legal challenges a bit over a year ago.
> Let's see it fly and let's see the total budget before such hopeful conclusions.
It's a fixed cost contract, not cost+ like SLS which BTW costs NASA 4 billions per launch all things considered according to their own estimates.
> for which there is plenty of research that can be done on Earth (and in LEO).
Everybody is welcomed to do the research on Earth. And Starship will make LEO based research at least 100x cheaper. 100B for ISS vs. 1B in the most pessimistic scenario for Starship. ISS and Starship have similar internal volume.
> Going to Mars can be a suicide mission
These goals seem contradictory.
That problem gets a lot easier and cheaper when you don't have to design for margins of 1.2 to or so to save on weight. When you can throw extra weight at a problem to overbuild it for reliability you can solve these problems cheaper and more reliably.
> The second biggest is probably avoiding contamination of Mars, if we actually care about exploring one of the biggest mysteries of life - has it arisen only on Earth? Are there other modes of life possible, and what do they look like?
Planetary Protection is the new version of treating Earth as "gaia". It's a form of regressive environmentalism. This is not an important goal. Mars is not a very good candidate for supporting life now that we know how many geothermally active ice moons with undersea oceans exist in our solar system.
If hypothetical life on Mars is similar to life on Earth then it's not that valuable of a thing to learn and anything found would vary drastically from life on Earth from billions of years of separate evolution. If it's very different from life on Earth then it will still be easy to find even with plentiful human contamination.
Finally, with additional mass you can bring substantially heavier and more complex analysis and remote robotic equipment with you. (Or on a completely separate mission before humans arrive.)
> The third biggest challenge is human psychology and physiology - could we actually get a group of ~100 people or however many we need initially to live and be productive for the years-long space mission (including travel time to and from)? What do we do when at least one of them inevitably gets sick on Mars?
This is overrated given that there's plentiful human experience throughout the history of humanity where humans suffered significantly worse isolation and hardship. Some projects will fail from human psychological issues, and the risk from them should be minimized (bring plants along, allow spaces for people to self-isolate, etc) but a single failure should not be taken as a reason that the entire concept is doomed. For sickness, you try to minimize possible issues by bringing significant medication and medical equipment, but sometimes there will be inevitable deaths. As mentioned, having additional mass that you can bring for human comforts and medical equipment saves a lot of potential deaths and issues
In LEO further you have no gravity and no materials so the only going there is bringing whatever you want to do there with you. There's no resources that can be used. With no gravity also many things simply can't work. For example you can't run any pumps that pump liquids built in a normal manner. You can't rely on gravity to separate or settle liquids.
The GP's point, as I understood it, is that we haven't even figured out how to make missions 1/1000th as complex as a Mars mission on our own planet viable.
From what I can tell people are talking about two different things here. Group 1 is talking about how we prevent humans from going extinct in the long term by setting up a Mars colony. Group 2 is talking about doing something easier before we jump to something harder (Antarctica -> LEO -> Moon -> Mars). I don't know why these two groups always feel so at odds with each other online, as it seems like both philosophies end up in the same place.
Group 3 are the people who think we should save Earth INSTEAD of going to Mars, and I think they miss the point entirely.
1. An event that affects the Earth without affecting Mars.
2. An event that leaves the Earth more uninhabitable than Mars, even temporarily.
A gamma ray burst or rogue star that destroys the Earth would just as easily destroy Mars. Meanwhile, even a colossal meteor strike such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, despite leaving the Earth a shattered ruin for millenia, would still result in a planet that is more habitable than Mars.
The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.
In the near term, absolutely. But the long term goal is to colonize multiple planets/moons. Eventually, Mars will be one of many worlds on which life finds a foothold, which is perhaps the best backup for life that humanity can currently deliver. But we still need to take that first step.
So even if a very low percentage survive within underground settlements here it would be far better situation than being on Mars.
The difference is that on Mars, we're for the most part forced to build underground.
On Earth we have to choose to do so, and we haven't done enough of that so far.
Yet we still have infinitely more underground settlements on earth than we can conceivably have on Mars in any imaginable future...
That doesn't mean not trying to do something is a great idea.
Seeding libraries for the culture that rose from the ashes would achieve whatever you are trying to.
huh. most honest answer I've seen so far. "We're going to mars so we can later to go war with Earth, ideally when they are weak"
BTW Do you guys think building big chemical rockets just automatically advances your matsci/chem/bio timeline? It doesn't. That's the effect of massive government cheese.
Fun fact about the age of discovery: shit was already discovered. Domesticated food, fresh water, and abundant friends were already there.
The universe is bored of generating new challenges for your particular kind of aggressive. It has lots of fun new problems for people who are willing to work together though. Sorry.
Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?
Any global extinction event is then just going to be a solar-system extinction event, Expanse style. To save enough humans from extinction in case of catastrophy probably some vaults are enough.
Life on Earth survived the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, obviously, otherwise we wouldn't be here now. The dinosaurs were wiped out, but the dinosaurs had nowhere to hide and were completely unprepared for the asteroid impact. It's important to keep in mind that the Earth after the asteroid hit was still vastly more livable and conducive to life than Mars is now. Mars is more hostile to life than a big asteroid impact, because Mars has no habitat to start with. Mars has no benefit whatsoever to humans as far as Earth disaster survival is concerned, except for the fact that Mars is not Earth.
A much better plan to avoid extinction is multifold: (1) Stop destroying our own environment, duh. (2) Get rid of nuclear weapons. (3) Stop killing each other in general. (4) Invest in asteroid detection and deflection. (5) Build shelters on Earth capable of surviving disaster, such as underground. It also wouldn't hurt to (6) Stop being afraid of vaccination.
We've got everything we need here already: normal gravity, breathable atmosphere, food, water, raw materials, people. It would be sooooooo much easier to build disaster shelters on Earth than to permanently populate Mars. The difference in difficulty level makes Mars a total joke in comparison.
As a species, if we can't even get our shit together on Earth enough to stop polluting, stop killing, stop the threat of nuclear war, and vaccinate against contagious diseases, then we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity. You can forget living on Mars, a massively hostile environment, if we can't do it right here on Earth, which was practically made for us.
We don't know if human nature can be "fixed" (in a positive way), so stopping other things until that's been done sounds a bit silly to me.
What's the point of a "backup plan" when the primary plan isn't even working?
The whole point of a having a backup plan is for when the primary plan isn't working :S
c/when/if
When your primary plan isn't working, you fix that first. Ideally, the backup plan is never needed.
If your house is on fire, you don't start building a second house, you put out the damn fire.
Also, it would be pretty dumb to put a backup in place more dangerous than the original. It would be like building your second home inside a volcano.
If one looks at the history of colonies (attempts to colonize the new world, for instance), we see that they often fall apart socially even in situations where they're in a place with much more resources than they had back home. Humans aren't dwarf fortress type automatons that can simply be handed whatever necessary job is needed and mindlessly go about their day for the rest of their lives.
No one has been able to manufacture a functioning mini-society, and every attempt has ended in spectacular failure. It seems crazy to think things will suddenly work if we drop the people in a place devoid of almost all resources and entirely hostile to life from Earth.
Flippantly using "stop destroying our environment" brings to mind a pastoralism that was triumphant in the 90s but is basically unworkable.
Your suggestion requires degrowth, and degrowth would entail a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions
It wasn't flippant. Global warming is one of the greatest dangers facing humanity.
> degrowth would entail a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions
We have no choice, because growth already entails a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.
Energiewende was the renewable transition that primarily offshored responsibility to Russian natural gas and coal when plants weren't running, assuming that the renewables would grow and balance out.
That didn't work so well, and now a European heat wave is saving European lives.
People need heat, and light, and to compute.
The developing world cannot wait for net zero carbon energy, and the developed world cannot just stop all useful human activity to pursue climate goals.
The rhetoric around this is if we "just" had better politics, if the oil and gas lobby weren't such villains, if conservatives weren't sticking their heads in the sand we would be able to make it to net zero while "only" sacrificing things we don't care about, like big gas guzzling pickup trucks.
We are finding out that no, we can't.
Continuing down this line of rhetoric is flippant, or perhaps glib.
There's hope though, even if you believe that climate change will end humanity (it won't) - the status symbol cars are electric, more consumer cars are electric, renewable deployment is proceeding apace and we even have developments in fusion and SMRs.
That's how we win - not with the Extinction Rebellion, but with new people doing diligent work to produce higher and higher standards of living at less and less cost.
Fuel costs money, and nobody wants to use it if they don't have to - economics will eventually win, because the best low or no carbon energy sources require almost no operational cost due to lack of constant fuel input.
I agree except this doesn’t seem possible neither politically nor economically… launching people to Mars really sound easier
This is tricky. Both because for better or for worse, they do provide a certain military equilibrium, and also because you know, it's probably a good idea to have them around, at least to a certain degree, if the Xel'naga decide that creating us was a bad idea. Not that nuke might not be sort of like throwing rocks at an advanced civilization, but it's not like we'd have anything better...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
Which could also help with the second issue - say an alien elephant invasion. ;-)
Not as of now. The outer space treaty[1] forbids nuclear explosions in space. I don’t think this treaty will be revised until it is made obsolete by a total elimination of these weapons of horror (e.g. by another treaty[2]). So if you want to see nuclear explosions used as propellant in space (which honestly isn’t such a bad use for them) then I recommend you petition your government to sign and implement the UN ban on these world ending weapons, if they haven’t already.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_N...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
is more inspiring to me.
On a related note, lets also look at the nuclear salt-water rocket - arguably the king of crazy (yet theoretically viable) on the nuclear rocket field right now:
Similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-inertial_fusion
The exhaust is clean, because the system is closed.
Also it reminds me of some descriptions of so called 'Vimanas' which occur in old Indian scriptures, and nerdy people from today tried to reconstruct/reverse engineer/remimagine what's described in there.
And this fits, perfectly so.
Edit: I think of this as even more terrifying thant that saltwater thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
Would you trust in this evil trickster dust? ;->
Actually, I kinda think it demonstrates we really are not done with nuclear engines & even better, more crazy and higher performance propulsion methods will show up. And also, we really need to finally start building some of them them! :)
Like, even some simple NERVA or NEP would be at least a start. :)
1) it is achievable with 1960s technology
2) the payloads, my god, MILLIONS of tons is the ideal cargo size
3) one month to get to jupiter's moons!
I think if we had good funding I would do:
1) Get starship mature
2) capture some asteroids to make an orbital base
3) moon base + a lunar launch loop or launch rail or lunar space elevator
4) build an orion ship on the moon and launch from the moon
5) mine the major asteroids. Profit!
That all sure sounds simple enough if you handwave over all the inherent complexity, but by that standard so does colonizing Mars, and yet colonizing Mars also sounds like a fun adventure.
In particular, (2) and (3) are working at cross purposes here—nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945. Also, (4)—asteroid deflection—could provide a safeguard for earth, but could just as easily be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
(1) is a slogan and not a concrete plan. How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people? Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits. Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish, solar and batteries require mining rare earth metals, and so forth.
I didn't say it was simple. I believe what I said: "we have no hope of long-term survival anywhere, because of our own stupidity."
> nuclear deterrent is the primary thing that has prevented a great power war from happening since 1945.
A sad statement about humanity. Which is why I said we need to get our shit together.
Do we bring nationalism and nuclear weapons to Mars? How soon after settlement until the first Martian war starts? Could a Martian colony even survive a war, if the life-sustaining infrastructure is attacked? Or do they do it in the style of Star Trek "A Taste of Armageddon", with simulations and disintegration chambers?
> How do you plan to provide food, energy, housing, and health care to eight billion people?
How do you plan it? Hunger, power outages, homelessness, and lack of access to health care already exist.
> Windmills are a hazard to birds, hydroelectric dams are a hazard to fish
We're already killing birds and fish in many other ways more deadly.
Would a small Mars colony survive a single jilted lover aiming for the ultimate murder-suicide?
Then give up and cede the floor to the people who are actually trying to do something about the future of humanity. If you're really this defeatist about the whole thing, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation.
Also, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation in general. You've managed to quote almost everything I wrote in my post except for one of the central points, which was: "Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." You ignore that while quoting just about everything else to provide snippy and dismissive comments that aren't really engaging with anything. Of course, why would you contribute anything of value if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
The truth? Are you concerned with truth, or just wishful thinking?
Let's say you have a terminal illness, for example, ALS. Would you lie to everyone, including yourself, and say you're fine, that everything is going to be ok? Or would you admit the truth, and try to come to grips with it?
Of course we would love to have a cure. Nobody welcomes a terminal illness. But the reality and gravity of the situation cannot be honestly denied.
> Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits
In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant. The livability of the Earth's environment is a precondition for every other human endeavor. You can't have economic activity without ecological activity. And if you aim to convince me to be quiet about that, then the last thing you want to do is claim that we can "trade" the environment for something else. This kind of attitude only reaffirms my pessimism about whether we can, as I put it, get our shit together.
I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish when we're currently facing a period of mass animal species extinction due to human effects on the environment, such as global warming, chemical and physical pollution, deforestation, overfishing, etc.
> if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
I'm not philosophically committed to it, just empirically convinced of it.
I don't know how it's going to go down in the end. What I do know is that humans are essentially less hairy, more talkative apes, and as a group we can't responsibly handle the technology that the cleverest (but not necessarily wisest) among us were able to create. We're like the sorcerer's apprentice, except there's no sorcerer to show up at the last minute to save ourselves from the disaster we created.
We've known about global warming for many decades, yet we've done practically nothing about it, and now hardly anyone can deny that the consequences of it are starting to show. We're already past the point of no return. We allow amoral madmen to control world-threatening nuclear arsenals. We put anything and everything into the water, into the air, into the ground, without any apparent concern for the future. Millions of people are in near total denial of science, believing among other things that the world was literally created a few thousand years ago, and evolution did not occur. And by the way, these people dominate at least one of the two major political parties of the most powerful nation on Earth. I don't know why exactly I should be hopeful about all this. To whom am I supposed to cede the floor? The "pedo guy" guy?
In 1963, a graduate student was diagnosed with ALS. Instead of deciding that his life was pointless and meaningless, he completed his doctorate and spent the rest of his life contributing to scientific research and to educating the public. His name was Stephen Hawking and he passed away at age 76, in 2018.
> In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant.
Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable. This kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the issue is counterproductive and useless.
> I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish
I'm not saying not to build the windmills and dams. I'm saying that the benefits of doing so outweighs the ecological costs. I'm not concern trolling here; I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with. You're just so worked up that you missed the point.
1) I didn't say my life is pointless and meaningless. Moreover, I obviously care, otherwise I wouldn't bother to argue about all of this.
2) You're seriously going to pull unusual anecdotal data about a condition that has well known scientific statistics?
3) I think it's fair to say that Hawking's physics talent resulted in greater caretaking effort put into his life than the average case.
> Thankfully, nobody is suggesting making the earth uninhabitable.
Of course nobody suggests it. They're not going to do it on purpose, they're going to do it by accident, due to carelessness and neglect.
> I'm giving an example of a cost/benefit tradeoff that you presumably agree with.
Why? If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
You asked about my plan to provide the essentials, such as food and housing, but that's a bit of misdirection, because we do vastly more than just provide the essentials. We have rampant, insatiable consumerism, not to mention planned obsolescence, driven by zombie non-human entities called "corporations" that lack ethics and exist for nothing except unfettered growth. We have the military-industrial complex whose appetite for war and weaponry is never ending. And now people want to massively ramp up the space program again and constantly launch (polluting) rockets into space, even littering our orbit with satellites that block our own view of it that we so admire from a distance. I don't think the problem is the essentials. Rather, I want to know what the plan is for cutting back on the non-essentials.
> You're just so worked up
Please refrain from personal comments, which are unnecessary and uninformed. You don't know me, and you're certainly not in the room with me, so you don't have the slightest clue about my present mental or emotional state. At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
No, you said human civilization is doomed, and then you mentioned an ALS diagnosis as an analogy between an individual life and the fate of human civilization.
> If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?
The point is that tradeoffs exist. It's not "tangential" to provide examples of tradeoffs when making the point that tradeoffs exist.
> At this point, I could probably rattle off my spiel in my sleep.
As far as I can tell, you are rattling this off in your sleep, because you aren't constructively responding to my points in any way. It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up, as opposed to having poor reading comprehension or some sort of apocalyptic monomania. At this point I'm content just dismissing you as a fanatical doomsayer with no interest in what anyone else has to say, because that's how you've conducted yourself thus far.
Yes. That doesn't mean human life isn't worth living. After all, the Earth itself is ultimately doomed, billions of years in the future. Everyone acknowledges that, scientifically. What we do with that knowledge is a different matter.
If there's a way for humanity to avoid its sorry fate, I believe that the solution is not inherently technological. Technology may be needed, but the solution has to start with our acknowledging the truth, acknowledging reality, and becoming self-aware, self-reflective, especially of our own human flaws. We can't attempt to overcome our flaws if we don't even admit that we have those flaws.
The first step is to look inward, to human nature, not look outward to Mars. We'll never be able to govern the space outside of Earth unless we can govern the space between our ears. Rationality, ethics, cooperation, these are the keys to long-term survival of the species. And perhaps biological evolution would bring us to that eventually. But evolution works painfully slowly, so I fear that the combination of technology and self-destructiveness will get us first.
If humans even need something like "nuclear deterrence", for example, that's an inherently unstable and extremely dangerous situation. It's no way to live. Which is why I keep asking if we're going to bring that crap to Mars with us.
> The point is that tradeoffs exist.
Ok. And 1+1=2. You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
> It was a charitable assumption on my part that you're just worked up
No, it wasn't. Try coming up with something other than your two uncharitable interpretations, the second of which isn't even worth repeating.
You don't think there is, though. You've admitted as much. So why are you wasting your time?
> Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.
That's always been one of the benefits of settling a frontier--any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form.
> Ok. And 1+1=2.
So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
> You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.
It's certainly more nuanced than the statement of yours I was responding to, which was "stop destroying our own environment, duh". It doesn't take very much light to illuminate the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Because I've got time to waste? And because I'm not happy about the situation.
Honestly, aren't most HN commenters mostly just wasting time here?
> any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form
This does not seem true to me.
> So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.
No, I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention. There are some obvious, massive environmental problems in the world, such as global warming, air pollution, water pollution, ground pollution, etc. I'm not seeing a serious global effort to stop, undo, or prevent these problems. In that respect, I'm not interested in "tradeoffs", which sound to me like a justification or excuse to continue to destroy our one planet for the sake of short-term profit. But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish, which as you can probably guess, doesn't impress me or justify doing nothing about the environment.
I mentioned those things as examples of tradeoffs where the benefit outweighs the ecological impact. “Doing nothing about the environment” is a complete strawman that you made up for some reason, it certainly has nothing to do with anything I mentioned.
I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either, but you’re still not really grasping it or coherently responding to it, so I have no reason to think you’re willing and capable of engaging with anything more nuanced.
I keep asking, over and over, for you to give examples of tradeoffs where the cost/benefit goes the other way, but you steadfastly refuse to elaborate. All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view. If doing nothing about the environment is a strawman, then why don't you go ahead and explain your non-strawman position?
> I don’t think I’m making a particularly nuanced point either
You're not making any point. That's my point. You apparently just want me to say "You were right, Phil, and I was wrong", despite my not even knowing what the heck you're supposed to be right about, except the totally vague, handwavey "tradeoffs exists".
Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You haven't, actually. But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
> All you do is complain that I'm misunderstanding you, while never elaborating on your view.
When you keep misrepresenting what I've already said, I'm going to go back and try and clarify the points that you missed instead of moving on. If you're going to continue making the same misunderstandings, I'm going to get frustrated and give up.
> Ok, fine. Tradeoffs exists. Are you happy now? But that doesn't really get us anywhere or change anything in the argument.
You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point. I'd say that's progress, and I'm going to leave it at that because I don't think you're engaging in good faith here, and I suspect that if we continue, you're just going to circle back to claiming that I was "concern trolling" about renewable energy again even though I've clarified that point more than once.
This is demonstrably false. Reread the thread.
Me: "How do you plan it?" "If there's supposed to be a moral to the point about tradeoffs, then why not directly talk about what it's supposed to be, rather than mentioning little tangents that are largely irrelevant?" "You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way." "I'm still waiting for the nuance that you mention." "But if there's some nuance that I'm missing here, then please explain. The only thing you ever mentioned was windmills hurting birds and dams hurting fish"
> But now that you finally have, I think the use of coal to generate electricity would be an example that goes the other way.
> You've spent the past three days disingenuously arguing against the point that tradeoffs exist. Now you've conceded the point.
From my perspective, you've spent the past three days hiding your real views in order to get me to get me to concede a point that in most circumstances would not be worth even mentioning, like 1+1=2. Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist", unless you believed that my conceding the point commits me to other things that are favorable to your own argument and views? There's a rather simple and obvious reason why I've been resisting what you called "one of the central points, which was Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits." The reason I've resisted is that I want to know exactly what I'm agreeing to by conceding that point, and you've refused to say until now. And guess what, I do not agree about coal. So I think I was justified in resisting your point. I definitely don't agree with a laissez-faire market-based approach that always leads to the tragedy of the commons. I think "carbon offsets" are a joke and nothing more than a system to pay to pollute, as usual allowing the wealthiest to do nothing and get away with murder.
None of these quotes actually contain the question, “what are some tradeoffs that would go the other way?”.
> Why? Why did you place so much importance on that, on the (purposely?) vague "tradeoffs exist"
Because your apocalyptic rants are very, very absolutist and seem to exclude the very possibility of tradeoffs. You are right that it’s a 1+1=2 type point, but you were passionately ranting that 1+1=11. I was trying to introduce some nuance into the conversation, and then you freaked out.
> And guess what, I do not agree about coal.
You don’t agree with me that we should phase out coal power plants? That makes absolutely no sense given your doomsday ranting.
Oh, I think I see what happened here. We agreed, I think, on hydroelectric dams as a case where the tradeoff favors building or maintaining the power plant. You asked for a tradeoff that went the other way, and that’s when I mentioned coal. See, hydroelectric goes the way of “let’s keep the power plant running” while coal goes the other way—i.e. not keeping that power plant operational. Or do you think we should phase out hydroelectric? You’re not making any sense here.
I don't think going extinct from the effects of any human capability is much of a concern. Humans have lived in stone age for tens of thousands of years. It's more that we wouldn't have nice things like houses, cars, and computers.
If we have to terraform anything, why not first learn to do it here on Earth? Plenty of inhospitable space that we can turn green, no need to go to Mars.
Doing that will almost double the amount of living space for the human population. Earth is a big planet. There is also ample space deeper underground. Why not make entire high-tech undergound cities?
Doing it will allow us to plan similar projects on Mars, or even some day, on Titan. Conditions underground on very cold planets should be much more "habitable", than those on freezing surface.
While we are at it, even the Moon has cave systems where various research can be made and where people can get shelter from radiation.
With no ocean and barely any atmosphere the damage would also be much more localized.
Most of the damage from the Chelyabinsk meteor was caused by the shock wave as it exploded high in the atmosphere:
It doesn't.
Reading the article I think the author tries to figure why this requirement cannot be dropped and gets no rational answer.
2) even if it does, the point of GP's counterargument is not "if you want to colonize a hostile environment we have those here on earth" it's "your goal is extremely far outside of our current technological capabilities. We can't even colonize hostile environments in our own backyard."
The main reason cited is usually one of species resilience. “Not Earth” is an arbitrary requirement bolted on.
The main risk is that of an extinction-level event, such as large meteor impacts, substantial tectonic activity, or a worldwide nuclear disaster.
All of those would likely have minimal impact on an autonomous underground city with a complete, mostly hermetic air filtering system, with three redundant power sources (say, nuclear, solar, and geothermal). That would also be substantially easier to build than a >1K self-sustaining Martian base.
That’s because there are places on Earth that similarly better than e.g. Antarctica or some desert.
The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.