Why do people take Elon Musk seriously? I know he’s been successful with his car business, and SpaceX is making great progress, but every time he opens his mouth he sounds like a delusional maniac, or worse, he sounds like the Discovery “Five Year Goals” Institute. His latest extremely optimistic plans are rather unbelievable.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has outlined his highly ambitious vision for manned missions to Mars, which he said could begin as soon as 2022 – three years sooner than his previous estimates.
He’s going to solve all the technical difficulties of that mission — and all of the expenses — in six years. I know the US made a commitment to land a man on the moon in a span of a decade (and succeeded!), but that involved a major effort by a nation, fueled by cold war competition. I don’t think Musk has that kind of clout.
Then, this is really unclear. I assume he’s only talking a small crewed mission in six years, not launching a rocket with 100 people aboard to Mars, but I don’t know — his optimism sounds like it’s going to explode out of the top of his head.
In order to achieve this goal, Musk outlined a multi-stage launch and transport system including a re-usable booster like the Falcon 9 which SpaceX has already successfully tested – only much larger. The booster, and “interplanetary module” on top of it, would be nearly as long as two Boeing 747 aircraft. It could initially carry up to 100 passengers, he said.
That can’t work as a Mars vehicle. A 747 holds 400-500 people in cramped quarters for short hops, but doesn’t need to carry elaborate life-support systems, food, water, and air, and all the fuel for a 260 day journey. But the highest capacity destination in Earth orbit, the ISS, has only 6 sleep stations and has held at most 10 people at once. So I’m not sure why he’s planning a large space bus right now. Especially when he freely states that the current cost of a seat on that bus would be about 10 billion dollars.
But at least he’s solved the really important issue of what to name his space ship already.
The first ship to go to Mars, Musk said, would be named Heart of Gold as a tribute to the ship powered by an “infinite improbability drive” from Douglas Adams’ science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
And it wouldn’t be a Musk event without some mention of the locust mindset. We’re all gonna die if we have to stay on this huge planet we’re adapted to live on, so we’ve got to get a few people to the off-world colonies, which we know are all inhospitable hell-holes. But…but…EXTINCTION EVENT.
He said there were “two fundamental paths” facing humanity today. “One is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event,” he said. “The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization, and a multiplanetary species.”
We know a few things about extinction events, having caused a few for other species. We know, for instance, that a major cause is habitat destruction, elimination of the environment to which the species is well-suited and capable of independent survival. If you want to foster the survival of a species, building a big steel-and-glass enclosure that holds a few representatives that you have to feed and care for artificially is only a stop-gap measure — you want them to thrive, you have to restore their environment fully.
Face reality. If planet Earth goes, so does humanity. It’s the end. Game over. Putting a few of our people in a self-imposed space zoo does not save the species, it only prolongs the agony briefly. If you really care about the problems facing humanity, and are thinking extremely long term, you have to appreciate that a species is part of a larger system that must be maintained.
So please do explore the universe and send rockets and people to other planets — I think that’s cool, and a part of what we overgrown monkeys do. But when you frame it as “saving the species”, I know you’re an ignorant fool and will stop trusting you to be competent at whatever other goals you have.
I’ve really come to loathe this fantasy, because it allows too many people to conveniently ignore just how much we are fucking things up, right here, on this beautiful planet we all live and depend on.
And then that whole Biosphere thingy in AZ was such a success LOL
The only thing I really have a problem with is his timeline. Six years? Maybe he knows something I don’t, but still, I have doubts. I mean, six years? Sixty would be more reasonable, and I would have doubted that too. It smells a bit of “clickbait/instant gratification/etc” pandering.
What’s so wrong with saying; “We’ll do this, it will take decades, but we will do this.”?
He’s rich and he’s telling them what they want to hear.
Anyway, getting to Mars is the easy bit – it’s living there that’s hard. If you want to prevent extinction, then any off-world colonies have to be completely self-sustaining. I’m not sure that many people appreciate just how hard it is to build a completely self-sustaining colony here on Earth, where conditions are perfect. Show me you can build a truly self-sufficient* community in Kansas first – then we’ll try the Atacama desert, then we’ll think about Mars.
I also don’t see why so many people are so excited about the prospect of working their asses off to scrape out a subsistence lifestyle in the ass end of nowhere… You want that, buy a farm in Daniels County, Montana.
(* And I mean truly self-sufficient. You get to take in tools, equipment and materials at the start, then you’re on your own. You need a new shovel? First, find your iron ore…)
I would follow the money. This seems like a scheme to get investors to dole out billions. Even if it’s a failure, Musk and company can use that revenue stream to churn up other billions.
I fight it might be possible to set up an artificial biosphere that can sustain itself long-term, but thinking about that now is like the Vikings dreaming of nuclear subs or oil tankers. We’re making progress in supporting humans in hostile places for years with regular supply missions*, in sending humans to the nearest astronomical bodies for days, and in launching robots all over the Solar System. Before we talk about having a self-sustaining settlement on Mars, maybe have the ability to get humans to Mars and back for a visit first. Or showing the idea works on Earth where we can crack the seals if people run into problems.
(Also, it occurs to me to ask if people would want to do that. I don’t see many people clamoring to settle down in Antartica with no return ticket. Mars is more exotic, and certainly the winters are less depressingly dark, but at least in Antartica, you can go out for a walk in slightly less equipment and get flown back to New Zealand in an emergency.)
* Things like the space station or McMurdo, the latter being less hostile but done first.
still nice to see “visionaries” give us: unreachable dreams to attempt. Even without achieving it, there could likely be very beneficial unintended consequences of our intermediate steps.
EG getting the concept accepted that interplanetary emigration is the only way to avoid the disaster we’re causing here on Earth, may get people working on how to extend the habitability of the Earth. Maybe give us nifty little gadgets to help preserve remnants of survivable environment (like ‘renewable energy sources’, natch).
I guess I prefer optimism over pessimism. Aiming for a goal that requires some cleanup to achieve is a little more motivating than making the clean-up itself the goal. IMO not arguing , just sharing my humble (literally) opinion. *looking down*
In theory, having a few people on another planet would help the species survive an extinction event, if:
1. the event were transient, killing everyone but in a way that the environment came back
2. the colony were self-sufficient for however long that takes
3. the colony had enough resources on its own to send an interplanetary colonization mission back again
But just how far short even a few hundred people in a functioning city would fall is pretty obvious.
Of course the time frame is unrealistic.
And Elon Musk knows damned well the “saving the species” meme is BS, but it is also very good PR since the journalists do not have the background to assess feasibility. He has achieved a lot of publicity with small means.
(this is a more benign form of propaganda than what the the Trumpistas are doing, since Musk is not interested in screwing over minorities or cutting funding for education. Nor is he doing propaganda for coal or tobacco)
I was listening to an interesting conversation that this article recalled for me. I don’t think colonizing another planet would help ward off human extinction, because all of the ‘potential’ planets for colonization, not visitation are so far away and the time scale so long that anybody returning from that planet would be a different species from the population that remained. This is not even near my area of expertise but it sounded plausible. Can anyone who knows more about speciation comment?
Naming his ship after one from the Hitchhiker’s Guide is a great idea. But I think he chose the wrong namesake – it seems like Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B would have been a better analogy. And I think we should make Donald Trump the captain – he can be president of Mars, which is a whole planet, not just a single country, so he should like that.
Has anyone ever pointed out that even during the most terrible extinction events on Earth, our planet was still the most habitable planet in the solar system?
In theory, “strong” AI inside von Neumann machines colonizing small planetoids and uninhabitable planets could have a geometric growth curve, eventually producing a total industrial output compareable with that of Earth. But that is a millennium away.
In theory, that output may help the future humans restore Earth, sequestering carbon dioxide and re-greening regions that have lost most of the topsoil. (this is in territory familiar to readers of SF by Iain Banks, Hamilton and Neal Asher)
Mars-heads are really desperate to go to Mars. They’ll never make it, because they lack the patience to do any of the necessary intermediate steps:
* Create a sealed, unmanned biome on Earth that can live for many years.
* Create a sealed, unmanned biome in orbit or the Moon that can live for many years.
* Develop robotic factories on the Moon that can self-sustain from local materials.
All of these are much simpler tasks than living on Mars, all of them are prerequisites to not dying on Mars, and nobody who is obsessed with humans on Mars gives a shit about any of them. Lets face it, Mars colonization is a big macho posture for people who’ve read too much Heinlein. They think the Moon is wimpy.
Also: maybe we should establish 100% that there is no native life on the red planet before we commit planetary genocide with a plague of human gut bacteria.
It’s silly in the short term, we aren’t going to be colonizing shit in six years, or sixty for that matter. But what about 600? 6000? We’ve been kicking around as a species for 200,000, assuming we don’t kill ourselves first there’s every reason to plan for colonies on other planets. The problem isn’t working towards colonization, the problem is viewing it as a potential solution for short term problems like climate change or habitat destruction or whatnot. Exoplanet colonization is worthless unless we fix the problems we already have. Fix our fuck ups first, after that we’ll worry about getting our asses out of the solar system before the sun kills us all.
“anybody returning from that planet would be a different species from the population that remained.”
Since the human genome is open to modification, even those who remain are perfectly capable of splitting off from the “baseline” human form in many directions, a matter humoristically discussed in Stanislaw Lem’s “The Star Diaries”.
— — — —
BTW since we are now in the middle of a mass extinction, I hope more people will listen to Gregory Benford’s idea of freezing tissue and specimen of endangered organisms, from soil bacteria to big animals. Even if the species go extinct you can -in theory- un exterminate it.
NB “Freezing” does not mean “cryonic preservation”; Rather, you get more information from saving the entire body than saving just the DNA. For instance, you get the commensal bacteria that have co-evolved with the host species.
For example, if human infants do not diversify their gut microbiome (one of the consequences of early starvation), they will get permanent cognitive impairment. Apparently our development has evolved to depend on some chemical signals crossing the gut wall. This is one case of how difficult it is to get an organism to thrive if you do not have the whole complement of commensal organisms. It is also an indication of the difficulties you are likely to face when trying to create a whole new biosphere.
Space colonies have to be self-sufficient in order to be any sort of “hedge” against extinction. (And when it comes to hedges against extinction, EVERYTHING is just a delay of the inevitable – its the length of the delay and the quality of life for the duration that matters)
It does no good if the colonies wither on the vine without support from earth if something happens to the home civilization.
A single colony also isn’t much of a protection. Given the severe technological challenges involved, and the potential consequences if even small things go wrong, one additional colony on a place like Mars is not much of an improvement over earth alone (chances are pretty good that the mars colonies will fail several times, needing reestablishment from earth, before anything serious happens to earth, seeing as how a minor screwup in the atmospheric control system is liable to kill everyone on a mars colony in short order…) You’d probably need several colonies, in different places, up to a hundred or so, each with at least several tens of thousands in population, before you can really say that the system acts as a “buffer” against unexpected disasters threatening the species.
Colonies also aren’t going to be that foolproof a bulwark against some of the biological threats to the species – diseases and invasive will spread from homeworld to colony to colony if there is any maintained trade or contact.
That said, I reject the claim that thinking about space colonization leads to people “ignoring” the problems here on earth, or that its proponents use it as an excuse not to worry about the problems on earth. Elon Musk certainly is not an example of that.
Much of what we would learn attempting to create a self-sustainable space colony will be applicable to helping us maintain a habitable environment on earth, and most of what we would learn working on maintaining our earth as a habitable environment is applicable for building space colony habitats that would be sustainable. The two go hand in hand. We can and should be trying to do both at the same time.
We are centuries away at least from achieving this kind of technology, of course. Making grand promises along these lines is quite premature.
This “ignorant fool” kickstarted the electric car industry and is responsible for the only successful landing of the first stage of an orbital rocket launcher. We need some more such fools.
A few thousand or tens of thousands of people living rather rugged lives on Mars isn’t going to change much for folks back home, especially if or when people are actually living there and Mars stops being romanticized because it’s far away. I’ve met a few people who were like “fuck the Earth – we’ve got Mars/space/etc”, but they were libertarian types who wouldn’t care about the environment even if they didn’t care about space.
I mean, if Musk really had that “locust” mentality, his other two start-ups would be something more lucrative than a solar power firm and an electric car company, right? He could have done what Jeff Bezos did, and kept a main job that served as a cash cow to pay for all the space stuff.
@12 Owlmirror
Yep, and it’s true for just about any natural disaster short of a Dino-Killer-sized asteroid or comet impact (or larger). Of course, there are man-made risks as well that might kill. The 21st century and onward is going to introduce some rather terrifying possibilities for biological warfare.
@9 birgerjohanssen
It’s typical Musk – reach for the next big thing while struggling to follow-up on what he has. Tesla’s had its share of problems as well, and Musk is better at thinking up and developing new engineering stuff than he is at getting the implementation right.
I dunno, if a seat on the thing costs $10bn, then sounds more like it’s Golgafrincham Arc B, and good riddance. You go, Elon!
“And I mean truly self-sufficient. You get to take in tools, equipment and materials at the start, then you’re on your own. You need a new shovel? First, find your iron ore”
A good proof-of-concept project for the first von Neumann machines?
The first things they would have to build would be sophisticated 3D printers, mining equipment and solar cells/nuclear reactors. Humans would only bein the way with their need of a narrow temperature range, oxygen, food, radiation protection, sleep, recreation et cetera.
But I do not see this happening within the next few centuries. Maybe, if your grandkids get the GM patches needed to live to 150 they will experience this?
Part of the reason is, that he (or more like his companies) did some very cool things and did build really difficult technical stuff like a good electrical car or a space rocket. This is in sharp contrast to other people, who mouth off and build nothing.
Does he sometimes exagerate? Are many of his plans too ambitious (at least timeframe wise)? Yes and Yes.
#13:
I think you are off by an order of magnitude.
In 5 years? … maybe not, in 10? … unlikely, in 50? … the jury is still out
But in a 100? Yes! It will not take 1000.
schini,
OK, maybe your children will experiennce strong AI, depending on a good understanding of how to delay ageing and the development of suitable GM technologies.
Not sure if anyone else mentioned this but Billionaires who have spent up to 10 Billion per seat on the “get out of the hell hole of Earth” are probably not the most self-aware, and sharing types of people. Having up to 100 Billionaires on a space zoo flight requires tight and confined living spaces, resource sharing, and cooperation is really, really, really not a good plan for “saving the species”.
The type of mindset that allows you to live a ‘no expense mindset’ on Earth really is a bad idea, you know?
Six years seems really optimistic, but SX is doing some really cool stuff , for example during the course of 2 years they have essentailly mastered reusability(first stage landing) through Trial and error. This has been a big headache for creating cheaper rockets. But as for the “extinction” argument , i agree is bs , take for instance a repeat of the asteroid that “killed the dinosaurs”, such an event might kill most of us instantly , while “lucky” survivers would struggle through 100+ years of nuclear winter. Well that might sound like hell , but its STILL BETTER THAN MARS, or likely any other planet.
I’ll blame capitalism. Our economic system is based on the idea that if 100 people gather in a factory to work, then the owner of the factory rightfully earns the profits from that work simply for being the owner. That the owner should receive the credit for the work quickly follows, hence the usual blather about “job creators.”
That getting rich by selling innovative cars other people invented and built makes you an Innovative Genius worth listening to is just the end result of that.
You’re naming your ship after a fictional spacecraft whose defining trait is its own impossibility. I’m thinking that may be a bad sign.
I checked Wikipedia, and humanity is listed as “least concern.” I think it’s a bit premature to start worrying about extinction.
Mind you, while humanity as a species is likely to survive virtually anything that happens in the next few thousand years, our technological society is a lot more fragile than our species. Any attempt at space exploration is contingent on a massive infrastructure that can only be maintained by a technological society, so if you even want to consider any sort of space exploration of any sort you should probably be more worried about present and very real threats to our ability to maintain the technological and social infrastructure for space travel than to the future extinction of humanity which is both distant and inevitable no matter what anyone does.
brett:
What do you mean “short of” that? As Owlmirror implied, life did survive the “Dino-Killer” impact (which may not have been the only or primary factor that killed off dinosaurs, but never mind). Even while it was happening, Earth would’ve presumably been a better place for humans to inhabit than anywhere else in the solar system. There at least seems like there would’ve been a decent chance for them to survive it, like many other species did (which obviously didn’t require any technological solutions).
People also claimed this about the 19th and 20th centuries (maybe earlier too, I don’t know). Their predictions weren’t all wrong — terrifying stuff did happen — but the fact remains that we are still here.
Anyway, I don’t see how building a spaceship would be any sort of a solution to biological warfare. You fix that kind of problem by not going to war and not using biological weapons in the first place. If you can send some thousands of people (or more) to Mars, you can send a biological weapon to it as well. Is there any reason why the kind of war criminal we’re talking about would consider that off-limits? Besides, the less diverse and more fragile ecosystem/environment in a Mars colony may make it even more devastating than an attack on Earth. So in what sense would it help?
schini:
How do you know this? Or is there any reason at all to believe this is probably true? I agree that we could eventually make strong AI, but I have no idea how I’m supposed to conjure up a timeline for its development. It doesn’t look to me like there is any evidence suggesting it will happen any time soon (within the next century, let’s say), so it looks like a safe bet that it will take longer.
Six years to start with a new vehicle from scratch? Designing and testing a vehicle much much larger and more complicated than the Falcon 9, which took five years? Tell him he’s dreaming.
schini@22: “Part of the reason is, that he (or more like his companies) did some very cool things and did build really difficult technical stuff like a good electrical car or a space rocket.”
Uh, dude…
http://spacenews.com/developing-explosion-rocks-spacex-falcon-9-pad-at-cape-canaveral/
Frog beat me to it. Sending 200 billionaires on a one-way trip into space would be a great day for the Earth and its atmosphere. Musk *is* a genius.
I still think that human beings will live in space someday. But not in a few years, more like a thousand or two years from now, perhaps longer. Assuming we don’t cause our own demise before that of course.
Taking even a few people to Mars and back is orders of magnitude harder than taking them to our moon and back. It took an entire national government to do the latter in about ten years, and another one tried and failed. Musk ain’t going to do Mars in ten years and nobody else is either.
My “vision” for the future of mankind:
1)The current generation will continue to screw up the planet’s ability to support us.
2)The following two generations will face increasingly harsh challenges due to climate change, overpopulation and environmental degradation.
3)In 5 generations we’ll be hunter-gatherers again, on our way to a well deserved extinction.
He’s a nut, but a nut with money and resources and engineering skills. I’ll root him on because I’m a child at heart when it comes to space exploration. Perhaps the resources would be better directed towards wiser concerns at home, but I doubt we’d get a brilliant nut throwing all his effort and skill at something unless he was passionate about it, so I’ll just root him on and hope that his plan works.
as inspiration the idea proposed is great because it works, but as has been pointed out it has some very serious problems to over come to reach any practicality at all.
I can anticipate some spin off from the research that would go a long way to helping to maintain the environmental conditions of earth hospitable for humans. One of the biggest problems that would need to be solved is to reduce the negative impact of the living structures and the processes that need to be done to maintain life.
The resources needed and the waste stream created are a major problem maybe the biggest problem. The ISS just saves all the waste until there is enough than if I remember correctly keeps all the waste in one of the re-supply capsules and when full just “DE-orbits” it (puts the multi million dollar supplied resources now turned into crap and trash into a multi million dollar trash bag and then just burns it up.)
if we can solve that problem for space colonies we can for terrestrial cities as well.
it could change our dwellings as much as the inventions of glass windows or central heating has.
I am not going to guess if we will or when we might
uncle frogy
@27 consciousness razor
Life survived it, but civilization wouldn’t and humans probably wouldn’t. Global firestorm, major ash and dust fall – you’d either have to be very, very lucky or have an exceptionally well-designed underground shelter far away from the impact. It’s one of the few times when Mars wouldn’t be a thousand times worse, because in both cases you’d be spending years inside a heavily sheltered habitat with its own life support system.
Yesterday I heard an argument that setting grand goals, even totally unrealistic ones, is good ANYWAY, because of all the things we will learn by researching how to solve all the problems involved. For example, (I heard) that Elon Musk was researching a new kind of rocket, that used liquid oxygen and liquified natural gas. Historically, NASA went from lox and kerosene in its early rockets, directly to lox and liquid hydrogen, because lox and H2 was the best they could imagine. But, this argument went, LNG has its own set of features that might make it better for this sort of task. (Very large heavy-lift? Long-duration missions?) A different example, The radiation level on Mars (or the Moon) would be too high to allow Earthlings to live permanently on the surface; a Mars base would have to be mostly underground. I would like to see an effort to build a closed colony underground, in an old mine.
Something else that bothered me from the SpaceX release, separately from the “you can’t use this thing to set up a self-sufficient settlement” and the other things that have been dissected at length here already:
Even from the standpoint of relatively short-term planetary exploration, the Falcon XX can’t be used for the missions the SpaceX graphics team showed it doing.
For example, there was a picture of the upper-stage human-carrying vehicle sitting on the surface of Europa. Europa is in the outer part of the Jupiter magnetosphere radiation zone. On most of Europa’s surface, an unshielded human would accumulate LD50 for acute radiation poisoning within 24 hours: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rej/papers09/Paranicas4003.pdf . To bring the radiation dose down to something survivable to us would require either speed-running through the radiation zone in a couple of hours (requiring much more fuel than the rocket can carry and nearly zero time on the surface) or load the upper stage with a literal ton of shielding for every square meter (there goes the entire mass budget).
If SpaceX can build the launch vehicle they described, then there are a lot of valuable projects that could be done with it – including a very nice robotic Europa lander. But those aren’t the projects that they advertised.
@37
That problem goes for all future colonization missions of SpaceX. The have plans hot to get there, but the have not given any indication that they know how to keep people alive once they arrive.
Mars is a hell hole. Besides the cold and lack of oxygen, Mars will possible kill humans in three major ways.
1) Lack of gravitation. While humans can survive micro gravitation for quite a while and Mars has 1/3 of a g of gravity, prolonged exposure to low gravity has major immediat health impacts. And we do not know what the long term impact will be, because we do not have any studies on that. A reduced lifetime at least seams possible and studies have to be done before we can start sending people to Mars for a lifetime.
2) Radiation. Mars does not have a magnetic field nor an atmosphere capable to protect it from charged particles and EM-Radiation. Curiosity measured 300 mSv over 180 days. That is a lot and would lead to an increase in cancer rates. To prevent this you need mass as shielding. And that means living in caves with limited exposure to surface conditions. The psychological impact of living underground for basically your entire live is again unknown and has to be researched.
3) Heavy metals. The surface of Mars is “polluted” with heavy metals and other unhealthy substances. To protected against them will be a major hassle, considering everything that comes from Mars has to be purified.
And there are even more problems. The minimum sustainable population for humans is 10.000. That is a lot of people to sustain under incredible hard conditions.
Another big problem are human rights. To keep such a colon running, you would need a very strict regulated society for a long time. Which is fine for first generation colonists, because they choose that live. But what is with second generation colonists? Can they choose freely what job they do? What if they do not care for Mars and want back? Do they have a vote and if yes for what? Does every colonist get a share of SpaceX? Or does Musk rule about this colony with an iron fist? (The same goes for national/international efforts)
That are all serious questions that have to be answered before we even start building the first colony rocket. And Musk has to this point not even given a hint.
@18
Ever heard of a Blue Origin, the first enterprise to actually do it?
We already have a giant spaceship!!!
I’m on it right now. So are you.
It’s called the Earth. It’s been traveling for 4.5 billion years and the life support system has been running for 3.8 billion years. It is propelled by a mysterious drive force called…gravity with help from the Big Bang.
Admittedly, we are still working on the steering problem. So far all it does is go around the galactic core, over and over again while flying away from the universe center.
Seriously, if we can’t keep a robust, self running spaceship like the earth going, a space colony somewhere is going to be even harder.
@Turi1337 @37:
My point was that SpaceX is misrepresenting their rocket even in terms of short-term planetary exploration. There are a great number of things we could do with such an extreme-heavy-lift launch vehicle: Human missions to near-Earth asteroids lasting 6 months to a year ( with one-tenth of the launch mass being shielding ); potentially setting things up for a two-year long human Mars mission; sophisticated robotic landers on Europa, Enceladus, and Titan; a robotic Neptune orbiter that takes less than 15 years to get there; an extremely large space-based telescope to get resolved images of hundreds of exoplanets. But that’s not what SpaceX tried to sell.
Regarding long-term human settlements on Mars:
There are other problems in addition to those you mention – such as making sure that the perchlorates and hydroxides are adequately removed from any soil and water that would be used to grow any plants (I have had to explain that one too many people since “The Martian” book and movie were released). Even simpler forms of space resource utilization in more-accessible environments require a lot of very carefully-controlled engineering. Surviving anywhere in space isn’t easy.
Regarding human settlements in space in general:
Perhaps not call them “colonies”, given the long and ugly history that is colonialism.
Before any humans are sent into interplanetary space, I would like to see some animal studies of time in that high radiation environment. Send a suitable animal in several capsules out to the L1 Earth/Sun position, and bring them back at different times.
For informed consent in investigative new drug studies, the LD50 in some animal must be known. The same should be expected for interplanetary travel, which allows extrapolation to interstellar travel.
Mars does have a magnetic field, but it’s weaker than Earth’s and more irregular – it’s not one neat dipole (to a good approximation), like on Earth. Depending on where you are on Mars, you can have more or less protection from cosmic rays, so a measurement from a single location isn’t necessarily indicative. As for reduced gravity, 0.376g is not microgravity. Microgravity is close to 0g, as experienced in free fall conditions in, e.g. the ISS, and even there people have lived well for over a year, with rigorous exercise. Mars is nothing like that.
I’m getting tired of the locust argument. Being in the space research community, I would be surprised if there was a single person here (including engineers) who holds the view that space colonization should be pursued at the expense of saving the Earth. And that includes Elon Musk, judging by his non-spare related initiatives. It’s a straw man, as far as I can tell.
The Earth will eventually be uninhabitable – that is a fact – although the scale for that is far longer than the current age of our species. One would simplistically assume that humanity will be long dead by then, but that assumption has actually no data to support it. We are the first technological civilization on our planet. We can’t imagine what we’ll be like in 100 years, much less 1000, much less a billion. We could plunge the Earth in nuclear winter, exterminating most species, and yet we’d probably still survive, because we’re better at surviving than cockroaches. Not all 7 billion of us, but some would. That’s not meant to be a comforting thought, by the way. It’s not a way of saying “screw those 7 billion, we can have a global thermonuclear war because some may survive”. But it’s a natural human tendency to not put all our eggs in one basket. Try with all our might not to blow ourselves to oblivion, but prepare some bunkers just in case. Do our best to keep Earth clean and functional, but, when possible, establish some off-world colonies just in case a rogue exoplanet smashes into it. You may laugh at the improbability of that ever happening, but space colonization is a technological challenge that benefits from human paranoia as much as from our desire to explore, and may have multiple benefits down the line.
I’ll grant you that there are some people (who know very little about space) who see colonization of Mars as a viable alternative to preserving the Earth. I put it to you that the only thing that will convince them otherwise is an actual colony on Mars, from which they can see how much cost goes into everything and how inhospitable Mars is at its best compared to Earth at its worst. I have often read that one of the biggest boosts to environmentalism was the photos of Earth from the Apollo missions. For the first time, humans saw Earth for what it really is, a small, fragile blue sphere suspended in the barren emptiness of space. Although it provided no new facts, the emotional impact was profound. The further we move from Earth, the less it becomes the universe in people’s emotion, that eternal unchanging environment where we emerged, that is bountiful but essentially indestructible but by divine power, and the more it becomes a planet. Small, rare (in this solar system or in general – I doubt one can get a planet with a predominantly oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere without billions of years of biological activity), and special. Something to be preserved rather than exploited. You may not need such a prompting to appreciate that, but many people do.
You say “please do explore the universe”, and I hear that and appreciate it. But when you call people “ignorant fools” for wanting to establish colonies in space it sounds like you’re using the technological state of the present to deny any utility of colonization in the future, and to rant against the kind of research that will eventually lead to a future where it may make more apparent sense. Ten years ago I would have laughed at the idea of a rocket’s first stage landing back where it started, ready to be reused. I’m no longer laughing. I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy, but I have a healthy appreciation of the capability of humans to, in some cases, overcome seemingly insurmountable problems when they’re passionate about something. Ridiculing them doesn’t help. Although, that said, I should confess that I’m generally dismissive of Mars One, since they don’t seem to have any technological expertise to back up their plans.
brett:
Why?
Yes, sounds pretty awful. Do you think many thousands of species which did survive (and were not designing underground shelters or anything else) were “very, very lucky”?
What does it mean that they had to be “lucky” or that we “probably” wouldn’t make it? If you’ve got a lottery with lots of winning tickets, you’re not talking about something that requires a great deal of “luck.” And once you introduce modern humans with all of their intellectual and technological abilities, their chances seem to be better than some species which survived (or came close to it) without such advantages.
Even so, it would be worse, making it “more habitable” — are you agreeing here?
On the other side of that habitat is either (1) Earth, in roughly the same physical condition which makes it habitable to a huge/diverse array of species, but quite a bit less pleasant for a few decades or centuries, or (2) Mars, with its low temperature, minimal atmosphere and magnetic field, almost certainly no life outside the shelter to depend on, etc.
I know which place I would rather set up a shelter, since it would be much easier and require less comprehensive protections to make up for the hostile aspects of the environment. Fuck, you can even toss in some velociraptors that are trying to eat me in addition to the catastrophic impact, and I’ll still prefer Earth. Mars really sucks. Nobody with any sense would ever want to live there if they had a choice.
@4, Dunc
DING DING DING
Yeah, he’s the Trump of the tech sector. Only with enough business sense so that his ventures are generally healthy, of course! Not that his success is his work, rather than that of the engineers he purchased expensively. And sometimes cheats out of their pay, what makes ’em sue for a pretty dollar. Hey, another Trump parallel!
This is a strange argument. The universe will eventually be uninhabitable. If you’re worried about something you can hardly imagine in a few billion years, why aren’t you worried about our descendants’ survival a trillion years from now, ten trillion, and so on?
I mean, from the perspective of a human lifetime (some decades) or the lifetime of a civilization (some centuries), those timescales are are all enormous. One billion years is just as preposterous as one trillion, when you’re talking about what human beings might plan to do with themselves. As advanced or unusual as we might be, we don’t plan ahead for much beyond a few years or decades (when we do it at all) — that isn’t something that’s only happened once or which we’re not so sure about for whatever reason, because history is littered with examples.
Anyway, if you’re going to dream big like this, why be so parochial about the fate of our solar system? The problems don’t stop with our sun. Why pretend there’s some glimmer of hope that our descendents won’t at some point go extinct? That will happen, and no amount of technological sophistication or research or planning or whatever is going to change that.
@46 consciousness razor:
I agree that a billion years is a preposterous time scale, but it’s an upper limit on the Earth becoming uninhabitable. There are all sorts of nasty events that can happen between now and then and, while sending a handful of people off to primitive colonies in the near future wouldn’t save us, it’s a start, and you’ve got to start somewhere. One may argue that it makes no financial sense for people to spend their money on such projects now while they could be waiting for the technology to progress further, but when it’s the private sector doing it (e.g. Elon Musk), then the argument becomes “I should have a say in where you spend your money” for something that has no negative impact on other people or Earth (since the locust argument is a strawman). If it’s a con, if it’s promising clearly impossible things in an attempt to get thousands of regular people to part with their money, then shout away and I’ll happily join you. I get that vibe from Mars One, but not from this project – at least not yet – but one can be skeptical about its feasibility (I certainly am) without disparaging the whole concept of space colonies because of it.
Over very long time spans, our remaining descendants are likely to be AIs. They should be a bit more robust.
As mentioned earlier, Musk is just doing clever PR.
But the underlying concept is interesting, I have been a member of the Mars Society from the start and they have helped inspire NASA policy to try to go beyond low Earth orbit with crewed missions.
Look at this link to Reddit(sorry).. Essentially, it’s Musk making excuses for not going for an IPO to employees who got paid in stock options. Essentially, my impression is he’s under pressure and wants to delay going public, because then his manifest destiny would never actually, har har, manifest.
As for how interesting is his idea, it should be made illegal, Mars is far more interesting if there are no sacks of meat and bacteria polluting the place. It’s scary that everyone’s so stuck in the colonial mindset that it’s nearly impossible to outright reject the idea of landing humans there as not infeasible, but unwanted.
I think he’s brilliant. Shove 100 obscenely wealthy parasites into a rocket and charge them 10 billion dollars a head to send them to Mars where they belong.
consciousness razor @ # 44: And once you introduce modern humans with all of their intellectual and technological abilities, their chances seem to be better than some species which survived (or came close to it) without such advantages.
If you intend to use the same human species that just crashed a relatively well-balanced ecosystem as your operators — the heirs of those who have already devoured most of the oceans and chewed up most of the lands with market economics, population overgrowth, and warfare — odds for a turnaround before hitting bottom seem rather slim.
The Sixth Extinction may not reach Permian levels, nor merely Cretaceous, but even a Toba scenario (surviving human population in the low-5-digit range) seems improbable optimism when you consider the multiple vultures coming home to roost. If the cockroaches don’t make it, the weeds will. Or maybe fungi ‘n’ algae.
Mars really sucks. Nobody with any sense would ever want to live there if they had a choice.
Yeah, but – like New York, it might be fun to visit. Would also make a fine mortuary. Save the best spot for Elon.
@consciousness razor
Very lucky or small was the order of the day when it came to surviving the K-T impact and its aftermath.
Fair enough, assuming you’re fortunate enough to be in a place to survive the impact.
As for the “immortality” argument made by @seleukos, it’s true that a lot of these are very far off. But Musk is alive now, so why not do what he thinks his part could be in helping it?
@applehead
The stuff with the engineers is not so hot, but in most regards he’s the anti-Trump, investing in bleeding-edge businesses that aren’t super-profitable but may be technologically interesting and useful down the line. I said it above, but if all Musk wanted was more money (and Trump has given every indication that money is the only thing he truly cares about), he could have skipped all this rocket and electric cars stuff and focused on making a more conventional tech startup (or started a hedge fund). The guy got rich off of Pay-Pal.
Hell, he could have done that and SpaceX, like how Bezos keeps running Amazon while doing his Blue Origin side project.
@ModZero
That’s because most people don’t reject it, including me. The only situation in which I’d reject a crewed surface landing would be if we did a number of robotic landings with good life detection equipment and found strong results within the top few meters of Mars for life. Otherwise, it’s probably kilometers down – send a drill and put it through Category IV-level sterilization before you send it, and you’re golden.
I admire his optimism. I think it’s misplaced, but I admire his optimism. I would ask some serious questions about who he plans to have colonise Mars, though.
My theory is the first successful off-Earth colonies aren’t likely to follow the model of the settling of the US western frontier, which is the romantic ideal most people (particularly in the USA) think of when they think of “colonists” (free settlers, moving into “empty” land – “empty” because the native inhabitants have all been moved on through forced re-settlement and genocide, and making a go of it supported only by their own hands… and the massive infrastructure investment of the US federal government). This romantic ideal ignores a lot of things, such as the way this expansion didn’t occur until after the land area which became the USA had been colonised for anything up to about three hundred years; the way it depended on a lot of infrastructure on the east coast, and the expansion of this infrastructure (particularly railway lines) for its sustenance; the way a lot of the colonists, particularly the smallholders, didn’t succeed – they got bought out or starved out by ranchers; and the way it was a lawless and highly uncomfortable place to live for long periods of time.
I would argue the far more likely model to be followed is what I’d call the Australian model – a large bunch of highly expendable prisoners as a labour force (offer it as an option to the “lifers” or long term prisoners in the US prison system – you’re starting to see similar pressures over there to what the UK was facing back in the late 1700s); a smaller bunch of only slightly less expendable warders or guards (recruited from the lower classes of society, and offered this “chance” as a way of getting a leg up into a more affordable life; or alternatively and more cynically, offered this “chance” as a way of giving their families a leg up by way of their death benefits); and a small class of officers and governors, who may or may not be repatriated should things go minorly wrong (they’d be the ones staying in the mother ship for at least the first six months or so). But even they would be expendable if things went seriously wrong.
People paint this picture of the first extra-terrestrial pioneers as being brave explorers. I think we’re more likely to see them being the expendable “dregs” of society, launched out into the stars with a set of instructions which more closely resemble “and don’t come back!” than “back with your shield or on it”.
seleukos:
Such as?
A start to what? Who is “us,” when and where and how are they being saved from what?
First of all, the private sector isn’t doing this by itself. You may call it a “public/private partnership,” but it seems more like an abusive relationship than that term suggests.
We should all have a say in what happens when huge corporations (or even individual people) spend “their” vast resources without regard to anyone or anything else but themselves. Because that shit does impact other people. Climate change comes to mind — perhaps this is one of your short-to-medium-term problems that are supposed to motivate an escape. However, it is a direct result of the “I’ve got mine, fuck you” mentality that I’m supposed to be accepting here. If that’s going to escape with us all to Mars too, we haven’t solved anything.
I don’t know what you mean by “the locust argument” or what it’s supposed to be a strawman for, but I am sure that billions of dollars (and equivalent resources) would be wasted on a project like this (and of course there’s consequently irreversible environmental damage associated with that). That can be spent on many other things that will improve the lives of non-billionaire human beings (and billionaires too, if they had any such needs), in permanent and non-fanciful ways in the real world. Maybe we can call this the “parasite argument.”
I guess you could, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t disparage the whole concept of space colonies, for reasons that have nothing to do with feasibility.
My friend is going to have to update her Tshirt which reads: “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we send them all?”
There’s about a trillion lbs of living human meat on Earth. It’s not going anywhere; it’ll all die here. Lifeboat scenarios are silly.
birgerjohansson@#13:
In theory, “strong” AI inside von Neumann machines colonizing small planetoids and uninhabitable planets could have a geometric growth curve, eventually producing a total industrial output compareable with that of Earth. But that is a millennium away.
The software and firmware in them will be backdoored by every government on earth, to the point where ultimately every one of them has a unilateral veto. And one of them will. Or they’ll be used as a weapon.
Human nature’s the problem, we don’t solve that, all the other stuff’s not going to matter because someone’s going to shit on it because they want to show they don’t have small hands, or something.
I say let him build his rockets and fail, as he will. Biology will never leave this solar system unless we develop a new understanding of physics that allows for it, but robots can, in theory, go on forever.
Maybe his stunt turns out to be the spark that lights the fire that lights up the universe by giving technology that little nudge that allows for self replicating AI to explore the cosmos? Maybe that’s the legacy of humans, to have birthed a new kind of life that couldn’t have come about through any other means? Who knows?
It’s not likely, but it’s his money and things will be learned from it either way, even if we only learn that The Invisible Hand of capitalism is a failure when it comes to the advancement of science.
That being said, major breakthroughs in physics tend to be profound and world changing. We haven’t had one in quite some time and we’re reaching the technological limits, in some respects, of how much we can take advantage of the knowledge that we have now. We were at the end of a spurt as it were, and right now there’s no clear way forward in physics. CERN pretty much just confirmed what we already knew. It was good to have that confirmation but no new real knowledge was gained.
Point is, directed science doesn’t always get it right and some times dreamers do.
If I view the entirety of human history, past present and future, as a finished painting, I do not suspect that EM’s will be the brush stroke that keeps it from being a masterpiece.
I get the feeling that many people think that being rich, in and of it’s self, is a bad thing. If all billionaires were like Gates and Buffet, I wouldn’t have a problem with the existence of billionaires. It’s the Trumps and the Koch Brothers and the Murdochs of the world that are dangerous.
Musk is neither Gates nor Murdoch, so I say let him do his thing.
My problem with the whole space pioneer thingy isn’t that I’m opposed to colonizing space-though admittedly that’s not a massive priority for me, it’s that folks like Musk think that humanity can rest on it’s laurels if it saves a couple of space colonists and presumably bugger all the billions left on Earth.
I am in favor of space exploration, if they find life in the seas of Europa-massively cool I just think it’s a tad elitist to say you’ve “saved” humanity if you plonk ten thousand of them on Mars while all the other humans still here presumably die off painfully.
A group of humans transported back to the day of the impact, if placed in a sheltered natural location on the other side of the planet, would have at least a 50-50 chance of surviving, with only stone age technology, for several hundred years.
Some of the species that ultimately went extinct during that event (and indeed during any of the mass extinction events), still managed to survive in those conditions for tens of thousands of years, ie two or three times longer than human civilization has existed in its entirety.
No where on the Mars can you say the same thing. If we managed to set up a Mars colony that lasted for a mere 500 years before something happened that either killed everyone or forced an evacuation back to earth, we’d still hail the venture as a resounding success and be eager to try again!
The only place on earth that even approached the average habitability of Mars on a good day, even during the height of the KT extinction event, was the immediate impact zone, and even there only for a short period of time.
Sounds like Ken Carter with his plan to jump a car from Canada to America. Whenever the investors start complaining add a new tweak to the original plan and cut a few months off the projected start date.
@brett, 53
I said that they don’t reject it, and you didn’t actually refer to the colonial thing. See, “traces of life” wouldn’t be the only thing lost if the planet got covered in moss or equivalent. We can pretty much never say that we know we got all we could from it, and for what? It’s useless as living space, any minerals are better acquired from the more handy and less unique asteroids. Planetary science lab is pretty much the only way the planet has value, and we want to let it be squandered because someone is still impressed with Columbus in 2016.
@ consciousness razor
Such as a gamma ray burst in this galaxy pointed our way, or any other freak non-human caused occurrence. Those are rare, but given enough time anything can happen. I’m not thinking of global warming because that’s human-caused and, although it will cause irreparable damage to the ecosystem, ruin the lives of billions, and probably lead to brutal wars over resources, I doubt it will actually lead to our extinction. As for “a start for what”, I’m referring to gathering knowhow on setting up colonies far from Earth, which is far from trivial. As for who is “us”, it’s humans. If something truly catastrophic does happen, I’d like humanity, as a species, to survive. I don’t care if that subset of humanity doesn’t include me, my relatives, or anyone of my nation, as long as it contains humans or equivalent entities capable of continuing to make sense of this universe. Until (if) we discover technological aliens, we must act on the pessimistic assumption that we are the only scientific species in this part of the universe, and if we were to die out it would be a staggering loss. Who would care?, you may ask. Exactly, I would answer.
SpaceX, along with other companies, has been taking advantage of the lack of NASA spaceships since the retirement of the space shuttles to resupply the International Space Station. I was skeptical of this at first, since it seemed like an ideologically (or worse) motivated effort to bring the private sector into what was already done quite efficiently by the public sector. But I’ve changed my mind recently, since this appears to be generating genuine innovation. If this impacts other people, of course it concerns us. If SpaceX ends up having a significant effect on the climate with its activity, it should be regulated or fined accordingly. But so far it doesn’t, so I’m not going to criticize someone on hypotheticals.
As for the locust argument, that’s how PZ has referred to space colonization schemes in the past, reasoning that the people who propose them intend to strip Earth bare of all its resources and then move on to the next planet to do the same. He has ascribed this mentality to Carl Sagan, IIRC, in previous posts, and also to Elon Musk, and I don’t think I commented on it back then so I did so now.
I respect your disagreement on the idea of space colonization. I, for one, don’t believe that if such a project were to go ahead it would take away any resources that would otherwise go to combating world hunger or reversing climate change. The world economy isn’t neatly divided into “space” and “fixing the Earth”, and I’d wager that people who are willing to invest in one of those are more willing to invest in the other as well, compared to those who prefer to invest in unrelated things.
“Human nature’s the problem, we don’t solve that, all the other stuff’s not going to matter ”
Human nature 2.0 should arrive faster than 1.0 did, by way of GM. The challenge is, identifying the genetic correlate to “human nature”….
Not entirely getting it…
A planet with hardly any atmosphere, no fossil fuels, hardly any water, and insane temperatures on which you need five meters of soil to shield yourself from solar radiation. e.g. Mars.
Or planet with plenty of atmosphere (maybe polluted a bit), no fossil fuels, too much water, and thoroughly unpleasant but not insane temperatures on which you need five meters of soil to shield yourself from nuclear fallout. e.g. Post-apocalyptic Earth.
Seems to me that post-apocalyptic Earth is the easier planet to colonize. Even in a worst-case scenario, I can’t imagine anything we could do our planet that would make it a worse planet to colonize than Mars.
And if the purpose of the exercise is to get away from people, Antarctica is still a much nicer place to live than Mars.
Things also happen on Mars. There’s some non-zero chance that both planets will be destroyed or sterilized. A Mars colony would not in any sense be safer. It would be another place in the universe where people are not permanently safe. Sure there would be two such places instead of one. But the people on Mars would be much less safe compared to those on Earth, so why would they be living there? Will this be a prison colony, like someone mentioned above?
I don’t think it matters if we know about intelligent aliens. I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t care about the survival of humanity in the future, for as long as that’s possible, although I wouldn’t say it’s primarily about us being a “scientific species.” But at some point it will be impossible (no different for von Neumann replicators, if you want to count those too), and it makes no sense to claim we should do what we can’t.
Not an argument in favor of them. NASA and other public institutions generate genuine innovation, when the public funds them. The public should fund them.
All of those resources could be better spent elsewhere. That’s posed as a counterfactual (because they’re not in fact being spent that way), not a hypothetical. I’m not imagining it, nor am I hypothesizing that it’s possible or conceivable. That’s a concrete, tangible way it actually impacts real people now.
Your argument was that I can have no basis for criticizing (or even caring about) how other people spend “their own money,” simply because they claim it’s theirs. But in a free and fair society, in the real world where actions have consequences, I do.
I’m not interested in people who are “willing to invest” in humanity’s fundamental existential problems. It shouldn’t be construed as a voluntary, private charity which some willing (and wealthy) benefactor decides to run however they see fit (in a position which supposedly can’t be criticized, because it’s their personal hobby and “none of my business” how they spend “their money”). We should all, as a society, work on it collectively and democratically to the extent that we can, because we’re all responsible for it. Your friendly neighborhood billionaire/genius isn’t supposed to do it for us, just like a kindly magician in the sky isn’t supposed to do it for us. It’s our job, and we shouldn’t be satisfied with whatever happens to trickle down to us. I don’t know if you’ve had too much free market Kool-Aid or if you’re just not used to thinking this way, but I’m saying this is how we should be thinking about it.
Such negativism. Even *if* it doesn’t come to full fruition, how much potential innovation, what new technologies, what new knowledge stands to be gained from even striving for such an endeavor? Of course it’s worth trying even in spite of the problems we have hear on earth. Perhaps a discovery accidentally helps solve a more domestic problem, we’ll never know if no one tries.
Forget this gloom and doom “won’t save the species” crap. Is that what’s really important? What happened to the love of discovery and adventure? Knowledge that could be gained simply in the act of seeking knowledge?
Go for it Elon, and best of luck to you.
I love this sort of “spin-off” argument… You could apply it to almost any endeavour you like. Fancy stacking dwarves up to 5km on each other’s shoulders? Photographing ghosts? Inventing a steam-powered, cat-navigated craft which can both travel underwater and fly through space? Well, sure, maybe it’s not possible, but we might accidentally invent some cool technology in the process if we just try hard enough…
Basically, what this argument says is “sure, I can’t give you any kind of plausible reason for why we should pursue my pet project, but maybe something will come up along the way”.
The first large payloads may be shipped with chemical rockets.
But a sustained long-term effort requires nuclear thermal rocket engines. They may not be so difficult or expensive to develop, but they will in turn require a sustained engineering effort.
For this, government funding will be required as no commercal payoff will be in sight.
You seem to have lost touch temporarily with reality. Instead let’s look at the “spin off argument” from a realistic perspective and you’ll see that it indeed works. NASA alone has brokered many new technologies during it’s time; things needed to make other things successful that wind up having other uses for the rest of us. This isn’t “stacking dwarves” or “photographing ghosts”, this is grounded in reality and making life better.
I have to worry about someone that uses ridiculous arguments designed to attack reason form an illogical emotion based direction, especially when that argument goes against potentially improving life for the rest of us down the road. Seriously, you deliberately chose absolutely ridiculous “arguments” that have no basis in reality to attack advancing technologies? Why would you do that or even think those arguments would give even the illusion of being credible?
Yeah, maybe nuclear turns out to be the way to go, who knows. Ion engines seem interesting (but perhaps not at large payload sizes), other new technologies such as a mass-driver could be developed (we’ve a lovely moon to put one on…)
I can think of other uses already though for those big nuclear engines. For example, asteroid/comet redirection. The stronger the engines the larger the gravity well you can place next to a dangerous body to alter it’s orbit and put it out of harms way. Speaking of asteroids and comets, I could see an enterprising individual taking a shot that they contain enough resources to be worth a mining consideration.
I love the idea of the government dumping money into stuff like this. If I had my way I’d increase NASA’s budget by at least ten-fold and tell them to go crazy with it. That’s the nice thing with NASA, the sky isn’t the limit, it’s just the first step.
Yeah, like, for example, improvement to airport traffic control systems. Which has nothing to do with putting humans in space, and that’s quite similar to most useful advancements from NASA, the national *AERONAUTICS* and space administration, with the space part tacked on to tickle some egos. Even the few things that came up during Apollo (bits of new mathematics, some material science) were probably unavoidable anyway, precisely *because* they are so useful in other fields.
Well the original Apollo program was grounded in reality because there was a solid scientific rationale for the missions, sure there was an element of “Cold war pissing contest”, regardless they did measure seismic activity on the moon, the did return samples, they did scientific research in other words.
Musk’s Mars colony is not a scientific rational it’s a science fiction book blurb. If you sink billions of dollars into a high scale science research project and there are spin offs well and good. If you expect spin offs from funding fever dreams that’s not the same thing.
You propose a solid, scientific reason for a manned mission to Mars I’ll be all for it, but misty eyed visions of carrying humanities torch into the cosmos aint that.
It’s a fantasy, and an elitist fantasy at that. What difference would it make to a Pacific islander who’s homeland’s underwater because of global warming to know that a bunch of Elon Musk’s dupes were eking out a living as dirt farmers on Mars?
I disagree with Myers in that I think it may be possible to make space colonies some time down the track but, until you can build a viable self sustaining habitat right here it’s not worth throwing them onto another planet and expecting them to work better because they’re in a worse neighborhood.
If Musk and co want to go to Mars they should have a valid reason, the Apollo programs weren’t a cakewalk for the astronauts involved and the ISS is still risky now. Before you expose human beings to bone loss, radiation poisoning et cetera, ad lib you should have a coherent mission rationale.
@consciousness razor
You misconstrue me. When I talk about investing, I’m not referring specifically to corporations, but also to governments or any other type of personal or cooperative entities. They are all made of people, so your comment that you’re “not interested in people who are “willing to invest” in humanity’s fundamental existential problems” could be just as easily misinterpreted by me as anti-human if I were biased against your posts. I’ve never worked in the private sector, and am quite happy working as a scientist on CSA and ESA projects, but I don’t consider either governments, corporations, or billionaires as inherently good or evil. Take that as you will.
I’m also not in any way passionate about a Mars colony, nor do I consider it a magical solution against extinction events. I do consider it a neat project, if we could get it off the ground eventually, and a springboard for further space travel. There are so many people willing to live on Mars, even with all the related hardships, that the idea of a prison is nonsensical. The most efficient way would probably be an international megaproject, as generously funded as Apollo was back in the day, but you wouldn’t approve of governments spending money on it, and neither would most people, so it’s a moot point. If there’s a billionaire who’s willing to use his wealth to give it a try, instead of using it like Trump or the Koch Brothers to make the world worse, I’m not going to give him flak for not following my directives on how to use it more efficiently.
Probably no difference at all, but so what? You’re tying two completely unrelated things together reaching for an emotional response instead of a logical one. The Pacific Islanders are going to have to deal with identical issues whether or not Elon Musk makes his Mars shot or not. Global warming is going to be quite the problem to deal with for sure, but it’s not related in any way to the issue. (Claiming the money should be spent there is a cop out. Money isn’t going to fix the problem, changing the politics will.)
A valid reason according to who? “Because it’s there” can be a perfectly valid reason for some people. “Because no one has done it before” is a valid reason to some. Whether or not you think the reasons are valid is irrelevant.
Ugh, silliness.
seleukos wrote:
Except there is Gary Johnson who recently said we shouldn’t do anything about climate change because we should be focusing on colonizing other planets instead (and also that we shouldn’t do anything about it because the sun would destroy the earth eventually). It turns out that there are indeed people who will use an idea like this to avoid addressing world hunger or climate change.
@ grumpy santa.
“Because it’s there” is a heck of a thing a risk for the people that Musk wants to send off on his adventure that he can watch fail from the comfort of his Earthbound mansion.
Also, as I said my issue is not being opposed to colonizing other planets per se. I am however opposed to doing it as an alternative to fixing Earth’s climate woes as has been propsed by a number of loopy libertarians. It’s also daft to send people off with the explicit goal of colonizing if you cannot maintain an enclosed biosphere habitat here on Earth. If you do you are setting yourself up for failure and risking the lives of your personnel.
You mean the volunteers that will choose to go there knowing it may very well be a one-way trip, if they even make it at all? Yes, it certainly will. Those are the types of people that blaze trails the rest of us will eventually travel in comfort, and our history owes a lot to these types of people from the past.
Yeah, I’d have to agree with you fully there. We should set our sights on doing both and more, it’s not a “one or the other” type of thing.
parrothead:
So, how many of us will eventually travel to the North pole? The ocean depths? The Moon?
I tell you now: MOST CERTAINLY not “the rest of us”.
(All far, far easier than travelling to another planet — something nobody has yet done.
PS parrothead:
Opportunity cost. Are you aware of TANSTAAFL? Associated with RAH, but predates his popularisation.
parrothead.
If you send people to Mars with the explicit goal of colonization and you can’t demonstrate that you can maintain a completely enclosed, self contained biosphere for a human lifetime that’s not blazing a trail, it’s suicide. Encouraging people to commit suicide to massage your own ego is abhorrent.
evodevo@2: Biosphere is a success!! (as a tourist trap).
I understand they continue to do research there now, but last time I talked to anyone who actually knew anything about it, they said they were years away from actually being able to make it work. And this is 20 years after the initial try.
Think of the great stuff they could do if they spent that money educating people instead of blowing soot into the atmosphere.