The ingenuity (and accumulated knowledge) of people never stops amazing me. "Well, we can't actually drill into Mars to see what it's made of, so let's slap a marsquake detector on the surface and we'll measure seismic energy from meteor impacts to figure out what this bad boy's guts are made of." Of course no NASA person actually talks like this; I have been reading too much Heinlein.
Also, they use the term "marsquake". Never stopped to think about how geocentric the term "earthquake" is!
As the article shortly touches on, it's how we know what the earth is made out of too. Our deepest borehole reaches 0.2% of the distance to the middle of the earth, most of what we know is instead from measuring seismic waves from earthquakes.
My question is, if we were to dig a hole to the centre and carve out a sphere there, would the very central point have no gravity?
My thinking is that the mass is in all directions so the gravity would cancel out in the middle. You’d then have an inside surface you could run around on which would have gravity.
Yes! In fact, as you go down the borehole, gravity will decrease linearly, until it reaches zero at the center. Strictly speaking, not quite linearly, since the earth’s density is not uniform. Thinking of the earth as made up of concentric shells, it turns out that once you’re inside a spherical shell of uniform density, that shell contributes zero to the gravitational field. Outside of it, OTOH, the shell produces gravity as if all its mass were located at the center.
One of my favorite fun facts is that if you were to dig a frictionless borehole to the other side of the world, you could hope in, be accelerated towards the center of the earth, decelerate on your way up to the other side, and pop out with 0 velocity 42 minutes later.
Now, this is the fun part, the 42 minute time frame is true for using gravity to coast through a straight hole between any two locations on Earth's surface!
(Assuming a perfectly uniform density sphere and no friction on your journey of course)
It’s fun to think about, but frictionless means you’d have to pump out the air. So you’d need to wear a space suit, and heat shielding. It’s kinda hot down there.
"... For here, at the very center of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was collossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless ..."
Some people call Hacker News the "Orange Site", but of course that's way too fruit-centric, so we shouldn't call it that -- the website banner is not actually a citrus fruit at all!
Or can we just accept that orange-the-color is a fundamentally different idea than orange-the-fruit, despite the fact that the former is named after the latter? Can we accept that "earth" can simply refer to the material that makes up the hard surface layer of a planet, as a different idea than "Earth" the planet after which it's named? Is that OK? Do we really need to come up with a new word for "Solar Power" if the power comes from a light source other than our own sun? Can we call the large-scale geoengineering of Mars "terraforming", or must we insist that it's "marsaforming" (and not "geoengineering", but "marsoengineering")? Can we call something "romantic" even if it isn't actually written in Latin ("from Medieval Latin rōmānicē, Vulgar Latin rōmānicē (“in the Roman language”, adverb"))? Is that OK with everyone?
..how did the words 'marsquake' and 'geocentric' set you off so badly? None of your examples even loosely fit the mold, 'terra' and 'geo' don't refer to a specific planet in this context at all.
Marsquake is a fun word. You can also call it an earthquake and no one will bat an eye.
I'm not sure why I agree with the op, but I do. I think it has something to do with the fact that this convention of planet prefix, and geological activity suffix is not going to work well at astronomical scales. Epsilon-eridani-c-quake is kind of a mouthful, no?
It could be argued that doesn't work very well on a human scale either. after all when there's an earthquake, barring a civilization-ending apocalyptic situation, it's not the whole Earth that's quaking (at a human scale perspective), but rather a localized crustal region of it. A patch of earth (lowercase).
> 'terra' and 'geo' don't refer to a specific planet in this context at all
Although originating as basically meaning "dry land", the word "Terra" became a proper name for the Earth in Latin around the Renaissance. The prefix "Geo" comes from the Greek for "Earth", the name of our planet. If you argue that "geo" really just means "land, ground, soil", etc., then you are exactly agreeing with me, since the word "earth" went through the same evolution: Geo-the-planet was named after geo-the-dirt. Earth-the-planet was named after earth-the-dirt.
If we start retiring Earth-centric terms too quickly, we'll have to invent tons of planet-specific cognates: not geography but marsography, lunagraphy, etc. Same with Sun-centric terms vs other star systems.
I would suggest going for generic terms like "planetquake".
My whole point is that "earthquake" refers to the material called "earth", meaning
"dirt", or "soil", or "the material making up the top layer of a planet", and that we should stop making up new words for everything that remotely shares an origin with the word for the name of our planet. This is my entire point. We should not be beholden to the origins of the word (and even if we were, we still don't need to rename earthquakes that happen on Mars).
So you say: "geo-" and "terra-" don't refer to a specific planet in this context and I agree with you. That's the point. Neither does "earth-" in "earthquake". Are you trying to make the argument that "earth-" in "earthquake" refers to the planet Earth (rather than the material), unlike "terra-" and "geo-", or are you just completely agreeing with me on everything? I'm having trouble telling which is which.
Lets reset then and try to get to the root issue; your characterization of this as someone insisting is a total buzzkill, do you have to treat this like a bizzare moral pronouncement that you must denounce? If you can be chill about marsquake then I'll swear by all the fruit you can name to defend the use of 'earthquake' as correct regardless of the planet being discussed.
That raises an interesting question, is the surface of Mars made out of mars, or is it made out of Earth? In english, capitalizing a noun clarifies this, but that approach may not generalize to other languages.
Yes... and? Do you think that's problematic here? Why?
Language is pretty robust and we're able to deduce a ton of meaning from context. The term by itself is already used to refer to earthquakes. For all the other things that quake, we don't need to prefix them with the quaking entity to understand the meaning. You aren't going to say that someone was humanquaking in their boots so that people understand that the person wasn't actually experiencing anything on the Richter scale. Similarly, if I mention a quake on Mars, it's pretty apparent I'm not referring to Mars trembling in fear.
> Can we accept that "earth" can simply refer to the material that makes up the hard surface layer of a planet, as a different idea than "Earth" the planet after which it's named? Is that OK?
No, the planet is named after the substance, not the other way around.
Of course I agree with you, which only strengthens my argument. But anyone who thinks we need to make up words like "Marsquake" clearly disagrees with you, and those are the people I am arguing against. It was a preemptive concession to ignore that point -- even if earth-the-material were named after Earth-the-planet, there's still no need to abandon the thousands of earth-related words as soon as we step foot on another planet. I felt that if I argued "Planet is named after material, therefore it's an earthquake" people would have missed the more important argument. (Not that any of this is particularly important.)
Not a bit, but maybe sport? I truly believe everything I said, and I believe it's a solid argument against a practice I see as silly and unsustainable: replacing any word that sounds superficially related to the name "Earth" as soon as the events are happening on some other planet. I'm saying that whatever reasons you use to avoid "earthquake" because it's on Mars, the exact same reasons mean you should avoid the term "romantic" to describe something that isn't written in Latin -- this shows the reasoning is deeply flawed. Basically a proof by contradiction. I hope that came across?
But of course I realize it's completely unimportant. Arguing is fun. It's not trolling: I'm not trying to get a rise out of people. Nor is it a bit: I'm not kidding or falsely representing any of my beliefs. I'm just having a bit of sport arguing with strangers online. If you see someone online making passionate arguments about minor word-use issues, or which superhero would win in a fight, or whether the Byzantine Empire was actually part of the Roman Empire or not, you're witnessing the same sport, and you're free to engage or not as you choose.
They're probably referring to this photo [0]. This effect was actually due to the fact they were on the spacecraft in motion, but it's apparently possible to have an earthrise near the edges of the Earth-visible portion of the moon, because the Moon isn't completely stationary relative to earth:
> Because the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, one side of the Moon always faces toward Earth. Interpretation of this fact would lead one to believe that the Earth's position is fixed on the lunar sky and no earthrises can occur; however, the Moon librates slightly, which causes the Earth to draw a Lissajous figure on the sky. This figure fits inside a rectangle 15°48' wide and 13°20' high (in angular dimensions), while the angular diameter of the Earth as seen from Moon is only about 2°. This means that earthrises are visible near the edge of the Earth-observable surface of the Moon (about 20% of the surface). Since a full libration cycle takes about 27 days, earthrises are very slow, and it takes about 48 hours for Earth to clear its diameter.
Kim Stanly Robinson also hits on this in Red Moon. Someone is emotionally invested in having a particular plot of moon where the earth peeks out through a gap in a crater wall during the wobble.
Sure, in the sense that the Earth can never leave a small fixed area of the sky, that area of the sky generally doesn't include the horizon, and the Earth cannot be seen to move at all except over very long periods of time.
In other words, not only are they not the same, they are not similar in any way, nor is "rise" an applicable term.
I thought the "reason" mars has no magnetic field is that its core solidified a long time ago. How does this new finding affect understanding of Mars magnetics?
Earths core spins slightly faster than its surface. If Mars core is locked with its surface speed because it is more viscous then this may kill the field generation ability.
Recently, it has come to light that the relative rotational speed of Earth's core seems to have a decades long cycle of leading and lagging the surface.
I mean the moon has to have some effect, right? Given the effect it has on the oceans, it must have some effect on a liquid core as well. It's actually surprising that it's not the number one suspect for causing/ generating Earth's magnetic field (whatever the mechanism) when you consider that Earth is the planet with both the relative largest magnetic field in the solar system, and the relative largest moon. Not to mention, most of the planet's surface is covered by an electrolyte.
If both Mars and Venus have liquid cores and not much in the way of a magnetic field, it seems like there must be more to it, and it's likely to be one (or a combination) of factors that makes Earth unique in the solar system.
Amazing to me that this billion dollar plus mission (InSight) is now offline because of dust on solar panels. We’ve had solar panels more than four decades now. I don’t assume the challenge is easy, and know that dust is endemic to Mars, but think of the impact from solving this problem on longevity of future missions! After establishing a habitat, Mars visitors need to revive all the offline experiments with a hanky.
That’s why nuclear is the meta. They’re too scared to use it regularly but it’s perfect. No maintenance and guaranteed power for decades.
The problem with solar is it’s really easy if you have a settler there, they just wipe it. But trying to get a robot to wipe itself means dealing with all kinds of edge cases. What if it’s windy and the wiper snaps off, what if the wiper gets jammed with dust, what if the wiper scratches up the panels.
The push for humans on Mars is deeply misguided. The same resources should be used to send many more probes and for far longer durations. After 100 years of deeply mapping all available resources, then maybe send humans if a long-term colony is self-sustainable and necessary for deep space exploration with better propulsion technologies.
Edit: Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Surprised people seem confused on the necessary and sufficient conditions. Show me that robots can set up a self-sustaining colony with self-generating resources to get to other worlds, and that’s a legit “backup” plan. Otherwise we’re just arguing about edge cases with no viable solutions. You don’t need humans on Mars to show what’s possible.
People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies aren't about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions. Yes, it would be a better use of resources to set up a colony on Antarctica first. But who cares about that? It's not that interesting or inspiring to anyone that doesn't already care about space travel.
A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history. It's exciting. That excitement is what inspires people to get involved (and governments to fund projects.)
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he gets a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him saying something to the affect of "take a look at the pioneers of space exploration. Note down their age. Notice a trend? They all grew up during the apollo programs! Why? Because sending a human to the moon was exciting. How many people do you see today with posters of the rockets that carried Perseverance or the rover itself versus Apollo or even the Shuttle? We must put people in space, not because the science demands it, but because of the impact it will have on society."
Sending humans to Mars isn't about exploring Mars. It's about the impact this would have on society as a whole. Suddenly, there's another planet out there that we care about and focus on. Perhaps wars on earth seem just that much more petty? At a minimum, it will likely inspire a whole new generation to explore the cosmos.
* Neil has his flaws, I get it, but I've sort of come 360 on him. His exuberance is contagious and as ambassador for space exploration, his approach does have a certain "public resonance" to it that I've not seen from others even if he tends to embellish things...
> NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he gets a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him saying something to the affect of "take a look at the pioneers of space exploration. Note down their age. Notice a trend? They all grew up during the apollo programs!
That doesn't make any sense at all. The "pioneers of space exploration" would obviously include the people who did Apollo [and Sputnik, and Mercury, etc], and they obviously did not grow up during the Apollo program, unless NASA has a time machine they're not telling us about.
Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c of what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent, the shuttle. According to NDT, budgets and education enrollment has been down because of a lack of enthusiasm and this lack of enthusiasm is b/c we no longer have people EXPLORING the frontiers of space (the IST doesn't count).
> Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c of what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent, the shuttle.
1) that "TODAY" is a pretty important qualification, and 2) it's a stretch to call those people pioneers. I live in the American West TODAY, but I certainly shouldn't be labeled a "pioneer" like the people who moved to this area 150+ years ago.
I think the word is being stretched a bit, but not much. Space is not inhabited by any meaningful number of people, and very few have been, so for the foreseeable future anyone simply leaving Earth could be called pioneer - among the first to explore a new area.
No idea who NDT is, but I'm kind of afraid that doing something like a Mars mission too early will turn out having the opposite effect. With the tech available for a soon-ish to launch Mars mission, chances are pretty high that something would go wrong catastrophically, there's just so much complexity that cannot break down for such a long time under extreme conditions, we're not ready for that. Watching the people we send there die slowly and horrifically isn't going to be a rational "we knew the risks" thing for the general public, people will be horrified and it'll put a big damper on future endeavors of this kind. I'd expect manned spaceflight to be pretty much dead for decades after that.
Exactly this. The current hype for a human on Mars is repeating the mistakes of Apollo then the Shuttle. By contrast the public has absolutely been engaged in what rovers and telescopes find.
I feel like spacex is the only group that has a chance at landing on mars this decade, and Starship is exactly what we’d want if we were trying to make a self sustaining mars colony right?
> A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history.
I'm actually skeptical about that. It certainly would be the "single most watched event in human history" among geeks interested in space, and probably among geeks in general and nationalists of the country that did the landing, but I suspect it's a biased projection to extend that attitude to all of humanity. Objectively, it's likely that stuff like the opening days of some war or the 9/11 attacks would be more watched than a Mars landing.
The first human moon landing is among the top 5 most watched television events, topped mostly by sports events (and possibly the rescue of the rescue of Chilean miners).
Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or terror attacks.
> Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or terror attacks.
IMHO, that makes my point much stronger. If sports got higher ratings than the Moon landing, it's a clear indication we're in a bubble that inflates the importance of and interest in space exploration.
Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be impressive that something so abstract and distant was able to rival something so elemental and popular.
> Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be impressive that something so abstract and distant was able to rival something so elemental and popular.
My only point is I think geeks over-estimate the popularity of space exploration, incorrectly generalizing "it excites me/my type" to "it excites everyone/humanity." If regularly-held sporting events eclipse singular events in space exploration, it deflates high-flying rhetoric that expects the latter to be "the single most watched event in human history."
I make no comment on the importance of sports. But I'd argue that professional sports are probably more abstract (ultimately counting according to some arbitrary rules) and (practically, in a human sense) about as distant as space exploration.
The global population in 1969 was about 3.5 billion people, and I imagine global TV adoption was much lower at the time as well. Even if 60% of people alive at the time watched the moon landing, a sports event today would only need to be watched by ~30% of the global population to eclipse it.
I agree that a televised Mars landing would be the most watched televised event in history.
I think it would be comparable to the first moon landing. Even if it wasn’t as big, the population and access to video has drastically increased. It doesn’t seem crazy to me that a few billion people would watch it live/within 24 hours.
> I think it would be comparable to the first moon landing. Even if it wasn’t as big, the population and access to video has drastically increased.
Though that introduces the problem that you're not really measuring what you're talking about, sort of like how lists of the "highest-grossing films of all time," are mostly about inflation and not popularity.
> As the motion picture industry is highly oriented towards marketing currently released films, unadjusted figures are always used in marketing campaigns so that new blockbuster films can much more easily achieve a high sales ranking, and thus be promoted as a "top film of all time",[24][31] so there is little incentive to switch to a more robust analysis from a marketing or even newsworthy point of view.[30]
The first landing would be the most watched event.
The sixth landing wouldn't pull anyone away from this week's Monday-Night-Handegg game. The sixtieth would be fighting for ratings with Charlie's Angels.
I’d question even the interest among geeks. Recall the observation that the rationalist or new-atheist community of the early millennium declined just as social-justice rhetoric rose: people were shifting their interest en masse from one thing to another. I think geeky Westerners are so focused right now on social and political battle within Earth society that space exploration would draw no more than a "that’s neat" response before the discussion in their bubbles went right back to the usual.
Everything you say can be applied to the history of humans on the Earth’s moon. 50 years later you’ve been proven wrong. Robots are better and cheaper at space exploration and humans being in the loop have only made things more expensive and more risky. The failures of human space adventures have made things much harder on space budgets. See also the Shuttle program, after Apollo.
But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon since the initial landings, so it’s not surprising that interest has dried up. There’s no colony, no space casino resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial achievement.
The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.
That’s neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.
And the average person has almost no interest in it, except for world-history events like the first landing on the Moon. The first landing on Mars would be a similar event.
The last 60 years have shown the interest is there without humans AND having humans in the loop dying have deeply impaired progress based on limited resources and their allocation.
Everyone who actually has to make a mars colony work.
Because, yes "yearning for the vast and endless sea" is certainly more poetic than figuring out how to make beams from tree trunks.
But without lots of people who think alot about trees and carpentry figuring out how to reliably produce good quality beams and techniques that allow for them to be fitted together into a hull that won't break apart when hit by the first few waves, no amount of yearning will result in a working Carrack.
> human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history.
Probably. And now imagine the reaction of all those people watching, when the landing vehicle crashed and exploded, or the Astronauts died horribly from thirst or starvation.
That's why there are people who care about building a sustainable colony in the arctic dry valleys.
May I suggest that people who say what you say also do not understand one thing?
To get excited about watching one man eking survival on Mars, you have yourself to be quite far away from any concern for your own survival here on earth.
To say it differently, this is very high on Maslow's pyramid.
For reference maybe check out Gilles Scott Heron's "Whitey on the moon"...
> People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies aren't about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions.
On the contrary, many of us agree very much with this. Mars is not a practical goal at the moment and it doesn't make sense from a resource perspective.
What might be more exciting, I think, is to develop such a well-functioning, resilient terrestrial society, such an abundant, adaptable community of life, that we could realistically take ourselves and our companions to Mars and hope to persist there. But that takes a lot of know-how, a lot of materials and energy, and (most importantly) a lot of wisdom.
Is a species steamrolling its paradise of a homeworld's living fabric really capable of planting a viable colony on a dead planet?
So we risk a human dying 40 days from help and severely overcomplicate the mission just for the public to not care even a tenth as much as they did during the apollo era. I wish we had a space program that didn’t rely so much on sacrificial heroics and building of a public myth.
You can get humans on Mars with a big effort. Fine. Now get them back off.
Simple hand waving shows it's a really really hard thing to do. Let's assume current rocket science. You somehow have to get a fueled launch vehicle off the surface. The gravity is less, ~3/5ths, so it's a lot less fuel than on Earth, but it is still a lot of fuel. Somehow, without nearly any infrastructure and in a near vacuum, this rocket has to successfully get off of the surface. We can see that it's really hard to do this just on Earth with huge hangers and loads of experts and tools on standby. Doing this on Mars with a few astronauts and lord knows what sort of repair and maintenance facilities is just going to be a lot harder to pull off.
Fine, sure, now let's assume that we've somehow managed to have improved the science of reliability engineering to the point that we can just have fully fueled rockets just sitting on Martian dirt for years on end [0]. How do you get that rocket down from orbit? Like, how do you land that much fuel? That's a really hard problem to solve. Sure, fine, lots of little payloads all over the place. But then you have to have some sort of industrial machinery to go retrieve all those fuel pods and then load up the rocket. Who or what are going to drive all over Utopia Planitia to grab it all and then handle fueling? Astronauts? AI? Whatever it is, it's really expensive and has to be really safe. Why not build the rocket on Mars too?
Any return from Mars requires sciences and industry that we currently do not have, full stop. Iterating our way to that future is possible, but is currently outside of our skill sets. A lot of money and time is going to be needed to get to return missions. Ideas that this mission requires also upset the state of current industrial manufacture, repair, and maintenance here on Earth. Not in a bad way, mind you, but those techniques are miles beyond what we currently can do and will very much change the future of Earth just as much as it changes Mars.
[0] By the by, do you have any idea what that science will do to our Earth based industry? Nothing will ever break ever again!
I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is exactly why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It requires doing things far beyond our knowhow, which historically is the best way to actually get something done – inspire towards an impossible goal and humanity can make it happen. You generally don't make technological leaps by pursuing things you know you can do already. Even if we don't make it happen, we are guaranteed to learn a plethora of useful things along the way.
Needing "a lot of money and time" is irrelevant. Money is a fiction and time we have in spades. Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads? Or maybe it would be better if, instead of designing Martian space-suits, we spend more time designing fast-fashion clothing meant to be worn once or twice, basking in hitherto unimagined heights of navel-gazing.
> I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is exactly why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It requires doing things far beyond our knowhow, which historically is the best way to actually get something done – inspire towards an impossible goal and humanity can make it happen.
You can say the same thing about literally any other hard problem, most of which have a far better ROI, and are still not getting much traction.
> Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads?
If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood.
But then, the great thing about markets is that they can see more broadly than me. (And the bad thing is that they can't see as far.)
Anyway, if we decide to invest on space exploitation (instead of just exploration), I'd bet on asteroid mining much before planet colonization. Settling down on a planet seems to be a completely useless action.
We just established that we would need to invent a lot of new and useful things to make a Mars colony work. How is inventing new and useful things a useless action?
> If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood.
All of these things would probably be worked on as part of Mars colonization, no? It's just the Mars colony excites smart people. Working on solar on earth, with loads of fossil fuels and an associated lack of appreciation for your work, is much less exciting.
Someone who fixes solar panels on Earth is making minimum wage. Someone who fixes the solar panel array at the Mars Colony is a hero.
We can't even swing a self-sufficient (emphasis added) colony on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone sent to Mars needs a handy supply of cyanide capsules for the inevitable disaster. In the next twenty years, arrival of human meat on Mars is just bragging rights. Want exploration? We could do more of that with robots. Backup civilization? Simply not going to happen until we can get that Antarctica colony rolling. Nobody in, nobody out, allowance of once every two years robot-guided payloads under ten tons, and it has to run for forty years ... that is a good example of a colony.
Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation, and learn from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to do stats and discount one-offs. And we'll have to start tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns built by those boring machines.
If you want humans on Mars, first you need a self-sufficient logistics chain on Mars. We've made breathable Oxygen on Mars, and we should be able to make a Von Neuman probe to send, and set up that supply chain. Instead of having it manage itself, we simply make it remote control, and we don't have to worry about run-away issues.
We should be able to go anywhere there's large enough of a fraction of the resources required for human life. For instance, if there's NO phosphorus, instead of just a smaller percentage, it's no-go, unless we're willing to live off a stockpile imported from elsewhere.
So, ambient temperature and pressure, along with elemental composition, are really the only hard limits.
I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with robotics, and it's safer.
However, we also need to factor in human psychology. It would inspire billions of people worldwide to see a person on Mars. This is not something that can be replicated by sending robotic missions. It's possible that this could increase public support for funding space exploration, and drive more people to go into careers in science.
It's hard to predict the benefits of human exploration of space because we don't know how the world will react. But it's a lot more significant than just measuring the scientific output of the mission.
It’s been over 50 years since a human was on the moon. The need to replicate that psychological success has not been there for humanity given the costs and better use of resources. Mars is exponentially more expensive.
Doing something we've never done before is a lot more exciting to people than repeating our previous success.
Think about it this way: who were the astronauts on the first lunar landing mission? Who were the astronauts on the last? Why do you think that we remember the first ones to do it better?
Who were the astronauts that died with Challenger? Notoriety is hardly an index worth investing in.
A colony on the moon is technically possible, albeit very expensive. Many nations could create one today. People are choosing to spend their limited resources on better forms of progress.
To your first point, I think success at doing something that no human has done before is going to be more memorable to the masses than failure to do something that many people have done before. Hence we remember the first people to land on the moon but we don't remember the 200th astronaut that didn't make it into space cause they died. Regardless, referring back to my original point, it's not the fame of a specific individual that should be the goal in a human mission to Mars. Instead it's a combination of the scientific yields as well as the increased public enthusiasm for science that could make a human mission more valuable than robotic ones. It's very hard to measure the latter but it should not be discounted when considering the value of a human mission.
Regarding your second point, you were the one that said we should spend the same resources of a manned mission on robotic missions. So if it is going to cost $2 trillion dollars for a manned mission we should spend $2 trillion instead on robotic missions. Now it seems you are arguing that we should spend the money elsewhere. If that's your point it is a different discussion.
> I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with robotics, and it's safer.
I don't see much that's safe about robotics in our future. In space they'll be great (until they turn on us), but on Earth it seems like they'll mostly be used to kill people and if we ever do get robot butlers and maids you can bet that they'll be sending a continuous stream of audio and video of our homes, conversations, and sex lives back to at least one remote server as "telemetry" that will be sold off to data brokers and our government.
I don't think the pole shift theory holds, but there still are all those rocks flying around solar system... as well as gamma bursts, but those would probably take out Mars too.
If I remember correctly, a thick layer of soil would protect people from a GRB - if most of the Martian colony (or Lunar colony) lives underground, they would survive - and there is no large-scale biosphere that humans depend on for survival on Mars or the Moon.
As long as those colonies are self sufficient (the biggest handwave of the whole deal), they would survive while the majority of Earth would have a rather bad time of things.
Then again, it's likely that more humans would survive on Earth than elsewhere - nuclear submarines, underground government complexes, maybe even the Antarctica base depending on the angle.
We are nowhere near being able to support and propagate life unaided on Mars. Life on mars as a backup for life on earth is like keeping bitcoin in case of a technological collapse.
Except Mars has already had total life annihilation, so I'm not sure what the point of using that as your argument is...
Stick a few people on an already-annihilated planet where they will never become self-sufficient, anyways?
If you want humanity to escape vulnerability on earth, your best bet is to not go into another gravity well at all. Esp one with no ionosphere, thin unusable atmosphere, brutal storms, and toxic fine sand everywhere.
The moon makes a lot more sense -- easier to manage shipping/trade with earth, no gravity well. And if you need off a planetary body completely, build orbitals.
Also many life-terminating events for earth -- local (galactic region) supernovae or other mass irradiating event, our own sun flaming out, etc. would just do the same to Mars.
In the long run an overheated planet Venus style is much harder to deal with than a cold, nearly airless one. Anything that triggered mass plant death and decomposition could do.
A directed gamma ray burst could affect the solar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY A nuclear powered bunker seems much more pragmatic than generation ship(s) to another star system to survive one.
100 years with ZERO humans on mars? You have no sense of risk or scale. We should be there already.
We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. In 100 years your kind of thinking will be considered ludditean and playing russian roulette with 5 in the chamber for no reason.
> We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics.
Nuked Earth that's also climate-changed so bad that only the poles are temperate is still a whole lot better than Mars.
Why is the solution for this "establish a colony somewhere already 100x worse than a multi-catastrophe-stricken Earth would be, and is also very-expensive to get back to Earth from" ? It makes no sense.
Asteroid strike? There are (much) cheaper ways to guard against that—hardened, distributed bunkers with paid inhabitants, increasing asteroid-hunting programs and interception research. Orbital habs or even the Moon if you're worried about a whole-crust-liquifying event that you can't stop in time. And we're not doing those. Why would we do Mars? It's worse than those options in basically every way. It's a really really bad place.
Most the other threats those measures couldn't guard against, would probably also take out Mars.
Going to Mars is cool and romantic and I hope to see it, but I think people trying to pin some practical reason for colonization other than "because it was there" (romantic) are misguided.
It's not just romantic, it's literally the only way to live in the case where this good place to live turns bad. We absolutely have the technology, even immediate capability to turn on nuclear winter.
There is simply no argument against just not having all your eggs in one basket.
Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have? Exploratory activity can, is and should be done by robotic drones. Mars has zero resources Earth doesn't already have in abundance, is inimical to almost every lifeform on earth and confers no advantage as a launch platform for furture space exploration over the moon or a space station.
> We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics.
Fun fact: Even after a full-scale thermonuclear war, Earth would still be a more liveable planet than Mars.
So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
> I bet some people said the same about america in 1400s.
Here is what I bet noone said about america in the 1400s:
"Man, it sure would be nice if there was air, arable soil, and building materials in america."
> If we can we should.
Humans can do lots of things that they absolutely shouldn't.
> Large asteroid impact
Ah, so we moved on from policy decisions. Good. Okay, let's talk asteroids.
a) I would be alot more worried about asteroids if I were on Mars. Mars is closer to the asteroid belt after all, and it's thin atmosphere is a lot less of a hurdle to evil space rocks than Earths.
b) Humanity has already proven, that it has the technical capability to alter an asteroids course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te... So far, humanity has NOT proven that it can build a self-sustaining colony on mars. As a matter of fact, we have not even done so in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and they would at least have air there. So purely from the perspective of resource-allocation, it seems there are better ways to protect humanity from asteroid impacts, than trying to build a mars-colony.
Sure... we can barely detect asteroids and you're saying we can deflect them, is the argument in good faith?, do you really believe we can detect and deflect a planet killer?
> So purely from the perspective of resource-allocation, it seems there are better ways to protect humanity from asteroid impacts, than trying to build a mars-colony.
So you don't want humanity to waste resources on space. That is your point of view which I hope is a minority at large. I disagree, but I doubt I can convince you otherwisr.
> The point I made is you can never know the benefits.
Yes we can know the benefits, and for the exact example you mentioned, we did. It was pretty clear to every major seafaring nation, that securing as big a piece as possible of that new continent, would be very beneficial in terms of resources, generated taxes, and geopolitical power.
And we also know that there are no benefits for a Mars colony. It would be a giant resource sink, and, based on what we know now, probably never able to sustain itself without constant help from earth, making it useless as a "backup plan" in case of some global catastrophe on Earth. If Earth dies, martian colony dies with it.
> do you really believe we can detect and deflect a planet killer?
I know we successfully tested a method that could, with further refinement and development, have a fighting chance at deflecting one.
> So you don't want humanity to waste resources on space.
Waste? No.
Use for useful projects regarding space exploration and defending Earth against catastrophes? Gladly.
> And we also know that there are no benefits for a Mars colony
You seem to assume that, I disagree, to quote you: "would be very beneficial in terms of resources, generated taxes, and geopolitical power."
> It would be a giant resource sink
So were english colonies in america at first.
> probably never able to sustain itself without constant help from earth
Again, your assumption, what if you're wrong?, check out 'The Expanse' for what I think we might achieve long term.
> I know we successfully tested a method that could, with further refinement and development, have a fighting chance at deflecting one.
So your answer is no, we cannot right now or near future. You also didn't answer if we can even reliably detect such a threat...
> Use for useful projects regarding space exploration and defending Earth against catastrophes? Gladly.
Sure, let's spend resources on that too. Doesn't seem like we are though, perhaps we might need some inspiration in order to get it?, something like some mars colonies might do?
Your disagreement won't change the fact that there are no resources on Mars that we cannot already collect here on Earth, for a fraction of the cost, and without constant risk of someone dying to explosive decompression.
> check out 'The Expanse'
I watched "Monsters Inc." at least a dozen times. I am still no closer to turning laughter into unlimited clean energy.
> So your answer is no
Nope. My answer is it works in theory and the principle has been successfully tested experimentally. That's alot more than can be said for the establishment of a Mars colony.
> You also didn't answer if we can even reliably detect such a threat...
> the fact that there are no resources on Mars that we cannot already collect here on Earth, for a fraction of the cost, and without constant risk of someone dying to explosive decompression.
How come you're so confident about this?
> I watched "Monsters Inc." at least a dozen times.
Ah, it's a 'win an internet argument' comment rather then have a discussion and think a bit.
The Expanse shows a possible future where the moon/mars and beyond were colonized, the implications and progress made and its problems, the comment was made to answer your question - what good can we get from it, which you confidently say there's none.
The previous Asimov book is a what if we never reached for the stars, something that seems like what you are advocating.
Both meant to perhaps share other ideas if you were so inclined to entertain.
> Nope. My answer is it works in theory and the principle has been successfully tested experimentally.
Ah, so still no, we cannot defend ourselves, rephrasing won't change the core idea you're expressing here.
Because Mars was created from the exact same stellar matter accretion as our own planet, and nothing we ever learned in 63 years of mission-capable Mars-Research gave even the slightest hint at any kind of Unobtainium there?
But hey, you know whos really good at figuring out if I'm wrong about that? Robotic probes on Mars. So let's send more of those that can do more science, instead of sending would-be colonists who can do very little science, because they would be very busy with trying-not-to-die-horribly.
> rather then have a discussion and think a bit.
A discussion about what exactly, the point of using SciFi series as arguments?
> Ah, so still no
I am not going to repeat myself.
> That still needs proper funding to achieve good coverage, we still detect asteroids way too late.
I agree. So how about we pump money into that instead?
> Check out Apollo program and what that did for the world.
Please answer my question. I asked specifically how, likely failing, attempts at building a Mars Colony could further asteroid defense research. Because the only impact I can see is a negative one: We waste billions on Mars, failing attempts with human casualties generate more bad press, public opinion shifts, politicians demand stricter budgets, the fallout drags down other space research in its wake.
But since you mentioned Apollo, here is what it did for the world: It gave 2 superpowers the chance to do their "who-got-the-largest-rocket" contest without blowing up humanity in the process. There is a reason why no human foot has touched the moon since the 70s.
Well, considering that Mars is currently a frozen, low-gravity, toxic, airless, irradiated, soil-less desert with barely any water, no nitrogen to speak of, very few options for energy generation, no protection from cosmic radiation and constantly wrecked by planet-wide duststorms, I honestly cannot imagine how we could possibly make it worse, even if we actively tried.
This is the thing. Living on mars is something for the strong. Something that forces us to focus on what's important. With earth we may quickly swing from paradise to a total catastrophe. Which would be worse than mars and only reach mars-level after some time.
Things that incentivize lazing away do not incentivize progress.
> Something that forces us to focus on what's important.
Primarily, it would be something that forces us to send rocket after rocket of supplies there, wasting countless resources in the process for very little, if any, practical benefit.
Because, no, there is nothing to be gained on Mars that can't be gained much more effectively via robotic probes, and no, a Mars colony will not be self-sufficient.
Investing resources for no good reason, is to me the exact opposite of "focusing on the important".
Saying putting 1% of earth's resources to have a chance, of let's say super pessimistically, 15%, of actually surviving as a species through and beyond an otherwise species-ending catastrophe, to be "waste" is so stupid. This kind of thinking would have us never have gone to the moon or even have utilized the loom.
Robotic probes are irrelevant to colonization. It's like saying why don't Russians stop at just fly drones to Ukraine lol
> 1% of earth's resources to have a chance, of let's say super pessimistically, 15%, of actually surviving as a species
That would be a good investment, yes.
Unfortunately, a Mars colony doesn't realize that investment. There wont be a self-sustainable colony on a planet, where even the planets gravity well (which we cannot change, unless someone has SG1-Asgard-level technology lying around) prohibits long term survivability of a species that evolved in a gravity well almost three times as strong.
With no next gen propulsion system and no self-sustaining colony, humans on Mars are a resource sink with no added benefits.
Lest you forget it took 300 years for North America to generate self-sustaining colonies from the first Europeans. And those didn’t require life support for oxygen and water for every second of survival.
The point is the challenge that was involved sending a small group on the same planet out to be self sufficient, not commentary about the habitability of the americas. If anything that underlines their point.
Agreed. It just irritates a little that an analogy was proposed between a lifeless planet and a continent with millions of people already living there.
While I think having people on mars would be neat, I'm not sure there's anything we could do to earth period, let alone in a year, that would make it less livable than mars
The middle ground you're ignoring (between #yolo startup culture and Boeing's defense contractor culture) has been done pretty well with SpaceX's Falcon 9.
The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist. The benefits of doing so are dubious and the real viability of a human colony are almost nil. The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previously healthy, if unspectacular, social network. It is less exciting work, but we should make every effort to not reduce ourselves to a Paleolithic lifestyle on our home planet via accidental terraforming instead.
> The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently exist.
But are being worked on. This statement would've been true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade ago.
> The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular, social network.
The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.
While I agree (and give a lot of credit to Gwynne Shotwell for the steady hand), that reinforces the point; that you can do space work somewhere inbetween "startup" and "giant defense contractor" style approaches.
Well said. It's a bit disheartening that there's no other companies as capable as SpaceX, but man am I happy we have them. When the company I was a cofounder was still up an year ago I would have rather had it founder than SpaceX.
I just watched this depressing video about the $130b dollars spent building a high speed rail in England (HS2). He actually mentions off-hand how many James Webb Space Telescopes that could buy. (the video is about the fact that the rail line will actually be 100% useless in the end, not just overpriced) https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8
So maybe it’s fine if we spend a bunch of money on getting to Mars. There are plenty of interesting arguments for doing it, and it would be a way better use of resources than just flushing it down the toilet on useless infrastructure. Could be much worse.
> Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back.
And it changed the world forever. Probably contributed to avoid the cold war to turn hot. Not to mention we got diapers out of it, and a healthy space program that made amazing things possible like the GPS.
> Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries.
I'm also pretty sure some people said things like "We will soon have colonies on the moon" shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped off that Lunar Lander ladder.
Also: When Columbus set sail, he could reasonably assume that he would see his home again. Big boats and long sea voyages were not a new technology in his time. When NASA started the Apollo Missions, they had them planned out from start to finish and knew exactly how that would work.
So yes, once in a while, humanity does something amazing, that seems a bit far fetched, but still reasonable. What humanity usually doesn't do, is something that it has absolutely no plan on how to do it.
We could be exploring the inside of our own planet. We have literally only scratched the surface and we barely know anything about the deeper parts of Earth, yet we are obsessed with places that are incredibly far away and hard to reach
why not? we know microgravity has a negative effect on people but we haven't tested 1/3rd gravity. unless I missed something we don't know the threshold for negative effects from lowered gravity.
It would really suck if, in the next 100 years, we see some extinction-level comet or asteroid crash into the Earth when we might have done the "not all our eggs in one basket".
Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate, to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-term profit.
Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel.
Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose?
We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?)
I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.
It would suck a lot more if we wasted money on a mars colony, that will take hundreds of years to become self sufficient, if it is possible at all (I am still waiting for a solution to human bodies deteriorating in low gravity that is actually workable at scale), instead of using these resources to further develop things that have already had successful experimental runs.
Is it even remotely possible that a Mars colony could become self-sustaining within the next 100 years? It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.
I don’t really see what a person with a shovel could accomplish that a robot can’t, other than consuming the vast majority of the project budget on life support systems.
Even a hybrid mission with humans in orbit doesn't make sense. You have to bring less fuel for landing/take-off from Mars. But for that same cost you could send way more robotic workers and just deal with speed of light/delays (3-20 minutes).
If there was significant uncertainty in what resources needed to be deployed to where then I could see a benefit to having an onboard team of humans who could assemble workers or payloads on the fly from orbit. However this would be a big shift from current mindset of designing robots for exact problem/solutions with precise payloads to instead having an excess of resources on board.
If the perspective shifted to "we're colonizing Mars so every ounce of metal in orbit will get used at some point" this is less of a concern.
Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust.
And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to keep the cameras running!
Eyes connect to one of the best diagnostic systems in the universe.
IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper, to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly independent colony on Mars.
At our stage, having that come from the private sector versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation of ancient cultures), governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things, in my opinion worth preserving across several planets, solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
> Eyes connect to one of the best diagnostic systems in the universe.
These eyes, and the attached brains, can safely study the images that the aformentioned cameras send back to earth, and spend their valueable brainpower developing ever new and better robots instead of worrying about unpleasantries like explosive decompression.
> governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
The problem is, there is no reward to be had on Mars. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. The red planet has nothing to offer that isn't already available in abundance here on Earth. What there is an abundence of on Mars, is cosmic radiation, toxic perchlorate salts, microabrasive powdered regolith, planet-wide dust storms, and many many many ways for would be settlers to perish.
> But we should grow and expand as a species.
Absolutely. The thing is, trying and likely failing to somehow establish a colony on a dead, irradiated, freeze-dried wasteland isn't exactly going to help us much in that regard.
Are there things that someone can see with their eyes that can’t be picked up with an array of state of the art cameras / specialty sensors / microscopes, that would justify the overhead of everything required to get a human there? I’m genuinely curious.
Human eyes are not good. We have a massive central void in our vision that we literally fill in with our imagination. We can't sense light polarity, we can't sense beyond infrared or ultraviolet, and our resolution is poor. I suspect you could put together and deliver to Mars a highly redundant system with all of those capabilities for less than the addition fuel cost to launch a 100kg human, supplies, and life-support systems out of Earth's gravity well.
The robotic probe is backed up by thousands of scientists, analyzing the data it sends back home, while the man with the shovel is unlikely to even survive long enough on Mars (if he even gets there alive) to discover anything the robot missed.
If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive (for a time).
Off-topic nitpicking: I find it intriguing to encounter the term "marsquake" in scientific articles, or anywhere outside science fiction. Replacing the prefix "earth" with the nomenclature of a celestial body is somewhat perplexing and unnecessary. This practice is more plausible when applied to "Earth," our own planet with that capitalized "E" - for instance, the transformation from "earthling" to "marsling" is linguistically sound. Are we going to now "unmars" new data from these studies? Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them? Will this practice scale when we finally colonize the Solar System and have to replace these words for each and every planet or moon? Should "colonize" be called "elonize" the Solar System since Columbus is controversially bound to Earth history alone? /s
> Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them?
Probably will depend on whether there is a difference you can taste from earthy to "marsy" potatoes. Some experimental trials [1] have indicated that growing potatoes on Mars will be difficult, but possible.
Google is telling me Geosmin is the chemical typically associated with earthy odor and taste [2]. The mars regolith is apparently quite salty, so it's completely possible that "marsy" taste may become associated with some similar common chemical product of martian agriculture?
You're absolutely right! I've always thought it came from the Spanish "Colon" (Columbus), but it's from the Latin colonus ("tiller of the soil, farmer"). Elonize still makes, ahem, a great neologism.
Spoiler: The "surprise" layer is (relatively) quite thin, and just outside Mars' molten core. That Mars has a molten interior is not a surprise at all, and evidence for very recent (relatively) volcanic activity on the Martian surface has been piling up for a century or more.
We need to go there so we can study it properly. What would the Victorians, or Columbus, think of us if they saw how we gave up after going to the moon a few times.
Victorians/Columbus didn't exactly have scientific study on their mind. If there was oil or gold on Mars it would have been "discovered" several times over by now.
Also I'm not sure how we've "given up" considering there are two rovers on Mars right now, the last one going as recently as 2021, plus several more in development. People expecting Mars colonies by now have been reading too much sci-fi.
If there was a new continent somehow popped up we wouldn't be fine just sending some drones there or taking pictures of it with satellites.
We have had the capability to develop ourselves to send a colony to mars in 10 years if we really wanted to, for 50 years, so yes we're late. But I for one am very happy we've got some real vision and development towards it now.
> If there was a new continent somehow popped up we wouldn't be fine just sending some drones there or taking pictures of it with satellites.
True.
You know what else is true? We could breathe on that new continent, there would be enough nitrogen compounds to grow food, anyone who wanted to go back home could eventually do so, our colonists bodies would not deteriorate due to the low gravity, and if our colonists there got into trouble, we could send help before they all died horribly.
The martian atmosphere is 2.8% N2. For comparison, Earths atmoshpere is 78.08% N2, while also being more than 100x as dense. And Earth already has soil, and a developed nitrogen cycle, while Mars doesn't.
So there is nowhere near enough Nitrogen in-situ on Mars to support any form of agriculture. It has to be brought from Earth.
So yes, lowered gravity has negative impacts on our bones and physiology in general. The gravity on Mars is 1/3 that of Earth. And that's after spending several months in-transit at microgravity.
> But yes, it does mean bringing your own air and being self sufficient, but we do both of those things on the ISS already
Nitrates on earth range from 10-50 mg/kg in soil, on mars they make up 1100ppm = 0.1% = 1mg/kg, so in the extreme you can convert 10% of martian land to soil. Seems like plenty.
We just don’t know if the 1/3 gravity will cause bone loss problems - going to the moon is the best way to study it, but who knows. Probably, people will just age 3x faster in terms of bone mass on mars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia
And yeah, the first years of a mars colony are gonna be dependent on earth. We’d definitely make sure we have enough rockets that they can abort if shit goes south on supply missions, but there’s no reason earth can’t supply them at first.
Nitrogen in Earths soil is present in the form of Ammonia, and derived substances. Occurring naturally, it is the product of microbial nitrogen fixation of diazotrophic bacteria, and subsequent biological processing. Plants can use these compounds directly.
Nitrates on mars will probably be in the form of nitrate salts.
Btw. agriculture also requires soil. Which the martian regolith isn't.
> We’d definitely make sure we have enough rockets that they can abort if shit goes south on supply missions
Have enough rockets where? On mars? Using what fuel? Using what ground installations like scaffolds and launch pads? Also, launching between Mars and Earth is only possible during specific time windows. For an Earth-Mars transit, these occur ~once every 2 years. So if "shit goes south" outside these windows, the amount of rockets won't matter.
> Also, launching between Mars and Earth is only possible during specific time windows.
No. It is always possible, but the optimal windows happen every two years. There is another 2nd optimal window, that happens every 5.5 months, which flies by Venus before continuing on to Earth/Mars.
Earth crust has relatively small amounts of iron, or nickel, or silver, but it has areas with high concentration of these, so large as to enable massive metallurgy on Earth.
Chances are, Mars may have local concentrations of nitrous minerals (as does Earth), and these can be used to run a large enough agriculture. Few plants know how to consume atmospheric nitrogen anyway.
Air pressure and temperature can be maintained below transparent domes, greenhouse-style.
Dim sunlight looks like a much bigger problem, which can't be fixed by any terraforming.
> Chances are, Mars may have local concentrations of nitrous minerals
Which would have to be found, ideally near the equator (otherwise landing and solar power generation is going to be a problem), mined and transported. And since Nitrous minerals aren't fertilizer, it would have to be processed (which is an energy intensive process even on earth, where we get to use atmospheric Nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch-Process).
And of course there is no soil on mars, so we have to bring that as well.
Indeed! This turns a nigh-impossible task into a just technically very hard one.
Of course we won't be able to do this now, and still won't be in 10-15 years. In 30 years it's hard to predict: there can be a huge technological breakthrough, or a total loss of interest and regress in capabilities.
Well, it's "a just technically very hard one" right now. Because, we could, technically, just send fertilizer, and soil, from Earth.
The question I am asking isn't "is it possible". The question I am asking is "is it worth it". I see a lot of comparisons with Columbus, colonising America and the first Lunar landing flying around in such discussions. Well, all of these, and in fact most grand far-fetched undertakings of mankind, as un-romantic as that may sound, were the result of a cost-benefit analysis;
Columbus expected to find a valueable trade-route.
Colonising America promised resources, taxes and geopolitical power.
Landing on the Moon showed off who got the biggest most badass rockets to a geostrategic opponent in the middle of a cold war centered around, well, rockets. There is a reason no man has been on the moon since the 70s.
Colonizing Mars for real (that is, building a self-sustained habitat there) is a way to create a habitat not controlled by any Earth government. That's the only potential upside I see in the short term, an upside for those who care about such things and are ready to pay an immense price for it. Something that a bunch of eccentric libertarian-leaning billionaires might do. (Oh wait.) Large and unconventional religious movements could be interested, too, like Puritans of old, but much more well-funded and determined.
> is a way to create a habitat not controlled by any Earth government.
Yeah, a few tiny problems with that assumption:
a) Earth goverments can easily shut down launches from Earth. Since any Mars Base would be dependent on resupply for probably a very long time, that effectively gives them control.
b) Establishing a Mars Base doesn't work without government support to begin with, so they have their hands in from the start. And even if they didn't, being ruled by a corporation or billionaire overlord instead of a government would be a prime example of "Out of the frying pan - into the fire".
c) In a bid for Braveheart-Style "Freeeedoooooom!", Mars colony has no leverage over Earth. Zero. There is no Unobtainium on Mars.
d) Any ungoverned, larger group of humans, left to its own devices, will eventually form some kind of government, if only out of the need for self-organisation. Proof: The entirety of history.
Regarding d); Now, our Earth governments may not be ideal solutions. And yes, maaaaybe Mars Gov. will be an ideal utopia. I kinda doubt it.
Because that group would be under constant psychological pressure from several life-threatening dangers, where one mistake by one person could kill everyone. They live in a planet-sized dead wasteland, with very limited resources. They are locked in crowded habitats for most of the time. Their lifespan is likley cut short by radiation damage and low-gravity related physiological deterioration.
Now, I am not a psychologist, nor a political scientist. But under such conditions, I imagine the outcome of any government-formation-process to be...unpleasant.
Boston was founded in 1615, and the US declared independence in 1776. A colony will depend on the mother country / planet for quite some time, but has a chance to become materially independent in 150+ years, too.
I'm not saying that this desire is rational, or that the result would be a libertarian utopia, etc. But "all progress depends on the unreasonable man", as history also shows time and time again.
> A colony will depend on the mother country / planet for quite some time, but has a chance to become materially independent in 150+ years
Boston was founded in a breathable atmosphere and a livable climate, in a land that contains building materials, wildlife, liquid water, and arable soil, all shielded from cosmic radiation by Earths magnetic field and in a gravity well our physiology has evolved to cope with.
Yes, life for the colonists was hardship and back-breaking work, but the basic building blocks for survival existed.
There are definitely people advocating one-way trips to Mars. Buzz Aldrin wrote "Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration" (2013) pushing the idea of one-way trips and colonization by 2040. There are quite a few projects that have invested time and money into the idea. MarsOne (2012-2019) is possibly the most serious of the attempts, but they weren't exactly close to sending a mission.
I guess there are zero practical reasons to go to Mars that would justify the massive cost required to do so. The only thing that comes close on Earth (from the practicality perspective) is the exploration of Antarctica and the Artic and that was done on a shoe-string budget.
> We have had the capability to develop ourselves to send a colony to mars in 10 years if we really wanted to, for 50 years
Like I said, pure delusion. We can still barely manage to launch rockets into space, and it still costs thousands of dollars per kg of cargo just to get to LEO. No human has lived in space for an extended period of time at a range beyond the ISS (400 km, while Mars is 400 million km).
On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves. You would be better protected than in LEO.
The Moon is very inhospitable, but it's close enough we could have just shuttled an endless stream of ready-to-live habitat modules there, one after another. The tech was there. The will was not.
I'm not saying it would have been rational to do it in the 1970s, but we could have!
On the other hand, what we actually did do (to the Earth) wasn't exactly rational, either.
> On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves.
Really? What machines would be used to build these shelters? How do they get to Mars? How would they be powered? What auxilliary materials will they require and how do those get to Mars?
Launch while also having to launch everything the people we send there need for the rest of their lives, and also launch everything needed to power and maintain that robot for as long as it's required? Hmmmmm...
But okay, let's say we do all that. We can now dig up Mars-dirt. How do we make that into airtight shelter that is also proof against cosmic radiation?
You keep raising these logistical issues like you’re the only person who ever thought of them. And you seem to be underestimating the resources that can be committed. It’s not like people are planning to send one or two rockets and calling it a day. Serious plans involve sending hundreds of rockets every year, and tens of thousands of tons of cargo.
> You keep raising these logistical issues like you’re the only person who ever thought of them.
Better than to hand-wave them wouldn't you agree? Because these issues are real, hard and very limiting factors, and they don't go away by throwing money at them. And I'm pretty sure I am not the only person who keeps raising these issues.
> Serious plans involve sending hundreds of rockets every year
That would be a really neat trick.
Mars's synodic period with Earth is 780 days (about 26 months) and the resulting transfer window lasts a few weeks at most. So if you want to send even 100 rockets per year, you have to start +200 rockets within that launch window.
To put that into perspective, since 1960 there were a grand total of 50 Mars missions, that includes unsuccessful ones, which were more than half: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars Most of these missions didn't land anything on Mars, and not a single one involved landing the spaceship itself, or had even remotely the kind of payload capacity that a colonisation effort requires.
So unless someone has a workable idea for a completely new propulsion system, I'm afraid there won't be "hundreds of rockets every year".
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot, small question: How do these "hundreds of rockets per year" get back to Earth? Because, if they don't, well, that's gonna up the launch costs somewhat, wouldn't it?
You could launch 200 rockets the same day if you wanted to. These things are exactly what throwing money at works for. If you have a really deep pipeline of several, the rockets could also be coming home - but cheap transfers take a really long time.
> You could launch 200 rockets the same day if you wanted to.
No, I can launch 200 rockets the same day if I have sufficient rockets, launch pads, reload-capacity on these pads, fuel, and personnel.
We have none of these things, and they cannot be solved by throwing money either. Just one example why not: Launch sites have geographic requirements.
> If you have a really deep pipeline of several, the rockets could also be coming home
A pipeline of what, rockets!?
The fuel-requirements of a spaceship far outstrip it's payload capacity. That's not me saying that, but physics.
So I have to launch M rockets to bring N rockets back home, with M being a multiple of N. And then to bring M home, I have to launch L rockets, with L being a multiple of M. Did anyone say "geometric growth"?
Yes, it does. What is doesn't have: lots of available energy, industrial facilities, storage tanks, or any of the other things required to actually make in-situ methane/LOX production feasible.
You don't have to believe me, the helpful folks at CSS have provided all the numbers and background data:
> Starship uses Methane/LOX because almost all modern rocket engines do
That is simply not true. Starship has been built for Mars and Elon has said it himself that making fuel on mars makes it using methane the only option. It's not some exploratory science craft that can live in the luxury of just importing everything from Earth. It's a relatively very cheap, massive water tower free of NASA's hope-ending bloat that is the only current realistic shot at our species being multi-planetary.
Yes that is true, as shown by the link I provided. Methane/LOX is simply one of the go-to options for liquid fuel rocket engines these days, whether or not these engines are intended to go to Mars or not.
And btw. SpaceX themselves market Startship as a transport vehicle "to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond."https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
> the only current realistic shot at our species being multi-planetary.
I'm curious: How does building a base on Mars, that is 100% dependent on regular support from Earth to survive, contributes neither resources nor self-sustaining living space to our species, cannot terraform the planet, and cannot serve as a backup in case Earth goes boom, make our species "multi-planetary"?
A multi-planetary species has permanent settlements on more than one planet or moon, that are either self-sustaining, or contributing (resources), or both. These settlements serve a role beyond bragging rights and exploration. A Mars base, insofar as we could currently make it happen, doesn't do that.
If a 15th century nation brought 5 guys to some bare-rock-island in the middle of the Atlantic and left them there with the promise to drop by every now and then to bring them food, that doesn't make them a colonial power.
Other than Mars, the moon is near enough to actually make permanent bases feasible, which could provide a platform for further space exploration (Launching something from 1/6th of earths gravity uses a lot less energy). Luna is near enough to support a colony, including rotating crew, and it actually has a resource that could become useful in the not-so-far future, that could be worth exploiting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Moon
Wtf is that "argument"? You proved nothing. Methane is the way because of ferrying all the fuel to mars isn't an option, full stop.
> bla bla because we dont have bases on 10 planets/moons we aren't multiplanetary
With the more urgency we should press on then. Humanity has advanced on other fronts enough that it's becoming a real inconsistency/risk because we can die to nuclear, viral reasons due to tech while still being trapped here
> free of NASA's hope-ending bloat
You actually don't know what you are talking about. Please see SLS's budget per launch/kilo VS SpaceX's offerings. NASA was not going to get much of anything done by itself when it comes to not just science, other than scamming money from congress for things that look good but don't work towards realistic human off-world migration
> Moon
This is part of the NASA-specific not hurrying out when your house is on fire strategy. Yes Spaceship will go to moon, but that's far from the main goal because it's not good enough. The mission to go to the moon is literally more of a PR thing funded by that japanese billionaire for SpaceX
It’s more complicated than that. Cargo rockets don’t all need to be launched at once, they just need to be ready to burn in the launch window. In fact because they’ll need to be refuelled in orbit they have to be launched before the launch window anyway. The passenger rockets will be the last to launch.
Optimal transfer orbits have short windows, but there are other orbits available if you’re prepared to wait longer, including ballistic capture orbits, elliptic transfer orbits, and making use of aero braking (skimming through the high atmosphere) for orbital capture.
As for the return journey, it’s unlikely that many of the initial rockets will be coming back. Return journeys will likely be limited to passenger rockets. There won’t be much else to bring back until there is sufficient infrastructure on Mars.
> Cargo rockets don’t all need to be launched at once, they just need to be ready to burn in the launch window.
So what's the plan, launch all those rockets into LEO, and then have them sit there for up to 2 years before sending them on their merry way?
Whos doing maintenance? Who repairs these rockets when they get hit by space debris? Who'd even know one was damaged? What's the backup plan when almost inevitably some of them will fail come travel-day? More rockets? Whos doing maintenance on them, and who pays for them?
Where are all these rockets coming from btw.? Spaceships aint cheap, they have to earn their keep by doing things like ferrying commercial cargo into LEO. Who can afford to have a fleet of them sitting around doing nothing?
Look, I'm not saying that any of this is impossible. I'm just saying that a VERY hard task, that we have never done before, just got an order of magnitude harder. At what point in this hardship am I allowed to wave a little cost-benefit-analysis and ask what exactly we gain from sending people to Mars (aka. nothing that can't be done better with robotic probes)?
> Return journeys will likely be limited to passenger rockets.
Let's start with: return journeys will be limited to rockets that are still operational after landing in a rock-desert, with zero support structures, on a sheet of powdery regolith-dust, and after having been blasted for months with Martian dust-storms, and subjected to extreme temperature differentials.
Humans have 10 successful missions landing robots on Mars, starting in 1975. Robots have been operating on Mars continuously for almost 20 years. Opportunity was active for 15 years. The helicopter Ingenuity has flown 63 separate times and counting. The Perseverance rover is about the size of a hatchback car and carries seven advanced scientific instruments.
Ten years of strong-willed national effort was enough to get us humans landing on the moon. From where we are now, you honestly don't think ten years of strong-willed national (or even international) effort could get us a robot capable of digging holes?
> you honestly don't think ten years of strong-willed national (or even international) effort could get us a robot capable of digging holes?
Yes, I do think that.
Because there is a big difference between an exploratory vehicle that carries a number of scientific instruments and can be powered by a few solar panels or a small nuclear battery...
Just for comparisons sake: Perseverances MMRTG provides 110 watts of power. A single metric horsepower is 735.5 watts. I leave looking up the power requirements of even a small machine that would be capable of digging habitats into the martian bedrock, as an exercise to the reader.
I agree it's not realistic to send a full tunnel boring machine, drilling out 200 to 700 meters per week for subways and highways, to Mars in the next 10 years. Such a thing would have to be assembled on Mars with advanced industry already in place.
I vehemently disagree that we need a 700 meter/week behemoth, sized for heavy rail, to dig out a habitat for one or two dozen humans. I'm imagining something more like a small-ish Roadheader[1], two to four times larger than Perseverance. It would either need to be Diesel powered (yes, shipping the diesel would suck, but it doesn't need to run forever) or we'd need a small solar farm and a couple Tesla batteries powering the thing (we probably want that anyway, for our habitat).
It would take months to dig out a cave large enough for 10 to 20 humans, and there are hundreds of other problems to solve to actually turn a small, potentially unstable Martian cave into a livable habitat. We know the first steps will be slow; that's OK. Besides, we have a decade of engineering to refine the design. Don't underestimate humans.
A (very) small roadheader starts at around 8 metric tonnes, and requires around 20kW of power...just for operating the cutting head. And that's a really small one.
Again, for comparison, Perseverance: 1025kg, 110W of power
> It would either need to be Diesel powered
That would be a neat trick on a planet with an atmospheric pressure of 610 pascals, where oxygen registers barely above a trace element.
> or we'd need a small solar farm
Or maybe a not so small one.
Using Tesla solar panels https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels as a reference point, they produce up to 400W and are just shy of 2m². That's on Earth. Solar irradiance on Mars is 59% of Earths, so these panels will probably produce ~240W apiece. So to meet the energy requirements of even a small roadheader, we need 83 of these panels, each of which is ~21.5kg in mass, so a total of 1.784t in solar panels alone.
Note, that is without cabling, inverters, electronics, spare panels, support structures, etc. ... or the batteries for that matter. Production numbers are also for peak sunlight conditions on Mars, so best-case daylight during the martian summer, and no dust storms.
So depending on how heavy the batteries are, I reckon we are already looking at around 12-14 tons of equipment, just for digging with a single machine. And that doesn't include any prefabricated parts, spare parts, airlocks, other heavy machinery, support beams, other auxilliary materials....
I mean, these roadheaders will require new drill heads every now and then, won't they?
What's the payload capacity of our current space ship designs again? Because...
> It would take months to dig out a cave large enough for 10 to 20 humans,
...we need food and water and medical supplies and power and space suits, and a lot of other things for all these people. Oh, and habitats, because they will need somewhere to live during all these months bevore the cave is ready.
> So depending on how heavy the batteries are, I reckon we are already looking at around 12-14 tons of equipment, just for digging with a single machine.
So you're saying a single Starship could ferry 7 to 8 full rigs? 14 tons of payload is not a big deal right now, much less with 10 years of project-of-national-importance funding. Let's send 2 (one backup) along with lots of other nice goodies for setting up shop then.
> So to meet the energy requirements of even a small roadheader, we need 83 of these panels, each of which is ~21.5kg in mass, so a total of 1.784t in solar panels alone.
> ... I mean, these roadheaders will require new drill heads every now and then, won't they?
1.8t in solar panels and some extra for new drill heads is really not that much tonnage for the kind of project we're talking about. And remember, we're re-using all this electrical infrastructure for our habitat.
> ...we need food and water and medical supplies and power and space suits, and a lot of other things for all these people. Oh, and habitats, because they will need somewhere to live during all these months bevore the cave is ready.
They live on Earth before the cave is ready. Why send them at the same time?
Remember: the original point was that digging a habitat-sized cave on Mars is really not the hard part here, and something we could accomplish within 10 years if we wanted to. 15 to 20 tons of payload and some moderate engineering challenges have not really disproved that notion. Yes, there are plenty of other hard parts.
But we aren't talking about LEO deployment here. We are talking about a flight to Mars. And we won't be deploying that paylod in space, we have to land it, with the ship, with zero support structures on the ground.
> They live on Earth before the cave is ready. Why send them at the same time?
Then please show me the robotic infrastructure that is capable, with no pre-existing support structures, of building a sealed habitat, after self-unloading from a landed spaceship, and self-assembling itself from it's packaged form. All steps have to be done with no human help on site.
Show me that this works here on Earth. And then show me that same thing, but this time, any remote control has a 6-minute delay (and that's still generous, because 3 light minutes is the lowest possible distance between the 2 planets), and it has to be done at in an antarctic dry valley.
So we have a vessel capable of ferrying 100 tons to Mars that's already had 55 seconds of controlled flight from a launch where it was missing 3 engines, developed by a single non-government company. And this is supposed to make me pessimistic about a concerted effort from the United States government being able to make this thing (or something like it) work in the next ten years?
> But we aren't talking about LEO deployment here. We are talking about a flight to Mars.
I was using the payload-to-Mars number, about 100 tons. That does require refueling in orbit. That's expensive, but a pretty simple orbital rendezvous, which we've been doing since 1965.
> And we won't be deploying that paylod in space, we have to land it
Parachutes, aerobraking, skycranes ... these are well-solved problems on Mars. You think we've already hit the limit of mass that's possible to land on Mars?
> Then please show me the robotic infrastructure that is capable, with no pre-existing support structures, of building a sealed habitat, after self-unloading from a landed spaceship
Let's revisit the original point being made:
> Pretty sure we could design and launch a digging robot in 10 years, I dont really buy that as the bottleneck to mars exploration
An extra ~14 tons (half of which we need anyway) and a couple of months of digging is pretty clearly not the bottleneck.
But to actually address your point: the robots don't need to make it move-in-ready, they just need to set up enough that the arriving humans can do it relatively quickly (days). If humans have to IKEA-assemble things and weld* some stuff, that's fine. (*yes, harder on Mars, but possible). Since the spaceship itself will have to be a livable habitat, obviously the hope would be to re-use most of that. We send pre-emptive missions to set things up (dig holes, set up solar panels, gather basic resources), and another manned mission to finalize the hab. Bonus points if we can just scooch the ship into the cave after it lands as the initial hab.
I think we're just deeply divided on what we think ten thousand focused engineers with hundreds of billions of dollars in budget can accomplish in 10 years. Remember, we're talking about a national or international focused initiative here.
> that's already had 55 seconds of controlled flight
Good. And once it makes the trip to Mars and lands successfully, with 100t of payload, then I will accept it as an argument.
> Parachutes, aerobraking, skycranes
We are not talking about a 1025 kg science vehicle here, we are talking about 100t of cargo, that has to land in the same place, preferably intact. Good luck making a parachute that carries that weight in a 610 pascal atmosphere.
And latest the colonists will have to land a ship there, or they are stuck. So no, without ships being able to land on Mars, intact, Mars Colony is not happening.
And btw. since you mentioned Spaceship: I'm pretty sure landing the thing on mars and letting it take off from there, is what it says on their own website: https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/ (scroll down to the "TO MARS AND BACK" diagram)
> they just need to set up enough that the arriving humans can do it relatively quickly (days).
> We send pre-emptive missions to set things up (dig holes, set up solar panels, gather basic resources)
Good, then show me that the robots can do that, under the conditions pointed out above.
> I think we're just deeply divided on what we think ten thousand focused engineers with hundreds of billions of dollars in budget can accomplish in 10 years.
No I don't think we are. I am well aware that nothing about a Mars colony is physically impossible, or outside the reach of contemporary human technology, if we really want to do it. I think it would take somewhat longer than 10 years, given the technological difficulties, but I don't think it is impossible.
The thing where I think we disagree is, given all the problems I pointed out, whether or not it is worth it jumping through all those hoops just for...yeah, for what? For science? We have robots doing that on Mars, and they don't require habitats, or food, or water. Resources? Mars doesn't have any Earth doesn't already have in abundance. Land? The entire planet is an airless, freeze dried, irradiated, toxic wasteland. As a backup plan? Even after a thermonuclear war, Earth would still be more inhabitable than Mars.
Wanna invest the time and effort of 10000 engineers and hundreds of billions of dollars working in international cooperation into space programs? Fine by me! Here are a few suggestions:
- The DART test was a huge success, we should develop that, because defending earth from asteroids could come in handy at some point
- A moon base sounds awesome. btw. the Moon might actually have a valuable resource we don't easily get on Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Moon
- Please build more deep space telescopes
- ISS is getting old
- There is lots of garbage in LEO that we need a solution for
- Eventually we will need much better propulsion systems
All of these activities sound way better to me, than wasting resources trying to set up shop on a worthless ball of dust for no good reason.
I actually think we've basically reached agreement. All your dashed items are higher on my priority list as well, and much more. I want to see Mars terraformed in the next few hundred years, which starts with learning how to terraform Earth (a rather immediate need, in fact!). Sending humans to live on Mars makes terraforming it harder, not easier, since now we can't just chuck ice comets at it without endangering lives. I still firmly believe that we could set up human habitats in 10 years, but I totally agree that we should not.
>> We send pre-emptive missions to set things up (dig holes, set up solar panels, gather basic resources)
> Good, then show me that the robots can do that, under the conditions pointed out above.
For your consideration (I have no idea on the merits of this company, but I see it on this site every once in a while):
> I actually think we've basically reached agreement.
Yes, I do think so too, and thanks for the discussion, I enjoyed it alot!
> I want to see Mars terraformed in the next few hundred years
I think it will be a few centuries until we have the technology to do that, and then carrying out the task will probably take further centuries, but I do think it is a worthwhile goal to work towards.
However, if I were looking for a first terraforming target, I would recommend Venus instead. Reasons being, the planets gravity (which we cannot do anything about barring some serious SciFi-esque breakthroughts in physics) is much closer to Earths (~0.9g), energy may be easier to come by due to it's proximity to the sun, and while its magnetic field is weak, it is still stronger than that on Mars.
> which starts with learning how to terraform Earth
Luckily, that is surprisingly easy. The biosphere is self regulating, so if Humanity manages to pull itself together and stop actively ruining it, it can undo the damage caused so far. Nature will do so anyway, eventually, the question our species has to answer is if we still want to exist by that point or not.
> Good. And once it makes the trip to Mars and lands successfully, with 100t of payload, then I will accept it as an argument.
This guy is trolling. Think if Kennedy said the same about funding the Apollo program only after computers were 50 times smaller and we had solved the F1 vibration problems, among the thousand other ones.
Blinded by wanting to feel right in an argument to the point of proving themselves wrong. It's a bit dark to be on the hopeless side doing that though. Even if it proves hope absolutely prevails here.
> You could totally just dig a 1 meter deep hole with a fancy bulldozer, then plop down a prefabbed house and bury it
Yes, and that "prefabbed house", that is sturdy enough that we can "bury it" under a pile of rock [1] thick enough to provide adequate protection from cosmic radiation, where does that come from? How much mass is that? How is that mass transported to mars? What machines and tools are required to assemble it there, and how much mass are those? How is the energy for these tools provided?
[1]: Just to be clear what a pile we are talking about here: If we used the water-shield method, it would require 5m of water for a 50% reduction in radiation intensity.
Apollo wasn't really fiscally sustainable, particularly given the expansion that you visualize. In 1965 it was 0.75% of GDP per year and NASA was 1% of GDP per year. By comparison the "pork program" SLS is running at 0.018% of GDP so is 40x more affordable. Expanding the Apollo spending in the 1970s probably wouldn't have helped us any when climate change became a concern.
> On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves. You would be better protected than in LEO.
Is that true? Maybe if you never ever go outside but you might as well just dig a very deep cave here on Earth if your entire is to prove that humans can live in extremely inhospitable environments.
You're nothing but the harbringer of your own doom with that kind of uninformed loser talk. You know how unrealistic and pointless it sounds like, especially said on HN?
Back when Kennedy first harnessed the whole US towards something truly greater, the odds seemed infinitely worse. But they got it done. Including minituarizing a room-sized computer to fit in a box just to serve as cruise control for Apollo.
> If there was oil or gold on Mars it would have been "discovered" several times over by now.
There is something even rarer than gold on the moon: helium-3, usable for cryotechnology and potentially in nuclear fusion reactors. Helium on the Earth is about to run out (partially because the US keeps on selling their stockpiles, that are then wasted for stuff like party balloons) - that is why everyone and their dog are pushing moon missions at the moment.
The principal difference from Mars is that you don't need a rocket to send bulk goods from the Moon, you can literally hurl it into an Earth-bound orbit using an electromagnetic catapult. Sunlight is also more plentiful on the Moon, so powering the catapult does not require operating a large nuclear reactor.
When some if the new 3He-based fusion reactors with huge magnets actually breaks even, this maybe become potentially practical. You don't need so much 3He for generation if you produce it from Li in the blanket.
The shipping and handling fees are astronomical. Sending gold to Mars is very expensive. Sending gold from Mars is even more expensive. In particular there are no oil deposits in Mars, so kerosene for the return rocket is very expensive. (Hydrogen and Oxygen are very expensive too.)
Note that there is already a huge amount of gold in the oceans, but it's very diluted so it's too expensive to extract. You don't want to just know that there is gold. You want to know how much profit you would get after the gold bars arrive to Fort Knox.
What about generating methane and oxygen from Mars' atmosphere? I'm aware it would take a long time and a vast area of solar panels but say we set up a base there, would it be feasible?
edit: this is assuming we're not allowed to set up nuclear reactors there
But then you'd have to bring the oxygen instead. To manufacture anything resembling normal rocket fuel you need at least oxygen + hydrogen. Preferrably oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, so you don't have to deal with cryogenic storage of hydrogen.
But you need a lot of energy to split water. You can get a few bubbles with a battery, but to fill the rocket with oxygen you need a huge solar farm or something similar to power the electrolisis plant.
Oxygen atoms are easy to find, sand and rust (and water) have a lot of them. The problem is isolating them to produce molecular oxygen that can be used to burn the fuel.
> a huge solar farm or something similar to power the electrolisis plant.
Eventually it should be possible to build such things in space and then they can be huge. There are already semi-serious proposals to solve the Earth's energy problems with space based solar collectors. Of course they would have to a lot bigger further out. Perhaps Jupiter's flux tubes could be tapped.
The thing I wonder about is this - what if there's a city on Mars that has a 10 ton block of gold.
What's the price of gold on Earth? Is it the same as now? What if I could email someone on Mars and buy 50oz of gold? Could I sell it to someone here? What if it's cost prohibitive to move all of the gold to Earth? Or any of the gold to Earth? How refined does the Martian gold have to be before someone on Mars can say the own it?
The answers to all of those are clear (or at least only marginally unclear) for materials that are intrinsically valuable but for the "store of vaule" as opposed to industrial use of something like gold it gets weird for me.
I guess the answer to all of those questions is - whatever someone will pay.
In Micronesia there was a practice of carving massive "coins" out of stone. These "Rai stones" were often too large to move. Yet individuals could "own" them and they were traded often for things of great value. I believe I even read an account of one that had sunk in a shipwreck, but the owners went on to trade it even though it was at the bottom of the sea.
Just cause a physical item cannot be possessed physically doesn't mean it is valueless.
However, for gold specifically, part of what makes it valuable is that it has some manufacturing uses and people like making jewelry out of it. There is no doubt a much larger supply of gold throughout the universe than on earth and it has no effect on the price here.
So I think while you can buy and sell gold on another planet (provided people can widely agree on it's transfer of ownership), that would be a completely separate market from the terrestrial gold market.
Gold is probably also not valuable enough on a per volume or per weight basis to offset the transport costs.
We'd need something much more valuable, although the usual go-to, diamonds, also wouldn't work since it's a highly controlled market.
At that point you're in exotic materials territory. Maybe a natural source of Californium which on Earth is only produced in reactors or particle accelerators, and actually has industrial uses? Even if its price dropped substantially, we'd probably find new uses for the new supply and the stuff costs millions of USD per gram.
More accurate is we can either go there or study it properly. A human mission to Mars would be entirely dedicated to keeping the crew alive; only remote probes can do real exploration for the foreseeable future.
Well humans can do many things, a robot cannot. But in general yes, sending a swarm of robots to mars will deliver way more data for way less money, than a human mission.
For example: suffocating, starving, dying of thirst, getting sick, suffer psychologic breakdowns, having their bodies deteriorate due to low gravity,...
No but robots on the other hand have the disadvantage of being dumb with no understanding of the situation.
Also, they can "die" of thirst for energy as well. Have some unplanned thing gone wrong? Boom, all mission is lost. Happened countless times.
Human are flexible. Why do you think, they sometimes need to go outside to fix something on the ISS? Not automated yet.
With more advanced robots that might be possible, but currently robots can only do, what you exactly told them to do. Depending on the real parameters, that might be enough, or not. And they certainly can get "sick" and broken as well. Hardware as well as software.
> robots on the other hand have the disadvantage of being dumb with no understanding of the situation
Which is hardly a disadvantage given that this includes not understanding that we send them on a mission with no return, and a high likelihood of something going horribly wrong.
> Also, they can "die" of thirst for energy as well.
True, but that energy can be collected via a few solar panels, or provided for decades from a relatively small nuclear battery. Human supplies for a prolonged stay cannot be collected on Mars, and take up alot of space and payload capacity for even a single human. And that's not including the fact that with humans we also have to take many many extra steps to be able to bring them back.
> but currently robots can only do, what you exactly told them to do
Depending on the situation, that can easily become necessary for humans as well. Astronauts on missions do very few things that ground control doesn't know about or didn't order them to do / plan ahead for them to do. Yes, this includes procedures during emergencies. Given the more severe resource constraints and even slimmer margins for error, the situation won't be any different on Mars.
Sorry if that sounds un-romantic, but the movies of brave buckaroos McGuyver-ing their way out of trouble on the Red Planet, relying on their wits, duct tape and tons of plot armor, isn't how this will play out in real life.
Well, Apollo 13 for example was saved by human improvisation. As long as we cannot build full self repairing robots, humans will be highly beneficial for maintaining any kind of equipment.
> Apollo 13 for example was saved by human improvisation.
Yes, by human improvisation on the ground, with teams of engineers and scientists figuring out the exact steps the Astronauts had to perform, and transmitting these instructions up for the crew to implement.
Just like they would have done, and in fact did on many occasions, with a robotic probe that found itself in a pickle.
Yes, and my microwave oven with integrated grill can do alot of things that my cast-iron skillet cannot. Problem is, when out camping, there is no power outlet for the microwave, and I'm pretty sure if it gets hit by heavy rain, or if I wash it in a stream, it will be broken afterwards.
For much the same reason, robots are much better suited to do exploratory work on Mars, than humans.
Apollo 13 was saved by human improvisation on the ground; the crew could not have survived with a Mars-like communication delay (40-ish minutes at worst).
I totally disagree. Ro optic probes are awesome, but their range of activity is extremely limited. They can stay on mission for years at a time in that limited area, but the ground you can cover with several manned missions is currently greater.
We've proven that we can keep humans alive indefinitely in space with the International Space Station. Expanding that practice beyond Earth's orbit can and will go a long way in advancing our understanding of our solar neighborhood.
The initial human explorations of the planets will be more limited than the rover projects. But I think we are getting very close to being able to mount much more significant investigations of our closest neighbors. We just need to choose to go.
The ISS is heavily dependent on regular resupply from Earth, is teleoperated from Earth, and depends on large Earth laboratories to analyze air and water samples. We can keep humans alive "indefinitely" there in the same way we could keep people alive indefinitely on the ocean floor; it's an expensive stunt entirely reliant on support operations from the surface that does nothing to advance our ability to explore.
The ISS is way more limited in what it can do because it exists in a vacuum, which inherently limits the size it can reasonably have, and there's zero gravity. The moon has a bit more gravity, but zero atmosphere.
In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on Mars to make it possible to build larger, pressurized structures and even use aerial flight, and more gravity than on the Moon.
The ISS design is ultimately constrained by cost and fairing size (how big a thing you can fit on your rocket), limits that are far more stringent for the surface of Mars (where the limiting size is set by the descent stage). The fact that it's in vacuum doesn't affect its size at all.
The average surface pressure on Mars is a few millibars; from an engineering perspective it's the same as building pressurized structures in vacuum. If anything, it's more difficult, since your design will have to deal with wind loads and airborne dust.
Bootstrapping scientific facilities in a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere which can only be effectively transversed to and from every 18 months is not an easy thing.
Not to mention the phenomenal effort required to grow food there or transport who knows how much food per person to provide the kinds of safety margins you would want to avoid your first Mars astronauts starving.
An amusing and underappreciated technical obstacle to Mars trips is that food you can subsist on long-term with that kind of unrefrigerated shelf life doesn't exist, even on Earth.
BTW the Earth/Mars synodic period is not 18 months, but 26 months.
How did Reid Stowe manage? He surely could not have relied on frozen food, too much risk of a generator failing.
"In 2010 Stowe completed a more extensive ocean voyage, entitled 1000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey—a journey that commenced on April 21, 2007, from the 12th St. Pier, Hoboken, New Jersey.[1] Stowe was the principal designer and builder of the Anne, a 70 ft (21.3 m), 60-ton (54,400 kg) gaff-rigged schooner which he sailed on this voyage.[1][2] The purpose of the enterprise was to remain on the open ocean, without resupply or pulling into any harbor, for a period of one thousand days, "
The food shelf-life problem is solved if you can rehydrate and cook foods, like this crew did. But a spacecraft has the cooking facilities of an office breakroom — just a microwave and source of hot water. And in that situation, where you need precooked heat-in-bag foods that stay shelf-stable for three years without refrigeration, we don't yet have the technology.
Why can't you include dried pulses and dehydrated other foods? All of those can be cooked in a microwave? Dried pulses are edible for a very long time.
> In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on Mars to make it possible to build larger, pressurized structures and even use aerial flight, and more gravity than on the Moon.
True, though the atmosphere there brings challenges of its own:
“Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time,” said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
> but the ground you can cover with several manned missions is currently greater.
Wouldn't we able be to build much better robots which would probably be more effective than humans for the same cost it would take to send a manned mission to Mars?
This is a common thing that trips people up — you can't compare the capabilities of robots on Mars with what humans can do on Earth. You have to compare like with like, and a human crew on Mars would essentially be living in a Level 4 biocontainment facility and remotely operating the same kind of robots we could send to the planet autonomously. And their effective time available for work would be worse even than ISS, where the entire station (6 people) does something like 35 hours/week of science.
Robotic Mars exploration has made huge progress on what is a shoestring budget compared to boondoggles like Artemis or ISS. Just look at the improvement between Sojourner and Ingenuity and imagine what an adequately funded robotic exploration program could look like.
> "worse even than ISS, where the entire station (6 people) does something like 35 hours/week of science."
You may have seen China launching their youngest ever crew to their space station this week, and I noticed the quotes from the three crew members:
"I'm solely focused on the mission, on how to accomplish the mission successfully. I have to get prepared every minute, every second, and this was my aspiration when I joined the Air Force, and that aspiration has never changed," said Tang Hongbo, Commander.
"I feel that I am fully prepared physically, mentally and technically. I am confident to complete this upcoming flight mission. In fact, to be honest, I can't wait to carry out the mission now." - Tang Shengjie, Operator.
"Talking about the roles and responsibilities, I will try my best to complete the routine maintenance of the space station" - Jiang Xinlin, Operator.
One of those sounds less exciting than the others.
It's actually an interesting comparison. If the Queen of Spain circa 1500 had today's technology she wouldn't care nearly as much about Mars as she did then about India (sic) because extracting anything from Mars can't possibly be profitable yet. She wasn't in it for the science; she was in it for god, glory and gold, and not necessarily in that order.
On the other hand both Spanish capital and Columbus personally took a huge risk. They knew less about what lay ahead than we know about Mars. They new the rewards were high, but the risks were enormous.
Colombus and his band of scoundrels certainly took a huge risk. He was hell-bent on joining the aristocracy, and it seems to have made him willing to believe and argue things that a less motivated person might not have done.
Google says his whole expedition cost about 1.5 million maravedis. I'm not finding what fraction of the Spanish crown's budget that was. Do you know?
Well it took Columbus 2 months and 9 days to get across the Atlantic. He never made it to India, which was his original goal. The first expedition from Europe to India via the ocean was by Vasco da Gama and it took him around 10 months.
Earth to the moon is 240,000 miles. Earth to Mars at it's closest approach is 34 million miles. So this would be like telling Columbus to sail not for 2 months and 9 days, but for 27 years to get to India. He wasn't even willing to sail for 10 months to do it! (Also bear in mind that's the one-way timeframe; the return from Mars would be about twice as long in this scenario.)
And not only that but also let Columbus know there won't be any gold, spices, or slaves at the end of the trip. See how willing he is to dedicate the next 81 years of his life to it.
Hopefully this puts the interplanetary distance in perspective.
You are right about that. My post was answering a poster about "how would Columbus feel that we went to the moon but not to Mars?" The 27 year timeframe is an analogy comparing the distance to the moon vs the distance to Mars, and relating it back to the timeframe it took Columbus to do his famous voyage.
Columbus is not a measuring stick for human exploration... Nevertheless I think some would be flabberghasted that such a leap fizzled out but some would wonder why we went in the first place if not to gather resources.
I think they’d have gotten the Cold War dick measuring aspect, or at least the Victorians would have; a lot of 19th century colonialism was of that general form (in particular see Germany in Africa).
> We need to go there so we can study it properly.
The only thing that would accomplish, compared to sending robotic probes, is wasted payload capacity that could otherwise transport scientific instruments.
Also, they use the term "marsquake". Never stopped to think about how geocentric the term "earthquake" is!