The billionaires talk about "saving humanity" or "making a lifeboat" but when they get questioned, they maneuver the discussion to the motte: "there is no planet B" (or the equivalent). Then, when the attention is elsewhere, back to fantasies of Mars.
In our lifetimes I could picture basically McMurdo station on the Moon and some flights back and forth to Mars. I could picture a mostly autonomous settlement somewhere in 100 years.
This comment is a straw man. The author gave a link to what the "planning" entailed: https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-p...
"‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he [Musk] said."
>> This is a straw man.
>> This comment is a straw man.
There isn't, but there should be, an HN guideline against throwing formal fallacies at each other instead of just saying what one disagrees with.
Beep boop.
The article is written for people, not academia. Ask laypeople about Mars and you’ll get a representative insight into the Mars fantasy.
Artificial magnetic fields are easy. Sometimes we do them when we don't want them.
Carbon is 1/3rd of the atmosphere (such as it is) by mass. Conveniently in solid form near the poles during Martian winter.
I'm not sure it has nitrogen in any significant quantities, though…
And the only sane way to do this is ISRU, so we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well for the structural mass.
This is the straw-man I was complaining about.
Here's a direct quote from Musk, saying the exact opposite ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1329205209915154433 )
"Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime."
> or at least put a million people there
That's an incredibly different question (see the sibling comment about Motte and Bailey fallacies).
A million people on Mars seems plausible, if we take "soon" to mean a century or two (Musk seems to have an incredibly optimisitic goal of 2050, but that still seems the right order of magnitude)
I hope we'll converge on manufacturing infrastructure that depends on a somewhat constrained set of inputs. Not because we're designing for Mars, but because that's just good fault-tolerant design.
Like maybe the plans call for steel but al that we have on hand is brass, and it's ok if this one is weaker, so we'll print it in brass: improvising to avoid logistic complexity.
Turns out, that's what you'd need for mars too. You can't be ordering part numbers manufactured on earth all the time. Wherever possible you're probably better off just importing tungsten (or whatever) and machining it local.
I think this sort of periodic-table-of-manufacturing approach would also be necessary to make recycling work. Whatever we call recycling today, it's nothing compared to what we'll need on Mars.
I think the only way that trips to the moon or mars that will earn money is space tourism. I don't believe Mars will have any valuable resources, for example. Or even discovering them will require an improbable amount of investments (trillions).
The last reason I can think of is political; the first major force to have a permanent presence on these bodies will have a big say in the future of said body.
It's not about discovering new materials, or technologies, or physical phenomena.
It's about exploring new social contracts. Here on Earth we are stuck with whatever social arrangements we've developed over the millennia, we can tweak here and there, but we can't start with a blank slate.
For me this would be the grand prize: figuring out better ways for people to live together.
This is a nice idea if the frontier is accessible by foot, horse, or boat.
If the frontier is accessible only via corporate-owned spaceship, then the frontier will inevitably be a corporate-owned dictatorship.
The (hypothetical) colonists would develop loyalty to their own silly, strictly hierarchical government that was imposed on them. (For some strange reason, many Americans still have loyalty to a 200 year old document. And others have loyalty to 2000 year old documents.) As usual, some people will benefit greatly from the hierarchy and fight to the death to preserve it. Some other people might fight to the death to overthrow it. Perhaps they'll have a civil war, which likely won't end well for anyone, given that survival on Mars would be tenuous in the very best of circumstances.
Note that "terrorism" on Mars could be an extinction-level event for colonists.
Not to mention, if the Mars colonists get uppity, then Earth can send a fleet of warships to put down the rebellion. Hell, Earth could just launch unmanned missile strikes at Mars. Wipe the slate clean and start over.
If things eventually do escalate to interplanetary warfare, Mars has the significant advantage of having a much shallower gravity well. It's much cheaper for them to send missiles to Earth than vice versa, so perhaps the MAD threat will be enough to keep them safe.
Have you seen [gestures broadly] the world? People are people regardless of where you put them. There's no reason to believe that Mars will magically become a political paradise, simply because it's a long distance away from here.
> Mars has the significant advantage of having a much shallower gravity well.
But vastly fewer people, vastly smaller manufacturing base, and vastly more difficult living conditions.
Obviously it won't be a paradise. But the natural environment will select for hard-working individuals with grit, determination, and community spirit.
What do you mean by this?
Natural selection AKA "survival of the fittest" only works over the course of thousands or millions of years. Otherwise, Mars would be pretty much stuck with whatever people it (hypothetically) had. Especially if you're talking about a colony that decides to make itself independent of Earth.
On Earth, we can be selective of who we would (hypothetically) send to Mars. But wouldn't we select loyalists to ourselves? Unless... we make Mars a penal colony. ;-)
Also, "community spirit" can mean obedience to the strict existing hierarchy, for the preservation of the community.
The initial group of settlers will self-select themselves; not many of us are willing to live in such harsh conditions.
Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to develop grit and cooperative spirit, and they will see first-hand how it is necessary just to survive.
Alternatively, they may grow up dispirited and disillusioned, because they had no choice in the matter. Maybe they'll want to leave Mars and go to Earth. Or maybe they'll just be pissed off and lazy, wanting to watch the world burn, so to speak.
If you want to keep the kids in line, you'd better have a totalitarian government that restricts their access to information, to prevent them from discovering that life on Earth is so much better than their own miserable lives.
"Mommy, I want to go outside and play!" "Sorry honey, but outside will kill you. Now eat your manufactured nutrient packs and drink your recycled urine."
(As is the case here. We're in the middle of "let's tear down Elon Musk" phase right now, so the strawmen are getting impressively absurd.)
Yes, it's even worse than that.
Environmental types want to keep Earth habitable for humans, because Mars as a plan B is infeasible.
> "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!"
So yeah, it's not really that we'll save humanity by moving it to Mars. It's that some people will go to Mars and the rest of us can die out here.
If the alternative is that no-one goes to Mars and everybody dies, I'm OK with only some people going there.
There are a lot of possible catastrophes that can wipe us out from Earth, and not all of them are preventable or due to mankind.
Starting to move towards a direction were we at least have a temporary alternative, even if the alternative is much worse than Earth, and cannot sustain everyone, seems like a basic goal.
Having a plan B does not mean that plan A is not the preferred solution.
Both are hard, yet quick and high visibility wins may be easier with Mars.
"Look humans set foot on it!" (After X failed attempts and even the arrivals died soon after.)
"Mars now has a habitat module!" (Vulnerable to radiation and completely dependent on shipments from Earth.)
"Move to Mars" sounds the opposite of easy.
In fact if you are so worried about going the way of dinosaurs you must support establishment of a colony, because the industry developed for that will be the best way to change the path of an asteroid flying to earth.
I mean, have you been on HN for long?
Of course maybe I just dismiss clueless comments so rapidly that I don't register them.
I have heard people say we could put a settlement on the Moon or Mars, which is possible.
> Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
The top of that article says, "Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future."
So the author is giving the exact explanation of what it means "to move humanity to Mars". It's a straw man to suggest that the article author intended it to mean "everyone on earth".
Having a tiny fraction of humanity on a different world, which is entirely dependent on shipments from home for the foreseeable future, is an irrelevance to the problems we're facing on Earth.
> Moreover, the whole justification for colonizing Mars is supposed to be if a disaster struck Earth. So in a sense you have moved all of humanity to Mars if humans on Earth go extinct.
Sure, but those disasters are entirely unrelated to any of the problems we're facing right now. Nobody is claiming Mars is a refuge from, say, man-made climate change. It could be a refuge from, say, a gamma-ray burst crossing Earth's orbit in half a million years.
I agree. Which is why I think the fanciful idea of a Mars colony is nothing more than a hand-wavy distraction at this point, designed to propagandize a billionaire's other projects to gullible sci-fi enthusiasts.
I would claim not - at least some of the biggest problems that we need to solve to create a self-sustaining colony in a harsh environment don't actually need us to be on Mars - there are significant problems we can first address right here on Earth. This is significant because unless and until we can solve these problems, there is no reason to try to establish a base on Mars.
As a first step, to prove Mars is liveable. As far as I can recall, he believes that we must be a multi-planetary species to survive which means Earth is destined to die.
Space is absolutely a “earth is doomed, we must leave” fantasy for Musk and his acolytes.
I don't read it as "destined to die", just that there is a non-trivial chance.
Mars… I want to be excited, but the more I think about it (and, bluntly, the more bad decisions Musk makes), the less I like the idea.
That said, Mars is sufficiently difficult in all the right ways that if we can make a self-sustaining colony there, the only way life on Earth will end is some kind of self-replicating swarm, either in the sense of an engineered pandemic (specifically an engineered one: a merely natural one we can probably defeat just like COVID) or a more sci-fi von Neumann swarm.
Mars has half our sunlight, it is colder than Antarctica, dryer than the Sahara, the air is thinner than the top of Everest, the soil is toxic, and we'd have to make any hydrocarbons from the air itself rather than digging them up.
Make a Mars colony work despite all of that, we'd easily survive a repeat of the asteroid-ending impact or nuclear winter here on Earth.
Yes; in several billion years, e.g. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482552643343904770
"There is a [100%] chance of all species extinction due to expansion of the sun, unless humanity makes life multiplanetary"
Do you disagree with this assessment? Either way, it is irrelevant to the claim that "billionaires [are] planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future"
You just invented the "several billion years" part. I absolutely, unequivocally believe the premise of the article we're discussing, that space-loving billionaires (like Elon Musk) and their acolytes believe that the earth is doomed to failure in the short term and that the only way for humanity to survive is to become multi-planetary. If you think Elon Musk is operating on several billion year time horizons, I have a spaceship to sell you.
Belta lowda!
As far as I'm aware, no billionaire has ever said anything about "moving humanity" to Mars or anywhere else; except to dismiss such claims as nonsense. Nobody is "planning" such a thing; let alone for "the near future".
Musk wants there to be a colony on Mars in the near future.
Bezos wants heavy manufacturing in orbit, or in-situ in the asteroid belt.