I think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip. First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years.
Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there. There really isn't that much for humans to learn by going there in person. Those people will just have to stay in a tiny space for years on end without a lot to do. Think of what a bust the video game No Man's Sky was. People hated it because it was boring. But I'm sure exploring planets in that game was much more interested than Mars will be.
As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.
Settling to Mars seems so glamorous, but it really will not be a fun affair. It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.
> Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there.
Have you ever been backpacking in a desert, mountains, wilderness? It continues to be amazing for days. Anything that new and different definitely induces novelty more than an hour tops.
Also, have you seen the data returned by the rovers? There's stuff to explore and discover everywhere. Mars may have less biome variation (on a scale that can be sensed by unprotected humans, and for whatever the 'bio' of 'biome' means on a lifeless world) than Earth, but it's not featureless.
This strikes me as the usual motivated denial that you get from Mars enthusiasts. You're not going to "go exploring" forever. At some point, it's just more rocks.
A better analogy than backpacking would be permanently living underwater at great depth. To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world. Your skin touches the inside of your suit. You smell only the air from your breathing apparatus and your own breath. Forever.
I'd be way more impressed with Mars enthusiasts if they'd admit that this is a problem and then describe how they'll overcome it, rather than just insisting that it all really is going to be one big breathless adventure. It's like mentioning boredom on Mars is a taboo that upsets frail escapists.
I'd be more impressed with Mars pessimists if they'd admit that it's just not really the kind of thing that interests them rather than insisting that it's going to be a terrible nightmare for anyone.
The GP said the novelty will wear off in one hour, tops. Sorry, to some people, that's a ridiculous statement. Pointing out that it would probably last longer than that is not insisting that it's going to be one big breathless adventure.
People have lived in solitude and isolation before. People have lived on the space station for extended periods of time. There are people that don't really care to come home to their comfortable home and family every night. I'm pretty sure there are some people who would not be miserable living on Mars.
You wouldn't like it at all. I would probably be done after a couple weeks.
But I'm sure some people would love to explore places where no human has ever been before for the rest of their lives.
There is also the work of building a new society, settling in new immigrants, improving infrastructure in your settlement etc, that has to be fun for the right kind of person.
So I'm sure that a small percentage of the populations would genuinely like living on Mars. Maybe he biggest problem is predicting who those people are before you ship out :)
> To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world. Your skin touches the inside of your suit. You smell only the air from your breathing apparatus and your own breath. Forever.
This sounds close to the neck beard trope, of people living in their parents basement and never seeing sunlight. Could we inadvertently be adapting to a Martian or Lunar environment?
No. My adaptations are definitely intentional. All that sandbox-world gaming is training, for when I will be stuck inside a ~70 m^3 volume with several other people, simultaneously mining for vital resources and additional living volume using a remotely-operated robot that is not quite ready for fully autonomous operation yet.
It will totally be worth lifting 250kg of human adipose tissue into LEO, I swear. If the food supply fails, you'll need someone that can survive without it until the next available harvest. Not that I weigh that much now, but with some intensively sedentary neckbearding, I can probably get that high by the time we're ready to launch.
> Have you ever been backpacking in a desert, mountains, wilderness?
To be outdoors in the vast wilderness teaming with life, breathing fresh air, being able to wander off in any direction you feel like does have a certain amount of appeal. If you went to Mars, though, you would never be able to do this again in your life. You'd never be able to breath fresh air again. You'd never be able to stand outside on your own again - you'd only be able to do it from the inside of a constricting suit. You'd never be able to just go off and wander when you feel like - even if you could use rovers and suits for fun, you'd have to get the approval of your fellow travelers before going out. You'd never be able to see wild plants and animals again.
Colonists on Mars would have to build almost everything. But is there anything stopping them from building parks and forests? It will be tremendously difficult but they absolutely will do it, it's human nature. What they miss, they'll build. They'll spend much of the first years building up the rudiments of industry. Methane and Oxygen production will be there from day one. They'll start by mining water ice to allow them to produce arbitrary amounts of methane, oxygen, water, Hydrogen, and carbon monoxide. They'll use that to kickstart other industrial infrastructure like production of iron/steel, glass, concrete, plastic, etc. All of which can begin in only a handful of years past the initial colonization and get going with a minimal amount of capital equipment. They'll move on to expanding their habitat, building greenhouses, growing food. And from there they will increase the carrying capacity of their habitat(s) and the capabilities of their industrial base continually. Then it's just a matter of time until they have the ability to build parks and forests, things they'll want to get started on sooner rather than later.
They won't have the redwoods or the amazon rainforest but they'll have lakes to swim in and trees to walk under.
It presumably will, however be somewhat easier than being on the space station, which people have managed for over a year with relatively few adverse effects.
Of course, these are the best of the best, specifically selected because they are focused and driven, but we aren't going to be sending just anyone to mars either.
Its difficult to fathom quite how much there is to do in space. Astronauts aren't sitting around, but constantly performing maintenance and fielding science requests from all the world's top researchers.
Consider additionally people living about a nuclear submarine have similar freedoms, and there are many that willingly get back on board even when their mandated time is up because its not a terrible job. Some things the human psyche can work around when you have a constant supply of mental stimulation and a fulfilling life.
The duration is very close to Earth's. I don't think it will be an issue.
And since Mars is several light minutes away, and hence out of range for real-time dialogue, going out of sync with Earth's cycle will not be a huge issue either. You'll be talking via email anyway.
> reduced gravity
Yeah, that's a bigger issue.
> boredom and cabin fever
Could be an issue, yes. But if you're a scientist, you could work yourself to death in that new environment. So much to study, so little time.
> It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.
Climbing down from trees seemed the same at first.
Moving out of caves, into hand-built dwellings seemed the same at first.
Etc.
The point being, it's easy to overstate both the glamorous and the depressing aspects of something we are not familiar with.
>As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.
We don't have to wonder. We do it now. Its called jail.
I am someone who has wanted to go to Mars for many years now. I first thought about it when I was about 8 years old -- 30 years ago. I'm still enthusiastic about it, although I doubt I'd have the skill sets or youth to participate given the current timeline.
I expect Mars would be too much the opposite of boring. We'd be trying to live in an environment that, as far as we know, doesn't support any life at all. It is extremely hostile. The conditions are more difficult than Antarctica. The planet will be trying to kill you in all kinds of ways, some of which we haven't imagined yet. Early colonists will have their hands full solving one life-threatening issue after another, and without the massive manufacturing and diagnostics and natural resources of Earth at hand.
There is a great deal of science to be done there and that would likely be a major impetus for going and one of the selection criteria for early colonists. Even when the planet isn't trying to kill them, they'd have work to do -- mapping, soil samples, ongoing human health research, materials research, agriculture and biology.
Martian colonists would also not be entirely isolated. There's no reason in principle why you wouldn't be able to email people on Earth on a semi-regular basis, or receive the latest books and movies and games -- to the extent that you'd really have time for any of that.
There are people who are attracted to the idea of living in a smaller community in a completely alien environment. They tend to get dismissed out-of-hand, but it's not really all that unusual. Humans are tribal, there are isolated research facilities in remote parts of the world, even a cramped little space station now.
I seriously doubt it will turn out to be pointless. Colonization has usually moved the larger human society forward a little, with new forms of governance, new materials, new technologies or techniques for daily life. We have no way of knowing now what kind of returns we'd get back from a long-term Martian colony, but I don't think the answer is "none".
> Colonization has usually moved the larger human society forward a little, with new forms of governance, new materials, new technologies or techniques for daily life.
I would really like to see the historical data that bears out this broad claim. I'd like to see a more or less representative sample of "colonization" events that "moved society forward," for example. Also, I'd like to see an accounting of the counterfactuals regarding progress that wouldn't have happened. To cite one example, the "new [if that can be alleged] form of governance" that resulted (if that much can be alleged) in the U.S. from the colonization of the New World took a quarter of a millennium. How much longer for the cotton gin?
Ironically, it's been 50 years since we landed on the Moon, and we can't even rid ourselves of the Space Race / World Of Tomorrow propaganda that drives the public's impression of space exploration. I think we need to look elsewhere than colonization to explain progress.
(Where was colonialism in the discovery of integral calculus? In chaos theory? In...? I'll stop.)
Quite off-topic, but sometimes I even wonder if we should not "de-colonize" Earth. I first thought of that when I learnt that if all human population was living in one place with the same population density as in Tokyo, this megacity would fit in the state of California or something.
That sounds extreme, but I somehow am attracted by the idea of leaving entire continents completely void of humans.
E.O. Wilson has proposed setting aside half the earth for nature. That would be achievable by protecting existing wilderness areas and connecting them together into corridors.
well realistically you only need to get the governments of the UN to agree which is a little less daunting. I can easily imaging taking the Sahara, Siberia, the interior of Australia, and the steppe would get us a good chunk of the way there. Adding on the amazon might be possible with effort.
Of course, these areas have substantial mineral/oil deposits that make the current political situtation difficult. But it's not outside of the realms of possibility that this may eventually stop being the case, such as how Britain's one ubiquitous coal mines are all closed now.
The thought experiment usually goes that the world's population could all fit into the state of Texas, at New York City density.
That always ignores the space required for agriculture, roads and transportation, waste management, power, manufacturing, and of course the natural resources that modern society depends on.
Also, I'd risk arrest or worse just to get out of that area and get some damn peace and quiet. I just spent a week in Chicago. It was fantastic. I'm really glad I'm not still there.
(And no, we shouldn't de-colonize Earth, we should get better at living in it.)
I don't have any other citations or references at hand, sorry.
But, you're attempting to rebut me using a rather deeply-nested stack of science and technology developed in some former colonies.
You might also give my earlier comment a more careful reading. I didn't imply that progress is limited to colonization, only that it contributes to it.
There are people who are attracted to the idea of living in a smaller community in a completely alien environment.
Stated like this, I have more empathy for such a community of Mars settlers if viewed as a lark and a kind of "oddball" enterprise, rather than what Mars colonists seem to be portrayed as now which is "SAVIORS OF HUMANITY."
The idea of having a human colony on Mars is absurd to me, and the idea that we should spend 100s of Billions on it is frustrating. However it would be interesting to see what a rag-tag group of one way explorers could do for a few $100M.
It seems like gravity is the biggest factor that the pie in the sky posts always seem to gloss over. As you said, living in the low of gravity, for the rest of your life, has to have untold issues on bodies that evolved here. It would also add another layer of complexity to everything you do.
So many people act like it's just a cool destination spot for Sheldon-types. I have no doubt there'd be no shortage of people wanting to sign up, but it does seem very sad to me. Like people willing to get facial tattoos sad. They should focus on finding ways to create a VR experience that would allow everyone to experience it safely.
To play devil's advocate - there are a lot of people who would argue that the view: "Why would you do something with so many known and unknown dangers, when you could focus your energies on making a VR simulation of it instead?" also very sad.
I'm not saying we should shoot for Mars, just that until we reach the point of being able to do round-trips and step up the solutions, it sounds like an awful idea to go there. The VR is just a personal wish that I think would be great for not just Mars but all space exploration. I know that I'll never get a chance to visit the moon. But before we're able to engineer a roundtrip I could purchase, I know we'd be able to engineer a rig that could transmit a VR experience that we could all enjoy.
We need both - simulations and to go there in person. We used simulation even for going to the moon, it's going to be an essential tool for Mars as well.
Whenever I hear this point made I think of the movie Master and Commander.
In the 1800s, being on a European wooden sailing vessel in the Pacific was, relatively speaking, very similar to being on another planet:
- Takes months or years to get there: check
- Fire could kill everyone on your vessel: check
- "Nature" could kill you in innumerable ways: check
- Some life sustaining and necessary items could be found along the way but many had to be brought with you: check
This was the most annoying thing about the film The Martian for me.
Everyone crows about the science, but I've not heard anything about the psychological trauma someone marooned and isolated on an alien planet for several months would go through.
I imagine it would be something on a par with the Dancing plagues of Strasbourg
While mostly glossed over, I believe there was some small nod to Watney being one of the psychological anchors of the original team (at least in the film, I don't recall if that was in the book). Him being an optimist that doesn't give up is just as important to his survival as his specific scientific skill sets that come into play. That said, I believe a lot of his sanity was preserved by hope. He believed in a non-negligible chance that he could be rescued. People that signed up and are living a situation where there's no real hope it will change might have a vastly different reaction over time. Then again, they would also have company, and that can make a huge difference.
People have in fact talked about these things. Including the science being great, the psychology being preposterous yet entertaining, and the disco being disco.
> As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there,...
They may suffer from an acute version of what is known as prairie madness[1], which American colonists suffered from in the nineteenth century.
> ...and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.
I am often thinking about food, it will likely be incredibly bland and not very varied. Plus you'll spend probably most of your time indoors. You won't ever lay on a beach listening to the sounds of the wave, or walk on dry leaves in a forest anymore.
There are a huge number of humans on earth who spend their lives in urban centers and also never have those experiences.
Speculating about the quality of food on mars is pointless; we have no idea how that will work. If you can afford regular equipment shipments to mars (which is probably what a mars colony will require with near-future tech), it would probably make a lot of sense to ship up a bunch of spices. They have a very high utility/weight ratio, which is why they were the impetus for the foundation of so many historical colonies.
> There are a huge number of humans on earth who spend their lives in urban centers and also never have those experiences.
Those people can and do at least go to parks.
A better analogy is that it would be like living in an underground bunker on Death Valley, with periodic excursions out to the desert, while wearing a spacesuit.
There are a few theories for getting magnetic poles going on Mars. With that, and some terraforming, and a whole lot of time, they could eventually have a breathable atmosphere.
Of course this will take many hundreds of years and need a bunch of new tech.
Anyway, for now, we can breathe the atmosphere when we go outside. That's not what it's like on Mars. I don't think I'd enjoy that.
This is way off, and reflective of a view of space exploration of the Apollo style rather than actual colonization like what will happen on Mars.
The first people to go to Mars may be scientists and explorers, but the second wave will be a very different kind of people. That group will have the job of building a technologically advanced, industrialized, self-sufficient civilization on Mars. That is no small task, nor is it one we have a simple template for. The people who will be drawn to it won't be the "science is f'ing cool!" spectators, nor will they even be hardcore research scientists. They'll be hyper-competent workaholics and overachievers. They'll be people with broad expertise in multiple subjects who just enjoy getting stuff done. The sheer amount of work ahead of them will be mind-boggling. But by the same token, the amount that they can get done, what they will be able to achieve will be equally mind-boggling.
Every single day they'll wake up and they'll have a hundred lifetimes of truly challenging work ahead of them. And every single night they'll go to bed having made real, material, significant progress on advancing Martian colonization and making human civilization multi-planetary. Most days they'll do something that was never done on Mars before. They'll build something that will have a tangible impact on what is possible in the future on Mars, and on many other people's lives. They won't just be spending their days reading facebook and occasionally making a git pull-request, they'll be building greenhouses, they'll be farming, they'll be making habitats, and they'll be building up all of the industrial infrastructure to do that. They'll be mining ice, and iron ore, and sand, etc. They'll be figuring out how to setup iron smelting operations. How to make plastic out of methane. How to make concrete on Mars. How to build habitats with the maximal contribution of Martian resources that are safe and robust. They'll be min/maxing like crazy, and innovating like crazy. They'll be spending a crap-ton of time in shops using machine tools. And they will constantly see the fruits of their labor, day by day, hour by hour.
They'll be able to look around at their growing colony and think to themselves "I built this". It will be like the ultimate start-up experience on steroids. Some of them might find it overwhelming, but I doubt many of them will find it boring, they won't have time.
I found this (mental health issues of colonization) to be one of the most interesting parts of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It drags on a bit but plenty of folks go batshit, so that lends a tinge of realism.
It's doubtful we'd send people to Mars as a one-way trip (though some regard that as a reasonable cost-cutting measure). The day-night cycle is almost the same. We don't know what extended time in ~40% gravity would be like, but people have lived for an extended time in zero G, which is a much more extreme change. Sailors on submarines have survived in tight quarters without natural sunlight or wide-open spaces for extended periods of time.
I think you're thinking of a trip to Mars in the most pessimistic terms possible: a small team of explorers with no return trip and they live out the rest of their days in a tiny RV buried under the Martian soil and totally dependent on Earth for supplies and entertainment and no possibility of meeting anyone new.
Consider a different possibility: a smallish community growing into a large community by periodic waves of immigration and shipments of equipment needed to establish self-sufficient infrastructure. Ships travel back and forth, so trips are possible. Living and working spaces are small at first, but are constantly being expanded by continuous construction. You can live and work with interesting people on an ambitious project to establish a permanent human presence in a hostile environment.
We don't really know which of these alternatives is going to be a more accurate description of the situation presenting itself to the first Martian settlers, but we'll have a good idea which it's going to be before sending anyone. And if it looks like it's going to be a miserable experience and way too expensive, well, we can wait another decade or so and let the technology mature.
Okay, but why? What is anyone's purpose for going to mars en masse? Migration to the New World was spurred on by the promise of wealth, resources, and independence from existing governments.
The latter is utterly implausible when you consider the total dependence colonists would have upon supply from the nations they're hypothetically fleeing. The former, well, again I suspect dependence upon supplies from the home-planet puts colonists on an extremely poor footing for negotiation.
I'm just not seeing the case for why large groups of people would feel compelled to make the trip at obscene cost.
When it comes to negotiation, both sides have quite a bit of leverage. Earth (pretending for a moment that it's a monolithic political entity) can threaten to withhold supplies, whereas Mars explorers can do things Earth doesn't want them to because they aren't there to stop them. So, the situation is complicated. Earth may have the upper hand in the beginning, but that dynamic could change as Mars becomes more self-sufficient.
A lot of scientists would want to go. Ordinary people might too if they were feeling adventurous and if Musk is right and we can send people at a relatively affordable cost. There will also probably be a lot of workers to do the things that are physically demanding and not very much fun. If they're paid more to do that work on Mars than on Earth, then it could be a good deal.
Some people might want to stake a claim to some land or participate in the creation of a new government. There might be valuable natural resources like gold or platinum that make the transportation and infrastructure costs worthwhile.
Some old people might prefer walking in ~40% gravity to being confined to a wheelchair on Earth. Some people might be sick of working on made-up first-world problems (like how to get more people to click on ads) and creating shareholder value, and want to do something more challenging and more rewarding. Some people might just prefer the company of the sort of person that would move to Mars.
I think you missed a subtlety in my argument. I'm not saying nobody will want to go to Mars. Obviously some will. I'm arguing that this is an extremely small contingent of people who are willing to make this journey when there's little social or economic reason to go.
> If they're paid more to do that work on Mars than on Earth, then it could be a good deal.
What good is money when you're stuck on a lifeless rock with no atmosphere, and nothing to actually spend that money on? What goods, exactly, do you think people are going to be buying on Mars — consider that the shipping costs alone would necessitate you being paid an absolutely astronomical (ha!) salary for your labor.
> Some people might want to stake a claim to some land or participate in the creation of a new government.
You're missing the greater point. None of this matters when you're occupying a dead, lifeless rock that will be completely and totally dependent upon the governments of the Earth you're trying to escape from.
Life on Earth is hard for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons -- debt, lack of employment, lack of opportunity, social unrest or civil war in the more unstable parts of the world. If you can start over somewhere else where it's possible to have a somewhat middle-class standard of living, it might not matter that much that the environment outside is harsh and inhospitable.
If life on Mars turns into a "work 16 hours a day, every day, to be able to buy your daily ration of CO2 filters from the company store" dystopia, then maybe everyone had better stay on Earth, but if we can at least avoid that scenario, then for a lot of people the prospect of being able to survive and have a stable job and a place to live and a community to be part of is appealing even if it's on a lifeless rock.
It's also not clear that Mars will remain totally dependent on Earth in the long term.
It will be pretty miserable for the first colonists. But that's true of any endeavor like this. Some goals are worth suffering for, even if the individual will never see the payoff.
And I don't like to begrudge people for their optimism. Optimism, well-grounded in a long-term vision, can be incredibly helpful in overcoming adversity on the way to audacious goals. In other words: fake it til you make it.
Busy people rarely get bored. We won't go to Mars for vacations, we'll go to establish a colony. Which means there are a myriad tasks that have to be accomplished on any given day. They'll have to make sure their equipment works in stellar condition otherwise they'll die, build new things, explore, grow plants and taste their food, run experiments, fix things, take notes of everything and report back to Earth, and the list goes on. And once they get there we'll keep sending them new stuff, and probably other people too, quite frequently. Mars is indeed a barren place but imagine being a geologist, it's like Christmas, you have a new world all to yourself to explore and learn new shit. That could keep you busy for a lifetime.
Sure, in the long term they might get depressed assuming a trip back to Earth would be impossible. And that's why we'll send mosty scientists. We want people who are dedicated and passionate about exploration and learning.
> First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity.
There's more difference between Alaska and the Equator than the extra 40 minutes Mars introduces, and there don't seem to be significant mental health issues from zero gravity on the ISS. Bone density, sure.
> I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there.
I know a geologist who's still getting super-excited over rocks ten years later.
> Across 89 shuttle missions from 1981 to 1998, US astronauts had over 1,800 in-flight medical events; less than 2 percent of these were related to behavioral health, largely stemming from “anxiety and annoyance.”
Everything in your comment presupposes a one way trip, which it doesn't have to be.
Furthermore, the idea isn't just to get there and whittle on your rocking chair until you die. There will be a plan to start building out facilities which is an endless task that will keep colonists busy.
I remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.
Isn't this essentially what the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is doing? Albeit they're only isolated for 9 months at a time, not years, but still:
1. They have a small group of 50 people. Issues with crew psychology and relationships are mostly covered.
2. They live entirely indoors in small, manmade habitats. They're actually under the snow in much the same way that Martian hab units would be under regolith.
3. They are autonomous. It's completely up to them to survive the winter.
Yes, they're not doing the full biosphere thing - they're surviving on rations brought in by airplane, and breathing the outside air after just heating it - but that's pretty close.
I also think of people on strategic submarine ballistic missile nuclear boomers. They're shockingly big boats, but the crews are in a limited space with a limited air supply and no views of the outside for 70 days at a time. I would be unsurprised if the public information on their maximum deployment times for crews (said to rotate out every 10 weeks) has been exceeded, and I'm sure the navy has studies on it. Also living off rations, but similar.
It's probably more conceivable and informative to try to grow rations in a lab using the constraints that would be placed on martian astronauts than to convince a crew to do the Amundsen-Scott experience or SSBN experience, but with also growing your own food.
Though I imagine after 8 months of Antarctic winter, a salad would sound pretty good...
I wonder how well the South Pole station would do if they got a only very limited supplies to start with, had to wear pressure suits outside, couldn't afford any air leaks and didn't get supplies for several years.
I'm not sure who down-voted you, but it's an interesting question. However, the South Pole station afaik isn't equipped with the means necessary for self-sustainability, such as being able to recycle bio material. Anyone with more info on this?
Also, it would be nice if we could make a self-contained ecosystem work on Earth before sending one into space. People seem to think this is a solved problem, but actually all attempts so far have lost their equilibrium pretty quickly, most notably Biosphere 2.
Yes it might cost as much as ONE real mars mission. The value comes from being able to analyze and fix all of the problems that occur in the experiment here on earth in real time. On mars many fixes will require a costly second trip or at a minimum a non-trivial time delay in even getting additional expert information to the site.
You want to send the best version possible to mars and not do your survival learning there. Some will of course be unavoidable but much can still be learned here on earth.
The continental margin and ice shelves are where all the wildlife is. On the interior ice sheet plateau, there are pretty much no animals or plants. Water is, of course, plentiful, albeit in the wrong phase of matter.
Another "advantage" of interior Antarctica is that, in winter time, it is difficult-to-impossible to actually get in or out of it. The Amundsen-Scott research base is isolated for three months of the year, although two medevac flights have been done in winter.
> Water is, of course, plentiful, albeit in the wrong phase of matter.
Well, since they mention that water as ice is actually abundant[1], it's probably good for testing out strategies for harvesting and purifying water effectively and reliably at the same time they are dealing with the other problems.
1: From the article: Water is a mix of hydrogen and oxygen and is abundant in the form of ice mixed into the top meter of the Martian regolith. Around the equator and up to 60° latitude it varies in concentration from 2-18% but further north and south it’s in even higher concentrations, reaching 100% at the north pole.
Actually that makes Antartic a better place to try. If there is a problem they use the food, water, and air available for survival. Then you learn whatever lessons needed and try again until you get to the point where you can live for an arbitrary amount of time there. Once you solve that problem you can move to the Atacama desert.
Of course since we are on earth either way a rescue plan is at most a few days away (generally hours but bad weather might stop your efforts for days).
I think that was his point. Antarctic is easier but I don't think we could make it work when you are not allowed to hunt for animals. Atacama is probably more realistic.
The Mars Society has been doing a reduced version of this for several years now with different groups of volunteers. I think they use two different locations, with one being in a Antarctic like location.
I've thought about a lot of things... think of the massive supply chain that would be needed to build semiconductors, for example. Or even something simple like... cheese. There's a reason Musk estimated that a million people would be needed for a fully self sufficient colony.
Semiconductors are one of few products that are so value dense ($/kg) that you can ship them from Earth for a reasonable marginal price. It's everything else with a long production chain (or very large upfront costs, like mining) that's infeasible to do on Mars without 1M+ people.
I imagine construction materials will be a right pain. E.g. concrete is right out, as is most metals, since you need a lot of carbon (coal) in the production process. Those two are pretty important in tunnel digging.
> E.g. concrete is right out, as is most metals, since you need a lot of carbon (coal) in the production process.
What you need to make steel is carbon, not coal. You need a lot of energy, currently supplied by coal in most blast furnaces, but electric arc furnaces work too and only need on the order of 2% carbon by weight.
We use coal for both energy and carbonizing the iron because it's a convenient source of carbon here on Earth. On Mars, there is no coal, but the entire atmosphere is composed of 96% carbon dioxide. If plentiful electricity was available from solar panels or nuclear RTGs, this could be split with electrolysis into carbon monoxide and used in metalurgy, or combined with hydrogen (extracted using electrolysis from water in the soil) to form methane or other organics. Or you can simply use plants.
You also have lots of aluminum oxide in the soils (approximately 10%), which is another useful metal that can be extracted using carbon from the atmosphere.
For most metals, some platinum (much, much less than coal) and electricity (much, much more than when using coal) are enough. It is steel that is the problem, but you can also make it (way more expensively) using atmospheric CO2.
According to many experts, this would be an easy way to shield humans from the radiation. A glass dome could also work but would be more expensive and could be fragile.
On the other hands, tunnels do not provide any sunlight but I don't know if humans can actually use the sunlight on Mars (so a dome might be necessary as an addition or completely irrelevant anyways).
The lower gravity than Earth bit sounds like the most debilitating thing about Martian colonization. One of the reasons why I think Venus cloud cities would be a better long-term bet for baseline humanity:
Nobody actually knows what an extended period living in 38% of Earth-normal gravity will do to a person. It seems probable that there will be bone density problems that might not be correctable with any existing drug or exercise regimen, but there's no evidence it will be as systematically debilitating as living for an extended period in microgravity.
We don't know. If the bones are "adapting" to a lower gravity, and stop getting weaker at some point, then it may be OK. If the bones are losing strength all the time, then it may not be.
And, of course, bones are not monolithic atomic objects but complex living things. Different parts of them may be described by either of those two cases, or others.
Well, your constant mass means that you will still have the same inertia when playing sports. I would expect pairs of fractured skulls, pairs of broken shins in soccer players, etc.
Maybe ... you can't run much faster, so i'd imagine it would be like ultimate aerobee[0] - i.e., minutes-long chases of errant balls with no other player within hundreds of yards.
That would be lame. Maybe, try massive multiplayer soccer, with an average of 1 player per square decameter? Now the captain's most important quality is management skills, and they might need a handful of squad leaders. I guess this isn't soccer anymore, but whatevs.
I've always dreamed of finding a field big enough and 10 people willing to play ultimate aerobee. If we can find 8 other people like us, want to rent a polo field?
One of the interesting arguments for colonization of Mars is that it could be a good place for old people with serious joint problems. There are likely quite a few people who would be in wheelchairs on Earth but could walk around just fine on Mars.
It sounds terrible to suggest sending your elderly relatives to an old folks home on Mars, though.
If you don't plan to return to Earth, the whole thing could conceivably be a win. Less bone density but considerably less wear on the joints. It's anyone's guess at this point, but it'll be interesting to find out...
So basically Mars would be a prison, with robots doing most of the work. Might as well just send the robots and leave the humans on Earth. If people want to live in a cave they can do that here.
Don't forget, that if you're unlucky enough to be an American (like Musk), you will still fall under the interplanetary/intersolar/intergalactic grasp of the IRS.
Even an 'offplanet' bank will fall under FATCA and FBAR.
Having your house covered in a few feet of regolith sounds like roofs and walls to me, not "living underground".
Windows will be hard. Maybe you could have them on the side facing away from the sun, but I think general cosmic radiation is also a big problem.
More realistically, you'd have "camera windows". A camera on the outside that displays an image on a screen inside of what you would see if there was a window there.
Very cool article! It will certainly be interesting to see how we get around these hurdles. The most interesting one to me was definitely the lack of being able to electrically ground anything, we will definitely have to design newer electrical motors etc to get around that!
It wouldn't really impact devices, it would impact buildings.
(for household service, ground and neutral are bonded at the service panel, grounding is a safety issue, not something electrical devices depend on to function)
And even those could be just inflatable doughnut plugs with a pair of inwards opening flaps. You could even squeeze the air out of the lock, against the user's suit, to avoid the need for a vacuum pump!
also a 100% flawless vacuum wouldn't be that crutial, there's an atmosphere and you can pump more oxygen into the base, and also have maybe more "sphincters" to keep the air in.
I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day.
Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the work at a lower cost.
> [Insects] can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day.
This is because of the square-cube-law. Basically, muscle strength is proportional to cross-sectional muscle area, while muscle weight is proportional to volume. So when you take e.g. an insect and start scaling it up, it gets heavier faster than it gets stronger, thus strength relative to weight decreases.
But: I'd seriously doubt that wasps can mine more than an excavator.
Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as about a million wasps). That excavator can lift 100+ kg with every swing of the bucket, so if you assume the wasps dig 30x their body weight, the excavator beats the wasps if it can dig more than 300 buckets in one day. That sounds easy - there are 480 minutes in an 8 hour working day, and a bucket each minute is very doable. And on Mars you'd have it fully robotic running 24/7.
Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there. There really isn't that much for humans to learn by going there in person. Those people will just have to stay in a tiny space for years on end without a lot to do. Think of what a bust the video game No Man's Sky was. People hated it because it was boring. But I'm sure exploring planets in that game was much more interested than Mars will be.
As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.
Settling to Mars seems so glamorous, but it really will not be a fun affair. It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.