> Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.
What we have on Antarctica is an outpost, not a colony. It's made up of habitats, not homes. It has virtually no local industry, and cannot support itself. The only way it could endure for longer than its food reserves is by fishing, which is obviously not an option on Mars.
We haven't even solved the easy case where water and oxygen are available in unlimited quantities, let alone the much harder scenario of space or another planet.
No. It's because it's not economically worthwhile yet to do anything significant in Antarctica given the costs of doing something. Treaties will get renegotiated if there is enough economic value and in any case, treaties need to have millitary might ultimately to get enforced. The Budapest treaties never got enforced as an example and that's why we are where we are in Ukraine
I'm fairly certain there would be major mining, commercial fishing, and oil drilling operations in Antarctica today it weren't for the Antarctic Treaty. (Also, wars.) It's a geopolitical accident that everything worked out so well with the treaty. I doubt it will hold forever.
Perhaps you're forgetting that the initial detailed resource assessment (exploratory drilling etc.) is also prohibited, which stops investment from getting a foothold.
(I spent a lot of time down there)
Edit: thinking a bit more... Why do you say the treaty isn't enforced? I've been under federal investigation for what some people thought was a violation of the Antarctic Conservation Act (US law enforcing the treaty). I don't think anyone has ever been charged under that law so you could be right, but I was scared and I assure you people take the ACA seriously.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Yes indeed the treaties prevent "privateer" operations. They don't prevent major nation state level economic operations backed by millitary force it one decides it needs the resources. You can see some of this playing out in Ukraine, South China Sea etc. This is even true for large scale private organisations Vs smaller countries though setting aside Antarctic treaty will require more millitary might - see squid fishing off Chile or drug cartel control of central America as examples.
Your argument seems to be "treaties between nations are violated whenever it becomes expedient." This might be true in some cases, but I think a the Antarctic Treaty is a great counterexample.
Do you know about the overlapping territorial wedge claims in Antarctica and how they were suspended by the treaty? If not I think you would find it quite interesting.
While it looks like there are resources (oil, gas and coal being mentioned) it does not seem they have been mined before the current treaty cam into effect, most likely due to the 19/early 20 century technology.
But there certainly were substantial whaling stations in Antarctica for a while, with quite a lot of people & much more primitive technology compared to what we have now.
The Budapest Memorandum was specifically not a treaty. The US and UK did enforce the terms as written by raising Russia's invasion as an issue in the UN Security Council. The memorandum didn't require them to do anything more.
Given that there's laws and international treaties forbidding mining, resource extraction or resource exploration, of course it's not economically worthwhile.
The northernmost part of Canada is Ellesmere Island. Which is almost as large as Great Britain. There is no "you may not settle here" international treaty.
Wikipedia gives the entire island's population as 144 - all of them at a military base. [Edit: Vs. a population of ~61 million for Great Britain.]
Actual daily life in the high arctic/antarctic is nowhere near so desirable as many people want to believe.
I don't think that's true. What is the alleged treaty called? The Antarctic Treaty binds the contracting states to prohibit individuals from doing various things in Antarctica, the Outer Space Treaty doesn't really do that, and arguably does the opposite by prohibiting territorial claims. Regardless, I don't think any treaty should be taken very seriously. They will both be violated whenever it's expedient to violate them.
That's true, but it's defined (and kept up to date) in practice by COSPAR, who have a pretty elaborate set of definitions in place for Mars in particular.
COSPAR is (officially speaking) a private body, and as such their Planetary Protection Policy is not legally binding. They propose their policy as an interpretation of Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, but as a private body they lack the legal authority to make binding interpretations of an international treaty. The standard approach in international law would be to look at the intentions and understanding of the States Parties at the time the Treaty was originally concluded in order to interpret it - which would likely support a far weaker understanding of “harmful contamination” than what COSPAR proposes.
The rules for Mars aren't based in the treaty but instead on "planetary protection" an abstract policy coming from no law other than forms of regressive environmentalism that tries to limit contamination so that it's easier to find potential microbes. It's already actively harming site selection for Mars exploration by preventing sending of rovers that might discover life to actual areas that might have life.
To save the possibility of finding life we are preventing ourselves from finding life.
The treaty doesn't prevent Mars settlement. It just prevents claiming of territory. Antarctic treaty is actually significantly stricter than the outer space treaty in many ways.
By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
> Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
Ridiculous, given that flight is entirely about swimming through the air, while space rocketry is mostly about how to get through and out of the atmosphere ASAP.
(Not to mention, rocketry as a field was already making better progress than flight back then.)
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
This is how we've always been learning, though. Even Leonardo and other early pioneers of flight constantly attempted things impossible at their level. It's those attempts that led to progress - the theory and methods to solve such problems on paper came about only in the century.
Incidentally, it also turned out that studying bird flight was a waste of time - bird flight is too complicated for us to replicate even these days, and we mostly don't bother, because simpler systems yield better results for the kind of needs we have now.
We already know all the basics about agriculture for example. Hardly any of the problems we need to solve to do agriculture in Antarctica are the same as the problems we need to solve to do it in Mars. The soil medium is different, the processing needed to make it useful for agriculture is different, the light levels are different, the atmospheric environment is different.
Ultimately Antarctica is so similar to, say, a mountaintop in the USA, or even a lab in a US city compared to Mars that I dont really see the added value. The unknown problems we will face on Mars are there on Mars, not here.
Will a city on Mars ever be viable, let alone self sufficient? I have my doubts, but there’s only one way to find out.
Now try growing grain indoor with lights instead of just lettuce with no caloric value for multiple years with no outside input. And also balancing crop carbon needs against human breathing needs in a closed capsule without having something like mold or algae or other bacteria from throwing everything off balance because you lack 99.99% of the ecological diversity of anywhere on Earth. Or having access to fossil-fueled derived fertilizers which takes massive amounts of energy to produce without natural gas.
It sure as hell doesn't make sense to ship fertilizer from the surface of the Earth to Mars, or water, or really anything other than handfuls of extremely specialized equipment like computer chips or extremely difficult to obtain or rare chemicals or elements. You are going to need sustainability of all your basic resources for years, if not decades, before you ever have a chance of assaying and mining and processing such materials for yourself.
How much enriched nuclear material can we really send up in a rocket at a time in order to fuel the massive energy requirements of such a colony? We sure as hell don't want to send up multiple tons of enriched material at a time in a rocket to potentially fail during launch, and we would need that much energy to build any sort of functioning industry on Mars so it is anything more than a glorified emergency bunker where we send people to die.
Knowing the basics is still far removed from demonstrating self-sufficient capability at civilizational time scales. How many successful, isolated biodome projects are there? My understanding is that every one so far has failed. Theory ain't practice.
Of course, my point is that Antarctica is insufficiently different from e.g. Boston to make any difference to any research we might perform on earth. Meanwhile there will be conditions on Mars we can’t anticipate or fully simulate anywhere on earth. We need to do both.
> That is, attempting something that is impossible given your current level of engineering is not likely to produce any useful results.
Engineering advances fundamentally by trying to do things you haven't done before. If you already know how to do it, you higher a technician and hand him the instructions. (Many software developers for example are closer to trades people/technicians than actual engineers.)
>By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about flight from trying to build a rocket to the Moon than from trying to build a glider or studying bird flight.
By this argument, Leonardo would have learned a lot more about cultivating apples by cultivating oranges.
I think this whole argument boils down to "people need to be inspired to do something great". Settling Antarctica isn't as inspiring as colonizing Mars.
But in my estimation, colonizing Mars would run out of steam really quickly. Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring. There isn't that much geological diversity, and there's no life. You wouldn't want to take a vacation there. I know there's going to be a lot of people here who are going to say "No! Mars is really cool!" The people here aren't normal. Living in a cave underground without being able to go outside and see the sun or take a walk is a nightmare for most people.
Landing on Mars could inspire lots of people. But once it's done, its mystique is just going to wear off. People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
The "Terra Ignota" series really gets into this question in a way that finally broke me out of what I agree to be a sort of "faith" in the Idea of Mars. For me, Mars has always been an obvious target for the reasons discussed here re: inspiration, but also because I feel terror at the idea of all of our species on one planet with no backup.
In Terra Ignota, there's a "nation" (the novel has a radically different concept of sovereign states an nationhood than our world today) composed of people who many here I think would identify with: they take a vow both of productivity and leisure so as to maximize their potential ability to contribute to the betterment of the human race, and their national obsession is the eventual (500 year timeline) colonization of Mars.
(spoilers)
A critical ideological revelation in the novel is that despite the fact that basically the entire nation is obsessed with the eventual colonization of Mars (they send their bodily remains there so as to increase the organic biomass), when push came to shove for the idea of actually putting people on the planet, it was realized by many in the nation that they don't actually want to abandon all of humanity on Earth for a life sentence of scrabbling out a hard life on Mars. Not because they don't want to put in the work, they are arguably the hardest working society in the series, but more like, it would just separate them for the remainder of their lives from all of humanity, and they have to acknowledge to themselves that they don't want that.
As cool as you can make Mars with improving colonization technologies,I think that for a ticket to Mars to be economical from a labor, safety, equipment, and resources standpoint, it has to be one way. It has to be you telling yourself that you will die on Mars, away from all of humanity but the smallest slice. I think that's a pill too bitter to swallow.
And what a fate to impose on your children. You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter, and those future children would be essential to a permanent colony.
Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Mars (if that's even medically viable) decide that Mars totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Earth?
Do we build a wall around Earth and stop them as "illegal aliens"?
Seriously, life on Earth is likely to be much better, much easier than life on Mars, so there's going to be a desire among a significant number of Martians to leave, just as there's a desire among Earthlings to move for a better life. Then what? In order to keep the Mars colony sufficiently "staffed", do you turn it into a totalitarian regime, where nobody can leave? No personal freedom?
How many of us want to sacrifice our lives and our happiness just to be a "backup plan"?
I rarely if ever hear space enthusiasts talk about the morality of a Mars colony. They act like it's just a technological problem, and it's somehow a given that we can put large numbers of humans wherever we want, whether or not the humans themselves would want that.
> Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Mars (if that's even medically viable) decide that Mars totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Earth?
This is essentially the plot of Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (albeit on a generation ship heading mission to another solar system(
Moral dilemma: What if children conceived and born on Earth decide that Earth totally sucks, and they want to migrate to Mars?
Do we build a wall around Mars and tell them their shitty life on earth is all they get, and they should be happy with antarctica?
I think your moral argument can easily be flipped, why do you get to decide that we shouldnt do something because there exist people who dont want to do it? What of the the people who do?
> Do we build a wall around Mars and tell them their shitty life on earth is all they get, and they should be happy with antarctica?
I'm not personally in favor of the "colonize Antarctica" approach. It's true that if we can't figure out how to colonize someplace like Antarctica first, then it's unlikely we'd be successful on Mars, but I'm not advocating the colonization of Mars anyway.
> If you dont want to go, then dont go...
This completely ignores what I said, which was "You personally may choose the hardest road, but your unborn children would have no choice in the matter".
> I guess i see children having to deal with choices their parents made a part of life.
Most responsible parents strive to make the lives of their children better rather than worse. Not always successfully of course, but it's the goal, and going to Mars is predictably worse.
> Would the offer of a trip back to earth for any child born on mars go any way to overcoming your concerns?
It might allay the moral dilemma, but it would increase the concerns about the long-term viability of the colony.
Would you also say "shame on you" to anyone who procreates in a country with a lower standard of living than the wealthier countries on this planet? After all, aren't those parents subjecting their children to a life with more hazards / less opportunities?
Only very few places on Earth are truly that shitty that I would doubt people's sanity for raising children there. Active war zones and areas affected by climate change for example, and to no one's surprise people risk their lives to escape from those. Even in a refugee camp, their children would still lead a life that is magnitudes easier and more pleasurable than on a Mars colony.
> Would you also say "shame on you" to anyone who procreates in a country with a lower standard of living than the wealthier countries on this planet?
I would not hesitate to do so to any parents that leave a perfectly functional society to raise children as subsistence farmers in an smog-choked, irradiated, arid clime. Opting to raise your children under worse conditions than those one grew up under, and has access to is despicable and selfish.
> I feel terror at the idea of all of our species on one planet with no backup.
While I would like to live out the rest of my life as best as I could, and I hope everyone alive and not yet alive gets that chance too, I don't think it would be that great a tragedy if humankind no longer existed. Imagine a world where everyone is hooked up to a simulation that feels as real as real life and everyone gets to live out the best possible life (or even lives) for them. They can have as many (AI) children they want in the simulation and never even know they weren't real. In that world, where no one ever had real children again and humanity naturally died out, would that be a bad thing? Humanity is not providing any benefit except to itself.
That seems pretty bad, yeah.
I care about humanity. I care about myself! You're welcome to sterilize yourself, but i don't think I'll follow.
The scenario you describe doesn't involve pain, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad. An empty, dead universe seems worse to me than one teeming with thought.
The thought experiment wasn't to end sentient life in a glorious generation of virtual hedonism, just humanity. Let the octopi build their ~own VR escapism pods.
I think people really underestimate resources needed to run these VR paradises - it needs mass and energy!
I can fully imagine a totally disconnected VR dwelling civilization that still has hordes or self replicating bots of doom that dismantle planets and stars only to make more memory and compute.
Might very well be more dangerous than a "normal" space faring civilization.
It's really not required to be one-way. Starship is explicitly designed to refuel and return. It's way harder (in rocketry terms) to go from Earth to Mars than the other way around.
Anybody who volunteers for a one-way trip is not sane enough to want to have along.
They might not object to going with equally insane incels, but do I want to spend to send and maintain them? The best that could be said is they wouldn't be here anymore.
So what is the legality? AFAIK, euthanasia and assisted suicide are not legal in a lot of jurisdictions. An actual Mars mission may set a precedent, for, uhm, voluntary short-term underwater scientific missions for geriatrics and hospice patience with challenging pain management situations.
For the law, intent usually matters. If you help someone who has the intention to die, then that's assisted suicide. But people can accept any level of danger they please, as long as they intent to survive the ordeal. The actions might be the same, but the intent is different.
they applied for a training program that will give them a ton of exposure.
I doubt they will leave Earth to go dying on a desert planet with no oxygen, water and Instagram after they eventually gained the "Mars space program" status at home.
> Settling Antarctica isn't as inspiring as colonizing Mars.
> Mars is horribly inhospitable, yes, but it's also pretty boring
Yep, exactly.
Mars is fundamentally retro futurism promoted by a bored billionaire who ran out of ideas to impress the news.
edit: for reference. this is how Musk really ignited the public interest around SpaceX, whose goal is primarily reusable rockets, not missions to Mars.
> Uh no, this has been one of his passions for a very long time. It’s the reason SpaceX exists:
How does that contradicts the premise?
SpaceX is primarily (emphasis on is) in the business of reusable rockets.
Musk launched the Mars colonization idea as a self promotional venture.
There are many things Musk said about Mars which are borderline retarded
Starting from the fact that he wants to colonize Mars, I am much more interested in the exploration and I believe it defines human nature much more than simply being a billionaire with a colonialist mindset.
For example
- Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess he believes that his life (and other billionaires like him) must be preserved. I'm not sure about regular folks like most of us...
- “I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me” this is from 2018, it hasn't aged very well
- I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we’re or not. Why???
- Musk said there's 70 percent chance he’ll get to Mars within his lifetime, with plans to permanently resettle on the Red Planet. No, he won't. We all know he wouldn't do it. He's never gonna be an astronaut, at best he can be a Bezos.
- in 2021 he said he would send humans to Mars by 2026, now it's become 2029 (it's always five years away). He also said that by 2050, there will be 30,000 to 50,000 people who choose a one-way trip to Mars to begin a new life. Everyone's free to form an opinion on this, I simply call them BS.
I’m refuting that he’s “a bored billionaire who ran out of ideas to impress the news”.
He wasn’t a billionaire when he started working on it, and he’s been working on it for 20+ years, so I don’t think he’s bored.
The rest of your complaints boil down to his overly optimistic timeframes, and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
> The rest of your complaints boil down to his overly optimistic timeframes
it boils down to the fact that he's lying. And he probably already knows it.
> and disagreement that making humans spacefaring / multiplanetary is a worthy goal.
Please refrain from interpreting what I say and write.
I do not necessarily disagree with Musk on that, I simply can differentiate from day dreaming and reality.
Mars is a worthy goal as much it is going to live on the top of Mauna Loa.
Or deep down the Marianas Trench.
Musk said it: he would like to go because it's a challenge, like climbing mount Everest.
That's all he cares about.
But lets also be absolutely real: he means send someone to die, he will never be fit to be an astronaut, let alone a space colonist. He's also not stupid enough to go towards certain death after having accumulated an enormous amount of money here on Earth. That he could actually use for the good, but, who cares, buying Twitter is more fun.
It's also honestly quite depressing to listen someone with so much money say that humans are worth only if they waste their enormous wealth on macho challenges.
He literally said that humanity will be much less interesting if we don't become a multiplanetary society, which, assuming it will be possible (I seriously doubt it) will take millenia, if not more. And once it happens, Martians won't be able to come back to Earth, because our gravity would crush their body.
How splendid.
p.s. I'm a fan of retro futurism. I grew up watching movies like Forbidden Planet and reading Asimov.
> People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
Sports! Imagine playing basketball (or football, etc.) on a dome on Mars with less than half the gravity of Earth. People back on Earth would love to watch it. People on Mars would love to play it.
I actually think this would be a great idea...for the Moon. Pro-athletes making millions of dollars per year won't want to spend their whole lives in a desolate, extremely remote desert. The Moon has a much more reasonable commute.
And I think some new sport would need to be invented.
Why would you assume it'd be a dome on the surface of mars, given there's no radiation protection? You'd need to play it in underground rooms or wearing bulky radioactive protection suits.
The case where Mars becomes very interesting is if Earth becomes uninhabitable for some reason, maybe nuclear war or a runaway climate problem or big enough asteroid impact. (I'm not pushing any of that alarmism, but on a long term time scale of 10^6 to 10^10 years, almost anything could happen eventually.)
I really don't buy this argument though. It you want a colony that can survive almost any planetary-scale catastrophe, build a colony at the bottom of the ocean. Kilometres of water will shield you from literally any amount of radiation, the surface of the earth could be a scorched wasteland and you'd be fine. And you'd have access to ocean floor resources as well as limitless resources still on the surface, even if you need to use robots to get them.
And yes I mean sure - colonizing another planet is the ultimate backup plan. But like this article(and many others) have said, it feels like jumping the shark - we can barely keep people alive for a prelonged period of time on a space station, and we are jumping straight to mars outpost from there? Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?
> Why not make a self-sufficient base on the moon first, where literally everyone on earth would be able to see it almost with a naked eye and it would inspire countless generations of people to pursue science?
Yes. This.
I hope that we piggyback on Mars exploration for building infrastructure on the Moon.
The Moon is a much better target for a first self sustainable colony and also could become economically interesting.
There is nothing on Mars that is economical interesting AFAIK.
Well, its the gate to the Asteroid belt & even has two asteroids full of resources in low orbit! Not to mention having and a (thin) atmosphere and usable gravity, that also opens a lot of opportunities (aerocapture, no micrometeoroids, easier thermal control, etc.).
Why do you need to be on Mars to do that? It's simpler to do everything in orbit, which is the real gate to the asteroid belt. Or directly establish bases in the belt, if we knew how.
Yes, that's also certainly an option. Still, it seems to me that a lot of people still can't really think in terms of space only infra and "a hight tech city, but on Mars/Moon" gets them to a more familiar context.
So I think it makes sense to talk also about surface bases, to get more people on board, even if those are potentially quite inefficient.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think it's actually more difficult to keep an airbubble under the ocean from flooding than it is to keep an air bubble around yourself in thin atmosphere.
Not really - we now have the technological and resource window and we should use it. Wasting this opportunity could otherwise doom us forever if we can't get back to this level of capability again.
We have literally millions of years to prepare for that. Mars isn't a stepping stone, Mars is a stretch goal. A few hundred or even thousand years sooner or later is a rounding error in the kind of timeframe you're talking about.
At the current rate we don't have to wait for the sun to kill us, climate change will do that first. Sure, it might not be an extinction level event but societal collapse requires much less than that. Disruption of the supply chains needed to maintain a Mars colonization program requires even less than that.
> We have literally millions of years to prepare for that.
So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
You can have billions of years of spare time. If you only concern yourself with Earth and never move beyond it, you'll end up just like anemones
> Mars is a stretch goal.
If Mars is a stretch goal, we're fucked. By time of red giant sun Mars will also be toasted.
> climate change will do that first
It probably won't. Devastate and depopulate anything outside arctic circle? Yes.
Nuclear winter has a good chance but even that's not a certainty..
> societal collapse requires much less than that
I don't care about societies I care about totality of humans. All societies exist while their energy/work production can ballance the expanding complexity, or are knocked out of balance by another society.
What do you think where your Mars rockets come from? Who mines the raw materials? Who refines them? Who builds the tech? Who does the assembly? Who does the research to actually make Mars colonization possible?
"Societal collapse" is another way of saying you will not go to space today (or ever). I'm not talking about a society. I'm talking about our entire global economical and political system. Unchecked climate change will wipe out food production and make vast swathes of land uninhabitable.
For someone who seems to focused on human survival and creating self-sustaining life on Mars, you don't seem to have a very good understanding of supply chains (and in case you're unaware: everything has a supply chain, even modern agriculture can't function without entire industries producing its resources and equipment). You'll have a hard time establishing let alone maintaining that on Mars in the next million years if we can't maintain it on Earth in the next hundred.
If you want to ensure human survival, fix climate change first, then we can worry about Mars colonization.
>>So do sea anemones. What are their chances of inhabiting Mars? ~0%.
We were nothing more than sea anemones once too. In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight. The timeframe is just so unfathomably long thah it's impossible to predict what could happen.
We had common ancestors with sea anemones. We weren't necessary anemones no more than anemones being humans. Parallel evolution led us here and anemones where they are.
> In a billion years you could have literally any lifeform currently on earth evolve into intelligent beings capable of spaceflight.
That depends on how likely is human-level intelligence to arise, so far only one species arrived there and no other. Then you add expectations of being able to build a spaceship capable of escaping Earth's gravity well.
Hoping some future intelligence can do job we can do now is ultimate form of procrastination.
There are probably at least 20 stereotypes/organizations objectively more dangerous than "crazy MAGA freak with a gun", but congratulations, you've contributed to political divisiveness on a tech-oriented forum!
By the time Earth becomes this uninhabitable, we don't have the resources anymore for a Mars shot, much less a full-scale evacuation or, dare I say, colonization. And Earth would have to turn into a Venus-like hellscape to truly become uninhabitable. Even an iceball Earth is ten times as hospitable to life than Mars.
The idea is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars during a time of prosperity on Earth, not evacuate anyone when things fall apart. The humans already at the colony would continue the existence of our kind.
Please name one other sentient, human-equivalent intelligent species.
Animals are awesome and I am indeed amazed by how smart some of the species are. Not a single one is near human level, though, and won't be for millions of years, if ever - which is not at all guaranteed, it's very much possible that human-level intelligence is evolutionary mistake/accident.
Let me know when you find an animal that can do e.g. lambda calculus and relational algebra like a human can. Since this has nothing to do with anthropocentrism, the same argument will be made - we have to preserve this species on another planet to ensure that intelligence doesn't disappear from the observable universe in case something happens to Earth/its biosphere.
> we have to preserve this species on another planet to ensure that intelligence doesn't disappear from the observable universe in case something happens to Earth/its biosphere
And why would such disappearence be bad? Really, honest question. Is there some inherent greater good to adher to by preserving intelligence, no matter how narrow it's being defined in this thread?
It could just cease existing. I don't see the problem.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much --- the wheel, New York, wars, and so on --- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man --- for precisely the same reasons."
Yeah sure. If they had the ability to learn math but chose not to, it might be true. They don't, though - and I bet there is more than a few dolphins that'd like to do more if they could.
All living creatures have genes, why humans in particular?
Don't dogs and dolphins have offspring?
Aren't they intelligent?
And why not plants, which are the real reason why Earth life forms can exist on the surface of the planet?
But most of all, if you have children, would you really want for them an horrible life on a Mars colony where they would grow up in a labor camp like life and develop such weak bones that they could never live the red planet to visit Earth?
Well, a cat should live just fine on say an O,Oeill cylinder[0] or a surface level Lunar or Martian hab (possibly a large dome or huge cavern). They might have to adapt to the low gravity or the side effect of spin gravity, but the environment should eventually be pretty similar otherwise.
> Well, a cat should live just fine on say an O,Oeill cylinder[0] or a surface level Lunar or Martian hab
sounds pretty sad for a lion or a moose and frankly impossible for a shark or a whale.
Science fiction is nice, but transporting wild animals for months in a spaceship to a desert planet with no water and oxygen?
Forget about it!
Hard sci-fi actually addressed the issue and the outcome is always the same: there are no animals in space, except some domesticated small ones. There are no wild animals in Asimov works, no wild animals in Dick, no wild animals in Lem or Clarke, no animals either in recent works, the Expanse for example.
There are humpback whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home though :)
The myth of the Noah's arc is just a myth, if we'll really move into space because our planet cannot sustain humanity anymore, we'll be the only species to survive. We, some plants we'll use as food and viruses/bacteria living inside us. Maybe we'll have perfected cloning technology and will try to resurrect them if the conditions arise.
But even then, how many people do you think could live in such a dome?
1,000? 10,000? 100,000?
Would we share the little precious oxygen with rats or mosquitos?
How do your scifi stories solve social issues like the breakdown of civilization following events like civil wars caused by events like the Capitol storming?
In other words, isn't the threat to the human species mostly within itself, and finding solutions to those issues much more impactful (and attainable) than dreaming of building such fantasy structures?
Aside from the realization that society wouldn't work differently on Mars either. Look around you. The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth.
"In other words, isn't the threat to the human species mostly within itself, and finding solutions to those issues much more impactful (and attainable) than dreaming of building such fantasy structures?"
Society will break down, once there is no more hope.
Good sci-fi stories, like a colonisation of mars (like in the mars trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinsons) gives people hope, that a different world is possible, therefore (helping) preventing that breakdown in the first place.
This is the reason, why so many otherwise smart people ignored reality and signed up for Mars One for example. It is the dream of having the chance to start over in a clean way.
"The fraction of idiots in a society on Mars is unlikely to be lower than here on Earth. "
And when you have colonists with that altruistic mindset, then yes - the idiot rate of that society has the potential to be significantly lower. This is why people would sign up for one way tickets - exactly to get away from the idiots here on earth.
But yes, a real mars colony is very far away and would likely stay a hellhole for a long time, until either terraforming becomes realistic, or big domes, that protect enough from radiation, but gives people freedom to move in sunlight.
No one wants to go to mars, to become a mole in a bunker, even though this is what the beginning most likely will be. It is the dreams, that attract us Mars enthusiast. I would argue, if there would be more people dreaming, instead of mindlessly watching netflix over and over, there would be a better chance to make those dreams real. Also here on earth.
Ok, but you do care about their well-being. And their well-being will depend on their offspring, etc.
I would not be comfortable knowing, that the children I helped bring into this life are doomed in the long run. That would be pointless to me, there needs to be a way forward, whether it is mars or something else.
1000 generations into the future? People to whose genome you contributed 2^-1000, i.e. almost nothing? Who know neither your name nor care about it? Like you don't really care about your ancestors 1000 generations ago? Or 100,000 generations?
I don't get it.
Basically: Let's face it, when we're dead then we're dead. That's it. You have your life. Trying to achieve some sort of immortality or higher purpose by creating offspring is just as futile as praying or paying some quack to help you with afterlife matters.
"Basically: Let's face it, when we're dead then we're dead. That's it."
If you feel that unconnected, than yes, that was it to you.
And sure, I will be dead one day, too and my name forgotten. That doesn't mean, my life was without purpose nor significance, because I do feel part of something bigger. Progress of humankind and the spreading of life and consciousness in general.
I don't know the names of my ancestors, but they are of significance, as without them, I wouldn't exist and without me, neither would the 1000. generation after me.
For the colony to be truly self-sustaining it would have to replicate the entire industrial supply chain for its technological and material needs. Without it, the colony and its infrastructure would slowly crumble apart. In such a situation, we could always go back to basic agriculture and hunter-gatherer lifestyles on Earth. Most humans would perish, but the species would survive. That option does not exist on Mars before self-sustaining terraforming.
Putting boots on Mars doesn't help solving the above problem. As TA explains, the first humans would be mostly busy surviving and would be dependent on permanent resupply from Earth. It's a pure prestige project.
The effort would be better spent on engineering a streamlined and automated version of our technological base that can be deployed with minimal effort and supervision to set up a colony or a mining base. Once we have achieved that, we are on the way to become a post-scarcity civilization and can easily push much farther than Mars.
Any of those leaves Earth thousands of times more habitable than Mars. They even leave Antarctica and the sea floor thousands of times more habitable than Mars.
What plants would resist the massive amounts of radiation, or perchlorate soil?
Note that we don't even know if any plants today would actually be able to fruit in the low gravity environment (nevermind if any animal would be able to successfully procreate).
You would generate a magnetic field at the center of the colony to deflect solar energetic particles and galactic cosmic rays. The colony would produce compost with biowaste and use that for soil. There are various ways to remove perchlorates from soil. One avenue of research is to find an optimal mix of martian soil and compost to allow plants to thrive.
The points you are making are excellent but I believe solvable. Also we do know if plants can fruit in space. We've already grown tomatoes in space and they are fruits of the tomato plant. And that was zero G.
You are going to run into energy generations REALLY fast trying to generate such a massive magnetic shield, Not to mention all the other massive energy needs for mining and processing material.
Also nobody has yet produced a self-sustained biodome.
I'm not really sure farming will work on Mars with sunlight alone given the distance from the Sun. Still, you have gravity and reasonable day length and even some atmospheres, not to mention a lot of mass available - that already makes a lot of things easier.
And why would anybody care? Will you or anybody who will know about you be alive at that point?
There are millions if not billions alive today who are suffering from war, famine, dictatorships. And climate change is just making that worse. It would be more reasonable to help those souls instead.
mankind is heading for space ~ this is unstoppable. colonising mars makes a lot of sense as its the only other semi habitable planet in the solar system. short term ~ there might be some interesting mineable ores on mars. medium term ~ lower gravity makes it easier to launch ships into space / build a space elevator. long term terraformation of mars is a possibility.
It's not unstoppable at all. It's 54 years since we landed on the Moon and we're only just getting around to considering another visit. The ISS, amazing as it is, is a glorified shed in orbit. We're still getting into orbit by throwing giant fireworks at the sky. (Is there a better way? Possibly. We really haven't spent a lot of time looking for it.)
But none of that is the problem. The real problem is that we haven't learned how to do reality-based politics and economics, and possibly never will. We're so bad at this we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.
The idea that we might somehow get better at planning rationally by moving to a planet that has none of the above is really quite strange.
> we haven't even solved the kindergarten-level problem of creating a stable living environment on a planet with abundant water, oxygen, natural resources, free energy, and a ready-made (mostly) supportive ecosystem.
Haven’t we? I guess it could always be more stable. Where is the line for you? Is there any point where you’d consider this problem solved?
Besides, if things feel unstable to you, why would that be an argument against attempting to set up a secondary living environment on another planet?
If we had stability issues in our primary datacenter, would this be a reason not to create an offsite backup?
I think that what happened since the industrial revolution is pretty much a definition of unstable. We are living a mass extinction right now (not even caused by global warming, which will just make it worse).
Since the industrial revolution, we have become excellent as destroying life. Not the opposite.
Citation needed, because real-world experience shows otherwise.
Mankind is heading for a larger capacity for information processing, this is the unstoppable arc of history. Mars or space doesn't figure into this equation at all.
The only unstoppable thing is human imagination. Unfortunately physically and economically it's not worth it to pursue this dream unless we generate unlimited power.
> > mankind is heading for space ~ this is unstoppable. colonising mars makes a lot of sense
Yes, it makes a lot of sense for mankind, no doubt about it. Does it make sense for men and women though?
It's easy to say mankind. Flight makes a lot of sense for mankind too, but less than a third of the global population has ever been on a plane because for the remaining 2/3 it doesn't make sense to do so given their economic constraints.
> We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on.
The reason why is because you will learn a lot more by doing that stuff. The things that are going to doom a first Mars colony attempt isn't necessarily something like "we don't know how to grow plants on Mars" but "we don't know how to build a proper door for the Martian environment" (inspiration for this is taken from https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo, which has appeared on HN recently). If your ultimate goal is to build a self-sustaining interplanetary colony, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that maybe we should start by trying to figure out how to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere inhospitable first because it's never been done before, and all previous attempts have failed.
I love that blog! I think that door post is a perfect example of why we won't learn anything useful on Antarctica:
> Most (but not all!) doors open inward. There is a huge amount of snowdrift during the winter, and if the doors opened outward, they would be impossible to open without a lot of digging. This could be a life safety issue if the building is occupied.
On a Mars there is no "inward" like there is in McMurdo because swinging doors only work between sections with equalized pressure. Going outside requires an airlock that slowly normalizes the pressure to avoid shooting the colonist out the door with a blast of air. Going between sections requires doors that can slam shut in either direction to seal away damaged sections in case of emergency, like the sliding doors in almost every scifi movie/series/book - which we still haven't tested in the real world because there's nowhere to test that kind of pressure differential on Earth and our space station technology is still based on Cold War submarine hatches.
I'd expect such vacuum chambers to be relatively easy to build. The hull only has to hold one atmosphere of pressure difference, and it's pushing inward, so existing pressure tanks should be more than adequate with at most slight modifications. Generating the vacuum is mostly handling the sheer volume of air to evacuate because the quality of vacuum is irrelevant -- leaving 1% of air is as good as 0.001% of air when you are pushing doors against that pressure.
I mean in the context of actual use by humans in the day to day operation of a colony or other off-world facility.
There's obviously plenty of large vacuum chambers than can fit a door mechanism or even a small test room (the ones JPL uses to test spacecraft thermals was the first to come to mind for me, didn't know about the Plum Brook facility).
There are a couple (…um yeah…) of things different between Moon and Mars: lunar day is about 2 weeks long, which basically rules out solar-only colonies and lack of any sort of atmosphere makes radiation a significantly worse problem (not that it isn’t one on Mars…)
The Martian atmosphere provides almost no protection against the heavy ion component of galactic cosmic radiation, which is the dangerous stuff. The Moon more than makes up for its lack of atmosphere by being deeper inside the Sun's magnetic field than Mars.
The lack of atmosphere also means a risk of micrometeoroid strike on the surface & makes thermal control harder.
But for some industries this could be a benefit & even if the lunar dust is abrasive, at least it won't move itself that much without wind (though there could apparently be some electrostatic effects in play sometimes).
Also can't do aerobraking/aerocapture, but there is Earth next door for that.
> […] how to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere inhospitable first because it's never been done before, and all previous attempts have failed.
Hmm? It’s been done lots of times: it’s just that once people start living somewhere, we stop calling it “inhospitable.” But c.f. the Inuit, who’ve been living above the Arctic Circle for more than a thousand years.
But we... have already mostly done that in Antarctica already. There's not a lot more to learn by moving a few thousand more people to a particularly unpleasant place to live.
That's not even remotely true. For one, we have barely scratched the surface of the psychology of living in an Antarctic outpost, and already what we've seen doesn't suggest long-term viability (decades instead of months). Perhaps with more people, the problems could go away, perhaps not - there's no reason to find out on Mars.
No, but there's also little we gain from trying to make it so. We know how to operate all sorts of things in Antarctica, and anything else we bring there just... needs to be operated pretty much the same way.
That's the wrong approach, though. "We can't" is the default state. The thing we need to find out is how to make it so. The goal is to be able to say, after all the finding out, that yes, we can now.
> We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization
We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible. People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate. Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts, but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
People said just over 100 years ago that we'd never be able to fly, yet here we are. We're welll aware of the issues but there are solutions. I mean, we happen to exist in space, so it's not impossible, is it.
I'm not so sure - I have this slab of crystal I can use to talk talk to people on the other side of the Earth, see things from above and make things do my bidding without touching them. And apparently it can transfer ideas in text form to your head.
Also looks like I can fly if I book the right tickets.
They could be though, at current tech level. It's the infrastructure that doesn't support it. Smartphones are as close as we got, but they reveal couple unfortunate things about the real world, such as:
- In a competitive market economy, everything ends up sucking as much as it can get away with;
- Magic wands would offer individuals more autonomy than the market, and possibly civilization, can sustain without self-destructing.
> wizards don't exist
Within constraints of the above, sure they do.
> Magic still doesn't exist.
_joel already provided the obligatory quote, but to expand on it, most of the magic in fantasy literature could be made possible with current technology, but would require supporting infrastructure to avoid breaking rules of thermodynamics. If you want to go less conspicuous, we'll have to wait for molecular nanotech ;).
> We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible.
Not with that attitude. ISS would like to differ, anyway.
> People in space for a month already have permanent health defects. If you are up there you have to constantly be training your body to not disintegrate.
Yes. But that's not because space is evil or haunted or a domain gods reserve themselves. It's because of weightlessness. We know how to solve this problem - it's precisely the kind of things GP is talking about: an engineering challenge we know how to solve on paper, but need to actually do it, to a) learn all the little peculiarities that always come with something new, b) actually have this working on some piece of space infrastructure.
> Unlike other places where there are living beings, there is nothing in space for a reason!!
There's lots of stuff in space. Within the distances past manned missions already covered, there's way more of everything than on Earth itself - except life. That one is on us to get there, you can view this as a natural process of life evolving to settle other niches :). And while space itself by volume is mostly empty, the reason you're talking about is just gravity.
> People don’t want to accept that space science fiction is as real as Middle Earth or Hogwarts
On the contrary, people treat these as equivalent and considering them just fantasy entertainment, instead of realizing that most aspects of sci-fi are somewhere between artist's concept (soft end of sci-fi) to engineering blueprints (hard end of sci-fi, which often literally describes real engineering blueprints in prose!).
People used to take inspiration from softish sci-fi; for all my love of Star Trek, it's as soft a sci-fi as it gets, and it managed to drive a couple generations of people to STEM, and predict, inspire and/or pre-market plenty of new technologies. Would iPhone and iPad become so popular so quickly if not for a large part of US population, and Western culture itself, having been familiar with those concepts for two decades already, thanks to Star Trek: TNG? You got a whole generation there, growing to await stationary and portable touchscreens.
Point being, people used to look up to sci-fi ideas, and stuff happened. Now they don't, stuff doesn't happen, and even sci-fi gets sadder and more boring year by year. It's like the whole culture advanced from energetic young adult stage into a depressed, bored middle-aged suburbanite stage.
(Also, a lot of Middle Earth / Harry Potter stuff is doable too, you just need a sprinkle of molecular nanotechnology and a post-scarcity economy where people can afford spending an order of magnitude more effort on showing off than on utility aspects.)
> but there is already an abundance of evidence that the human body is not capable of existing for years on end in space.
There's an abundance of evidence that human body is not capable of existing for years anywhere but on specific terrain in a small latitude band on the planet. Everywhere else, we exist thanks to technology. That's literally the story of humanity: inhabiting the previously inhospitable areas by building tools we need to survive. Space is no different.
Hate to break it to you, but ISS is not technically in space. There is still some athmosphere, a ton of gravity (comparing to "actual space"), and plenty of protection from the earth's magnetic shield.
Its actually quite the equivalent of "lets try this in antartica first".
> Hate to break it to you, but ISS is not technically in space. There is still some athmosphere
There's still some atmosphere quite high away from Earth, the transition from "not space" to "space" is asymptotic.
> a ton of gravity (comparing to "actual space")
It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
> plenty of protection from the earth's magnetic shield
Fair enough.
But I reserve my right to hold ISS as being in space, to counterbalance the parent's claim: "We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible.".
>There's still some atmosphere quite high away from Earth, the transition from "not space" to "space" is asymptotic.
Not saying otherwise; however, 400km above surface and eg. Stationary orbit are quite different things.
>It doesn't matter because ISS is in orbit. Weightlessness is weightlessness, whether you're free-falling in circles, straight at something, or so far away from anything it's hard to calculate who's pulling on you the most.
Actually, we don't know that. From a perception perspective, you are right;From a biological perspective, we actually don't know if there is any biological process that may be affected by the free-falling effect, specifically.
>"We already know about the realities of space colonization: it’s not possible."
The op's assertion seems to be right - most of what we know to date seems to confirm it. Maybe "not possible" is a strong statement, but certainly not feasible, and that is not going to change anytime soon.
You need a big centrifuge where you can live or at least sleep and do physical exercises. It should eliminate the health problems caused by low gravity.
Near-Earth asteroid mining? Is there anything close and worth mining? AFAIK most asteroids, including those containing valuable heavy metals like platinum, are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter orbits. Which is significantly farther than Mars.
I more easily believe in mining rocks on Moon as cool souvenirs. (And as a first step in developing the technology.)
Just as with scientific research, asteroid mining will be the domain of robots. There's no economic case for sending humans for that job, and AI is improving year on year. So sadly no Belters, whatever the value of mining space rocks.
Even a completely useless piece of rock is already a piece of rock in space. It can be used for shielding, counterweight for a spinning habitat, melted into simple shapes to support your habitats, etc.. You can even use it for propulsion - fling it away with a mass driver or vaporize with an arc-jet through a thruster nozzle!
The obvious answer to "why" is that you can use Antarctica as a low(er) cost, low risk, practice run. Similar to space tech of the 60s, the tech developed this way could have a big impact on many areas of life. And yes, it won't solve everything, nor give us a second planet.
Raising radiation levels is not a problem here on earth at all. Not sure about gravity and health effects, maybe it can be simulated with some amphetamine + sedative cocktails.
Hard thing in living on Mars is not the cold, it is the lack of oxygen or easily accessible water. All of these are abundant on Antarctica so it is not really a practice run.
I see little point in exploring this on Antarctica which is why I believe no one really is entertaining idea of this type of test run on Antarctica.
Becoming a multi-planetary species is a fantasy which only seems plausible when you’ve watched too much science fiction, and don’t have a good understanding of the physical, biological, technological, economic, and political challenges that prevent it from happening.
we haven't solved vertical farming yet. it's not energy efficient. i imagine its even harder/more expensive in Antarctica to keep the plants warm enough.
cheap and clean energy production is where we should spend our money.
Plus, the comparison shouldn't be "open farmland vs. PV+LED", it should be "for the resources cost of PV+LED, what can you build in the way of polytunnel or greenhouse?"
It would provide proof of concept and troubleshooting for many technologies which Mars colony proponents seem to think already exist and they can just buy or slap together on short notice. If nobody can manage a self-sufficient biodome on Earth, there is basically no chance of it working in a much harsher and demanding environment.
Mars is a harsher environment than actual empty space, you can't just toss a space capsule onto the surface and expect to live in it for the next 2 years even if you had the food and power and extra parts.
Trying to escape the confines of Earth in our fragile meat-bag bodies is probably 100x less practical than escaping the confines of our fragile meat-bag bodies.
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.