Colonizing Mars makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believing otherwise just for the sci-fi trope of living on Mars.
Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. It's just enough to complicate landing and to cover all your equipment in dust when there are planetary-wise dust storms. The ground is poison. Energy production is an issue. Low gravity is a problem. It's a long way from Earth. Terraforming Mars is a fantasy.
Now compare this to the Moon. Inhabitants can remain in real-time contact with Earth. Getting there is far easier and quicker. You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. There's evidence of extensive lava tunnels that can be pressurized and inhabited without the need for massive excavation.
The only real issue with the Moon where Mars actually wins is day length. Mars has almost a normal Earth-like day length. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth on a 28 day orbit so has... a 28 Earth day "Moon day".
You see this same psychology at play every time some fringe scientist comes up with another completely unworkable idea for FTL travel (warp drives,, wormholes, etc).
But really living in another gravity well doesn't mmake much sense in any case. It's further compolication for not a lot of gain. I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
It doesn’t really make sense, but some childhood part of me likes to imagine us as a species of explorers.
There are tons of things humans do that don’t make sense. IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense. We did end up benefitting in unforeseen ways from the technology developed by doing so.
If people want to sign up to fly to Mars or send hardware there to terraform, why should we stop them? I take lots of unnecessary risks mountaineering, because it’s what fills my cup.
You make great points about orbitals, and I do agree from a logical standpoint. Maybe Mars proves too impractical, but the technology developed leads us in that direction instead. I’m excited for the future either way.
Suppose it was possible to travel to Mars and survive on its surface. Even if no-one ever moves there permanently, I'm sure that many people would visit, just like people currently seek adventure in remote and inhospitable locations on Earth.
Maybe we'll even get a version of the show Alone that's set on Mars. "We dropped ten astronauts off in isolated locations on the Martian surface. Let's see who can survive the longest!" I'd tune in to that.
> IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense
The Space Race made perfect sense. It was a political exercise. a proxy for war between nuclear powers. As long as civilizations have existed they've built monuments and undertaken massive tasks as a political exercise.
> ... why should we stop them?
Who said anything about stopping them? My argument is it won't happen because the costs are so high and there's no hope of a return from that.
People like to bring up human exploration as some kind of argument but every aspect of human exploration has been an economic activity. In the Middle Ages, European colonialism was pure exploitation. Columbus's famous journey West was to find a faster way to India... for exploitation.
There is literally nothing we could produce or extract on Mars that would make economic sense to bring back to Earth.
Life doesn't make sense. It's a fantastic tower of complexity fighting against entropy. Just let hydrocarbon goo sit peacefully like it apparently does on other bodies in the universe and stop this self-replication and evolution madness.
It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem.
> Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere.
Not directly, but it does mean (1) leaks can be represurised from outside, and (2) is a source of carbon, useful for plants and ISRU fuel manufacturing.
The fuel point is useful for any initial colonisation creation, but by the time we seriously consider a million people we should be able to build a mass driver… which works better on the airless moon than the thin atmosphere of Mars.
> I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
I understand the appeal, but I strongly suspect they only seem good due to the failure modes having not yet been deeply investigated.
> Is there an obvious reason this would not work ?
Nah, it's fine.
It's just big and expensive and we've already got gravity under our feet, so it's a very expensive way to remove one of the few reasons to do stuff in space in the first place.
We'll get around to it at some point, for sure. Just no hurry.
If the loop is large, you don’t have to move too fast. Fairground rides spin fast enough to exceed 1g with little kids in them, and those rides are usually not wider than 10m, often less. Speed here is distance around the circumference, so twice the radius, half the turning speed.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but generally it’s considered that the issue is more that if you’re standing on a spinning cylinder, you might have weird balance issues due to speed differences between head and feet. Also, you have to remember you don’t have gravity, so as you intuit, entry and exit are trickier.
Two broad ideas for entry/exit: do it at the center where the physical position is stable, then “spin up” some how, or alternately get up to external speed and lock on to something that you then elevator through the surface.
Take a really long cable, put a suitable weighted asteroid on the other end, then spin the whole thing up. As long as the cable holds, you have a decent amount of centrifugal force without needing a particularly large habitat.
The usual design for these things have very low surface speeds, so you're not likely to go off into the deep even if it fails, as you're going to be pretty close to your prior combined orbit even without thrust, and the Δv needed to get back will be tiny.
But also, the forces are never more than the apparent gravity times the mass, so when someone does finally end up experiencing this, it will be part of a larger pattern of bad maintenance and/or engineering that likely has other things going wrong at the same time.
Neal Stephenson suggested having two habitats with hooks so they’d spin against each-other. Then you could have fun and climb up to see your neighbors.
Was assuming they do a kind of ferris wheel with center and 3 or 4 spokes to start, maybe 200m diameter, and gradually fill out the rim with modular units maintaining balance, and center of mass at central dock ?
> You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust.
Once there are regular landings on the Moon, dust management will be an issue, either at source on the landing pad, or where it lands, which will be just about everywhere on the moon.
I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot, having most people die in the process, not knowing if they was an end to that sand, felt the same.
Why would you do that?
Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now.
That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing.
But eventually something pays of big time.
And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively.
It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive.
I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds.
I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same.
It's always a different situation. That's the point.
Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert.
> I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot
Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never.
Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert.
Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG.
Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas.
> But eventually something pays of big time.
There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.
Sometimes being outside easy nuclear strike capabilities of the superpowers is a good on its own. Plus lot less annoying environmentalists and I imagine plentiful fissile material.
If literally every nuclear bomb ever made was detonated in a world war, the fallout from that would be a significantly smaller problem than the steady-state radiation is on Mars right now.
The fallout will eventually decay, but Mars will stay an irradiated hellscape forever.
With a couple fairly simple genetic modifications humans could thrive in place with high background radiation, in a place where nobody can throw nukes at you for doing simple genetic modifications.
People didn't know there was a fertile land of the other side. Just like we don't know if there is a good thing that will come out of mars. We just know the constraints.
It's not about what you know is there. It's the potential.
There is no point for Usain Bolt to run that fast. There is not point in building the tallest tower in the world once again.
Meanwhile, the mars goal already managed to bring us spaceships that land and divide the cost of putting satellites in orbit by 10.
No other path lead to it because there was nothing to motivate it enough.
This comment is really poorly reasoned imo. To continue your metaphor, ancient peoples did not sail across the Pacific *, they sailed to the next nearest island and started colonies there (if viable). You could apply your logic to argue for colonising Uranus, or even the Sun.
> Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious
IF the colonisation of Mars is successful (however you define that), the benefits of it MIGHT be obvious. Those are 2 huge conditionals; it may not be possible to colonise Mars, and if it is possible, we may still not be seeing any benefits in 200 years time.
*Of course, some did, but very much by exception. And it rarely ended well for these people, or their tribes, or humanity at large.
Colonizing the Moon makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believing otherwise just for the sci-fi trope of living on the Moon.
Maybe in 50 years the Moon can be colonized by machines, but for humans if they really want to experiment with self sufficiency, they can try building Biosphere 3 in the Sahara and see if they can survive for a few weeks without constant support from the outside.
A fully isolated colony anywhere isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. This would be true even if there were another Earth. It would require multiple revolutions in compact software-defined manufacturing and a rethink of supply chains around that core.
McMurdo on the Moon is entirely possible and I think there's a good chance we'll see it. This would get us started trying to live elsewhere and we'd start learning how to deal with the challenges. We'd also find out about the challenges we don't know.
Back in 1999 I worked on a (unfunded) pre-proposal to NASA on "OSCOMAK" (Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge) but, it did not go very far.
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
"The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix). We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository. You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web..."
See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 "... So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical prototypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossiped about by academics.) ..."
One of the big arguments for colonizing Mars is that a self-sufficient Mars colony could serve as a "backup" for the human race in case we screw things up so badly that we wipe ourselves out here on Earth.
I always thought this was a specious argument and that despite a lot of social media threads and Elon ravings, no one is really taking it seriously. The reason I think this is because no one ever brings up the idea of having a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica.
I mean to build a proper threat model you need to understand exactly what threats you're trying to mitigate I guess. But let's say it's the usual doom and gloom stuff, a) climate change, b) nuclear war/winter, c) meteor strike.
If anything an Antarctic colony stands to benefit from climate change. A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole, and to be self-sufficient you had to solve your energy needs without much sunlight anyway (there are surely tons of undiscovered hydrocarbons down there waiting to be dug up and refined).
A meteor strike, well as long as it doesn't land on the colony, the problems are similar to nuclear winter.
So if you want to have a "backup" for the human race - the Antarctic Plateau is sufficiently remote, and about 10,000x easier than anything off-world.
But we don't even talk about it because everyone knows life on Antarctica is pretty depressing and PEOPLE JUST WANT TO DO SCI-FI IN SPACE.
An antarctic base/colony would not solve a number of issues:
1. A meteor strike can be big enough to obliterate anything on what was once the surface. It can heat the entire globe to 100 degrees Celsius due to tektites bombarding the surface.
2. Due to millennia of snow and ice covering it, the surface of the continent is just bare rock. Nothing will grow there without significant amounts of soil moved to it. Yes, this is also a problem for Mars, and a boat is more proven tech than a spaceship, but the removal of all ice off the surface will not change Antarctica into a bountiful oasis. Making a self-sufficient colony there is going to be extremely hard.
Musk is using SpaceX to drive down the cost of sending things into space. This greatly reduces obstacles for going to space, and makes a self-sufficient Antarctic base a bit obsolete.
Still mars colony will not be a colony, it will be an outpost.
I dont think we are even close to be able to make it self sufficient.
Self sufficient sounds nice in principle but is way more complicated. You need industry for every single part used to build colony - that is replace everything you rely on.
Soil enrichment, material wear, silicon chips... you need to have uranium mine and processing to sustain energy production.
The scale of the operation is massive. And all done underground.
Not impossible, just unlikely we will ever get there.
> You need industry for every single part used to build colony - that is replace everything you rely on.
That's actually much, much harder than it sounds, and this is the key part that everyone just hand-waves away.
On Earth, it is already unaffordable to move to many places for even relatively rich westerners. As in, your own personal economic output is unable to pay for the cost of moving the materials there, setting up a habitable abode, and then keeping you alive until the age of retirement. That's with normal-ish housing in normal-ish conditions.
We can only afford our current lifestyles with the "cheat codes on": free oxygen, free water, free temperature control, and free energy growing out of the sky[1].
On Mars, you have two compounding challenges:
1) Every aspect of staying alive is harder. Housing has to be air-tight. Instead of a mere air conditioner, you need a life support system. Instead of just food, air and water also need to be made. Space suits are needed to go outside. Etc...
2) Productivity itself is lower. The supply chain is tiny, raw materials are much harder obtain, cooling water and air is not available in bulk, and so on. Just think about how dependent modern technology is on plastics, which are made from oil. Mars has no oil!
The combination of both lower productivity multiplied by higher cost of living and ridiculous supply-chain issues for the first century (or more!) means that self-sustainability will be out of reach well past all of our lifetimes.
Fair point on #1 but I imagine the probability of a meteor strike that literally boils the planet is a lot lower than a strike in general.
Regarding #2, the solution for self-sufficient agriculture in Antarctica and on the Moon/Mars is the same: hydroponics.
Only it's much easier to do hydroponics in Antarctica. You can melt that ice for fresh water. You can harvest all kinds of nutrients from the ocean. The Antarctic seas have huge oil deposits to provide limitless energy. An Antarctic colony pretty much just needs lots of weather-hardened infrastructure, it's tough, but well within reach of current tech.
Self-sufficient Moon/Mars hydroponics is way harder. Water is far more scarce. Where do you obtain the nutrients for plant life in situ? Not sure it will all require exotic systems that haven't been invented.
My premise is basically that the political will for a self sufficient colony that "backs up" human society doesn't exist. If it did we would just have some countries agree to amend the Antarctic treaty and do it. It could probably even pay for itself by exporting oil. But no one genuinely cares so we just write scifi stories on the Internet instead.
If there is a self-sufficient colony there, and it consists of people from a single nation, it will be targeted. Only a non-political, mixed-heritage colony of scientists and farmers might be overlooked.
I very much agree that the moon is a better target. Being able to send help in a few days instead of months is a big deal.
What I believe the moon is especially good for is as a launch pad for further exploration. Build mostly-automated factories in low but non-zero gravity and launch with a much smaller escape velocity. Lots of raw materials right there, easy energy from the sun (with solar panels in space for the night).
Unfortunately, the moon is "old hat" now that we've walked on it, and people want exciting new goals, not just a space factory.
You're not wrong, but if we follow that logic, we might as well shut down all the bases in Antarctica; for that matter, people should probably stop living in Las Vegas, and what is up with that restaurant on top of the Jungfraujoch? Nobody can live there!
We do things that don’t make sense all the time. The idea that our lives and plans should be dominated entirely by rational decisions only itself makes sense if you’re willing to expand rational to include the likes of “because it’s there” and “because I felt like it”.
That said, given the unknowns and uncertainties, I believe it’s rational to devote some small amount of our resources to trying to achieve multiple sustainable off-earth communities, including in orbit, on the Moon, and yes, on Mars.
I think GP is referring to people like Elon Musk, who have a personal brand built around the idea that they’re “rational people who make data-driven decisions based on logic” and yet twist themselves into fascinating rhetorical shapes trying to argue that human colonization of Mars is possible, necessary and also imminent. I think they do this because they recognize that “some small amount of our resources” won’t actually be enough to do anything on Mars in the coming century, and they want to go to Mars in their lifetime.
In general, life, if it is to endure, has to keep pushing its boundaries. Our current niche will surely end. Through stretching to build colonies in difficult places, hopefully we will become more robust. So it’s useful for explorers to go to places where they might just barely survive.
As humans start moving beyond Earth, I think that it’s more likely that we change ourselves. We can probably make our bodies more tolerant of lower gravity and higher radiation.
This is important because an unmanned project could redirect asteroids to repeatably hit a chosen canyon on Mars. This increases the neighborhood metal value and begins the 50 km shaft you’d need to achieve survivable pressure underground.
I assume we use distance as proxy for “how hard is to get there” (time and energy needed). Actual momentary distance is a bit tangential, because you never move in a straight line.
The problem with a Hohmann transfer orbit is that you rely on launch windows. You can only do it when the two planets are in a straight line from the sun (or more accurately, and the same equivalent points in each of their orbits at the same time). This is a pain as Earth-Mars launch windows only come along every two years.
If you want to launch without that issue, you're then into the world of using more delta-v, which is catastrophically expensive, unless you've got some form of propulsion for your craft beyond what we've got now. So yes, but with caveats.
Obviously, there's a giant pile of detail beyond this in terms of the calculations for trading off time of flight vs distance between bodies, vs delta-v to accelerate towards the body, and then accelerate away from it to slow your descent into an orbital trajectory, but that's more depth than I'm going into for a quick HN comment.
Distance and time are two of the fundamental constraints for how much delta-v you're going to need to move from point A to point B, with the third being how you control your velocity when you arrive. The other child comment and my answer to them goes into this at about the highest level possible.
It's definitely a con for human habitation. Our physiology evolved in 1g and without that many of our bodily processes behave poorly over extended timeframes.
We don’t actually know what the long-term health consequences of Martian or lunar gravity are.
We know the long-term health consequences of microgravity (as in LEO) are significantly negative.
But, we lack data on long-term health effects of Martian or lunar gravity. Pessimistically, humans really need close to 1g, and anything significantly less causes serious problems-lunar isn’t going to be much better than microgravity. Optimistically, humans just need “some gravity”, and while close to zero is harmful, lunar or Martian isn’t.
The way things are going, we are likely to find out in the next 10-20 years, at least for the lunar case. If lunar gravity avoids most of the negative health effects of microgravity, Martian gravity will too. If it doesn’t there is still the chance that Martian gravity might be “just enough” even if lunar gravity isn’t
Mars makes sense to Elon Musk because it would be the culmination of his multi-decade strategy of pumping up companies on government largesse. Whether it's fat government contracts or tax credits and grants, every single one of his ventures have relied extensively on the taxpayer. Musk correctly has identified an international effort to Mars as the most lucrative, multi-governmental contract that ever existed.
Yes, but there is also nothing on the moon worth going there for. Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids.
I’m of the opinion that if you want real space industry, leave the planets alone and go to the near-earth asteroids followed by the belt. If you want space tourism and money-sucking colonies then it doesn’t really matter which location you pick - they’re all bad.
> Fusion resources are a pipe dream and anything you mine there would be much better mined off asteroids.
More pertinently, when we actually develop a fusion reactor, the gas giants are a far easier place to get fusion fuel from than the parts-per-billion in regolith.
The Moon is kind of glossed over but it’s not as bad as it sounds.
There are peaks of (near) eternal light at the poles. Put up a tower there with solar collectors and you have power. Nuclear power works too and there is probably fissile material on the Moon if it can be found.
It’s only a few days away, meaning it’s close enough for people to come and go and supplies to be sent in an emergency. It’s also close enough for tourism while Mars is definitely not barring fusion rockets or something.
Magnetic or gun launch from the Lunar surface could export minerals from the Moon to Earth, another possible industry that could at least offset the cost.
There are some compelling scientific and industrial possibilities.
For science the Moon would make an amazing place to build massive telescopes. The low gravity would make huge structures easier to build too.
Spacecraft could be built on the Moon and launched into space easily, making it an ideal place to construct really huge craft that would probably be needed for any serious forays elsewhere. Nuclear powered launch from the Moon is fine too unlike Earth where this would be an environmental disaster.
The environment on the Moon is a bit harsher than Mars but not as much as it first appears. There is water and probably lots of minerals. A vacuum isn’t that much worse than the thin wispy Martian air. The dust may be more abrasive but otherwise is probably not much worse.
It's complicated enough that I don't think you could have something fully automated unless it's an RTG.
It would all probably end like Antarctica, we had one reactor down there, but the cost of sending people there just to run it and the infeasibility of any repairs of upgrades ended the entire effort after one generation.
> It would all probably end like Antarctica, we had one reactor down there, but the cost of sending people there just to run it and the infeasibility of any repairs of upgrades ended the entire effort after one generation.
The decision to close McMurdo Station's "Nukey Poo" nuclear power station in 1972 wasn't just due to cost of running it, it was also due to environmental concerns. On the Moon, those environmental concerns don't exist – there is no living environment to be harmed.
Also, Nukey Poo was 1960s technology. State-of-the art nuclear reactors are more reliable and less maintenance-intensive than their 1960s forebears. So just because Nukey Poo required an on-site crew of 25 people, it doesn't necessarily follow a lunar reactor would.
The reactor could be remotely monitored and controlled from Earth, and some maintenance tasks could likely be performed by robots–not possible in Nukey Poo's day. There would still likely be some maintenance tasks that would require humans on-site, but that might require significantly less than 25 people.
For improved safety, a lunar reactor could be situated several kilometres away from the nearest human settlement, and left unattended most of the time. Humans (travelling in pressurised lunar rovers) could visit on those occasions when in-person maintenance was necesary.
Another factor which added to the cost of Nukey Poo – under the Antarctic Treaty, it is prohibited to dispose of nuclear waste in Antarctica, so the whole site had to be disassembled and cleaned-up and all waste shipped back to the US via New Zealand, at great expense. By contrast, a disused lunar reactor could likely just be abandoned in-place.
That's the biggest reason I prefer the Moon to Mars for anything in the next 25-50 years at least. The Moon is close enough to Earth to get supplies quickly in a crunch. Mars is not. It's going to take a long time for anything off-world to be industrially self-sufficient because as you point out supply chains are longer and more complex than people realize.
Moonquakes are smaller than Earth and don't seem common. This is very low on the list of risks.
A meltdown on the Moon wouldn't be nearly as bad as Earth. The thing that makes it bad here is all the water, wind, etc. and the thick atmosphere that spreads nasty radioactive material everywhere. On the Moon you would end up with one site that was radioactive AF but it wouldn't go everywhere unless it exploded and a reactor prone to that would be stupid.
Different reactor designs would be much easier on the Moon too like liquid sodium fast reactors. Liquid sodium is problematic on Earth because it loves to react with water and oxygen but on the Moon if it were exposed it would just sit there.
Of course the whole surface environment is bathed in radiation because it's sitting underneath an unshielded open fusion reactor called the Sun. This also makes radiation incidents less of a concern. It doesn't change all that much except for right next to the thing.
Edit: BTW I do think if solar towers at peaks of eternal light work that's probably easier than a nuclear reactor at least in the short-medium term and maybe forever.
The USSR landed a probe on mars, the unimagetivelly called Mars 3, it's mission was aborted in less than 2 minutes due to communication failure, but it acchieved a successful landing, and was actually the first one to do so succesfuly.
Its predecessor, Mars 2 reached mars, but crash landed, but have the honor of being the first man made object to land on mars surface.
The only top search results for Alan Shepard which claim he was first in space are fanfic alternative history, which I guess is popular. I feel it’s quite popular to hypothesize that a Russian secretly preceded Gagarin but didn’t survive.
1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison.
2. After that, there’s pressure or I suppose the lack there of basically You might as well be in space.
3. Solar panels don’t work for shit on Mars, because it’s so much further away in the inverse square law is a bastard.
4. It’s a long ass way away.
5. The lower gravity has implications long term for having babies.
Like, I think we should explore space, and become a multi planetary species, but I don’t know that Mars is the place for a viable long-term colony. I’m much more partial to Venus-cloud-cities or something similar.
I'd be excited to see someone living on Mars, or at least visiting. Just like I'd be excited to see someone climb a previously unconquered mountain or invent an innovative new technology. I want to be part of a species that never stops pushing the boundaries of what's possible - I bet that if we keep persisting, we can go far further than most people today can even imagine.
There's an alternate timeline out there where everyone always listened to the "experts" telling them their dreams are stupid or impossible. No-one in that timeline has ever even run a four-minute mile.
Yup, the only real way we could ever set up a long term habitat on mars would be to do it underground to shield from the radiation. The only way we could maybe justify the huge pain in the ass it would be to stay there long term, is if we treated it as a purposeful scientific mission with a goal of looking for signs of (potentially ancient) life, and accepted that there’s nothing else useful we could really do there.
Whether this is worth it is questionable. What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.
You could also ionize particles from the surface of Phobos and then accelerate them so they create a plasma torus along its orbit. This would create a magnetic field but we'll probably already be venturing outside of the solar system by the time we could do it.
We could plausibly land a human on Mars within our lifetimes and they wouldn't immediately die. To get Venus to that point would take minimum hundreds, more likely thousands of years. Which is neat, but between the two it implies something about the better place to start.
>> What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.
> Granted it doesn’t look like low-hanging fruit but never, ever is a very long time.
I believe the applicable qualifier here is, "on the surface of the planet." And since this would relegate any long-term occupation to be subterranean, the GP's assertion is difficult to refute.
“If we don’t kill ourselves first” is doing all the heavy lifting here. I’m not convinced that more time helps us, given that civilization itself is very fragile and we are continually a moment away from nuclear holocaust ending everything we’ve worked to achieve. And that’s not even bringing up the damage we’re doing to the environment we derive all this prosperity from.
I wouldn't say never. All the elements necessary to sustain life are present. With a certain level of tech and energy production it becomes viable. Not any time soon, though.
> 1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison.
Add water: perchlorate dissolves readily in water, so by bathing the dust in water, you remove the perchlorate from the dust and transfer it to waste water. You can then process the waste water further to remove the perchlorate from it and recycle it. (Assume this is happening inside a pressurised habitat/greenhouse/airlock where water can be liquid.)
Another option is heating it, which decomposes the perchlorate, liberating oxygen
There are also microorganisms which consume perchlorate
Heating perchlorate also liberates chlorine and other chlorine compounds. That doesn't sound great. Also water isn't exactly easy to come by on Mars. I doubt there will be a whole lot of bathing going on.
> Heating perchlorate also liberates chlorine and other chlorine compounds. That doesn't sound great.
I think the main thing it produces other than oxygen is HCl. Filter the produced gas through water, the water will absorb the HCl and start to turn into hydrochloric acid. Then we just need to add a base such as NaOH to neutralise the acid. (Not sure what bases are readily available on Mars but I’m sure people will be able to come up with something.)
> Also water isn't exactly easy to come by on Mars. I doubt there will be a whole lot of bathing going on.
There is evidence that Mars contains substantial quantities of subterranean water ice, at varying depths and ease of access. SpaceX’s plan for fuelling Starship for return to Earth is to manufacture CH4 using atmospheric CO2 and mined H2O. If they manage to mine enough H2O to produce the fuel to refuel a Starship, they’ll have enough H2O to fill swimming pools for the crew to swim in - and to rinse perchlorate out of the soil.
The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose? What are people going to do there? Sit around and write software?
At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining. On Venus, you can't do anything really, because you'd have no access to the natural resources there. So what's the point?
The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.
>At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining.
You can also take that idea further and just do mining in space. One of the most interesting regions is simply cislunar space. Human development there means you can haul asteroids in, you could potentially move polluting industry there, do science in environments that you can't do on earth, and so on. It's much safer than being stranded far away, it's relatively easy to get people back to earth, etc.
The entire idea of going to another planet simply has the huge problem that you need to waste a ton of energy to get things off the damn planet again so really why not just built habitats in space.
This is exactly my position. It would be easier to just build habitats (like O'Neal cylinders) in space that have the exact parameters you want, rather than trying to terraform worlds like Venus to be somewhat-habitable after millennia.
And yes, asteroid mining looks very promising. Facilities on the Moon might be good for this industry, by providing a place with some gravity to do work, and not be worried about environmental issues (or an atmosphere to get in the way of transport). And it's not far from Earth, so you can take all the products of asteroid mining and easily ship them to where they'll be used on Earth, or launch them out into orbit to build space habitats.
> you could potentially move polluting industry there
The reason industry pollutes is that they either DGAF, or it's part of the process. Those industries either won't care to move to space in the first place, or the re-design of the whole process would have been better spent improving the process on earth.
It'd be a pretty extreme way to make web developers think about latency of their bloated websites, sorry "immersive app experiences", but it might actually be the one that works.
> The problem with Venus cloud cities is: what's the purpose? What are people going to do there? Sit around and write software?
Retirement homes. 90% Earth gravity probably high enough to keep you fit and avoid weightlessness adverse effects, but low enough to help with joint pain, reduced motility and fall risk.
Robots could do some of the care work, but some work will probably still need humans, like repairs and some medical work I would imagine. To do that, the colony would have to hire people to live there, for years at a time or more. Pay would probably need to be very high unless Earth has gotten really, really horrible.
This is actually a pretty good idea I think, aside from the huge cost of course, and possibly the high amount of radiation seniors will experience just traveling to their retirement home in the clouds.
> Room is not the resource that retired people take up in homes on Earth
Proximity to friends and distance from crime has real value. It’s absolutely classist. But every social system we invent contorts to provide it to its elite.
It sounds like the big benefit of Venus cloud cities as a retirement destination is the lower (0.9g) gravity, plus possibly distance from problems on Earth, so it wouldn't be a destination for poor elderly people, but rather rich ones (esp. ones who don't care about visiting with family).
I imagine it would resemble a giant cruise ship, with luxurious surroundings, plenty of stuff for older people to do, etc. Of course, there would be a very large crew/staff aboard to clean and maintain it and provide services, such as medical care. Salaries for the staff would have to be huge, since they wouldn't be able to go home for years, and gigs on this floating city would probably be contracted fixed-length terms, similar to Saudi Aramco workers, so prices to live in this city would be enormous, making it something only very wealthy retirees could afford.
Considering the view would be pretty boring after a while, and the prices astronomical, it's hard to believe that 0.9g gravity would be enough of a draw to make this project economically viable.
Distance from Earth would be a benefit in case of nuclear war, which currently looks highly likely at some point. Even if humans aren't eradicated, it would probably be a civilization-ending event, and not many places would be safe. However, it does seem like some kind of giant submarine might be more feasible and cheaper.
But yeah, 0.9g doesn't seem like enough of a draw to make it economically feasible.
That's absolutely correct I believe. I don't see how such a colony would be self-sustaining without some big advances in technology (at which point you might as well just build a space habitat with low gravity).
Yeah, but sadly anyplace we can send a bunch of humans to, we can figure out how to send a nuke to as well. And if leaders on the homeworld are crazy enough to turn Earth into a wasteland, I'm not sure how confident I'd be they wouldn't point their threat at your colony (which might look like an enticing bargaining chip).
Bargaining chip for what exactly? The colony wouldn't have any kind of resources, except the wealth of its residents, but that wealth would all be tied up in bank accounts back on Earth. If Earth gets turned into a wasteland, the colony will probably die because I don't see how it could possibly survive without regular supply missions from Earth, and that depends on things on Earth not getting too horrible. Also, if Earth became a literal wasteland, all the wealth those rich people on Venus had would be gone: it's just numbers in computers after all.
You're not answering the question. What concession? What do a bunch of old people in the clouds of Venus have to bargain with? What resources do they control?
They aren't bargaining with the colony, they're bargaining with the nation that sent its citizens there (or any nation that views the survival of the colony as important enough to make other concessions).
It's like a criminal that points a gun at your kid and threatens to shoot unless you do X.
> At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining. On Venus, you can't do anything really, because you'd have no access to the natural resources there. So what's the point?
Depends what you're trying to make. The atmosphere soup on Venus contains more interesting chemicals than the Martian surface, and there's a whole lot more energy going around to power whatever you're doing.
> The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.
IMO Phobos is actually the best option - most of those advantages apply, and being smaller makes it easier for spacecraft to go to or from.
You can already live in a tiny cabin and never go outside in any major city of your choice (or even outside a city, but you might need to provide your own cabin). You can even choose to pay the vast proportion of your salary to pay for the right to live there.
But you may have to make do with fresh air and water unless you make your own recirculating scrubbers.
Give it a few years and Amazon will do housing and then you can even buy everything from the same entity that provides your living volume.
I wouldn't want to bet that the operators of a space habitat wouldn't take some cues from the company town era, except with even less oversight.
Crazy idea, since O2 is lighter than CO2 couldn’t we just terraform the layer of the atmosphere where the cloud city is? Air is a lifting gas, so theoretically could you float breathable air on top of CO2?
Searching for "bacteria use perchlorate as terminal electron acceptor" it seems that the perchlorate thing is a simple matter of bioremediation, just give some bacterial an electron source (reduced carbon substrate).
> Perchlorate reductase is usually encoded as a combination of four genes, denoted pcrABCD. ... The function of pcrD is uncertain, but may encode a molybdenum-containing chaperone protein specific to assembling the pcrABC system
Odd, why would a chaperone protein require Mo?
edit: Ok, I see. Seems like pcrD is homologous to a part of the DMSO reductase and that has a chaperone that inserts the Mo cofactor (Molybdopterin) into the complex
Yeah I always like the sound of a Venus colony more, similar gravity being one of the main benefits but guess being stuck in a habitat in the clouds doesn't satisfy the same explorative instinct as Mars where you could actually walk on a new land
Beaming the power to Earth is probably not going to work very well because of the diffraction limits involved.
Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.
If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.
You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.
Indeed, when opening a hatch and allowing scalding ultra-high-pressure sulphuric acid into the habitat is an option, dissent will be fairly easily handled!
That's not what I mean. If you look at many of the problems in the world now, they're geopolitical, caused by conflicts between countries. If you had a bunch of different countries trying to all colonize Venus or wherever all at the same time, it would inevitably lead to war. But if only a single country were doing it and no one else was involved, they would only be limited by their own technical or economic or manpower limitations.
> The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) was a NASA Discovery Program mission that placed a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. But InSight was more than a Mars mission. It addressed one of the most fundamental issues of planetary science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago. The mission ended in December 2022 after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars.
I wonder if you could make a huge steel balloon float in the Venusian atmosphere.
You'd run into problems with the atmospheric acid eating away at the skin, but I wonder if you can at least float high enough to have a pleasant outdoor temperature.
At least the Sun wouldn't appear tiny and cold as from Mars!
I love the idea of floating, self replicating factories on Venus that launch comets made of dry ice to Mars to build up an atmosphere on Mars and reduce the atmosphere on Venus.
Well, HDPE would be way easier to manufacture there.
But people on your link are mostly unanimous:
"Quite often the caps are the weakest point.
And as mentioned above HDPE bottles tend to sweat over time.
I would vote against long time storage (years on end) of sulfuric acid in HDPE bottles."
> I have also a HDPE bottle of 98% sulfuric acid over a decade old without single hint of issue.
And they're talking about almost pure acid, which is not nearly what's going on in at atmosphere that's mostly CO2. Venus is probably not even as strong as drain cleaner.
It doesn't take a lot of acid to cause problems over time. You still wouldn't want to use steel, as mentioned above. But yeah, you don't need Teflon either. Honestly I'm pretty sure I remember HDPE showing up in real proposals for Venus missions, which is why it was top of mind.
There's absolutely a school of thought which views Venus as a better colonization candidate than Mars, and as early as the 70's scientists envisioned floating cities.
In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's.
Humans working outside could wear simpler breathing masks rather than full pressure suits.
In fact I came here to offer a counterpoint to this statement in the article:
"Nearby Venus has far too much atmosphere, whose pressure and noxious gases would crush and choke visitors from Earth."
Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem.
I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).
Surely the best place in terms of hospitality is Earth. But Mars, with all its problems, is likely still second. Likely.
We can deal with all martian problems.
1. Perchlorates in the soil? You can deal with them, say, chemically if you need some patch on Mars which is more Earth-like. After al you don't need to have the whole Mars immediately fertile.
2. Low pressure? Yes, but it's still better than vacuum, so spacesuits could be simpler, and also the cold atmosphere won't freeze you as much.
3. Far from Earth so Sun is too dim for solar batteries? Then take more of those batteries, they are becoming good, cheap and even light.
4. Far away from Earth? Yes, true - but we can survive for the year to get from here to there, and we routinely had ISS missions for half a year, comparing to ~9 months flight with today's technologies from Earth to Mars.
5. Low gravity on Mars and weightlessness in flight? Some are optimistic about artificial gravity during flights or even on the surface, and if we don't yet consider permanent settlements, it's imaginable to live a couple of years in that artificial gravity, and come back in a relatively good shape.
0. Radiation? How about better shielding for spacecrafts for the flights - both using e.g. water onboard and plasma clouds around, so different kinds of radiation would be at least reduced. Just like with artificial gravity, there are much more questions than answers in these areas, but at least we have physically plausible ideas. On the surface we can use underground houses - even with centrifuges.
As for point 2, pressure on mars is a few millibars, so not even a percent of earths atmospheric pressure, way too little to simplify construction or anything
And it has 25 hours in a day, arguably an upgrade from Earth in terms of getting an extra hour of sleep. No other planet comes even remotely close to being so similar.
I still harbor resentment about being brought up in a small village without decent public transport. I can't imagine the intergenerational conflict when people raised in a sulfuric hellscape learn that there is a green earth. What kind of departure from our own cultural norms will be required to keep a Venusian society from tearing itself apart? Something akin to the difference between our society and that of the victorians?
Is exciting to speculate though :)
I think we should push some asteroids at Venus to make it spin faster. Is this feasible? Maybe hit it with two simultaneously, one in each side. Surely that would help with the temperature and magnetosphere there.
On the same theme, A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC fame) is a humorous yet an in-depth pragmatic look at why space colonization will suck.
Summarizing: space will kill you fast, moon will grind you down with the regolith, and Mars will poison you. There are some interesting bits about international/space laws and treaties too.
Wasn’t that convincing for me. The hard science elements seemed a bit cherry-picked and the later sections on governance and laws seem to want almost a wide spread agreement across multiple countries on every detail before people are allowed to go.
A multi-part review [1] is available which detailed more aspects quite well.
In short, people will go for a multitude of reasons (whether it is sensible or not).
+1, great book. Their recommended strategy is to 1) wait until technology improves and we have a better understanding of how to solve the fundamental problems of Mars colonization, then 2) go big and build a large settlement that has the scale to actually succeed.
They didn't even cover the chemical composition and harsh structure of the regolith, which makes converting it to soil impossibly difficult and probably a good source of novel lung diseases. Or the low gravity resulting in issues for long term habitants. Or the length of the Martian day being annoyingly close to but not exactly 24 hours which will fuck up some rhythms. Or the general mineral paucity. Or the distance. Or or or.
Mars is incredibly cool as a science fiction destination, but I'd much rather see us target near earth asteroids as space habitats first.
Operating in the asteroid belt may be more useful. Good access to water, carbon, some nitrogen, and metal resources, so all the basics are available. Robots are probably going to be doing most of the work. Maybe with some on-site human presence, maybe not. It's not clear anyone will live there, but mining operations are likely.
We will achieve artificial general intelligence before any sort of permanent Mars settlement is meaningfully viable. It would make sense to develop the capacity to terraform the Earth out of climate change before worrying about making Mars habitable anyway.
That’s the kind of attitude that leaves you caught with your pants down in the other dozen scenarios that wipe out humanity. No one, including Elon, is saying to write off earth. It’s just within our capability now to colonize and prepare mars as a plan B.
The resources needed to colonize Mars are best suited devoted to preventing the most probable threats to humanity. A large underground bunker with nuclear power would be more viable as a plan B than a Martian colony in a time frame of the next 30-50 years or so. For Mars to be a unique contingency in the event of complete destruction of every human on earth, thousands of problems would have to be solved to make Mars viable. The engineering force to solve those problems would make Earth 100x more resistant to catastrophe.
Underground bunkers are immune to giant meteors. Also it wouldn't kill every human, it would simply just screw up most of humanity and lead to a dark age. Every mass extinction in geologic history triggered by a meteor took thousands of years to kill off the species they did. Humans would adapt over such a time frame.
please explain how a meteor would guarantee the extinction of humankind, and if so, over what time frame this would occur. I think you're overestimating the severity of a large meteoric impact on a geologic time scale. Mass extinctions occur over thousands of years. Homo sapiens' ancestors survived every one of them so far, by definition.
At a sufficient magnitude, a meteor might well liquefy the Earth's crust, or cause seismic shocks sufficient to damage even the deepest bunkers.
That said, such an event might well cause problems on a (far more generally vulnerable) Mars colony as well (e.g., ejecta subsequently impacting Mars).
And the odds of such an event are quite low. Most killer asteroids would disrupt the biosphere, and quite considerably, but not significantly rearrange the Earth's structure itself. The one time that's happened which we are reasonably confident of is the hypothesized Theia impactor, roughly the size of, erm, Mars, which is thought to have impacted the proto-Earth as the latter was forming 4.53 billion years ago, and forming the Moon as a consequence.
Other cosmic events such as a gamma ray burst or rogue star disrupting solar system orbits would have impacts affecting Mars as well, and even a well-established self-sufficient Mars colony would not be a sufficient mitigation.
(I'm generally not in the "Mars as a lifeboat from Earth" camp.)
Post-meteor earth by far. Post meteor Earth has been habitable to every ancestor of all life living today. Mars in inhabitable to almost all life except extremophiles.
It matters to you if a robot discovers something and tells you rather than some person you don’t know discovering it and telling you? All the exploration of space is being done by robots anyway.
Then computers crunch the data and screens display it…all directed by humans.
No fan of Elon, not by a long shot, but he's right on this one: all it takes is is one asteroid, one volcano, or one nuke party for this planet to become everyone's least favorite planet.
Isn't this exactly the moment where he is wrong? Even if all three of these would happen simultaneously, it would still be easier to ensure human continuity on earth, not on mars. A mars colony would have to be underground to escape the radiation and poisonous atmosphere - but of course you could also build an underground shelter on earth. And have better gravity, easier energy sources, endless amounts of water and so on for free.
A mars outpost after a nuke party on earth would simply die, as it is completely unfeasable to both a) develop it so far that it becomes self-sufficient and b) not become a military target along the way simply because of its size.
That's probably true with our current technology and understanding of a Mars colony. The idea would be to get to a point where we have (at least) a self-sufficient colony as a backup.
As others have pointed out, it doesn't have to be Mars, it just needs to be not Earth.
Long term we obviously need to escape the solar system too.
You have fewer options without redundancy, no matter how ineffective the backup site is. The odds of getting many humans to collaborate on reaching a second planet is also greater than the odds of getting all humans to collaborate on saving this one (which, to be clear, is absolutely no chance at all).
I think it's like all blue ocean endeavors, like Columbus first trip.
He used the wrong earth circumference calculation to estimate his trip to the Indias to convince the queen (it was way off, that's why the Portuguese went around Africa instead), he got really lucky, and the end result was way better than what they set up on to obtain in the first place.
Exploration is a bit crazy and a bit stupid, some people die and a few times we find something amazing that was in non way near what we thought we would find.
I think Mars is - hopefully - going to be a bit like that. We go for one (maybe the wrong) reason, yet we stay for a different one.
The mortality for interplanetary spaceflight, in the near future, will likely be an order of magnitude lower than it was of the Age of Exploration’s front line. The comparison is terrible for several reasons. But it’s one that speaks to spirit, not means. If the Americas were uninhabited, they would have been—to colonial-era Europe—of comparable difficulty to setting up a permanent Lunar or Martian. (Note: NOT permanent population. Reproduction is harder.)
> Americas have trees, meat, rivers, oxygen, grasslands, forests, birds
Exploitable constrained human power shipped across a sea by way of a costly, lossy transport system. Colonising the Americas without a latent labour pool and social hierarchy to swap over would have been near impossible for pre-industrial Europe.
It would have required long-term support across months of shipping and communication time for purchase of unknown resources in unknown time scales in respect of unknown risks. Sound familiar?
Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. It's just enough to complicate landing and to cover all your equipment in dust when there are planetary-wise dust storms. The ground is poison. Energy production is an issue. Low gravity is a problem. It's a long way from Earth. Terraforming Mars is a fantasy.
Now compare this to the Moon. Inhabitants can remain in real-time contact with Earth. Getting there is far easier and quicker. You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. There's evidence of extensive lava tunnels that can be pressurized and inhabited without the need for massive excavation.
The only real issue with the Moon where Mars actually wins is day length. Mars has almost a normal Earth-like day length. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth on a 28 day orbit so has... a 28 Earth day "Moon day".
You see this same psychology at play every time some fringe scientist comes up with another completely unworkable idea for FTL travel (warp drives,, wormholes, etc).
But really living in another gravity well doesn't mmake much sense in any case. It's further compolication for not a lot of gain. I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.