> Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth.
> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.
Poor understanding of physics are exemplified everywhere these days. It's tiring seeing so many armchair experts trying to take over the discourse with their incessant posturing.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
Those that are used to hiking the Himalayas could live on Mars with a little extra pressurization and some basic filtering. It doesn't seem that unfeasible.
That’s one of the things I’m curious about regarding the Curiousity rover’s RTG. How efficient is convection cooling in order to maintain the thermal gradient to generate electricity?
It has radiator fins, so I assume that’s the main form of cooling over radiation; but with such a thin atmosphere I wouldn’t have that it could take away that much heat.
Many deep space probes in vacuum have RTG's as well (like Voyager), and they can radiate the heat just fine. Also, over time of course the amount of power and heat they generate lessens.
help me wrap my head around that. If you’re in -40 in a low pressure atmosphere, it doesn’t cool you down faster because there’s less mass for your heat to transfer to?
Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?
Heat transfer happens by heat conduction and heat radiation, so even in a vacuum you will radiate heat away in the form of infrared photons, at least if the vacuum is not at a higher temperature. Heat radiation is however a less efficient process then heat transfer in a sufficiently dense environment. That is also an issue for spacecrafts, they need rather large radiators to radiate away excess heat into space.
You lose/gain heat through conduction and radiation. Eliminating/reducing the atmosphere or making it out of something less conductive or lower specific heat reduces the speed at which the vibrating molecules of your body transfer kinetic energy to or gain energy from the molecules of the surrounding environment.
The vast majority of heating/cooling that people experience in their day to day lives is done through conduction from the earth's atmosphere so in most situations you'd lose heat more slowly on Mars even if it is colder. It's kind of like the difference between being in cold air and cold water.
You lose out on convection and your heat loss has to be almost entirely through black body radiation instead. Astronauts have to work harder to stay cool than to stay warm, especially if the sun is shining on them.
One of the major sources of headaches for designing satellites is thermal management.
In fact, during some weeks of the year the Space Shuttle could not visit the International Space Station because at the ISS inclination, the Shuttle would have spent too much time in the sun. The ISS, Space Shuttle, and other satellites have large radiators to cool them down.
That is correct, things don't cool down easily in a vacuum. Overheating is a problem on space vehicles. Thermal drinking bottles use a vacuum layer to keep heat in.
The way I see it, there are two goals to human space travels.
The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.
The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
I honestly think that both of those are weak reasons.
The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own time scale. The second is just not compelling; space exploration is hardly the only endeavor that produces spinoff technology, and it's far from certain that it's the best or most productive way to do so.
There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
I honestly think the first one mentioned will become a "primary" reason as soon as the first largish "came from the direction of the sun" doomsday asteroid slams into us, and makes us rethink some of our priorities.
Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".
You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).
Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.
I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" - and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.
We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.
> There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
Individuals may think like that, but I think you're downplaying the Space Race. There was immense fear of the Soviet space domination, it was seen as an existential threat. If there could be only one goal driving us to those furthest horizons, it'd have to be conflict.
From the same speech as your quote:
"For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding:
JFK to Congress
"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth"
To get a self-sustaining Mars base working and to be able to leave the base and go back to Earth would require some real nifty engineering and automation. Stuff that would transfrom the Earth before lift-off.
Think about it. To get off of Mars, you have two options really. Land the take-off rocket with the fuel in it or land it dry and then fuel it up. Landing a take-off rocket wet is super hard, especially on what amounts to virgin regolith. Fueling up the rocket means you make the fuel on the surface and transport it to the rocket. Also, super hard.
Supposing that you did manage to find a good pocket of the raw materials that you need for the fuel, you still have to have astronauts do that mining, or you need to invent reliable robots to do that for you. Such robots would completely transform the mining and resource extraction economy of the Earth. Then you need to get that fuel to the rocket somehow. Again, either you use astronauts or you invent a hell of a self-driving tanker, which, again, transforms the lives of all humans on Earth. There is the other issues of building the landing pad, the job site for mining extraction, the issues when the fuel spill everywhere with Earth 8 lightminutes away, the scientific issues of just mining willy-nilly into the regolith, the static electricity issues of super dry and thin air, yadda yadda yadda. Even with astronauts on Mars directing all the chaos, it's a nightmare of logistics and black-swan events to refuel a rocket.
Like, comparing the Apollo missions to the eventual Ares missions is foolhardy. The tech we got out of going to the moon is going to seem like brightly colored wood blocks compared to the F-35 that is the tech the Mars missions require.
Being able to sustain human life with minimal inputs is a ridiculously useful trick if we can pull it off. It could be an answer to environmental threats. learning how to survive on Mars could teach us how to live on earth.
I can get behind that, but really we ought to colonize Antarctica first (as in, with a self-sustaining colony). It's a much easier target and still presents significant challenges.
Sadly what I know of humanity tells me that we won't do that without ruining it to drill for resources like oil, so I say let's leave at least one place untouched back here on earth until we have a backup plan somewhere.
There isn't the forcing function of being really hard to get there, so it doesn't interest people to build self contained habitations on earth. It was tried a few times without much success, for example with the Biosphere project.
The author is listing facts about Mars that are pretty basic and well-known in the first two paragraphs and proceeds to talk in generalized terms about how we will never get around these obstacles. These are all basic facts about Mars that the engineers working on these problems know very well. Simply listing these facts as proof that colonizing Mars will never work seems overly pessimistic.
Well, I agree there is not that much merit in the article for pointing out the obvious, but if the emperor has no clothes someone needs to say it.
The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.
PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.
If you watch the opening credits of The Expanse, you'll see the moon is almost entirely populated, yet if you look closely at the Earth shot, Tibet is basically dark.
Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!
Or we could colonize the southern Pacific ocean. It's virtually empty of human habitation and although a permanent colony will be difficult to establish, it's still orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than Mars.
Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our environmental issues here on Earth into an even bleaker perspective.
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
Getting, say, a million people to escape velocity would not be significant in terms of greenhouse emissions, compared to the ~8 trillion revenue passenger kilometres flown annually (which itself is a tiny fraction of global emissions).
Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
Excellent points. I want to follow up with some back-of-the-envelope math on this later, if I have time. My intuition was that it takes a whole heck of a lot of fuel to get someone to even LEO velocity. Would love to see how that corresponds with air travel.
This is the true reason. Although, we should have the ideological goal of colonization, as a failsafe option to prevent extinction.
Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)
Not to be "that guy," but I think the real reason we'll never colonize Mars is simply that we're going to run out of time. Climate collapse and/or nuclear war will probably set in long before we have the technology or wherewithal to terraform a planet millions of miles away. We may be only a decade or two from severe environmental catastrophe, which makes the prospect of Mars colonization pretty far-fetched at best.
To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.
Robert Zubrin figured out a plausible plan to put a colony on Mars, yet the article fails to mention Zubrin and his Mars (Semi-)Direct plans.
Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.
However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.
"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.
Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.
These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.
Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.
As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.
So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.
>The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.
About Antarctica and colonization, yes, I agree it is not colonization, but then again it cannot be, since no-one can live permanently in Antarctica because of the treaties (ATS).
"Oil rig workers" or not, if people on Mars would live there until their old age and death, I'd call them colonists. If they are there on a 3 year rotation, then nope, not colonists.
(As a side note Antarctica would be the perfect place to learn about eventual self-sufficient space colonies in an environment which is a softer version of Mars, without complexities around airlocks, suits, oxygen and the omnipresent sand etc.)
Earth has limited and dwindling resources but Mars is still completely untapped. Then again I have no idea what could be so rare or useful to actually drive the colonization of Mars. I mean maybe something like that exists already, but I just don't have an idea.
Headline is speculative and unprovable since "never" is a very long time and there's no reason to think we are any good at predicting the far future.
But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.
Readit News
> The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface.
> Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it does on earth, so hypothermia due to exposure to -40 degree Martian air is not as big of a concern as it would be on Earth. Interesting points otherwise, though.
Please allow me to quote former vice president Dan Quayle...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
It has radiator fins, so I assume that’s the main form of cooling over radiation; but with such a thin atmosphere I wouldn’t have that it could take away that much heat.
Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?
The vast majority of heating/cooling that people experience in their day to day lives is done through conduction from the earth's atmosphere so in most situations you'd lose heat more slowly on Mars even if it is colder. It's kind of like the difference between being in cold air and cold water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_flask
In fact, during some weeks of the year the Space Shuttle could not visit the International Space Station because at the ISS inclination, the Shuttle would have spent too much time in the sun. The ISS, Space Shuttle, and other satellites have large radiators to cool them down.
Think about when it's cold, and when it's cold and windy.
Low pressure air is like "anti" wind, even less cold then no wind on earth.
Dead Comment
The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event.
The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new technology. Eg sure lower gravity will be an issue, until we figure out how to regulate gravity on a ship / base. That might seem far fetched but just looking at the tech invented to put human on the moon how many of those were far fetched beforehand ? Give people a challenge for tomorrow and watch them work at solving it.
There has only ever been one goal that has actually driven us to push our horizons further out into space, and I think it's the only one that really makes sense: We do it for the challenge and for the adventure.
As John F. Kennedy so famously put it, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."
Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".
You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).
Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.
I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" - and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.
We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.
Individuals may think like that, but I think you're downplaying the Space Race. There was immense fear of the Soviet space domination, it was seen as an existential threat. If there could be only one goal driving us to those furthest horizons, it'd have to be conflict.
From the same speech as your quote:
"For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding:
JFK to Congress
"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth"
The country or company ? Its lured by the competition and wanting to be the one winning the prize.
But as a society ? When the inevitable "why fund space travel / fundamental physics / ..." question is asked ? Side gains is where it's at.
Think about it. To get off of Mars, you have two options really. Land the take-off rocket with the fuel in it or land it dry and then fuel it up. Landing a take-off rocket wet is super hard, especially on what amounts to virgin regolith. Fueling up the rocket means you make the fuel on the surface and transport it to the rocket. Also, super hard.
Supposing that you did manage to find a good pocket of the raw materials that you need for the fuel, you still have to have astronauts do that mining, or you need to invent reliable robots to do that for you. Such robots would completely transform the mining and resource extraction economy of the Earth. Then you need to get that fuel to the rocket somehow. Again, either you use astronauts or you invent a hell of a self-driving tanker, which, again, transforms the lives of all humans on Earth. There is the other issues of building the landing pad, the job site for mining extraction, the issues when the fuel spill everywhere with Earth 8 lightminutes away, the scientific issues of just mining willy-nilly into the regolith, the static electricity issues of super dry and thin air, yadda yadda yadda. Even with astronauts on Mars directing all the chaos, it's a nightmare of logistics and black-swan events to refuel a rocket.
Like, comparing the Apollo missions to the eventual Ares missions is foolhardy. The tech we got out of going to the moon is going to seem like brightly colored wood blocks compared to the F-35 that is the tech the Mars missions require.
The carbon and oxygen needed can be extracted from the atmosphere; the rocket only needs to bring the hydrogen - just 1/12th of required fuel mass.
The engineers working on these problems will never solve them in a cost-effective manner. Never. A lot of new cool tech will come out of the space race, but never will (current versions of) humans live in a self-sustained Mars. And I'm not counting exporting scientific research and souvenir rocks as being self-sustainable.
PS: I'm not rejecting the idea that eventually big actors like states might compete for automated resource extraction and production of war commodities, nuke tests, etc. It's just human habitability that I question.
Before we try to colonize Mars, we should try colonizing Canada. It's warmer than Mars! It has air and water, so it should be easy! And yet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...
Even in a work of fiction we can't seem to make use of the entire Earth!
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)
To be clear, I don't think studying this is a waste of time. On the off chance that we get there, that'll be great (setting aside the concerns of this article of course). It just gives me a sense of a terminally ill person planning their retirement. Sorry to be the downer here.
Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.
However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.
"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.
Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.
These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.
Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.
As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.
So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Like the thousand people in Antartica right now? I just wouldn't call it colonization.
>The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.
Right on the money here. Save for space research, what could you possibly do on Mars that you couldn't do more cheaply and comfortably in the crowded Earth? Resource extraction only becomes cost-effective if its self-sufficient and automated enough, and which point human presence there would be more comparable to an oil rig than a colony.
"Oil rig workers" or not, if people on Mars would live there until their old age and death, I'd call them colonists. If they are there on a 3 year rotation, then nope, not colonists.
(As a side note Antarctica would be the perfect place to learn about eventual self-sufficient space colonies in an environment which is a softer version of Mars, without complexities around airlocks, suits, oxygen and the omnipresent sand etc.)
Earth has limited and dwindling resources but Mars is still completely untapped. Then again I have no idea what could be so rare or useful to actually drive the colonization of Mars. I mean maybe something like that exists already, but I just don't have an idea.
But otherwise, it's a good argument. It would be much easier to live underground, on the ocean, or in Antarctica, and if these aren't worth the investment, there is much less reason to think the obstacles to living on Mars are worth taking on.