I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the Earth's oxygen; most oxygen (50-80%) is created by phytoplankton in the ocean.
Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
I think it's a fair comparison if the point is to communicate to a lay audience. Most people have a reasonable mental model of how large a tree is, and the volume it occupies. Comparing the device to something like "the average daily output of 3000 deciliters of equatorial surface seawater" (made up comparison) is a harder sell. We'd have to fall back to comparisons like "4 football fields" or "2 school buses" worth of seawater - though it'd be an interesting comparison.
The issue with the a "tree's worth of oxygen" is that in people's mind a tree is very big, so this comparison gives the impression of a very large amount of oxygen is being produced, when, in fact, barely any is produced at all.
A better analogy would be anything that can be expressed in volumes. For this reason, "4 football stadiums" and "2 school buses" would actually be pretty good.
I think a better measurement would be something like "Enough breathable air for x people"... At least it instantly gives the information of how many machine you need to sustain x people.
I ran the calculations, 6 grams an hour seems to be about 15% of a single astronaut's oxygen consumption.
The planned larger machine they talk about, about the size of a chest freezer producing 3 kilograms of oxygen an hour, should be enough for ~85 astronauts. Though I assume that's also needing to produce rocket oxidiser for the return trip.
There was a guy who sealed himself in a "greenhouse" full of trees, he was trying to produce as much oxygen as he consumed, as well as scrub as much CO2 as he exhaled. It turned out he still didn't have enough oxygen/CO2 scrubbing, but it was enough to slow down his asphyxiation for a couple days or so. Unfortunately I can't find the YouTube video at the moment, but based on that video, I don't even think "10 trees worth of oxygen" is enough for an Astronaut.
> Managing CO2 levels was a particular challenge, and a source of controversy regarding the Biosphere 2 project's alleged misrepresentation to the public. [...] The crew worked to manage the CO2 by occasionally turning on a CO2 scrubber [...] In November 1991, investigative reporting in The Village Voice alleged that the crew had secretly installed the CO2 scrubber device, and claimed that this violated Biosphere 2's advertised goal of recycling all materials naturally.
> A mystery accompanied the oxygen decline: the corresponding increase in carbon dioxide did not appear. This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate in a process called carbonatation, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen.
But he probably isn't the only oxygen consumer in the greenhouse.
There will most likely be insects, bacteria, fungi; All which also consume oxygen.
On top of organic things, the Earth2 experiment famously ran into a problem where the concrete they used to build the biosphere kept curing long after construction finished, and kept sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere.
And don't forget to take into account that NASA's machine can produce oxygen all day, everyday, where trees stop producing oxygen at night, and over winter (and actually start consuming oxygen)
No, I don't think so. The numbers people throw around are generally not accurate as was discovered by that experimenter. So in general it should probably be avoided to describe oxygen production/consumption in terms of "trees worth", especially when it doesn't really account for any carbon dioxide scrubbing, either.
You are missing the biggest part of this. It doesn't matter if it's a lot of oxygen or a little bit. Because it's marketing to people who don't know and don't care exactly how much oxygen a single tree makes. It's just supposed to sound "neat" to normal people who vote and got a C in high school bio.
Yeah I have no idea how much oxygen a tree makes. How many trees would be needed to keep me alive in a sealed room? How big would they have to be? I have no idea…
I agree. The article says the device produces about 6 grams of Oxygen per hour, and some quick online searching suggests the average human needs about 840 grams per day. So 6 of these test devices should be sufficient for an average person.
It gives people a false sense of connection. How much oxygen does a small tree produce, over what period of time, what species of tree?
It's like someone saying, "hey I knew your cousin Dan". Nice, I have no idea of their relationship but they're trying to "break the ice" so to speak with an irrelevant tidbit.
I feel the goal of the comparison is to give people a quick heuristic, rather than a detailed breakdown. The article does say the device produces 6 grams of oxygen per hour.
In there any species of tree that would be intimately known to a global anglophone audience?
Well, that's the natural give and take when you need to address a global audience with unknown levels of background level knowledge on the topic, a tree is relatable and conveys a workable metric despite the values being unknown
that's the bottom line, it's meaningless without additional context. Because how many of us are familiar with the volume of a tree or how much O2 a tree produces. It's not even clear what aspect/property of the tree they're trying to highlight as relatable.
> I think it's a fair comparison if the point is to communicate to a lay audience.
It's not a very good comparison to communicate to a lay audience. A far, far better one would be in terms of "resting oxygen requirement of an average human."
Are you seriously insisting that you can’t believe that “small” tree doesn’t refer to a 40+ ft tall tree? Like to what end are you making this ridiculous point?
> I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the Earth's oxygen
They produce quite a lot of oxygen. The main issue is that they don't produce much surplus oxygen as they consume it too. And make no oxygen when the sun goes down.
> Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.
Yes. But then, these are living organisms that need to be cared for and fed. If there's a malfunction that wipes out your oxygen producing organisms, you have a big problem. You need to give them light, control the temperature and keep it in a very narrow range, provide them with water, nutrients, shield them from radiation, avoid contamination by other organisms, etc. Water and nutrients are not easy to come by in Mars, at least not yet. At this point, they aren't very different from a machine, it's just going to be a large bioreactor.
At large scale, they are probably still the best bet. But it will take a while until we have the proper environment for them. The good news is that, once there's such an environment, we don't have to ship tons of them. Let them replicate.
MOXIE is nice as it's a machine. You can store it away, bring more capacity online, etc. It can be added to both bases and vehicles (potentially suits(?)).
There is a fundamental problem with terraforming Mars; it has no magnetic field to keep the solar “winds” from blowing away the atmosphere. Humans will not be able to live outside on the surface of Mars, no matter how long we try to generate atmospheric oxygen without a planetary magnetosphere to divert the high speed ions escaping from the sun. At one point in the planet Mars’ life time it had an atmosphere and liquid water on the surface but now nothing that counts. The surface of Mars now has an atmospheric pressure of 0.0060 atm!
Perhaps we could generate a Martian artificial planetary magnetosphere, but I don’t know how.
In all honesty I think at that time scale it may be more practical to create a lifeform that does not depend on oxygen or water, and only needs sunlight for energy. It may have to be silicon based, and I use the word "lifeform" in a very liberal sense.
I thought it's more an issue of Mars not having enough magnetosphere to retain a decent atmosphere. Unless you're producing silly amounts of oxygen (outpacing loss due to solar wind etc.) it will never be viable.
On earth that was partly because the oceans absorbed a lot of oxygen. And then the rocks. Only once the water was saturated and the rocks had all oxidised did it start to build up in the atmosphere.
I feel like this is something you’d hear in 1500 about America.
“A forlorn land covered in crages and stormes, and wholly bereft of life giving aether, this continente of ‘Columbia’ is a kingdom moste unsuitable for a civilised Englishman.”
It had air, water, game, forest, and immediately arable land (cleared by people who had died in imported pandemics). It even had gravity. What does Mars have besides caustic dirt?
We have no valid reason to assume a pregnancy could be carried to term in Mars gravity.
Oceans may be a problem, but smaller saline pools shouldn't be.
Saline pools would have multiple benefits. Not only when kept warm could you use them to generate oxygen with phytoplankton, if you have to cut off power for some reason, they'll work as a great thermal heatsink, and they will not freeze as fast so they present less risk of piping damage.
Also, humans who come along are not going to be sterile. Seawater is friendly to a lot of different organisms. Any open system is going to be full of goo pretty quick.
> most oxygen (50-80%) is created by phytoplankton in the ocean.
True, but not the whole story. Phytoplankton did not create Earth's oxygen atmosphere but today is the majority producer of oxygen. Earth's oxygen atmosphere was initially created by cyanobacteria up to 3.5Bya and which today still produce about 10% of atmospheric oxygen.
The detail I am unsure of is what produced most of the current volume of Earth's oxygen. While phytoplankton today produces the most, that does not mean that most of Earth's oxygen was created by phytoplankton. My suspicion is that, though today cyanobacteria does not produce the majority of oxygen, that cyanobacteria in fact created most of the oxygen currently in our atmosphere.
Surely someone here knows for certain and can speculate on whether the idea of installing cyanobacteria on Mars is any good.
Let's sending all this melting ice water to mars and put phytoplankton on it. Let it be killed by solar radiation on mars than by human pollution on earth.
Technology is so unbelievably primitive compared to biology. They have to heat air to 800C to replicate photosynthesis! And they don't even get carbohydrates out of it.
Makes sense, our tech is a couple billion years behind.
They built a device around as big as a golden retriever, shipped it to a planet 130 million kilo meters away, and that device is generating its own electricity and generating as much O2 as a tree.
I don’t know man, I think that’s pretty advanced technology.
We went from room sized transistors to nm sized ones in less than a century. No way we will need a billion years to catch up.
Building something useful out of that would end up comically large.
I should probably qualify my "first transistor" statement; the device I was referring to is the first prototype created at Bell Labs in 1947. The first transistor that someone could actually buy to build a circuit out of came out a year later and was only a little larger than today's through-hole mounted transistors. They did get used to build early minicomputers, before integrated circuits took over.
Multiple decades of very slow progress in fusion, space travel -- and I dunno, almost everything else -- should be enough to make it clear that Moore's Law doesn't apply to every other technological endeavour.
There's no reason to assume exponential type improvements. That's not how the world works.
> no reason to assume exponential type improvements
Did we read the same article? This was a test. The full-scale version “would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees” with close to an order of magnitude more efficiency “because a bigger machine can run at lower pressures, saving energy on compression.” There are better reasons to expect exponential improvements than not.
The deeper point isn’t to compare mores law to all new technology but rather to consider how long it takes to get close to some fundamental limit. Early engines had horrible efficiency but that rapidly increased over time up to a reasonable fraction of hypothetical limits.
You see this all over the place, modern guns aren’t multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than the absolute earliest guns ever built.
So, when looking at a prototype the question isn’t can it be improved but by how much can it be improved.
Which is why Moore's Law was a thing for so long: early transistors were so many orders of magnitude off of fundamental limits that the improvements could keep up an exponential pace for a long while.
Moores law is still a thing, it’s just that the “jumps” between progression along the curve are longer. It will eventually reach infinity, but that’ll be awhile.
Aren't there also issues with some fundamental limits affecting the value of increased transistor density? Like we can cram the transistors in but the benefits aren't the same as before?
“Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
That’s a common misunderstanding, you can read the original quotes but to summarize:
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), who in 1965 posited a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. While Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
The speed of processors actually increased much faster than the number of transistors on a chip until recently. Smaller transistors used to mean both faster switching speeds and the ability to get more done per instruction cycle. The difference between the days of a 4 bit Intel 4004 and a 32Bit 486 was vast.
Those are weird examples as they exist under other umbrellas. Energy and space exploration. I would argue that we have absolutely made exponential progress in both fields, and it’s just perhaps not the exact type of progress you’d prefer. For example, solar would be under the energy umbrella so even if fusion hasn’t (or won’t) pan out our progress is still rapid.
Who said anything about Moore's Law up until this point? The person you responded to just said they see hope for the next billion (anywhere within that window, at least) years based on the last century alone. That's a pretty long amount of time to advance.
Not sure why you needed to rip them apart for words that you put into their mouth.
Transistor progress has been especially astonishing, but if you just look at the progress in basically all areas of living in the last 200, 1000, 5000 years there is absolutely no reason we won't see incredible further improvements in the next century. They don't have to be exponential doubling every 18 months. Steady incremental improvements compound just fine over decades.
I just don't see any of your opening statement being even close to correct given the context. There was even significant progress in space travel and fusion in the last 50 years (e.g. first reactors being net positive after startup and reusable rockets with commercial space flights).
> On Perseverance we use up to 300 watts to produce about 8 grams per hour of oxygen, which represents not much more than 10 percent efficiency relative to the amount of electrochemical power it actually takes to pull apart the CO2 molecule. ... It’ll still require a reliable power source, of course. According to Dr. Hecht, a nuclear reactor capable of around 10 kilowatts (currently being developed by NASA) should do the trick.
To me, this is not "generating its own electricity". The device is still an incredible accomplishment, even more so because it's operating on Mars. But it doesn't generate its own electricity. They still need to connect it to a separate energy input to run the reaction.
I want to clarify this just in case anybody skimming the comments gets the impression that chemically splitting the CO2 into CO and oxygen gas somehow produces enough energy to sustain the reaction without external input.
> They built a device around as big as a golden retriever, shipped it to a planet 130 million kilo meters away, and that device is generating its own electricity and generating as much O2 as a tree
Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is billions of years behind.
I'm curious: do we currently have bacteria that could survive in the atmosphere of Mars? My understanding is that it would require controlled conditions and monitoring to make bacterial growth feasible under those conditions.
Conditions that support Liquid water is only transitory there. So you’re generally correct.
Most extremophiles we’re aware of tend towards high temps or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity and water presence. Which don’t line up with Mars much.
We’d have to be managing the environment they grew in, which makes it hard.
The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and biochemical availability of that energy. Life ‘eats’ to survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and biochemically hard to access, it’s not a good environment for life as we know it.
That's the point. Eventually we'll get to the point where we'll be able to mass manufacture at the molecular or atomic level. Until then the best we can do is coax living things into doing our bidding. But as you point out, it's not a solved problem. The point of the parent comment was that we're not there yet.
One you send humans that you can't sterilize before flight you will inevitably introduce bacteria into the environment anyway, and you will not be preselecting them either.
Without liquid water in the upper few meters of the ground, the result is pretty predictable. I think there was some evidence of water at or close to the surface, but if I remember correctly only in salty solutions where the salts prevent the water from freezing at Mars temperatures. Maybe you could find some plant that can make use of that water but then the plant would still have to be able to control its temperature so that it does not freeze solid. I would not definitely rule it out, for that I know not enough about plants and Mars, but to me it seems at best barely possible. Which of course is still possible.
That feels like a disingenuous comparison. From what I can tell there is no living organism that could successfully transport itself to Mars, establish itself, and begin releasing oxygen.
Meanwhile,humans were able to solve that problem in a fraction of the time that evolution would take.
It's fair to say that we're millions of years behind the curve when it comes to creating usable energy from sunlight, however. That's an indisputable fact.
I suppose the actual comparison being made is this machine versus a living organism. As of right now, this machine is more capable of producing oxygen on Mars than any organism that we're aware of.
We burn dinosaur juice to make engines that burn distilled dinosaur juice to push an object 1/20th of the engine fast enough to escape gravity. To deliver an oxygen making device that weighs roughly a quarter of the engine that has the output of 1 tree to Mars will take a dozen launches.
There's no way this is scalable. Whatever innovation we produce here, has to be super light and super small enough to be economical.
We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in.
If there's an alien race that has discovered locomotion via warping the space around it (sort of like a bubble formed around an object under water allowing friction free movement) then our solution would be funny to them.
"So you dig up this dinosaur juice, you then, chuckles, light it on fire to push a tiny payload on top of it to put stuff in space?"
"Then your hope is to weaponize it so you can fight better wars and colonize other planets to dig rocks and ship it back home?"
All of this must be amusing and depressing to an alien race that has mastered space travel and then some.
And then the alien with a better knowledge of their own history and development will retort, "They are really no different than we were when we carried our food supplies around on our uppermost IR signaler organ. Given that they are almost asking the right quantum questions, they are probably within reach of that critical spatial dimension compression discovery that changed everything for us. I give them 2-3 more revolutions of Planet 9. Granted, based on our survey of other developing species, they do have a 26% chance of blowing themselves up in the process."
RP-1 is not the only type of rocket propellant currently used. Delta and Ariane for example use liquid hydrogen and you don't need to "dig up dinosaur" juice for that.
I find this common assumption that non-Earth lifeforms will automagically have found ways to break the laws of physics curious. Given the age of universe, it's highly likely that most other lifeforms will have developed within a rounding error of us, on geological time scales.
And as for ETs being peaceful zen wizards, the fundamental problem of resource scarcity would seem to be universally applicable. It's this resource scarcity that causes species which are good at competing to develop. So it seems likely that any species intelligent enough to become technologically advanced would have a history of belligerence similar to ours.
Thinking aspirationally about what sort of species we should strive to be is great. But I find the belief that, across the universe, humans are specially anti-progress to be a little silly. The laws of physics are universal.
I find the framing "break the laws of physics" to be curious. Does that mean the Newtonian laws of physics, which are enough to launch rockets but not enough to create the GPS network? General relativity is enough to create the GPS network, but not travel faster than light or connect two points in space without the intervening distance or whatever.
It's fallacious to presume that we -- or any other species -- will automagically find ways to beat the lightspeed barrier, but it's also hubris to presume that our current understanding is the most "correct" that it can be. Could there be some new sea change in our understanding of the world, that allows for things general relativity considers impossible or incoherent?
My understanding of the "peaceful zen wizards" trope was that if you've got the technology to cross the unimaginably big [0] gulfs between stars, let alone the gulfs between inhabited stars, you concomitantly no longer want for resources or territory in any way that civilizations of our Kardashev type [1] understand them. What's the point of belligerence, culturally, [2] at that point? And if you do want territory and mining and extraction and whatever, why not use a combinatorial explosion of Von Neumann machines? The only reason to send actual people would be to say hello to the locals and look around.
[2] I acknowledge that humans are genetically belligerent, but we can just choose not to be, especially in conditions of plenty. The fight is close, but culture ultimately beats genetics. I present, by way of example, the condom.
Something that's a rounding error on geological time scales is immense in the time scale of technological development.
The development of life took a few billion years to get to where we are now, so if for some otherwise equivalent civilization that highly random process took 0.1% faster or slower, then that makes for multiple million years of difference in development.
If we encounter another civilization, then it would be a wildly implausible coincidence if they happened to be close to us in technological level - say, just a thousand years or so; a more advanced civilization would be much more advanced - and we can see just how much things change in just a few centuries of technological development.
It's also pretty likely that any sufficiently belligerent species with access to technology at our level or greater will use that technology to destroy themselves in exactly those kind of resource conflicts, in which case the filter works in the direction opposite you claim here - only species capable of suppressing belligerence are able to make it to the stars.
Let's say we could use some sort of wonder technology that ETs gave us to take something as big as a container ship and send it to Mars for cheap. Well, now you got the resources of earth supporting two planets and not just one. That's not an improvement. Might as well live underground instead.
In theory, you would use Earth's resources to develop Mars to the point where it could produce resources, instead of just consuming them.
The goal is to send just enough resources that settlers can then create more of the products they need using the resources present on Mars. If you can (for example) figure out how to cultivate Mars soil to make it hospitable to Earth plants, you could turn Mars into a net exporter of food.
All of this is theoretical of course, but it's not implausible to assume that there's a "tipping point" past which inhabitants of Mars are self sufficient or can even export things to Earth.
How many millions of people do you need to be self sufficient for 3nm semiconductors on Mars? TSMC has 65,000 employees. ASML has 32,000 employees and 5000 suppliers. I think at some point the Mars project would reach a point where you hit a population ceiling because too much stuff that couldn't be made on Mars would have to be imported and there aren't frequent enough launch windows or cargo capacity to do it.
Because of that, I think it's more likely we'll build up an micro g manufacturing base. Manufacturing without super fund sites, and you can drop the finished goods in any gravity well that wants them, earth or mars.
Don't you think manufacturing semiconductors in deep space adds even more complexity on top of the already ridiculous complexity of doing it on Earth or Mars?
> How many millions of people do you need to be self sufficient for 3nm semiconductors on Mars?
At a guess, 23.19
However you don’t need the latest process node to produce most electronics. And integrated circuits are probably the last thing you’d produce off world.
I wouldn't get too hung up on the "dino juice" side of the equation. Global extraction is enough to fly a couple million of the biggest rockets every year and that's only counting dino fart extraction. Add in equivalent energy from dino juice and dino... cookies? and you'd be looking at somewhere above ten million rockets every year.
Fossil fuels are about the most scalable and scaled enterprise on the planet. They produce most of the energy to feed, house, and transport billions of people.
But at the same time this conversion is happening in an immensely smaller volume. Also it doesn't require constant maintenance of living conditions. There are always tradeoffs in engineering AND nature. For instance, trees tend to have to spend tons of their energy in order to get taller. This is mostly because they have to compete with other plants for sunlight. This inefficiency leads to much more waste product (O2) being produced and tends to capture more fuel (CO2).
Technology just optimizes for different things than nature. Otherwise the lander would have just carried a couple gallons of water and some algae.
The carbon monoxide is possibly more valuable than the oxygen.
It's a good feedstock for making hydrocarbons and petrochemicals and also as good a reducing agent as hydrogen for making metals. In fact you could use the CO to make, say, iron, producing CO2 which gets cycled back into the above reactor.
Even better, Carbon Monoxide can be used as a rocket fuel. Therefore MOXIE can completely generate propellant.
CO as rocket fuel isn't as effective as Hydrogen or Methane, but for the lower gravity of Mars it can still be useful for Mars-Mars transport or even returning to orbit.
since it partially burns coke to make CO which reduces FeO to Fe producing CO2. An alternate approach is to reduce FeO with hydrogen producing H2O. Either way this is likely to be a circular process in a space economy since volatiles like H2O and CO2 are precious.
He's talking about how elemental iron on earth binds to oxygen and that carbon monoxide could be used to reduce this but I have no clue wether martian metals are oxydised or not.
We think Mars had plenty of oxygen in the past, but because it's a smaller planet the molten core solidified. Without molten core no magnetic field, and without magnetic field most of the atmosphere was stripped away due to solar radiation, leaving only some heavy CO2 behind.
With that in mind, any metal ores had plenty of time to oxidize just like on earth. But metal from asteroids that impacted over the last two billion years or so should be unoxidized.
That's better than I expected. MOXIE was a small proof of concept. If it scale linearly, a device with the mass of the rover could produce oxygen for a few people.
> "The demonstration is only the beginning. A future version, about the size of a “small chest freezer,” would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees."
> "MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The machine then separates out the oxygen and expels the carbon monoxide, alongside other gases, as exhaust."
The real necessity is to make methane, assuming you want to launch rockets from the Martian surface. The presence of ice on Mars in some regions means this might be plausible: dig up ice/dirt, warm to generate water, split water, collect H2, mix with carbon monoxide to make syngas, pass over catalyst to generate CH4.
My thought here is surely it could be sufficient for Martian applications. In reality, rockets off Mars initially will be to return humans and Martian samples.
So such a rocket would be convenient if sourcing Hydrogen proves to be very difficult.
Long term we'd want to manufacture methane there, in the meantime people have drafted missions that just bring extra hydrogen to Mars and combine it with carbon on-site.
As always, whenever we have something like this people get overexcited for terraforming Mars. Or even living on Mars.
First, terraforming. This is such a monumentally massive task that it is almost beyond comprehension. The distribution of molecular velocities in a fluid is a Boltzmann distribution. The average of that is the temperature. Some molecules go very fast. In a liquid this allows them to overcome surface tension and gravity and become a gas. This is evaporation in water. In an atmosphere, a certain portion of the molecules are fast enough to escape the atmosphere and to be lost to space. This is called the Jeans escape energy.
The Earth's atmosphere loses about a million tons of gas every year. And that's fine because the atmosphere is many orders of magnitude more massive than this.
Mars has lower atmosphere and no protective magnetosphere from solar winds. This means proportionally more mass loss. The atmosphere would have to be so massive that you can afford to lose possibly millions of tons of it every year.
You can calculate how much energy that requires and it is massive.
So this brings us to creating oxygen for habitats. This is a way more solvable problem. Mars still has all the suual negatives:
1. A weak atmosphere, which is actually worse than no atmosphere, because it covers all your stuff in dust. Some dust storms last months;
2. The ground is toxic (eg perchlorates). There'd be no growing food like in The martian;
3. Low gravity;
4. No protection from solar and cosmic radiation because of no magnetosphere and (almost) no atmosphere.
So you can calculate the energy cost per gram of oxygen this produces and work out how much you'd need to create for whatever use (eg breatheable air, making water, making rocket fuel) and then work out how you'd get that energy. Solar is the likely candidate. I think you'll find the required footprint is massive.
Oh and cosmic radiation is important for life on Earth. Why? Cosmic rays are constantly hitting nitrogen in the atmosphere. At a predictable rate, some of these nitrogen atoms (7 protons, 7 neutrons) such that a proton becomes a neutron. 6 protons and 8 neutrons is Carbon-14. That's literally how we do carbon dating (because C14 is radioactive).
How feasible is it that Mars could become a mining outpost, powered by nuclear and solar, lightly staffed by humans, and mostly mined by robots, either autonomously or remotely from earth?
it is theorized that a single car sized satellite in mars Lagrange point 1 can emit an electromagnetic field large enough to divert solar radiation in mars down to about what we experience on earth.
This is amazing! Just scale this up, send a dozen or so of them to Mars for redundancy and you've got the first necessary life support system for a Mars colony. Really exciting stuff.
I built a CO2 filter for my house, a "bioreactor" full of algae fed by an air pump! It was a fun project, although by my napkin math, I'd need about 200 of them to offset the breathing my family does. Still a good proof of concept, and I haven't optimized the output at _all_.
Anyway, my point is - why do we need exotic technologies to convert CO2 to oxygen? An algae bioreactor can do it using decades-old and well-understood techniques, plus you can build yummy algae cakes out of the waste product.
> The algae didn't just convert the CO2 to O2, there needed to be an energy input for that.
Yeah, but from the article,
"MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide—which makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere—into oxygen and carbon monoxide."
So it's not as if MOXIE works for free either.
> mars gets less sun than earth
Yeah, about 43% as much. You can address that with mirrors.
Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control, salinity control, food sources, killing competing organisms, water intake and filtering, somehow shielding them from radiation (while still allowing sunlight!) and probably a billion things I haven't thought about yet. Mess it up and your organisms are all dead.
MOXIE sounds better if all you want is oxygen (and CO). Give it power and off you go.
> Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control, salinity control, food sources, killing competing organisms, water intake and filtering
lol, this comes across as FUD. Mirrors aren't high technology. They have no moving parts and do not require batteries.
Temperature control? Keep it the same temperature as your habitat, you should already have parts for that. Heck, keep it in your habitat. But algae isn't that sensitive, it can operate over a temperature range.
Salinity control is absurd, who's putting salt in the water and why can't you just tell them to stop?
Water intake and filtering? What? Dude it's essentially just water in a transparent container. There's no flowing or filtering.
Killing competing organisms? Algae is the competing organism, it can take care of itself, even if we brought competing organisms to Mars, which would be a silly thing to do.
I mean, maybe radiation is a factor, I don't know, but all that other stuff is not challenging.
And you're spending so much time inventing "challenges" for a simple algae farm, while just handwaving at a device that needs to compress the gas and heat it to 800 degrees celsius?
I'm not saying MOXIE won't work, or won't be useful in some circumstances. It's just that I don't understand why it's supposed to be simpler than tried-and-true alternatives.
I agree that making our planet livable is certainly much more important and we are very bad at that. But I don't see that researching livability on Mars makes us less likely to succeed on Earth. On the contrary, researching Mars livability probably has some probability of producing breakthroughs that could help us overcome our problems here.
Imagine for a moment we all stop what we're doing, crack our knuckles, and then REALLY clean our planet up. Clear the oceans of plastics, the sky of co2, the lands of garbage, and our hearts of consumption.
And then humanity gets wiped out by a rogue meteor. A rogue blackhole. A really bad solar flare. An object comes to our solar system and knocks us off our orbit. Our home is wiped clean in nuclear fire. Take your pick.
We have all our eggs in earths basket. I love earth, lets get the hell out of here though.
The technology that would allow us to survive on Mars could probably allow us to build self contained underground habitats that could survive a meteor, solar flare or even being flung out into deep space. Only something that actually resurfaced the planet, or destroyed it completely would actually require us to leave.
The most likely cause of Earth’s total destruction is our Sun turning into a red giant in a few billion years.
Being able to do something like this is important because being able to refill on-site means you don't need to bring enough oxygen with you for a return trip, but we should remember this is nowhere near sufficient to start terraforming the Martian atmosphere. The biggest issue is still the density. It is well, well below the limit at which human bodily fluids boil at normal body temperature. Getting the molecular mix right might eventually be a concern many, many centuries from now, but first we just need more gas at all. It doesn't help that Mars continually loses more atmosphere due to solar wind because it doesn't have a magnetic field, too. I have no idea what we could realistically ever do about that, but solving that is a prerequisite to ever having permanent colonies that don't need to live underground forever.
I think a turning point in my perspective as an adult is being hesitant to change. Current generations laugh at people who were resistant to telephones or something - but I’d certainly not want to leave Earth and live on the moon or Mars.
Question, while these Moxie things seem like they would be obviously good assets for a long term self sufficient base, is there any reason we can't just burn candles like on nuclear subs? I would assume that any effort to start colonizing mars would have to get the transport so cheap that shipping an absurd quantity of these candles is probably much more economical than a MOXIE unit?
> So, keep shipping a finite resource versus producing in situ? What if there's disruption in the logistics chain?
This point isn't obvious though. E.g. we'll likely be shipping them finite supplies of food. Supply chain disruption sucks but so is your MOXIE breaking down. MOXIE and 10 weeks of backup candles or 10,000 weeks of backup candles.
It's not obvious to me which is the cheaper / safer option.
We don't use them on subs all the time because subs don't have a lot of storage, and electrolysis is pretty easy to do.
"On the International Space Station, chemical oxygen generators are used as a backup supply. Each canister can produce enough oxygen for one crewmember for one day."
That's a lot of candles if you intend to use it as the primary supply for a multi-year multi-human mission like Mars will entail.
"An explosion caused by one of these candles killed two Royal Navy sailors on HMS Tireless" probably gives NASA engineers the shivers, too.
They have also been the cause of fire[0] on the Mir space station. They make for a reasonable emergency oxygen supply (no working infrastructure required), but you don't want to use them regularly due to the fire risk they represent.
This begs the question, with all the hoopla about CO2 on Earth... can this be used at scale to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere here? Or add a couple steps to create Sugar? This might be useful on mars but are we using anything similar here?
Can it be used here? Yes, of course, though you need to concentrate the CO2 in the atmosphere first.
Is it useful? Almost certainly not, just don't burn the hydrocarbons in the first place and use that nice concentrated source of carbon (and atmospheric O2), instead of burning oil and O2 to produce CO2, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere, and then unburning it.
Will someone do it here? Probably, SpaceX is saying that they will as a way to develop the technology and claim they're carbon neutral.
Yes, but (1) the atmosphere is a lot thicker here, and (2) we would need to power it with green energy. The combination of 1 and 2 means that we would have to build a lot of renewable energy infrastructure dedicated to doing this instead of using that infrastructure to replace fossil fuel generation.
If it makes sense at all, I think that it would make more sense to deploy a solution like MOXIE-at-scale *after* we have replaced fossil fuel power generation. There's an argument that says that the planet itself could clean up the excess CO2 reasonably quickly once we stop adding more.
I wouldn't man any mission to Mars with no less than THREE fully built MOXIEs and replacement parts to fully rebuild at least SIX. And it would still be extremely risky, since everything would be stored in the same proximity.
Different trees produce oxygen at different rates, due to difference in size and difference in species. Also even knowing about one standard tree doesn't tell you how many people it would support, for example.
Man minutes in a suit with controlled oxygen? Man minutes in a cockpit? Man minutes in open atmosphere? A bunker? A ship? Large man? Woman? Obese man vs fit? Golly this is as poorly defined as the tree problem isn't it.
> At the rate we're going, we'll need these on Earth soon :(
Climate changes and dangerous weather events aside, I don't think that things are quite as dire, in regards to breathable air. Well, at least outside of certain metropolitan areas in certain countries.
That said, the fact that we even have the technology to do this is good - if we ever actually needed to utilize it after the collapse of too many ecosystems, at least we'd have the option to try scaling it up, provided that the powers that be would deem it "financially viable".
Serious question: Why are we so focused on Mars? We haven't even made it back to the Moon once. We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic? Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?
But we are planning on going back to the Moon before we send humans to Mars. We haven't neglected the Moon for Mars, we just haven't done any human spaceflight beyond low earth orbit for the past 50 years.
I'd call that more of a design review than a cancelation. Obama tried to cancel the Constellation program, but because it provides a lot of jobs it was un-canceled and resurrected as the Artemis program. At that opportunity some changes were made: the Orion capsule got carried over, but the Ares V was downscaled to the SLS, but uses the same basic design; the lunar gateway was added and the landers were turned into a contract more like Commercial Resupply. But at it's core it's still the same "let's get to the moon on spare shuttle parts" concept, with many contracts simply carried over.
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like [...] the Arctic?
The primary barrier to doing this is politics, not the environment. Colonizing the artic would be a major violation of international treaties, and would certainly see you detained (or killed) by a hostile country. Wars have been started over much less.
People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting.
> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?
No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). We already have research stations in the arctic. We don't get to experience a different amount of gravity, different geology, different atmospheric chemistry, different (primarily a lack of) biosphere, or pretty much any interesting feature of either mars or space. Nor do we get any of the "backup population of humans" we would get from mars if we manage to make it self sufficient (admittedly a very tall goal), because the arctic isn't really isolated from the earth. Nor we do get the inspirational effects of going places we haven't before.
>People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting.
_Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with them, or traded for, to survive.
>> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?
> No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic does).
This is a remarkable claim. Virtually space projects have involved considerable rehearsals of different sorts on earth. Human survival in extreme environments isn't an easy or solved problem. It makes me sad if many people believe we have nothing to learn in these circumstances.
> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that would come from being on Mars?
You can’t get to the Moon by climbing successfully higher trees. This experiment might as well be Exhibit A. Mars has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This device would be useless in Death Valley or on the Moon. There is also a realistic chance of establishing an industrial base on Mars in a way that’s more challenging on the Moon and worthless in Death Valley.
The easy answer is because Mars has all the mindshare. Just as the USSR always had their ambitions of a Venus colony, the US always had ambitions of a Mars colony, which is reflected in popular culture.
The other reason is that humans closer to Mars would be scientifically useful. We don't have that many open questions about the moon. We had a couple manned moon missions doing lots of science, and with the moon being only a lightsecond away, you can drive rovers almost like RC cars. Mars is many lightminutes away, making rovers complex, costly and slow. Opportunity took 15 years to drive 45km. Manned lunar rovers have driven roughly twice that distance over just two years (Apollo 15/16/17). The amount of science we could do with boots on the ground would be incredibly valuable.
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic?
Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on demand a self-contained and functioning society is _extremely_ hard, even if we're trying to do it in pleasant environment where we don't have to deal with almost any environmental hazards. If we were able to do it successfully, allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer.
But Mars colonies are probably so far off that a lot of the difficulties are easy to ignore. NASA seems to do something similar to what a lot of tech companies do, where they tease tech seems to be just around the corner, but which they know actual implementation is very far away (remember Amazon drone delivery?).
> allowing people to just sign up and have the government create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country would be a huge game changer
It wouldn’t be super productive if it were self contained. Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.
Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_ difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment, dealing with the extreme lack of raw materials, and dealing with any specialized materials or equipment being months/years away and costing an exorbitant amount of money just to ship it over. Any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony.
Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are able to overcome the numerous technical issues.
> any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of resources just battling the environment…any self-contained government created "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output would be super productive compared to any Mars colony
I’m arguing those constraints are what will drive ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart, ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on the history of settler civilisations outperforming their home countries.
I'm not sure how we can square the idea that integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms, yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll actually start to become very productive again. You have to believe that a hermit kingdom would both be more productive if it was more open, and simultaneously believe that it would be more productive if it was even more isolated.
I don't believe settler civilizations outperform their home countries across the board. Certainly there have been many that failed. Successful ones tend to be in places that offer a lot of natural resources, often even surpassing the home country. But of course, the opposite would be true for Mars.
> yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll actually start to become very productive again
A Mars colony wouldn’t be a hermit kingdom. It would be isolated, but there would obviously still be dependence on followed by trade with Earth. Recreating that mix of semi-isolation and adversity on Earth strikes me as silly. Even if you got the mechanics right, what’s the attraction for the denizens? What keeps them there when the going gets tough? What are they doing and seeing that they fundamentally couldn't in more comfort?
I think it's mainly that Mars has an atmosphere, which helps shield it from radiation and asteroids, regulates the temperature, and creates weather like wind and even carbon-dioxide snow. The Moon basically doesn't have an atmosphere, which makes it a much harsher place to survive.
Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be very important to a long-term human colony.
I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on expanding industry into LEO and to the surface of the moon? We have no mining capability and no capacity to gather resources off-Earth with the intent to build anything with them. We can't even make fuel that I know of. We haven't even increased our LEO population beyond the ISS and Tiangong, with the capacity of at most a dozen people living in space at any one time.
If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess.
Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.
If Starship works as well as it'll need to work for a Mars mission, it'll effectively have enabled Bezos's approach as well. That much mass to orbit that cheaply changes the game entirely.
Bezos may chafe at having to buy rides on someone else's rocket.
> We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the Arctic?
McMurdo Station [1] in the Antarctic is generally self-reliant/self-contained. Regular shipments of things like diesel, of course, but it also sees a sometimes surprisingly large residency (Wikipedia points out it can support around 1200 people at times) for what people generally consider a "small" science installation, and it has been in perpetual, year-round operation for decades.
McMurdo is not at all self-reliant. Everything from food to fuel, from clothing to electronics, from tools to entertainment comes from outside. It is the exact opposite of self-reliant, it is completely dependent on the outside world.
It's always going to be a semantics battle over details of how often those shipments occur. We aren't going to build a moon base or Mars base without some expectation of regular shipments either. We aren't going to string them along without at least some basic lifelines in place. "100%" "pure" self-reliance of a "colony" has never happened in the history of humanity and likely never will. We're too social of a species to do that.
McMurdo is about as self-reliant as we might reasonably expect any moon base or Mars base to be in the short term. The details of shipping schedules among the closest on this planet to those thrust upon us by the economics of orbital mechanics in space projects.
It's absolutely not perfect self-reliance. It's still more self-reliance as an example than we are likely to find elsewhere on the planet and "good enough" for complaints that we aren't "ready" for space colonies because we haven't done enough of the homework. We've collectively done at least some of the homework.
It looks like they get annual shipments. That requirement seems like it would be a show-stopper for Mars, right? I mean we can queue up shipments so that they get a constant yearly train, but there will be times where the trajectories to Mars aren't very favorable I think...
McMurdo is useful at least as a science mission, in the sense that it studies a part of the planet that humans live on. There is basically an infinite number of empty, dead rocks out there in space -- we shouldn't waste research focus on this particularly large one that happens to be nearby.
For McMurdo: is there a situation where neither the US nor New Zealand (partners, run the next nearest Antarctic base and technically "control" the land McMurdo is on through wild politics and loopholes in political treaties) can send supplies?
It's an interesting exercise, certainly, but the kinds of doomsday scenarios where that is likely to occur, humanity as a whole may have much larger concerns than if the people stranded at McMurdo might survive.
Planning a space base certainly has a much longer list of not even quite doomsday scenarios to consider where contact/supplies/cargo runs are all the more infeasible. You can't account for all possible scenarios, but what are the threat models worth concerning about when all of the nations with spaceflight capabilities and all of the private corporations now with spaceflight can't and/or won't help out if humans are stranded on a base in space without possible contact? What are the cases where problems on Earth dwarf any humanitarian missions to space? I'm sure there are such threat models. I certainly don't know enough about them to talk to them to any detail. It's a bunch of entangled, interesting questions. Preparing for those scenarios may not necessarily require, a priori, expecting a base to survive with absolutely zero contact from the rest of humanity for extended periods of time. We may be able to assume a baseline of contact and know that breaks from that baseline risks the lives of people. I don't know. What's the threat model?
> It's an interesting exercise, certainly, but the kinds of doomsday scenarios where that is likely to occur, humanity as a whole may have much larger concerns than if the people stranded at McMurdo might survive.
it's not a doomsday scenario, it's just what it means to be a colony. if it can't keep itself alive it's not a colony, it's an expedition.
obviously people are always moving around and moving stuff around, but a colony that can't produce any of the necessities of life just isn't a colony.
it produces enough food for the people there with surplus for disruptions to food production? because that's a basic part of what i think of as colonization.
Actually yes, I am more excited with Venus. Good pressure,nice temperature, all kinds of gases in the atmosphere, metal is missing, but this could be sent from Earth.
Not in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and atmospheric densities are close to Earth-normal.
I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need to go down to the surface you don't need extreme cooling systems.
If you did want people to be able to live on the surface it is kind of an interesting question how you'd manage it. Presumably there'd be ample wind energy available if you can just build a wind turbine that doesn't melt in that environment.
Keeping things aloft is costly too! But the solar radiation should be favourable there, there might be a solution where you have a solar powered aircraft that always stays on the illuminated side of the planet.
Yikes. How are we supposed to construct the floating cities? Mining Venus is out of the question with non sci-fi tech, even if all we wanted was to make, say, concrete.
If something happens to the floating cities, the "fall" would be a horrendous fate.
Temperature isn't "nice", would still be around 160F high up.
Importing materials... at that point why not just make space stations?
An enclosed bubble of Earth atmosphere would literally float in Venus's atmosphere with about 6x as much lifting force as hydrogen has in Earth atmosphere or 10x as much as helium. As long as you can breathe, you don't fall (though "sink" is probably a better word for it than "fall").
We couldn't even stay in our own houses a week or two early in Covid days. There's absolutely zero chance more than four or five people can be on a rocket ship long enough to get somewhere and do something.
I don't think NASA is all that focused on a Mars colony.
The general public has some interest because Elon Musk is "good" at twitter and advertising, but not a ton of interest.
I'm not sure why Musk is focused on Mars, I think you need to do a ton of drugs to get into his head. Or it might just be that he needs a big picture goal to help motivate SpaceX.
Mars is not a good target for colonization. It is just an inhospitable rock. A big pointless gravity well. Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself. Plus the view is better, and you can go fly to somewhere more interesting like the Asteroid belt.
> Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more habitable than Mars itself.
A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make building materials and rocket fuel.
The asteroid belts are probably worth visiting too, but I can understand wanting to go to Mars. It's probably the most Earth-like environment in the solar system excepting the Earth itself.
It is not possible for any modern technological society to be "perpetually self reliant" with a population of less than a few hundred million people. And that's with access to a planet's worth of resources. Hell, it wasn't even possible to have a bronze-age civilization without international trade. One of the reasons the transition to iron/steel based civilizations was so widespread was that there's a lot of iron ore and it's spread out all over the place.
It turns out that resources are not evenly distributed. There are only a handful of locations where it is economically feasible to gather or mine some elements. And until we have techno-magic replicators that can turn energy into matter, this problem will remain.
No colony 100's of thousands of people is going to be self-sustaining on Mars. It's simply not possible. They will always be dependent on Earth.
Mars is more dead than earth will become in the next centuries. And even if they were in the same state, earth would still be the better candidate for fixing up, simply because it's in the habitable zone. And this all ignores the fact that we won't be able to bring a significant amount of humans away from earth, ever. Even transporting a village-amount of people will be still absurd expensive in the next decades.
The thing I don't get is: I have to imagine that no matter how badly we screw up Earth, any technologies that we build to allow us to survive on Mars could just as well be used to make Earth "livable" again for less cost. Worst-case, it's pretty much the same thing without a rocket launch.
I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to colonize Mars.
Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up.
I think we should be focusing on establishing a space industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars. And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find that we don't need planets anymore.
I don't know if you've taken a look at Mars yet, but it's already dead. It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying.
> It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying
Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a technology problem. Our species is better at the latter than the former. In any case, the aims are far from competitive.
Perhaps. The problem of course is that as soon as there's a human on Mars... it becomes a human problem too. There's the dynamics between the humans there. The dynamics between the humans there & here. The dynamics between the people left here supporting the humans there.
Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to have a situation where everything is super tense all the time due to every little thing being both life & death and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems the literal instant after the first major success of the technological solutions occurs.
> Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment they step foot on Mars
Settler sociology is different. People who self select for that risk mode are different. The proximity of mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
But, once sufficiently populated, how do you prevent Mars from becoming a human problem just like Earth? This is one area I'm cynical around: I don't think we have the means to adjust human psychology at the rate we can adjust technology.
As the below comment alludes to, maybe the answer is keeping a sufficiently bottlenecked society to force that psychological change. But then you're not really recreating the parts of society that people are worried about losing. You might as well start a self sufficient commune here on Earth.
this is the conclusion I keep coming to also; anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth.
I guess that's not sexy
but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it terribly if leaving became the only option.
So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars as longingly as we do.
We should look at it about as longingly as as an offsite backup for critical data. If you only have one habitable planet, you have none.
There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity.
There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
Mars’ atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per operating cycle [2], it also means you aren’t superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has no use on Earth. It’s tremendously useful on Mars.
> anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth habitable
This is fundamentally false for the device this article highlights. Different chemistries.
> you’re telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be captured or reused: then that is likely also true of mars
It’s not. There isn’t oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense. Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].)
Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them a good environment to do so.