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.
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.