[HN Gopher] NASA can now reliably produce a tree's worth of oxyg...
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NASA can now reliably produce a tree's worth of oxygen on Mars
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 226 points
Date : 2022-09-06 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (singularityhub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (singularityhub.com)
| aradox66 wrote:
| Technology is so unbelievably primitive compared to biology. They
| have to heat air to 800C to replicate photosynthesis! And they
| don't even get carbohydrates out of it.
|
| Makes sense, our tech is a couple billion years behind.
| btmiller wrote:
| Or rather the opposite! Trees haven't yet been able to survive
| on Mars, so we're advancing technology where biology has thus
| far failed.
| a257 wrote:
| As far as we know, there is no biology on Mars. It is
| entirely possible that people could bring life to Mars in the
| future to fulfill oxygen needs.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > Trees haven't yet been able to survive on Mars
|
| As far as I know, nobody tried
| danbruc wrote:
| Without liquid water in the upper few meters of the ground,
| the result is pretty predictable. I think there was some
| evidence of water at or close to the surface, but if I
| remember correctly only in salty solutions where the salts
| prevent the water from freezing at Mars temperatures. Maybe
| you could find some plant that can make use of that water
| but then the plant would still have to be able to control
| its temperature so that it does not freeze solid. I would
| not definitely rule it out, for that I know not enough
| about plants and Mars, but to me it seems at best barely
| possible. Which of course is still possible.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Why don't we just ask an expert? Mat D? /s
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Better volumetric and gravitmetric density than a tree though.
| [deleted]
| kzrdude wrote:
| We are only ~300 million years behind trees(!)
| vezuchyy wrote:
| It may be primitive, but advanced bio tech in real trees
| doesn't work there.
| antasvara wrote:
| That feels like a disingenuous comparison. From what I can tell
| there is no living organism that could successfully transport
| itself to Mars, establish itself, and begin releasing oxygen.
|
| Meanwhile,humans were able to solve that problem in a fraction
| of the time that evolution would take.
|
| It's fair to say that we're millions of years behind the curve
| when it comes to creating usable energy from sunlight, however.
| That's an indisputable fact.
| sifar wrote:
| >> Meanwhile,humans were able to solve that problem in a
| fraction of the time that evolution would take.
|
| One would say humans cannot solve it faster than evolution
| since humanity < evolution.
| antasvara wrote:
| I suppose the actual comparison being made is this machine
| versus a living organism. As of right now, this machine is
| more capable of producing oxygen on Mars than any organism
| that we're aware of.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Humanity [?] the products of evolution.
| sph wrote:
| The good thing is that it won't probably take us a couple
| billion years to catch up.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| One wonders, if we could manipulate biology like we manipulate
| machines, would we build a heaven or a hell?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Send a tree and see how it fairs... Totally different
| requirements.
| malikNF wrote:
| They built a device around as big as a golden retriever,
| shipped it to a planet 130 million kilo meters away, and that
| device is generating its own electricity and generating as much
| O2 as a tree.
|
| I don't know man, I think that's pretty advanced technology.
|
| We went from room sized transistors to nm sized ones in less
| than a century. No way we will need a billion years to catch
| up.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > They built a device around as big as a golden retriever,
| shipped it to a planet 130 million kilo meters away, and that
| device is generating its own electricity and generating as
| much O2 as a tree
|
| Which could be easily accomplished by specialized bacteria
| dispensed to that planet's atmosphere. Yeah. Technology is
| billions of years behind.
| antasvara wrote:
| I'm curious: do we currently have bacteria that could
| survive in the atmosphere of Mars? My understanding is that
| it would require controlled conditions and monitoring to
| make bacterial growth feasible under those conditions.
| lazide wrote:
| Conditions that support Liquid water is only transitory
| there. So you're generally correct.
|
| Most extremophiles we're aware of tend towards high temps
| or if low temps, in the context of extreme high salinity
| and water presence. Which don't line up with Mars much.
|
| We'd have to be managing the environment they grew in,
| which makes it hard.
|
| The underlying issue of course being energy gradients and
| biochemical availability of that energy. Life 'eats' to
| survive, but if the only energy gradients are feeble and
| biochemically hard to access, it's not a good environment
| for life as we know it.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| The difficult part about that would be undispensing the
| specialized bacteria once we figured out that it backfired
| and contaminated a whole planet.
| baruch wrote:
| One you send humans that you can't sterilize before
| flight you will inevitably introduce bacteria into the
| environment anyway, and you will not be preselecting them
| either.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| That's the point. Eventually we'll get to the point where
| we'll be able to mass manufacture at the molecular or
| atomic level. Until then the best we can do is coax
| living things into doing our bidding. But as you point
| out, it's not a solved problem. The point of the parent
| comment was that we're not there yet.
| blue_dragon wrote:
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Multiple decades of very slow progress in fusion, space
| travel -- and I dunno, almost everything else -- should be
| enough to make it clear that _Moore 's Law doesn't apply to
| every other technological endeavour_.
|
| There's no reason to assume exponential type improvements.
| That's not how the world works.
| jjulius wrote:
| Who said anything about Moore's Law up until this point?
| The person you responded to just said they see hope for the
| next _billion_ (anywhere within that window, at least)
| years based on the last century alone. That 's a pretty
| long amount of time to advance.
|
| Not sure why you needed to rip them apart for words that
| you put into their mouth.
| ascar wrote:
| Transistor progress has been especially astonishing, but if
| you just look at the progress in basically all areas of
| living in the last 200, 1000, 5000 years there is
| absolutely no reason we won't see incredible further
| improvements in the next century. They don't have to be
| exponential doubling every 18 months. Steady incremental
| improvements compound just fine over decades.
|
| I just don't see any of your opening statement being even
| close to correct given the context. There was even
| significant progress in space travel and fusion in the last
| 50 years (e.g. first reactors being net positive after
| startup and reusable rockets with commercial space
| flights).
| Retric wrote:
| The deeper point isn't to compare mores law to all new
| technology but rather to consider how long it takes to get
| close to some fundamental limit. Early engines had horrible
| efficiency but that rapidly increased over time up to a
| reasonable fraction of hypothetical limits.
|
| You see this all over the place, modern guns aren't
| multiple orders of magnitude improvements over guns built
| 100 years ago. But they are orders of magnitude better than
| the absolute earliest guns ever built.
|
| So, when looking at a prototype the question isn't can it
| be improved but by how much can it be improved.
| [deleted]
| skykooler wrote:
| Which is why Moore's Law was a thing for so long: early
| transistors were so many orders of magnitude off of
| fundamental limits that the improvements could keep up an
| exponential pace for a long while.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Moores law is still a thing, it's just that the "jumps"
| between progression along the curve are longer. It will
| eventually reach infinity, but that'll be awhile.
| psadri wrote:
| First we build AGI, then we unleash it on all these other
| problems.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no reason to assume exponential type improvements_
|
| Did we read the same article? This was a test. The full-
| scale version "would produce oxygen at a rate equivalent to
| several hundred trees" with close to an order of magnitude
| more efficiency "because a bigger machine can run at lower
| pressures, saving energy on compression." There are better
| reasons to expect exponential improvements than not.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Those are weird examples as they exist under other
| umbrellas. Energy and space exploration. I would argue that
| we have absolutely made exponential progress in both
| fields, and it's just perhaps not the exact type of
| progress you'd prefer. For example, solar would be under
| the energy umbrella so even if fusion hasn't (or won't) pan
| out our progress is still rapid.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Room sized transistors? Lol. Then how big were the computers
| that linked them together?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I love the use of a golden retriever as a unit of size. I
| have poodles personally, but they come in various sizes so
| it's a bit less clear.
| rzzzt wrote:
| It needs to be golden so that corrosion doesn't alter its
| dimensions.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The first transistor was about the size of a Raspberry Pi but
| I think your point still stands.
| gnu8 wrote:
| That might be an interesting project, configuring a
| Raspberry Pi to emulate a single transistor and then using
| them to build a computer.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Building something useful out of that would end up
| comically large.
|
| I should probably qualify my "first transistor"
| statement; the device I was referring to is the first
| prototype created at Bell Labs in 1947. The first
| transistor that someone could actually buy to build a
| circuit out of came out a year later and was only a
| little larger than today's through-hole mounted
| transistors. They did get used to build early
| minicomputers, before integrated circuits took over.
| purim wrote:
| We burn dinosaur juice to make engines that burn distilled
| dinosaur juice to push an object 1/20th of the engine fast
| enough to escape gravity. To deliver an oxygen making device
| that weighs roughly a quarter of the engine that has the output
| of 1 tree to Mars will take a dozen launches.
|
| There's no way this is scalable. Whatever innovation we produce
| here, has to be super light and super small enough to be
| economical.
|
| We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one that
| isn't medieval like the one we use and pride in.
|
| If there's an alien race that has discovered locomotion via
| warping the space around it (sort of like a bubble formed
| around an object under water allowing friction free movement)
| then our solution would be funny to them.
|
| "So you dig up this dinosaur juice, you then, _chuckles_ ,
| light it on fire to push a tiny payload on top of it to put
| stuff in space?"
|
| "Then your hope is to weaponize it so you can fight better wars
| and colonize other planets to dig rocks and ship it back home?"
|
| All of this must be amusing and depressing to an alien race
| that has mastered space travel and then some.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| I find this common assumption that non-Earth lifeforms will
| automagically have found ways to break the laws of physics
| curious. Given the age of universe, it's highly likely that
| most other lifeforms will have developed within a rounding
| error of us, on geological time scales.
|
| And as for ETs being peaceful zen wizards, the fundamental
| problem of resource scarcity would seem to be universally
| applicable. It's this resource scarcity that causes species
| which are good at competing to develop. So it seems likely
| that any species intelligent enough to become technologically
| advanced would have a history of belligerence similar to
| ours.
|
| Thinking aspirationally about what sort of species we should
| strive to be is great. But I find the belief that, across the
| universe, humans are specially anti-progress to be a little
| silly. The laws of physics are universal.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It's also pretty likely that any sufficiently belligerent
| species with access to technology at our level or greater
| will use that technology to destroy themselves in exactly
| those kind of resource conflicts, in which case the filter
| works in the direction opposite you claim here - only
| species capable of suppressing belligerence are able to
| make it to the stars.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| I find the framing "break the laws of physics" to be
| curious. Does that mean the Newtonian laws of physics,
| which are enough to launch rockets but not enough to create
| the GPS network? General relativity is enough to create the
| GPS network, but not travel faster than light or connect
| two points in space without the intervening distance or
| whatever.
|
| It's fallacious to presume that we -- or any other species
| -- will automagically find ways to beat the lightspeed
| barrier, but it's also hubris to presume that our current
| understanding is the most "correct" that it can be. Could
| there be some new sea change in our understanding of the
| world, that allows for things general relativity considers
| impossible or incoherent?
|
| My understanding of the "peaceful zen wizards" trope was
| that if you've got the technology to cross the unimaginably
| big [0] gulfs between stars, let alone the gulfs between
| _inhabited_ stars, you concomitantly no longer want for
| resources or territory in any way that civilizations of our
| Kardashev type [1] understand them. What 's the point of
| belligerence, culturally, [2] at that point? And if you do
| want territory and mining and extraction and whatever, why
| not use a combinatorial explosion of Von Neumann machines?
| The only reason to send _actual people_ would be to say
| hello to the locals and look around.
|
| [0] cf. Douglas Adams' intro to THGttG
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
|
| [2] I acknowledge that humans are genetically belligerent,
| but we can just choose not to be, especially in conditions
| of plenty. The fight is close, but culture ultimately beats
| genetics. I present, by way of example, the condom.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Something that's a rounding error on geological time scales
| is immense in the time scale of technological development.
|
| The development of life took a few billion years to get to
| where we are now, so if for some otherwise equivalent
| civilization that highly random process took 0.1% faster or
| slower, then that makes for multiple million years of
| difference in development.
|
| If we encounter another civilization, then it would be a
| wildly implausible coincidence if they happened to be close
| to us in technological level - say, just a thousand years
| or so; a more advanced civilization would be _much_ more
| advanced - and we can see just how much things change in
| just a few centuries of technological development.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We absolutely need a world changing type of locomotion one
| that isn 't medieval like the one we use and pride in_
|
| We had cryogenic rocket engines in the 60s [1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_rocket_engine
| klabb3 wrote:
| I guess liquid is better than gas but any propellant is
| quite limiting on large spacetime scales.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Let's consider the other options:
|
| Climbing a very good rope. I think this option is the
| _most_ medieval.
|
| Using a huge launcher brings to mind trebuchets.
|
| An electric plane can give you a higher platform but I'm
| skeptical of that getting fast enough to be the bulk of a
| launch.
|
| Antigravity magic? I guess that's not medieval, but I'd
| argue that magic is in some ways quasi-medieval.
|
| Rockets are likely the least medieval option.
| cercatrova wrote:
| We do not burn "dinosaur juice." Petroleum is basically all
| fossilized plant remains.
| oynqr wrote:
| It's a joke.
| oefnak wrote:
| We can create rocket fuel from water and solar power.
| narrator wrote:
| Let's say we could use some sort of wonder technology that
| ETs gave us to take something as big as a container ship and
| send it to Mars for cheap. Well, now you got the resources of
| earth supporting two planets and not just one. That's not an
| improvement. Might as well live underground instead.
| antasvara wrote:
| In theory, you would use Earth's resources to develop Mars
| to the point where it could produce resources, instead of
| just consuming them.
|
| The goal is to send just enough resources that settlers can
| then create more of the products they need using the
| resources present on Mars. If you can (for example) figure
| out how to cultivate Mars soil to make it hospitable to
| Earth plants, you could turn Mars into a net exporter of
| food.
|
| All of this is theoretical of course, but it's not
| implausible to assume that there's a "tipping point" past
| which inhabitants of Mars are self sufficient or can even
| export things to Earth.
| narrator wrote:
| How many millions of people do you need to be self
| sufficient for 3nm semiconductors on Mars? TSMC has
| 65,000 employees. ASML has 32,000 employees and 5000
| suppliers. I think at some point the Mars project would
| reach a point where you hit a population ceiling because
| too much stuff that couldn't be made on Mars would have
| to be imported and there aren't frequent enough launch
| windows or cargo capacity to do it.
| monocasa wrote:
| Because of that, I think it's more likely we'll build up
| an micro g manufacturing base. Manufacturing without
| super fund sites, and you can drop the finished goods in
| any gravity well that wants them, earth or mars.
| narrator wrote:
| Don't you think manufacturing semiconductors in deep
| space adds even more complexity on top of the already
| ridiculous complexity of doing it on Earth or Mars?
| ballenf wrote:
| And then the alien with a better knowledge of their own
| history and development will retort, "They are really no
| different than we were when we carried our food supplies
| around on our uppermost IR signaler organ. Given that they
| are almost asking the right quantum questions, they are
| probably within reach of that critical spatial dimension
| compression discovery that changed everything for us. I give
| them 2-3 more revolutions of Planet 9. Granted, based on our
| survey of other developing species, they do have a 26% chance
| of blowing themselves up in the process."
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Alternatively, it has to be manufactured on Mars with
| materials available there. That is much more tenable.
|
| By the way, hydrolox is not dinosaur juice. Methane would be
| but insufficient specific impulse is a problem.
| outworlder wrote:
| Clubs made out of animal bones were perfectly serviceable but
| look silly to us now.
|
| Who's to say that this advanced alien race didn't have the
| same pains (or worse!) when they started their space program?
|
| > There's no way this is scalable.
|
| There is - we need to stop shipping devices from Earth's
| gravity well.
| aeyes wrote:
| RP-1 is not the only type of rocket propellant currently
| used. Delta and Ariane for example use liquid hydrogen and
| you don't need to "dig up dinosaur" juice for that.
| foxyv wrote:
| But at the same time this conversion is happening in an
| immensely smaller volume. Also it doesn't require constant
| maintenance of living conditions. There are always tradeoffs in
| engineering AND nature. For instance, trees tend to have to
| spend tons of their energy in order to get taller. This is
| mostly because they have to compete with other plants for
| sunlight. This inefficiency leads to much more waste product
| (O2) being produced and tends to capture more fuel (CO2).
|
| Technology just optimizes for different things than nature.
| Otherwise the lander would have just carried a couple gallons
| of water and some algae.
| richardfey wrote:
| I wouldn't man any mission to Mars with no less than THREE fully
| built MOXIEs and replacement parts to fully rebuild at least SIX.
| And it would still be extremely risky, since everything would be
| stored in the same proximity.
| lakomen wrote:
| What I'll say to that is that we should focus on making our
| planet livable or preserving our planet before we try to colonize
| another.
|
| And since we can't seem to get even that right why bother with
| Mars?
| oehpr wrote:
| Imagine for a moment we all stop what we're doing, crack our
| knuckles, and then REALLY clean our planet up. Clear the oceans
| of plastics, the sky of co2, the lands of garbage, and our
| hearts of consumption.
|
| And then humanity gets wiped out by a rogue meteor. A rogue
| blackhole. A really bad solar flare. An object comes to our
| solar system and knocks us off our orbit. Our home is wiped
| clean in nuclear fire. Take your pick.
|
| We have all our eggs in earths basket. I love earth, lets get
| the hell out of here though.
| outworlder wrote:
| Why does it have to be an either/or proposition? We can and
| should do multiple things at once.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I agree that making our planet livable is certainly much more
| important and we are very bad at that. But I don't see that
| researching livability on Mars makes us less likely to succeed
| on Earth. On the contrary, researching Mars livability probably
| has some probability of producing breakthroughs that could help
| us overcome our problems here.
| naikrovek wrote:
| I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is
| misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the
| Earth's oxygen; most oxygen (50-80%) is created by phytoplankton
| in the ocean.
|
| Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet (once
| we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I suppose)
| is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you can give them
| a good environment to do so.
| valarauko wrote:
| I think it's a fair comparison if the point is to communicate
| to a lay audience. Most people have a reasonable mental model
| of how large a tree is, and the volume it occupies. Comparing
| the device to something like "the average daily output of 3000
| deciliters of equatorial surface seawater" (made up comparison)
| is a harder sell. We'd have to fall back to comparisons like "4
| football fields" or "2 school buses" worth of seawater - though
| it'd be an interesting comparison.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Fractions of what a human requires per day would be a more
| meaningful unit.
| valarauko wrote:
| I agree. The article says the device produces about 6 grams
| of Oxygen per hour, and some quick online searching
| suggests the average human needs about 840 grams per day.
| So 6 of these test devices should be sufficient for an
| average person.
| Angostura wrote:
| "1 leg's worth"
| Insanity wrote:
| Neither of those comparisons tell me how useful it is. I
| don't know how many trees nor how many school buses I breathe
| in a day.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I think it's a fair comparison if the point is to
| communicate to a lay audience.
|
| It's not a very good comparison to communicate to a lay
| audience. A _far, far_ better one would be in terms of
| "resting oxygen requirement of an average human."
| gouggoug wrote:
| The issue with the a "tree's worth of oxygen" is that in
| people's mind a tree is very big, so this comparison gives
| the impression of a very large amount of oxygen is being
| produced, when, in fact, barely any is produced at all.
|
| A better analogy would be anything that can be expressed in
| volumes. For this reason, "4 football stadiums" and "2 school
| buses" would actually be pretty good.
| elcomet wrote:
| I think a better measurement would be something like
| "Enough breathable air for x people" or something like
| that... At least it instantly gives the information of how
| many machine you need to sustain x people.
| phire wrote:
| Yes...
|
| I ran the calculations, 6 grams an hour seems to be about
| 15% of a single astronaut's oxygen consumption.
|
| The planned larger machine they talk about, about the
| size of a chest freezer producing 3 kilograms of oxygen
| an hour, should be enough for ~85 astronauts. Though I
| assume that's also needing to produce rocket oxidiser for
| the return trip.
| TomVDB wrote:
| How many giraffes is that?
| robofanatic wrote:
| a banana maybe? I mean does a tree produce 1 banana worth
| of oxygen?
| cal5k wrote:
| Hey now, don't be ridiculous...
|
| ...it's a rate, it would be bananas/hr.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| By mass or by volume? Or by economic value?
| leokennis wrote:
| No I meant by itself
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm looking at a tree right now. It is not very big.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| On the Internet, nobody knows you're 14 feet tall
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| It gives people a false sense of connection. How much oxygen
| does a small tree produce, over what period of time, what
| species of tree?
|
| It's like someone saying, "hey I knew your cousin Dan". Nice,
| I have no idea of their relationship but they're trying to
| "break the ice" so to speak with an irrelevant tidbit.
| CyanBird wrote:
| Well, that's the natural give and take when you need to
| address a global audience with unknown levels of background
| level knowledge on the topic, a tree is relatable and
| conveys a workable metric despite the values being unknown
| HPsquared wrote:
| Bonsai or giant sequoia?
| valarauko wrote:
| I feel the goal of the comparison is to give people a quick
| heuristic, rather than a detailed breakdown. The article
| does say the device produces 6 grams of oxygen per hour.
|
| In there any species of tree that would be intimately known
| to a global anglophone audience?
| irrational wrote:
| The trees in my backyard are 150+ feet tall and the trunks
| are 3+ feet in diameter. That is what I imagine when I
| imagine a tree.
| valarauko wrote:
| The article (not the headline) says "small tree" - how big
| do you imagine a "small tree"?
| irrational wrote:
| The smallest trees we have around here are about 40 feet
| tall with 1-1.5 foot trunks.
| gsk22 wrote:
| Surely there are trees smaller than that, unless they
| just pop out of the ground 40 feet tall?
| irrational wrote:
| I assume a small tree means a mature small tree, not a
| sapling.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Are you seriously insisting that you can't believe that
| "small" tree doesn't refer to a 40+ ft tall tree? Like to
| what end are you making this ridiculous point?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Double-negative confusion? Is the word 'like' required?
|
| Like maybe they aren't seriously insisting they can
| believe that "small" tree does refer to a 40+ft tree.
| notorandit wrote:
| And a tree's with of oxygen implies time. There are tree that
| live for 20, 50, 200 years...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I read it as meaning how much a (growing) tree produces.
|
| Trees as a collective do not increase or decrease oxygen to the
| atmosphere in this era.
| ISL wrote:
| The great joy of organisms is that you only need to ship a few
| and then they'll make more all on their own.
|
| The hard part is generating the oceans in which phytoplankton
| might live.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Oceans may be a problem, but smaller saline pools shouldn't
| be.
|
| Saline pools would have multiple benefits. Not only when kept
| warm could you use them to generate oxygen with
| phytoplankton, if you have to cut off power for some reason,
| they'll work as a great thermal heatsink, and they will not
| freeze as fast so they present less risk of piping damage.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Humidity and saltwater corrosion aren't great in a space
| habitat, though.
| lazide wrote:
| Also, humans who come along are not going to be sterile.
| Seawater is friendly to a lot of different organisms. Any
| open system is going to be full of goo pretty quick.
| wereHamster wrote:
| I would much rather see a comparison to how many people (or
| fractions of an average person) this current device could
| sustain.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Average person uses around 375 liters of STP oxygen/day. A
| liter of O2 is about 1.4 grams.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| So about a quarter of what a human needs.
| LelouBil wrote:
| That's pretty impressive, considering it's size !
| badrabbit wrote:
| Let's sending all this melting ice water to mars and put
| phytoplankton on it. Let it be killed by solar radiation on
| mars than by human pollution on earth.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I think the comparison to a "tree's worth of oxygen" is
| misleading, because trees overall produce very little of the
| Earth's oxygen
|
| They produce quite a lot of oxygen. The main issue is that they
| don't produce much surplus oxygen as they consume it too. And
| make no oxygen when the sun goes down.
|
| > Shipping tons of single-celled organisms to another planet
| (once we're sure it's devoid of life otherwise, a high bar, I
| suppose) is going to produce oxygen much more quickly if you
| can give them a good environment to do so.
|
| Yes. But then, these are living organisms that need to be cared
| for and fed. If there's a malfunction that wipes out your
| oxygen producing organisms, you have a big problem. You need to
| give them light, control the temperature and keep it in a very
| narrow range, provide them with water, nutrients, shield them
| from radiation, avoid contamination by other organisms, etc.
| Water and nutrients are not easy to come by in Mars, at least
| not yet. At this point, they aren't very different from a
| machine, it's just going to be a large bioreactor.
|
| At large scale, they are probably still the best bet. But it
| will take a while until we have the proper environment for
| them. The good news is that, once there's such an environment,
| we don't have to ship tons of them. Let them replicate.
|
| MOXIE is nice as it's a machine. You can store it away, bring
| more capacity online, etc. It can be added to both bases and
| vehicles (potentially suits(?)).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| My understanding is that it took ~450 million years for Oxygen
| to go from nothing to a significant portion of the atmosphere.
|
| Is there anyway we could do that in several orders of magnitude
| less on Mars?
|
| Even 1 million times faster is still several human life-times.
| dheera wrote:
| In all honesty I think at that time scale it may be more
| practical to create a lifeform that does not depend on oxygen
| or water, and only needs sunlight for energy. It may have to
| be silicon based, and I use the word "lifeform" in a very
| liberal sense.
| secondcoming wrote:
| 'A tree'... what's that in Olympic-Sized Swimming Pools?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| A tree's production capacity seems like a very natural unit of
| measurement for oxygen production to me?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Are you suggesting trees migrate?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| No?
| Tade0 wrote:
| Which tree specifically and what age?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If you have the capacity to use that information, you also
| have the capacity to understand the ballpark of what is
| meant by "a typical tree".
| pessimizer wrote:
| And if you don't, you don't, and a comparison to
| something that you understand would be better. Give me
| man-minutes.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Different trees produce oxygen at different rates, due to
| difference in size and difference in species. Also even
| knowing about one standard tree doesn't tell you how many
| people it would support, for example.
| wernercd wrote:
| This begs the question, with all the hoopla about CO2 on Earth...
| can this be used at scale to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere here?
| Or add a couple steps to create Sugar? This might be useful on
| mars but are we using anything similar here?
| politician wrote:
| Yes, but (1) the atmosphere is a lot thicker here, and (2) we
| would need to power it with green energy. The combination of 1
| and 2 means that we would have to build a lot of renewable
| energy infrastructure dedicated to doing this instead of using
| that infrastructure to replace fossil fuel generation.
|
| If it makes sense at all, I think that it would make more sense
| to deploy a solution like MOXIE-at-scale *after* we have
| replaced fossil fuel power generation. There's an argument that
| says that the planet itself could clean up the excess CO2
| reasonably quickly once we stop adding more.
| gpm wrote:
| Can it be used here? Yes, of course, though you need to
| concentrate the CO2 in the atmosphere first.
|
| Is it useful? Almost certainly not, just don't burn the
| hydrocarbons in the first place and use that nice concentrated
| source of carbon (and atmospheric O2), instead of burning oil
| and O2 to produce CO2, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere,
| and then unburning it.
|
| Will someone do it here? Probably, SpaceX is saying that they
| will as a way to develop the technology and claim they're
| carbon neutral.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I had absolutely no idea this was possible.
| eterevsky wrote:
| 6 to 8 g/hour which is roughly 1/5 of what a single human
| consumes (0.84 kg per day).
| mumumu wrote:
| That's better than I expected. MOXIE was a small proof of
| concept. If it scale linearly, a device with the mass of the
| rover could produce oxygen for a few people.
| strictnein wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > "The demonstration is only the beginning. A future version,
| about the size of a "small chest freezer," would produce
| oxygen at a rate equivalent to several hundred trees."
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Question, while these Moxie things seem like they would be
| obviously good assets for a long term self sufficient base, is
| there any reason we can't just burn candles like on nuclear subs?
| I would assume that any effort to start colonizing mars would
| have to get the transport so cheap that shipping an absurd
| quantity of these candles is probably much more economical than a
| MOXIE unit?
| outworlder wrote:
| So, keep shipping a finite resource versus producing in situ?
| What if there's disruption in the logistics chain?
|
| Even submarines, here on Earth, don't use the candles all the
| time. Why?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > So, keep shipping a finite resource versus producing in
| situ? What if there's disruption in the logistics chain?
|
| This point isn't obvious though. E.g. we'll likely be
| shipping them finite supplies of food. Supply chain
| disruption sucks but so is your MOXIE breaking down. MOXIE
| and 10 weeks of backup candles or 10,000 weeks of backup
| candles.
|
| It's not obvious to me which is the cheaper / safer option.
|
| We don't use them on subs all the time because subs don't
| have a lot of storage, and electrolysis is pretty easy to do.
| arcastroe wrote:
| Wouldn't burning candles consume oxygen rather than produce it?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Not normal candles
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_oxygen_generator
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "On the International Space Station, chemical oxygen
| generators are used as a backup supply. Each canister can
| produce enough oxygen for one crewmember for one day."
|
| That's a _lot_ of candles if you intend to use it as the
| primary supply for a multi-year multi-human mission like
| Mars will entail.
|
| "An explosion caused by one of these candles killed two
| Royal Navy sailors on HMS Tireless" probably gives NASA
| engineers the shivers, too.
| extrapickles wrote:
| They have also been the cause of fire[0] on the Mir space
| station. They make for a reasonable emergency oxygen
| supply (no working infrastructure required), but you
| don't want to use them regularly due to the fire risk
| they represent.
|
| [0]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/25-years-ago-fire-
| aboard-space-...
| dom96 wrote:
| This is amazing! Just scale this up, send a dozen or so of them
| to Mars for redundancy and you've got the first necessary life
| support system for a Mars colony. Really exciting stuff.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I built a CO2 filter for my house, a "bioreactor" full of algae
| fed by an air pump! It was a fun project, although by my napkin
| math, I'd need about 200 of them to offset the breathing my
| family does. Still a good proof of concept, and I haven't
| optimized the output at _all_.
|
| Anyway, my point is - why do we need exotic technologies to
| convert CO2 to oxygen? An algae bioreactor can do it using
| decades-old and well-understood techniques, plus you can build
| yummy algae cakes out of the waste product.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > well-understood techniques
|
| presumably not so well understood on the moon or mars?
| Suddenly you have more, and more complex, variables with
| sustaining life.
| knodi123 wrote:
| they ARE the techniques used on the space station.
|
| https://www.space.com/space-station-algae-experiment-
| fresh-a...
| ttfkam wrote:
| I don't think you've thought this all the way through.
|
| The algae didn't just convert the CO2 to O2, there needed to
| be an energy input for that.
|
| The Sun, which has far lower output once you're on Mars. What
| would be the O2 output of your algae farm then?
| knodi123 wrote:
| > The algae didn't just convert the CO2 to O2, there needed
| to be an energy input for that.
|
| Yeah, but from the article,
|
| "MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out
| dust, and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees
| Celsius. The heated air flows through a solid oxide
| electrolysis instrument that splits carbon dioxide--which
| makes up 96 percent of the Martian atmosphere--into oxygen
| and carbon monoxide."
|
| So it's not as if MOXIE works for free either.
|
| > mars gets less sun than earth
|
| Yeah, about 43% as much. You can address that with mirrors.
| outworlder wrote:
| Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control,
| salinity control, food sources, killing competing
| organisms, water intake and filtering, somehow shielding
| them from radiation (while still allowing sunlight!) and
| probably a billion things I haven't thought about yet.
| Mess it up and your organisms are all dead.
|
| MOXIE sounds better if all you want is oxygen (and CO).
| Give it power and off you go.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > Now we are talking about mirrors, temperature control,
| salinity control, food sources, killing competing
| organisms, water intake and filtering
|
| lol, this comes across as FUD. Mirrors aren't high
| technology. They have no moving parts and do not require
| batteries.
|
| Temperature control? Keep it the same temperature as your
| habitat, you should already have parts for that. Heck,
| keep it _in_ your habitat. But algae isn 't that
| sensitive, it can operate over a temperature range.
|
| Salinity control is absurd, who's putting salt in the
| water and why can't you just tell them to stop?
|
| Water intake and filtering? What? Dude it's essentially
| just water in a transparent container. There's no flowing
| or filtering.
|
| Killing competing organisms? Algae _is_ the competing
| organism, it can take care of itself, even if we brought
| competing organisms to Mars, which would be a silly thing
| to do.
|
| I mean, _maybe_ radiation is a factor, I don 't know, but
| all that other stuff is not challenging.
|
| And you're spending so much time inventing "challenges"
| for a simple algae farm, while just handwaving at a
| device that needs to compress the gas and heat it to 800
| degrees celsius?
|
| I'm not saying MOXIE won't work, or won't be useful in
| some circumstances. It's just that I don't understand why
| it's supposed to be simpler than tried-and-true
| alternatives.
| dieselgate wrote:
| I think a turning point in my perspective as an adult is being
| hesitant to change. Current generations laugh at people who were
| resistant to telephones or something - but I'd certainly not want
| to leave Earth and live on the moon or Mars.
|
| Edit: but cool technology I suppose
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Being able to do something like this is important because being
| able to refill on-site means you don't need to bring enough
| oxygen with you for a return trip, but we should remember this is
| nowhere near sufficient to start terraforming the Martian
| atmosphere. The biggest issue is still the density. It is well,
| well below the limit at which human bodily fluids boil at normal
| body temperature. Getting the molecular mix right might
| eventually be a concern many, many centuries from now, but first
| we just need more gas at all. It doesn't help that Mars
| continually loses more atmosphere due to solar wind because it
| doesn't have a magnetic field, too. I have no idea what we could
| realistically ever do about that, but solving that is a
| prerequisite to ever having permanent colonies that don't need to
| live underground forever.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I have no idea what we could realistically ever do about that
|
| There's some discussion about it here and there, but the most
| viable route seems to be just wrapping the planet in 5cm
| diameter superconducting wire:
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
|
| Doing this on Mars would be a monumental task, but the concept
| itself isn't completely ridiculous.
| elina123 wrote:
| cletus wrote:
| As always, whenever we have something like this people get
| overexcited for terraforming Mars. Or even living on Mars.
|
| First, terraforming. This is such a monumentally massive task
| that it is almost beyond comprehension. The distribution of
| molecular velocities in a fluid is a Boltzmann distribution. The
| average of that is the temperature. Some molecules go very fast.
| In a liquid this allows them to overcome surface tension and
| gravity and become a gas. This is evaporation in water. In an
| atmosphere, a certain portion of the molecules are fast enough to
| escape the atmosphere and to be lost to space. This is called the
| Jeans escape energy.
|
| The Earth's atmosphere loses about a million tons of gas every
| year. And that's fine because the atmosphere is many orders of
| magnitude more massive than this.
|
| Mars has lower atmosphere and no protective magnetosphere from
| solar winds. This means proportionally more mass loss. The
| atmosphere would have to be so massive that you can afford to
| lose possibly millions of tons of it every year.
|
| You can calculate how much energy that requires and it is
| _massive_.
|
| So this brings us to creating oxygen for habitats. This is a way
| more solvable problem. Mars still has all the suual negatives:
|
| 1. A weak atmosphere, which is actually worse than no atmosphere,
| because it covers all your stuff in dust. Some dust storms last
| months;
|
| 2. The ground is toxic (eg perchlorates). There'd be no growing
| food like in The martian;
|
| 3. Low gravity;
|
| 4. No protection from solar and cosmic radiation because of no
| magnetosphere and (almost) no atmosphere.
|
| So you can calculate the energy cost per gram of oxygen this
| produces and work out how much you'd need to create for whatever
| use (eg breatheable air, making water, making rocket fuel) and
| then work out how you'd get that energy. Solar is the likely
| candidate. I think you'll find the required footprint is
| _massive_.
|
| Oh and cosmic radiation is important for life on Earth. Why?
| Cosmic rays are constantly hitting nitrogen in the atmosphere. At
| a predictable rate, some of these nitrogen atoms (7 protons, 7
| neutrons) such that a proton becomes a neutron. 6 protons and 8
| neutrons is Carbon-14. That's literally how we do carbon dating
| (because C14 is radioactive).
| bamboozled wrote:
| At the rate we're going, we'll need these on Earth soon :(
| KronisLV wrote:
| > At the rate we're going, we'll need these on Earth soon :(
|
| Climate changes and dangerous weather events aside, I don't
| think that things are quite as dire, in regards to breathable
| air. Well, at least outside of certain metropolitan areas in
| certain countries.
|
| That said, the fact that we even have the technology to do this
| is good - if we ever actually needed to utilize it after the
| collapse of too many ecosystems, at least we'd have the option
| to try scaling it up, provided that the powers that be would
| deem it "financially viable".
| Bakary wrote:
| Are there any other websites similar to this? Aggregators of non-
| sensationalized significant science news
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| https://physurls.com/
| Bakary wrote:
| Thanks. You've just altered my life for the better.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Cool stuff:
|
| > "MOXIE works its magic by sucking in air, filtering out dust,
| and compressing and heating the gases to 800 degrees Celsius. The
| heated air flows through a solid oxide electrolysis instrument
| that splits carbon dioxide--which makes up 96 percent of the
| Martian atmosphere--into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The machine
| then separates out the oxygen and expels the carbon monoxide,
| alongside other gases, as exhaust."
|
| The real necessity is to make methane, assuming you want to
| launch rockets from the Martian surface. The presence of ice on
| Mars in some regions means this might be plausible: dig up
| ice/dirt, warm to generate water, split water, collect H2, mix
| with carbon monoxide to make syngas, pass over catalyst to
| generate CH4.
| skykooler wrote:
| You can actually run a rocket engine on carbon monoxide and
| oxygen, no hydrogen needed:
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910014990
|
| The downside is relatively low Isp, so you need a much larger
| rocket to get to orbit.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| My thought here is surely it could be sufficient for Martian
| applications. In reality, rockets off Mars initially will be
| to return humans and Martian samples.
|
| So such a rocket would be convenient if sourcing Hydrogen
| proves to be very difficult.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Long term we'd want to manufacture methane there, in the
| meantime people have drafted missions that just bring extra
| hydrogen to Mars and combine it with carbon on-site.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Methane is useless as a fuel without oxygen.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The carbon monoxide is possibly more valuable than the oxygen.
|
| It's a good feedstock for making hydrocarbons and petrochemicals
| and also as good a reducing agent as hydrogen for making metals.
| In fact you could use the CO to make, say, iron, producing CO2
| which gets cycled back into the above reactor.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Even better, Carbon Monoxide can be used as a rocket fuel.
| Therefore MOXIE can completely generate propellant.
|
| CO as rocket fuel isn't as effective as Hydrogen or Methane,
| but for the lower gravity of Mars it can still be useful for
| Mars-Mars transport or even returning to orbit.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > to make, say, iron
|
| ? but iron is an element?
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| He's talking about how elemental iron on earth binds to
| oxygen and that carbon monoxide could be used to reduce this
| but I have no clue wether martian metals are oxydised or not.
| brohee wrote:
| Where do you think Mars red color come from?
|
| https://www.space.com/16999-mars-red-planet.html
| wongarsu wrote:
| We think Mars had plenty of oxygen in the past, but because
| it's a smaller planet the molten core solidified. Without
| molten core no magnetic field, and without magnetic field
| most of the atmosphere was stripped away due to solar
| radiation, leaving only some heavy CO2 behind.
|
| With that in mind, any metal ores had plenty of time to
| oxidize just like on earth. But metal from asteroids that
| impacted over the last two billion years or so should be
| unoxidized.
| [deleted]
| im3w1l wrote:
| He means that you use carbon monoxide and iron-compound-rich
| mars dust to get elemental iron and carbon dioxide.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This is how a blast furnace works
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_furnace
|
| since it partially burns coke to make CO which reduces FeO
| to Fe producing CO2. An alternate approach is to reduce FeO
| with hydrogen producing H2O. Either way this is likely to
| be a circular process in a space economy since volatiles
| like H2O and CO2 are precious.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Carbon monoxide helps reduce iron oxide to iron [1]
|
| [1] https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Inorganic_Chemist
| ry/...
| [deleted]
| netsharc wrote:
| Factorio should make a DLC...
| TheMerovingian wrote:
| Mods... lots of mods...
| root_axis wrote:
| You might enjoy the popular "Space Exploration" mod.
| cheschire wrote:
| They are making a DLC, and part of the team they onboarded
| for it made the Space Exploration mod.
|
| https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-365
|
| https://www.patreon.com/posts/im-factorio-now-47218319
|
| https://mods.factorio.com/user/Earendel
| hbossy wrote:
| Various navies have been doing this for decades but it's all
| classified submarine technology.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Serious question: Why are we so focused on Mars? We haven't even
| made it back to the Moon once. We haven't built a completely self
| contained, perpetually self reliant colony in some place like
| Death Valley or the Arctic? Wouldn't experimenting with things
| give us a lot of learnings when we have increased issue that
| would come from being on Mars?
| swarnie wrote:
| Timeframe, this planet is dead.
|
| Mars is the only next best option if you have 100bn and a
| rocket company kicking around.
| bumby wrote:
| It's would be orders of magnitude easier to make this "dead"
| planet more hospitable than to do the equivalent to Mars.
| dijit wrote:
| this is the conclusion I keep coming to also; anything we
| develop that makes mars habitable would do so infinitely
| more effectively and easily here on earth.
|
| I guess that's not sexy
|
| but there is a part of me that looks on this planet with
| fresh eyes when I learn more about the universe. What we
| have is astonishingly beautiful and we will miss it
| terribly if leaving became the only option.
|
| So logically, emotionally, we shouldn't be looking at mars
| as longingly as we do.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _anything we develop that makes mars habitable would do
| so infinitely more effectively and easily here on earth_
|
| This experiment turns CO2 into oxygen and expels CO. How
| is that "infinitely more effective and eas[y] here on
| Earth"?
| dijit wrote:
| Because we don't have to ship the equipment to another
| celestial body where it cannot be maintained or debugged?
|
| If you're suggesting that it has no use on earth then...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_a
| tmo...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you're suggesting that it has no use on earth_
|
| Mars' atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide with most of the
| remainder being inert gases [1]. That not only means this
| reaction yields a meaningful amount of oxygen per
| operating cycle [2], it also means you aren't
| superheating corrosive gases. This is technology that has
| no use on Earth. It's tremendously useful on Mars.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
|
| [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abp8636
| dijit wrote:
| From my perspective anything we do to make mars habitable
| can make earth habitable.
|
| If you're telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be
| captured or reused: then that is likely also true of
| mars.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _anything we do to make mars habitable can make earth
| habitable_
|
| This is fundamentally false for the device this article
| highlights. Different chemistries.
|
| > _you're telling me that a corrosive byproduct cannot be
| captured or reused: then that is likely also true of
| mars_
|
| It's not. There isn't oxygen. Superheating 95% CO2 with
| inert gases and running it over a catalyst in a device
| that can do about sixty operating cycles makes sense.
| Superheating a 20% oxygen gas mix [1] is immediately
| problematic for most metals; doing it to convert the
| 0.04% CO2 to oxygen makes no sense. (While pumping a
| bunch of CO into the atmosphere [2].)
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
|
| [2] https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/air-
| quality/carbon-mono...
| [deleted]
| ballenf wrote:
| We should look at it about as longingly as as an offsite
| backup for critical data. If you only have one habitable
| planet, you have none.
|
| There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It
| just becomes prudent at some point after becoming
| possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to
| that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that
| question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost
| to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going
| toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on
| world total economic activity.
|
| There's probably more economic activity on discussions
| about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
| swarnie wrote:
| I'll text that to my Pakistani mate, presumably he can get
| SMS underwater
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Mars is more dead than earth will become in the next
| centuries. And even if they were in the same state, earth
| would still be the better candidate for fixing up, simply
| because it's in the habitable zone. And this all ignores the
| fact that we won't be able to bring a significant amount of
| humans away from earth, ever. Even transporting a village-
| amount of people will be still absurd expensive in the next
| decades.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I don't know if you've taken a look at Mars yet, but it's
| already dead. It'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a
| dead planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from
| dying.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 'll be quite a trick to be able to animate a dead
| planet to life if one can't keep a live planet from dying_
|
| Common refrain is about the folly of trying to fix human
| problems with technology. Earth is a human problem. We can
| fix it. But the politics are difficult. Mars is a
| technology problem. Our species is better at the latter
| than the former. In any case, the aims are far from
| competitive.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| Perhaps. The problem of course is that as soon as there's
| a human on Mars... it becomes a human problem too.
| There's the dynamics between the humans there. The
| dynamics between the humans there & here. The dynamics
| between the people left here supporting the humans there.
|
| Unless the expectation is that humans are going to evolve
| into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the moment
| they step foot on Mars... it seems like you're going to
| have a situation where everything is super tense all the
| time due to every little thing being both life & death
| and utterly existential, and then you get to mix normal
| human behavior into the mix. Such a common refrain
| strikes me as perhaps the most extreme form of myopia to
| consider Mars is anything but a pile of human problems
| the literal instant after the first major success of the
| technological solutions occurs.
|
| :shrug:
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Unless the expectation is that humans are going to
| evolve into some blend of hyper-pragmatic altruists the
| moment they step foot on Mars_
|
| Settler sociology is different. People who self select
| for that risk mode are different. The proximity of
| mortality is clearer; that influences culture. Much of
| modern socioeconomics involves compassionately recreating
| those conditions. On Mars, you get that for free.
| jsharf wrote:
| Yeah but it has the advantage of everything being 100%
| sustainable from the beginning. All water and oxygen will
| need to be recycled, etc.
| clhodapp wrote:
| The thing I don't get is: I have to imagine that no matter
| how badly we screw up Earth, any technologies that we build
| to allow us to survive on Mars could just as well be used to
| make Earth "livable" again for less cost. Worst-case, it's
| pretty much the same thing without a rocket launch.
|
| I mean I do get the idea of defense against a cataclysmic
| event like an asteroid strike or wide-scale nuclear war
| but... That seems to be the only realistic reason to want to
| colonize Mars.
| outworlder wrote:
| > no matter how badly we screw up Earth,
|
| Really? Our weather can potentially get incredibly violent
| and completely obliterate any structure we can conceivably
| make. There's a limit on how badly we can mess up.
|
| I think we should be focusing on establishing a space
| industry (or moon bases) before we even think about mars.
| And at that point, unless it's for hiking, we might find
| that we don't need planets anymore.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| Escaping to Mars is just living in caves with extra steps.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The easy answer is because Mars has all the mindshare. Just as
| the USSR always had their ambitions of a Venus colony, the US
| always had ambitions of a Mars colony, which is reflected in
| popular culture.
|
| The other reason is that humans closer to Mars would be
| scientifically useful. We don't have that many open questions
| about the moon. We had a couple manned moon missions doing lots
| of science, and with the moon being only a lightsecond away,
| you can drive rovers almost like RC cars. Mars is many
| lightminutes away, making rovers complex, costly and slow.
| Opportunity took 15 years to drive 45km. Manned lunar rovers
| have driven roughly twice that distance over just two years
| (Apollo 15/16/17). The amount of science we could do with boots
| on the ground would be incredibly valuable.
| ccozan wrote:
| Actually yes, I am more excited with Venus. Good pressure,nice
| temperature, all kinds of gases in the atmosphere, metal is
| missing, but this could be sent from Earth.
|
| We get floating cities!
| outworlder wrote:
| Yikes. How are we supposed to construct the floating cities?
| Mining Venus is out of the question with non sci-fi tech,
| even if all we wanted was to make, say, concrete.
|
| If something happens to the floating cities, the "fall" would
| be a horrendous fate.
|
| Temperature isn't "nice", would still be around 160F high up.
|
| Importing materials... at that point why not just make space
| stations?
|
| No water.
| kardos wrote:
| The energy cost of air conditioning everything down by 450
| degrees is going to be a bit of an obstacle
| elihu wrote:
| Not in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and
| atmospheric densities are close to Earth-normal.
|
| I think living in zeppelin cities would be logistically
| difficult for other reasons, but as long as you don't need
| to go down to the surface you don't need extreme cooling
| systems.
|
| If you did want people to be able to live on the surface it
| is kind of an interesting question how you'd manage it.
| Presumably there'd be ample wind energy available if you
| can just build a wind turbine that doesn't melt in that
| environment.
|
| Either way I'd rather go to Mars.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Wouldn 't experimenting with things give us a lot of
| learnings when we have increased issue that would come from
| being on Mars?_
|
| You can't get to the Moon by climbing successfully higher
| trees. This experiment might as well be Exhibit A. Mars has an
| atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This device would be useless in
| Death Valley or on the Moon. There is also a realistic chance
| of establishing an industrial base on Mars in a way that's more
| challenging on the Moon and worthless in Death Valley.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sorry to pile on, but "we", as a civilization, are _extremely_
| unfocused on travelling to Mars.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > We haven't even made it back to the Moon once.
|
| you mean other than the 6 times we landed a crew there ?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't think we need to split hairs here, the last manned
| moon mission was 50 years ago. A manned mission haven't been
| back a single time since.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But we are planning on going back to the Moon before we
| send humans to Mars. We haven't neglected the Moon for
| Mars, we just haven't done any human spaceflight beyond low
| earth orbit for the past 50 years.
| renewiltord wrote:
| We'll be back there in three years.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| *unless it gets cancelled again
|
| Constellation was supposed to be back to the moon 2 years
| ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'd call that more of a design review than a cancelation.
| Obama tried to cancel the Constellation program, but
| because it provides a lot of jobs it was un-canceled and
| resurrected as the Artemis program. At that opportunity
| some changes were made: the Orion capsule got carried
| over, but the Ares V was downscaled to the SLS, but uses
| the same basic design; the lunar gateway was added and
| the landers were turned into a contract more like
| Commercial Resupply. But at it's core it's still the same
| "let's get to the moon on spare shuttle parts" concept,
| with many contracts simply carried over.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >I'd call that more of a design review than a
| cancelation.
|
| ...you absolutely must work in HR. Or for a transport
| company.
| smm11 wrote:
| We couldn't even stay in our own houses a week or two early in
| Covid days. There's absolutely zero chance more than four or
| five people can be on a rocket ship long enough to get
| somewhere and do something.
|
| Numerous TV shows have proven that to be true.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I think it's a dream that's basically held over from the days
| when technology used to solve problems and we imagined using it
| to advance humanity.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually
| self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the
| Arctic?
|
| McMurdo Station [1] in the Antarctic is generally self-
| reliant/self-contained. Regular shipments of things like
| diesel, of course, but it also sees a sometimes surprisingly
| large residency (Wikipedia points out it can support around
| 1200 people at times) for what people generally consider a
| "small" science installation, and it has been in perpetual,
| year-round operation for decades.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station
| rmah wrote:
| McMurdo is not at all self-reliant. Everything from food to
| fuel, from clothing to electronics, from tools to
| entertainment comes from outside. It is the exact opposite of
| self-reliant, it is completely dependent on the outside
| world.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It's always going to be a semantics battle over details of
| how often those shipments occur. We aren't going to build a
| moon base or Mars base without some expectation of regular
| shipments _either_. We aren 't going to string them along
| without at least some basic lifelines in place. "100%"
| "pure" self-reliance of a "colony" has never happened in
| the history of humanity and likely never will. We're too
| social of a species to do that.
|
| McMurdo is about as self-reliant as we might reasonably
| expect any moon base or Mars base to be in the short term.
| The details of shipping schedules among the closest on this
| planet to those thrust upon us by the economics of orbital
| mechanics in space projects.
|
| It's absolutely not _perfect_ self-reliance. It 's still
| more self-reliance as an example than we are likely to find
| elsewhere on the planet and "good enough" for complaints
| that we aren't "ready" for space colonies because we
| haven't done enough of the homework. We've collectively
| done at least _some_ of the homework.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It looks like they get annual shipments. That requirement
| seems like it would be a show-stopper for Mars, right? I
| mean we can queue up shipments so that they get a
| constant yearly train, but there will be times where the
| trajectories to Mars aren't very favorable I think...
|
| McMurdo is useful at least as a science mission, in the
| sense that it studies a part of the planet that humans
| live on. There is basically an infinite number of empty,
| dead rocks out there in space -- we shouldn't waste
| research focus on this particularly large one that
| happens to be nearby.
| clhodapp wrote:
| I think the question is: would McMurdo (or the space
| colony) find a way to survive if severed from the rest of
| humanity?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| What's the threat model?
|
| For McMurdo: is there a situation where neither the US
| nor New Zealand (partners, run the next nearest Antarctic
| base and technically "control" the land McMurdo is on
| through wild politics and loopholes in political
| treaties) can send supplies?
|
| It's an interesting exercise, certainly, but the kinds of
| doomsday scenarios where that is likely to occur,
| humanity as a whole _may_ have much larger concerns than
| if the people stranded at McMurdo might survive.
|
| Planning a space base certainly has a much longer list of
| not even quite doomsday scenarios to consider where
| contact/supplies/cargo runs are all the more infeasible.
| You can't account for _all_ possible scenarios, but what
| are the threat models worth concerning about when all of
| the nations with spaceflight capabilities and all of the
| private corporations now with spaceflight can 't and/or
| won't help out if humans are stranded on a base in space
| without possible contact? What are the cases where
| problems on Earth dwarf any humanitarian missions to
| space? I'm sure there are such threat models. I certainly
| don't know enough about them to talk to them to any
| detail. It's a bunch of entangled, interesting questions.
| Preparing for those scenarios _may not_ necessarily
| require, a priori, expecting a base to survive with
| _absolutely zero_ contact from the rest of humanity for
| extended periods of time. We _may_ be able to assume a
| baseline of contact and know that breaks from that
| baseline risks the lives of people. I don 't know. What's
| the threat model?
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > It's an interesting exercise, certainly, but the kinds
| of doomsday scenarios where that is likely to occur,
| humanity as a whole may have much larger concerns than if
| the people stranded at McMurdo might survive.
|
| it's not a doomsday scenario, it's just what it means to
| be a colony. if it can't keep itself alive it's not a
| colony, it's an expedition.
|
| obviously people are always moving around and moving
| stuff around, but a colony that can't produce any of the
| necessities of life just isn't a colony.
| [deleted]
| pasquinelli wrote:
| it produces enough food for the people there with surplus for
| disruptions to food production? because that's a basic part
| of what i think of as colonization.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The Mars ambition, when it works, has a future. It is possible
| with long time spans to make Mars a livable planet with a
| sizable civilization.
|
| The Moon isn't quite so favorable for this, the end result
| wouldn't be as nice and would be more because it would be
| useful than desirable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think NASA is all that focused on a Mars colony.
|
| The general public has some interest because Elon Musk is
| "good" at twitter and advertising, but not a ton of interest.
|
| I'm not sure why Musk is focused on Mars, I think you need to
| do a ton of drugs to get into his head. Or it might just be
| that he needs a big picture goal to help motivate SpaceX.
|
| Mars is not a good target for colonization. It is just an
| inhospitable rock. A big pointless gravity well. Any ship
| capable of bringing people to Mars would be infinitely more
| habitable than Mars itself. Plus the view is better, and you
| can go fly to somewhere more interesting like the Asteroid
| belt.
| elihu wrote:
| > Any ship capable of bringing people to Mars would be
| infinitely more habitable than Mars itself.
|
| A ship only has the mass it brings with it. On Mars you have
| an atmosphere and mineral resources, from which you can make
| building materials and rocket fuel.
|
| The asteroid belts are probably worth visiting too, but I can
| understand wanting to go to Mars. It's probably the most
| Earth-like environment in the solar system excepting the
| Earth itself.
| rmah wrote:
| It is not possible for any modern technological society to be
| "perpetually self reliant" with a population of less than a few
| hundred million people. And that's with access to a planet's
| worth of resources. Hell, it wasn't even possible to have a
| bronze-age civilization without international trade. One of the
| reasons the transition to iron/steel based civilizations was so
| widespread was that there's a lot of iron ore and it's spread
| out all over the place.
|
| It turns out that resources are not evenly distributed. There
| are only a handful of locations where it is economically
| feasible to gather or mine some elements. And until we have
| techno-magic replicators that can turn energy into matter, this
| problem will remain.
|
| No colony 100's of thousands of people is going to be self-
| sustaining on Mars. It's simply not possible. They will always
| be dependent on Earth.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| I think it's mainly that Mars has an atmosphere, which helps
| shield it from radiation and asteroids, regulates the
| temperature, and creates weather like wind and even carbon-
| dioxide snow. The Moon basically doesn't have an atmosphere,
| which makes it a much harsher place to survive.
|
| Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night
| cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be
| very important to a long-term human colony.
| [deleted]
| bnralt wrote:
| > We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually
| self reliant colony in some place like Death Valley or the
| Arctic?
|
| Or even just the suburbs. Being able to simply manufacture on
| demand a self-contained and functioning society is _extremely_
| hard, even if we're trying to do it in pleasant environment
| where we don't have to deal with almost any environmental
| hazards. If we were able to do it successfully, allowing people
| to just sign up and have the government create a super-
| productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted to in the country
| would be a huge game changer.
|
| But Mars colonies are probably so far off that a lot of the
| difficulties are easy to ignore. NASA seems to do something
| similar to what a lot of tech companies do, where they tease
| tech seems to be just around the corner, but which they know
| actual implementation is very far away (remember Amazon drone
| delivery?).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _allowing people to just sign up and have the government
| create a super-productive "Scienceville" wherever it wanted
| to in the country would be a huge game changer_
|
| It wouldn't be super productive if it were self contained.
| Integrated economies outperform hermit kingdoms.
| bnralt wrote:
| Right, which is why I said it would be _extremely_
| difficult to do. Consider this: any semi-functional Mars
| colony is going to have to spend a considerable amount of
| resources just battling the environment, dealing with the
| extreme lack of raw materials, and dealing with any
| specialized materials or equipment being months/years away
| and costing an exorbitant amount of money just to ship it
| over. Any self-contained government created "Scienceville"
| wouldn't have those constraints, and as such it's output
| would be super productive compared to any Mars colony.
|
| Again, I don't think we're anywhere close to being able to
| create these Sciencevilles, but that just goes to show how
| far away we are from creating a Mars colony, even if we are
| able to overcome the numerous technical issues.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _any semi-functional Mars colony is going to have to
| spend a considerable amount of resources just battling
| the environment...any self-contained government created
| "Scienceville" wouldn't have those constraints, and as
| such it's output would be super productive compared to
| any Mars colony_
|
| I'm arguing those constraints are what will drive
| ingenuity. In large part because pitching smart,
| ambitious on a Scienceville is dubious. In part based on
| the history of settler civilisations outperforming their
| home countries.
| bnralt wrote:
| I'm not sure how we can square the idea that integrated
| economies outperform hermit kingdoms, yet somehow that if
| hermit kingdoms became isolated to the extreme they'll
| actually start to become very productive again. You have
| to believe that a hermit kingdom would both be more
| productive if it was more open, and simultaneously
| believe that it would be more productive if it was even
| more isolated.
|
| I don't believe settler civilizations outperform their
| home countries across the board. Certainly there have
| been many that failed. Successful ones tend to be in
| places that offer a lot of natural resources, often even
| surpassing the home country. But of course, the opposite
| would be true for Mars.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _yet somehow that if hermit kingdoms became isolated to
| the extreme they 'll actually start to become very
| productive again_
|
| A Mars colony wouldn't be a hermit kingdom. It would be
| isolated, but there would obviously still be dependence
| on followed by trade with Earth. Recreating that mix of
| semi-isolation and adversity on Earth strikes me as
| silly. Even if you got the mechanics right, what's the
| attraction for the denizens? What keeps them there when
| the going gets tough? What are they doing and seeing that
| they fundamentally couldn't in more comfort?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It's Mars + the Moon + a lot of other places. Just because NASA
| is looking at Mars doesn't mean they are not looking at the
| Moon or anywhere else.
|
| If you actually don't know why Mars might be an interesting
| place to test on, then you should do some research about the
| topic.
| gpm wrote:
| > We haven't built a completely self contained, perpetually
| self reliant colony in some place like [...] the Arctic?
|
| The primary barrier to doing this is politics, not the
| environment. Colonizing the artic would be a major violation of
| international treaties, and would certainly see you detained
| (or killed) by a hostile country. Wars have been started over
| much less.
|
| People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why
| that one would be at all interesting.
|
| > Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of learnings
| when we have increased issue that would come from being on
| Mars?
|
| No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in the
| cold. We know we can live in isolated environments (nuclear
| submarines replicate this much better than the artic does). We
| already have research stations in the arctic. We don't get to
| experience a different amount of gravity, different geology,
| different atmospheric chemistry, different (primarily a lack
| of) biosphere, or pretty much any interesting feature of either
| mars or space. Nor do we get any of the "backup population of
| humans" we would get from mars if we manage to make it self
| sufficient (admittedly a very tall goal), because the arctic
| isn't really isolated from the earth. Nor we do get the
| inspirational effects of going places we haven't before.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| >> Wouldn't experimenting with things give us a lot of
| learnings when we have increased issue that would come from
| being on Mars?
|
| > No. We would learn next to nothing. We know we can live in
| the cold. We know we can live in isolated environments
| (nuclear submarines replicate this much better than the artic
| does).
|
| This is a remarkable claim. Virtually space projects have
| involved considerable rehearsals of different sorts on earth.
| Human survival in extreme environments isn't an easy or
| solved problem. It makes me sad if many people believe we
| have nothing to learn in these circumstances.
| hguant wrote:
| >People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure
| why that one would be at all interesting.
|
| _Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and
| perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding
| is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory
| and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with
| them, or traded for, to survive.
| godshatter wrote:
| I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun
| with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on
| expanding industry into LEO and to the surface of the moon? We
| have no mining capability and no capacity to gather resources
| off-Earth with the intent to build anything with them. We can't
| even make fuel that I know of. We haven't even increased our
| LEO population beyond the ISS and Tiangong, with the capacity
| of at most a dozen people living in space at any one time.
|
| If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the
| ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials
| sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our
| space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of
| Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make
| that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess.
|
| Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating
| space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that
| instead of Mars
|
| Wasn't that Bezos's goal already? It's unfortunate that the
| best execution is aimed at a less productive goal (imo).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If Starship works as well as it'll need to work for a Mars
| mission, it'll effectively have enabled Bezos's approach as
| well. That much mass to orbit that cheaply changes the game
| entirely.
|
| Bezos may chafe at having to buy rides on someone else's
| rocket.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Artemis-I is slated to correct this problem. Last time the
| launch was scrubbed though.
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