Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs
Listen: I am still reading this - it is delightfully long - but this is the takedown I've been waiting for for years. Maciej has been particularly critical of the idea of extra Earth colonization while an entire continent goes uncolonized.
In the interest of discourse, who is the greatest proponent of Mars colonization who has been to Antarctica?
We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people. I'm not sure how we expect to establish any kind of working colony on Mars, where there is no atmosphere or accessible oxygen, food or accessible water, magnetic field to keep radiation away, reliable supply chain for delivering anything else we need.
Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
> We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people.
That’s because there are places on Earth that similarly better than e.g. Antarctica or some desert.
The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.
But that Martian dust that gets all over the solar panels is also loaded with toxic perchlorates. Every time they wear a suit out, they have to absolutely insure that none of it gets into the living space. Good luck.
"Anybody who is saying they want to go live on the surface of Mars better think about the interaction of perchlorate with the human body. At one-half percent, that's a huge amount. Very small amounts are considered toxic ...."
This is such a good point. Whenever I read about a technology that's supposed to make Mars livable, I ask myself "why aren't people doing this already on the Balleny Islands?" (a lovely but remote as hell archipelago off of Antarctica). Usually there's no good answer; something about the exoticism of Mars makes people think problems that are hard on Earth get easier to solve there.
We have 8.x billion people on Terra, an environment with circa 4.x billion years of evolution for eukaryotes to thrive, and still we have about 1.x billion people undernourished with around 20,000 people dying of hunger each day [1], not to mention the other eukaryotes.
Our species has proven again and again it's inability to care for the extended tree of life, heck, we still believe there are sharp and crisp delimitations inside our own species (the blacks, the Jews, etc.). Why then this gaslighting about "we must save civilization"? Just because some of the billionaires, those who our system lets to own the world, are afraid of dying? Hey, rich guy [2], got news for you: we don't have a civilization, we are barely a bunch of pseudo-evolved tribes, infighting for trivial resources and perceived boundaries.
Let's figure out how to have a civilization, then, maybe, we can try to save it.
However, as it stands, "we must save civilization" is doublespeak for "you, hoi polloi, go and build an Elysium for me and my friends", just as the Qataris said to the slaves to build them stadiums [3]. And if you own less than $30 million [4], don't kid yourself, you are still hoi polloi.
The problem with running a colony of 20k in Antarctica is a human/political one, not a technological one. We have been running one of over 2k on Spitsbergen, which is not terribly different in terms of climate and accessibility, for a long time. Assuming you even get your hypothetical Antarctic colony past whatever international treaties that apply, good luck resisting the inevitable backlash from environmentalists who will find the potential disturbance to a dozen penguins in a 100-kilometer radius of your proposed site an unacceptable risk.
One of the advantages of a Mars colony is that the argument for it infringing upon any existing interests is much weaker than for anywhere on Earth. Of course, to some people, the idea that someone could just go somewhere and do a thing without anyone (who those people of course claim to speak on behalf of) being in a position to claim injury is disturbing in itself.
>Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
Finally, what do you think will be the effect on climate change of at minimum quadrupling the people in Antarctica and providing them some sort of economically viable reason for being there?
What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison. Aside from all the other arguments that we CAN put people in Antarctica the complexity and side effects for our environment are more dangerous than putting them on Mars.
This comes off as extremely disingenuous. We aren't unable to inhabit Antarctica for the long term, we just aren't interested in doing so. We don't have much left to learn about living in space from living in Antarctica that we haven't already learned from the people who live in the various other parts of the world which do have permanent settlements and experience extreme cold for large parts of the year. Thus there is no real point to doing much else there in terms of human spaceflight.
Just like how America hasn't outright been unable to develop the means to go to the Moon again for the past 60 years, it just has had other priorities.
In fact, following your logic, Artemis also should be cancelled until we've spent the arbitrary duration of 100 years sitting around in Antarctica just to prove that we can do it.
An additional point being missed is that when we started talking about going to the Moon the first time around, we didn't really know how to do it, we sent out several impactors just to learn enough about the surface to decide where to go. By setting that goal we gathered data for the purpose and eventually managed to do it. Similarly, there will never be a time where we are 'ready' to go to Mars or any other distant celestial body if we just keep waiting for arbitrary requirements to be met. Right now it's living in Antarctica for 100 years, then it'll be something more ridiculous and arbitrary like maintaining an artificial atmosphere for 1000 years.
Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo. We've been studying the surface for decades now, have got rovers storing away reference samples and testing oxygen production, we've even been testing how much mileage we can get with less conservative choices in hardware (eg Ingenuity's processor being much more modern than Perseverance's and Perseverance's landing footage being mostly off-the-shelf industrial cameras made possible by the more modern coprocessors being used to compress the video onboard before transmission).
A stated goal of Artemis is to use the Moon as a step to Mars, which it's turning out to be given that the only vehicle remotely capable of making the trip survivable is on the critical path of establishing a long-term presence on the Lunar surface. Everything that has to be developed for missions to Mars will end up tracing back to something tested or learned from Artemis, just as many aspects of Artemis are based on things tested on, developed for or learned from the ISS.
> Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.
We have places on Earth, which are probably 10x if not 100x or 1000x more habitable than Mars, which we still do not and cannot inhabit long term with more than a handful of people.
Exactly this. It has been tried many times and every time the project ultimately fails. There have been many greenhouse / biodome projects that tried to simulate living on mars or the moon and they always go sideways. These projects also assume everyone involved has passed a physical and mental health screening. Society as a whole does not align with such tests. One bad neighbor will cause an atmospheric loss and take everyone out.
If we are going to spend a lot of money in space ventures I would rather see that effort put into something that could save life on Earth from real risks such as getting really good at mining asteroids and controlling the trajectory of asteroids and even that should be 99%+ robots. Humans should be hanging out in near-by spacecraft to have a low latency control and monitoring of the robots and have smaller rescue ships that could be used to extract people from the control spacecraft when things ultimately go wrong. Rescue and maintenance drones should also be robots.
Mars should be a distant stretch goal when our technology advances to the point where we can transform the land and the atmosphere in one or two human lifetimes. We are obviously not there yet as we can not even clean up our own atmosphere here on Earth.
Has anyone come out and said "we should deliberately avoid sticking a colony in Antarctica or the Sahara or on the moon, and going to Mars with no trial runs is a great idea"?
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.
Just to be pedantic, Mars is absolutely covered in oxygen. It's the most abundant element in the atmosphere and second most abundant in the crust. It's part of the reason they planet is red.
What about the very remote villages in the colder/harsher parts of the world? Ie the disputed islands north of Japan, the easternmost parts of Russia, the vast northern parts of Canada, etc? Figuring a way to make those worthy/capable of growth to cities seems still lower lying fruit than Antarctica.
Basically, an Earth that’s capable of colonizing the moon or mars is probably already capable of further settling those conditions on Earth. That stage of humanity probably needs to have a stronger sense of community than current, too.
"Can we do it" is only part of the question, the other is "what's to gain compared to other options?". I'm not sure I know the answer for Mars, but am pretty sure properly colonizing Antarctica compared to more densly settling Siberia or Alaska has no advantages. Settling Mars might though. Besides research, there might be good mining or advantages from let gravity. These might be better though on the moon or astroids.
Agreed 100%. The worst places on Earth are still better than the best places on Mars because you have free gravity and oxygen here. Even for a self-sustaining colony, it would be nice for a dome-crack to not be immediately fatal.
Once we have thriving biodomes in the Outback, then talk to me about trying to do it on Mars.
Because learning how to do it in the inhospitable environment of Mars will teach us lots about how to do it better on Earth.
> We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
What about preserving what we have left and trying to not expand humanity footprint on the planet? Barren landscape of Mars is unremarkable compared to Earth's ecosystem which we still mostly don't understand but keep ravaging nonetheless
It is because no one would invest same as much money to do a pointless habitat challenge. Given same funding as used in Mars plan, of course we can manage to habitat in Antarctica.
The primary reason Antarctica is uninhabited is because it’s effectively against international law. Unfortunately there are similar laws affecting outer space.
There’s no great point to having 20k in Antarctica. Becoming a multiplanet species does have a great long term point, but it’s more of a thousand year vision than a five year vision. Many of Mars’ shortcomings can be improved upon but they’re slow and take a lot of scale. Open bodies of water and a breathable atmosphere are entirely possible and more of an challenge of developing the scale than solving a scientific obstacle.
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t stand in the way of people who want to try.
The concentration of resources involved in getting people to and on Mars, will as a side effect also open up these areas on Earth for habitation.
The same effect occured with the space race. Instead of standing around saying it's impossible, our species rose to the challenge and as a side effect the technologies developed ended up altering our lives on earth in fundamental ways.
We are doing it because it is hard. Because we know the payoff for achieving difficult things.
> If NASA is Amtrak in space, then SpaceX is the Fyre Festival with rockets
> the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit
This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.
SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.
To me this article misses the main point for not going to mars, which is it is stupid vs the next best option of investing in building up our space infrastructure near Earth, ideally finding profitable niches (moon/asteroid mining, solar electricity? zero gravity manufacturing? I don't know what, but I am pretty sure something can be profitable up there) that support that effort so that the spend on point 1 and 2 of the article's argument is motivated by positive cash flow driving us towards whatever the feasible version of an O'Neil cylinder ends up being. Why would we ever want to go back down an expensive to escape gravity well to a barren wasteland that we would have to terraform when the opportunity to terraform more manageable chunks of space will probably exist at the same technology investment level and will almost certainly be much faster/easier/cheaper than doing a whole planet at once?
While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated.
Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?
"Some of the reasons for exploring space, when there are numerous social problems on earth, were described recently by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, Associate Director of Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville. His beliefs were expressed in his reply to a letter from Sister Mary Jucunda, O.P., a nun who works among starving natives of Zambia, Africa."
"Space flight, without any doubt, is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."
Things worth doing in space that are more promising than Mars:
- A robotic Venus lander that can survive for a few days. The last lander to take pictures on Venus landed over 40 years ago, and it only operated for half an hour.[1] Venus Surface temperatures are around 475°C. The electronics overheated. Now we have silicon carbide semiconductors and laser welding, so continued operation at those temperatures might be possible. Here are most of the existing pictures of the surface of Venus.[2] It looks more interesting than Mars.
- A Europa lander. The recent Europa flyby shows much more interesting surface features than Mars. What are those long, thin features? Not rivers; rivers don't have right-angled intersections.
Arguments against human colonization of the solar system (moon/Mars/etc) sound just like trying ot argue against the westward expansion from the 13 colonies.
We will have a Donner Party-like memorial on Mars. And there will be a McDonald’s next to it.
You’re not going to win this argument because it is an argument against the basic nature of humanity, the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain.
I think this post and many of comments here fail to grasp that a true full scale colonization mission of Mars would likely neccistate some sort of terraforming effort in the far future. Along really long timescales, you can even imagine the opposite effort to alter human biology. The major first step is simply getting there.
Another factor is that the civilization that is able to reach Mars is going to be the one that has achieved the capability to dominate Earth. The original purpose of the space race was war, and though people no longer think about it, mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons.
Expanding human life to Mars (and the entire solar system) is a fantastic goal for humanity. Better than just about everything else we could do. To accomplish it, we will solve many problems along the way. I would much rather we advance our technology in the pursuit of Mars than in the pursuit of weapons of war.
I've spent long periods of time underwater with about 120 others. I've seen how people slowly go mad under those conditions so I always come around to how they are going to keep people mentally fit during those long months in deep space. It's probably much lonelier out there between Earth and Mars vs the space station with it's constant view of Earth and of possibility of rescue.
This was a really good, well-researched article that actually changed my (admittedly not very strong) opinion on going to Mars, but there are 740 comments in this thread so far and I doubt more than 5% of people posting comments actually read the entire thing.
We need a highly condensed version of the main bullet points, preferably in TikTok format, to reach more people.
> The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon.
The thing that troubles me about these takes is the "we." There is no singular "we" in the world. Using the singular "we" deceives people into thinking that it is binary choice. In actuality, there are potentially many nations, many companies, and many people who can pursue resources and make a choice without impacting others.
It has no more impact on you than your neighbor deciding whether to buy an insurance policy or not.
Humanity is not a single mass of protoplasm, thank goodness.
You don't go to Mars because it's easy. The biggest producer of technological advancements is pressure to solve hard problems. Not knowing is the whole point if you know how it's a worthless learning experience. It's always going to be hard to get a (the first?) human to Mars. It's 60 million of miles away. But one of the direct ways to solving this is to start working on them.
Plus Neil Degrassi Tyson has a great point on this in that robots can make discoveries and are low risk but they are way less inspiring. You know the Mars rovers names but the average person doesn't however the average person has a much higher chance of know Neil Armstrong because people inspire that.
One must ask the question: why bother exploring space at all? Don't tell me it's for the spinoff technologies, those are a fringe benefit at best, and have dubious return on investment compared to more direct funding. No, it's just because we're curious. We just want to.
Eventually logical arguments about how to acheive goals bottom out at raw, built-in desire. And no matter how many silly-sounding phrasings of the goal that you come up with, the fact remains that we want to go there. We just want to.
(This is no defense of any particular extant plan. OTOH I suspect OP underestimates the value of life support tech here on earth. But these are side questions.)
>The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?
How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.
Good read. Perhaps we need a competing Venus religion? Consider building a floating airship community in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Perhaps we could also control contamination easier being close to edge of space where we could put waste into an orbit for collection and disposal at a later time.
[+] [-] skissane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|3 years ago|reply
In the interest of discourse, who is the greatest proponent of Mars colonization who has been to Antarctica?
[+] [-] ryandrake|3 years ago|reply
Let's figure out how to house and sustain, say, 20K people in Antarctica for 100 years before we even dream about doing the same on Mars.
[+] [-] _Microft|3 years ago|reply
That’s because there are places on Earth that similarly better than e.g. Antarctica or some desert.
The main reason for Mars is that it is not on Earth. Make „not on Earth“ a requirement that cannot be dropped and suddenly Mars makes a lot of sense.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|3 years ago|reply
But that Martian dust that gets all over the solar panels is also loaded with toxic perchlorates. Every time they wear a suit out, they have to absolutely insure that none of it gets into the living space. Good luck.
"Anybody who is saying they want to go live on the surface of Mars better think about the interaction of perchlorate with the human body. At one-half percent, that's a huge amount. Very small amounts are considered toxic ...."
[https://www.space.com/21554-mars-toxic-perchlorate-chemicals...]
[+] [-] idlewords|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ly3xqhl8g9|3 years ago|reply
Our species has proven again and again it's inability to care for the extended tree of life, heck, we still believe there are sharp and crisp delimitations inside our own species (the blacks, the Jews, etc.). Why then this gaslighting about "we must save civilization"? Just because some of the billionaires, those who our system lets to own the world, are afraid of dying? Hey, rich guy [2], got news for you: we don't have a civilization, we are barely a bunch of pseudo-evolved tribes, infighting for trivial resources and perceived boundaries.
Let's figure out how to have a civilization, then, maybe, we can try to save it.
However, as it stands, "we must save civilization" is doublespeak for "you, hoi polloi, go and build an Elysium for me and my friends", just as the Qataris said to the slaves to build them stadiums [3]. And if you own less than $30 million [4], don't kid yourself, you are still hoi polloi.
[1] https://reliefweb.int/report/world/humanitarian-organisation...
[2] There are no rich gals https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-ric...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/03/qatar-wo...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_high-net-worth_individua...
[+] [-] 4bpp|3 years ago|reply
One of the advantages of a Mars colony is that the argument for it infringing upon any existing interests is much weaker than for anywhere on Earth. Of course, to some people, the idea that someone could just go somewhere and do a thing without anyone (who those people of course claim to speak on behalf of) being in a position to claim injury is disturbing in itself.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|3 years ago|reply
you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
Finally, what do you think will be the effect on climate change of at minimum quadrupling the people in Antarctica and providing them some sort of economically viable reason for being there?
What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison. Aside from all the other arguments that we CAN put people in Antarctica the complexity and side effects for our environment are more dangerous than putting them on Mars.
[+] [-] dotnet00|3 years ago|reply
Just like how America hasn't outright been unable to develop the means to go to the Moon again for the past 60 years, it just has had other priorities.
In fact, following your logic, Artemis also should be cancelled until we've spent the arbitrary duration of 100 years sitting around in Antarctica just to prove that we can do it.
An additional point being missed is that when we started talking about going to the Moon the first time around, we didn't really know how to do it, we sent out several impactors just to learn enough about the surface to decide where to go. By setting that goal we gathered data for the purpose and eventually managed to do it. Similarly, there will never be a time where we are 'ready' to go to Mars or any other distant celestial body if we just keep waiting for arbitrary requirements to be met. Right now it's living in Antarctica for 100 years, then it'll be something more ridiculous and arbitrary like maintaining an artificial atmosphere for 1000 years.
Right now we're in a similar phase for Mars as we were for the Moon in the early days of Apollo. We've been studying the surface for decades now, have got rovers storing away reference samples and testing oxygen production, we've even been testing how much mileage we can get with less conservative choices in hardware (eg Ingenuity's processor being much more modern than Perseverance's and Perseverance's landing footage being mostly off-the-shelf industrial cameras made possible by the more modern coprocessors being used to compress the video onboard before transmission).
A stated goal of Artemis is to use the Moon as a step to Mars, which it's turning out to be given that the only vehicle remotely capable of making the trip survivable is on the critical path of establishing a long-term presence on the Lunar surface. Everything that has to be developed for missions to Mars will end up tracing back to something tested or learned from Artemis, just as many aspects of Artemis are based on things tested on, developed for or learned from the ISS.
[+] [-] akiselev|3 years ago|reply
Why? We established a colony there in the 50s and by now the population of Antarctica ranges from 1K to 5K people depending on the season. We could build nuclear reactors and mining facilities and indoor vertical farms and a whole bunch of other industry to make the continent self sufficient and import more people but... why? We really won't learn much more there than we can from the ISS agriculture experiments, McMurdo's existing research, how Saudi Arabia and the other rich states grow and survive in extreme environments, and so on. And you want to delay everything while we twiddle our thumbs for another century?
We need to aim higher to create the kind of cross disciplinary projects and environments that lead to real "innovation." We need to go into space - not Mars yet because there really is nothing to do there until we get our non-robotic space-footing closer to home - but we need to move on to a less pedestrian approach that pushes the boundaries.
We need near Earth asteroid mining to understand the complexities of resource extraction in space, we need lunar colonies to study the day to day realities/psychology/etc of space colonization, we need orbital manufacturing so we can start adapting the lessons and tools of the industrial revolution to zero-G and convection-less environments, we need to continue nuclear rocketry research to improve our ISP and get real SSTO to solve the recovery problem once and for all, and so on. We're not going to make any progress on those problems in Antarctica and Mars will always be two decades away just like fusion.
[+] [-] LinuxBender|3 years ago|reply
Exactly this. It has been tried many times and every time the project ultimately fails. There have been many greenhouse / biodome projects that tried to simulate living on mars or the moon and they always go sideways. These projects also assume everyone involved has passed a physical and mental health screening. Society as a whole does not align with such tests. One bad neighbor will cause an atmospheric loss and take everyone out.
If we are going to spend a lot of money in space ventures I would rather see that effort put into something that could save life on Earth from real risks such as getting really good at mining asteroids and controlling the trajectory of asteroids and even that should be 99%+ robots. Humans should be hanging out in near-by spacecraft to have a low latency control and monitoring of the robots and have smaller rescue ships that could be used to extract people from the control spacecraft when things ultimately go wrong. Rescue and maintenance drones should also be robots.
Mars should be a distant stretch goal when our technology advances to the point where we can transform the land and the atmosphere in one or two human lifetimes. We are obviously not there yet as we can not even clean up our own atmosphere here on Earth.
[+] [-] strken|3 years ago|reply
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.
[+] [-] russdill|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8n4vidtmkvmk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|3 years ago|reply
Basically, an Earth that’s capable of colonizing the moon or mars is probably already capable of further settling those conditions on Earth. That stage of humanity probably needs to have a stronger sense of community than current, too.
[+] [-] ajmurmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
There are really no frontiers left on Earth that are not locked up by existing states.
That point is missed by the whole “space makes no sense because nobody lives in Antarctica” argument.
That and settling another planet is much more interesting than trying to settle a less friendly area of Earth where people already can live.
[+] [-] uuvs8|3 years ago|reply
You know where palm trees don't grow? On mars.
[+] [-] nrclark|3 years ago|reply
Once we have thriving biodomes in the Outback, then talk to me about trying to do it on Mars.
[+] [-] justsomeuser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balaji1|3 years ago|reply
I’m a fan of Mars and beyond also eventually. Expanse TV series does great at near future sci-fi and solar system scale humanity.
[+] [-] Quindecillion|3 years ago|reply
> We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
[+] [-] Buffout|3 years ago|reply
We could learn great things, and maybe reuse technology for going on Mars.
[+] [-] wheelerof4te|3 years ago|reply
We need to do some basic expreriments, take the soil samples and drill few meters down in order to check for water ice deposits.
But before all that, we need to send more rovers.
[+] [-] throwaway290|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|3 years ago|reply
https://taxfoundation.org/tax-court-antarctica-not-foreign-c...
[+] [-] nonethewiser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerryzh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t stand in the way of people who want to try.
[+] [-] sneak|3 years ago|reply
Establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars does benefit us, even if it is more difficult.
[+] [-] bratbag|3 years ago|reply
The concentration of resources involved in getting people to and on Mars, will as a side effect also open up these areas on Earth for habitation.
The same effect occured with the space race. Instead of standing around saying it's impossible, our species rose to the challenge and as a side effect the technologies developed ended up altering our lives on earth in fundamental ways.
We are doing it because it is hard. Because we know the payoff for achieving difficult things.
[+] [-] rlt|3 years ago|reply
> the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel, the door panels that fall off the self-driving car, the robot that’s only a guy in a suit
This was an otherwise well-articulated post, but wow, Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
I’m not saying SpaceX and Musk have a complete viable plan for getting to Mars, but it was striking how the quality of his arguments when it came to Musk just dropped off a cliff.
SpaceX is making more rapid progress towards Mars than anyone. Even if Mars is not viable in the timeframe Musk has said, or you don’t think we should send humans to Mars at all, it would still be highly beneficial for Starship to succeed.
[+] [-] snapplebobapple|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeboi|3 years ago|reply
Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?
[+] [-] thangalin|3 years ago|reply
Source: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730015241/downloads/19...
HTML: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
"Space flight, without any doubt, is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spinoffs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation."
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
- A robotic Venus lander that can survive for a few days. The last lander to take pictures on Venus landed over 40 years ago, and it only operated for half an hour.[1] Venus Surface temperatures are around 475°C. The electronics overheated. Now we have silicon carbide semiconductors and laser welding, so continued operation at those temperatures might be possible. Here are most of the existing pictures of the surface of Venus.[2] It looks more interesting than Mars.
- A Europa lander. The recent Europa flyby shows much more interesting surface features than Mars. What are those long, thin features? Not rivers; rivers don't have right-angled intersections.
Mars is nearly airless and boring.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14
[2] https://www.popsci.com/yes-weve-seen-surface-venus/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s98cHbM1cRM
[+] [-] kiratp|3 years ago|reply
We will have a Donner Party-like memorial on Mars. And there will be a McDonald’s next to it.
You’re not going to win this argument because it is an argument against the basic nature of humanity, the basic urge of a species to expand over all available domain.
[+] [-] LarsDu88|3 years ago|reply
Another factor is that the civilization that is able to reach Mars is going to be the one that has achieved the capability to dominate Earth. The original purpose of the space race was war, and though people no longer think about it, mass produced planetary scale rocketry beats all other weapons.
[+] [-] issa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwattsun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogwog|3 years ago|reply
We need a highly condensed version of the main bullet points, preferably in TikTok format, to reach more people.
[+] [-] golemotron|3 years ago|reply
The thing that troubles me about these takes is the "we." There is no singular "we" in the world. Using the singular "we" deceives people into thinking that it is binary choice. In actuality, there are potentially many nations, many companies, and many people who can pursue resources and make a choice without impacting others.
It has no more impact on you than your neighbor deciding whether to buy an insurance policy or not.
Humanity is not a single mass of protoplasm, thank goodness.
[+] [-] xphos|3 years ago|reply
Plus Neil Degrassi Tyson has a great point on this in that robots can make discoveries and are low risk but they are way less inspiring. You know the Mars rovers names but the average person doesn't however the average person has a much higher chance of know Neil Armstrong because people inspire that.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|3 years ago|reply
Eventually logical arguments about how to acheive goals bottom out at raw, built-in desire. And no matter how many silly-sounding phrasings of the goal that you come up with, the fact remains that we want to go there. We just want to.
(This is no defense of any particular extant plan. OTOH I suspect OP underestimates the value of life support tech here on earth. But these are side questions.)
[+] [-] osigurdson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply
How do you breathe? Elon was talking about Starship having a crew capacity of 100 yet there doesn't seem to be any mention of how they would scrub the air of all that CO2. I've heard estimates that with existing solutions Starship might only be able to support 10 colonists per trip.
[+] [-] zwilliamson|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
Doesn't this seem like a much more exciting and compelling option compared to landing on Mars?
[+] [-] daneel_w|3 years ago|reply