Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides similar challenges.
That right there is complete, unadulterated bullshit. The cost of getting a pound of supplies to Antarctica is several orders of magnitude cheaper than getting a pound of supplies even as far as orbit, let alone Mars. And Antarctica is a much less hostile environment (breathable atmosphere, for one).
That line alone tells me this isn't remotely a well-thought-out, plausible venture.
The logistics of supplies and rescue are a lot easier, sure, but the two environments have more in common with each other than the rest of the surface of this planet. You already need to live in artificial structures that can take a pounding, grow your own food with little from the environment but sunlight and some raw materials, and you can't survive outside for very long without ample protection. I mean, for a training environment, where else would you go?
Also, if you look at the context of the quote, you can see that they're making an analogy:
Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides
similar challenges. However, the South Pole now has a number of very advanced,
large research stations that boast a great deal of modern facilities that provide
a good quality of life. These looked very different 50 years ago. The Mars
settlement will develop in the same way.
I agree. I have long wanted to spend time in Antartica, but I wouldn't set foot on a shuttle destined for Mars for this reason: breathable atmosphere. Maybe the Mars project is more comparable to sending people into deep sea, leaving them there, and sending fresh supplies with a 6-month delay?
> The crew is actually going to stay and live on Mars, with the intention to remain there, for the rest of their lives.
Wait what? Isn't that a really important part of the problem that shouldn't be just skimmed through as a mere detail on the video? Aren't the ethical issues that would arise from this, by itself, be enough to make everything else unviable. Humans live for a long time. What if after 10 years living there, the show just didn't raise enough money. "Hey crew, you'll just have to suicide, we won't send anymore food". Just so many huge issues come to mind. With not many obvious solutions. I would be interested to hear to which solutions they have, if any.
edit: their incredibly short FAQ answer about ethics doesn't make me anymore hopeful. They don't touch on any of the obvious hard problems and even dare to make an absurd analogy with immigrants from Europe to the Americas:
Oh please, those clowns aren't actually going to fly anyone to Mars. They aren't even remotely close to solving the genuinely hard engineering problems involved. So worrying about ethics is rather premature.
If someone announces his intention to build a time machine I wouldn't get too worked about the ethical concerns of changing history.
Thought experiment. Imagine that we could send people to Mars, but we knew with 99%+ certainty they would die “prematurely” there, ahead of time. And those astronauts knew that.
Would that be ethical?
I sure think so. I know some people would disagree, but that doesn’t matter. As long as those involved know what they are getting into, it’s ethical enough to work.
Everyone is impressed at how real they're keeping it?
With the risks involved, and the $6 billion price tag (that will surely bloat out), there would need to be at least $50-60 billion in profit potential for rational investment.
Seinfeld is the top grossing show in history, at $2.7 billion.
Maybe they're hoping that billionaires with nothing else to spend the money on will cough up hundreds of millions to sponsor the project, just to get their name on it.
Either that, or they're not revealing the whole plan.
I have a hard time seeing any benefit to colonizing Mars without coupling it with a large-scale attempt at terraforming. If we're going to just put a domed colony somewhere, the moon makes far more sense.
I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.
You have to think beyond immediate practical applications and consider what an event like this would mean to our species as a whole. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes this argument better than anyone:
On Mars, you're surrounded by easily processed carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, and you have close to a 24-hour day/night cycle. Bring hydrogen with you, and you can quickly start producing air, water, fuel, and food. On the Moon, you're stuck having to import the full weight of all of the above.
Discovering feasibly concentrated pockets of ice in polar craters on the Moon would help, but still not with carbon or nitrogen, and whether any ice could be found in useful concentrations is an open question.
A Mars settlement could quickly become largely self-sustaining, without having to wait to be able to terraform first.
Without magnetic shielding I'm not sure how far large scale terraforming is going to get us. Any atmosphere we try to build up will just blow off into space. But I agree, put the dome on the moon.
At first I thought "wow cool, a reality show on mars sounds like an awesome idea". Then I thought about it further and wondered "What would they actually do on mars that would make people want to watch?"
Diary Day 662: "Today we explored another crater, the dirt was quite similar to the last 83 days. John is still with Dianne and I haven't had sex in nearly 2 years. I've read the Harry Potter series 97 times now, maybe I'll make it to 100 by the end of the year."
I can imagine it lasting a few months or maybe even a year, but what happens after then when viewers stop tuning in?
I guess by then they're hoping they'll have set up a mining expedition or maybe other tourist flights and can raise money that way.
This project is completely ridiculous. Those people completely underestimate how extremely difficult it is to even land on Mars. Nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way, and yet these people are convinced they can simply put humans on Mars? Right.
You don't have to take my word for it, though. Take a look at what they say at their own site, and see if it actually makes sense. A few examples:
"In addition to this, the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe."
And we will extract these resources how? We theoretically know how to build such systems, but that's not the same as actually being able to build them on Mars. Are they just going to experiment during the project, and if it doesn't work then "oops, well, I guess you're all going to die"?
But, most ridiculously:
"Of course most of the elements we need are not yet exactly in the form we would like, but crucially: no brand new inventions have to be conceived, designed, tested and built for the mission to become reality."
That's like saying we can also build a colony on Venus right now. Or Mercurius. Or Jupiter. Because we have a theoretical understanding of how to launch rockets there and how to build space colonies, and of course the technology to do both these things already exist. What these people fail to see is not that we don't have a theoretical understanding of how we might do all this, but that without any practical experiments in several areas AND many failed tests the chances of this project going perfectly as planned (which almost never happens to begin with) are VERY slim.
> This project is completely ridiculous. Those people completely underestimate how extremely difficult it is to even land on Mars. Nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way, and yet these people are convinced they can simply put humans on Mars? Right.
Yes I don't think they have a real understanding. The founder of Mars One did two AMAs (ask me anything) on Reddit a while back [1] where he said "We are not scientists, we are entrepreneurs" [2]. A choice quote from a user:
> You have no one (I repeat NO ONE) on your team who is experienced or competent in anything related to space travel. The one guy on your team who you're showcasing has experience in land based telescopes and a small role in an experiment that was taken up by NASA... Which is pitiful compared to the amount of expertise needed in a lead on a project this ambitious.
If you check out the AMAs you'll see the above comment in action via the founder's answers to questions. Most of his answers are vague or difficult questions are just completely ignored.
You're advertising that you want to send humans to Mars by 2023 and you have NO idea how to do that. Your entire company is based on "wouldn't it be cool to go to Mars?" As a real entrepreneur building real things, this is like the new influx of business and marketting students (no offense to those that are in these fields) running around blabbering about these great ideas they have and all they need is an engineer to make it for them.
I don't believe it. Getting to Mars with people is going to be much harder challenge than the moon was. This[1] was a great episode of Nova (with Neil Degrasse Tyson) exploring the research NASA has been doing to prepare for a trip to Mars.
A much smarter plan would be to build a settlement on the Moon, build factories which build habitats, tools and mining equipment (to extract water, air, maybe food and fuel from either the Moon or Mars) and send a couple of those to Mars from the Moon, using a electromagnetic launch system before sending any humans. One could even remotely control the lunar equipment from Earth before risking astronauts there.
They plan to launch food supplies to Mars in 2016, 7 years before sending the astronauts and 2 years before they've even scouted out where to establish a settlement.
I don't understand why they would send the supplies there so early. Can anyone explain this timeline to me?
It's smart to launch supplies in low-energy orbits so as to increase the mass you can get to Mars for the same fuel budget. Humans have to transit quickly between the planets, but supplies can handle a much longer trip on a much less comfortable spacecraft and, to be there for the humans, they'll have to launch much earlier.
And yes, no sane human being would consider launching to Mars before a return vehicle is already settled at the destination and ready to take off. The return vehicle and its backup. And the habitats, supplies and everything else.
The way I see it, there's three outcomes to a goal like this:
1. Humans never go to Mars
2. Humans eventually decide it's interesting enough to go to Mars out of curiosity and find a way to get there
3. Earth looks doomed, but there's a slim shot at saving humanity by sending some people to Mars
I'm kind of disappointed there isn't more interest in something like this. Let me ask you all something. If someone in 1960 told someone else "I bet we'll have a man on the moon before the decade is over", what do you think the reaction would be?
It's not a lack of capability that's keeping us from getting to Mars; it's that people just don't care enough.
Are there any experts who can comment (without bias) about the validity of these claims? It's quite hard to tell just from this whether or not this is a joke, or whether it's an exciting, plausible initiative.
Here's a good idea, why not "go through" with the project, then fake the entire media spectacle.
You could build up the exact same media hype and have less costs! Good thing they have a team member who has "...worked for over 20 years in the graphics industry".
I doubt it. But I think it would be possible to be living on the moon in that time frame. Plus, we could be shuttling all of our garbage into space and mining the moon. Space 2029 Redo.
[+] [-] akavi|13 years ago|reply
That right there is complete, unadulterated bullshit. The cost of getting a pound of supplies to Antarctica is several orders of magnitude cheaper than getting a pound of supplies even as far as orbit, let alone Mars. And Antarctica is a much less hostile environment (breathable atmosphere, for one).
That line alone tells me this isn't remotely a well-thought-out, plausible venture.
[+] [-] aperiodic|13 years ago|reply
Also, if you look at the context of the quote, you can see that they're making an analogy:
[+] [-] marquis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vibrunazo|13 years ago|reply
Wait what? Isn't that a really important part of the problem that shouldn't be just skimmed through as a mere detail on the video? Aren't the ethical issues that would arise from this, by itself, be enough to make everything else unviable. Humans live for a long time. What if after 10 years living there, the show just didn't raise enough money. "Hey crew, you'll just have to suicide, we won't send anymore food". Just so many huge issues come to mind. With not many obvious solutions. I would be interested to hear to which solutions they have, if any.
edit: their incredibly short FAQ answer about ethics doesn't make me anymore hopeful. They don't touch on any of the obvious hard problems and even dare to make an absurd analogy with immigrants from Europe to the Americas:
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/19-faq-health/231-is-this-ethi...
[+] [-] nradov|13 years ago|reply
If someone announces his intention to build a time machine I wouldn't get too worked about the ethical concerns of changing history.
[+] [-] alanh|13 years ago|reply
Would that be ethical?
I sure think so. I know some people would disagree, but that doesn’t matter. As long as those involved know what they are getting into, it’s ethical enough to work.
[+] [-] reitzensteinm|13 years ago|reply
With the risks involved, and the $6 billion price tag (that will surely bloat out), there would need to be at least $50-60 billion in profit potential for rational investment.
Seinfeld is the top grossing show in history, at $2.7 billion.
Maybe they're hoping that billionaires with nothing else to spend the money on will cough up hundreds of millions to sponsor the project, just to get their name on it.
Either that, or they're not revealing the whole plan.
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukifer|13 years ago|reply
I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.
[+] [-] AdamFernandez|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlGemHL5vLY
[+] [-] bfe|13 years ago|reply
Discovering feasibly concentrated pockets of ice in polar craters on the Moon would help, but still not with carbon or nitrogen, and whether any ice could be found in useful concentrations is an open question.
A Mars settlement could quickly become largely self-sustaining, without having to wait to be able to terraform first.
[+] [-] seanalltogether|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zikes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loceng|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|13 years ago|reply
Diary Day 662: "Today we explored another crater, the dirt was quite similar to the last 83 days. John is still with Dianne and I haven't had sex in nearly 2 years. I've read the Harry Potter series 97 times now, maybe I'll make it to 100 by the end of the year."
I can imagine it lasting a few months or maybe even a year, but what happens after then when viewers stop tuning in?
I guess by then they're hoping they'll have set up a mining expedition or maybe other tourist flights and can raise money that way.
[+] [-] hobin|13 years ago|reply
You don't have to take my word for it, though. Take a look at what they say at their own site, and see if it actually makes sense. A few examples:
"In addition to this, the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe."
And we will extract these resources how? We theoretically know how to build such systems, but that's not the same as actually being able to build them on Mars. Are they just going to experiment during the project, and if it doesn't work then "oops, well, I guess you're all going to die"?
But, most ridiculously: "Of course most of the elements we need are not yet exactly in the form we would like, but crucially: no brand new inventions have to be conceived, designed, tested and built for the mission to become reality."
That's like saying we can also build a colony on Venus right now. Or Mercurius. Or Jupiter. Because we have a theoretical understanding of how to launch rockets there and how to build space colonies, and of course the technology to do both these things already exist. What these people fail to see is not that we don't have a theoretical understanding of how we might do all this, but that without any practical experiments in several areas AND many failed tests the chances of this project going perfectly as planned (which almost never happens to begin with) are VERY slim.
</rant>
[+] [-] dvoiss|13 years ago|reply
Yes I don't think they have a real understanding. The founder of Mars One did two AMAs (ask me anything) on Reddit a while back [1] where he said "We are not scientists, we are entrepreneurs" [2]. A choice quote from a user:
> You have no one (I repeat NO ONE) on your team who is experienced or competent in anything related to space travel. The one guy on your team who you're showcasing has experience in land based telescopes and a small role in an experiment that was taken up by NASA... Which is pitiful compared to the amount of expertise needed in a lead on a project this ambitious.
If you check out the AMAs you'll see the above comment in action via the founder's answers to questions. Most of his answers are vague or difficult questions are just completely ignored.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ufb42/ama_i_am_fo..., http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/iama_founder_of_...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/_/c4yd59u?contex...
[+] [-] raufrajar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|13 years ago|reply
You're advertising that you want to send humans to Mars by 2023 and you have NO idea how to do that. Your entire company is based on "wouldn't it be cool to go to Mars?" As a real entrepreneur building real things, this is like the new influx of business and marketting students (no offense to those that are in these fields) running around blabbering about these great ideas they have and all they need is an engineer to make it for them.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/space-food.html
[+] [-] rbanffy|13 years ago|reply
The idea of a one-way mission is terrible.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nell|13 years ago|reply
I mean we could use it as a prison. Ship prisoners off to space ;)
[+] [-] mtrn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxtang|13 years ago|reply
I don't understand why they would send the supplies there so early. Can anyone explain this timeline to me?
[+] [-] rbanffy|13 years ago|reply
And yes, no sane human being would consider launching to Mars before a return vehicle is already settled at the destination and ready to take off. The return vehicle and its backup. And the habitats, supplies and everything else.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] loceng|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|13 years ago|reply
1. Humans never go to Mars
2. Humans eventually decide it's interesting enough to go to Mars out of curiosity and find a way to get there
3. Earth looks doomed, but there's a slim shot at saving humanity by sending some people to Mars
I'm kind of disappointed there isn't more interest in something like this. Let me ask you all something. If someone in 1960 told someone else "I bet we'll have a man on the moon before the decade is over", what do you think the reaction would be?
It's not a lack of capability that's keeping us from getting to Mars; it's that people just don't care enough.
[+] [-] ForrestN|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|13 years ago|reply
That's all you need to know about the feasibility of these claims.
[+] [-] aidenn0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_%28TV_series%29
Too bad only the pilot was ever aired (to my knowledge).
[+] [-] sabalaba|13 years ago|reply
You could build up the exact same media hype and have less costs! Good thing they have a team member who has "...worked for over 20 years in the graphics industry".
[+] [-] bocalogic|13 years ago|reply