Seriously, it would be a lot easier to build a colony on the bottom of the ocean or even on the moon - without the incredibly harsh penalty of many months of travel back and forth. There literally doesn't seem to be any benefit to living on Mars except for the romantic notions of it being another planet.
The Moon is indeed the best place to "learn the ropes" before setting out further out.
But it does not attract the same level of excitement as Mars does for some reason. We're already been there so it seems it's been ticked off the list...
I believe that our understanding of lunar surface resources has changed significantly since those books. We now know there is more water than we ever suspected. We also have found what look like lava tubes that form natural ice traps. Being about a week from Earth also means we can iterate a lot faster and the 2 second delay makes remote controlled exploration a lot simpler.
Mankind undertakes numerous endeavours where the benefits might be non-existent or very indirect. I would argue that when it comes to colonising Mars, we're looking at the latter case.
First rather obvious thing is that building the colony requires a great deal of technological advancement, which in turn creates employment throughout society from research positions to supply chain vacancies. These advancements might also lead to commercial successes which in turn create even more employment and likely an increase in the quality of life.
Second it is a huge inspiration for a lot of people. The very idea that we can conquer space is something that makes me feel shivers. At the same time it is art, testament of the good parts of our species. That romantic notion might end up inspiring many young folk to take careers in fields that contribute to the betterment of mankind.
No I totally get that. My point is if we want to get to that lofty goal of space exploration and colonisation, then our own Moon really is the obvious choice. The supply chains, the technology, the achievement is no smaller than it would be on Mars. For some reason people threat it as almost "too easy" which is obviously completely nonsense. We should built and maintain a permanently inhibited base(colony?) on the Moon before venturing out all the way to Mars. Surely having a visible colony so close to us would be a huge uplifting achievement to all of mankind.
The bottom of the ocean is perhaps less glamorous, but it's no less technically challenging - the risks of having a permanent base on the bottom of the Mariana Trench would be huge, but we could try living there permanently, growing our own food, conduct research etc - it many ways it's more similar to space exploration than many people think.
The Moon is very difficult as the long days result in extreme temperatures. Daytime temperatures can reach 253.4 degrees Fahrenheit (123° C). Covering a large area in a reflective surface can dramatically lower that, but the Apollo missions only worked because they stayed for a few days near lunar dawn.
There are ways around this, but the moon is a harsh mistress.
Make the first colony one thin, long pipe across the entire surface. The difference in temperature would provide a steady flow of air at the average temperature.
This is probably completely ridiculous for reasons obvious to someone who knows what they're talking about.
From a pure technology standpoint an under sea mining colony seems like a better first step. Like Mars internal combustion engines are useless and constant supplies of oxygen are required. Resource wise the ocean covers more land than the surface of Mars or the moon and it’s within shipping distance.
It requires some amazing mental gymnastics to call global warming the "result" of going to space. Exploring space has given us plenty of real word benefits, like communication links and weather satellites
I'm not sure the Moon would be that much easier than Mars. It's far enough that any transfer of anything needs a lot of planning. And no atmosphere. Mar's thin atmosphere means you can get some materials just by pumping air, which is a lot easier than mining.
Also no atmosphere = micrometeoroids striking directly the surface (and possibly you). On Mars the atmosphere takes care of burning up any meteoroids and Mars Climate Orbiters before they can hit you.
That’s a double-edged sword. Yes, Mars’s atmosphere can protect you from micrometeoroids, but it also makes it absolute hell to land anything there. The atmosphere is thick enough to burn up any spacecraft you try to land there but nowhere near thick enough to use a parachute. The moon, on the other hand, is much easier to land on using only retro rockets as brakes.
Sure, but you need to break all your speed at arrival with rocket engines. Not a big difference for regular trips from Earth - no need to make these more quickly than the regular few days.
But say you are coming back from Mars and want to land on a Moon base or even just dock to a lunar space station. Now you have to brake all the excess interplanetary speed with your engines! And that might be quite a lot, especially if you opted for going faster to reduce the transit time.
But if you are arriving with the same speed at Mars, you can use the atmosphere for aerocapture first without having to brake all that speed with engines. And people might do that for Moon bound trips as well - first do an aerocapture to an excetric Earth orbit using Earths atmosphere and only then adjust the resulting orbit for Moon encounter. That should reduce the raking requirements quite a lot.
For that reason I can imagine future interplanetary ships always having a degree of aerodynamic capability, so they can make use of the atmosphere to slow down when needed. Even if they are not really made to land on a body with atmosphere.
Aerocapture with the thin Martian atmosphere is much riskier than aerobraking [1]. Since you’re trying to bleed off all of your delta-v in one pass, your margin for error is much lower due to the high energies involved. Aerobraking is much less risky but way slower, taking months to decelerate and so much less feasible with human passengers.
For landing on earth you only need aerobraking and parachutes. For the moon all you need are the retro rockets (we’ve already done it). To send humans to Mars you need retro rockets, a heat shield, and a parachute. The combination of systems makes the whole procedure a lot more complicated and error prone, increasing risk.
Fair enough - and indeed, the Lunar delta-v needed is usually quite small. Apparently Chang'e 5 sample module needed just 1,67 km/s to reach lunar orbit for example.
Still, I think there are definitely cases where atmosphere helps (even if it causes issues elsewhere).
So even if you used propulsive breaking to get captured into orbit of a body with atmosphere for safety reasons, you can still capture into a very eccentric orbit & then carefully use aerobraking (as demonstrated many times at Mars already) to lower and circularize your orbit before landing. And with a bit better aerosurfaces you could even use the atmosphere to tune your orbits inclination as needed.
And where are you supposed to go from the bottom of the ocean? From the Moon or Mars, access to the whole solar system is easier than from Earth's surface.
Again, as I said in my other comment - the bottom of the ocean is increadibly challenging in itself. The need to build habitats that could permanently withstand tonnes of pressure is not that far off from habitats needing to survive the harshness of space. We could learn how to build those, how to live in them, how to grow food and obviously conduct science. Those findings would be valuable outside of our planet too.
And importantly, when people say that they want to go to Mars in order to secure the future of our species - the bottom of the ocean is protected form nearly every natural or human made catastrophe imaginable. Even if the surface of the earth was vaporised in nuclear fire, 10km under the surface of water nothing would touch such a colony.
But of course, please don't misunderstand me - of course a Moon colony would be far more preferable.
At least one reason would be to win internet arguments with people that say the high price of housing is due to there being a finite amount of land on earth.
Living on a single planet is a single point of failure for humanity. A nuclear war, an asteroid impact or a super vulcano eruption and we are done.
(Living in a single solar system is still dangerous, as a gamma ray burst directed at the solar system would still wipe us all out. Leaving the solar system is a lot further out than (trying to) colonize other locations in the solar system.)
And like I said in the other comment - colony at the bottom of the ocean would protect us from nearly anything, while simultaniously giving us opportunity to develop, test and perfect habitats for harsh environments. If it could become truly independent then that's your goal fully achieved and many technologies would transplant directly into space colonization. It's truly incredible what 10km of water can protect you from. The entire surface of Earth could be destroyed be it by nuclear war or an asteroid strike, and a colony on the bottom of the ocean would barely notice.
Both types of colonies could (and should) be pursued, but for self-sustaining colonies, the isolation that spaces colonies provide is an actual advantage. There's no incentive for self-sustainability with ocean colonies, because they can easily obtain what they need from the surface. Space colonies have clear incentives, because help would always be 6-12 months away (for Mars colonies).
A colony on the bottom of the ocean won't protect us from overpopulation or from exhausting the Earth's resources. On a long enough timescale, we'll have to stop the population from growing or find somewhere else to live.
Really? Ever? Like, "nobody ever is going to do this?" I don't believe in absolutes like that. For sure, we'll make the trip possible technically. You have to agree that we can make the trip, right?
So, what would it take for anybody (out of the billions of people on earth) to make that journey? Even it would mean certain death? Not much, is my guess. I think going down in history as the first human on Mars would be enough for at least 1 person. What about governments? To forever be known as the first nation on Mars. I can think of a few government who would 'force' people to do it... Dying in a dessert vs. dying on another planet, a true patriot would do it, right?. Or how is it different from living on a submarine, for example.
What if you were a social media influencer. Imagine the engagement and followers of posting from Mars.
There's so much profit to be made, somebody will make the journey, live in a sphere for a few years and maybe come back.
I can't imagine civilization has been improving science and technology for millennia and now will suddenly stop and never progress to when it is able to create a viable foothold on Mars.
And if I know anything about the People of the Earth it is that if something is possible somebody will do it. For one reason or another. Even if it doesn't make economical or scientific or other reason.
This is only going two ways, either humanity will land on Mars or we will all die or at least bomb / poison ourselves and go back to stone age.
It makes me think of that Russian mining town that is very far north with high pollution and horrible winters that basically last year round.. no one lives there except for the people paid very nicely (in relative terms) to be there to mine valuable materials. There are probably materials in abundance on/in Mars that people get paid to live there to extract, process, and send back to earth. Only then does it make sense to say “well we could really use a dentist up here, and a little deli, and maybe a store for home goods. And we can’t keep the team members away from each other, what do we do with all these children that have popped up, perhaps an elementary school?” Like many colonies, the first large foray of onto another planet may involve slave or political exile labor.
I’m not much of a sci fi person, but there are real economic reasons to set up shop on Mars beyond a mere achievement for mankind.
In that regard, the Moon may be a much better spot - lower delta-v to orbit, simple availability of highly specialized, long supply-chain components (from Earth), abundant solar (4+x Mars). It gets hotter than Mars, which is an issue, but I'd assume most delicate things would live underground, in lava tubes or similar places (which probably have abundant water ice easily extractable).
Right ? And they did that just by introducing a super efficient torch drive. Otherwise most technology is not that much advanced from what we have now, yet there is a believable human civilization spanning preatty much the entire Solar System.
Expanse is a really nice demonstration that drive technology is one of the most important if not the most important technology for space settlement. :)
That remote mining town also has something going for it that Mars doesn't - economic viability. The energy cost of going to and from mars makes any sort of known resource extraction economically unviable. Palladium, one of the most valuable elements in existence (and probably the most valuable in wide use), is ~$2400/troy oz. At 21967 troy oz/ton, that is ~ $53 million/ton or $76k/kg. Ignoring decreases in prices if a supply was found large enough to fund a Mars colony (2018 saw only 9 million ozt or 409 tons of supply), current return costs are in the billions of $/KG. 3 order of magnitude decrease would still be millions $/KG, and that is assuming there are nuggets lying on the ground that a robot could easily pick up and ship back.
Now one can argue - that is current technology. And that is correct. But you would need to get interplanetary total mining/collection/launch/return costs to sub $76k/kg to even be economically neutral, in the most ideal situation, for literal palladium nuggets sitting on the ground in essentially a big pile near your launch site.
We could speculate on the potential improvement in costs, etc. and they might eventually come. But what we don't have so far is anything on mars economically worth getting or living there to get, even at 'drive there in my car' costs, let along launch costs.
Going to mars as a purely a exploration/discovery/science project/hobby - totally worthwhile. So far we have no reason to believe it's economically worthwhile actually living there.
Some argue it makes way more sense to build and colonize space in O'Neill cylinders instead. You can have "nice" artificial environments and gravity that matches Earths.
You can have one orbit Mars and pop down anytime for short duration missions.
I believe an availability of resource throughout the surface is going to determine which solution is viable. Anything that requires some obscure resource available in a remote, difficult to reach location is going to loose unless it provides substantial benefits.
You can already extract oxygen from CO2 or rock. Both are available everywhere and are trivial to reach. You only need energy (to heat it up) which can be provided by solar arrays -- renewable resource and the process to extract is fairly simple (heat it up enough and it gives out oxygen, basically). Maybe not that important, but both are also available in practically unlimited supply.
I sort of feel like the constant stream of “scientists have discovered a planet that is like earth” is just a PR stunt to get more funding. Not that I don’t support space exploration efforts. I just have noticed most of the discovery articles are more theoretical than actual discovery and trigger my click bait mental alarms even though I love reading them.
We have already done that [1]. The first permanent base on Antarctica was built over a hundred years ago in 1903.
What we should do is build a permanent moon base. It's closer to earth so if something goes wrong it's only a three day trip back to earth, vs waiting 2 years for a return window on mars + about 8 months travel time.
46 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadRadiation being a huge problem apart from the basic unlivability https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html
But it does not attract the same level of excitement as Mars does for some reason. We're already been there so it seems it's been ticked off the list...
It is not because there is less in-situ there. Dr Robert Zubrin makes this case in his books.
First rather obvious thing is that building the colony requires a great deal of technological advancement, which in turn creates employment throughout society from research positions to supply chain vacancies. These advancements might also lead to commercial successes which in turn create even more employment and likely an increase in the quality of life.
Second it is a huge inspiration for a lot of people. The very idea that we can conquer space is something that makes me feel shivers. At the same time it is art, testament of the good parts of our species. That romantic notion might end up inspiring many young folk to take careers in fields that contribute to the betterment of mankind.
The bottom of the ocean is perhaps less glamorous, but it's no less technically challenging - the risks of having a permanent base on the bottom of the Mariana Trench would be huge, but we could try living there permanently, growing our own food, conduct research etc - it many ways it's more similar to space exploration than many people think.
There are ways around this, but the moon is a harsh mistress.
This is probably completely ridiculous for reasons obvious to someone who knows what they're talking about.
But say you are coming back from Mars and want to land on a Moon base or even just dock to a lunar space station. Now you have to brake all the excess interplanetary speed with your engines! And that might be quite a lot, especially if you opted for going faster to reduce the transit time.
But if you are arriving with the same speed at Mars, you can use the atmosphere for aerocapture first without having to brake all that speed with engines. And people might do that for Moon bound trips as well - first do an aerocapture to an excetric Earth orbit using Earths atmosphere and only then adjust the resulting orbit for Moon encounter. That should reduce the raking requirements quite a lot.
For that reason I can imagine future interplanetary ships always having a degree of aerodynamic capability, so they can make use of the atmosphere to slow down when needed. Even if they are not really made to land on a body with atmosphere.
For landing on earth you only need aerobraking and parachutes. For the moon all you need are the retro rockets (we’ve already done it). To send humans to Mars you need retro rockets, a heat shield, and a parachute. The combination of systems makes the whole procedure a lot more complicated and error prone, increasing risk.
[1] http://sicsa.egr.uh.edu/sites/sicsa/files/files/projects/dec...
Still, I think there are definitely cases where atmosphere helps (even if it causes issues elsewhere).
So even if you used propulsive breaking to get captured into orbit of a body with atmosphere for safety reasons, you can still capture into a very eccentric orbit & then carefully use aerobraking (as demonstrated many times at Mars already) to lower and circularize your orbit before landing. And with a bit better aerosurfaces you could even use the atmosphere to tune your orbits inclination as needed.
And where are you supposed to go from the bottom of the ocean? From the Moon or Mars, access to the whole solar system is easier than from Earth's surface.
And importantly, when people say that they want to go to Mars in order to secure the future of our species - the bottom of the ocean is protected form nearly every natural or human made catastrophe imaginable. Even if the surface of the earth was vaporised in nuclear fire, 10km under the surface of water nothing would touch such a colony.
But of course, please don't misunderstand me - of course a Moon colony would be far more preferable.
Living on a single planet is a single point of failure for humanity. A nuclear war, an asteroid impact or a super vulcano eruption and we are done.
(Living in a single solar system is still dangerous, as a gamma ray burst directed at the solar system would still wipe us all out. Leaving the solar system is a lot further out than (trying to) colonize other locations in the solar system.)
So, what would it take for anybody (out of the billions of people on earth) to make that journey? Even it would mean certain death? Not much, is my guess. I think going down in history as the first human on Mars would be enough for at least 1 person. What about governments? To forever be known as the first nation on Mars. I can think of a few government who would 'force' people to do it... Dying in a dessert vs. dying on another planet, a true patriot would do it, right?. Or how is it different from living on a submarine, for example.
What if you were a social media influencer. Imagine the engagement and followers of posting from Mars.
There's so much profit to be made, somebody will make the journey, live in a sphere for a few years and maybe come back.
And if I know anything about the People of the Earth it is that if something is possible somebody will do it. For one reason or another. Even if it doesn't make economical or scientific or other reason.
This is only going two ways, either humanity will land on Mars or we will all die or at least bomb / poison ourselves and go back to stone age.
The only question is "when".
It seems Manifest Destiny is not in fact destiny.
I’m not much of a sci fi person, but there are real economic reasons to set up shop on Mars beyond a mere achievement for mankind.
The Expanse books really got my imagination going!
Expanse is a really nice demonstration that drive technology is one of the most important if not the most important technology for space settlement. :)
Now one can argue - that is current technology. And that is correct. But you would need to get interplanetary total mining/collection/launch/return costs to sub $76k/kg to even be economically neutral, in the most ideal situation, for literal palladium nuggets sitting on the ground in essentially a big pile near your launch site.
We could speculate on the potential improvement in costs, etc. and they might eventually come. But what we don't have so far is anything on mars economically worth getting or living there to get, even at 'drive there in my car' costs, let along launch costs.
Going to mars as a purely a exploration/discovery/science project/hobby - totally worthwhile. So far we have no reason to believe it's economically worthwhile actually living there.
You can have one orbit Mars and pop down anytime for short duration missions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
You can already extract oxygen from CO2 or rock. Both are available everywhere and are trivial to reach. You only need energy (to heat it up) which can be provided by solar arrays -- renewable resource and the process to extract is fairly simple (heat it up enough and it gives out oxygen, basically). Maybe not that important, but both are also available in practically unlimited supply.
What we should do is build a permanent moon base. It's closer to earth so if something goes wrong it's only a three day trip back to earth, vs waiting 2 years for a return window on mars + about 8 months travel time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic...