> Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth.
> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.
Poor understanding of physics are exemplified everywhere these days. It's tiring seeing so many armchair experts trying to take over the discourse with their incessant posturing.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
The Mariner 4 probe showed that there were no canals on Mars, and no open water, by 1965. Quayle's knowledge on the subject was over two decades out of date at the time, and he was supposed to be in charge of the space initiative.
Quayle was not a smart man, even by the standards of politicians.
Well the details sure, but the general concept ? I have no idea of the basic reproduction number / R0 of any common virus, but I remember the idea of it. Although now that I think of it it's probably a terrible exemple since if people remembered that concept they wouldn't question herd immunity of vaccines.
Here's a snippet from a Feynmen talk[1]. He was discussing Latin America, but I think this passage applies equally well to secondary education in the US today:
> First, and most serious, I believe, is the almost exclusive teaching and learning by means of pure abject memory. This in no way teaches physics as a science. Nothing is understood; it is only remembered. This in no way satisfies the reasons I outlined for teaching science. Memorization of laws does not permit one to make applications of these laws to new situations; it does not permit one the pleasure of ultimately making scientific contributions; it cannot teach any techniques with the hands. From memorizing, knowledge is not understood, and the beauty of nature is not appreciated. It does not tell how things were found out, or reveal the value of an inventive free mind.
> For example, the telescope is an interesting device to make, understand, look through, and play with. It turned men's ideas and minds in new directions. It gave a great impetus to the modern revolution of thought. For a long while it was the sole revealer of the vastness of the heavens and man's modest place in it. But, in Latin America one learns that there are four kinds of telescopes: the Newtonian, the Cassigranian, etc., etc. In the first, the image is virtual and inverted, etc. (I put in all this "etc." because I really don't know how many kinds of telescopes there are, or what their names are, or which way the image is in each kind. But don't underestimate me; I know a very great deal about telescopes – how they work, how to make and use one, their powers and limitations, etc.) The result is that the telescope is lost. There is no more telescope, no lenses, no stars, no eyes, no light – just words memorized without requiring understanding. The examination is passed, for the question was "What are the four types of telescopes?"
> I must say immediately that I am not against memorizing. Some things, even many (though nothing special) may be learned by heart; for example, it is good, but not essential, to know by heart 7 x 8 = 56. What I oppose in any teaching philosophy is that the philosophy is used exclusively; but in this case it is especially serious because so little is left of the subject.
> ...
> When asked what Brewster's Law is, advanced students answer in a flash: "Light impinging on a material of index n is 100 percent polarized with the electric field perpendicular to the plane of incidence if the tangent of the angle of incidence equals the index of refraction."
> To these same students I then say, "Look out at the bay from which the sunlight is being reflected. If I look at that reflection through this piece of polaroid and turn it, what will happen?" All I receive are blank stares. No one knows. But I get cries of surprise and delight when they try it and see the reflections getting brighter and dimmer.
> This shows something is completely wrong. There is no knowledge whatsoever of nature. With the wrong entrance clue the memorization is useless. These students are like books, no more. I can look in the index of a book under "Brewster's Law" and find a reference equivalent to the students' reply. But in the index I cannot find "sun reflecting on bay."
> What do the students know that is not easily and directly available in a book? The things that can be looked up in a book are only a part of knowledge. Who wants such a student to work in a plant when a book requiring no food or maintenance stands day after day always ready to give just as adequate answers? Who wants to be such a student, to have worked so hard, to have missed so much of interest and pleasure, and to be outdone by an inanimate printed list of "laws"?
Honestly talking about him and his companies is very controversial on HN between the for and against, but I would disagree with you; on almost every PR and marketing pieces and talks he tends to take insane shortcuts.
Those that are used to hiking the Himalayas could live on Mars with a little extra pressurization and some basic filtering. It doesn't seem that unfeasible.
That’s one of the things I’m curious about regarding the Curiousity rover’s RTG. How efficient is convection cooling in order to maintain the thermal gradient to generate electricity?
It has radiator fins, so I assume that’s the main form of cooling over radiation; but with such a thin atmosphere I wouldn’t have that it could take away that much heat.
Many deep space probes in vacuum have RTG's as well (like Voyager), and they can radiate the heat just fine. Also, over time of course the amount of power and heat they generate lessens.
help me wrap my head around that. If you’re in -40 in a low pressure atmosphere, it doesn’t cool you down faster because there’s less mass for your heat to transfer to?
Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?
Heat transfer happens by heat conduction and heat radiation, so even in a vacuum you will radiate heat away in the form of infrared photons, at least if the vacuum is not at a higher temperature. Heat radiation is however a less efficient process then heat transfer in a sufficiently dense environment. That is also an issue for spacecrafts, they need rather large radiators to radiate away excess heat into space.
If you place a thermometer in space sufficiently far away from all heat sources, it will eventually reach 2.73 K, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background. I am not sure about the correct terminology but at least in some sense this is the temperature of outer space.
That is why I said that I am not sure about the precise terminology. But it still does not change the fact that an object placed in the vacuum of outer space will eventually reach the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, i.e. the temperature of the electromagnetic radiation filling outer space. Also not that I am not talking about any vacuum, I am specifically talking about vacuum of outer space.
Also no perfect vacuum exists which renders this rather irrelevant for discussing what happens in real situations. I also did some reading to figure out the correct terminology - it is certainly correct to say that a perfect vacuum has no thermodynamic temperature as it is defined by the state of motion of the particles making up the system you want to assign a temperature to, however I am still not convinced that it is wrong to associate a temperature with a vacuum based on the electromagnetic radiation filling it.
You keep repeating a point I never disagreed with, a perfect vacuum has no thermodynamic temperature. My issue with that is that I think it is a too narrow viewpoint for the comment I initially replied to. If one understands temperature as what a thermometer measures, then the temperature of a vacuum will be the temperature of its walls, it will not magically show »undefined« because you insist that temperature means thermodynamic temperature.
You say you don't disagree but you keep disagreeing...
I made a simple, yet fundamental statement. It's either true or false. There is no need to argue as if you had to out-do me in any way.
Vacuum cannot have a temperature. This follows immediately from the definitions.
This also means that the temperature of a vacuum's "walls", by which I'm guessing you mean particles in 'contact' with the vacuum, is just the temperature of these particles. It's not an indication of any "vacuum temperature".
Vacuum cannot have a temperature, by the definition you are using. This makes it useless for certain tasks, such as determining the temperature an object within a vacuum will stabilize at over time. Thus, we use a different definition of temperature - because saying 'the temperature an object will stabilize at' every time instead of 'temperature' is really wordy.
You seem to agree with me since you explain how 'temperature' may be assigned to vacuum as a fudge. This is a dangerous thing to do as equilibrium temperature does not depend on the vacuum itself but on any radiations present.
Try to look up the definition of temperature and you will see that it is not as simple as you think. One possible definition defines temperature as the partial derivative of the internal energy with respect to the entropy. Why wouldn't that be applicable to an ideal vacuum or a radiation-filled vacuum? Maybe it is not, I am neither a physicist nor particularly knowledgeable in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, but it is - at least to me - not obvious that it is not applicable. There are also generalized definitions of temperature applicable to system of few particles, i.e. not relying on the statistics of many-particle systems, which sounds like it should be applicable to any real vacuum as any real vacuum will never be perfectly empty.
You lose/gain heat through conduction and radiation. Eliminating/reducing the atmosphere or making it out of something less conductive or lower specific heat reduces the speed at which the vibrating molecules of your body transfer kinetic energy to or gain energy from the molecules of the surrounding environment.
The vast majority of heating/cooling that people experience in their day to day lives is done through conduction from the earth's atmosphere so in most situations you'd lose heat more slowly on Mars even if it is colder. It's kind of like the difference between being in cold air and cold water.
You lose out on convection and your heat loss has to be almost entirely through black body radiation instead. Astronauts have to work harder to stay cool than to stay warm, especially if the sun is shining on them.
One of the major sources of headaches for designing satellites is thermal management.
In fact, during some weeks of the year the Space Shuttle could not visit the International Space Station because at the ISS inclination, the Shuttle would have spent too much time in the sun. The ISS, Space Shuttle, and other satellites have large radiators to cool them down.
That is correct, things don't cool down easily in a vacuum. Overheating is a problem on space vehicles. Thermal drinking bottles use a vacuum layer to keep heat in.
So windchill is better interpreted as you will lose body heat as if it were this temperature without wind, but the actual temperature is still the same?
Pretty much. You lose body heat at a rate that depends on the temperature, air pressure, wind, humidity, and maybe more, for example the thermal emissivity of the objects around you (and of yourself).
If you set air pressure and humidity to "standard" values, and wind to zero, you can express the combination of other values as if they were a temperature, and call that windchill.
Of all the variables wind is most important, since the rest don't vary very much on earth. But air pressure does vary on Mars, and thermal emissivity varies in space.
The way I see it, there are two goals to human space travels.
The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.
The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
I honestly think that both of those are weak reasons.
The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own time scale. The second is just not compelling; space exploration is hardly the only endeavor that produces spinoff technology, and it's far from certain that it's the best or most productive way to do so.
There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
I honestly think the first one mentioned will become a "primary" reason as soon as the first largish "came from the direction of the sun" doomsday asteroid slams into us, and makes us rethink some of our priorities.
Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".
You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).
Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.
I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" - and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.
We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.
> There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
Individuals may think like that, but I think you're downplaying the Space Race. There was immense fear of the Soviet space domination, it was seen as an existential threat. If there could be only one goal driving us to those furthest horizons, it'd have to be conflict.
From the same speech as your quote:
"For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding:
JFK to Congress
"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth"
To get a self-sustaining Mars base working and to be able to leave the base and go back to Earth would require some real nifty engineering and automation. Stuff that would transfrom the Earth before lift-off.
Think about it. To get off of Mars, you have two options really. Land the take-off rocket with the fuel in it or land it dry and then fuel it up. Landing a take-off rocket wet is super hard, especially on what amounts to virgin regolith. Fueling up the rocket means you make the fuel on the surface and transport it to the rocket. Also, super hard.
Supposing that you did manage to find a good pocket of the raw materials that you need for the fuel, you still have to have astronauts do that mining, or you need to invent reliable robots to do that for you. Such robots would completely transform the mining and resource extraction economy of the Earth. Then you need to get that fuel to the rocket somehow. Again, either you use astronauts or you invent a hell of a self-driving tanker, which, again, transforms the lives of all humans on Earth. There is the other issues of building the landing pad, the job site for mining extraction, the issues when the fuel spill everywhere with Earth 8 lightminutes away, the scientific issues of just mining willy-nilly into the regolith, the static electricity issues of super dry and thin air, yadda yadda yadda. Even with astronauts on Mars directing all the chaos, it's a nightmare of logistics and black-swan events to refuel a rocket.
Like, comparing the Apollo missions to the eventual Ares missions is foolhardy. The tech we got out of going to the moon is going to seem like brightly colored wood blocks compared to the F-35 that is the tech the Mars missions require.
I mean still, you gotta have robots handling fuel on an alien world and you still gotta land the rocket on something other than some random patch of dirt. Yeah, you can engineer things this way and that, make the rocket land on just about anything solid, reduce the fuel you land, make robots that are more reliable or expendable. Anyway you look at it the engineering challenges are massive. No matter what you're going to try, it affects Earth much more than than the way Tang and freeze-dried ice-cream did.
On what pad are you going to land the rocket? You've got to at least level the ground and clear it of debris before a landing. That's gonna take some big construction equipment, even in 0.4G, likely not with a human anywhere near. Likely, you'll need to pour something akin to concrete for the pad, which is not an easy job for a suited up human without any real rad protection. Robots are going to be a major part of any Mars mission as Mars is not a great place to be outside and doing skilled labor.
Being able to sustain human life with minimal inputs is a ridiculously useful trick if we can pull it off. It could be an answer to environmental threats. learning how to survive on Mars could teach us how to live on earth.
I can get behind that, but really we ought to colonize Antarctica first (as in, with a self-sustaining colony). It's a much easier target and still presents significant challenges.
Sadly what I know of humanity tells me that we won't do that without ruining it to drill for resources like oil, so I say let's leave at least one place untouched back here on earth until we have a backup plan somewhere.
Who knows! Antartica used to be super moist and wet, so the oil resources may be there. I mean, if you can find a way to get under the mile of ice, there is likely to be a lot of resources just sitting there for the taking. It is an entire virgin contient afterall.
There isn't the forcing function of being really hard to get there, so it doesn't interest people to build self contained habitations on earth. It was tried a few times without much success, for example with the Biosphere project.
To be fair, Biosphere was a bit of a planning disaster. It was not meant to be a trial run for a self-sustaining greenhouse per se. It was more of a 'save the earth in a nano-way' project. They had a rainforest section, a desert section, etc. They did learn a LOT about plant biology, weather interactions, and microbiota, though mostly via failure, which was still SUPER useful.
However, just building something like Biosphere was incredibly difficult and laor intensive. Trying to do that constuction on Mars would be a LOT more difficult still.
The author is listing facts about Mars that are pretty basic and well-known in the first two paragraphs and proceeds to talk in generalized terms about how we will never get around these obstacles. These are all basic facts about Mars that the engineers working on these problems know very well. Simply listing these facts as proof that colonizing Mars will never work seems overly pessimistic.
Well, I agree there is not that much merit in the article for pointing out the obvious, but if the emperor has no clothes someone needs to say it.
The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.
PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.
If you watch the opening credits of The Expanse, you'll see the moon is almost entirely populated, yet if you look closely at the Earth shot, Tibet is basically dark.
Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!
Or we could colonize the southern Pacific ocean. It's virtually empty of human habitation and although a permanent colony will be difficult to establish, it's still orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than Mars.
Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our environmental issues here on Earth into an even bleaker perspective.
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
Getting, say, a million people to escape velocity would not be significant in terms of greenhouse emissions, compared to the ~8 trillion revenue passenger kilometres flown annually (which itself is a tiny fraction of global emissions).
Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
Excellent points. I want to follow up with some back-of-the-envelope math on this later, if I have time. My intuition was that it takes a whole heck of a lot of fuel to get someone to even LEO velocity. Would love to see how that corresponds with air travel.
This is the true reason. Although, we should have the ideological goal of colonization, as a failsafe option to prevent extinction.
Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)
Not to be "that guy," but I think the real reason we'll never colonize Mars is simply that we're going to run out of time. Climate collapse and/or nuclear war will probably set in long before we have the technology or wherewithal to terraform a planet millions of miles away. We may be only a decade or two from severe environmental catastrophe, which makes the prospect of Mars colonization pretty far-fetched at best.
To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.
Robert Zubrin figured out a plausible plan to put a colony on Mars, yet the article fails to mention Zubrin and his Mars (Semi-)Direct plans.
Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.
However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.
"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.
Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.
These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.
Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.
As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.
So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.
>The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.
About Antarctica and colonization, yes, I agree it is not colonization, but then again it cannot be, since no-one can live permanently in Antarctica because of the treaties (ATS).
"Oil rig workers" or not, if people on Mars would live there until their old age and death, I'd call them colonists. If they are there on a 3 year rotation, then nope, not colonists.
(As a side note Antarctica would be the perfect place to learn about eventual self-sufficient space colonies in an environment which is a softer version of Mars, without complexities around airlocks, suits, oxygen and the omnipresent sand etc.)
Earth has limited and dwindling resources but Mars is still completely untapped. Then again I have no idea what could be so rare or useful to actually drive the colonization of Mars. I mean maybe something like that exists already, but I just don't have an idea.
Headline is speculative and unprovable since "never" is a very long time and there's no reason to think we are any good at predicting the far future.
But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.
I mean, I think it's fairly obvious that we will never be able to colonize Mars perfectly. It would require constantly sending massive amount of supplies from Earth to Mars.
The atmosphere is too thin, and the planet itself is too small to maintain a real atmosphere. Even if we terraformed it using science fiction technology, most of the atmosphere would escape into space so it would require constantly producing this atmosphere, requiring a lot of off-planet resources, which is fundamentally impossible.
In addition, the lack of strong magnetic fields and Van Allen belts means that cosmic rays would kill everything eventually.
If you think about all the things that were likely considered improbably or impossible in 1800, I think it is clear that the possibilities of life in 2219 are not to be assumed from present conditions.
Everything they object to can be dealt with, including radiation and low gravity. If close to 1 G turns out to be necessary for human health, we could build cities as inclined racetrack centrifuges.
Given enough energy, we could not only make fuel in-situ, we could even make plastics out of the Martian atmosphere. In addition, Mars had geologic processes which would produce mineral ores. An entire human civilization could be started on Mars. Historically, this would be analogous to the founding of the United States, just without the smallpox and killing-off the people already there, also starting from more desolate conditions. (Instead of just starting agriculture and industry, we would have to start biospheres.)
It brings up many interesting challenges and unknowns of living on Mars, but it comes across as a naysayer's rant. Humans are capable of (and perhaps wired for) incredible personal sacrifices for the sake of exploration and progress.
Nothing in the article will stop individuals from trying, only government policy can stop that.
The fastest and easiest way to colonize space is to advance cybernetics to being able to transfer a human brain into a machine one. At that point, you can custom-build any kind of machine body designed for pretty much any environment, saving the trouble of adapting to the new environment through genetics (messy, slow, difficult to test) or bringing the environment with you (terraforming, purpose-build earth-like facilities).
Good on the article for outlining a lot of the issues with this, though I don't think enough time was spent on the mental aspects. We're adapted to live in a certain environment - a different one with different, more boring light, minimal plants, extreme temperatures, no area to roam, etc., is most likely going to be a miserable experience for all involved.
"Transfering" a human mind isn't necessary. If we can create a machine mind capable of similar cognition to a human one, then that's close enough. It will effectively be our offspring.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Okay, but that's the experience in an atmosphere that is 100X thicker than that of Mars. :)
Mankind is basically too poor and too stupid at the moment. Building a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require not only tremendous amount of resources, both material and intellectual, but also a transfer of knowledge - which will be impeded by the current legal framework, i.e. copyright laws, for example.
But I do agree with Musk: we must colonize Mars in order to survive the next extinction event.
Mostly too poor and perhaps lacking better engines - we really need nuclear propulsion at the very least (with concomitant big amounts of radioactive material) to not spend a year in space just getting there, which could cause damage, physical and psychological. Or maybe some form of suspended animation.
We cannot really build city sized ships, not yet. That'd require huge space stations.
Self sustaining architecture is one thing, getting it scaled up is another - and relatively hard.
Plus design so as to not cause problems related to living in confinement or in dreary space.
This necessitates at least village scale if not a bigger city.
Other than higher gravity, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't? Both would need highly artificial habitats, with either a steady supply chain or a closed ecosystem, to support human life.
"Poor" and "stupid" aren't helpful terms. The reality is we're heavily disorganized and stagnant, stuck in a scarcity mindset - leading the majority into lower level survival mode behaviour. Leaving it up to capitalism to advance innovation has been interesting, successful, however that doesn't specifically create leaders or organization necessary to solve holistic issues; it certainly has lead to creating pools of wealth especially as automation has occurred, and not being distributed well or fairly. This mess is quickly fixable with the right policies, leadership - educating the population to vote for that, while making sure elections are secure, are foundational supports of that happening; I hope for the world Andrew Yang wins US election, and that the FBI's warnings, along with Mitch McConnell's efforts to block measures securing elections, aren't realized into "Trump" being placed.
But is it really an issue? Were there experiments in low and microgravity on animals? Even then, a third of G is nowhere near as much of a problem as say microgravity or even lunar one sixth.
I'd expect this specific thing to not be a problem - birth may need some assistance which we already know how to do.
How good an analogy are marine mammals? Whales gestate in water, I’m assuming neutral buoyancy isn’t the same as weightlessness when one gets down to the details.
Perhaps aquatic creatures might adapt better to an extraterrestrial environment: Squids in Space!
Underground is the only way to live on Mars. So if you can find people on Earth who want to spend all their time underground (with no external food/water/air supply network to fall back on), you have a start.
The next step is finding people who want to live in a permanent totalitarian technodictatorship, given that one small act, say a minor hvac compromise, is all that it would take to kill everyone in the Mars colony within hours. Seriously, on Mars, the consequence of the smallest criminal action is colony genocide. Think of the social and legal consequences of that. Presumption of innocence is too expensive when the consequence of crime is everybody dies.
You can be selective about who you take, but only so long as it's a small group. I'd hesitate to call it a proper colony if there's no way they can ever raise children there.
Some people barely want to birth on Earth, where there's freedom and opportunity and sights to see and a very vague threat of potential modest temperature increase where you can just walk away at a snail's pace from the climate change threats. I wonder what kind of people would want to raise a child in underground technodictatorial Mars colonies
They'll need tunnel boring machines to carve out new space, and enough equipment to bootstrap production of everything. That's a lot, but then they could branch out and groups could conceivably split off.
The title should really read "Humans Will Never Colonize Mars (using current technology, that is)"
Just imagine what happens if, finally, we are able to set off a bunch self replicating drones that will collect materials and fuel from across solar system and set it off to deliver raw materials in the direction of Mars. We might not even need Mars, we would just build platforms in space.
It is not really that inconceivable. The solution isn't outside the realm of physics. It really is just a bit of programming (not even AI) and kind of technological moonshot program (ie create a system of space factories that can gather and process raw materials up to the point where they can replicate themselves, creating also a bunch of drones that can scour solar system for raw materials and deliver variety of them to the factories).
I see no technical reason for why Mars could not be home to humans, or even an economically self-sufficient society, in the future. That said, it is inhospitable, and once the first people have set foot there, I see little reason why it would be more attractive a place to live than Antarctica.
A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self-sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nuclear energy and hydroponics, yet even this isn't being done.
I will say that there are +7 billion human beings on this planet all requiring their share of resources. We need to do this. Nothing wrong with a dissenting pov in good faith. That is part of the process and how these kinds of things work.
This article was illuminating for me because it makes me second-guess my own projections of the future; the idea of getting so lost in the hows and whens of a conceptual challenge that you forget to ask why.
I'm not sure I want to live in a colony that's some 1%er Libertarian's personal playground with no rule of law beyond what he sets. Turns out most laws were written for a reason, and going through the pain of re-discovering the reason for said laws over and over again doesn't sound like much fun.
Honestly, I agree with the author. We'll set up a few bases, it'll take decades, and by the time we come close to having the technology to make Mars somewhat inhabitable we'll have discovered a more hospitable planet and have the spaceship tech to get there.
Assuming you are talking about extrasolar planets: Outer space is far less hospitable than mars, and the timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard the ships traveling there for an extended period of time.
> timeframes involved in getting to even very close stars means living aboard the ships traveling there for an extended period of time
At our current level of technology. Colonizing Mars is likely 50-100 years away, within that time frame it's very conceivable that we might develop the ability to travel between stars quickly.
There are only 11 stars within 10 light years. None of the exoplanets yet discovered around them are expected to be more habitable than Mars.
This puts a hard lower boundary of 10 years for travel to an earth-like exoplanet. If we limit the craft's acceleration to 1g, add a couple of extra years (about a year to hit 0.9c at 1g acceleration, and then the same amount of time to slow down on the other end).
Going off a tangent here, but global warming is pretty much our alpha-version of terraforming other planets.
We also have to be clear what the end goal is for being on Mars. Is it to have a permanent research base or an actual livable planet where you can go outside and not die without a spacesuit. They're radically different.
The memory limit of a CPU is based on the address lines. The 8088 and 8086 have 20 address lines permitting 1 MB of RAM. Of course more can be banked utilizing an MMU. So the 640K limit was not imposed by the CPU. The system designers needed some memory for ROMs, video memory and other I/O. They decided 384K was needed for those things, leaving 640K for user RAM.
But the 1MB limit for address space was the hard constraint. 640kb was not a number invented out of the blue by some MS designer. It could have been 800kb or 900kb, would that make a difference?
If this George Dvorsky fellow were a software developer, like me, he would be smart enough to know that technology advances exponentially, in all fields, all the time. If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better. Anyway, that means that all technological problems will be solved sometime in the next few decades. We probably won't even need to do it ourselves: now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us.
I disagree and actually think humans are very prone to overestimate how quickly certain technologies will develop. A good example is self-driving cars, which are still years – if not decades – away from being truly production-ready. I'm not even close to being an artificial intelligence expert, but I know its current capabilities are extremely limited and we are nowhere close to having a general AI; we don't even see a feasible theoretical path to get there from where we are today. Getting a computer to conduct abstract reasoning is very hard.
Well that's obviously wrong because some people used to think that a computer would never beat a human at chess. It follows logically that no one can ever overestimate how quickly technology will develop.
The form of your argument is that some people were wrong about a subset of X, therefore the opposite attitude of those people must be true for all of X. That's clearly not a valid argument.
"If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better." Really? There's collaborative editing, but in the end it's still just a writing tool. It's not like Google Docs can write my progress report for me.
"now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligence that can solve every problem for us." So we have machine learning that can do decent image recognition if you feed it massive dataset. How does that get to general AI? What, exactly, is the dataset I'm feeding a neural network to…live on Mars?
Machine learning is exactly like human intelligence, only less powerful. We know this because GPT-2 can't count, and babies can't count either. It follows that all we have to do is use more powerful hardware, and then we'll have general intelligence, which is the same as super-intelligence.
Intelligence is the only thing necessary to accomplish any task. We left the the so-called laws of Physics behind at around the turn of the 20th century. Medieval peasants would call cell phones impossible, so it logically follows that actually nothing is impossible.
> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.