I wish, just like all nations have a budget for defense, that they all have a budget for space exploration. Colonising mars would be the ultimate growth driver. Think interplanetary trade, tourism, asteroid mining. Not to mention population growth and diversity.
Discovering water in large amounts means establishing a colony is increasingly possible and viable.
It is not. Science fiction has colored our view of the rest of the solar system.
People underestimate how nasty Mars is to live on. We'd be better off building colonies on the moon then trying to colonize Mars.
Imagine a nuclear holocaust on Earth, but far worse. That's Mars. The radiation is crazy. It's the equivalent radiation to being about 1 mile away from the center of the bomb dropped on a Hiroshima, every year. The air will make you pass out in seconds. The soil can't grow anything, not because of the UV radiation that sterilizes everything but because of perchlorates in the soil. You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you. Never mind the low gravity.
And that's just scratching the surface. Mars isn't some nice place where we can set up a colony. It's a disaster zone of unimagined scale that no amount of money can do anything about.
Well that’s depressing. Just kidding, an excellent write up that I’m going to save for the next time I need to explain why “getting our ass to Mars” is just part of a grift.
Not so fast. People thought living in orbit would kill you, yet here we are, some having lived up there for over a year. Think of Mars as a premade space station core, of masive size, with premade shields against asteroids, a gravity generator, resources within reach, energy, and water.
The analogy to the ISS would be a science base Mars. That does not get you interplanetary trade, or asteroid mining.
Tourism is at least conceivable, but the number of people who could plausibly afford a ticket is tiny; and the journey time would be hard to justify. The market for low earth tourism is already tiny; and exists only because everything needed was already built to support the science mission.
For asteroid mining; just go to asteroids. It seems bonkers to set up your base at the bottom of a gravity well for no particular reason.
For trade; there is nothing of particular value on Mars. If you are already there, then on site production makes sense. Otherwise, skip the trip and gravity well and find an asteroid to mine.
Partly because Elon is advocating for it, and people have been conditioned to vociferously oppose anything espoused by someone who differs from your core political beliefs.
Didn't we think Chernobyl would be a dead zone yet things are growing there? Not that I expected to be able to grow stuff on Mars' soil without processing the ground.
> You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you
Aren't we getting slowly killed by _everything_ here on earth? Why wouldn't we be able to build planet wide sealed structures, starting with a small region, and growing to surround the entire "liveable" surface? Of cource it's not a trivial task, but the planet already provides relative shelter from space, has at least _some_ gravity and provides some of the resources needed for survival (water it seems, metals that we can easily access, metals, some minerals, and so on).
“People underestimate how nasty America is. We’d be better off building colonies in the Sahara than in America.”
Radiation on the surface of mars is only ~2.5x the radiation in the ISS. There’s no air there, either. Perchlorates suck for humans but are great as rocket fuel - there’s a double incentive to strip them out of the soil, and there are known mechanisms for doing so. The low gravity may or may not be an issue, but people have survived a year on the ISS in 0G so it’s probably surmountable.
Yes, living on Mars is much, much harder than living on Earth. No, it isn’t impossible.
not impossible but also not viable.
many decades before we create a sustainable "Biosphere X" experiment on earth, robots will be way better equipped to settle the solar system ... for themselves.
>> I wish, just like all nations have a budget for defense, that they all have a budget for space exploration. Colonising mars would be the ultimate growth driver. Think interplanetary trade, tourism, asteroid mining. Not to mention population growth and diversity.
Blah blah blah, this is kindergarten level perception of reality and it's really sad that a large swathe of adults cannot conceptualize beyond cheap fantasy.
Main problem with Mars is that is has no magnetic field. Without that any attempt at terraforming it is pointless and wasteful. Say one would devise some scheme to warm the planet and melt the water. Result would be the water would evaporate and the water would be lost in space. Pointless.
There is water there, like oil reserves on Earth. Once burned, it's gone forever.
So first, one must invent some way of generating planetary-scale magnetic field which would envelop the planet and shield it from the solar wind which blows any gas particles away. That doesn't require going to Mars, if it will ever happen it will happen here.
I don't see how but hey ... that's what science is for.
Isn’t atmospheric loss on the scale of millions of years? If we were capable of giving mars an atmosphere, surely we’d be capable of topping that atmosphere off when needed?
So, even if maybe the terraforming and colony project has a life span of a few million years…that’s still longer that’s humanity has existed.
You’re correct. Moreover a magnetic field is not needed for a planet to have an atmosphere. For example Venus has no magnetic field, and it has a very thick atmosphere, even though it gets 4 times the solar flux as Mars.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadDiscovering water in large amounts means establishing a colony is increasingly possible and viable.
People underestimate how nasty Mars is to live on. We'd be better off building colonies on the moon then trying to colonize Mars.
Imagine a nuclear holocaust on Earth, but far worse. That's Mars. The radiation is crazy. It's the equivalent radiation to being about 1 mile away from the center of the bomb dropped on a Hiroshima, every year. The air will make you pass out in seconds. The soil can't grow anything, not because of the UV radiation that sterilizes everything but because of perchlorates in the soil. You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you. Never mind the low gravity.
And that's just scratching the surface. Mars isn't some nice place where we can set up a colony. It's a disaster zone of unimagined scale that no amount of money can do anything about.
Tourism is at least conceivable, but the number of people who could plausibly afford a ticket is tiny; and the journey time would be hard to justify. The market for low earth tourism is already tiny; and exists only because everything needed was already built to support the science mission.
For asteroid mining; just go to asteroids. It seems bonkers to set up your base at the bottom of a gravity well for no particular reason.
For trade; there is nothing of particular value on Mars. If you are already there, then on site production makes sense. Otherwise, skip the trip and gravity well and find an asteroid to mine.
Didn't we think Chernobyl would be a dead zone yet things are growing there? Not that I expected to be able to grow stuff on Mars' soil without processing the ground.
> You would need to live in a clean room on Mars because they build up in your system and slowly kill you
Aren't we getting slowly killed by _everything_ here on earth? Why wouldn't we be able to build planet wide sealed structures, starting with a small region, and growing to surround the entire "liveable" surface? Of cource it's not a trivial task, but the planet already provides relative shelter from space, has at least _some_ gravity and provides some of the resources needed for survival (water it seems, metals that we can easily access, metals, some minerals, and so on).
Radiation on the surface of mars is only ~2.5x the radiation in the ISS. There’s no air there, either. Perchlorates suck for humans but are great as rocket fuel - there’s a double incentive to strip them out of the soil, and there are known mechanisms for doing so. The low gravity may or may not be an issue, but people have survived a year on the ISS in 0G so it’s probably surmountable.
Yes, living on Mars is much, much harder than living on Earth. No, it isn’t impossible.
Blah blah blah, this is kindergarten level perception of reality and it's really sad that a large swathe of adults cannot conceptualize beyond cheap fantasy.
Main problem with Mars is that is has no magnetic field. Without that any attempt at terraforming it is pointless and wasteful. Say one would devise some scheme to warm the planet and melt the water. Result would be the water would evaporate and the water would be lost in space. Pointless.
There is water there, like oil reserves on Earth. Once burned, it's gone forever.
So first, one must invent some way of generating planetary-scale magnetic field which would envelop the planet and shield it from the solar wind which blows any gas particles away. That doesn't require going to Mars, if it will ever happen it will happen here.
I don't see how but hey ... that's what science is for.
An interesting projection.
So, even if maybe the terraforming and colony project has a life span of a few million years…that’s still longer that’s humanity has existed.