[HN Gopher] Mars has a layer of molten rock inside
___________________________________________________________________
Mars has a layer of molten rock inside
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 141 points
Date : 2023-10-26 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| jimnotgym wrote:
| We need to go there so we can study it properly. What would the
| Victorians, or Columbus, think of us if they saw how we gave up
| after going to the moon a few times.
| mcv wrote:
| I think they would first want to know if there were any natives
| worth enslaving there.
|
| I kid. I agree we should go there. But not because of Columbus
| specifically.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| It's actually an interesting comparison. If the Queen of
| Spain circa 1500 had today's technology she wouldn't care
| nearly as much about Mars as she did then about India (sic)
| because extracting anything from Mars can't possibly be
| profitable yet. She wasn't in it for the science; she was in
| it for god, glory and gold, and not necessarily in that
| order.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| On the other hand both Spanish capital and Columbus
| personally took a huge risk. They knew less about what lay
| ahead than we know about Mars. They new the rewards were
| high, but the risks were enormous.
| gosub100 wrote:
| And in 600 years, modern society might consider _us_ slaves
| for having to work under duress for the wealthy elite.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| "there must not have been any gold"
| idlewords wrote:
| More accurate is we can _either_ go there or study it properly.
| A human mission to Mars would be entirely dedicated to keeping
| the crew alive; only remote probes can do real exploration for
| the foreseeable future.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The robots we've sent thus far seem far more limited than
| what humans could do with their own hands and standard tools
| and lab equipment.
|
| We wait decades to maybe get a tiny sample of a rock.
| idlewords wrote:
| This is a common thing that trips people up -- you can't
| compare the capabilities of robots _on Mars_ with what
| humans can do _on Earth_. You have to compare like with
| like, and a human crew on Mars would essentially be living
| in a Level 4 biocontainment facility and remotely operating
| the same kind of robots we could send to the planet
| autonomously. And their effective time available for work
| would be worse even than ISS, where the entire station (6
| people) does something like 35 hours /week of science.
|
| Robotic Mars exploration has made huge progress on what is
| a shoestring budget compared to boondoggles like Artemis or
| ISS. Just look at the improvement between Sojourner and
| Ingenuity and imagine what an adequately funded robotic
| exploration program could look like.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _worse even than ISS, where the entire station (6
| people) does something like 35 hours /week of science._"
|
| You may have seen China launching their youngest ever
| crew to their space station this week, and I noticed the
| quotes from the three crew members:
|
| "I'm solely focused on the mission, on how to accomplish
| the mission successfully. I have to get prepared every
| minute, every second, and this was my aspiration when I
| joined the Air Force, and that aspiration has never
| changed," said Tang Hongbo, Commander.
|
| "I feel that I am fully prepared physically, mentally and
| technically. I am confident to complete this upcoming
| flight mission. In fact, to be honest, I can't wait to
| carry out the mission now." - Tang Shengjie, Operator.
|
| "Talking about the roles and responsibilities, I will try
| my best to complete the routine maintenance of the space
| station" - Jiang Xinlin, Operator.
|
| One of those sounds less exciting than the others.
|
| [1] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-10-25/China-unveils-
| Shenzhou...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well humans can do many things, a robot cannot. But in
| general yes, sending a swarm of robots to mars will deliver
| way more data for way less money, than a human mission.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Well humans can do many things, a robot cannot.
|
| True.
|
| For example: suffocating, starving, dying of thirst,
| getting sick, suffer psychologic breakdowns, having their
| bodies deteriorate due to low gravity,...
|
| Robots cannot do any of these things.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| We can definitely starve a robot, just don't give it a
| way to recharge itself.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| No but robots on the other hand have the disadvantage of
| being dumb with no understanding of the situation. Also,
| they can "die" of thirst for energy as well. Have some
| unplanned thing gone wrong? Boom, all mission is lost.
| Happened countless times. Human are flexible. Why do you
| think, they sometimes need to go outside to fix something
| on the ISS? Not automated yet.
|
| With more advanced robots that might be possible, but
| currently robots can only do, what you exactly told them
| to do. Depending on the real parameters, that might be
| enough, or not. And they certainly can get "sick" and
| broken as well. Hardware as well as software.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| I totally disagree. Ro optic probes are awesome, but their
| range of activity is extremely limited. They can stay on
| mission for years at a time in that limited area, but the
| ground you can cover with several manned missions is
| currently greater.
|
| We've proven that we can keep humans alive indefinitely in
| space with the International Space Station. Expanding that
| practice beyond Earth's orbit can and will go a long way in
| advancing our understanding of our solar neighborhood.
|
| The initial human explorations of the planets will be more
| limited than the rover projects. But I think we are getting
| very close to being able to mount much more significant
| investigations of our closest neighbors. We just need to
| choose to go.
| idlewords wrote:
| The ISS is heavily dependent on regular resupply from
| Earth, is teleoperated from Earth, and depends on large
| Earth laboratories to analyze air and water samples. We can
| keep humans alive "indefinitely" there in the same way we
| could keep people alive indefinitely on the ocean floor;
| it's an expensive stunt entirely reliant on support
| operations from the surface that does nothing to advance
| our ability to explore.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The ISS is way more limited in what it can do because it
| exists in a vacuum, which inherently limits the size it
| can reasonably have, and there's zero gravity. The moon
| has a bit more gravity, but zero atmosphere.
|
| In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on Mars
| to make it possible to build larger, pressurized
| structures and even use aerial flight, and more gravity
| than on the Moon.
| idlewords wrote:
| The ISS design is ultimately constrained by cost and
| fairing size (how big a thing you can fit on your
| rocket), limits that are far more stringent for the
| surface of Mars (where the limiting size is set by the
| descent stage). The fact that it's in vacuum doesn't
| affect its size at all.
|
| The average surface pressure on Mars is a few millibars;
| from an engineering perspective it's the same as building
| pressurized structures in vacuum. If anything, it's more
| difficult, since your design will have to deal with wind
| loads and airborne dust.
| Guvante wrote:
| Bootstrapping scientific facilities in a planet with an
| unbreathable atmosphere which can only be effectively
| transversed to and from every 18 months is not an easy
| thing.
|
| Not to mention the phenomenal effort required to grow
| food there or transport who knows how much food per
| person to provide the kinds of safety margins you would
| want to avoid your first Mars astronauts starving.
| idlewords wrote:
| An amusing and underappreciated technical obstacle to
| Mars trips is that food you can subsist on long-term with
| that kind of unrefrigerated shelf life doesn't exist,
| even on Earth.
|
| BTW the Earth/Mars synodic period is not 18 months, but
| 26 months.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| How did Reid Stowe manage? He surely could not have
| relied on frozen food, too much risk of a generator
| failing.
|
| "In 2010 Stowe completed a more extensive ocean voyage,
| entitled 1000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey--a
| journey that commenced on April 21, 2007, from the 12th
| St. Pier, Hoboken, New Jersey.[1] Stowe was the principal
| designer and builder of the Anne, a 70 ft (21.3 m),
| 60-ton (54,400 kg) gaff-rigged schooner which he sailed
| on this voyage.[1][2] The purpose of the enterprise was
| to remain on the open ocean, without resupply or pulling
| into any harbor, for a period of one thousand days, "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Stowe
| macNchz wrote:
| > In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on
| Mars to make it possible to build larger, pressurized
| structures and even use aerial flight, and more gravity
| than on the Moon.
|
| True, though the atmosphere there brings challenges of
| its own:
|
| "Every year there are some moderately big dust storms
| that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas
| and last for weeks at a time," said Michael Smith, a
| planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
| in Greenbelt, Maryland.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/the-fact-and-fiction-
| of-ma...
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on
| Mars
|
| The martian atmosphere has less than 1% the pressure of
| Earths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
|
| So for the purposes of building habitats, it might as
| well have none.
|
| > and even use aerial flight
|
| Yes, if we are talking about very small, very light
| robotic probes, that can rotate their blades 10 times
| faster than what's required on earth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Mech
| ani...
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > but their range of activity is extremely limited.
|
| Not when I compare it with the range of activities a human
| can do _on Mars_.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > but the ground you can cover with several manned missions
| is currently greater.
|
| Wouldn't we able be to build much better robots which would
| probably be more effective than humans for the same cost it
| would take to send a manned mission to Mars?
| sho_hn wrote:
| By the way, I enjoyed your essay on this topic:
| https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
|
| I imagine it must be hard to participate in the conversation
| without simply pointing people at it, so I've decided to let
| you off the hook :-)
|
| Still occasionally refresh hoping to find the sequel ...
| datameta wrote:
| Columbus is not a measuring stick for human exploration...
| Nevertheless I think some would be flabberghasted that such a
| leap fizzled out but some would wonder why we went in the first
| place if not to gather resources.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think they'd have gotten the Cold War dick measuring
| aspect, or at least the Victorians would have; a lot of 19th
| century colonialism was of that general form (in particular
| see Germany in Africa).
| paxys wrote:
| Victorians/Columbus didn't exactly have scientific study on
| their mind. If there was oil or gold on Mars it would have been
| "discovered" several times over by now.
|
| Also I'm not sure how we've "given up" considering there are
| two rovers on Mars right now, the last one going as recently as
| 2021, plus several more in development. People expecting Mars
| colonies by now have been reading too much sci-fi.
| frutiger wrote:
| Wouldn't discovering a massive supply of gold on Mars
| instantly devalue it?
| paxys wrote:
| Not if you control how much you mine and bring home.
| HPsquared wrote:
| OGIC "Organization of Gold Importing Corporations"
| actionfromafar wrote:
| First I laughed, then I remembered it worked with
| diamonds.
| colanderman wrote:
| Not if you are the first and establish exclusive control of
| the supply.
| lagniappe wrote:
| Find out who that person is, and bring them water.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The shipping and handling fees are astronomical. Sending
| gold to Mars is very expensive. Sending gold from Mars is
| even more expensive. In particular there are no oil
| deposits in Mars, so kerosene for the return rocket is very
| expensive. (Hydrogen and Oxygen are very expensive too.)
|
| Note that there is already a huge amount of gold in the
| oceans, but it's very diluted so it's too expensive to
| extract. You don't want to just know that there is gold.
| You want to know how much profit you would get after the
| gold bars arrive to Fort Knox.
| mattsan wrote:
| What about generating methane and oxygen from Mars'
| atmosphere? I'm aware it would take a long time and a
| vast area of solar panels but say we set up a base there,
| would it be feasible?
|
| edit: this is assuming we're not allowed to set up
| nuclear reactors there
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe not Mars, but if you're willing to go to Titan
| there are literal lakes of methane:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Titan
| actionfromafar wrote:
| But then you'd have to bring the oxygen instead. To
| manufacture anything resembling normal rocket fuel you
| need at least oxygen + hydrogen. Preferrably oxygen,
| hydrogen and carbon, so you don't have to deal with
| cryogenic storage of hydrogen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| There is water on other satellites.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It's weird to think about Titan. Fuel is free as air
| here, but to drive a ICE car ypu need to pay to fill the
| oxygen tanks of your car.
| anticensor wrote:
| And oxidiser injectors and fuel turbochargers.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Possible in theory? Yes.
|
| Feasible? No.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wum8_8sWdeU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHjOXvmuZWQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-MQrp2P2GI
| echelon wrote:
| > In particular there are no oil deposits in Mars,
|
| We really lucked out with all of that ancient
| unmetabolized biomass.
|
| Without that, we might not have had our fancy computers
| by this point.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The cost would come down massively if there was ongoing
| repeated operation. Things are mostly expensive because
| everything is bespoke and one-off.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| >there are no oil deposits on Mars
|
| I'm genuinely curious: why do you say this?
| hackeraccount wrote:
| The thing I wonder about is this - what if there's a city
| on Mars that has a 10 ton block of gold.
|
| What's the price of gold on Earth? Is it the same as now?
| What if I could email someone on Mars and buy 50oz of gold?
| Could I sell it to someone here? What if it's cost
| prohibitive to move all of the gold to Earth? Or any of the
| gold to Earth? How refined does the Martian gold have to be
| before someone on Mars can say the own it?
|
| The answers to all of those are clear (or at least only
| marginally unclear) for materials that are intrinsically
| valuable but for the "store of vaule" as opposed to
| industrial use of something like gold it gets weird for me.
|
| I guess the answer to all of those questions is - whatever
| someone will pay.
| huthuthike wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
|
| In Micronesia there was a practice of carving massive
| "coins" out of stone. These "Rai stones" were often too
| large to move. Yet individuals could "own" them and they
| were traded often for things of great value. I believe I
| even read an account of one that had sunk in a shipwreck,
| but the owners went on to trade it even though it was at
| the bottom of the sea.
|
| Just cause a physical item cannot be possessed physically
| doesn't mean it is valueless.
|
| However, for gold specifically, part of what makes it
| valuable is that it has some manufacturing uses and
| people like making jewelry out of it. There is no doubt a
| much larger supply of gold throughout the universe than
| on earth and it has no effect on the price here.
|
| So I think while you can buy and sell gold on another
| planet (provided people can widely agree on it's transfer
| of ownership), that would be a completely separate market
| from the terrestrial gold market.
| tenpies wrote:
| Gold is probably also not valuable enough on a per volume
| or per weight basis to offset the transport costs.
|
| We'd need something much more valuable, although the usual
| go-to, diamonds, also wouldn't work since it's a highly
| controlled market.
|
| At that point you're in exotic materials territory. Maybe a
| natural source of Californium which on Earth is only
| produced in reactors or particle accelerators, and actually
| has industrial uses? Even if its price dropped
| substantially, we'd probably find new uses for the new
| supply and the stuff costs millions of USD _per gram_.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If there was oil or gold on Mars it would have been
| "discovered" several times over by now.
|
| There is something even rarer than gold on the moon:
| helium-3, usable for cryotechnology and potentially in
| nuclear fusion reactors. Helium on the Earth is about to run
| out (partially because the US keeps on selling their
| stockpiles, that are then wasted for stuff like party
| balloons) - that is why everyone and their dog are pushing
| moon missions at the moment.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| _Cheap_ helium on Earth is running out. We can always
| transmute more.
| nine_k wrote:
| The principal difference from Mars is that you don't need a
| rocket to send bulk goods from the Moon, you can literally
| hurl it into an Earth-bound orbit using an electromagnetic
| catapult. Sunlight is also more plentiful on the Moon, so
| powering the catapult does not require operating a large
| nuclear reactor.
|
| When some if the new 3He-based fusion reactors with huge
| magnets actually breaks even, this _maybe_ become
| potentially practical. You don 't need so much 3He for
| generation if you produce it from Li in the blanket.
| maxlin wrote:
| If there was a new continent somehow popped up we wouldn't be
| fine just sending some drones there or taking pictures of it
| with satellites.
|
| We have had the capability to develop ourselves to send a
| colony to mars in 10 years if we really wanted to, for 50
| years, so yes we're late. But I for one am very happy we've
| got some real vision and development towards it now.
| paxys wrote:
| > We have had the capability to develop ourselves to send a
| colony to mars in 10 years if we really wanted to, for 50
| years
|
| Like I said, pure delusion. We can still barely manage to
| launch rockets into space, and it still costs thousands of
| dollars per kg of cargo just to get to LEO. No human has
| lived in space for an extended period of time at a range
| beyond the ISS (400 km, while Mars is 400 _million_ km).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves. You
| would be better protected than in LEO.
|
| The _Moon_ is very inhospitable, but it 's close enough
| we could have just shuttled an endless stream of ready-
| to-live habitat modules there, one after another. The
| tech was there. The will was not.
|
| I'm not saying it would have been _rational_ to do it in
| the 1970s, but we could have!
|
| On the other hand, what we actually _did_ do (to the
| Earth) wasn 't exactly rational, either.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves.
|
| Really? What machines would be used to build these
| shelters? How do they get to Mars? How would they be
| powered? What auxilliary materials will they require and
| how do those get to Mars?
| notfish wrote:
| Pretty sure we could design and launch a digging robot in
| 10 years, I dont really buy that as the bottleneck to
| mars exploration
| axus wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that we could not, I guess our opinions
| cancel each other out.
| feoren wrote:
| Humans have 10 successful missions landing robots on
| Mars, starting in 1975. Robots have been operating on
| Mars continuously for almost 20 years. Opportunity was
| active for 15 years. The helicopter Ingenuity has flown
| 63 separate times and counting. The Perseverance rover is
| about the size of a hatchback car and carries seven
| advanced scientific instruments.
|
| Ten years of strong-willed national effort was enough to
| get us humans landing on the moon. From where we are now,
| you honestly don't think ten years of strong-willed
| national (or even international) effort could get us a
| robot capable of digging holes?
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > you honestly don't think ten years of strong-willed
| national (or even international) effort could get us a
| robot capable of digging holes?
|
| Yes, I do think that.
|
| Because there is a big difference between an exploratory
| vehicle that carries a number of scientific instruments
| and can be powered by a few solar panels or a small
| nuclear battery...
|
| ...and these beautys:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine
|
| Just for comparisons sake: Perseverances MMRTG provides
| 110 watts of power. A single metric horsepower is 735.5
| watts. I leave looking up the power requirements of even
| a small machine that would be capable of digging habitats
| into the martian bedrock, as an exercise to the reader.
| feoren wrote:
| I agree it's not realistic to send a full tunnel boring
| machine, drilling out 200 to 700 meters per week for
| subways and highways, to Mars in the next 10 years. Such
| a thing would have to be assembled on Mars with advanced
| industry already in place.
|
| I vehemently disagree that we need a 700 meter/week
| behemoth, sized for heavy rail, to dig out a habitat for
| one or two dozen humans. I'm imagining something more
| like a small-ish Roadheader[1], two to four times larger
| than Perseverance. It would either need to be Diesel
| powered (yes, shipping the diesel would suck, but it
| doesn't need to run forever) or we'd need a small solar
| farm and a couple Tesla batteries powering the thing (we
| probably want that anyway, for our habitat).
|
| It would take months to dig out a cave large enough for
| 10 to 20 humans, and there are hundreds of other problems
| to solve to actually turn a small, potentially unstable
| Martian cave into a livable habitat. We know the first
| steps will be slow; that's OK. Besides, we have a decade
| of engineering to refine the design. Don't underestimate
| humans.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadheader
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Okay, let's talk about that.
|
| A (very) small roadheader starts at around 8 metric
| tonnes, and requires around 20kW of power...just for
| operating the cutting head. And that's a really small
| one.
|
| Again, for comparison, Perseverance: 1025kg, 110W of
| power
|
| > It would either need to be Diesel powered
|
| That would be a neat trick on a planet with an
| atmospheric pressure of 610 pascals, where oxygen
| registers barely above a trace element.
|
| > or we'd need a small solar farm
|
| Or maybe a not so small one.
|
| Using Tesla solar panels
| https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels as a reference point,
| they produce up to 400W and are just shy of 2m2. That's
| on Earth. Solar irradiance on Mars is 59% of Earths, so
| these panels will probably produce ~240W apiece. So to
| meet the energy requirements of even a small roadheader,
| we need 83 of these panels, each of which is ~21.5kg in
| mass, so a total of 1.784t in solar panels alone.
|
| Note, that is without cabling, inverters, electronics,
| spare panels, support structures, etc. ... or the
| batteries for that matter. Production numbers are also
| for peak sunlight conditions on Mars, so best-case
| daylight during the martian summer, and no dust storms.
|
| So depending on how heavy the batteries are, I reckon we
| are already looking at around 12-14 tons of equipment,
| just for digging with a single machine. And that doesn't
| include any prefabricated parts, spare parts, airlocks,
| other heavy machinery, support beams, other auxilliary
| materials....
|
| I mean, these roadheaders will require new drill heads
| every now and then, won't they?
|
| What's the payload capacity of our current space ship
| designs again? Because...
|
| > It would take months to dig out a cave large enough for
| 10 to 20 humans,
|
| ...we need food and water and medical supplies and power
| and space suits, and a lot of other things for all these
| people. Oh, and habitats, because they will need
| somewhere to live during all these months bevore the cave
| is ready.
| notfish wrote:
| You could totally just dig a 1 meter deep hole with a
| fancy bulldozer, then plop down a prefabbed house and
| bury it
|
| Hell, you could even have humans do the digging assisted
| by machines and just live on the surface for the first
| few months while they build
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > You could totally just dig a 1 meter deep hole with a
| fancy bulldozer, then plop down a prefabbed house and
| bury it
|
| Yes, and that "prefabbed house", that is sturdy enough
| that we can "bury it" under a pile of rock [1] thick
| enough to provide adequate protection from cosmic
| radiation, where does that come from? How much mass is
| that? How is that mass transported to mars? What machines
| and tools are required to assemble it there, and how much
| mass are those? How is the energy for these tools
| provided?
|
| [1]: Just to be clear what a pile we are talking about
| here: If we used the water-shield method, it would
| require 5m of water for a 50% reduction in radiation
| intensity.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Design? Sure.
|
| Launch? Maybe.
|
| Launch while also having to launch everything the people
| we send there need for the rest of their lives, and also
| launch everything needed to power and maintain that robot
| for as long as it's required? Hmmmmm...
|
| But okay, let's say we do all that. We can now dig up
| Mars-dirt. How do we make that into airtight shelter that
| is also proof against cosmic radiation?
| notfish wrote:
| Probably, you dig a hole then put an inflatable hab
| inside and bury it? This feels like a supremely solvable
| problem
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > On Mars you can build shelter with dirt or in caves.
| You would be better protected than in LEO.
|
| Is that true? Maybe if you never ever go outside but you
| might as well just dig a very deep cave here on Earth if
| your entire is to prove that humans can live in extremely
| inhospitable environments.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Apollo wasn't really fiscally sustainable, particularly
| given the expansion that you visualize. In 1965 it was
| 0.75% of GDP per year and NASA was 1% of GDP per year. By
| comparison the "pork program" SLS is running at 0.018% of
| GDP so is 40x more affordable. Expanding the Apollo
| spending in the 1970s probably wouldn't have helped us
| any when climate change became a concern.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > If there was a new continent somehow popped up we
| wouldn't be fine just sending some drones there or taking
| pictures of it with satellites.
|
| True.
|
| You know what else is true? We could breathe on that new
| continent, there would be enough nitrogen compounds to grow
| food, anyone who wanted to go back home could eventually do
| so, our colonists bodies would not deteriorate due to the
| low gravity, and if our colonists there got into trouble,
| we could send help before they all died horribly.
| notfish wrote:
| There are nitrates on mars, nobody is seriously proposing
| unconditional one way trips, mars has enough gravity to
| prevent bone loss.
|
| But yes, it does mean bringing your own air and being
| self sufficient, but we do both of those things on the
| ISS already
| ccooffee wrote:
| There are definitely people advocating one-way trips to
| Mars. Buzz Aldrin wrote "Mission to Mars: My Vision for
| Space Exploration" (2013) pushing the idea of one-way
| trips and colonization by 2040. There are quite a few
| projects that have invested time and money into the idea.
| MarsOne (2012-2019) is possibly the most serious of the
| attempts, but they weren't exactly close to sending a
| mission.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| I guess there are zero practical reasons to go to Mars
| that would justify the massive cost required to do so.
| The only thing that comes close on Earth (from the
| practicality perspective) is the exploration of
| Antarctica and the Artic and that was done on a shoe-
| string budget.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > There are nitrates on mars
|
| The martian atmosphere is 2.8% N2. For comparison, Earths
| atmoshpere is 78.08% N2, while also being more than 100x
| as dense. And Earth already has soil, and a developed
| nitrogen cycle, while Mars doesn't.
|
| So there is nowhere near enough Nitrogen in-situ on Mars
| to support any form of agriculture. It has to be brought
| from Earth.
|
| > mars has enough gravity to prevent bone loss
|
| https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/07/407806/traveling-mars-
| will...
|
| So yes, lowered gravity has negative impacts on our bones
| and physiology in general. The gravity on Mars is 1/3
| that of Earth. And that's after spending several months
| in-transit at microgravity.
|
| > But yes, it does mean bringing your own air and being
| self sufficient, but we do both of those things on the
| ISS already
|
| The ISS is not self sufficient, and relies on continuos
| supply runs from earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unc
| rewed_spaceflights_to_the_I...
| notfish wrote:
| Nitrates on earth range from 10-50 mg/kg in soil, on mars
| they make up 1100ppm = 0.1% = 1mg/kg, so in the extreme
| you can convert 10% of martian land to soil. Seems like
| plenty.
|
| We just don't know if the 1/3 gravity will cause bone
| loss problems - going to the moon is the best way to
| study it, but who knows. Probably, people will just age
| 3x faster in terms of bone mass on mars.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia
|
| And yeah, the first years of a mars colony are gonna be
| dependent on earth. We'd definitely make sure we have
| enough rockets that they can abort if shit goes south on
| supply missions, but there's no reason earth can't supply
| them at first.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Nitrogen in Earths soil is present in the form of
| Ammonia, and derived substances. Occurring naturally, it
| is the product of microbial nitrogen fixation of
| diazotrophic bacteria, and subsequent biological
| processing. Plants can use these compounds directly.
|
| Nitrates on mars will probably be in the form of nitrate
| salts.
|
| Btw. agriculture also requires soil. Which the martian
| regolith isn't.
|
| > We'd definitely make sure we have enough rockets that
| they can abort if shit goes south on supply missions
|
| Have enough rockets where? On mars? Using what fuel?
| Using what ground installations like scaffolds and launch
| pads? Also, launching between Mars and Earth is only
| possible during specific time windows. For an Earth-Mars
| transit, these occur ~once every 2 years. So if "shit
| goes south" outside these windows, the amount of rockets
| won't matter.
| nine_k wrote:
| Earth crust has relatively small amounts of iron, or
| nickel, or silver, but it has areas with high
| concentration of these, so large as to enable massive
| metallurgy on Earth.
|
| Chances are, Mars may have local concentrations of
| nitrous minerals (as does Earth), and these can be used
| to run a large enough agriculture. Few plants know how to
| consume atmospheric nitrogen anyway.
|
| Air pressure and temperature can be maintained below
| transparent domes, greenhouse-style.
|
| Dim sunlight looks like a much bigger problem, which
| can't be fixed by any terraforming.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Chances are, Mars may have local concentrations of
| nitrous minerals
|
| Which would have to be found, ideally near the equator
| (otherwise landing and solar power generation is going to
| be a problem), mined and transported. And since Nitrous
| minerals aren't fertilizer, it would have to be processed
| (which is an energy intensive process even on earth,
| where we get to use atmospheric Nitrogen in the Haber-
| Bosch-Process).
|
| And of course there is no soil on mars, so we have to
| bring that as well.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Columbus was a pretty rotten human being, if his ghost is
| looking up at us from Hell I don't care what he thinks.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We need to go there so we can study it properly.
|
| The only thing that would accomplish, compared to sending
| robotic probes, is wasted payload capacity that could otherwise
| transport scientific instruments.
| huthuthike wrote:
| Well it took Columbus 2 months and 9 days to get across the
| Atlantic. He never made it to India, which was his original
| goal. The first expedition from Europe to India via the ocean
| was by Vasco da Gama and it took him around 10 months.
|
| Earth to the moon is 240,000 miles. Earth to Mars at it's
| closest approach is 34 million miles. So this would be like
| telling Columbus to sail not for 2 months and 9 days, but for
| 27 years to get to India. He wasn't even willing to sail for 10
| months to do it! (Also bear in mind that's the one-way
| timeframe; the return from Mars would be about twice as long in
| this scenario.)
|
| And not only that but also let Columbus know there won't be any
| gold, spices, or slaves at the end of the trip. See how willing
| he is to dedicate the next 81 years of his life to it.
|
| Hopefully this puts the interplanetary distance in perspective.
| notfish wrote:
| It doesnt take 27 years to get to mars. If you push, you can
| get it down to like 8 months or shorter - it depends how much
| fuel you bring.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars
| huthuthike wrote:
| You are right about that. My post was answering a poster
| about "how would Columbus feel that we went to the moon but
| not to Mars?" The 27 year timeframe is an analogy comparing
| the distance to the moon vs the distance to Mars, and
| relating it back to the timeframe it took Columbus to do
| his famous voyage.
| phkahler wrote:
| I thought the "reason" mars has no magnetic field is that its
| core solidified a long time ago. How does this new finding affect
| understanding of Mars magnetics?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Earths core spins slightly faster than its surface. If Mars
| core is locked with its surface speed because it is more
| viscous then this may kill the field generation ability.
| jpitz wrote:
| Recently, it has come to light that the relative rotational
| speed of Earth's core seems to have a decades long cycle of
| leading and lagging the surface.
|
| https://www.space.com/earth-inner-core-slowing-study
| tomrod wrote:
| Oof. Does that mean it could lock in at any time?
|
| Internal dynamics are weeeeird.
|
| Wonder if the moon affects this.
| bell-cot wrote:
| My impression is that the "planet has no magnetic field <==>
| planet has solid core" theory was retired quite a few decades
| ago now.
|
| The current theory looks like, at best, a work in progress:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Magnetic_field_and_core
| robg wrote:
| The push for humans on Mars is deeply misguided. The same
| resources should be used to send many more probes and for far
| longer durations. After 100 years of deeply mapping all available
| resources, then _maybe_ send humans if a long-term colony is
| self-sustainable and necessary for deep space exploration with
| better propulsion technologies.
|
| Edit: Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation
| propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die
| lonely deaths. Surprised people seem confused on the necessary
| and sufficient conditions. Show me that robots can set up a self-
| sustaining colony with self-generating resources to get to other
| worlds, and that's a legit "backup" plan. Otherwise we're just
| arguing about edge cases with no viable solutions. You don't need
| humans on Mars to show what's possible.
| baq wrote:
| You're missing that a man with a shovel can find out in a day
| what a robotic probe cannot find out in a year, unless you're
| talking serious AI.
| robg wrote:
| You're telling me we can't send, in the next 100 years, a
| fleet of remote controlled backhoes with the same sensors and
| assays the human would use?
| runeofdoom wrote:
| With no buried fiber to feed on, the backhoes will starve.
| macNchz wrote:
| I don't really see what a person with a shovel could
| accomplish that a robot can't, other than consuming the vast
| majority of the project budget on life support systems.
| tomrod wrote:
| Eyes.
| macNchz wrote:
| Are there things that someone can see with their eyes
| that can't be picked up with an array of state of the art
| cameras / specialty sensors / microscopes, that would
| justify the overhead of everything required to get a
| human there? I'm genuinely curious.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Human eyes are not good. We have a massive central void
| in our vision that we literally fill in with our
| imagination. We can't sense light polarity, we can't
| sense beyond infrared or ultraviolet, and our resolution
| is poor. I suspect you could put together and deliver to
| Mars a highly redundant system with all of those
| capabilities for less than the addition fuel cost to
| launch a 100kg human, supplies, and life-support systems
| out of Earth's gravity well.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Cameras.
|
| Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more
| spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what
| they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of
| human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users
| of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to
| explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed
| by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust.
|
| And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload
| capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to
| keep the cameras running!
| tomrod wrote:
| Eyes connect to one of the best diagnostic systems in the
| universe.
|
| IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on
| payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper,
| to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly
| independent colony on Mars.
|
| At our stage, having that come from the private sector
| versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the
| New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation
| of ancient cultures), governments explored but private
| companies promised the reward settled.
|
| People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we
| should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and
| comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things,
| in my opinion worth preserving across several planets,
| solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
| tkahnoski wrote:
| Even a hybrid mission with humans in orbit doesn't make
| sense. You have to bring less fuel for landing/take-off
| from Mars. But for that same cost you could send way more
| robotic workers and just deal with speed of light/delays
| (3-20 minutes).
|
| If there was significant uncertainty in what resources
| needed to be deployed to where then I could see a benefit
| to having an onboard team of humans who could assemble
| workers or payloads on the fly from orbit. However this
| would be a big shift from current mindset of designing
| robots for exact problem/solutions with precise payloads to
| instead having an excess of resources on board.
|
| If the perspective shifted to "we're colonizing Mars so
| every ounce of metal in orbit will get used at some point"
| this is less of a concern.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| The robotic probe is backed up by thousands of scientists,
| analyzing the data it sends back home, while the man with the
| shovel is unlikely to even survive long enough on Mars (if he
| even gets there alive) to discover anything the robot missed.
|
| If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with
| scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have
| to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other
| tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive
| (for a time).
| nick_ wrote:
| Find out what, though? That it's a dry, frozen wasteland? For
| tens of billions of dollars? No thanks.
| tomrod wrote:
| The push for human on Mars is misguided in that we aren't
| taking enough risks.
|
| We are one bad cosmic event from total known life annihilation.
| That would be a bad day
| soneca wrote:
| What kind of cosmic event would transform Earth in a worse
| place to support life than Mars currently is?
| blue1 wrote:
| Impact with a rogue planet?
|
| Grey goo?
| downvotetruth wrote:
| A directed gamma ray burst could affect the solar system:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLykC1VN7NY A nuclear
| powered bunker seems much more pragmatic than generation
| ship(s) to another star system to survive one.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| I would argue that a civilization that is actually
| capable of building a generation spaceship, should be
| capable of defending their planet from GRBs.
|
| How? I have no idea.
|
| Then again, we also have no idea how to build an actually
| working generation ship :D
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| In the long run an overheated planet Venus style is much
| harder to deal with than a cold, nearly airless one.
| Anything that triggered mass plant death and decomposition
| could do.
| roughly wrote:
| We are nowhere near being able to support and propagate life
| unaided on Mars. Life on mars as a backup for life on earth
| is like keeping bitcoin in case of a technological collapse.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Is this an argument for doing more or doing nothing?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's an argument for doing the _right things_.
| tomrod wrote:
| Today, that's more.
| WrongAssumption wrote:
| And how do you think we would go about achieving that
| capability?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Except Mars has already had total life annihilation, so I'm
| not sure what the point of using that as your argument is...
|
| Stick a few people on an already-annihilated planet where
| they will never become self-sufficient, anyways?
|
| If you want humanity to escape vulnerability on earth, your
| best bet is to not go into another gravity well at all. Esp
| one with no ionosphere, thin unusable atmosphere, brutal
| storms, and toxic fine sand everywhere.
|
| The moon makes a lot more sense -- easier to manage
| shipping/trade with earth, no gravity well. And if you need
| off a planetary body completely, build orbitals.
|
| Also many life-terminating events for earth -- local
| (galactic region) supernovae or other mass irradiating event,
| our own sun flaming out, etc. would just do the same to Mars.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It would really suck if, in the next 100 years, we see some
| extinction-level comet or asteroid crash into the Earth when we
| might have done the "not all our eggs in one basket".
|
| Some kinds of caution aren't very careful at all.
| kzrdude wrote:
| What timeframe do we need to setup a fully independent colony
| on Mars, so that we survive if Earth is not there?
|
| If you asked me to guess, it would be somewhere between
| impossible and 1000 years of terraforming.
| jrd259 wrote:
| Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some
| catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or
| perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's
| suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the
| world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate,
| to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use
| Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-
| term profit.
|
| Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at
| the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite
| serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and
| quarrel.
|
| Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we
| possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those
| people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to
| choose?
|
| We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve
| our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the
| past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention
| all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?)
|
| I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the
| claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter
| folly.
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| Is it even remotely possible that a Mars colony could become
| self-sustaining within the next 100 years? It seems like
| surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It certainly won't be if we don't build the infrastructure
| to send (temporarily, at least) people to Mars.
|
| Can we bootstrap up an energy economy there? Dunno, that's
| the first step. With a large enough energy budget, food's
| doable. Water is likely in situ.
|
| > It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way
| off regardless.
|
| Even longer if you wait to try.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| It would suck a lot more if we wasted money on a mars colony,
| that will take hundreds of years to become self sufficient,
| if it is possible at all (I am still waiting for a solution
| to human bodies deteriorating in low gravity that is actually
| workable at scale), instead of using these resources to
| further develop things that have already had successful
| experimental runs.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63221577
|
| Added bonus: Investing resources into this saves Earth and
| everyone on it.
| maxlin wrote:
| 100 years with ZERO humans on mars? You have no sense of risk
| or scale. We should be there already.
|
| We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not
| be livable after one year of bad politics. In 100 years your
| kind of thinking will be considered ludditean and playing
| russian roulette with 5 in the chamber for no reason.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Apply startup software ethos to interplanetary travel! It did
| well for deep sea exploration.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I have no idea how you got that from the comment.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The middle ground you're ignoring (between #yolo startup
| culture and Boeing's defense contractor culture) has been
| done pretty well with SpaceX's Falcon 9.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| The technologies to delivery humans to and back from Mars
| with any defensible level of safety do not currently
| exist. The benefits of doing so are dubious and the real
| viability of a human colony are almost nil. The sort of
| people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent
| civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to
| run a previously healthy, if unspectacular, social
| network. It is less exciting work, but we should make
| every effort to not reduce ourselves to a Paleolithic
| lifestyle on our home planet via accidental terraforming
| instead.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The technologies to delivery humans to and back from
| Mars with any defensible level of safety do not currently
| exist.
|
| But are being worked on. This statement would've been
| true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade
| ago.
|
| > The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed
| innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are
| failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular,
| social network.
|
| The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and
| how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very
| different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough
| for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closes-spacex-starship-
| mish... I was not impressed by this incident and it gives
| me concerns for their safety culture. My comment is not
| limited to propulsion or delivery technology.
|
| I respect SpaceX, but I also respect the real challenges
| of responsibly sending a crew to Mars.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Does the Apollo 1 accident report give you similar
| concerns about NASA's culture and ability to get to the
| moon?
| runeofdoom wrote:
| Musk is in the driver's seat at Twitter. At SpaceX he's a
| frontman, carefully managed by people who know both him
| and rocket science.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| While I agree (and give a lot of credit to Gwynne
| Shotwell for the steady hand), that reinforces the point;
| that you can do space work somewhere inbetween "startup"
| and "giant defense contractor" style approaches.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| HN is unprepared for this level of sarcasm.
| robg wrote:
| With no next gen propulsion system and no self-sustaining
| colony, humans on Mars are a resource sink with no added
| benefits.
|
| Lest you forget it took 300 years for North America to
| generate self-sustaining colonies from the first Europeans.
| And those didn't require life support for oxygen and water
| for every second of survival.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| North America had self sustaining human populations for
| thousands of years before they ever saw a European.
| burnished wrote:
| The point is the challenge that was involved sending a
| small group on the same planet out to be self sufficient,
| not commentary about the habitability of the americas. If
| anything that underlines their point.
| disconcision wrote:
| While I think having people on mars would be neat, I'm not
| sure there's anything we could do to earth period, let alone
| in a year, that would make it less livable than mars
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We should be there already.
|
| Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have?
| Exploratory activity can, is and should be done by robotic
| drones. Mars has zero resources Earth doesn't already have in
| abundance, is inimical to almost every lifeform on earth and
| confers no advantage as a launch platform for furture space
| exploration over the moon or a space station.
|
| > We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might
| not be livable after one year of bad politics.
|
| Fun fact: Even after a full-scale thermonuclear war, Earth
| would still be a more liveable planet than Mars.
|
| So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive
| as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
| thehappypm wrote:
| My sad take is that if we ruin Earth, we don't deserve a
| second chance. We would just ruin Mars too.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We would just ruin Mars too.
|
| Well, considering that Mars is currently a frozen, low-
| gravity, toxic, airless, irradiated, soil-less desert
| with barely any water, no nitrogen to speak of, very few
| options for energy generation, no protection from cosmic
| radiation and constantly wrecked by planet-wide
| duststorms, I honestly cannot imagine how we could
| possibly make it worse, even if we actively tried.
| adriancr wrote:
| > Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have?
|
| I bet some people said the same about america in 1400s.
|
| You never know what can come from this in the future.
|
| If we can we should.
|
| > So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars
| attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
|
| Large asteroid impact might destroy us entirely like this:
| https://youtu.be/02S3_DEaQWA?si=urqC47r14cFxbNjD
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > I bet some people said the same about america in 1400s.
|
| Here is what I bet _noone_ said about america in the
| 1400s:
|
| _" Man, it sure would be nice if there was air, arable
| soil, and building materials in america."_
|
| > If we can we should.
|
| Humans can do lots of things that they absolutely
| shouldn't.
|
| > Large asteroid impact
|
| Ah, so we moved on from policy decisions. Good. Okay,
| let's talk asteroids.
|
| a) I would be alot more worried about asteroids if I were
| on Mars. Mars is closer to the asteroid belt after all,
| and it's thin atmosphere is a lot less of a hurdle to
| evil space rocks than Earths.
|
| b) Humanity has already proven, that it has the technical
| capability to alter an asteroids course: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te... So far,
| humanity has _NOT_ proven that it can build a self-
| sustaining colony on mars. As a matter of fact, we have
| not even done so in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and they
| would at least have air there. So purely from the
| perspective of resource-allocation, it seems there are
| better ways to protect humanity from asteroid impacts,
| than trying to build a mars-colony.
| adriancr wrote:
| > Here is what I bet noone said about america in the
| 1400s:
|
| The point I made is you can never know the benefits.
|
| Asimov, end of eternity is a pretty nice book to see how
| your point of view might be flawed.
|
| > Humanity has already proven, that it has the technical
| capability to alter an asteroids course: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te...
|
| Sure... we can barely detect asteroids and you're saying
| we can deflect them, is the argument in good faith?, do
| you really believe we can detect and deflect a planet
| killer?
|
| > So purely from the perspective of resource-allocation,
| it seems there are better ways to protect humanity from
| asteroid impacts, than trying to build a mars-colony.
|
| So you don't want humanity to waste resources on space.
| That is your point of view which I hope is a minority at
| large. I disagree, but I doubt I can convince you
| otherwisr.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| > We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might
| not be livable after one year of bad politics.
|
| Nuked Earth that's also climate-changed so bad that only the
| poles are temperate is still a whole lot better than Mars.
|
| Why is the solution for this "establish a colony somewhere
| already 100x worse than a multi-catastrophe-stricken Earth
| would be, and is also very-expensive to get back to Earth
| from" ? It makes no sense.
|
| Asteroid strike? There are (much) cheaper ways to guard
| against that--hardened, distributed bunkers with paid
| inhabitants, increasing asteroid-hunting programs and
| interception research. Orbital habs or even the Moon if
| you're worried about a whole-crust-liquifying event that you
| can't stop in time. And we're not doing those. Why would we
| do Mars? It's worse than those options in basically every
| way. It's a _really really_ bad place.
|
| Most the other threats those measures couldn't guard against,
| would probably also take out Mars.
|
| Going to Mars is cool and romantic and I hope to see it, but
| I think people trying to pin some practical reason for
| _colonization_ other than "because it was there" (romantic)
| are misguided.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| We should map the ocean and available resources on earth along
| with future-proofing our atmosphere as a priority over
| colonizing Mars.
|
| Unless the cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is true, in which
| the solution is to get as many of us off this ticking time bomb
| before it happens next.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I don't think the pole shift theory holds, but there still
| are all those rocks flying around solar system... as well as
| gamma bursts, but those would probably take out Mars too.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If I remember correctly, a thick layer of soil would
| protect people from a GRB - if most of the Martian colony
| (or Lunar colony) lives underground, they would survive -
| and there is no large-scale biosphere that humans depend on
| for survival on Mars or the Moon.
|
| As long as those colonies are self sufficient (the biggest
| handwave of the whole deal), they would survive while the
| majority of Earth would have a rather bad time of things.
|
| Then again, it's likely that more humans would survive on
| Earth than elsewhere - nuclear submarines, underground
| government complexes, maybe even the Antarctica base
| depending on the angle.
| keiferski wrote:
| People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies aren't
| about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions. Yes, it would be
| a better use of resources to set up a colony on Antarctica
| first. But who cares about that? It's not that interesting or
| inspiring to anyone that doesn't already care about space
| travel.
|
| A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most
| watched event in human history. _It 's exciting._ That
| excitement is what inspires people to get involved (and
| governments to fund projects.)
|
| _If you want to build a ship, don 't drum up the men and women
| to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead,
| teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea._ - Antoine de
| Saint Exupery
| robg wrote:
| Everything you say can be applied to the history of humans on
| the Earth's moon. 50 years later you've been proven wrong.
| Robots are better and cheaper at space exploration and humans
| being in the loop have only made things more expensive and
| more risky. The failures of human space adventures have made
| things much harder on space budgets. See also the Shuttle
| program, after Apollo.
| keiferski wrote:
| But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon
| since the initial landings, so it's not surprising that
| interest has dried up. There's no colony, no space casino
| resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial
| achievement.
|
| The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares
| about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about
| humans, not probes.
| robg wrote:
| That's neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has
| almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The
| interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream
| of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.
| keiferski wrote:
| And the average person has almost no interest in it,
| _except_ for world-history events like the first landing
| on the Moon. The first landing on Mars would be a similar
| event.
| robg wrote:
| Sustained funding for 60 years shows the continued
| interest in there, to use one of the "reasons" you cite
| for Apollo.
| fastball wrote:
| You think there would've been _more_ interest if the Apollo
| program had never happened, and we 'd just done it all with
| robots?
| robg wrote:
| The last 60 years have shown the interest is there
| without humans AND having humans in the loop dying have
| deeply impaired progress based on limited resources and
| their allocation.
| deelowe wrote:
| NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he gets
| a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him saying
| something to the affect of "take a look at the pioneers of
| space exploration. Note down their age. Notice a trend? They
| all grew up during the apollo programs! Why? Because sending
| a human to the moon was exciting. How many people do you see
| today with posters of the rockets that carried Perseverance
| or the rover itself versus Apollo or even the Shuttle? We
| must put people in space, not because the science demands it,
| but because of the impact it will have on society."
|
| Sending humans to Mars isn't about exploring Mars. It's about
| the impact this would have on society as a whole. Suddenly,
| there's another planet out there that we care about and focus
| on. Perhaps wars on earth seem just that much more petty? At
| a minimum, it will likely inspire a whole new generation to
| explore the cosmos.
|
| * Neil has his flaws, I get it, but I've sort of come 360 on
| him. His exuberance is contagious and as ambassador for space
| exploration, his approach does have a certain "public
| resonance" to it that I've not seen from others even if he
| tends to embellish things...
| robg wrote:
| He's conflating all of the resources spent with the
| outcomes involved. Need to see the graph?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Budget-
| Federal.svg
|
| Now imagine if those same resources were spent on fusion
| propulsion...
| deelowe wrote:
| Whataboutism.
|
| I don't think he's confusing anything. He's saying the
| only reason those funds were allocated were because:
|
| 1) The government wanted to do it (military reasons)
|
| and
|
| 2) The public found it exciting (we're putting a man on
| the moon)
|
| Without either of those, this wouldn't have happened.
| robg wrote:
| Those two "reasons" are no where in the same universe.
| Take away the Soviets and it wouldn't have happened. See
| also the last 60 years.
| deelowe wrote:
| I said both were important... The military push already
| exists today. See SpaceX...
| tivert wrote:
| > NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he
| gets a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him
| saying something to the affect of "take a look at the
| pioneers of space exploration. Note down their age. Notice
| a trend? They all grew up during the apollo programs!
|
| That doesn't make any sense at all. The "pioneers of space
| exploration" would obviously include the people who _did_
| Apollo [and Sputnik, and Mercury, etc], and they _obviously
| did not_ grow up during the Apollo program, unless NASA has
| a time machine they 're not telling us about.
| deelowe wrote:
| Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c of
| what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent, the
| shuttle. According to NDT, budgets and education
| enrollment has been down because of a lack of enthusiasm
| and this lack of enthusiasm is b/c we no longer have
| people EXPLORING the frontiers of space (the IST doesn't
| count).
| tivert wrote:
| > Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c
| of what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent,
| the shuttle.
|
| 1) that "TODAY" is a pretty important qualification, and
| 2) it's a stretch to call those people pioneers. I live
| in the American West TODAY, but I certainly shouldn't be
| labeled a "pioneer" like the people who moved to this
| area 150+ years ago.
| hoten wrote:
| I think the word is being stretched a bit, but not much.
| Space is not inhabited by any meaningful number of
| people, and very few have been, so for the foreseeable
| future anyone simply leaving Earth could be called
| pioneer - among the first to explore a new area.
| deelowe wrote:
| Feel free to substitute a more appropriate term. The
| premise doesn't change.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| No idea who NDT is, but I'm kind of afraid that doing
| something like a Mars mission too early will turn out
| having the opposite effect. With the tech available for a
| soon-ish to launch Mars mission, chances are pretty high
| that something would go wrong catastrophically, there's
| just so much complexity that cannot break down for such a
| long time under extreme conditions, we're not ready for
| that. Watching the people we send there die slowly and
| horrifically isn't going to be a rational "we knew the
| risks" thing for the general public, people will be
| horrified and it'll put a big damper on future endeavors of
| this kind. I'd expect manned spaceflight to be pretty much
| dead for decades after that.
| robg wrote:
| Exactly this. The current hype for a human on Mars is
| repeating the mistakes of Apollo then the Shuttle. By
| contrast the public has absolutely been engaged in what
| rovers and telescopes find.
| johnyzee wrote:
| _Did we fly to the moon too soon? Did we squander the
| chance? In the rush of the race The reason we chase is
| lost in romance
|
| And still we try To justify the waste for a taste of
| man's greatest adventure_
|
| Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satelite
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ck38Cl474
| notfish wrote:
| I feel like spacex is the only group that has a chance at
| landing on mars this decade, and Starship is exactly what
| we'd want if we were trying to make a self sustaining
| mars colony right?
| vel0city wrote:
| NDT = Neal deGrasse Tyson. Astrophysicist, director of
| the Hayden Planetarium, a pretty big science
| communicator.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| So we risk a human dying 40 days from help and severely
| overcomplicate the mission just for the public to not care
| even a tenth as much as they did during the apollo era. I
| wish we had a space program that didn't rely so much on
| sacrificial heroics and building of a public myth.
| tivert wrote:
| > A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single
| most watched event in human history.
|
| I'm actually skeptical about that. It certainly would be the
| "single most watched event in human history" _among geeks
| interested in space,_ and probably among geeks in general and
| nationalists of the country that did the landing, but I
| suspect it 's a biased projection to extend that attitude to
| all of humanity. Objectively, it's likely that stuff like the
| opening days of some war or the 9/11 attacks would be more
| watched than a Mars landing.
|
| Apropos: Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon (Official
| Audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
| keiferski wrote:
| I think it would be comparable to the first moon landing.
| Even if it wasn't _as big_ , the population and access to
| video has drastically increased. It doesn't seem crazy to
| me that a few billion people would watch it live/within 24
| hours.
| tivert wrote:
| > I think it would be comparable to the first moon
| landing. Even if it wasn't as big, the population and
| access to video has drastically increased.
|
| Though that introduces the problem that you're not really
| measuring what you're talking about, sort of like how
| lists of the "highest-grossing films of all time," are
| mostly about inflation and not popularity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-
| grossing_films:
|
| > As the motion picture industry is highly oriented
| towards marketing currently released films, unadjusted
| figures are always used in marketing campaigns so that
| new blockbuster films can much more easily achieve a high
| sales ranking, and thus be promoted as a "top film of all
| time",[24][31] so there is little incentive to switch to
| a more robust analysis from a marketing or even
| newsworthy point of view.[30]
| wongarsu wrote:
| The first human moon landing is among the top 5 most
| watched television events, topped mostly by sports events
| (and possibly the rescue of the rescue of Chilean miners).
|
| Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd
| still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic
| opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or
| terror attacks.
| tivert wrote:
| > Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but
| I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic
| opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or
| terror attacks.
|
| IMHO, that makes my point much stronger. If sports got
| higher ratings than the Moon landing, it's a clear
| indication we're in a bubble that inflates the importance
| of and interest in space exploration.
| notfish wrote:
| Or maybe it has gotten easier to watch things than it was
| in 1969?
| burnished wrote:
| Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are
| dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be
| impressive that something so abstract and distant was
| able to rival something so elemental and popular.
| tivert wrote:
| > Might be making a mistake there, it sounds like you are
| dismissing sports as unimportant, instead it might be
| impressive that something so abstract and distant was
| able to rival something so elemental and popular.
|
| My only point is I think geeks over-estimate the
| popularity of space exploration, incorrectly generalizing
| "it excites me/my type" to "it excites
| everyone/humanity." If _regularly-held_ sporting events
| eclipse _singular_ events in space exploration, it
| deflates high-flying rhetoric that expects the latter to
| be "the single most watched event in human history."
|
| I make no comment on the importance of sports. But I'd
| argue that professional sports are probably _more_
| abstract (ultimately counting according to some arbitrary
| rules) and (practically, in a human sense) about as
| distant as space exploration.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The global population in 1969 was about 3.5 billion
| people, and I imagine global TV adoption was much lower
| at the time as well. Even if 60% of people alive at the
| time watched the moon landing, a sports event today would
| only need to be watched by ~30% of the global population
| to eclipse it.
|
| I agree that a televised Mars landing would be the most
| watched televised event in history.
| stickfigure wrote:
| So you get incredible Nielsen ratings for an hour or two,
| then what?
| robg wrote:
| And if the Apollo "success" is any guide, it actually
| hampers further progress because the milestone was
| overhyped with no sustainable plan.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I'd question even the interest among geeks. Recall the
| observation that the rationalist or new-atheist community
| of the early millennium declined just as social-justice
| rhetoric rose: people were shifting their interest en masse
| from one thing to another. I think geeky Westerners are so
| focused right now on social and political battle within
| Earth society that space exploration would draw no more
| than a "that's neat" response before the discussion in
| their bubbles went right back to the usual.
| vkou wrote:
| The first landing would be the most watched event.
|
| The sixth landing wouldn't pull anyone away from this
| week's Monday-Night-Handegg game. The sixtieth would be
| fighting for ratings with Charlie's Angels.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > But who cares about that?
|
| Everyone who actually has to make a mars colony _work_.
|
| Because, yes _" yearning for the vast and endless sea"_ is
| certainly more poetic than figuring out how to make beams
| from tree trunks.
|
| But without lots of people who think alot about trees and
| carpentry figuring out how to reliably produce good quality
| beams and techniques that allow for them to be fitted
| together into a hull that won't break apart when hit by the
| first few waves, no amount of yearning will result in a
| working Carrack.
|
| > human being landing on Mars would probably be the single
| most watched event in human history.
|
| Probably. And now imagine the reaction of all those people
| watching, when the landing vehicle crashed and exploded, or
| the Astronauts died horribly from thirst or starvation.
|
| That's why there are people who care about building a
| sustainable colony in the arctic dry valleys.
| polotics wrote:
| May I suggest that people who say what you say also do not
| understand one thing?
|
| To get excited about watching one man eking survival on Mars,
| you have yourself to be quite far away from any concern for
| your own survival here on earth.
|
| To say it differently, this is very high on Maslow's pyramid.
|
| For reference maybe check out Gilles Scott Heron's "Whitey on
| the moon"...
| walleeee wrote:
| > People who say this don't understand that Mars colonies
| aren't about pragmatic, resource-optimized decisions.
|
| On the contrary, many of us agree very much with this. Mars
| is not a practical goal at the moment and it doesn't make
| sense from a resource perspective.
|
| What might be more exciting, I think, is to develop such a
| well-functioning, resilient terrestrial society, such an
| abundant, adaptable community of life, that we _could_
| realistically take ourselves and our companions to Mars and
| hope to persist there. But that takes a lot of know-how, a
| lot of materials and energy, and (most importantly) a lot of
| wisdom.
|
| Is a species steamrolling its paradise of a homeworld's
| living fabric really capable of planting a viable colony on a
| dead planet?
| huthuthike wrote:
| I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with
| robotics, and it's safer.
|
| However, we also need to factor in human psychology. It would
| inspire billions of people worldwide to see a person on Mars.
| This is not something that can be replicated by sending robotic
| missions. It's possible that this could increase public support
| for funding space exploration, and drive more people to go into
| careers in science.
|
| It's hard to predict the benefits of human exploration of space
| because we don't know how the world will react. But it's a lot
| more significant than just measuring the scientific output of
| the mission.
| robg wrote:
| It's been over 50 years since a human was on the moon. The
| need to replicate that psychological success has not been
| there for humanity given the costs and better use of
| resources. Mars is exponentially more expensive.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Also the whole... "they're very probably not coming back
| from Mars alive" thing :)
| huthuthike wrote:
| Doing something we've never done before is a lot more
| exciting to people than repeating our previous success.
|
| Think about it this way: who were the astronauts on the
| first lunar landing mission? Who were the astronauts on the
| last? Why do you think that we remember the first ones to
| do it better?
| robg wrote:
| Who were the astronauts that died with Challenger?
| Notoriety is hardly an index worth investing in.
|
| A colony on the moon is technically possible, albeit very
| expensive. Many nations could create one today. People
| are choosing to spend their limited resources on better
| forms of progress.
| huthuthike wrote:
| To your first point, I think success at doing something
| that no human has done before is going to be more
| memorable to the masses than failure to do something that
| many people have done before. Hence we remember the first
| people to land on the moon but we don't remember the
| 200th astronaut that didn't make it into space cause they
| died. Regardless, referring back to my original point,
| it's not the fame of a specific individual that should be
| the goal in a human mission to Mars. Instead it's a
| combination of the scientific yields as well as the
| increased public enthusiasm for science that could make a
| human mission more valuable than robotic ones. It's very
| hard to measure the latter but it should not be
| discounted when considering the value of a human mission.
|
| Regarding your second point, you were the one that said
| we should spend the same resources of a manned mission on
| robotic missions. So if it is going to cost $2 trillion
| dollars for a manned mission we should spend $2 trillion
| instead on robotic missions. Now it seems you are arguing
| that we should spend the money elsewhere. If that's your
| point it is a different discussion.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I agree with you that for the cost we can do more with
| robotics, and it's safer.
|
| I don't see much that's safe about robotics in our future. In
| space they'll be great (until they turn on us), but on Earth
| it seems like they'll mostly be used to kill people and if we
| ever do get robot butlers and maids you can bet that they'll
| be sending a continuous stream of audio and video of our
| homes, conversations, and sex lives back to at least one
| remote server as "telemetry" that will be sold off to data
| brokers and our government.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Robots on earth are mostly used in manufacturing and to
| clean floors. Millions of them, today.
| autoexec wrote:
| That's the case today only because they have such limited
| capability. Our lowly roombas already want to spy on us.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-
| maps-of...
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomb
| a-i...
|
| https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/19/robot-vacuums-can-be-
| hacked-a...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Then you should build that space company. Show us how it's
| done.
| Balgair wrote:
| To add on to the Edit:
|
| You can get humans on Mars with a big effort. Fine. Now get
| them back off.
|
| Simple hand waving shows it's a really really hard thing to do.
| Let's assume current rocket science. You somehow have to get a
| fueled launch vehicle off the surface. The gravity is less,
| ~3/5ths, so it's a lot less fuel than on Earth, but it is still
| a _lot_ of fuel. Somehow, without nearly any infrastructure and
| in a near vacuum, this rocket has to successfully get off of
| the surface. We can see that it 's really hard to do this just
| on Earth with huge hangers and loads of experts and tools on
| standby. Doing this on Mars with a few astronauts and lord
| knows what sort of repair and maintenance facilities is just
| going to be a _lot_ harder to pull off.
|
| Fine, sure, now let's assume that we've somehow managed to have
| improved the science of reliability engineering to the point
| that we can just have fully fueled rockets just sitting on
| Martian dirt for years on end [0]. How do you get that rocket
| down from orbit? Like, how do you land that much fuel? That's a
| _really hard_ problem to solve. Sure, fine, lots of little
| payloads all over the place. But then you have to have some
| sort of industrial machinery to go retrieve all those fuel pods
| and then load up the rocket. Who or what are going to drive all
| over Utopia Planitia to grab it all and then handle fueling?
| Astronauts? AI? Whatever it is, it 's really expensive and has
| to be really safe. Why not build the rocket on Mars too?
|
| Any return from Mars requires sciences and industry that we
| currently do not have, full stop. Iterating our way to that
| future is possible, but is currently outside of our skill sets.
| A _lot_ of money and time is going to be needed to get to
| return missions. Ideas that this mission requires also upset
| the state of current industrial manufacture, repair, and
| maintenance here on Earth. Not in a bad way, mind you, but
| those techniques are miles beyond what we currently can do and
| will very much change the future of Earth just as much as it
| changes Mars.
|
| [0] By the by, do you have any idea what that science will do
| to our Earth based industry? Nothing will ever break ever
| again!
| fastball wrote:
| I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is _exactly_
| why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It requires doing
| things far beyond our knowhow, which historically is the best
| way to actually get something done - inspire towards an
| impossible goal and humanity can make it happen. You
| generally don 't make technological leaps by pursuing things
| you know you can do already. Even if we _don 't_ make it
| happen, we are guaranteed to learn a plethora of useful
| things along the way.
|
| Needing "a lot of money and time" is irrelevant. Money is a
| fiction and time we have in spades. Would we instead prefer
| the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days
| optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on
| their asses consuming ads? Or maybe it would be better if,
| instead of designing Martian space-suits, we spend more time
| designing fast-fashion clothing meant to be worn once or
| twice, basking in hitherto unimagined heights of navel-
| gazing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity
| spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that
| encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads?
|
| If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on
| renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow
| organics" like wood.
|
| But then, the great thing about markets is that they can
| see more broadly than me. (And the bad thing is that they
| can't see as far.)
|
| Anyway, if we decide to invest on space exploitation
| (instead of just exploration), I'd bet on asteroid mining
| much before planet colonization. Settling down on a planet
| seems to be a completely useless action.
| vkou wrote:
| > I'm not sure you realize this, but your comment is
| exactly why colonizing Mars is a worthy adversary. It
| requires doing things far beyond our knowhow, which
| historically is the best way to actually get something done
| - inspire towards an impossible goal and humanity can make
| it happen.
|
| You can say the same thing about literally any other hard
| problem, most of which have a far better ROI, and are still
| not getting much traction.
|
| There's a reason nobody's built a moon base.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| We can't even swing a _self-sufficient_ (emphasis added) colony
| on the much more hospitable Antarctica. Short of that, anyone
| sent to Mars needs a handy supply of cyanide capsules for the
| inevitable disaster. In the next twenty years, arrival of human
| meat on Mars is just bragging rights. Want exploration? We
| could do more of that with robots. Backup civilization? Simply
| not going to happen until we can get that Antarctica colony
| rolling. Nobody in, nobody out, allowance of once every two
| years robot-guided payloads under ten tons, and it has to run
| for forty years ... _that_ is a good example of a colony.
|
| Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating
| robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals
| onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins
| maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long
| trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can
| leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the
| radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty
| Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation,
| and _learn_ from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to
| do stats and discount one-offs. And we 'll have to start
| tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out
| what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns
| built by those boring machines.
|
| This isn't like a trip to a remote island.
| burnished wrote:
| Sounds like a plan to put boots on mars.
| nico wrote:
| We could be exploring the inside of our own planet. We have
| literally only scratched the surface and we barely know
| anything about the deeper parts of Earth, yet we are obsessed
| with places that are incredibly far away and hard to reach
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking about
| sending people to the moon.
|
| And people probably said things like that to Columbus about
| sending boats across the ocean.
|
| Humanity has to do grand projects like this that seem
| ridiculous, because once in a while, it changes everything.
|
| And even if it doesn't, the cheer amount of ingenuity it
| requires brings benefit on their own.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure people said things like that when talking
| about sending people to the moon.
|
| Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times
| and never came back.
|
| > And people probably said things like that to Columbus about
| sending boats across the ocean.
|
| Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that
| specific ocean for centuries.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few
| times and never came back.
|
| And it changed the world forever. Probably contributed to
| avoid the cold war to turn hot. Not to mention we got
| diapers out of it, and a healthy space program that made
| amazing things possible like the GPS.
|
| > Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across
| that specific ocean for centuries.
|
| Nick picking. People didn't know that.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| I'm also pretty sure some people said things like "We will
| soon have colonies on the moon" shortly after Neil Armstrong
| stepped off that Lunar Lander ladder.
|
| Fun fact: No human has set foot on the Moon since 1972:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17
|
| Also: When Columbus set sail, he could reasonably assume that
| he would see his home again. Big boats and long sea voyages
| were not a new technology in his time. When NASA started the
| Apollo Missions, they had them planned out from start to
| finish and knew exactly how that would work.
|
| So yes, once in a while, humanity does something amazing,
| that seems a bit far fetched, but still reasonable. What
| humanity usually doesn't do, is something that it has
| absolutely no plan on how to do it.
| mikewarot wrote:
| If you want humans on Mars, first you need a self-sufficient
| logistics chain on Mars. We've made breathable Oxygen on Mars,
| and we should be able to make a Von Neuman probe to send, and
| set up that supply chain. Instead of having it manage itself,
| we simply make it remote control, and we don't have to worry
| about run-away issues.
|
| We should be able to go anywhere there's large enough of a
| fraction of the resources required for human life. For
| instance, if there's NO phosphorus, instead of just a smaller
| percentage, it's no-go, unless we're willing to live off a
| stockpile imported from elsewhere.
|
| So, ambient temperature and pressure, along with elemental
| composition, are really the only hard limits.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| Mars only has 0.39 of our gravity. I don't see that as a viable
| place for humans to live.
| jayGlow wrote:
| why not? we know microgravity has a negative effect on people
| but we haven't tested 1/3rd gravity. unless I missed
| something we don't know the threshold for negative effects
| from lowered gravity.
| awongh wrote:
| I just watched this depressing video about the $130b dollars
| spent building a high speed rail in England (HS2). He actually
| mentions off-hand how many James Webb Space Telescopes that
| could buy. (the video is about the fact that the rail line will
| actually be 100% useless in the end, not just overpriced)
| https://youtu.be/rQ8mpBL07l8
|
| So maybe it's fine if we spend a bunch of money on getting to
| Mars. There are plenty of interesting arguments for doing it,
| and it would be a way better use of resources than just
| flushing it down the toilet on useless infrastructure. Could be
| much worse.
| Qem wrote:
| > Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation
| propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die
| lonely deaths.
|
| Actually there are elder scientists wanting to volunteer for
| such a mission. See https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG
| mjan22640 wrote:
| Self sustaining robots would be a cool project on Earth even.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Agreed with you.
|
| Relevant reading: "Why Not Mars" [0]
|
| [0]: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I have to ask the stupid question: Geothermal heating and energy
| production is still impossible in a practical sense, right?
| kaycebasques wrote:
| The ingenuity (and accumulated knowledge) of people never stops
| amazing me. "Well, we can't actually drill into Mars to see what
| it's made of, so let's slap a marsquake detector on the surface
| and we'll measure seismic energy from meteor impacts to figure
| out what this bad boy's guts are made of." Of course no NASA
| person actually talks like this; I have been reading too much
| Heinlein.
|
| Also, they use the term "marsquake". Never stopped to think about
| how geocentric the term "earthquake" is!
| KingLancelot wrote:
| It'll blown your mind when you realize what "Geo" means.
|
| (Geo is the Greek word for Earth)
| qiine wrote:
| moonquake exist too !
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/14/world/moonquakes-apollo-1...
| kaycebasques wrote:
| That was some pleasant, info-dense reporting from CNN. Didn't
| know they still had it in 'em!
|
| > The lunar surface is an extreme environment, oscillating
| between minus 208 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 133 degrees
| Celsius) in the dark and 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees
| Celsius) in direct sun, according to a news release about the
| study.
|
| Just re-read _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_. It 's fun to
| have some hard data on exactly how harsh the surface is. It
| comes up a few times in the book.
| wongarsu wrote:
| As the article shortly touches on, it's how we know what the
| earth is made out of too. Our deepest borehole reaches 0.2% of
| the distance to the middle of the earth, most of what we know
| is instead from measuring seismic waves from earthquakes.
| HerculePoirot wrote:
| In French "to land" is "atterrir" (to earth). So we have
| "alunir".
|
| >The eagle has mooned !
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amarsir
| tomrod wrote:
| I love this in so many ways!
| umanwizard wrote:
| "earth" (with a lowercase letter) means roughly the same
| thing as ground, land, soil, etc, just like "terre" in
| French.
| feoren wrote:
| Some people call Hacker News the "Orange Site", but of course
| that's way too fruit-centric, so we shouldn't call it that --
| the website banner is not actually a citrus fruit at all!
|
| Or can we just accept that orange-the-color is a fundamentally
| different idea than orange-the-fruit, despite the fact that the
| former is named after the latter? Can we accept that "earth"
| can simply refer to the material that makes up the hard surface
| layer of a planet, as a different idea than "Earth" the planet
| after which it's named? Is that OK? Do we really need to come
| up with a new word for "Solar Power" if the power comes from a
| light source other than our own sun? Can we call the large-
| scale geoengineering of Mars "terraforming", or must we insist
| that it's "marsaforming" (and not "geoengineering", but
| "marsoengineering")? Can we call something "romantic" even if
| it isn't actually written in Latin ("from Medieval Latin
| romanice, Vulgar Latin romanice ("in the Roman language",
| adverb"))? Is that OK with everyone?
|
| It's a damn earthquake.
| burnished wrote:
| ..how did the words 'marsquake' and 'geocentric' set you off
| so badly? None of your examples even loosely fit the mold,
| 'terra' and 'geo' don't refer to a specific planet in this
| context at all.
|
| Marsquake is a fun word. You can also call it an earthquake
| and no one will bat an eye.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I'm not sure why I agree with the op, but I do. I think it
| has something to do with the fact that this convention of
| planet prefix, and geological activity suffix is not going
| to work well at astronomical scales. Epsilon-eridani-c-
| quake is kind of a mouthful, no?
|
| It could be argued that doesn't work very well on a human
| scale either. after all when there's an earthquake, barring
| a civilization-ending apocalyptic situation, it's not the
| whole Earth that's quaking (at a human scale perspective),
| but rather a localized crustal region of it. A patch of
| earth (lowercase).
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| This is akin to worrying that the sky is falling when
| literally two drops of rain fell.
|
| "Oh my god, what are we going to do when the rest of it
| comes?!"
| feoren wrote:
| > 'terra' and 'geo' don't refer to a specific planet in
| this context at all
|
| Although originating as basically meaning "dry land", the
| word "Terra" became a proper name for the Earth in Latin
| around the Renaissance. The prefix "Geo" comes from the
| Greek for "Earth", the name of our planet. If you argue
| that "geo" really just means "land, ground, soil", etc.,
| then you are _exactly agreeing with me_ , since the word
| "earth" went through the same evolution: Geo-the-planet was
| named after geo-the-dirt. Earth-the-planet was named after
| earth-the-dirt.
| nine_k wrote:
| If we start retiring Earth-centric terms too quickly,
| we'll have to invent tons of planet-specific cognates:
| not geography but marsography, lunagraphy, etc. Same with
| Sun-centric terms vs other star systems.
|
| I would suggest going for generic terms like
| "planetquake".
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| That raises an interesting question, is the surface of Mars
| made out of mars, or is it made out of Earth? In english,
| capitalizing a noun clarifies this, but that approach may not
| generalize to other languages.
| croddin wrote:
| Once we start construction on mars, will the machines be
| called marsmoving equipment?
| Kye wrote:
| Is this a bit? It feels like a bit.
| adolph wrote:
| It got enough comments chewing it that it's at least a byte
| tomrod wrote:
| Quake is sufficient, no need to apply designations.
| adolph wrote:
| Many things may quake, friends.
| tomrod wrote:
| Indeed. Such as planets, love handles during aerobics,
| and Jello.
| dekhn wrote:
| and bowels.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Of course no NASA person actually talks like this
|
| Are you saying "The Martian" was inaccurate?
| ojosilva wrote:
| Off-topic nitpicking: I find it intriguing to encounter the term
| "marsquake" in scientific articles, or anywhere outside science
| fiction. Replacing the prefix "earth" with the nomenclature of a
| celestial body is somewhat perplexing and unnecessary. This
| practice is more plausible when applied to "Earth," our own
| planet with that capitalized "E" - for instance, the
| transformation from "earthling" to "marsling" is linguistically
| sound. Are we going to now "unmars" new data from these studies?
| Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them? Will
| this practice scale when we finally colonize the Solar System and
| have to replace these words for each and every planet or moon?
| Should "colonize" be called "elonize" the Solar System since
| Columbus is controversially bound to Earth history alone? /s
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > Will potatoes grown on Mars have a "marsy" taste to them?
|
| Probably will depend on whether there is a difference you can
| taste from earthy to "marsy" potatoes. Some experimental trials
| [1] have indicated that growing potatoes on Mars will be
| difficult, but possible.
|
| Google is telling me Geosmin is the chemical typically
| associated with earthy odor and taste [2]. The mars regolith is
| apparently quite salty, so it's completely possible that
| "marsy" taste may become associated with some similar common
| chemical product of martian agriculture?
|
| 1. https://cipotato.org/annualreport2016/stories/mars-potatoes/
| 2. https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-
| week/archive/g/geosmin.h...
| bilsbie wrote:
| Why no magnetic field then?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Spoiler: The "surprise" layer is (relatively) quite thin, and
| just outside Mars' molten core. That Mars _has_ a molten interior
| is not a surprise at all, and evidence for very recent
| (relatively) volcanic activity on the Martian surface has been
| piling up for a century or more.
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