Going to {the Middle East, Europe / Asia, Australia, the New World, interior South America, the North American West) seems pretty useless to me at this time. It’s a super hostile environment and we don’t have the technology yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades and progress in {insert technology} will make a base much easier. There is plenty of work to be done on {current place}. We have to solve {current problems}. These are massive technological challenges that deserve massive funding.
... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in all that time, they've only ever been right about Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
Only one technology matters: that which enables transportation.
Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a chance on a better life?
You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica.
Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that.
It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs), raw materials that aren't locally available (which means almost all of them), and habitable structures.
At the end of that epic effort you'll have something that will barely have a toe-hold on long-term survivability. Possibly. If you're lucky.
Not only is Mars far colder, it also doesn't have air. Or surface water. So all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder.
And it's much much further away.
Rhetoric and wishful thinking are not going to give you a better life if you can't deal with the reality of the challenges.
At the end of the day, profit determines reality. And that's where futurists have always screwed up, because profit funds solutions.
Nobody has colonized Antarctica not because it's impossible, but because it's difficult enough and useless enough that we all agreed on a treaty prohibiting it.
In contrast, we constructed the 63 radars (some with bases) of the DEW line in the late 1950s in under 3 years, with part of the Air Force's budget. Because it was useful.
Establishing a Mars colony is not impossible, it's just extremely hard. Which means expensive. Which means it needs a justification. Which is what I think the knee-jerk is really about.
And is a fair opinion. You may think interplanetary colonization should not be a priority. I think it should.
Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported.
> nuclear reactors
Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars.
> nuclear and other fuels
The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long time.
> machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs)
Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality but you know what they do it anyways because some things are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what they could create from local resources or do without. They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or Antarctica with a single expedition.
> raw materials
Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate sources here because they are too labour or energetically or materially expensive but when they are your only option price and effort become less of a concern.
> all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder
No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.
> Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives.
Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer).
I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"
"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first."
I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism.
I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
Big picture, I think all this pushing to make everything perfect for every person on the entire planet Earth before expanding to space is a TERRIBLE strategy
Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means".
There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this".
Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
Maybe I'm optimistic, but these are just problems to be solved. Space exploration is a big risk / big reward investment. Yes it would require a comparatively huge investment to mine an asteroid vs. open a pit mine in Brazil but "mining" an asteroid likely means carving off hunks of solid metal for transit back to the Earth's surface rather than processing megatons of rock by blasting, trucking, and smelting. Like many things about space, it boggles the mind that a single asteroid mining mission could produce more platinum group metals than have ever been mined on Earth throughout human history. How does the total amount of money and resources spent on mining those metals on Earth stack up against the cost of a single successful asteroid mining operation?
I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.
They are certainly easier, but how useful are they? A base on Mars will bring down the fuel requirements to exploring and exploiting the belt and outer planets tremendously. Missions that are impossible or uneconomical to do from Earth could be made possible and cheap if launched from Mars.
You need some way to make fuel and propellant, though. Phobos would be a great choice for a launchpad, but in such a scenario you would do ISRU on Mars and lift fuel and propellant there - which will be much more efficient than on Earth, since there's less gravity and less atmosphere.
Any fuel you could generate on Mars would be overwhelmingly easier and cheaper to ship in from Earth; and you wouldn't need to land a million tons of freight on Mars first. A million tons of fuel delivered to LEO would take you quite a long way, and you could start immediately.
If you want to go somewhere beyond Mars, stopping there and then starting again just sets you back. (Same goes for the moon, or lunar orbit.) "Stepping stones" have strongly negative value in space transport.
A million tons of fuel doesn't cut the delta v requirements down. You'd have to ship the required fuel to Mars orbit (or wherever you plan on doing refuelling) still.
If you need to refuel, send the fuel where it would be useful to get home with, i.e. where you are really going. Dumping it at Mars does no good. You would then have to stop at Mars to collect it.
That's assuming you have enough fuel to reach those destinations from Earth, let alone make it from Earth to there with enough payload for a return voyage.
I see you are finding this very hard. Try to think it through:
If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
If you will need extra fuel to get home with, sending it to Mars is completely useless, because where you need it to be is not at Mars, but at the place where you will be at the time when you need it. That place is not Mars.
Is this really so difficult? Stop, breathe, and think.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This simply isn't true. From Mars to Jupiter is a little over 6 km/s of delta-v. From Earth to Jupiter is almost 9. The latter is just barely possible with SpaceX's Starship. The former allows for not only some breathing room, but more payload.
If you will need more delta-V than you have on-board tankage for, sending another ship at the same time and acceleration, and refueling from it on the way, is overwhelmingly better than launching literally dozens of ships to get even more fuel parked at Mars, and then spending extra fuel stopping there to pick it up, and more again to get moving again.
If your true goal is to have crap on and in orbit around Mars, do that without pretending it has any other value. You don't fool anybody, but you make people wonder about you.
Or, hear me out, you get the available infrastructure set up on the surface of Mars to manufacture fuel and propellant, and then you can send a single ship from Mars to Jupiter. And, if you can bring payload, you can set up the infrastructure to do ISRU from one of the moons of Jupiter, and eventually bring your ships back with samples.
Versus, cannibalising several extremely expensive ships in order to get one ship to a destination it's never coming back from.
And this is just one example. The lower delta-v from Mars would allow extra payload to the belt, so if anyone ever intend to exploit those resources, starting from Mars will allow them to get heavy equipment there in less time and fewer trips (provided, of course, that they can manufacture that equipment on Mars).
You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars, while I do meaningful stuff at places that are not a waste of time and effort. By the time you are ready to supply fuel FOB at Mars, I have sent a million tons to places worth sending it to, instead.
Maybe my million tons of freight includes a liquid methane sump on Titan, where I don't even need to synthesize, never mind liquify the stuff; it is sloshing around in puddles everywhere. There is an interior liquid water ocean, and ice lava flows.
Seriously, if you need more delta-V for a Jupiter or Saturn trip than spaceship design A gives you, you are much better off making a spaceship design B with enough tankage to make the trip. (Maybe B is just A with an extra tank strapped on; or, a tug boosts A to escape velocity and then loops around Luna and back, aerobraking to LEO.) Park fuel depots at both low and high Earth orbits; you waste nothing by using those, unlike anything parked foolishly at Luna or Mars.
Luna, anyway, has stuff that is worth visiting, like craters in permanent shade at the south pole, and lava tubes where vapors have maybe drifted in and froze for hundreds of millions of years. Mars is the armpit of the Solar System.
You seem pretty contentious here; I'm just making a case that Mars makes sense as a destination, not trying to convince you that this is something you need to pay for. IMO, the numbers work out for it being a hub for traffic to the belt and outer planets. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. Again, I'm not asking you, personally, to start backing this. Just stop spouting off nonsense like 'if you can't get somewhere from Earth, you can't get there from Mars'. It's a matter of fact that delta v requirements from Mars are lower than they are from Earth, and this would have been obvious if you had thought just for a second about any of this.
> You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars
The equipment for generating the electricity to perform ISRU on Mars is supposedly within the payload capabilities of a single Starship, 100-150 tons, not a million, and this should be enough for a ton per day, enough to resupply in the 26 month launch window. The equipment for collecting water and CO2 is another matter, and I don't see estimates on that, but with the above and some engineering margin, it seems plausible that this operation can get off the ground in under ten ship-trips to Mars.
I have said nothing even vaguely like that, and cannot guess where you got it from. But it is a simple fact that:
Any trip to the outer Solar System that stops at Mars is, energetically, much more costly that one which does not stop at Mars.
In addition, getting stuff to Mars is itself a huge expense that completely swamps any imagined benefit of extracting fuel and launching it to stop by for.
If you want to go to Mars, go without promoting obvious falsehoods about any value it has as a transport hub. It has none. Period.
If, to make sense, your Mars story needs for Mars to be a useful transport hub, then it fails, and you need a different story.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This is as asinine as saying, if you can't get somewhere without a stop at the gas station, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at the gas station. Stopping at the gas station costs extra.
After all, it costs fuel to take an exit on the freeway and go to the gas station. It costs fuel to leave and go back on the freeway. It costs extra! Energetically, any trip where you have to make a detour to a gas station, costs more than a trip where you don't make a stop there.
Not must be. Is probably achievable, and is worth attempting, even at the cost of lives.
You can argue from either the perspective of futility of attempt (no chance of success) or futility of outcome (success wouldn't be worth it), but I'm pretty convinced both would be weak arguments, both logically and historically.
I'm probably an optimist on Mars travel. I think, with a fuck ton of starships, you could get people living on Mars. But there's some big asterisks on that. You'd more or less have to live in the starships, dependent on shipments from earth, with self sufficiency failing on pretty much every category. Over a very long period, most people would probably die a bit earlier from radiation and dust. Not much would be produced of value. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. And interest in it would rapidly decline.
The suspicion I have about self sufficiency pessimism is that it's an apples to oranges comparison. Are there any modern analogies? As near as I can tell, it hasn't been required after the 16th century, due to access to relatively timely transportation.
And if it hasn't been required, then how are we to look at existing practice and say we're bad at or incapable of it?
There is no survival advantage to us on Mars. What are we all arguing about? This site is staring to feel a bit unhinged when it comes colonizing the solar system. Like SGC Ori unhinged.
The fact that random groups people from the Old World decided to start colonies without any prior experience or preparation precisely shows that they didn't consider America to be "super-hostile".
... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in all that time, they've only ever been right about Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
Only one technology matters: that which enables transportation.
Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a chance on a better life?