Isn’t it a little wasteful though? The materials for the atmosphere need to come from somewhere, otherwise you’re just throwing out Mars materials. If you import atmospheric material from somewhere else, it feels like other worlds like Jupyter/Saturn moons might be a better call for settlement?
Also, Mars doesn’t have a (strong) magnetic field so going outside would be dangerous because you will be bombarded by radiation.
Presumably for whatever reason it worked well for us to develop as we did down here? Stops everything from exploding, dissolves all the other gases quite nicely? What other gas would you use?
Like, without that inert gas there would have to be something else. Being in a pure oxygen environment for a prolonged period has health impacts to many animals including us. Anything even remotely flammable, like paper, wood, sugar, would burn uncontrollably with the slightest spark.
If you didn't have nitrogen you would need another inert gas to make up 80% (or whatever) of the atmosphere you were going to make.
For the most part, partial pressure is what matters, not absolute pressures. The only contribution inert nitrogen has to life is raising the boiling point of water. But on a frigid planet like Mars that’s not going to be an issue.
Being in a pure oxygen environment does not have a long term impact on animals… if the pure O2 environment is 0.21 atm oxygen. There’s a long history of biological experimentation done by space agencies on this, and the Apollo missions operated on a 0.2 atm pressure for the duration of their missions. Apollo 1 famously had trouble not because it was pure O2, but because it was 1.2atm O2.
There is no reason you need backfill inert gasses to have 1.0 atmospheres.
The Nitrogen cycle [1] is a critical component of many ecological systems. Critical compounds in plants have nitrogen, and the nitrogen for these is absorbed from the soil, where it is fixed by bacteria.
The nitrogen cycle almost entirely involves fixed nitrogen, not inert N2. Nitrogen is fixed from the atmosphere slowly over time through lightning strikes and a very small number of nitrogen fixing bacteria that live symbiotically on the roots of very few plants.
The vast majority of the biomass on earth, including about half of the fixed nitrogen in your body was synthesized industrially via the Haber-Bosch process over the last 100 years.
Aside from those nitrogen fixing bacteria whose output we have already surpassed with industrial processes (artificial fertilizer), inert nitrogen plays no role in biological metabolism. It is not needed, at all.
Mars colonists can import nitrogen, or mine fixed nitrogen from the few deposits that are known to exist. It doesn’t need a massive atmospheric reservoir.
A pure oxygen atmosphere would completely ignite itself in contact with a spark. So you need to have another gas to dilute the oxygen.
Mars' (almost non-existant) atmosphere is mostly CO2, and you could use that, except that a CO2 level above 10% is lethal for humans and at 10%, it's still too oxygen rich.
Nitrogen has the advantage that it's inert and non-lethal.
There's no reason Mars' atmosphere needs to be a 1 atm pressure. For biological processes, it is partial pressure that matters, and nitrogen gas is inert. Mars' atmosphere could be 0.2 atm oxygen + trace gases and that would be perfectly acceptable for human beings.
However people can wear breathing masks when outside of buildings. Plants cannot. Most terraforming proposals focus on supporting surface plant life, and plants thrive in high-CO2 environments. These proposals involve toxically high (for humans) level of CO2 in order to support lush plant life. Once the O2 and temp gets high enough, people can survive on the surface without space suits, so long as they carry a bottle of oxygen and a breathing mask.
Longer-term, atmospheric pressure could be supplanted with a couple of Kuiper Belt objects consisting of frozen nitrogen and organics. Let it burn up in the thickening atmosphere and contribute to the developing pool of gases.
Plants also need nitrogen. Even if you chose plants that can get it just from soil and not worry about any fixing from the air, you need to get a lot to Mars for a terraform.
Not N2, no. There is not plant anywhere in the world that uses atmospheric N2. Plants used fixed nitrogen from the soil. In Martian greenhouses, that would be provided in the form of artificial fertilizer and/or organic waste.
There are fixed nitrogen deposits on Mars (which are also of scientific interest because they might contain fossil remains).
But even without access to such deposits, fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonia could be brought from earth in sufficient quantities to support each settler. Organic waste would be composted and thus the nitrogen recycled with very little loss. N2 waste produced by decomposition would be recaptured by the atmospheric regulators, and either fixed by certain plants brought for that purpose, or industrially fixed by an arc or Haver-Bosch process in the bigger cities.
A synthetic magnetic field is easy compared to adding an atmosphere. Big wire with current, very big by wire standards (one square meter cross section isn't close to enough for reasonable input values if it's on or close to the ground, but it doesn't really need to be) but still small compared to the mass involved in making a dent even compared to the thin Martian atmosphere.
Compared to Mars the moons of the gas giants have at least three major hurdles for long-term human habitation: their distance, with the trip there being around 6 years, the incredibly harsh planetary radiation belts the moons weave through, and ineffectiveness of solar energy that far away from the sun.
I think we should try to overcome these hurdles, but getting humans out there is a much taller order than establishing a human presence on Mars.
The short answer is that it would be underground or in domes for the foreseeable future. The long answer is that people have lots of clever thoughts about how they might achieve it, although none of them are yet practical: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars
And accomplish nothing. It was a terrible idea that wouldn’t work, rightly ridiculed by people who have been studying this for decades before Musk arrived.
"CelebrityDude had the amazing idea of flying around by building a set of robot arms that would reach down and pull really hard on your own shoelaces, which is something we could do today..."
It's not clear why we would care about that except as a reason to point and laugh at CelebrityDude.
I'm not Musk's biggest fan by any means, but after decades in existance he made electric cars "a thing", and he drove the costs of getting to space down by so much that it makes the existing players look like idiots. He's clearly not the dummy your portraying him as. I'd definitely listen to his ideas, even if some of them aren't good.
I disagree with the implied-worldview behind that: Such progress is fundamentally incremental and stochastic, rather than hinging on "Great Men" (or women).
For a great many discoveries or inventions or ideas, digging a little further into the history shows the famous-people often aren't the first to say/try something, but the ones who attempted it again at a more favorable time or place, were more powerful or influential, or just plain got lucky.
We're talking about SpaceX specifically, not Tesla or any of his other companies. In the context of SpaceX, what GP said is absolutely true. The rocket industry has not been getting incrementally better over time. If anything, costs have incrementally gone up over time. Until SpaceX, nobody was able to significantly lower launch costs. Then SpaceX came along and succeeded where dozens of previous startups had failed, and the price floor drops out. In this particular case, "revolutionary" is the right descriptor to use.
I mean, my world view is that you should listen to people's ideas when they've had some good ones in the past. I'm not saying we have to believe they're always right.
I don't believe in great men, but I don't believe innovation just stochastically appears either. Behind all those little steps upwards is someone who's stumbled on some kind of insight and did something about it. Sometimes an idiot can get lucky and have it work out once, but Musk has done it several times.
I don't know about Tesla, but at SpaceX he is actually the Chief Engineer, and in more than just title. A lot of the innovative stuff SpaceX has done were the result of engineering decisions he made. According to Eric Berger's book on the beginning of SpaceX, he is a quite capable self-taught engineer respected by the people who work for him, including those who moved on to other things and had no incentive to lie.
I don't hold him on any pedestal. But saying he's just a marketing guy isn't correct either.
The best thing you can do when you have the resources is to outsource your thinking to other people. Don’t want to figure out your own taxes? Pay someone to figure it out. Don’t want to figure out the law? Pay someone to figure it out. Don’t want to figure out your schedule? Pay someone to figure it out.
My point is, you’d probably get a lot farther by talking to the experts he pays to be close to rather than listening to him.
This isn't about putting a whole new atmosphere on Mars.
But if we did, it would have to be replenished but it would be lost on geological not human timescales. Think significant amounts of atmosphere lost after 100,000 years.
Mars catalysis are one of my validation projects, so it's cool to see work done by other scientists in this area too!
Catalyst discovery is quite fun because the molecular actions are highly varied, and you have to also watch for specificity, selectivity stability, and all sorts of other fun stuff. I have been implementing things like MLP (Machine learned potentials) to speed up the initial search and then higher resolution distirbuted workers that do the quantum chemistry after we switch from "exploratory" to "confirmatory" simulations.
Last weekend I wrote some shaders to visualize electron density grids on the GPU, it was super fun and I learnt a lot
I am hoping to get into y-combinator and find a co-founder, I am highly technical and wrote it all myself, I would also like to connect with deep tech investors too
I don't have much hope for Mars, considering we can't even take care of this planet. Moreover, prospects of living on Mars may make some even more lackadaisical about destroying earth. Instead of investing in this sort of research, we should invest more money in protecting oceans and habitats and living sustainably.
We tend to seek technological solutions to our problems, but where has that led us? Cars, fossil fuel use, massive cities, most people wasting away as drones for global corporations.
The problem behind this sort of technology is that it's just an intellectual exercise that is fun for researchers and is trendy because it's about AI, but I sincerely doubt it will contribute any good to the world.
> I don't have much hope for Mars, considering we can't even take care of this planet
The hard part of taking care of this planet is that every inch is covered with intricate and interconnected systems already. Almost anything you do is guaranteed to have significant side effects and the effort required to mitigate them is extreme. In space this is much less of a problem, comparatively speaking.
No, the hard part of taking care of this planet is that we keep chasing after a lifestyle that is farther and farther away from nature. It's a choice we've made, not something intrinsic to the world.
Dying of tetanus after a cut, or dying in childbirth is pretty natural - and electricity, computers and the internet are pretty unnatural. I'm glad I live in an "unnatural" time and place
We can have nice things and also take care of the planet. If your suggested solution to climate change is that we all wear loincloths and live out in the trees, foraging for a paleo diet, then your suggestion is going to be immediately ignored by everyone. There's no point in even suggesting trying to return to pre-industrial times, especially since we very clearly do not need to. Climate change is a massive engineering and social problem, but somehow reverting to pre-industrial times is an order of magnitude harder on both fronts. And pointless.
Which obviously won't rescue you from the negative consequences of everyone around you choosing to pump combusted fossil fuels into the air you breathe. All the same costs and none of the benefits: what a pitch!
Well, no, not me. I didn't make that argument to begin with, I was just pointing out how nonsensical your counterargument was.
Yeah, if mass production and mass consumption is causing the problem, distributed across the commons, then it's pretty obvious that an individual choosing to "opt out" isn't going to solve the problem.
Parent wanted to be "closer to nature", my solution would work perfectly for him.
By the way, as creatures that evolved into a world already engaged in tool use and cooking on camp fires, we are fundamentally technological. That smartphone is as natural as a shrub. It's just new, that's the only difference.
GP’s motive is to take care of the planet (and reading between the lines: at least our ability to inhabit it comfortably, since of course the piece of rock will be just fine no matter what we do).
No, age is obviously not the only difference between old technologies and new technologies.
Age is the difference between an old hand axe made out of stone and a new hand axe made out of stone.
The difference between an old hand axe made out of stone and an iPhone 15 goes… umm… a bit deeper.
> every inch is covered with intricate and interconnected systems already
The intricate and interconnected systems are what is required to make Earth habitable! If you wanted to live on Mars, you'd have to replicate the same complexity synthetically. Hopefully we can learn to treat the Earth with the same care that you'd treat the oxygen production system for your Martian bubble.
Yes, but on Earth you have the option of being a bastard who pushes your problems onto other systems. On Mars you have no choice but to develop closed circular systems. It's harder to engineer but harder to sin, too. I have high hopes that we will figure out the engineering. I have low hopes that we will figure out how to systematically avoid temptation. I think space exploration is the best way to figure out circular systems at scale, and hopefully those lessons can be backported.
I agree that this research is quite a bit more trendy than practical, for example, as someone who works in Catalysis, I'm not super sure that it is useful to limit the search for catalysts to materials available on Mars, when materials on earth give you so much greater search space, and catalysts do not get consumed with their use, so transporting them there is an O(1) cost.
HOWEVER, I am very optimistic about upcoming technology in green chemistry, For example our retrosynthesis models are finding molecular pathways that are much more green - I have one project for example that is removing dependence on oil using a chemical pathway that we found that uses a molecule thats easily harvested from discarded orange peels.
I think a lot of the past in chemistry (1800 -> 1940-50s) was done with little regard to the environment but many places are much more concious of it now. I would be hesitant to be critical of the current state of things, which is a product of the past, as a measure of current innovation, I think there's a logical error there.
I think you're underestimating the value of lofty research. I'm not a scientist, but I can imagine a few positive scenarios:
- this method or a similar one being used on earth to produce oxygen (if we ever need to)
- these AI method being applied in other fields - solving earth-problems here and now
> Cars, fossil fuel use, massive cities, most people wasting away as drones for global corporations.
These are some grim examples, but we are also using technology for good. We have a lot of work ahead of us in medicine and mental health, and AI has the potential to liberate people from chronic pain, mental decline, genetic diseases and generally just living happier and healthier. Maybe your quarrel is more with capitalism than technology, we would be drones for global corporations in some way or another even with pen and paper.
> Instead of investing in this sort of research, we should invest more money in protecting oceans and habitats and living sustainably.
We can and should do both. Remember, you can't just take an astronaut and ask them to farm crops. I mean, you can, but that's not the best use of resources. If we want to use our talent pool appropriately, we need to invest in several different areas.
> The problem behind this sort of technology is that it's just an intellectual exercise that is fun for researchers and is trendy because it's about AI, but I sincerely doubt it will contribute any good to the world.
That's what's always been said about any sort of research that doesn't immediately produces results. Lasers were at some point considered a novelty with zero practical application. Look at what we are now, there's a fiber optic cable right at my home (that's probably using LEDs instead of laser diodes; LEDs were another once very theoretical area of research).
Even Einstein's work was completely theoretical with no know practical applications... for a time.
Research has a way of bleeding through other fields. Many technologies that are required to colonize Mars are also useful right here.
In the past I've seen branding to the effect of 'Our product Appy opens a whole range of possibilities through a new, unique experience for data ingestion."
It was just a REST API.
"Appy" was quite literally just "API" read as a whole word.
They're using predictive models to decide which experiment to do next. It's as AI as anything else.
> The OER is a thermodynamically uphill reaction involving four consecutive oxidation steps and O–O bond formation, which requires an applied voltage of no less than 1.23 V to operate. The OER overpotential, which is defined as the extra voltage above 1.23 V required for catalysis to occur, characterizes the voltage efficiency of the electrochemical device. Therefore, we chose the measured overpotential as the primary target of our ML model in searching for the optimal OER catalyst10,11,12. We first created 29,902 unique compositions and simulated atomic structures of resulting high-entropy hydroxides (Fig. 2a) from classical MD simulations (Supplementary Figs. 11 and 12). The obtained structural features, such as averaged metal–metal and metal–oxygen distances (Supplementary Figs. 13 and 14 and Supplementary Table 2), are passed to previously established bimetallic hydroxide models13,14 (Fig. 2b) to determine the OER activity of each multimetallic hydroxide by DFT calculation. Three DFT-predicted OER activity descriptors—including the Gibbs free energy change of hydroxyl adsorption ΔGOH* (ref. 15) and differences between the Gibbs free energy change for oxygen adsorption and hydroxyl adsorption ΔGO−OH (ref. 16), the amount of charge transferred for hydroxyl adsorption on the activate site Δq (ref. 17)—and the paired composition information are used for NN training. As Fig. 2c shows, the NN model can accurately reproduce these DFT results. With the NN model, we can now rapidly predict the OER activity of high-entropy hydroxides obtained from any given composition of selected Martian ores (Supplementary Fig. 15), and these theoretical values are then connected with experimentally measured overpotentials. The ML model achieves remarkable accuracy in predicting true overpotentials (Fig. 2d).
> 2. We can't even take care of Earth. I'm no expert but I have to believe it would be far cheaper and easier to solve Earth's problems.
This is a popular view but I think it is wrong. Yes, we have problems on Earth. But if you compare Earth today, in terms of "carrying capacity for human beings", or "utils generated per day" or some other metric you like, vs pre-human Earth, I don't think it's a close contest.
The few early humans were hungry, naked and vulnerable to all manner of dangers. Now there are billions of us, and most live in relative safety, comfort and material luxury. If we can do for Mars what we did for Earth, that will be the best thing that has ever happened to Mars.
..and allows our species to (eventually) hedge our bets over multiple accommodating environments.
As for why not moon, I'm not a terraforming expert but my understanding is that the more massive planet will be capable of retaining an atmosphere more easily than our small satellite would.
We also are directly causing a mass extinction event as well as knowingly destroying our only habitat. I don't know if we can make Mars worse than it is but I would bet good money we'd find a way.
> if you compare Earth today, in terms of "carrying capacity for human beings", or "utils generated per day" or some other metric you like, vs pre-human Earth, I don't think it's a close contest.
Maybe let's turn down the optimization on a single metric before we're all turned into paper clips.
The moon doesn't have enough mass to hold onto an atmosphere.
Still, I think we should build a moon base for the same reason we should go to Mars: even if these projects don't yield direct benefits, they are probably necessary steps to exploring the solar system and beyond.
In terms of your "why explore space at all while children are dying in Africa?" argument -- we can do multiple things at once! Anyway, people's interests aren't fungible: you can't force the people who want to dedicate their lives to exploring space to instead dedicate their lives to curing malaria. Even if you could, people should be allowed to do what they like. And complaining that person X is doing prosocial activity A rather than prosocial activity B is stupid and antisocial.
I agree that we should be putting bases on the Moon, but not at the cost of doing the same on Mars (do both). Doing it on Mars has value in being a forcing function for attaining efficiency and self-sustainability that the Moon can’t due to its ease of accessibility, which can then be used to help grow our Moon presence to something larger than antarctic-style science outposts into something more permanent that can’t have the rug pulled out from under it by myopic politicians.
But financial capital, political capital, and public attention are fungible and directly trade off. Want a space program at the top of a national political party platform? What are priorities are you going to give up fighting for to prioritize that?
> But financial capital, political capital, and public attention are fungible and directly trade off.
I'm not sure that's true in any simple way.
As far as the government goes, it has a role, but this isn't the 60s. SpaceX has shown that a company can launch rockets. As long as there are people willing to work on the necessary problems and people willing to take the necessary risks, I see no reason (that isn't degenerate) why anyone would want to obstruct those efforts. It's not like making SpaceX illegal is going to somehow fix climate change or cure malaria.
According to google that process took several hundred million years. As long as we generate atmosphere faster than it gets stripped away, there's no problem.
Anyway, I think terraforming is getting ahead of ourselves. Step one is getting supplies to Mars. Step two is building a base there. Step three is making that base as self-sufficient as possible. Down the road from that we can worry about generating an atmosphere.
I didn’t mention anything about kids or Africa. And I certainly don’t think we should disallow people from doing what they wish and I wasn’t complaining.
I was merely asking what the point was, from the comparative costs and difficulty of terraforming other planets vs Earth.
> I'm no expert but I have to believe it would be far cheaper and easier to solve Earth's problems.
Nor I, but maybe the Earth's problems can't be solved at all, so -at least some people think- the next best thing would be to have an alternative for saving the human species.
89 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadIt's my understanding that evidence suggests that Mars once had an atmosphere that has since been lost.
If you could give mars an atmosphere tomorrow the loss of atmosphere won't be a problem on human civilization timescales.
Also, Mars doesn’t have a (strong) magnetic field so going outside would be dangerous because you will be bombarded by radiation.
Do Martian rocks have significant amounts of nitrogen?
If you didn't have nitrogen you would need another inert gas to make up 80% (or whatever) of the atmosphere you were going to make.
Being in a pure oxygen environment does not have a long term impact on animals… if the pure O2 environment is 0.21 atm oxygen. There’s a long history of biological experimentation done by space agencies on this, and the Apollo missions operated on a 0.2 atm pressure for the duration of their missions. Apollo 1 famously had trouble not because it was pure O2, but because it was 1.2atm O2.
There is no reason you need backfill inert gasses to have 1.0 atmospheres.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_cycle
The vast majority of the biomass on earth, including about half of the fixed nitrogen in your body was synthesized industrially via the Haber-Bosch process over the last 100 years.
Aside from those nitrogen fixing bacteria whose output we have already surpassed with industrial processes (artificial fertilizer), inert nitrogen plays no role in biological metabolism. It is not needed, at all.
Mars colonists can import nitrogen, or mine fixed nitrogen from the few deposits that are known to exist. It doesn’t need a massive atmospheric reservoir.
Mars' (almost non-existant) atmosphere is mostly CO2, and you could use that, except that a CO2 level above 10% is lethal for humans and at 10%, it's still too oxygen rich.
Nitrogen has the advantage that it's inert and non-lethal.
However people can wear breathing masks when outside of buildings. Plants cannot. Most terraforming proposals focus on supporting surface plant life, and plants thrive in high-CO2 environments. These proposals involve toxically high (for humans) level of CO2 in order to support lush plant life. Once the O2 and temp gets high enough, people can survive on the surface without space suits, so long as they carry a bottle of oxygen and a breathing mask.
Longer-term, atmospheric pressure could be supplanted with a couple of Kuiper Belt objects consisting of frozen nitrogen and organics. Let it burn up in the thickening atmosphere and contribute to the developing pool of gases.
Which requires supply from somewhere. How far you can go with ISRU depends on how big the colonisation development gets.
But even without access to such deposits, fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonia could be brought from earth in sufficient quantities to support each settler. Organic waste would be composted and thus the nitrogen recycled with very little loss. N2 waste produced by decomposition would be recaptured by the atmospheric regulators, and either fixed by certain plants brought for that purpose, or industrially fixed by an arc or Haver-Bosch process in the bigger cities.
I think we should try to overcome these hurdles, but getting humans out there is a much taller order than establishing a human presence on Mars.
"CelebrityDude had the amazing idea of flying around by building a set of robot arms that would reach down and pull really hard on your own shoelaces, which is something we could do today..."
It's not clear why we would care about that except as a reason to point and laugh at CelebrityDude.
> You think he's a genius?" she said, raising her eyebrows. The high-[noble] twit?
> "I don't know him quite well enough, yet. But I suspect so, a part of the time."
> "Can you be a genius part of the time?"
> "All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters."
-- Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold
For a great many discoveries or inventions or ideas, digging a little further into the history shows the famous-people often aren't the first to say/try something, but the ones who attempted it again at a more favorable time or place, were more powerful or influential, or just plain got lucky.
I don't believe in great men, but I don't believe innovation just stochastically appears either. Behind all those little steps upwards is someone who's stumbled on some kind of insight and did something about it. Sometimes an idiot can get lucky and have it work out once, but Musk has done it several times.
I don't hold him on any pedestal. But saying he's just a marketing guy isn't correct either.
My point is, you’d probably get a lot farther by talking to the experts he pays to be close to rather than listening to him.
But if we did, it would have to be replenished but it would be lost on geological not human timescales. Think significant amounts of atmosphere lost after 100,000 years.
You could do the same with the moon.
https://atomictessellator.com
Mars catalysis are one of my validation projects, so it's cool to see work done by other scientists in this area too!
Catalyst discovery is quite fun because the molecular actions are highly varied, and you have to also watch for specificity, selectivity stability, and all sorts of other fun stuff. I have been implementing things like MLP (Machine learned potentials) to speed up the initial search and then higher resolution distirbuted workers that do the quantum chemistry after we switch from "exploratory" to "confirmatory" simulations.
Last weekend I wrote some shaders to visualize electron density grids on the GPU, it was super fun and I learnt a lot
I am hoping to get into y-combinator and find a co-founder, I am highly technical and wrote it all myself, I would also like to connect with deep tech investors too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsBveF-PwAY
This is the illustrative YouTube video:
https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fs44160-023-00424-1
We tend to seek technological solutions to our problems, but where has that led us? Cars, fossil fuel use, massive cities, most people wasting away as drones for global corporations.
The problem behind this sort of technology is that it's just an intellectual exercise that is fun for researchers and is trendy because it's about AI, but I sincerely doubt it will contribute any good to the world.
The hard part of taking care of this planet is that every inch is covered with intricate and interconnected systems already. Almost anything you do is guaranteed to have significant side effects and the effort required to mitigate them is extreme. In space this is much less of a problem, comparatively speaking.
Yeah, if mass production and mass consumption is causing the problem, distributed across the commons, then it's pretty obvious that an individual choosing to "opt out" isn't going to solve the problem.
By the way, as creatures that evolved into a world already engaged in tool use and cooking on camp fires, we are fundamentally technological. That smartphone is as natural as a shrub. It's just new, that's the only difference.
GP’s motive is to take care of the planet (and reading between the lines: at least our ability to inhabit it comfortably, since of course the piece of rock will be just fine no matter what we do).
No, age is obviously not the only difference between old technologies and new technologies.
Age is the difference between an old hand axe made out of stone and a new hand axe made out of stone.
The difference between an old hand axe made out of stone and an iPhone 15 goes… umm… a bit deeper.
The intricate and interconnected systems are what is required to make Earth habitable! If you wanted to live on Mars, you'd have to replicate the same complexity synthetically. Hopefully we can learn to treat the Earth with the same care that you'd treat the oxygen production system for your Martian bubble.
HOWEVER, I am very optimistic about upcoming technology in green chemistry, For example our retrosynthesis models are finding molecular pathways that are much more green - I have one project for example that is removing dependence on oil using a chemical pathway that we found that uses a molecule thats easily harvested from discarded orange peels.
I think a lot of the past in chemistry (1800 -> 1940-50s) was done with little regard to the environment but many places are much more concious of it now. I would be hesitant to be critical of the current state of things, which is a product of the past, as a measure of current innovation, I think there's a logical error there.
- this method or a similar one being used on earth to produce oxygen (if we ever need to)
- these AI method being applied in other fields - solving earth-problems here and now
> Cars, fossil fuel use, massive cities, most people wasting away as drones for global corporations.
These are some grim examples, but we are also using technology for good. We have a lot of work ahead of us in medicine and mental health, and AI has the potential to liberate people from chronic pain, mental decline, genetic diseases and generally just living happier and healthier. Maybe your quarrel is more with capitalism than technology, we would be drones for global corporations in some way or another even with pen and paper.
We can and should do both. Remember, you can't just take an astronaut and ask them to farm crops. I mean, you can, but that's not the best use of resources. If we want to use our talent pool appropriately, we need to invest in several different areas.
> The problem behind this sort of technology is that it's just an intellectual exercise that is fun for researchers and is trendy because it's about AI, but I sincerely doubt it will contribute any good to the world.
That's what's always been said about any sort of research that doesn't immediately produces results. Lasers were at some point considered a novelty with zero practical application. Look at what we are now, there's a fiber optic cable right at my home (that's probably using LEDs instead of laser diodes; LEDs were another once very theoretical area of research).
Even Einstein's work was completely theoretical with no know practical applications... for a time.
Research has a way of bleeding through other fields. Many technologies that are required to colonize Mars are also useful right here.
Turns out it was regular expressions.
It was just a REST API.
"Appy" was quite literally just "API" read as a whole word.
> The OER is a thermodynamically uphill reaction involving four consecutive oxidation steps and O–O bond formation, which requires an applied voltage of no less than 1.23 V to operate. The OER overpotential, which is defined as the extra voltage above 1.23 V required for catalysis to occur, characterizes the voltage efficiency of the electrochemical device. Therefore, we chose the measured overpotential as the primary target of our ML model in searching for the optimal OER catalyst10,11,12. We first created 29,902 unique compositions and simulated atomic structures of resulting high-entropy hydroxides (Fig. 2a) from classical MD simulations (Supplementary Figs. 11 and 12). The obtained structural features, such as averaged metal–metal and metal–oxygen distances (Supplementary Figs. 13 and 14 and Supplementary Table 2), are passed to previously established bimetallic hydroxide models13,14 (Fig. 2b) to determine the OER activity of each multimetallic hydroxide by DFT calculation. Three DFT-predicted OER activity descriptors—including the Gibbs free energy change of hydroxyl adsorption ΔGOH* (ref. 15) and differences between the Gibbs free energy change for oxygen adsorption and hydroxyl adsorption ΔGO−OH (ref. 16), the amount of charge transferred for hydroxyl adsorption on the activate site Δq (ref. 17)—and the paired composition information are used for NN training. As Fig. 2c shows, the NN model can accurately reproduce these DFT results. With the NN model, we can now rapidly predict the OER activity of high-entropy hydroxides obtained from any given composition of selected Martian ores (Supplementary Fig. 15), and these theoretical values are then connected with experimentally measured overpotentials. The ML model achieves remarkable accuracy in predicting true overpotentials (Fig. 2d).
1. The moon is closer.
2. We can't even take care of Earth. I'm no expert but I have to believe it would be far cheaper and easier to solve Earth's problems.
This is a popular view but I think it is wrong. Yes, we have problems on Earth. But if you compare Earth today, in terms of "carrying capacity for human beings", or "utils generated per day" or some other metric you like, vs pre-human Earth, I don't think it's a close contest.
The few early humans were hungry, naked and vulnerable to all manner of dangers. Now there are billions of us, and most live in relative safety, comfort and material luxury. If we can do for Mars what we did for Earth, that will be the best thing that has ever happened to Mars.
As for why not moon, I'm not a terraforming expert but my understanding is that the more massive planet will be capable of retaining an atmosphere more easily than our small satellite would.
Maybe let's turn down the optimization on a single metric before we're all turned into paper clips.
Still, I think we should build a moon base for the same reason we should go to Mars: even if these projects don't yield direct benefits, they are probably necessary steps to exploring the solar system and beyond.
In terms of your "why explore space at all while children are dying in Africa?" argument -- we can do multiple things at once! Anyway, people's interests aren't fungible: you can't force the people who want to dedicate their lives to exploring space to instead dedicate their lives to curing malaria. Even if you could, people should be allowed to do what they like. And complaining that person X is doing prosocial activity A rather than prosocial activity B is stupid and antisocial.
But financial capital, political capital, and public attention are fungible and directly trade off. Want a space program at the top of a national political party platform? What are priorities are you going to give up fighting for to prioritize that?
I'm not sure that's true in any simple way.
As far as the government goes, it has a role, but this isn't the 60s. SpaceX has shown that a company can launch rockets. As long as there are people willing to work on the necessary problems and people willing to take the necessary risks, I see no reason (that isn't degenerate) why anyone would want to obstruct those efforts. It's not like making SpaceX illegal is going to somehow fix climate change or cure malaria.
Anyway, I think terraforming is getting ahead of ourselves. Step one is getting supplies to Mars. Step two is building a base there. Step three is making that base as self-sufficient as possible. Down the road from that we can worry about generating an atmosphere.
I was merely asking what the point was, from the comparative costs and difficulty of terraforming other planets vs Earth.
Nor I, but maybe the Earth's problems can't be solved at all, so -at least some people think- the next best thing would be to have an alternative for saving the human species.