But if the point was to start a long-term colony on mars then it would make sense to first send people that would not expect to come back. Robots are cool, but I’m guessing that us humans with our arms and fingers will be able to do general tasks better than robots will for a long while. Humans have ability to fix things, reach things, and to improvise which robots generally lack. Construction or factories on mars will require people on the ground managing those projects.
There would also be a scientific benefit understanding how people age and how long-term social relations can last on mars.
This is an area of research that has been explored extensively around earth already. In anticipation of the “real thing”.
Many cultures have a concept of sanctity of the grave, or right of sepulchre. From that point of view, what happens to the Mars habitat where those people died? Does it become a mausoleum forever? Anything else seems very fraught.
It would be a bizarre spectacle to send another trillion-dollar crew whose first task is to clear out the corpses...
But I expect that either civilization would be able to resupply them with people or even connect them back eventually, or alternatively (if we do decline) too much stuff would be happening on Earth for people to really notice the fate of Martians.
But then, if we can send automatons that are able to operate a station to such a high degree that they could be trusted to cremate the humans, why send the humans at all...?
We will do whatever we did the last time we explored a new frontier. How many European colonies failed in the new world? What did they do?
Nothing new under the sun.
- Sailing to New England didn’t cost a trillion dollars.
- The expedition wasn’t live-streamed to every pocket back in England.
- People didn’t know what could be found in America. There was a sense of adventure. In contrast, we know what’s on Mars and the answer is basically “nothing”.
History is full of people selling everything and taking a one way trip into a new frontier.
Not a lot. People actually paid to move there because it resulted in a significant improvement in living conditions/income/etc. on average (besides the few earliest attempts). Colonization and exploration was almost entirely driven by profit union at least the 1800s or so.
Colonizing Mars wouldn’t be even remotely comparable in almost any way to what happened in the Americas/Australia/etc.
> selling everything and taking a one way trip into a new frontier.
Yeah, because there was a lot of free land there/natural resources/high demand for labor etc.
To be fair they kind of did. Or rather they never expected to finding anything extremely different to what they have experienced in Europe (besides very low population density and all the benefits resulting from that).
In at least one case the failure of the colony resulted in the country which founded it being forced into a slightly one-sided merger with its nearest neighbour, which is why the British flag now has blue in it.
Modern nations may be mindful of this and wish to avoid repeating the mistake. On the other hand, they may have a case of the FOMOs after looking at how successful the USA became… at least if they convince themselves their new space colony won't also declare independence just like the USA did.
Considering that colonies on Mars are extremely unlikely to ever be self-sustainable that’s hardly a concern (in fact the opposite might be preferable).
Comparing the US (or any country or place that’s inhabited on Earth, besides maybe Antarctica but even that is not even remotely close) to a potential colony on Mars is beyond absurd.
"The ability to colonise Mars does not currently exist" is true, but tells us next to nothing about what will be possible if we put effort into the attempt, just as the fact that the ability to achieve the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" did not exist on May 25, 1961, but the attempt taught us many things including that (and how) we could.
Likewise for colonies, when Columbus set sail everyone knew the world was round, and almost everyone even knew how big it was (except, ironically, Columbus). What nobody knew was that America existed, and if America had not existed then none of the ships that existed at that time could make it all the way to where Columbus thought he was going.
It's the unknowns that hold us back from Mars, but at the moment the only reasons I have to suspect a Mars colony would fail are the black swans, not the problems currently being worked on.
Why don’t you move to Antarctica? We have the technology that would allow use to settle millions of people there. We don’t, because it’s cold, there is nothing to do there and there much nicer places to live further north. In the case for Mars multiply all of that including the cost by (idk) 1000? 10000 times?
> Likewise for colonies
I don’t see the analogy here at all. Yes Columbus took a risk, he did that because he and his investor expected to make a lot of money just like the Portuguese going around Africa did. How is that relevant?
Europeans colonized America because it was green, warm, full of resources and otherwise about as nice as Europe (just with a lot less people due to various reason). OTH nobody colonized Antarctica or the northern half of Greenland etc. due to obvious reasons..
I do however expect that there's enough psychological draw from "the final frontier" to get a million people spending $100k USD for the trip. Can he get that cheap? No idea.
> I don’t see the analogy here at all. Yes Columbus took a risk, he did that because he and his investor expected to make a lot of money just like the Portuguese going around Africa did. How is that relevant?
Because what he was actually aiming for wasn't possible, he just got lucky there was a (just about possible) alternative that he happened to find purely by coincidence.
What I'm expecting, is that we get von Neumann replicators before a Mars colony reaches the current population of Greenland (56k), let alone a million, and also that a lot of people will prefer the Moon instead (the ways in which the Moon is harder are not ones I expect to be important compared to the difficulty of either). But I also expect that some random thing which gets invented specifically as a result of the attempt to colonise Mars to prove really useful in some impossible to predict way.
How is that relevant at all? The only thing that comes close to mars are mostly self-sustainable colonies (not a thing) in Antarctica (which is still a more habitable place than Mars by several magnitudes).
> we did the last time we explored a new frontier
Because the cost was relatively extremely low and there were practical reasons to do that?
Compared to Earth, Mars has no atmosphere. (100k pascals vs 600 pascals.)
Mars has no magnetic field.
Mars has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth. We know low gravity has deleterious health effects.
Anybody who lived on Mars would have to live inside a pressurized building at all times. Stepping outside would be lethal. If we're able to to build sustainable colonies in these conditions then we might as well focus on colonizing the Moon first. There would be nothing special about Mars, we might as well just live in space habitats. If there is a future of Martian colonization it involves extensive genetic engineering and massive terraforming projects we can only dream of now.
We all watched Star [Trek|Wars] growing up, I get it. Mars is not a viable colonization project. The best you could ever hope for would be, at tremendous expense, an Antarctic-style research station.
And in any case if the only purpose of sending humans to Mars is to prove that we can, why go the easiest and most unethical route?
Being the first human to set foot on Mars stands out as one task it couldn't complete.
Something that nobody should be allowed to even try to do in the foreseeable future even id that person managed to get enough resources for that.
Eg. If you scale out to a 10,000 year timeframe and this is step 1 leading to a self-sufficient backup for Earth, then one day some event seriously threatened to take out our home planet, suddenly the ~whole population would feel the expense was worth it whatever the magnitude.
> If you scale out to a 10,000 year timeframe
AFAIK there were no events at last several hundred million years that had a realistic chance of making the Earth less habitable that Mars. So unless we had a ways to cheaply transport millions of people to Mars (maybe space station or the moon would be a better option though?) focusing on building infrastructure that would allow us to minimize the impact of meteorites or massive volcanic eruptions as much as possible.
> Human history is full of people who have done exactly this.
Are there any self-sustainable colonies in Antarctica (which is more habitable than Mars by at least several magnitudes)? So not humans have never done anything even remotely close to what colonizing Mars would require.
People have said the same of many great endeavours, and it is often hard to predict all everything that results from tackling big challenges.
I suspect that there is likely nothing anyone could suggest would succeed in shifting you position.
Usually due to practical or religious (so practical from the perspective of the people doing them) reasons
> I suspect that there is likely nothing anyone could suggest would succeed in shifting you position.
I’m not sure about that. A rational and well thought out argument might do that.
What would be the point, though? Besides live streaming someone slowly dying from radiation poisoning?
It’s not like a human can really do anything that a sufficiently complex robot wouldn’t be able to. Also I always assumed that the whole point of going there (or to the moon for that matter) was to show that we can successfully get humans there and back rather than anything else.