The Sahara desert is infinitely more hospitable than Mars. It's easier to get to. There's air to breath. There's water.
The main reason to terraform Mars (other than making humanity a multi-planet species) is that no one cares about Mars. If we want more water on Mars, we just throw a few hundred icebergs into it. And ignore the sonic booms, devastation, craters, etc. They can be fixed later.
But living on Mars is another prospect entirely. It's expensive to get there. Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day. If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it.
It's sexy in science fiction, but the practicalities are pretty bad.
I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities.
Your opinion is equally valid. But it's important to recognize the flipside.
On Mars, the frontier exists. I've wished for it all my life.
What a pessimistic outlook. People climb Everest for the challenge, not because its most convenient mountain. People sky dive, ski, mountain bike, and rock climb for the thrill of it. The men that crossed the Atlantic into the unknown in the face of near certain death are evangelized and their names taught to children in history books (there’s even a holiday for it!).
I think it’s a good thing that not all humans optimize for the most practical routes in life. It makes us more diverse and greater as a species, and pushes us to accomplish amazing feats that seem impractical on the surface. If everyone was optimizing for the lowest hanging fruits, who would invest in constructing the really tall ladders that future generations could build off of?
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Embrace your inner childhood sense of adventure and wonder!
Agreed. I would add that "living on mars" would be kind of a matter of speech. I mean, it would be more accurate to say you would live in a box that happens to be located on the surface of mars.
Mars is such an hostile environment that you'd have to live in a highly controlled, mostly closed artificial habitat. Basically, a human-grade terrarium. Saying that men in such terrariums live on mars would be just as much as a stretch as saying that fishes in aquariums live on the ground.
Honestly, if people enjoy living in a closed box, they can do it on Earth, they don't have to go to mars.
Humanity has always looked to colonize places seemingly on the margin of livability. Northern Europe, the arctic, the Eurasian steppes, etc. Our ability to live and thrive in different environments has come concomitant with our development of the technology to do so. We push to new environments because we can, we develop technology to better live in new environments because we're there, it goes hand in hand.
Living in the Sahara (aside from all the other problems) is not living on Mars, it won't depend on and push the development of technology for living off-Earth. Living on Mars will be hard. Harder than many people appreciate today. But the more we do it the easier it will get, and the faster our technology will advance for living off-Earth. By living on Mars we'll unlock our ability to live not just there but in space and on other planets. Colonizing Mars won't just give us Mars, it'll give us the stars. It'll kickstart the development of technologies that will enable self-reliant space habitats, which will give us, eventually, generation ships, and will also feedback to improving life on Earth (better recycling systems, better power systems, things we can't even envision today). That doesn't happen if you just try to spread out on Earth more.
I'm certain this will be downvoted to hell, but it's absolutely correct. Even Antarctica is more appealing. There has to be a money making, gold rush, get rich reason why anyone would settle Mars. My pet theory is that Mars, a much more shallow gravity well than Earth could serve as an industrial base for processing material from the rest of the Solar System.
Here's some rational reasons for why colonising Mars is a good idea (copy and pasted from an old comment of mine):
* It would be a challenge, and (as there is lots of historical evidence for) innovation comes from people working on hard problems. So it would lead to innovations
* It would inspire a generation to be more interested in areas like science and technology
* The fresh start of a new planet would provide the opportunity for people to try out new forms of social structure. The founding of the USA is a historical example of this. Broken systems and structures is a big problem on earth right now.
* Ultimately if humanity only exist on a single planet, then it's at great risk of being wiped out by some catastrophe. Getting off earth is important for our future existence.
Plus, to get an equivalent level of radiation shielding as earth's atmoshere you need 5 meters of soil above you. If you want to live in a self-sufficient cave complex, you might as well do that on earth.
I still think we should go, it's just that it seems getting there is the easy part, and even that is almost impossible.
Musk is worried about extinction-level events according to paragraph one. Supervolcanoes, whatever killed the dinosaurs.. That perspective does seem reasonable in the grandest scheme of things. Earth has managed to kill a whole bunch of it's inhabitants in the past.
That said, we may well have 70 million years to plan for that one.
One resource Mars has that no land on Earth has is Low Mars Orbit. It is much easier to launch mass into the solar system from Mars because LMO is closer to the surface in terms of velocity than LEO. Space craft don't need booster stages on Mars.
For now, because mass-produced starships are not a thing yet. SpaceX is on the best way to change this.
> If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it.
Assuming regular (monthly) spaceship travel it's anything from 150 (you noticed the same day the ship is launched and Earth is at optimum position) to 330 days (ship just launched a second after you noticed and Earth is at longest distance), but not a full year.
> Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day.
I'd guess if you put in a proper emergency hospital kit on a pre-manned-flight-mission and two ER doctors on the first manned flight you're pretty much set.
Lots of dangers that kill in short time on Earth are simply not present on Mars - you won't have deadly new pathogens, no cars, no dangerous animals and cancer can be kept at bay until a flight back to Earth can be arranged.
The immediate dangers however will be decompression/Mars atmosphere exposure, structural failure in the buildings that will be used for housing, fire and critical breakage of oxygen generation.
People don't need any valid reason to go. All they need is the means, the money, and the desire and then they can go for whatever reason, good or bad, they have.
This is all presented as a project where people who want in are paying for themselves. People who want out can just as well continue their life and stop telling others what is meaningful, what they're allowed to dream about.
It seems to me that most of the negative attitudes towards this project stem from the idea that we're going to colonise Mars with 2017 technology and ideas.
That's the hard thing about reasoning about the future: by definition it doesn't look like the present, but you're a product of the present.
Many people talk about terraforming as taking "thousands of years". Go back a few thousand years and tell someone how you travelled to the other side of the earth in less than a day.
Genetic engineering. AI. Nanotech. Quantum Computers. And that's just the next 100 years.
Ain't no way we're gonna have to wait that long to build sandcastles on Mars.
Nobody could have predicted the huge technological advances we've made in the last 100 years, let alone the speed at which they were developed.
If we just keep brushing ideas like this off as "totally impractical right now" then there's no goal to work towards.
It's no secret the our time on Earth is limited, and becoming more limited as the human race expands and evolves.
It really comes down to weather or not you believe the human race is capable of existing outside of Earth. I am in the camp of "we'll figure it out" just like we have up to this point. My fear is that most people fall into the "I'll die before it happens so why bother thinking about it" camp.
I'm continually unsold on this. Mars is far away, inhospitable, and feels like a run-before-we-walk kind of scenario to me. Merely sending humans to Mars seems like a huge task, let alone keeping them alive there.
I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of:
- Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit, makes space station construction practical?)
- Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in constructing human habitation away from Earth?)
- Mars/Venus.
Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?
As with all complex matters there are numerous considerations and issues with all of these.
Moon is close, we've already been there, escape velocity is low but there appears to be very little water, not very accessible at least. The day/nigh cycle is 28 days long, so there are issues with overheating during the "day" and lack of power during the "night". Solar radiation induces static charge on dust, which makes it go everywhere, particularly difficult condition to run mechanical devices for long periods of time. That said an air-sealed cavern on the Moon could be a great intermediate solution for making humans interplanetary. Electromagnetic launcher could also make our interplanetary ambitions more sustainable.
Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere (faint but still), better day/night cycle, more accessible water and carbon dioxide - allowing to manufacture rocket fuel and many chemicals needed for agriculture. Ultimately it seems better then the Moon in many respects, but it is very far away. In case of emergency there is very little that can be done to evacuate, transporting anything there will be more expensive (though not that much more expensive than the moon actually). There is the danger of irradiating astronauts during the trip, so crew missions should take faster transfer windows and trade more fuel for speed. Cargo missions could take longer, with better fuel efficiency.
Asteroids would be great but they are hard to work with because of the very low gravity (and electrostatic dust as on the Moon). Capturing one, though perhaps theoretically possible, would require enormous amount of force to change the orbit in any meaningful way. Perhaps detonating a hydrogen bomb near one could provide enough thrust, but likely not enough precision (we would not want such asteroid to accidentally hit the Earth). It would take many years to tow one any close to Earth with regular propulsion, so that is probably out of the question for now.
I agree that asteroid capture and in space refining/construction seems like the way to go. Once you show that you can make a profit in space other than pointing satellites at the earth you grow the # of people that are interested in participating by a huge amount.
It's funny that with all this talk recently about the rise of AI and robots, we continue to just assume that space exploration and colonization has to be done with human beings.. As if we've already exhausted the most robots could do with rovers and satellites.
From a economic and safety perspective, it would seem far more practical to establish a foothold in non-Earth environments with robots that do the initial habitat construction for humans. I fear we are hand-waving much of the risk the first batch of humans we send to Mars have to shoulder - think the Roanoke Colony of the 16th century
While Venus can support cloud city type colonies, what makes it hard is that you will have to bring them with you, or build them from asteroids along the way.
Since Mars has an atmosphere, you can use it to get the delta-v costs to be in the ball-park of landing on the moon.
If the numbers SpaceX posted for going to Mars are in the right ballpark, it looks like bypassing construction in orbit is the fastest way to backup humanity. Long term it might be more expensive to do it that way, but it would extend the timeline by decades.
Another advantage of doing Mars first is that anyone wanting to do orbital construction will be able to sell their goods to colonists which need lower tech items than the advanced stuff like semiconductors you need for making satellites. This should help bootstrap the industry as making simple, heavy goods (eg: shovels) is easier than trying to make more complex items.
Beyond the most efficient way of sending stuff to Mars I don't think it makes sense to send humans right away. In a decade, the earliest timeframe Musk envisions, robotics, AI, battery/solar technology will have likely advances to the point that it makes much more sense to send robots. Let them explore and build bases for a while and then send humans a few decades later.
I'm glad when I see I'm not the only one who thinks living on Mars would be awful. I only skimmed the article, but I didn't see any ideas on supplementing the 62.5% less gravity. I can't imagine what that'd do to your body after years of living in it. But the lack of nature (and Internet for that matter) would drive me crazy. I'm already too old to enjoy my PlayStation for more than an hour or so.
Maybe once we're able to terraform the planet to resemble the world we evolved on, or build enough Bio-Domes for his million people to enjoy (keeping in mind it only takes one Pauly Shore to ruin a dome), and compensate for the lack of gravity somehow, then I'd consider going.
You should read the Kim Stanley Robinson books on Mars. They're really good.
With less gravity, you'll see native be considerably taller. Hopefully their retinas won't detach, as tends to happen in zero-G.
Make no mistake, the first colonists to Mars will NEVER return to Earth. They will die there. Will they be able to propagate? We have a LONG way to go. Biosphere II is an amazing project that shows many of the problems we'd face trying to create a new contained eco-system. They're incredibly complex.
We need advances in automatic-machine-fabrication (we literally need to be able to drop factory robots that can both dig and make buildings), advances in radiation shielding (you can only come above ground in a fully shielded suit), advances in CO2/O2 recycling, advances in food production and self contained eco-systems.
It's not impossible, but I'd say it's a good 90 ~ 100 years out minimum. All of these needs to be in place and highly advances and reliable, with test units dropped to Mars, before the first colonists go there .. and eventually die there.
The kind of people who would want to do this are the kind who would be willing to put up with discomfort and danger. Even on Earth many people voluntarily participate in sports or other activities that involve extreme risk or danger, or visit and live in dangerous and challenging places. It sounds like this experience isn't something you'd want, but that's not true of everyone.
I love how his various ventures all seems to be pointing to this one goal. The Boring Company? Makes sense that he would want to get experience with tunnel boring considering no one is living on the surface of mars for very long without exposing themselves to considerable radiation and near certain death. A tunnel can be sealed and regulated. The first few generations of Martians are going to be mole people.
For all the complaining and pessimism I usually exhibit, this is a pretty exciting time to be alive. This gets me excited in a giddy little-kid way. I hope that I live to see the first human colonization of other planets.
In the very, very, long term we might be able to terraform Mars, but in the next few hundred years I think it would be more accurate to say that heating is a lot easier to manage than cooling.
We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But as Phoenix, AZ is discovering this week, even a few degrees over body temperature is really bad.
In the section on the importance of reusability, he writes:
> However, with frequent flights, you can take an aircraft that costs $90 million and buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Vegas for $43, including taxes.
That's because the casinos subsidize it. Flights to and from Vegas from anywhere are cheaper than others, even more frequent or shorter flights.
While I think its extremely interesting and exciting to colonize Mars, both out of curiosity and the trickle down of new technologies that would be developed in the endeavor, I just don't personally feel any particular emotional drive to do so because humans might otherwise go extinct. I have a child and so have a very strong instinct of wanting to do everything I can to help him to survive as well as his children and grandchildren. Similarly I want people on the other side of the planet, whom I have never met, to survive simply because I know they exist now. Once I start to think beyond maybe 300 years these feeling deteriorate rapidly. If I think about our species being wiped out in 10,000 years I hardly have an emotional response at all.
I think nobody can deny that, all other things being equal, short-term occurring events tend to matter more than long-term ones.
Therefore, no matter how bad one can feel about the prospect of humanity being wiped out, that feeling can be made arbitrarily low by delaying the expectation of its occurrence.
"The threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars or a civilization would be a million people. "
That number seems highly speculative ...
But afaik, there is no self-sustaining city on earth, so I doubt there are more solid numbers on that topic. Economic cycles are quite complex, thats for fure.
But aside from that, I think the much more realistic plan, than building and leaving in a huge fleet at once and then see how it goes, would be sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance ... if that works, we might be ready for colonisation.
And the needed technology is evolving right now on earth.
Maybe less spectacular, but more realistic in my opinion.
Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of. Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth. In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on mars sounds quite ludicrous.
> sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance
The main problem is that robots (currently) suck without humans to guide them. And with an up-to 20-minute speed of light delay each way, it's really hard to guide robots on Mars. Curiosity, the most complex robot we've landed on Mars, is managing something like <5 km/year.
Autonomous robots would be needed- multiple, very smart and very tough. We don't have that yet.
He made electric cars sexy. He made rockets that come back to earth for a smooth landing. I'm betting that as crazy as this sounds he is the man to make this happen.
I interpret Musk's interest in this kind of thing as a form of ideological futurism rather than a pragmatic goal. I think he presents the idea of something very far out and very ambitious as a way to try and inspire people to think big and think about developing technology the likes of which we've never seen before.
It's an interesting strategy, but I think it has a major downside too. It strikes many people (me included) as a bit detached from reality and even cold to the concerns of the many people here on Earth that are struggling.
Don't print Musk's journal article in black and white: the copy editing is bad. Table 4 distinguishes Good/OK/Bad using colored circles -- it's undecipherable in black and white.
Elon makes a good point that it is inevitable that Human should colonize another planet. I don't think Mars is the planet. We are solving a hard problem with the current technology, but we are missing the point that we may have a technology in the future that enables us to explore less hostile far planets that require one trip. Think about the first settlers who came to North America before the Europeans.
Let's reframe the problem for him. The main problem he is trying to solve is the risk of being tied to one planet. So he wants to buy insurance for humanity. How else can you solve this problem?
[+] [-] adekok|8 years ago|reply
The main reason to terraform Mars (other than making humanity a multi-planet species) is that no one cares about Mars. If we want more water on Mars, we just throw a few hundred icebergs into it. And ignore the sonic booms, devastation, craters, etc. They can be fixed later.
But living on Mars is another prospect entirely. It's expensive to get there. Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day. If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it.
It's sexy in science fiction, but the practicalities are pretty bad.
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
Let them die.
I'd go die on Mars. It's Mars.
I think there are just different kinds of people in the world. Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities.
Your opinion is equally valid. But it's important to recognize the flipside.
On Mars, the frontier exists. I've wished for it all my life.
[+] [-] bufbupa|8 years ago|reply
I think it’s a good thing that not all humans optimize for the most practical routes in life. It makes us more diverse and greater as a species, and pushes us to accomplish amazing feats that seem impractical on the surface. If everyone was optimizing for the lowest hanging fruits, who would invest in constructing the really tall ladders that future generations could build off of?
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Embrace your inner childhood sense of adventure and wonder!
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
Mars is such an hostile environment that you'd have to live in a highly controlled, mostly closed artificial habitat. Basically, a human-grade terrarium. Saying that men in such terrariums live on mars would be just as much as a stretch as saying that fishes in aquariums live on the ground.
Honestly, if people enjoy living in a closed box, they can do it on Earth, they don't have to go to mars.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|8 years ago|reply
Humanity has always looked to colonize places seemingly on the margin of livability. Northern Europe, the arctic, the Eurasian steppes, etc. Our ability to live and thrive in different environments has come concomitant with our development of the technology to do so. We push to new environments because we can, we develop technology to better live in new environments because we're there, it goes hand in hand.
Living in the Sahara (aside from all the other problems) is not living on Mars, it won't depend on and push the development of technology for living off-Earth. Living on Mars will be hard. Harder than many people appreciate today. But the more we do it the easier it will get, and the faster our technology will advance for living off-Earth. By living on Mars we'll unlock our ability to live not just there but in space and on other planets. Colonizing Mars won't just give us Mars, it'll give us the stars. It'll kickstart the development of technologies that will enable self-reliant space habitats, which will give us, eventually, generation ships, and will also feedback to improving life on Earth (better recycling systems, better power systems, things we can't even envision today). That doesn't happen if you just try to spread out on Earth more.
[+] [-] le-mark|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesrcole|8 years ago|reply
* It would be a challenge, and (as there is lots of historical evidence for) innovation comes from people working on hard problems. So it would lead to innovations
* It would inspire a generation to be more interested in areas like science and technology
* The fresh start of a new planet would provide the opportunity for people to try out new forms of social structure. The founding of the USA is a historical example of this. Broken systems and structures is a big problem on earth right now.
* Ultimately if humanity only exist on a single planet, then it's at great risk of being wiped out by some catastrophe. Getting off earth is important for our future existence.
(A long time ago, I read Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" and I think a lot of these ideas came from that. https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/14516...)
[+] [-] Joeri|8 years ago|reply
I still think we should go, it's just that it seems getting there is the easy part, and even that is almost impossible.
[+] [-] bpicolo|8 years ago|reply
That said, we may well have 70 million years to plan for that one.
[+] [-] crawshaw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|8 years ago|reply
For now, because mass-produced starships are not a thing yet. SpaceX is on the best way to change this.
> If you forgot something on Earth, it will be 2 years before you can retrieve it.
Assuming regular (monthly) spaceship travel it's anything from 150 (you noticed the same day the ship is launched and Earth is at optimum position) to 330 days (ship just launched a second after you noticed and Earth is at longest distance), but not a full year.
> Once there, you're damned closed to dying every minute of every day.
I'd guess if you put in a proper emergency hospital kit on a pre-manned-flight-mission and two ER doctors on the first manned flight you're pretty much set.
Lots of dangers that kill in short time on Earth are simply not present on Mars - you won't have deadly new pathogens, no cars, no dangerous animals and cancer can be kept at bay until a flight back to Earth can be arranged.
The immediate dangers however will be decompression/Mars atmosphere exposure, structural failure in the buildings that will be used for housing, fire and critical breakage of oxygen generation.
[+] [-] AYBABTME|8 years ago|reply
This is all presented as a project where people who want in are paying for themselves. People who want out can just as well continue their life and stop telling others what is meaningful, what they're allowed to dream about.
[+] [-] toephu2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|8 years ago|reply
That's the hard thing about reasoning about the future: by definition it doesn't look like the present, but you're a product of the present.
Many people talk about terraforming as taking "thousands of years". Go back a few thousand years and tell someone how you travelled to the other side of the earth in less than a day.
Genetic engineering. AI. Nanotech. Quantum Computers. And that's just the next 100 years.
Ain't no way we're gonna have to wait that long to build sandcastles on Mars.
[+] [-] nxsynonym|8 years ago|reply
Nobody could have predicted the huge technological advances we've made in the last 100 years, let alone the speed at which they were developed.
If we just keep brushing ideas like this off as "totally impractical right now" then there's no goal to work towards.
It's no secret the our time on Earth is limited, and becoming more limited as the human race expands and evolves.
It really comes down to weather or not you believe the human race is capable of existing outside of Earth. I am in the camp of "we'll figure it out" just like we have up to this point. My fear is that most people fall into the "I'll die before it happens so why bother thinking about it" camp.
[+] [-] rndmize|8 years ago|reply
I've felt for a while that a more practical path would be along the lines of:
- Asteroid capture around Earth to develop material processing/construction in space (seems way cheaper than launching ships and resources into orbit, makes space station construction practical?)
- Robotic moon base with electromagnetic launcher (cheaply/easily launch resources from the moon, provide practical, closer, safer experience in constructing human habitation away from Earth?)
- Mars/Venus.
Am I missing something here? Can SpaceX really make launches cheap enough that the benefits of construction in orbit aren't worth it? Is trying to move a biosphere to another planet easy enough with no prior experience?
[+] [-] felippee|8 years ago|reply
Moon is close, we've already been there, escape velocity is low but there appears to be very little water, not very accessible at least. The day/nigh cycle is 28 days long, so there are issues with overheating during the "day" and lack of power during the "night". Solar radiation induces static charge on dust, which makes it go everywhere, particularly difficult condition to run mechanical devices for long periods of time. That said an air-sealed cavern on the Moon could be a great intermediate solution for making humans interplanetary. Electromagnetic launcher could also make our interplanetary ambitions more sustainable.
Mars on the other hand has an atmosphere (faint but still), better day/night cycle, more accessible water and carbon dioxide - allowing to manufacture rocket fuel and many chemicals needed for agriculture. Ultimately it seems better then the Moon in many respects, but it is very far away. In case of emergency there is very little that can be done to evacuate, transporting anything there will be more expensive (though not that much more expensive than the moon actually). There is the danger of irradiating astronauts during the trip, so crew missions should take faster transfer windows and trade more fuel for speed. Cargo missions could take longer, with better fuel efficiency.
Asteroids would be great but they are hard to work with because of the very low gravity (and electrostatic dust as on the Moon). Capturing one, though perhaps theoretically possible, would require enormous amount of force to change the orbit in any meaningful way. Perhaps detonating a hydrogen bomb near one could provide enough thrust, but likely not enough precision (we would not want such asteroid to accidentally hit the Earth). It would take many years to tow one any close to Earth with regular propulsion, so that is probably out of the question for now.
[+] [-] placeybordeaux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vtange|8 years ago|reply
From a economic and safety perspective, it would seem far more practical to establish a foothold in non-Earth environments with robots that do the initial habitat construction for humans. I fear we are hand-waving much of the risk the first batch of humans we send to Mars have to shoulder - think the Roanoke Colony of the 16th century
[+] [-] extrapickles|8 years ago|reply
Since Mars has an atmosphere, you can use it to get the delta-v costs to be in the ball-park of landing on the moon.
If the numbers SpaceX posted for going to Mars are in the right ballpark, it looks like bypassing construction in orbit is the fastest way to backup humanity. Long term it might be more expensive to do it that way, but it would extend the timeline by decades.
Another advantage of doing Mars first is that anyone wanting to do orbital construction will be able to sell their goods to colonists which need lower tech items than the advanced stuff like semiconductors you need for making satellites. This should help bootstrap the industry as making simple, heavy goods (eg: shovels) is easier than trying to make more complex items.
[+] [-] gehwartzen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pigo|8 years ago|reply
Maybe once we're able to terraform the planet to resemble the world we evolved on, or build enough Bio-Domes for his million people to enjoy (keeping in mind it only takes one Pauly Shore to ruin a dome), and compensate for the lack of gravity somehow, then I'd consider going.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
With less gravity, you'll see native be considerably taller. Hopefully their retinas won't detach, as tends to happen in zero-G.
Make no mistake, the first colonists to Mars will NEVER return to Earth. They will die there. Will they be able to propagate? We have a LONG way to go. Biosphere II is an amazing project that shows many of the problems we'd face trying to create a new contained eco-system. They're incredibly complex.
We need advances in automatic-machine-fabrication (we literally need to be able to drop factory robots that can both dig and make buildings), advances in radiation shielding (you can only come above ground in a fully shielded suit), advances in CO2/O2 recycling, advances in food production and self contained eco-systems.
It's not impossible, but I'd say it's a good 90 ~ 100 years out minimum. All of these needs to be in place and highly advances and reliable, with test units dropped to Mars, before the first colonists go there .. and eventually die there.
[+] [-] Sangermaine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tthayer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] passivepinetree|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|8 years ago|reply
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/space.2017.2900...
In the "Why Mars?" section, Musk writes:
> It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.
In the very, very, long term we might be able to terraform Mars, but in the next few hundred years I think it would be more accurate to say that heating is a lot easier to manage than cooling.
We can survive in Martian temperatures that occur on Earth with nothing more than well-insulated clothing. But as Phoenix, AZ is discovering this week, even a few degrees over body temperature is really bad.
In the section on the importance of reusability, he writes:
> However, with frequent flights, you can take an aircraft that costs $90 million and buy a ticket on Southwest right now from Los Angeles to Vegas for $43, including taxes.
That's because the casinos subsidize it. Flights to and from Vegas from anywhere are cheaper than others, even more frequent or shorter flights.
[+] [-] bradbatt|8 years ago|reply
Vegas casinos subsidize public air travel? I didn't realize they did this...do you have a source for this?
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 6d6b73|8 years ago|reply
But we need pressurized suits to survive on Mars. Mars is really not a smart place to colonize. Clouds of Venus are much nicer.
[+] [-] gehwartzen|8 years ago|reply
Am I alone in feeling this way?
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
Therefore, no matter how bad one can feel about the prospect of humanity being wiped out, that feeling can be made arbitrarily low by delaying the expectation of its occurrence.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|8 years ago|reply
That number seems highly speculative ... But afaik, there is no self-sustaining city on earth, so I doubt there are more solid numbers on that topic. Economic cycles are quite complex, thats for fure.
But aside from that, I think the much more realistic plan, than building and leaving in a huge fleet at once and then see how it goes, would be sending robots first and let them build at least a rudimentary base first and mine resources and teleoperate the whole thing from a save distance ... if that works, we might be ready for colonisation.
And the needed technology is evolving right now on earth.
Maybe less spectacular, but more realistic in my opinion.
[+] [-] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of. Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth. In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on mars sounds quite ludicrous.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
[+] [-] mabbo|8 years ago|reply
The main problem is that robots (currently) suck without humans to guide them. And with an up-to 20-minute speed of light delay each way, it's really hard to guide robots on Mars. Curiosity, the most complex robot we've landed on Mars, is managing something like <5 km/year.
Autonomous robots would be needed- multiple, very smart and very tough. We don't have that yet.
[+] [-] not_that_noob|8 years ago|reply
Go Elon!
[+] [-] bjl|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nbarbettini|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sajid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metaphorm|8 years ago|reply
It's an interesting strategy, but I think it has a major downside too. It strikes many people (me included) as a bit detached from reality and even cold to the concerns of the many people here on Earth that are struggling.
[+] [-] strin|8 years ago|reply
Interesting Venn diagram in Fig 2. If "COST OF TRIP TO MARS" = "INFINITE MONEY", shouldn't "CAN AFFORD TO GO" be an empty set?
[+] [-] yosyp|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] perseusprime11|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googletazer|8 years ago|reply