One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X): There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that. A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with no outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it. This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously. Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.
Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.
That's actually not even the sort of thing I'm talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of Earth without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do that, Mars is hopeless.
You're not considering the actual, non-hype reasons for colonization of Mars. It's about scientific discovery first and foremost, and the vast majority of "beings" there will be robots in early colonization. Look at what we've sent already: robots for scientific discovery. This pattern will continue for at least a couple decades, the first humans sent there will be technically minded to do maintenance on robots, build up a small base/solar arrays/propellant production. Putting fake bases in the West isn't going to do anything towards understanding Mars, its former ecosystems, and its current potential for harboring life.
If you and everyone else has bought into the hype machine, well that sucks, but real scientists are still focused on robotics on Mars.
> There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.
I think the principal problem here is that those places aren't on Mars.
1. Those that postdate farming. Because we obviously can't cream off the local wildlife in Mars as there is none.
2. Those that can survive the loss of their motherland. If the goal is to survive the complete loss of Earth, the Martian colony needs to be completely self-sustaining and cannot have any reliance on the Earth-bound umbilical cord.
The list of lands uninhabited as of about 2000 BC essentially amounts to remote islands in the oceans. Polynesian colonization definitely relied on the sustained contact between these remote islands. A lot of the remote Arctic/Antarctic islands were settled largely to facilitate hunting of sea mammals (seals, whales) and wouldn't exist if that trade ceased. Hell, the Norse colony in Greenland collapsed after it was dropped from Viking trading routes... despite lasting for over 400 years before then.
The closest thing I can think to of an example that meets this criteria is the Pitcairn Islands. But while they did clearly last for a decade without outside contact, much less support, they became dependent on outside support within about 50 years. The carrying capacity of Pitcairn Islands is probably smaller than the minimum self-sustaining band size of human beings.
Exactly, literally every place that is now inhabited was once an uninhabited tract of land that humans colonized. Humans are very good at living in almost every environment on Earth.
I don't think anyone wants to colonize Mars because they're looking for land. They want to colonize Mars because it's super-cool to live on another planet.
If it's feasible or makes sense is of course an entirely different question.
Because usually in the past, the big leap was not done by playing it safe, but by ignoring all the naysayers, disbelievers and those without imagination and doggedly doing the impossible only to discover that when push came to shove, solutions were found to previously impossible problems and when enterprising people put their heads together and do not consider failure an option, miracles can and do happen.
Playing it safe can net small incremental improvements, but it won't capture people's imagination and it won't energize the human spirit to reach to the very bottom of our abilities. Playing it safe won't unite a large group of fundamentally egoistic beings for a common cause.
I believe the biggest evolutionary leap that propelled humans to the top of the food chain is the enterprising human spirit, the pioneering drive, the irresistible urge to stick our fingers into the wallsockets of the universe. Sometimes we get shocked, and sometimes it hurts badly, but we strive becase we do not give up. We reach for the stars, and when we find ourselves in dire need because the cold, merciless and deadly vastness of space threatens our survival, we are pushed to find solutions that were deemed unthinkable otherwise. Perhaps the first shot only gets us to the moon, but we'd never reach it just plinking arrows. Early explorers set out into the unknown oceans knowing that they will likely not return. Many faced extreme hardship and regrettably died. But some survived and they wrote history as we know it. They were all ill-prepared, because they didn't even know what to prepare for. But it is their sacrifice that allowed us to discover new continents, to circumnavigate the world and connect pockets of humanity into an ever denser network of modern society.
There was a time when scientists were convinced that humans will not be able to breathe if travelling faster than 40 mph. There was a time when human flight was thought impossible. It took a bunch of people jumping off cliffs and plunging to their death to figure out the details. Those jumps were necessary. Not just for lessons learned ("this is not the way to do it" is a valuable lesson!) but each of those jumps pushed the envelope a bit further. Each pioneer got a bit closer to the light at the end of the tunnel. The light in some tunnels ends up beign a train, but some tunnels end up leading to the bright spark of revolution.
As much as logic dictates otherwise, we need dreamers who are irrational and fearless enough to go into the unkown. Without these dreamers, nobody will push the envelope. Most of them will be considered foolish, stupid and reckless in their time, but our history is built on the shoulders of those who succeeded against all odds.
Yeah, I've been making that argument since Musk and Bezos first announced their intentions (though I usually used terraforming Arizona as an example as that state has become one of the largest polluters per capita in the US).
But the argument that guys like Bezos and Musk are clinging to is that Mars presents an opportunity to continue the human race in an event of cataclysmic proportions (like another massive asteroid strike, the Yellowstone caldera erupting at a scale we hadn't anticipated, or global warming making Earth generally uninhabitable).
Being farther away from the Sun, Mars gets much much colder than Earth, but it never gets as warm (max temps are something like 60 - 70 degrees Fahrenheit). So it's substantially different than a place like the Nevada desert.
I don't argue that we shouldn't be trying to terraform Earth first and reduce our reliance on positive feedback loop functions like air conditioning, quite the contrary. And I do believe all the rocket launches involved getting people to Mars would likely accelerate warming here on Earth. But Earth and Mars are vastly different places that are very far apart, and I think that's the argument for colonizing Mars.
> Mars presents an opportunity to continue the human race in an event of cataclysmic proportions (like another massive asteroid strike, the Yellowstone caldera erupting at a scale we hadn't anticipated, or global warming making Earth generally uninhabitable).
Even in a worst-case scenario we're better off here. We have a pretty good idea where all the dinosaur-killer-sized asteroids are and none of them are on a collision course with earth. There is the possibility of a medium-size rock causing some very serious damage to infrastructure, but it's not going to make us go extinct. Likewise for volcanic activity. Even a dinosaur-killer-sized rock is survivable (for the species, not for civilization) by moving underground for a while until the dust settles.
Global warming is an existential threat to civilization, but not to homo sapiens as a species. We may have to go back to being hunter-gatherers in northern latitudes, but again, it's not going to make us go extinct.
Homo sapiens are just damned tough to exterminate.
Do you believe this would be worth it? Do you think our society does not have sufficiently advances technology to start a self sustaining colony in the desert? I think it would be absolutely trivial, and i'm pretty sure someone has already planned this out and decided against spending the money.
Biosphere 2 was meant as a self-sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting human life. It wasn't entirely successful, but was along the lines of what you described.
Biosphere was an interesting experiment, but very different from what I had in mind. It relied on a huge up-front engineering effort, orders of magnitude more than what would be realistic on Mars. What I had in mind was a colonization effort in the desert starting with what you could realistically carry on a spacecraft, i.e. a few shipping containers (even that is being pretty generous) and then no outside contact for two years (at a minimum).
The less-obvious difference between Mars and "anywhere on Earth" is that no amount of environmental (even tectonic) damage done on Earth is going to affect Mars. I'm not arguing that Mars is orders of magnitude harder than Nevada, but it covers the risk of "we fucked Earth".
But the risk of "we fucked Earth" to the point where it's harder to colonize than Mars is effectively nonexistent. You could set off every nuclear device at once and it would still be easier to live here than on Mars. Even a dinosaur-killing asteroid would still leave the planet easier to live on than Mars. (Many species did survive last time, even without technology.)
It's not clear what you're trying to say. All human colonization to date has been dependent upon fertile lands or extensive outside support. If we want to colonize Mars, we should prove we can survive without these things, and since nobody has done that on Earth, why should anybody they think it can be done on another planet?
I think you are missing the bigger premise with colonization of another planet. I agree your challenge would be worth of consideration but the premise is that if earth due to some reason becomes uninhabitable having a colony on another planet gives human population ability to continue on. This is regardless of whether we have colonized every inch of this planet right?
I think the original point was that you can practice and fine tune various techniques critical for Mars right here on Earth first. Makes sense to me. Let’s still reach Mars but let’s also make the best use of our resources here so we can minimise the failures over their. Not eliminate, but significantly reduce.
I think calling it a televised execution is quite an oversimplification. Mars One was deeply flawed, but the basic concept of a one way colonization mission to Mars isn't insane. A one-way mission is legitimately simpler from a technical perspective, and there are obviously plenty of people who would be happy to go. If it were done well, with a high probability of survival and prosperity (and really, only in that case), I would be fascinated to watch.
Not to mention, even if the initial mission were one-way, it's entirely possible that return trips could be possible within the lifetimes of the initial colonists. And besides, everyone dies; I can see why someone might choose a life of adventure (and pain, toil, monotony, etc.) on Mars over a life of relative comfort on Earth, even if I wouldn't make the same choice.
I'd expect it to get boring quick, just like watching rocket launches. New exciting images can only happen every so often. You probably want some drama or tension for better ratings. That's a pretty big mismatch of incentives combined with tricky power dynamic. I'd stay away from that unless that reality show is just a small side venture. And no way it could ever significantly finance a mars base in the first place.
> a one way colonization mission to Mars isn't insane
Actually, it pretty much is. There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet we don't do it because even that is borderline insane (at the very least, economically irrational). No rational person should take Mars colonization seriously until, at the very minimum, someone puts a colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that manages to sustain itself for a few years with no outside help. No one is doing that because it's both unsexy and stupid. But being sexy doesn't make colonizing Mars any less stupid.
Bone loss, changes in bone structure, muscle atrophy, and changes in the inner ear are just some of the suspected negative effect of spending extended periods of time in weaker gravity.
They'd have to spend hours each day working out to counter those effects. Their day would primarily consist of sleep and working out, with a few hours of time for everything else. That doesn't make for a good televised program.
On top of that, a minimum-energy launch window appears every two years and two months (or 780 days), making it way more realistic to send people on two year long missions.
I don't really see the logic of "it'll be so much less costly and complicated if we make it a one way mission"
Why?
If we are able to successfully lower the $ per kg cost for cargo to LEO, and from LEO to mars transfer orbit, it will be a moot point. We're going to need something like the most wildly optimistic scenarios for full re-use of the SpaceX BFR, and huge numbers of BFRs or BFR-equivalents flying many missions to make a Mars colony a reality. Doesn't matter whether one-way or not.
Presuming that we have done so, and the spacecraft are fully reusable and the $ to orbit cost is low, what technical problem or economic problem would prevent a few launches from Mars on a return trajectory to Earth? For whoever was part of the initial colony that decided they wanted to return.
I know that for everyone here, it was obvious from the start that Mars One was never going to fly. What really gets my goat is the utter gullibility of the media. Here are a few of the articles from The Guardian:
22 Apr 2013: Life on Mars to become a reality in 2023, Dutch firm claims
19 Jan 2014: Why we want to spend the rest of our lives on Mars
9 Feb 2015: Mars One mission: a one-way trip to the red planet in 2024
17 Feb 2015: Mars One shortlist: the top 10 hopefuls
19 Feb 2015: Why I want to be a passenger on Mars One
30 May 2015: Can Mars One colonise the red planet?
It was always complete bullshit, anyone with a smidge of technical or scientific background said so repeatedly, so why they did write about it so many times? Yes, I know the proximate reasons – Mars One had a good PR agency, The Guardian wants clicks, etc. But The Guardian is meant to be a good, trustworthy news source, and here they were giving credibility to what I can only describe as a scam artist, or at best, a completely deluded entrepreneur.
It should never have gotten as far as it did, and I blame the media for this.
I find it amazing that, even though Mars One looked so sketchy since the beginning, still 200,000 people applied for their program. That means that still many people dream about exploring space. If a solid project was launched, probably hundreds of millions of people would apply to travel and settle down on another planet. It makes me very hopeful.
Until a few years ago, medias were always very negative and described space exploration as a waste of money. But, it is getting a bit better. This may be thanks to Space X, the new race to the Moon (China), the landings on a comet (Europe) and an asteroid (Japan), the Indian mission on Mars, and so on.
Now, the project of replacing the ISS (end scheduled in 2020) with a permanent base on the Moon sounds more plausible (Moon Village).
One only needs to look at the death records for New England in the early period to realize that's not the case. An 90% mortality within a year is no stop for colonization if there is enough political will for it.
200.000 started the registration, but only 2800 remainend at the end of the process. Problably because they where not willing to pay the fee of $73 Dollar.
My friend "applied," knowing full well it was a scam. He said that he regretted nothing, as it allowed him to fantasize about the journey more concretely. So perhaps it served the same function as pornography.
Instead of offering dumb 1-way trips to Mars why not create round trips to the Moon and back? You can see Earth from the surface of the moon, see the lunar lander, drive a lunar rover, bounce around for a bit then hop in your module and head back home and live the rest of your life with a new perspective. More interesting than Mars, and doesn't take months to get there.
That seems like a much harder sell -- telling people they are going to be the first people to colonize another planet is exciting. Sending them on a sightseeing cruise around the moon (without even stopping) seems less interesting since even if the trip is "free" (paid by others), it's going to be risky.
Mars One wasn't seriously aiming to colonize Mars. It was a glorified suicide mission. That isn't appealing to most people, especially compared to a trip round the moon you'd actually have a good chance of surviving.
Not as simple as you would think. Mars has atmosphere for capture braking, for parachute landings. The moon requires lots of powered deltav to get onto the surface from low earth orbit, more so than mars iirc.
That's almost exactly backwards. For any decent-sized payload there's too much atmosphere to ignore (so you need heat shielding) yet not enough to exploit (so you need heavy rockets), parachutes rip off of big payloads... the skycrane was the least ridiculous device JPL could come up with for their rover.
The Moon is much easier, it's just a rock and some delta-V.
The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin — per wikipedia, "the atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface averages … about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure."
It is not really sufficient for capture braking / parachute landings with any efficiency or safety.
Yep, and as often happens when a scam involves science or tech, many journalists helped out by promoting their ridiculous claims without due challenge or skepticism.
Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]
Readit News
Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-sim...
That's actually not even the sort of thing I'm talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of Earth without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do that, Mars is hopeless.
If you and everyone else has bought into the hype machine, well that sucks, but real scientists are still focused on robotics on Mars.
I think the principal problem here is that those places aren't on Mars.
Maybe we could better spend our time working on the things we haven't figured out.
Without a connection to existing civilization, and without a source of easily accessible water provided by nature? No, we have never done that.
1. Those that postdate farming. Because we obviously can't cream off the local wildlife in Mars as there is none.
2. Those that can survive the loss of their motherland. If the goal is to survive the complete loss of Earth, the Martian colony needs to be completely self-sustaining and cannot have any reliance on the Earth-bound umbilical cord.
The list of lands uninhabited as of about 2000 BC essentially amounts to remote islands in the oceans. Polynesian colonization definitely relied on the sustained contact between these remote islands. A lot of the remote Arctic/Antarctic islands were settled largely to facilitate hunting of sea mammals (seals, whales) and wouldn't exist if that trade ceased. Hell, the Norse colony in Greenland collapsed after it was dropped from Viking trading routes... despite lasting for over 400 years before then.
The closest thing I can think to of an example that meets this criteria is the Pitcairn Islands. But while they did clearly last for a decade without outside contact, much less support, they became dependent on outside support within about 50 years. The carrying capacity of Pitcairn Islands is probably smaller than the minimum self-sustaining band size of human beings.
It makes zero sense to go to Mars if we have enough uninhabited land available.
If it's feasible or makes sense is of course an entirely different question.
Playing it safe can net small incremental improvements, but it won't capture people's imagination and it won't energize the human spirit to reach to the very bottom of our abilities. Playing it safe won't unite a large group of fundamentally egoistic beings for a common cause.
I believe the biggest evolutionary leap that propelled humans to the top of the food chain is the enterprising human spirit, the pioneering drive, the irresistible urge to stick our fingers into the wallsockets of the universe. Sometimes we get shocked, and sometimes it hurts badly, but we strive becase we do not give up. We reach for the stars, and when we find ourselves in dire need because the cold, merciless and deadly vastness of space threatens our survival, we are pushed to find solutions that were deemed unthinkable otherwise. Perhaps the first shot only gets us to the moon, but we'd never reach it just plinking arrows. Early explorers set out into the unknown oceans knowing that they will likely not return. Many faced extreme hardship and regrettably died. But some survived and they wrote history as we know it. They were all ill-prepared, because they didn't even know what to prepare for. But it is their sacrifice that allowed us to discover new continents, to circumnavigate the world and connect pockets of humanity into an ever denser network of modern society.
There was a time when scientists were convinced that humans will not be able to breathe if travelling faster than 40 mph. There was a time when human flight was thought impossible. It took a bunch of people jumping off cliffs and plunging to their death to figure out the details. Those jumps were necessary. Not just for lessons learned ("this is not the way to do it" is a valuable lesson!) but each of those jumps pushed the envelope a bit further. Each pioneer got a bit closer to the light at the end of the tunnel. The light in some tunnels ends up beign a train, but some tunnels end up leading to the bright spark of revolution.
As much as logic dictates otherwise, we need dreamers who are irrational and fearless enough to go into the unkown. Without these dreamers, nobody will push the envelope. Most of them will be considered foolish, stupid and reckless in their time, but our history is built on the shoulders of those who succeeded against all odds.
That is a lovely turn of phrase!
But the argument that guys like Bezos and Musk are clinging to is that Mars presents an opportunity to continue the human race in an event of cataclysmic proportions (like another massive asteroid strike, the Yellowstone caldera erupting at a scale we hadn't anticipated, or global warming making Earth generally uninhabitable).
Being farther away from the Sun, Mars gets much much colder than Earth, but it never gets as warm (max temps are something like 60 - 70 degrees Fahrenheit). So it's substantially different than a place like the Nevada desert.
I don't argue that we shouldn't be trying to terraform Earth first and reduce our reliance on positive feedback loop functions like air conditioning, quite the contrary. And I do believe all the rocket launches involved getting people to Mars would likely accelerate warming here on Earth. But Earth and Mars are vastly different places that are very far apart, and I think that's the argument for colonizing Mars.
Also, you should look into Earthships.
Even in a worst-case scenario we're better off here. We have a pretty good idea where all the dinosaur-killer-sized asteroids are and none of them are on a collision course with earth. There is the possibility of a medium-size rock causing some very serious damage to infrastructure, but it's not going to make us go extinct. Likewise for volcanic activity. Even a dinosaur-killer-sized rock is survivable (for the species, not for civilization) by moving underground for a while until the dust settles.
Global warming is an existential threat to civilization, but not to homo sapiens as a species. We may have to go back to being hunter-gatherers in northern latitudes, but again, it's not going to make us go extinct.
Homo sapiens are just damned tough to exterminate.
Interesting phrase ... isn't Earth "terraformed" already, by definition?
Absolutely.
> Do you think our society does not have sufficiently advances technology to start a self sustaining colony in the desert?
I think the jury is very much out on that question.
> I think it would be absolutely trivial
I think you underestimate how much humans depend on their connections to civilization.
Even surviving in benign environments (i.e. ones where water is available for free) for long periods of time is non-trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
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Here's a technical assessment of the viability of their plan: https://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2014/01/18/ask-etha...
Not to mention, even if the initial mission were one-way, it's entirely possible that return trips could be possible within the lifetimes of the initial colonists. And besides, everyone dies; I can see why someone might choose a life of adventure (and pain, toil, monotony, etc.) on Mars over a life of relative comfort on Earth, even if I wouldn't make the same choice.
I'd expect it to get boring quick, just like watching rocket launches. New exciting images can only happen every so often. You probably want some drama or tension for better ratings. That's a pretty big mismatch of incentives combined with tricky power dynamic. I'd stay away from that unless that reality show is just a small side venture. And no way it could ever significantly finance a mars base in the first place.
Actually, it pretty much is. There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet we don't do it because even that is borderline insane (at the very least, economically irrational). No rational person should take Mars colonization seriously until, at the very minimum, someone puts a colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that manages to sustain itself for a few years with no outside help. No one is doing that because it's both unsexy and stupid. But being sexy doesn't make colonizing Mars any less stupid.
They'd have to spend hours each day working out to counter those effects. Their day would primarily consist of sleep and working out, with a few hours of time for everything else. That doesn't make for a good televised program.
On top of that, a minimum-energy launch window appears every two years and two months (or 780 days), making it way more realistic to send people on two year long missions.
Why?
If we are able to successfully lower the $ per kg cost for cargo to LEO, and from LEO to mars transfer orbit, it will be a moot point. We're going to need something like the most wildly optimistic scenarios for full re-use of the SpaceX BFR, and huge numbers of BFRs or BFR-equivalents flying many missions to make a Mars colony a reality. Doesn't matter whether one-way or not.
Presuming that we have done so, and the spacecraft are fully reusable and the $ to orbit cost is low, what technical problem or economic problem would prevent a few launches from Mars on a return trajectory to Earth? For whoever was part of the initial colony that decided they wanted to return.
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22 Apr 2013: Life on Mars to become a reality in 2023, Dutch firm claims
19 Jan 2014: Why we want to spend the rest of our lives on Mars
9 Feb 2015: Mars One mission: a one-way trip to the red planet in 2024
17 Feb 2015: Mars One shortlist: the top 10 hopefuls
19 Feb 2015: Why I want to be a passenger on Mars One
30 May 2015: Can Mars One colonise the red planet?
It was always complete bullshit, anyone with a smidge of technical or scientific background said so repeatedly, so why they did write about it so many times? Yes, I know the proximate reasons – Mars One had a good PR agency, The Guardian wants clicks, etc. But The Guardian is meant to be a good, trustworthy news source, and here they were giving credibility to what I can only describe as a scam artist, or at best, a completely deluded entrepreneur.
It should never have gotten as far as it did, and I blame the media for this.
"how can you not be suspicious of a bloke who has no rockets or spacesuits but says he’s off to Mars soon"
and it's quite an interesting story.
Until a few years ago, medias were always very negative and described space exploration as a waste of money. But, it is getting a bit better. This may be thanks to Space X, the new race to the Moon (China), the landings on a comet (Europe) and an asteroid (Japan), the Indian mission on Mars, and so on.
Now, the project of replacing the ISS (end scheduled in 2020) with a permanent base on the Moon sounds more plausible (Moon Village).
The first several waves will need to be the absolute best of us to have a chance of establishing a permanent settlement.
It actually looks to be closer to 2030: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#En...
2030 would give us more time to prepare an ambitious next step.
Knew it was a scam and did it anyway?
These are the people that need to have conversations with economists.
I got my son a telescope last year and we have been watching the moon whenever we get a chance. It is another world.
The Moon is much easier, it's just a rock and some delta-V.
It is not really sufficient for capture braking / parachute landings with any efficiency or safety.
Also, mars takes more delta v than the moon.
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Even Gerard 't Hooft, famous physics nobel prize winner and one of the ambassadors of Mars One said the schedule and budget were off by a factor of 10. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/23/mars-one-pla...