Skepticism is so easily displaced by fantasy


We’ve seen it so many times before, you think we’d learn. The glib, charismatic con man, short on evidence but long on vision. The desirable dream: cure my fatal disease, show me proof of an afterlife, teach me how to unleash my psychic powers. We’re supposed to be good at recognizing those, and rejecting them. But it turns out that the con man just needs to tailor his fantasy to fit, and he can reach even the hard core skeptics. In this case, it’s the vision of shiny spaceship and a voyage to Mars.

mars

I’m not at all impressed with Elon Musk’s recent PR sweep, but then, I’m into crunchy-slimy biological stuff, and his fantasy is aimed at the physics and engineering crowd. Maybe if he promised to seed Mars with genetically resurrected Mesozoic vertebrates he’d be able to rope me in? Nah, that’s too silly.

But I’m sorry to say that Phil Plait is thrilled, although he also has reservations. The rocket is really big — it hasn’t been built yet, but it’s yuge. Isn’t that enough to win you over?

First, the rocket. The as-yet unnamed booster is beefy. It’ll be 122 meters tall and about 12 meters wide (the Saturn V was 111 x 10 meters in size). That’s big. But it’s the thrust that shocked me: It’s planned to have a staggering 13,000 tons (29 million pounds) of thrust. The Saturn V—still to this day the most powerful rocket ever launched—had a thrust of 3,500 tons (7.5 million pounds). The SpaceX booster will have a thrust 3.5 times as much as that.

But he’s not totally blinded by the glory of that massive phallic erection. He has some serious concerns as well.

Still, I have some bigger concerns. For example, a trip to Mars using the ITS will take roughly 80 to 140 days (Mars has an elliptical orbit, so sometimes the dance of the planets brings it closer to Earth than other times, so this is an average). This raises the danger of radiation. Normally this isn’t all that big a deal; in interplanetary space, levels are low. But if there’s a solar storm like a flare, this can send deadly waves of subatomic particles racing into space. If such an event occurs, astronauts will have to be protected.

Musk was remarkably cavalier about this, saying it’s not that big a deal. I disagree; it’s something engineers will have to plan for, especially given the sheer number of flights planned. Over 10,000 trips, the odds of a ship getting hit are very high indeed. Water is an excellent shield, and the ships will need plenty of it, so designing the transport to use it that way would be beneficial.

Wait — here’s a serious flaw in Musk’s plan, it’s an obvious problem, and Musk is dismissing it. Shouldn’t that make every one realize that this is not even at the design stage yet, let alone the actual engineering phase, and that all Musk has is a flashy video of a scheme he dreamed up? For normal people, this Mars trip is at the sketched-on-a-napkin-while-drunk phase, but because it’s Elon Musk, he can hire an animation team to have his napkin sketch professionally rendered as a slick animation, and everyone is going oooh and aaaah over it. This is pure pixels and vapor, why are people defending this?

Here’s another example: Jason Torchinsky sees big problems with Musk’s spaceship.

This week electrovehicle and space transit magnate Elon Musk unveiled his master plan for the human race to become “a multi-planetary species”, starting with travel to Mars. But while I know it’s an act of remarkable hubris for me to even say this, I believe SpaceX’s plans for their Interplanetary Transport System have some pretty glaring flaws. The good news is they are flaws that are easily corrected by applying some decades-old solutions from the American and Soviet space-faring experience.

No! It’s not hubris! Musk is dreaming of throwing 200 people at a time into space, and you’re wondering about the propriety of questioning the God-Man’s holy prescriptions?

What Torchinsky does next is get out his own paper napkin, and completely redesign everything — the Mars vehicle, the entire mission profile, all gets chucked in the trash and brand new, completely different ideas slung around, all while singing the praises of Elon Musk. He even points out that parts of the Musk plan make no sense at all, he is “delighted by the whole Mars/Interplanetary travel plans”.

It’s bizarre. We’re seeing people in the tech/engineering sector simply losing their minds over a poorly thought-out dream.

Allow me to point out a few other lacunae in the Musk scheme.

  • People are treated as passive cargo. He’s talking about cooping up hundreds of people in a tin can the size of “two 747s” for 80 days. Ask any airline what happens when an airplane is grounded on the tarmac for a few hours — they go insane. Musk blithely suggests that “games” will be available to play…for months. In inevitably cramped quarters. He hasn’t given a second’s thought to the psychological issues.

  • All of the attention is focused on the big rocket, but not on the destination. You’ve landed 200 people on Mars, so now what do they do? How do you go about creating a self-sustaining colony? This is a non-trivial problem, especially if your dream is to put a million people up there. What are they going to eat? I hope to god he doesn’t think The Martian solved everything, because no, you’re not going to put up a dome and raise potatoes. Agriculture is not something simple, especially not on Mars.

  • Assume your desperate colonists find a way to extract air and water from rocks, and have somehow managed to scrape together a thin diet from poop and dust, like The Martian (I am giving them sooo much here; there is no plan, so I’m being overly generous). Now what? They learn from the space radio that the latest Marvel superhero movie is out, and being a bunch of nerds, they very much want to see it. How do they pay for it?

    No, really. This colony will die without trade and revenue. They’ve got to be doing something that is of value to Earth, and they have to be able to export it, and import luxuries. Ships full of potatoes flying back to Earth won’t cut it. What will be uniquely produced on Mars that makes it economically viable in the long run?

  • So far, all Musk has said about the utility of the Mars colony is that it can produce fuel for other journeys deeper into space. Will the colonists be informed that their fate is to spend the rest of their lives in the Musk Mines, laboring to scrape out volatiles to keep themselves alive and to propel the ambitions of the Musk Fleet? Will one ton of extracted hydrogen be rewarded with one ticket to The Avengers XXIII: The Hulk Gets New Pants? Will this be the new high tech version of the Company Town, in which the residents are totally owned by Musk Enterprises, right down to having to buy the air they breathe?

  • What’s the dream, beyond “let’s live on Mars”? There were a lot of utopian movements in the 19th and early 20th century where a charismatic leader would organize a group of men and women to found a colony in the wilderness: we had several in America, there were others in the Galapagos and other exotic islands, or South America. Virtually all of them failed — the Mormons are one notable exception. What’s the unifying ideology that’s behind Mars? The Cult of Musk? Free Love? Low-G Sex? The joys of scraping volatiles out of rocks? You need something more to motivate people than starry-eyed affection for Hugo Gernsback.

You know, if they thought this colony on Mars stuff was feasible, I’d suggest a simple pilot project. Can they build a self-sustaining, successfully productive colony in Antarctica? Fill a ship with people and the wherewithal to build a habitable base that is more than a tiny temporary science station; actually grow enough food to feed all the inhabitants and produce a little extra material of some sort for profit. It ought to be easy — Antarctica has air and water, and it doesn’t get as cold as Mars, so that’s one set of problems that won’t have to be solved, and it’s far cheaper than using a spaceship to get there, since boat technology has already been solved. I don’t exactly see capitalists flocking to occupy that niche, though. What’s holding things up? And why think that a colony in an even more remote and inhospitable land would be viable?

I know the Libertarians have one simple answer to all of these problems: the Market will provide. But they’re loons, and so can be ignored; I’m sure the inhabitants of the Roanoke colony also thought the Lord would provide, or at least the Queen of England, and that didn’t help at all when the resupply ships failed to show up in time.

Otherwise, though, all we’ve got now is space optimists who get a glitter in their eye at the phrase “going to Mars”, but don’t have a scrap of reasonable explanation for why. Or, actually, they do, but it’s a kind of meaningless mantra.

Torchinsky ends on this:

I’m a believer in Musk’s vision that humanity needs to become a multi-planetary society.

Phil Plait closes with this:

Then why go, I asked him.

“Humans need to be a multiplanet species,” he replied.

I agree with that as well.

WHY? Why do we need to be a multiplanet species? I’ve read the same science fiction novels and watched the same science fiction movies of far-flung interstellar empires and exotic alien worlds, and I think they’re fun and neat. But they’re fiction. They’re entertaining. They echo the romanticizing of the American expansion into the West (which was dirty, bloody, and cruel, but hey, let’s not bring that up).

But it doesn’t explain why we need to get off planet Earth.

If pressed, I know what they’ll say about that, because it’s what they always say. It’s to protect us from an extinction event, they’ll say. It’s because we may need to escape from a planet we’re in the process of poisoning.

It seems to me that what we need to do is to stop wrecking what we’ve got before a few of us go haring off irresponsibly to wreck another planet. Especially when the “plan” to get there is delusional nonsense.

Comments

  1. psychomath says

    “They’ve got to be doing something that is of value to Earth, and they have to be able to export it, and import luxuries.”

    This one is easy. “Life on Mars!”, the reality-tv show. They’ll make quadrillions.

  2. MichaelE says

    I agree that the “we need to leave Earth to survive” is a bullshit argument. I simply don’t see why they have to justify it with anything other than “Because we want to!”

    I think the good ol’ “Because it’s there and we want to go there” argument is enough justification.

  3. keithb says

    You make it sound a lot like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, with a lot of the same “company town” issues. And if they “fuel” they are mining is required for the colony’s survival, the exact same reason for revolution against Musk.

  4. Sastra says

    It’s to protect us from an extinction event, they’ll say. It’s because we may need to escape from a planet we’re in the process of poisoning.

    What would have to happen to earth to make it a more toxic environment than what’s already on the local planets?

  5. brett says

    @PZ Myers

    No, really. This colony will die without trade and revenue.

    A more likely path to a Mars colony would be putting a large scientific base – a campus, more or less – on Mars containing hundreds of people. Said campus would have been pretty strong incentives to figure out how to use local resources as much as possible, and it could serve as the focal point for future inhabitants (as well as any rotating-out researchers who decide they want to stay permanently). That doesn’t mean they will form a colony – nobody has formed a permanent colony in Antarctica despite having a couple thousand people in bases there – but it’s there.

    But it doesn’t explain why we need to get off planet Earth.

    Does it matter? If they can do it, and they’re not harming anyone but themselves potentially, then why do you care? A couple tens of thousands of people going off to Mars to (probably) die isn’t going to make the remaining population of Earth stop giving a shit about conditions on Earth , which seems to be the implicit fear here.

  6. says

    Agreed. A successful self-sustaining colony in Antarctica would prove that the species can survive right here on earth even if we manage to destroy the existing ecological basis for human existence. It would be easier to do in the Rub al-Khali in fact, than Antarctica.

  7. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Phil Plait is also wrong about the space radiation environment. Even in the absence of a solar particle event, there are galactic cosmic rays. These are so energetic that you cannot shield them out, and these highly energetic and ionizing particles are especially damaging to DNA. In interplanetary space, you don’t have the geomagnetic field to deflect them. This was identified by the NAS panel that looked at threats to NASA’s mission to Mars as a serious threat.

  8. says

    #5: “Incentives.” Is that another magic word for “The Market”?

    The people in Syria have some rather strong incentives to fix the situation there. Why haven’t they?

  9. Callinectes says

    Any problems we don’t solve here will be exported by our colonists. Environmental damage, for one. Whatever the long-term plans for a Martian colony, those early colonists are hardly going to set a precedent for environmental protection when the starting Martian environment is cold and deadly.

    Also notice that unless we solve issues of equality and opportunity here on Earth first, then the Founder Effect will ensure that the injustices of the past and present will be forever enshrined in the very gene-pool of our off-world population.

  10. Becca Stareyes says

    I assume the motivation would be building a science station, with as much self-sufficiency as possible to save on operating costs. But science stations don’t have to make a profit. (But, yeah. Setting up industrial bases in space implies an industry beyond our satellites and the occasional science mission into the Solar System,.)

    (I can also imagine tourism, but that doesn’t fit. People might be willing to spend a few weeks in orbit or on the Moon if the price was right. But Mars is not a short trip: even rich people might balk at spending a few years out of instantaneous contact with Earth* and living on frozen food**.)

    The sort of religious and philosophical utopias actually seem like the most likely thing to motivate an actual space colony beyond ‘scientists who go to the back of beyond for a few years to do field work, and their support staff, and maybe a few artists in residence and idle rich’.

    * Which is another concern. You can notice the light delay from the Moon, but it is a few seconds. The light delay from Mars is 20 minutes. And that’s assuming you have a communications system that can listen: NASA’s is scheduled to handle all their deep space operations, not catering to making sure email goes out more than once a day.
    ** I do think agriculture is worth trying, both for something to do and to relieve the monotony of everyone’s diet, but we haven’t even made hydroponics a staple of space station cuisine, let alone longer trips. Any potatoes you grow will probably be haut cuisine because it’s actually something different.

  11. cartomancer says

    This seems like a classic example of people who are familiar with one world (in this case the world of technology entrepreneurship) believing that their familiarity with that also makes them familiar with how everything else works. Perhaps this “lets do what they did in mid-20th century sci-fi!” attitude worked well with mobile phones and driverless cars and computers, but those are all things that have some practical value to human life. This… this is a monstrously expensive camping trip to somewhere cold and horrible. One that only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the world’s population could afford.

    One thing these people lack is an understanding of the social, cultural and, as PZ says, economic factors that lead to colonisation. The great period of European colonisation from the 16th century onward was driven far more by trading and economic opportunities for the great European powers than it was by curiosity, wanderlust and an exploratory spirit. It was only once the trade routes and colonies were established that people started migrating for ideological reasons. It certainly wasn’t a case of building new and better ships and leaving the technology to decide what was done with them.

    Perhaps humanity will, one day, become a multi-planet species. The technology of a thousand years in the future, or two, or three, might make it trivially easy. But it’s next to impossible and pretty much pointless to try it now. What this is is ego, pure and simple.

  12. brett says

    @8 a_ray_in_dilbert_space

    Cosmic rays are a big problem for any long-term inhabitants of Mars, which is why any long term base would have to be buried or underground. It’s not a show-stopper for crewed mission, since it’s more like a gradual accumulation of damage than the quick death you’d get from being unprotected in the face of a solar flare (IIRC the estimates were that a three-year Martian mission would get you a 5% greater chance of fatal cancer, versus the acceptable NASA threshold of 3%).

    Or at least that’s the cancer risk. We don’t know what what the heavy ions (shielded by Earth’s magnetic field even in Low Earth Orbit) would do. If we send astronauts to Mars, then it’d be a good idea to have them do a couple weeks in orbit around the Moon to gather some data on that – and bring them home quickly if it turns out to be worse than we expect.

    @Sastra

    What would have to happen to earth to make it a more toxic environment than what’s already on the local planets?

    That’s the rub. It’d either have to be a massive impactor/asteroid that we get no warning on (think dinosaur-killer), or a nearly 100% fatal and contagious disease we have little preparation for.

  13. Vivec says

    I don’t see why we need a reason for going to mars beyond “because we could and it’d be cool if we did.”

  14. brett says

    @PZ Myers

    #5: “Incentives.” Is that another magic word for “The Market”?

    No, just the cost of shipping additional stuff out there. You don’t think they’ll try and figure out how to supplement what they bring with local Martian resources? That’s essentially what all the Mars crewed missions are proposing to do in terms of fuel – i.e. make it out of Mars’ atmosphere with hydrogen you bring from Earth.

  15. says

    Which is more likely to be wiped out by an asteroid collision or a disease sweeping through the population? The 7 billion strong population of an entire planet, or a little bubble of habitability on inhospitable world, inhabited by between 200 and one million people?

    The latter could be destroyed by a power outage or a single potato crop failure, or one guy with cabin fever and a bomb. I’m in Minnesota, look at the history of the first European settlers here — it was isolation and cold and people snapping all the time.

  16. Siobhan says

    I’m going to go on a limb and assume that using water as a radiation shield might have merit but it probably needs to be separate from your drinking water.

  17. cartomancer says

    Though I did once read that it is technically possible to build huge solar power stations on the moon and beam back the energy generated as microwaves. That sounds like a much better idea. Though, again, we could do it far more cheaply on Earth, so what’s the point?

  18. brett says

    @PZ Myers

    The colony, but it won’t kill both of them at the same time unless the colony depends on imports for Earth just to survive. An impact on Earth won’t affect the colony on Mars, and a sudden disease outbreak would have to get through quarantine and be deliberately exported to the colony on Mars.

    @cartomancer

    The plan was for solar power stations in orbit, built with materials from the Moon. It’s preposterously expensive, though – for the cost of one solar power station producing a couple hundred megawatts, you could build many more ground-based solar power stations producing far more power.

  19. says

    You’re not getting it.

    This is like saying my plan for retirement is socking away a hundred dollars a month for all of my working life, but just in case, I’m going to spend a million dollars to bury this dollar bill in a coffee can in a concrete vault in my back yard, so if something wipes out my savings, I’ll have that dollar to fall back on.

  20. Elladan says

    Just wanted to point out that, adjusted for inflation, the cost overruns on the F-35 fighter jet are more than the entire Apollo program.

    The cost overruns.

    I’ll just never understand why people get all up in arms about whether we should spend a comparatively small amount of money on space. So what if Elon Musk’s personal justification is unconvincing? Who cares?

    Let me suggest another argument:

    * It’s cool.
    * It’s cheap.
    * We’ll learn a lot along the way.

    Seriously, there’s something about any sort of science or research program that seems to just attract anger that the money might somehow be spent better, both inside and outside the technical community. I think it has to be some sort of reaction to the reality most important research has to beg and fight for the tiniest scraps, while untold billions are wasted pretty much everywhere you look.

    Let’s get real here. Musk proposes to blow approximately half of what Facebook paid to buy a shitty cell phone chat program, but instead use it to build an enormous space rocket which would certainly change space exploration drastically, even if it never went to Mars.

    Sounds good to me. Just seeing this thing explode would be worth more than WhatsApp.

  21. ModZero says

    I don’t exactly see capitalists flocking to occupy that niche, though. What’s holding things up?

    Definitely not that there were several experiments in even less unwelcoming environments, and they all failed horribly.

    I don’t see why we need a reason for going to mars beyond “because we could and it’d be cool if we did.”

    Because it costs money and resources, and because when lives are at such risk that consent implies risk of being uninformed, ethics of the plan go beyond simple consent.

    Simply, only thing such plans are evidence of is that taxes aren’t high enough — that money and resources would be better spent by the government. And that paying employees in stock options should put an obligation for going public in a relatively short order.

  22. brett says

    It’s more like if your neighbor did that, or built a bomb shelter in their backyard. Again, why do you care? After all, it’s nothing to you – you can just think they’re a paranoid crank and go on. It’s not like your neighbor’s bomb shelter is going to make nuclear war more likely to happen.

  23. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    One objection I haven’t seen: To have a self-sustaining colony off Earth, you need to create, bear, and raise new colonists. So far in human history, no child has even left earth. We have no idea about the complications of reproducing and raising children in space, and no way to study that ethically. So any child born and/or raised off planet would effectively be participating without consent in a study with no ability to opt out.

    I’d like to see how that is explained to an IRB.

  24. cartomancer says

    I’ve just had a much better idea.

    Why not build the colony in Antarctica, or the middle of the Gobi Desert, or somewhere else very remote, and just tell all the proffligate billionaire customers that it’s on Mars. Everyone wins – the dupes will still get to do their interplanetary survivalist live-action roleplay, the rest of us would have effectively ostracised all the idiot billionaires we dont’ like, and the project will come in at a fraction of the price. We’d still charge them ten billion dollars a pop of course, then spend the money on something that might actually make a difference.

  25. A Masked Avenger says

    My $0.02 is as much wankery as anyone else’s, of course, but for what they’re worth:

    I think SpaceX illustrates, at its best, why the race to the moon was a bad idea: we spent unbelievable resources, in an age of slide-rules and vacuum tubes, to score a PR victory over the Soviet Union. (And, not incidentally, to develop missile technology suitable for delivering nukes to any desired target on earth. The whole program was basically about developing ICBMs and other Reagan-era sex aids for war profiteers.)

    Now we’ve reached a technological level where a single multi-millionaire can deploy a space vehicle for something like $25M. That’s compared to project Mercury, which cost about $1.6 billion in today’s dollars. NOW is when it would have made sense to talk about going to the moon, now that the economy and technology can support it.

    It’s not time to talk about Mars. Going to Mars in 2020± — if it were even possible, which is doubtful — would be on par or worse than going to the moon in 1969. Ridiculously expensive, and producing no clear benefit. Not even the dubious military benefit of perfecting the MX missile.

    In another 50-100 years it might be doable: what’s needed for such a long trip is a suitable propulsion system. Engines that fling mass out the back are too inefficient, and too slow, for those kinds of distances. There’s some indication that we might actually invent an exhaust-free engine (e.g., a resonant cavity thruster) for short distances, and a warp drive (e.g., a toroidal-field Alcubierre drive) for long distances. If we had those, we could think about reaching Mars in a few days rather than several months. That would be the right time to think about sending people there.

    It’s also conspicuous that we haven’t gone back to the moon, though. We haven’t because there’s no way to profit from such a trip. If (not when) we could get the fuel costs down with innovative engines, we might be able to realize economic benefits that would drive expansion into space. But that could only happen if we found something unbelievably valuable, or if the cost of going there was tremendously reduced. If Musk were serious, he should be focusing on that latter option.

  26. brett says

    @26 Masked Avenger

    That’s what SpaceX’s main business is. Musk may make grand proposals for Mars colonization, but the actual business of SpaceX is going cheaper commercial launches of cargo and hopefully paid launches of crew for NASA to ISS.

  27. ModZero says

    No, there will be no Alcubierre drive (it’s just a what-if thought experiment, a mathematical equivalent of the trolley problem, and then there’s the part where it would sterilize the target solar system on braking), and EM drive turns out to be a very inefficient photon drive. And anything we could imaginably get from Mars would be better found on asteroids. Not to mention that messing with other planets is barbaric.

    It’s more like if your neighbor did that, or built a bomb shelter in their backyard. Again, why do you care?

    Because the backyard is shared. Because it’s also not really like that, because Musk is, absolutely, using our shared resources.

  28. razzlefrog says

    I love it when transhumanist types are like, “We’ll just terraform another planet,” as though we’re going to make a damn piddling difference with our efforts. If we can’t even manage to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere on Earth slightly to thwart catastrophe, and we actually KNOW how to do that, how the heck are we supposed to radically alter the entire atmosphere on Mars?! It’s like 95% CO2, 4% argon and nitrogen, and some tiny fraction of the rest of that is oxygen. Earth has about 150 times more oxygen as a percentage of its total air. It’s ridiculous.

  29. ModZero says

    KNOW how to do that, how the heck are we supposed to radically alter the entire atmosphere on Mars?!

    We’re going to crash comets into Mars. No, that totally wouldn’t invalidate the argument that Mars is insurance against comets crashing into Earth. /s

  30. brett says

    @ModZero

    And anything we could imaginably get from Mars would be better found on asteroids. Not to mention that messing with other planets is barbaric.

    I prefer space habitats built out of asteroid material myself, since the conditions are more customizable and you won’t potentially end up with people who can never safely travel back to Earth.

    As for Mars being shared, well, yeah. If we find life on Mars, I’d be very strongly opposed to terraforming it.

  31. Blattafrax says

    The colonisation of North America by Europeans is a good analogy – IMO. Turned out OK in the end for the colonisers after a few centuries. But multiply all the hardships and challenges here by 10 and divide the benefits by 10. So basically, it’ll happen – inevitably – but most of the first colonists will die; the second (or third etc) wave will be very unhappy for a very long time and by the time it works no-one will remember Musk. But it will start sometime and it will take people with a certain type of imagination – like Musk – to do it. Doesn’t mean I want to join him or think his idea is good for humankind right now though.

    I am also reminded of a recipe I use, online, for waffles. Most of the comments read something like, “Great recipe. 5*s. Just leave out most of the salt, reduce the milk, add a bit of vanilla, cook for longer. But delicious, highly recommended.” Just one comment saying, “if it’s such a great recipe, why does everyone need to change it?” Musk is that recipe.

  32. ModZero says

    I prefer space habitats

    Why would you ever build a habitat in a loose clump of rock and dust? The only spacenerd quote that ever made sense was “never send a person to do a robot’s job”.

    As for Mars being shared, well, yeah. If we find life on Mars, I’d be very strongly opposed to terraforming it.

    Mars is already shared, by the scientists, by people for whom an unaltered planet with an atmosphere that you can land robots on is actually valuable. But the shared backyard I implied was here, the earth and its resources and its economy, that billionaires and egomaniac rulers would exploit to put some dudes on a desert.

  33. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    need to be multiplanet is a grim assessment of our capability to maintain survivability on the planet we already inhabit. Multiplanet is assuming extinction event is inevitable and unpreventable.
    Asteroid impacts are easier to deflect than to colonize a planet with zero bio-resources, eg mars.
    Attempting to colonize Mars may be productive with interesting spin-offs, as well as being an adventurous exploration, but to set it as a goal is a bit … uh… – out of reach, – grasping at a straw, – etc.

  34. says

    Why do we need space habitats on asteroids when it makes more sense for robots to do the mining? The people seem to be a superfluous expense.

  35. brett says

    @ModZero

    I said built out of asteroid material, not in an asteroid. And of course you’d use robots to do the processing and building as much as possible – in fact, that’s the main reason why I think it will (eventually) happen. Good space robots combined with good telepresence are invaluable for anything space-related.

  36. Matt Harrison says

    PZ, your main criticism of off-earth colonies seems to be: All resources spent on it would be better spent on earth-based “improvements”

    How far do you want to take this line of criticism? What about public money spent on the arts? Would this not better be spent on directly combating global warming? How about basic physics research? What is the direct connection to the well-being of the planet or its inhabitants? Sports? Waste of resources for sure. Film/ TV / Music? How many billions are wasted that could be cleaning up the oceans and the environment.

    There is room for people to responsibly care about multiple causes.

    I think this project is good for humanity even if it fails.

  37. A Masked Avenger says

    @ModZero,

    I’m aware of the things you mention (in fact deleted a paragraph about “asteroid mining” as too tangential). Nevertheless, a drive that works by throwing matter out the back will never be viable for transporting humans across long distances, so identifying an alternative is a prerequisite to making space travel practical. And speeds << C will never be suitable for travel outside our solar system (or even inside it, by manned craft), so cracking that problem is another prerequisite.

    Harold White proposed a modification to the Alcubierre drive that would purportedly reduce the energy requirements to something feasible. That may not work, but something else might, so I don't give up all hope that something along those lines will turn out to be possible.

    But as I said: until and unless the problems of speed and fuel efficiency are solved, we will not only never leave the solar system, but we will never see asteroid mining, or mars colonies, or anything else where the potential benefit isn't truly astronomical (no pun).

    (I also cut a paragraph talking about the problem of colliding with… anything, really, even a few atoms… at significant fractions of C. One can only hope that a working "warp drive" has the side effect of reducing the effective front-facing surface area of a ship to near zero. I.e., of causing most matter to slip around the ship, like flotsam slips past the bow of a watercraft. Because otherwise we've got a pretty major third problem to solve, beside the first two I mentioned.)

  38. brett says

    Not Harold White, please. I have no idea why he still has funding from NASA – he sporadically makes some announcement about warp drive, only to immediately get evasive when someone asks for the details and a peer-reviewed published paper. And he’s done that for years.

  39. A Masked Avenger says

    Why do we need space habitats on asteroids when it makes more sense for robots to do the mining? The people seem to be a superfluous expense.

    Quite so. People will want to go, and will go, if the cost is cheap enough. Until then they won’t, unless there’s something for them to do that (a) justifies the cost, and (b) actually requires a human.

    In the case of the Apollo program, both conditions were satisfied: the powers that be decided that showing up the Russians, and getting sweet sweet missile technology as a side benefit, was worth any cost — and that the only way to accomplish it was for an actual human to stand on the actual moon and thumb America’s collective nose at Russia.

  40. juno says

    If we can’t rouse ourselves to stop de-terraforming Earth, how is this ridiculous enterprise going to save us?

  41. applehead says

    I’ve said it once and I say it again, Musk is the Nerd Trump. He can with minimal effort attain Messiah status simply by telling his audience very loudly what they want to hear. Nerds (primarily the white males among them) are angry that the future didn’t end up a 50s space-bound world as promised over and over again. By tapping into this resentment, Musk can make them crown him a “visionary,” a “thought leader” by feeding them their pet fantasies.

  42. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 42:

    If we can’t rouse ourselves to stop de-terraforming Earth, how is this ridiculous enterprise going to save us?

    perhaps that’s his plan *twirling mustache*: to propose a farfetched scheme, telling us it’s necessary as a last resort, etc, in order to motivate us to prove it unnecessary, by repairing most of the damage we’ve already wreaked. *twirl mustache* (I think I gots Musk sussed)

    *walks away, shrugs*

  43. consciousness razor says

    brett:

    Musk may make grand proposals for Mars colonization, but the actual business of SpaceX is going cheaper commercial launches of cargo and hopefully paid launches of crew for NASA to ISS.

    So why fake everyone out with a bullshit Mars mission? He could be designing systems for asteroid mining or something…. Still not something I expect any time soon, but I could at least see the point of having that somewhere on the agenda. Of course, it’s a little hard to sell things like that as a tourist attraction for billionaires, who have the money you want. And there’d be no reason to raise the specter of extinction and pretend to be humanity’s savior. The point would be to do missions that could conceivably be useful or profitable somehow, not to sink a bunch of resources into something stupid and hope that other missions will help you break even.

    Matt Harrison:

    PZ, your main criticism of off-earth colonies seems to be: All resources spent on it would be better spent on earth-based “improvements”

    How far do you want to take this line of criticism? What about public money spent on the arts?

    Let’s take it the fucking max. The arts are an Earth-based expense. Every artist lives on this planet. If sculptures made of Martian rocks (since that’s all it fucking has) would really be worth the absurd expense, they should be in a museum on Earth where everyone can appreciate their magnificent red rockiness. Or at least when they are placed on the grounds of Musk’s palace, it should be open to the public, so that everyone can pay to appreciate them in the $1000 tour of the estate.

    Maybe I’m having trouble understanding your point.

    I think this project is good for humanity even if it fails.

    Why? What exactly makes it good for humanity even if it fails? (Just in case: “it’s cool” doesn’t make it good for humanity.)

  44. UnknownEric the Apostate says

    Even in the absence of a solar particle event, there are galactic cosmic rays. These are so energetic that you cannot shield them out, and these highly energetic and ionizing particles are especially damaging to DNA.

    Absolutely, you could end up stretchy, invisible, on fire, or entirely made of orange rocks!

  45. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    Why not build the colony in Antarctica, or the middle of the Gobi Desert, or somewhere else very remote, and just tell all the proffligate billionaire customers that it’s on Mars. Everyone wins – the dupes will still get to do their interplanetary survivalist live-action roleplay, the rest of us would have effectively ostracised all the idiot billionaires we dont’ like, and the project will come in at a fraction of the price. We’d still charge them ten billion dollars a pop of course, then spend the money on something that might actually make a difference.

    Kickstarter. Nao. :D :D :D

  46. Brother Ogvorbis, Fully Defenestrated Emperor of Steam, Fire and Absurdity says

    But it doesn’t explain why we need to get off planet Earth.

    To get away from Libertarians, conservatives, power-hungry capitalists, MRAs and authoritarian asshats?

  47. brett says

    @45 consciousness razor

    So why fake everyone out with a bullshit Mars mission?

    Because it’s what he’s personally interested in. It’s just not the main business of SpaceX, and likely never will be.

  48. multitool says

    I’d just like to see life be multiplanet, if it isn’t already. Fuck humans.

    Move an iceball into a good orbit, then spray it with cyanobacteria, tardigrades and poop.

  49. wzrd1 says

    First, what a load of crap they’d have at the end of their trip to Mars. Seriously, it is not as if you want to jettison waste over that long of a trip, staying on course would be virtually impossible.
    Indeed, the food required for the trip would be phenomenal.

    But, let’s look at another problem. People living under 0.38 G for any significant amount of time would experience severe osteoporosis and after enough time away from 1 G, they might never be capable of returning to earth.

    Musk loves his showy presentations and hand waves away every single problem.
    In short, what a load of crap!

  50. Matt says

    I really like hard sci-fi. It’s interesting that you’ve seen a subtle shift in its emphasis over the last few years. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the optimistic Mars trilogy in the 90’s — a diamond hard sci-fi epic about the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Last year though, he wrote Aurora, which is about an interstellar mission to colonize another planet, but which turns out to be a love letter to planet Earth:

    Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home. So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. . . . So, of course, every once in a while some particularly stupid form of life will try to break out and move away from its home star. I’m sure it happens. I mean, here we are. We did it ourselves. But it doesn’t work, and the life left living learns the lesson, and stops trying such a stupid thing.

    Stephen Baxter’s Voyage (an alternate history where NASA goes to Mars instead of doing the Voyager and Shuttle programs) and Titan (about a trip to Titan) convey a similar message. I remember reading Into Thin Air many years ago and losing all possible interest in ever wanting to climb Everest. Sci-fi in some quarters seems to be undergoing a similar change: the Earth is our home and there’s no where else that we belong to like we do to the Earth. It’s ours and we should cherish it.

  51. qwints says

    There were a lot of utopian movements in the 19th and early 20th century where a charismatic leader would organize a group of men and women to found a colony in the wilderness: we had several in America, there were others in the Galapagos and other exotic islands, or South America. Virtually all of them failed — the Mormons are one notable exception.

    This isn’t accurate, as the wikipedia page you linked shows. You’re conflating a number of distinct historic trends. The utopian movements of the time period which mention were primarily communes built in territory that had already been stolen from its indigenous inhabitants, not colonization efforts.

  52. stark says

    So, Elon Musk wants to spend his own money on a trip to mars. Good for him. If he can do what he says he can, and his track record is good on that score, then why not? He’s not spending taxpayer funds for this. He’s not taking away from efforts to make the world we have more habitable (quite the contrary, his industries stand to benefit the world – solar cells and efficient home battery systems and non-emitting cars). All of the major endeavors he has undertaken have been touted as impossible or very unlikely to work… and yet, here we are looking at rockets that return to earth post launch, massive increases in solar power availability, electric cars with capabilities that only existed in science-fiction 15 years ago – all with major inputs from Musk industries. Is he wildly optimistic about his mars plans – probably. But then again I can show you scores of engineers who said that the Falcon 9 being able to successfully fly and return to the earth was 20+ years off when he said he’d have it done in 5… and he did it in 4. Elon Musk is a lot of things – eccentric, flashy, a showman, arrogant, absolutely convinced of his own abilities…. and undeniably successful in many of his more ambitious endeavors.

    I won’t hold my breath for a sustainable colony on Mars… but I won’t condemn the man for having his vision and trying to achieve it. Especially as every technology he develops on the way there (and make no mistakes, his solar, battery, EV, and space companies are all technologies in support of his goal to go to mars) stand to benefit everyone still here on earth in the long run.

    I will remind all of you that a certain ambitious plan to go to the moon for what simply amounted to bragging rights is largely responsible for all of the wonderful electronics we use all the time as well a several dozen other world changing inventions – especially in medicine. Recent attempts to do what we have never been able to do before, and the engineering that gets done to overcome the hurdles in the way, have often shown to be very good for the rest of us.

    @consciousness razor – You comment about why have the bullshit plan for mars when he could be doing things for asteroid mining etc. misses the point : namely that trying get a large vehicle to mars and support a colony there is orders of magnitude harder than building asteroid mining vehicles…. and asteroid mining vehicles based on a booster that can lift a few hundred tons to orbit in an efficient manner become more of a “well of course well do that” than a “it sure would be nice if we could figure out a way to do this”. The engineering involved in building Musks pie in the sky goal of putting significant resources on mars open up the entire inner solar system to much more ambitious probes and programs than cars size objects sent to distant points. What kind of science package could you send to the asteroids if you had 400 tons to play with in the vehicle? What sorts of space telescopes could you build if you had a vehicle that could deliver ridiculously large payloads? The average comsat today is 5-8 tons and produces maybe 10-12kw of power… what could engineers do with a 100 tons comsat prodcuing a megawatt of power – this is feasible with a launch vehicle like Musk wants to build.

  53. Matt says

    I will remind all of you that a certain ambitious plan to go to the moon for what simply amounted to bragging rights is largely responsible for all of the wonderful electronics we use all the time as well a several dozen other world changing inventions

    There’s probably a germ of truth to the idea that the space program of the 60’s stimulated some technological development, but the vast majority of inventions ascribed to it are apocryphal.

  54. jdmuys says

    My take on this is: you may be all right. Actually, you are almost certainly all right. But you are sooooo chilling too.

    – why we need to move away from earth? Because it’s a lot easier and cheaper than to fix what’s going to happen to the sun in a few billion years. Global warming is small potato.

    – why will this be useful to humankind even if it fails? Because of everything we will learn along the way.

    This leaves out one argument: the opportunity cost. i.e. “all those resources, money, brain power… could be used for more benefit if used elsewhere”. That may be true, but is still a bad argument, if only because the same argument could be made about sending Rosetta (RIP) to some comet, and any other exploration project, or even, any fundamental science.

  55. unclefrogy says

    Just wanted to point out that, adjusted for inflation, the cost overruns on the F-35 fighter jet are more than the entire Apollo program.

    for real survival as a species we would probably need to be colonizing planets orbiting different stars and we are a very long way from that capability.
    this idea offered by E. Musk is a little bit more than all the similar ideas offered up before. This time we have a guy who seems willing to put his money where his mouth is and not just some “egghead fantasist” talking about his dreams.
    it is good as investment into new ideas and research into difficult problems it may even yield solutions we might not have thought of.
    As a way to help change the focus of society from war, destruction and power politics it may be helpful. It is all well and good to say no more war and fight directly against it but that does not seem to have stopped war we do seem just as busy fighting each other. It is M.A.D. that is mostly responsible for the prevention of WW III though that may end up just a temporary delay. We still are spending a hell of a lot of money on the wars we are fighting now and while preparing for the next really big one how ever. So anything that might help change the focus is OK and this time someone is willing to put up some real money to attempt to solve the real practical problems that have been pointed out.
    I am too old to go myself and I sure as hell do not have any spare money to help pay for it but there is nothing I would do to try and stop it either.
    There is just as much glory in this proposed endeavor as any great patriotic war you might die in.
    uncle frogy

  56. consciousness razor says

    stark:
    A big rocket is not a trip to Mars, and they are not in the same category. I don’t doubt that a big rocket could be useful for many things.

    So, Elon Musk wants to spend his own money on a trip to mars.

    No, he doesn’t want to spend his own money.

    Good for him. If he can do what he says he can, and his track record is good on that score, then why not?

    Because it’s a stupid thing to do.

    He’s not spending taxpayer funds for this.

    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html

  57. says

    @38, Matt Harrison

    PZ, your main criticism of off-earth colonies seems to be: All resources spent on it would be better spent on earth-based “improvements”

    How far do you want to take this line of criticism? What about public money spent on the arts?

    Umm…are not the arts earth-based improvements in a way? Actually, based on how you seem to be defining this term, I suspect you are quite wrong about PZ’s objection. I find PZ’s objections have more to do with improving the human condition than…well, whatever it is you’re thinking about. Art certainly has a place in the human condition.

    How about basic physics research?

    I think part of the reason we know about global warming was due to physics research. Was it not? (And chemistry and other research.) So, obviously, that research makes sense as it is necessary for making earth-based improvements.

    Sports?

    Are you not a regular reader of this blog? If you were, you’d already know that PZ thinks too much is spent on sports (and, from what he has blogged, particularly how much the coaches make, especially at universities).

    Film/ TV / Music?

    Now you’re just repeating yourself as those are forms of art.

  58. wzrd1 says

    I’ve always loved sharing this link:
    https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html

    As for humans remaining on earth, even assuming if we do manage to not render ourselves extinct, for true long term survival, humanity will have to leave the earth.
    The sun grows 10% brighter per billion years, which means that earth will be utterly uninhabitable in around two billion years.
    I’ll be at my summer home on Europa by then. ;)

  59. brett says

    @52 Matt

    Sci-fi in some quarters seems to be undergoing a similar change: the Earth is our home and there’s no where else that we belong to like we do to the Earth. It’s ours and we should cherish it.

    Aurora is a very good book, both for showing the human toll of such expeditions as well as busting the conceit that “earth-like” means anything habitable. The segment you cited is true – life is well-suited for the environment it evolved in, and moving into a new environment often requires a lot of death before life becomes suited for it. That was certainly true for historic conquest and colonization efforts, like the staggering death toll in Jamestown.

    I guess I don’t believe it has to be always true, though. Space colonies don’t have to require mass death, and KSR had to write in exposure to Earth’s environment as a kind of ineffable biological thing that science couldn’t duplicate at all to get the effect in 2312 and Aurora.

  60. consciousness razor says

    jdmuys:

    – why we need to move away from earth? Because it’s a lot easier and cheaper than to fix what’s going to happen to the sun in a few billion years. Global warming is small potato.

    What’s your plan for 100 trillion years from now? How about 10^50 years from now? Are those stupid questions to ask, and if so why?

    – why will this be useful to humankind even if it fails? Because of everything we will learn along the way.

    I already know space is big, and that Mars has rocks. We won’t learn that.

    Maybe we’re already learning how many promissory notes people are able to write without promising anything. But I wasn’t especially interested in learning that.

    the opportunity cost. i.e. “all those resources, money, brain power… could be used for more benefit if used elsewhere”. That may be true, but is still a bad argument, if only because the same argument could be made about sending Rosetta (RIP) to some comet, and any other exploration project, or even, any fundamental science.

    If there is something better to do, then yes, that argument could be made about things which are actually worse than it. How could there be a problem with that claim? Making sure people don’t starve to death, for example, is more important than fundamental science, as important as that is, so we should prioritize accordingly when faced with that kind of choice. Do you accept that it’s true in this case, or are you just complaining that you don’t want to think seriously about it?

  61. Kreator says

    @43 applehead

    I’ve said it once and I say it again, Musk is the Nerd Trump. He can with minimal effort attain Messiah status simply by telling his audience very loudly what they want to hear. Nerds (primarily the white males among them) are angry that the future didn’t end up a 50s space-bound world as promised over and over again. By tapping into this resentment, Musk can make them crown him a “visionary,” a “thought leader” by feeding them their pet fantasies.

    It seems you’re not alone in that sentiment. I know the source I found perhaps isn’t the best, but I can’t help to agree with stuff like this:

    When it comes to articulating their grand plans, both Musk and Trump excel at describing an idyllic future, but not the means by which it will be reached. Musk’s latest “master plan” talks about a world where the owners of self-driving Teslas cover their car payments by renting out their vehicles through mobility apps. There are lots of practical reasons why this may never work: for example, as my colleague Edward Niedermeyer pointed out, the typical driverless taxi of the future probably will be a much more utilitarian vehicle than a Tesla. Yet such details don’t slow Musk when he’s in his futuristic mode.

    Something similar is true of Trump. In the acceptance speech, he described an America that isn’t just “great again” — it’s safe, it has “millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth” and many fewer immigrants. He didn’t dwell on what it would take to achieve this golden age.

    Or this:

    The heroization of courageous, risk-taking, overpromising business figures is probably as much of a reason for both men’s success — and for Trump’s remarkable resilience despite a poorly-run campaign — as Tesla’s consumer qualities or the anger of middle-aged whites left behind by globalization. This is an integral part of America, and it won’t go away if Trump loses or Tesla fails. New heroes will inevitably rise, and they’ll be much like the old ones.

  62. stark says

    @consciousness razor

    Indeed Musks other 2 companies – Solar City and Tesla have benefited vastly from direct government subsidies… but SpaceX, not so much. Directly from the LA Times article:

    “On a smaller scale, SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, cut a deal for about $20 million in economic development subsidies from Texas to construct a launch facility there. (Separate from incentives, SpaceX has won more than $5.5 billion in government contracts from NASA and the U.S. Air Force.)”

    Contracts for services, while government in nature, are not subsidies. SpaceX is planning on going to Mars, not Tesla.

    In comparison, United Launch Alliance has received around a bout a billion a year in pure subsidies – money for which no deliverables were expected other than the vague “maintaining of launch capability and readiness” while the government (aka all us taxpayers) also pays for each individual launch separately on launch contracts.

    Musk most assuredly makes heavy use of government funding wherever possible – but SpaceX was never in the running for those kinds of funds due to open hostility to actual competition and massive lobbying from the previous monopoly holder of launch services. Musk would have taken that money if he could have though, absolutely.

  63. jdmuys says

    #62: “Making sure people don’t starve to death, for example, is more important than fundamental science, as important as that is, so we should prioritize accordingly when faced with that kind of choice. Do you accept that it’s true in this case, or are you just complaining that you don’t want to think seriously about it?”

    No I don’t accept that this is true. This is simply a false dichotomy.

  64. frog says

    cartomancer@24:

    Why not build the colony in Antarctica, or the middle of the Gobi Desert, or somewhere else very remote, and just tell all the proffligate billionaire customers that it’s on Mars.

    Hmmm. Some of these folks will be smart enough to know that the trip ought to take months, and the view out the windows should change. We’ll have to tell them we have sleep pods, and hire an anesthesiologist with questionable ethics to knock them all out for a few hours. When they wake up, we just say they were under for months.

    Oh, but wait, they’ll know they’re not on Mars because the sun will be too big. And there will be some life, even in the middle of the Gobi or Antarctic. And at least in the Gobi, there will be airplanes flying overhead. (“Oh, those are satellites we put in Mars orbit already.”)

    These millionaires need to be Trumpian levels of stupid and ignorant. Which…well. We should perhaps arrange for the support staff to all quietly slip away in the middle of the night and leave them to fend for themselves.

    This is an excellent plan, Smithers. :)

  65. wzrd1 says

    Ah, that’s how he’ll recruit colonists to Mars! As part of a weight loss scheme. Touting how one will weigh so much less on Mars at 0.38 G.

  66. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    The segment you cited is true – life is well-suited for the environment it evolved in, and moving into a new environment often requires a lot of death before life becomes suited for it. That was certainly true for historic conquest and colonization efforts, like the staggering death toll in Jamestown.

    I guess I don’t believe it has to be always true, though. Space colonies don’t have to require mass death, and KSR had to write in exposure to Earth’s environment as a kind of ineffable biological thing that science couldn’t duplicate at all to get the effect in 2312 and Aurora.

    Colonies like Jamestown were established in areas which were already demonstrated to be suitable for human life. If they suffered staggering death tolls it was in large part because they were too hubristic to learn from the people who were already there. Also because they had a tendency to steal from and kill the native people, which for some reason they often didn’t react kindly to.

    There is absolutely no evidence that a human society can survive indefinitely in space.

  67. says

    I’m just going to repeat what I said in the previous post: 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 I loathe this asinine fantasy even more, because as I knew would happen, there wasn’t one fucking person in that other thread who didn’t get all lost in the fantasy, demonstrating that no, they don’t give a shit about the planet they are on. Our earth has become a dumping ground for most people, white people in particular, who get the glitter of colonialism in their eyes once again, happily ignoring the wealth of damage that colonialism has wrought right here, on the one fucking planet we can actually live on.

    I despise colonialism, and the goblins who perpetuate it – you’re nothing but forces for evil destruction, a complete lack of care, respect, and any other quality that makes us naked apes anything worth possibly saving. My people and many other indigenous people are fighting for all lives, all over this fucking planet, and do most white people care? Nope, you want your damn oil and coal, you’ll destroy earth, air, water, and people to get it, wring everything dry, then say with that possessive, destructive evil, “there are other planets, fuck this one”.

    I have a fuck you too – fuck every single one of you.

  68. robro says

    I assume that someday far in the future humans will establish a significant presence off planet. I doubt those people will need a rational motivation for doing so, like escaping a dead earth or avoiding an extinction event, but just because humans do that sort of thing as silly as it seems.

    Still, when I say “far in the future” I mean very far indeed. It certainly won’t happen in any of our life-times, including Musk’s and all his goo-gah supporters. Right now, the technical challenges are so enormous that it’s inconceivable for him to succeed. Saying you’re going to build an enormous rocket ship is fine, but doing it is whole different matter. Doing it many times, even more challenging. (As for the size, I could easily say I’m going to build a rocket twice as big as his. So there, Elon, see if you can top that!)

    The bottom line for all his yammer is, well, his bottom line. Can he get investors to finance the fantasy? Probably so. He’s a pitch man, after all, in an age when a pitch man can even win the nomination for president. Even though his scheme is almost 100% certain to fail and never get off the ground (much less Mars), he will be reaping the benefits of billions of dollars in cash flow. As folks in the money business will tell, it’s all about the cash flow.

  69. Zeppelin says

    I’m kind of confused by that whole Star Trek “humanity’s insatiable curiosity and lust for discovery” narrative. It just looks like a romanticization of American colonialism to me.

    Considering that the big exploration and colonisation movements on this planet originated in a desire for wealth and status back home, and/or in a desire to get away from things like poverty and population pressure, rather than an urge to discover anything in particular…and given that the great majority of people seem happy to be born, live, and die inside a radius of a couple kilometres…given all that, people who actually want to travel long distances and expose themselves to great dangers out of “curiosity” seem to be a tiny, unusual minority.

  70. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Jebus christ! Anyone who thinks humans are still going to be around when in 5 billion years or so when the Sun envelopes Earth is smoking some industrial-grade, Gary Johnson strength weed! Dudes, in 5 generations, we’ll be lucky if we can scrape a living together as small bands of hunter-gatherers given how we are trashing this planet.

  71. Zeppelin says

    I mean…I’m told that the majority of Americans (who came up with this trope, I assume) aren’t “curious” enough to leave their own country once in their entire lifetime. But they think that taking great risks for the sake of pure discovery is an intrinsic human trait that we should be basing sociopolitical decisions and predictions around?

  72. says

    No matter how much we trash and poison earth, it will still be 100000 times better than Mars. If Mars was suitable for life, it would already be there. We need to find another earth-like planet, go there and destroy the local native population. We are good at that.

  73. A Masked Avenger says

    Dudes, in 5 generations, we’ll be lucky if we can scrape a living together as small bands of hunter-gatherers given how we are trashing this planet.

    This.

    Between sea-level rise, desertification, and threats to pollinators, we could be looking at a dramatic loss of human-habitable land, supplies of fresh water, and most fruits and vegetables. We could be looking at human extinction on the scale of a few generations, let alone thousands of years, let alone millions.

    Call me weird, but I consider this a bad thing. When I go into that good night, gentle or not, the main thing preserving me from madness as I gaze into the abyss of my own nonexistence will be the satisfaction of knowing that I played my part in the circle of life, and that our successors (like my children) will carry on after us. It’s my comfort, like the hope of heaven was my parents’ comfort. To die knowing that I’m part of the last (or fifth-from-last) generation would fucking suck.

    Apropos: reading Childhood’s End actually triggered a lengthy depression for me. I was already prone to it, but still.

  74. mothra says

    Back in 1992, Pamela Sargent wrote a great SF short story- Danny goes to Mars. Perhaps humanity could get together and do a Donald goes to Venus?

  75. ModZero says

    @32

    The colonisation of North America by Europeans is a good analogy – IMO. Turned out OK in the end for the colonisers after a few centuries.

    Oh, I missed that one. Worked out for whom, exactly? The indigenous people, deprived of their land and slaughtered? The black people, relocated and enslaved? So no, I reject the idea that it “turned out OK”. It’s really well past time we stopped thinking of colonization as a good thing.

  76. Ed Seedhouse says

    robro@71: “I assume that someday far in the future humans will establish a significant presence off planet. I doubt those people will need a rational motivation for doing so, like escaping a dead earth or avoiding an extinction event, but just because humans do that sort of thing as silly as it seems.”

    I guess that depends on just what you mean by the “far future”. Humankind have only infested our planet for a short time, geologically speaking. A human lifespan is insignificant compared to the age of the earth.

    So, speaking geologically, I suspect we will be inhabiting space in the near future, say within ten thousand years or so, granted that we survive. Most likely it will be our machine creations that lead the way for a few centuries. One day our creations may visit the start, but whatever that is it won’t be recognizably a member of homo sapiens.

  77. pipefighter says

    Holy cow, lots of comments here. If i’m repeating a point already made or refuted, my apologies. I’ll start by saying that I don’t think Musk is so much a con man as he is wildly idealistic and at times delusional. This may have helped him keep it together while getting his businesses going. As far as the trip there goes(from a psychological stand point i’m mixed. I would have to say the fact that they are in space as opposed to being isolated somewhere on earth is a concern. It should also be considered that a number of countries have nuclear submarines that travel for months at a time and those things are far less spacious than any airliner. Just my two cents. The interplanetary species thing is beyond ridiculous though. If you can terra form a planet like mars which has 1/100th atmospheric density, toxic soil, very little geological activity, no moon to help the cores dynamo and maintain a magnetic field(i thought thats how it works anyway) and a lower gravitational pull, wouldn’t just be easier to fix this one? The same goes for building a habitat to ride out a mass extinction( like if the deacon traps went crazy or some other basalt event(apologies again about the typos), or a meteor, gamma ray burst etc.) wouldn’t it be way easier and more efficient and save more lives just to build some of thise here? I actually think space exploration is super cool and would gladly tax the shit out of the wealthy to pay for it(among other things), but this multiplanetary talk just shows an incredible level of ignorance about how ecosystems work, our relationships with them and the generally unsexy subject that is logistics.

  78. pipefighter says

    As far as the why we haven’t gone back to the moon thing goes, the PR win over the soviet argument gets a lot of attention but I wonder if lowered effective tax rates on the wealthy played any role. After all, wasn’t it in the mid seventies we started playing around with neo liberalism? I thought it was.

  79. seanpatgallagher says

    As a thought experiment, I like the problem of how to keep lots of people living comfortably on Mars. Because, if you really can keep a million people living well on a planet with almost nothing, then you’ve already figured out solutions to all the hard sustainability issues we have here on Earth.

    In fact, I would be okay with spending a trillion dollars devising ways to live happily on Mars and then not go at all. Take the money you would have spent actually building a Mars colony and use it to implement all the sustainability solutions you’ve devised here on Earth.

    -S

  80. brett says

    @83 pipefighter

    David Graeber made that argument, that Neoliberalism killed space exploration (I can’t quite remember how he phrased it). It seemed a bit dubious to me, because the Soviets sort of scaled back there program a bit as well, going for better space stations instead of trying to keep on doing “feats” like in the heat of the space race. The US was more or less aiming for the same type of thing, although the funding wasn’t as strong.

  81. says

    I think Musk greatly underestimates the biological problems of space travel. Even if he can build a workable Mars travel system over the next 8 years it’s highly unlikely there will be major developments in space medicine during that time that will allow a healthy group of space travellers to operate long term on Mars. And what is going to be the effect on space exploration efforts if we see a bunch of would be colonists suffering major health problems, (almost) live on TV? Hopefully if that ever happens Musk’s lawyers made sure the space travellers signed a nice, watertight, make it effectively impossible to sue contract before they left.

  82. Ichthyic says

    Why not build the colony in Antarctica, or the middle of the Gobi Desert, or somewhere else very remote, and just tell all the proffligate billionaire customers that it’s on Mars.

    Wanna get an idea of how that might work out?

    Kim Stanley Robinson: “Antarctica”

    https://libcom.org/library/antartica

  83. springa73 says

    I totally do NOT understand the sheer level of hostility directed toward anything related to human exploration of space that I often see on this blog. The main objections seem to be …

    – it’s impossible, the technological and scientific hurdles are just too high
    Uh, most scientists 100 years ago thought that it would be impossible to ever travel beyond the earth’s atmosphere even with uncrewed rockets, yet here we are. Things have a way of seeming impossible until they aren’t anymore.

    – it takes resources away from solving problems on earth
    Well, much of earth’s resources are spent on things that are technically luxuries, not directly related to solving the basic needs of life on earth. Would it be better if no resources were spent on things like entertainment? Compared to the amount of money we already spend on things that are technically luxuries, we’re talking drops in a bucket here.

    – it reflects a colonialist mindset
    For some people, perhaps, but I seriously doubt that most advocates for human expansion into space want humans to emulate the conquistadors or settlers. We’re talking about people moving to and altering environments that don’t have any indigenous life, not conquering and enslaving extraterrestrials or something.

    – it should not be done until we’ve solved our problems on earth
    As long as there are humans, there will be human problems. Waiting until we’ve solved everything on earth means never doing anything, because that day will never come.

    – it promotes the illusion that we can just escape the damage we’re doing to Earth
    This seems like a straw man to me. I’ve never seen anyone, in person or online, argue that we should just trash earth and then leave it behind.

  84. Ichthyic says

    – it promotes the illusion that we can just escape the damage we’re doing to Earth
    This seems like a straw man to me. I’ve never seen anyone, in person or online, argue that we should just trash earth and then leave it behind.

    In my lifetime, I have met SCORES of people who think it’s just fine to trash earth because “Jesus is coming”.

    so the mindset is certainly there, and not a stretch to apply it to space exploration.

    similarly, there are a LOT of folks that think we don’t need to worry about AGW because some magical tech wizardry will simply solve it for them.

  85. says

    I am not hostile to the human exploration of space. I’m entirely in favor of ongoing efforts to send probes, and maybe even humans, on missions of exploration. I don’t want it to stop.

    I am hostile to bad arguments, lazy ideas, and pointless exploitation of resources. Plans to build colonies on Mars in 6 years certainly fall into that category.

  86. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    I totally do NOT understand the sheer level of hostility directed toward anything related to human exploration of space that I often see on this blog.

    What you fail to understand, is the difference between exploration and colonization. They aren’t the same. We explored the moon. It wasn’t colonized, as there wasn’t the money or resources to do it. Fact versus science fiction. And I’ve read a lot of science fiction.
    Any exploration of Mars should be safe for everybody who is sent. That isn’t shown the be case ATM. Colonization is unfeasible at the moment, and unlikely in the near future, if ever. Musk is ignoring the human element, and just thinking of BFR’s, like that is the only problem.

  87. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    On August 7th 2012* I sat atop of a playground slide, my daughter cradled in my lap. And there, in that tiny, rural Australian town we watched human beings successfully land a car-sized robot on another planet.

    We watched the culmination of years of effort, of vast collective problem solving, of the unbridled drive of human curiosity.

    The exuberant joy of the control team was infectious. We cheered.

    I may have got misty eyed. Not just out of second hand happiness, but out of the realisation that I had just shared a triumph of human ingenuity with the most precious person in my life. Only time will tell if that experience informs who she will become as an adult. But in a world where human ingenuity is so often denied and degraded to support ancient ideologies, so often turned to the maiming and killing of others, having this example to share filled me with hope.

    I don’t think for a second that a Mars colony is likely, and I agree with PZ’s thoughts on human locusts. But I ever so desperately want to see us put a person on Mars for the sheer joy of that expression of positive human achievement.

  88. John Morales says

    FossilFishy:

    We watched the culmination of years of effort, of vast collective problem solving, of the unbridled drive of human curiosity.

    Just like the Manhattan Project.

    (Boom! Yay!)

    But I ever so desperately want to see us put a person on Mars for the sheer joy of that expression of positive human achievement.

    Small dreams. Did I have such, I’d opt for transhumanism.

    (Feel free to donate $$$ to the endeavour, to reflect your utter desperation for that goal)

  89. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Just like the Manhattan Project.
    (Boom! Yay!)

    Huh, I could have sworn I addressed this… oh wait, I did:

    But in a world where human ingenuity is…so often turned to the maiming and killing of others, having this example to share filled me with hope.

    Thanks for the negative illustration though.

    Small dreams. Did I have such, I’d opt for transhumanism.

    Eh, I think putting a person on Mars is possible in my life time, transhumanism, not so much.

    (Feel free to donate $$$ to the endeavour, to reflect your utter desperation for that goal)

    Should crowdfunding be set up for a reasonable exploratory mission to Mars, unlike the PR stunt of Mars One or Musk’s colony fantasy, I’d contribute.

  90. John Morales says

    Sorry, FossilFishy. I do get your point, but was a tad chafed by your hyperbole — desperate, you’re not, because desperate people will clutch at straws.

    No doubt it could be done with existing tech and sufficient allocation of resources — say, those currently allocated to the military. The USA could probably even do it on its own.

  91. springa73 says

    To be clear, I don’t think Musk’s plan or timetable is realistic, but I do think that humans living elsewhere than earth is possible in the longer term. What baffles me is the idea that space colonization is somehow harmful to people on earth. If anyone is in danger, it would be the people trying to colonize another planet.

  92. John Morales says

    springa73:

    What baffles me is the idea that space colonization is somehow harmful to people on earth.

    Care to quote but a single comment on this thread espousing the idea you find so baffling?

    I think the closest you will come is the claim that many imagine there’s no particular need to worry about our existing biosphere, because one day we will have others available (cf #70) by virtue of space colonisation. Hardly the same thing.

  93. springa73 says

    Comments like #70 are exactly what I’m referring to – the idea that it’s somehow destructive to people on earth or “colonialist” to even think about having people live on other planets. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Sure there’s a few yahoos who think that we can escape into space if the earth gets trashed. I hardly think that they are numerous or representative of people who support space colonization, and I think that it is disingenuous to pretend that they are significant.

    If space colonization doesn’t hurt anyone on earth (as I believe it does not), and does not harm life in other places (because that life either doesn’t exist or is unlikely to be harmed by anything from earth), then the only objection I can see to at least trying space colonization is the danger to the colonists themselves. This, I’ll admit, is a serious issue.

  94. Ichthyic says

    Comments like #70 are exactly what I’m referring to

    context is everything. read it more closely.

  95. chigau (違う) says

    springa73
    To what are you referring when you say space colonization?
    luna?
    mars?
    alpha centauri?

  96. John Morales says

    springa73, it seems I need to adumbrate #70 for you: space colonisation (in practice, resource exploitation, but that doesn’t sound so good) is not a get-out-of-jail card, but the belief that it is pernicious.

    (There’s more there, but in relation to your current bafflement that is the salient aspect)

  97. wzrd1 says

    Personally, before I’d go hog wild fooling around with planets and the multitude of challenges involved in surviving on them, I’d prefer by far to perfect space habitats.
    Graduate from there to space habitats for manufacturing from asteroidal minerals harvested by robotic spacecraft.

    Lunar and martial operations are best automated or left for short duration stays, due to bone mineral loss, lack of magnetospheric protection, significant temperature extremes and minimal to negligible atmosphere.
    Hell, if we could pull that off, we might even manage to lift enough earth population off to let this poor planet recover from our excesses (although, I suspect that’s far beyond unworkable).
    But, such environments won’t tolerate earth style pollute and ignore, as such excesses would become rapidly lethal.
    But, such small scale (read: kilometer or so sized initial units) would teach us a hell of a lot about building a regenerative, self-contained biosphere, its feedback mechanisms, etc (this, while pondering a fire ant problem in my back yard after my wife has been repeatedly stung by the little buggers. Social insect, my ass – stinging for no reason whatsoever isn’t very sociable at all!).*

    *That last parenthesis portion being a joke, due to frustration over the actual subject matter – a fire ant infestation of my yard. Now, to learn the endemic ants in an area rather new to me and the difference between them and fire ants, so that I target the invasive species only.
    Fortunately, one of my most favorite things to do is learn new things. :)
    An odd tangent intruded during a bathroom break, are we seeing colony collapse disorder in Africanized bees? I’ll have to check on that tomorrow night.
    I have to change my diurnal cycle, as I do each “weekend” (I’m off on Thursdays and Fridays) and work midnight shift. That will involve a brief period of afternoon wakefulness, for feeding and short duration activities, then a nap to “reset” my “clock”. Nowhere near enough time for me to properly devote the appropriate amount of uninterrupted time to the subject.
    So, I’ve placed this note here and in one other place where I’ll find it.

  98. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    John

    …was a tad chafed by your hyperbole…

    Yeah, I get that. I’m very aware that hyperbole and the purplest of prose is what I do. Some find it evocative, and others chafing, so it goes.

  99. Silentbob says

    @ ^

    Why? You want the world’s population wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from dirty telephone? Locust.

  100. says

    I recently read a manga where some people had the bright idea to terraform Mars for colonization. It ended up with 500 years later, still no colony and 7-foot tall cockroaches going around Mars smashing the humans. One of the reasons I prefer fiction to Elon Musk’s kind of fantasy is because fiction doesn’t try to deny that a seemingly nice idea may not turn out as you hoped. I get not wanting to deny ideas a place too early in the creative process, but interplanetary colonization is not first a creative endeavor, and you cannot use “suspension of disbelief” to let you play fast and loose with science to make your dream a reality. I sometimes wonder if people with enough money and power and presence that their immediate world seems to follow their narrative forget that they do not actually have the power to rewrite reality.

  101. says

    There is only one disaster i would rather sit out on Mars than on Earth. And that would be the impact of an asteroid big enough to remelt the earth crust, which would also be big enough that we could prevent the disaster, because we would see it early enough.
    Of course it would be a good idea to invest some money into asteroid defense (*hint hint* Musk, you could even use your big rocket for it). Not an asteroid defense against such big objects by the way, they are to rare for that. No, a defense against or at least forecast of small, city leveling objects like the Chelyabinsk meteor which hit the earth every few decades. They are mostly harmless because Earth is such an empty place and they are only happening every 60 yrs or so, but they are also the objects which are on the peak of short warning time and damage potential. And far more likely than super volcanos or mystical illnesses with a 100% fatality rate.

    And people, please stop talking about gamma ray bursts. While GRB’s are focused, that means focused on astronomical scales. They would still be light years across when they hit the solar system and wipe out life on Mars even quicker than on Earth.

  102. says

    People are treated as passive cargo. He’s talking about cooping up hundreds of people in a tin can the size of “two 747s” for 80 days. Ask any airline what happens when an airplane is grounded on the tarmac for a few hours — they go insane.

    That’s kind of a silly argument, isn’t it?
    That is: the question of how feasible it would be to transport 100 people in an object of that size to Mars is certainly a valid one… but airplanes on the tarmac? Really?

    People in airplanes get pissed off by multi-hour delays because they signed on in the belief that the trip would take a certain limited amount of time: anywhere from twenty minutes to half a day, in most cases. They are worrying about near-term things to do at the end of the voyage: catching a connection, picking up rental cars, getting to hotels, etc, which can be disrupted by multi-hour delays. So it’s understandable that they’re annoyed. (Also, they’re confined to mostly uncomfortable chairs the whole time.)

    Comparing that to a situation where people know in advance that the whole thing will take several months is pretty nonsensical. (I mean, prior to the mid-19th Century, sailing ships routinely transported a hundred or more passengers on multi-month voyages, and they generally didn’t start rioting within the first few days.)

  103. Ronan Wills says

    Why are we even discussing the idea of colonizing Mars when we haven’t even sent a single trained astronaut there yet? Hell, if we decide (for some reason) that we need a permanent human presence off-planet, wouldn’t a moon-base or a large space station be much closer to the ballpark of feasible than going to *Mars*?

    Let’s get an Apollo-style mission to Mars and back again in one piece first, then maybe a few centuries from now we can start discussing space colonization.

  104. jefrir says

    jdmuys

    why we need to move away from earth? Because it’s a lot easier and cheaper than to fix what’s going to happen to the sun in a few billion years. Global warming is small potato.

    Tell you what, how about we put that problem to one side for, say, a billion years, and then come back to it? Should give us plenty of time to find a solution.
    Jesus fuck, “a few billion years” is the entire history of the earth. We do not need to solve it now with shitty attempts at space colonization, and we definitely don’t need to use it as an excuse to ignore climate change, which is killing people right now.

  105. bargearse says

    Ichthyic already mentioned Stark by Ben Elton but I’d like to point it out again. It might be fiction but a bunch of narcissistic billionaires blasting off to restart humanity on another world (the ultimater “going Galt”) does not end well for anyone.

  106. wzrd1 says

    @Turi1337 #112, any body large enough to remelt the earth’s crust wouldn’t be an asteroid, it’d be a minor planet and we’d likely need at least a century of warning or more to actually effectively deal with it.
    Those city smashing asteroids can be dealt with in a decade or so and something the size of the Chelyabinsk fireball, likely only a few years with gravitational tugs.
    And yes, a whopping big rocket would most certainly help handle those things.

    As for GRB’s, few are the stars close enough to be a real threat of harming even unprotected astronauts in deep space with a GRB. The beam is rather narrow, the distance is great and between the two, the probability that something would be aimed directly or even glancingly at our solar system is minute.

    Meanwhile, last year, NW Louisiana had “the flood of the century”, this year, “A thousand year flood” and the southern part of the state had a stubborn weather system dump disaster inducing amounts of rain on it – and that’s just one state. Such events are predicted to become more and more common.
    But, there’s no reason that we can’t do both. Astrophysicists and rocket scientists don’t do climate mitigation, climatologists don’t do space travel and a fraction off of our monsterous military budget could trivially pay for both.

  107. Ichthyic says

    Which to me wasn’t so much dubious as deeply and astonishingly ignorant on just about every possible level. Kind of fractally wrong.

    except the part where neoliberals have indeed killed funding for not just space exploration, but science in general over the last 30 plus years.

    I haven’t the article referenced, which might be filled with all sorts of idiocy. but that? that is not wrong at all.

  108. springa73 says

    #104 –
    I was thinking mainly of within this solar system – beyond that is so long term and speculative that I think it must remain in the realm of fiction for the foreseeable future.

    #105 –
    The point that I’m trying to make is that I don’t think many people actually think this way. It’s a bit of a straw man argument to claim that most people who advocate for space colonization don’t care about earth or think that space provides a “get out of jail free” option.

  109. says

    Siobhan @ 16:

    I’m going to go on a limb and assume that using water as a radiation shield might have merit but it probably needs to be separate from your drinking water.

    Indeed, we’re not going to drink that. Instead, the vessel will return to Earth where we will sell this ballast as “Cosmic Water™” to the credulous New-Age types. The mission will pay for itself!

  110. says

    cartomancer @ 24:

    Why not build the colony in Antarctica, or the middle of the Gobi Desert…

    The SF writer Bruce Sterling made a similar point a few years ago: there are plenty of environments on Earth completely unsuitable for human habitation and yet a fraction as inhospitable as Mars, yet we appear to be in no great rush to colonise them. In fact, the Gobi Desert was the example he used; show me a self-sustaining colony in the Gobi Desert, was his argument, and I’ll believe we can colonise Mars.

  111. aziraphale says

    Elon Musk’s Dragon capsule is the only system in the world able to return significant amounts of cargo (3,000 lb) from the International Space Station. I know his priorities are not yours, but do you think you could bring yourself to stop calling him a con man?

    I used always to look forward to reading your blog. Now I don’t.

  112. wzrd1 says

    @aziraphale #123, the problem is, this *is* a huge con. Hand waving each logistical challenge, inventing from whole unplanned as of yet cloth new space craft and engines and ignoring the very basics.

    A crew of four on a three-year martian mission eating only three meals each day would need to carry more than 24,000 pounds (10,886 kilograms) of food.

    Multiply that out for a crew of 200, try to shoehorn in that amount of food inside of the space of two 747’s alongside of those 200 people.
    Then, remember that they’ll also need water – loads of water.
    Now, one could use water in a dual role, consumption and radiation shielding, but now we’ve added bulky recycling devices.
    https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everydaylife/jamestown-needs-fs.html

    Dude handwaved that away.
    Then, they’d require supplies when they land on Mars, shelters, atmospheric processing supplies, more food and water, exercise equipment (or after a year or so, return to earth would be extremely problematic), more radiation shielding, some way to produce more food in a dimmer, cooler environment, etc.

    He’d have been better served making the big rocket to deliver sections of a habitat, solve long term problems in earth orbit, then solve radiation problems in lunar orbit, then begin to think about moving that habitat to Mars.

  113. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    It’s a bit of a straw man argument to claim that most people who advocate for space colonization don’t care about earth or think that space provides a “get out of jail free” option.

    Advocate away. Just shut up about other peoples motives, especially those who want more of our limited resources to go into solving problems on Earth, rather than setting up some colony likely to fail in a spectacular fashion, killing everybody.
    Nobody has to agree with you and colonization. You are unconvincing to me, simply relying on optimism.

  114. wzrd1 says

    <blockquote…especially those who want more of our limited resources to go into solving problems on Earth…
    So, as it’s Musk’s money being expended and hence, his resources and his investors resources, who else are you going to demand expend their resources in ways that you approve of?

    While I agree, his notion of a colony – indeed, his notion on numbers of people per trip is logistically unsustainable, but it’s his resources to waste.
    Complaining about that is about as bad as the “leave it in the ground” campaign, while not having a viable substitute to replace those fossil fuels immediately. Both are premature ideas, with no pathway toward the realization of either idea.
    In the former, Musk has no real plan, just a napkin idea. In the latter, replacing the fuel in my car, one for one, so that I can still go to work, go to the doctor, go to the pharmacy and maybe have enough left over to go to the supermarket for food.
    We’re part way to fuel replacement and technologies being replaced, we have no effective one for one upgrade pathway. I sure can’t afford to replace my car, so that means replacing its fuel. Well, that or you find a free replacement powerplant for it.

  115. Rich Woods says

    @Siobhan #16:

    using water as a radiation shield might have merit but it probably needs to be separate from your drinking water.

    In which case your drinking water would also need a radiation shield. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s a problem. Solar photons and protons slamming into H2O lose energy by breaking an atomic bond or knocking an electron into a higher shell, and then go on to lose more energy by hitting another molecule (if the water tank between you and the sun is deep enough). The electrons drop back done; the ions recombine. There are a few flashes of light and the water gets a little warmer, but it doesn’t become noticeably radioactive or poisonous.

  116. Rich Woods says

    All other difficulties aside (and there are a lot of them), has Musk yet stated where he plans to build his colony? Has he scouted it out for sufficient quantities of water ice? If not, where is he going to get his supply of hydrogen and oxygen from, fast enough to replace the losses from the recycling inefficiencies and inevitable wastage? If he doesn’t already have a sound plan for water and air, his colony is doomed. There’s not much point in working out how to send people to Mars if they a) can’t come home, or b) can’t stay there indefinitely.

  117. says

    wzrd1 @124:

    I’m very skeptical of Musk’s plans, but you’re objecting to straw-man versions of it.

    Multiply that out for a crew of 200, try to shoehorn in that amount of food inside of the space of two 747’s alongside of those 200 people.

    No, the claim is that the “long term goal” of the “interplanetary ship” would be to transport 100 (not 200) people.

    The only direct experience we have of long-term “space travel” is space stations. Mir held 3 people, with a pressurized volume of 350 cubic meters, and went as long as 8 months between resupply missions. The ISS holds 6 people (3 at the moment), with a pressurized volume of 930 cubic meters, and has gone four months without resupply (twice). So to zeroth order, we could say that living space, food, water, toilets, exercise and recycling equipment, etc. for “journeys” of 4 or so months take about 120-150 cubic meters per person, using late 20th/early 21st Century technology. (Note that this assumes no recycling of food, just of water.)

    So 100 people on a trip to Mars might require 12,000 to 15,000 cubic meters of pressurized space in order to have the equivalent of what astronauts on Mir or the ISS had. The volume of Musk’s hypothetical ship is around 40,000 cubic meters; the wild-ass-guess living space thus takes up about 30-40% of the ship. That’s probably too much (given that the majority of space has to go to fuel, rocket engines, etc.), and of course I haven’t bothered to figure out how much mass that would involve and how that affects fuel requirements.

    But it’s not, at first glance, completely outside the realm of possibility.

    Then, they’d require supplies when they land on Mars, shelters, atmospheric processing supplies, more food and water, exercise equipment (or after a year or so, return to earth would be extremely problematic), more radiation shielding, some way to produce more food in a dimmer, cooler environment, etc.

    Of course. The “100 people” thing is a hypothetical transport mode after all the infrastructure has been set up and some sort of colony is up and running.

  118. wzrd1 says

    @Rich Woods, indeed, we’re not talking about neutron activation. Long chain hydrocarbons have long been used in portable reactors, offering superior radiation shielding as well. Those can even absorb some x-ray and gamma radiation released by bremsstrahlung radiation from charged particles impacting the hull of the spacecraft, the remainder being absorbed by the water jacket.
    Which is why I mentioned above, one could indeed use that water safely. It’d then just be a matter of water treatment and purification, which has already been perfected for space flight (tested on the shuttle and ISS).
    The ISS using far less water than previous missions, down to three gallons of water per day per person.

    Although, that’s a considerable amount of mass, when accounting for 200 people, plus operational losses.

  119. ModZero says

    @97, Fishy

    Monorail

    Musk is selling that Kool-Aid too. From a European perspective of a country with a really good railway service, it’s hilariously missing the point. Colonizing Mars, self-driving cars, pneumatic transport – what is it with USA and heroically finding terrible solutions to long solved problems?

  120. ModZero says

    While I agree, his notion of a colony – indeed, his notion on numbers of people per trip is logistically unsustainable, but it’s his resources to waste.

    No they’re not. What kind of medieval view of enterprise you’re subscribing to? The company isn’t just the bosses thing to do what the dude wants to do with it.

    Complaining about that is about as bad as the “leave it in the ground” campaign, while not having a viable substitute to replace those fossil fuels immediately. Both are premature ideas, with no pathway toward the realization of either idea.

    No, you’re ignoring that the idea was around for long enough for us to smoothly transition, only regressives were fighting it tooth and nail for so long, that now we’re actually in a position where it’s either that, or learning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

  121. brett says

    @133 ModZero

    SpaceX is still a private company, so it is basically his money to waste on this. Not that he is wasting money on it – the raptor engine could be quite useful for future re-usable space launches, giving it valid commercial purposes.

  122. wzrd1 says

    @Peter Erwin #130, not a lot of room for redundancy. Doable, barely, with a loss of redundancy and safety. A space station isn’t a frequently maneuvering unit, a spacecraft is.
    Also, one wants redundancy in personnel, hence why I said 200, rather than 100.

    @Rich Woods, for water, that’d be a bit tricky, although we’re finally starting to get a handle on where water is deposited on Mars. O2, easily enough via rock kilns releasing oxygen bound to the elements in the rocks.
    That said, I’m uncertain where I’d get all of the energy from to operate these magical kilns, save if I were packing a nuclear reactor and all of the excess baggage that brings.
    Personally, I’d still prefer robotics for surface work and possibly short term technical support staff to repair the robots, using a habitat system in orbit. There’d be a lot less logistical restrictions that way – once we perfect that technology and fully satisfy radiation safety requirements.
    That said, I’m such an infamous “safety nazi” as to require shirt sleeves operation during a dead on CME impact level of safety. Plus redundancy on every single system.
    But, habitats are far more doable than his big old space ship, with people trying to operate under 0.38 G for extended periods of time, while trying to carve out the necessities of life from a phenomenally hostile environment. As a hint, NASA suppressed – for years – much of the lunar astronaut footage. Astronauts spent about as much time on their knees and butts as on their feet. We evolved to operate under 1 G, not low partial G conditions.
    I’ve actually told Aldrin, “You didn’t walk on the moon. You shuffled, you hopped and you fell often enough to give everyone in mission control premature grey hair. Walking just ain’t in the cards for a species that evolved under 1 G”. He laughed and agreed.
    Still, they all did better than I’d have done. I’d have fallen through my faceplate.

  123. John Morales says

    wzrd1 @126:

    While I agree, his notion of a colony – indeed, his notion on numbers of people per trip is logistically unsustainable, but it’s his resources to waste.

    Brett @134:

    SpaceX is still a private company, so it is basically his money to waste on this.

    What a stupid retort; it doesn’t dispute the wastage, it merely claims it’s justified.

    (Well, that’s alright, then!)

  124. wzrd1 says

    @ModZero…

    No they’re not. What kind of medieval view of enterprise you’re subscribing to? The company isn’t just the bosses thing to do what the dude wants to do with it.

    Magical food, as worked in the first Roanoke colony. Yeah, that worked out really well!

    No, you’re ignoring that the idea was around for long enough for us to smoothly transition, only regressives were fighting it tooth and nail for so long, that now we’re actually in a position where it’s either that, or learning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

    More bullshit, smooth transition, without a substitute offered. More handwaving.

    Here’s a hint, lose my car, lose my transportation to medical care and food, my wife and I do that dead thing rather quickly.
    Offer me fossil free death isn’t an offer, it’s summary execution and I’ll happily offer my own suggestions in return.

  125. wzrd1 says

    @John Morales:

    What a stupid retort; it doesn’t dispute the wastage, it merely claims it’s justified.

    OK, tell me, order me how to expend my resources, watch them disappear entirely. Don’t tell me how to spend my fucking hard earned money. Even Musk would say the very same thing.
    Order me to spend my money in a specific way, I’ll burn the shit and nobody gets it.

    A philosophical objection is one thing, we’ve passed that line here, with objecting to regulatory levels. I’d then put the money inside of a pillow, then burn it when I die.
    That money would eventually reconcile, around a generation or two later.
    As, if I can’t use what I’ve earned as I see fit, although listening to you, I’ll destroy that which I’ve earned, as it’s worthless to me and you’re stealing what I earned.
    I loathe thieves.

  126. John Morales says

    wzrd1:

    OK, tell me, order me how to expend my resources, watch them disappear entirely. Don’t tell me how to spend my fucking hard earned money. Even Musk would say the very same thing.
    Order me to spend my money in a specific way, I’ll burn the shit and nobody gets it.

    Such pointless fury! Who is telling or ordering anybody to do anything?

    (Also, I am amused by how you confuse money with resources)

    A philosophical objection is one thing, we’ve passed that line here, with objecting to regulatory levels.

    A philosophical objection which evidently has you greatly exercised.

    Again: if I point out that you claim you would you burn all your money in a fit of pique, retorting that it is your right to do so doesn’t dispute my point; rather, it tacitly acknowledges it.

  127. wzrd1 says

    @John Morales, you have to realize, I’ve had this conversation multiple times.
    I’ve had far right and far left tell me how something “shouldn’t be allowed” to be spent upon.
    In that context, I’d do my level best to see that money, which is indeed a resource gatherer, destroyed and nullified.
    If I earn it, in a Capitalistic system, sure as hell should be allowed to have a right to it, beyond that which is taxed for the common good.

    You’d loathe my response to abuses to eminent domain for private gains, think radium and toxic waste on my property, for starters.
    I loathe thievery, save for when it’s necessary for survival, then, I’ll add to the thieves load.
    I’ve been *really* down, economically. I’ve been quite successful as well. I’ve also had significant assets stolen from me, lifetime level assets.
    My preference on what to do with such an individual is to strike them in twain with a continental divide or something.
    As I’m not the Emperor of the Earth, I lack that ability to declare an impossible Imperial Decree.
    As I’m not Emperor and I also happen to have such an ongoing theft effort, I can entangle the effort until the point where the resources sought to be stolen are worthless to the thief, with preference to rendering it a greater cost to the thief than is gained by said theft.

    That said, I’m limited by both finances and the unwillingness to engage in terrorism.
    That is the truth today. Every damned thing that I’ve earned and acquired of worth to me and my family is being actually stolen due to some local government corruption and grudges, so I’m tossing what obstacles in the way as I can.
    So, it’s rather a sensitive subject on how I expend what resources that I still have.

  128. ModZero says

    Magical food, as worked in the first Roanoke colony. Yeah, that worked out really well!

    WTF does Roanoke Colony have to do with the (so outdated it wasn’t ever real) idea that a company is an actual property in anything other than the name?

    Here’s a hint, lose my car, lose my transportation to medical care and food, my wife and I do that dead thing rather quickly.

    In ye olde Europe we have those things called “trams” and “trains”. And for more rural areas, a bus network, still far more efficient than individual cars, for shorter trips extensive bike networks. For people with limited mobility public transport provides door-to-door service. It’s all mostly funded by taxing people who put disproportionate strain on the economy, like billionaires. It also funds social housing, food and access to medicine in places where it wouldn’t easily pay for itself.

    It’s pretty cool, if you taxed people like Musk out of their silly vanity projects you could survive without individual car too!

  129. lpetrich says

    There is an organization that has more-or-less taken up PZ’s challenge, The Mars Society. It runs research stations in the Utah desert and in Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, where people live in simulated Mars-base conditions.

    When I look at Mars-colonization initiatives, I think “Why is it important to live on a planet? Why not live in a free-flying space colony?” The habitability problems are essentially the same, with the exception of the local gravity.

  130. lpetrich says

    CBC News – Indepth: Space: Mars is a nice article on the Mars Society’s Devon-Island plans.

    Devon Island is a 54,100 square-kilometre island between Baffin and Ellesmere Islands in Nunavut. The site is an almost-perfect imitation of the environmental conditions on Mars – a cold, bleak desert of rocks, frozen rubble, dry streambeds, and deep canyons. Daytime temperatures are similar to summer days on Mars although the atmosphere on Earth is about 100 times as dense as the atmosphere on the Red Planet.

  131. John Morales says

    lpetrich:

    When I look at Mars-colonization initiatives, I think “Why is it important to live on a planet? Why not live in a free-flying space colony?”

    Wrong question, but I shall indulge you.

    Because there are no free-flying space colonies, but there is a life-bearing planet.

    Already has the right gravity.
    Already has the right atmosphere.
    Already has protection from charged particle events.
    Already has an ecosystem compatible with people.

    And it is multiply-redundant, as has been well-and-truly noted above — it doesn’t need constant maintenance and care to maintain itself.

    (Admittedly, it’s not perfect — do enough damage, it will eventually become less and less compatible — and humanity is currently on its way to achieve that)

    The habitability problems are essentially the same, with the exception of the local gravity.

    Really. Only gravity. Because Newton and Einstein were wrong, and there’s just no way to generate gravity* on a space station!

    So, it’s a worry that there will be a depressurisation event in the Utah desert and in Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic? Maybe run out of volatiles or dirt due to lack of supply?

    (More to the point — do you even realise the difference between an outpost and a colony?)

    All that said, sure — with sufficient tech and resources, building and maintaining space habitats would be far, far easier than building planetary colonies. But they wouldn’t be colonies, would they? They’d be habitats.

    * Equivalence principle.

  132. John Morales says

    lpetrich:

    The site is an almost-perfect imitation of the environmental conditions on Mars – a cold, bleak desert of rocks, frozen rubble, dry streambeds, and deep canyons. Daytime temperatures are similar to summer days on Mars although the atmosphere on Earth is about 100 times as dense as the atmosphere on the Red Planet.

    FFS. Ignore the atmospheric composition, and hand-wave away the atmospheric pressure* and radiation flux. And ignore the relative degree of isolation — because, in (say) a medical emergency, one of the researchers could just as relatively quickly be evacuated from Devon Island as from Mars, as could emergency supplies be equally quickly be shipped in.

    Yeah, almost perfect — for certain values of ‘almost’ and of ‘perfect’.

    (bah)

    * You do know to what temperature refers, no? The gas laws?

  133. Vivec says

    As fond as I am of public transportation – my home country has a pretty great tram system – I am kind of wary at positing it as altogether better than private transportation. As a trans person in a world that is very not safe for people like me that often has to travel at night, I’d absolutely rather drive myself than take a bus or a tram. I’ve already had people spit on me or break my stuff before.

    Not that I don’t think public transportation is altogether superior, but I think that is one factor to keep in mind when advocating for it.

  134. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Some areas of the world have nice public transit systems.

    We have a minimal bus system (PACE) here in Chiwaukee, but I’ve never used it. It would have been quicker to walk to work (40 minutes) than take the bus (fifty minutes, a transfer, and a long walk), whereas it was only a 7 minute drive. Same is true for the other places I go to, like the grocery stores, drug stores, and doctors.

    Since I can only be gone a couple of hours due to caring for the Redhead, it pretty much precludes any use of the PACE system.

  135. springa73 says

    #125 – OK, I’ll stick with my optimism and others can stick to their pessimism. I’ve already said that I think the actual plan is wildly unrealistic, but I suspect that Musk knows this too, and is deliberately proposing an over-ambitious plan just to get people considering the idea and some of the steps required to do it. As for waste of resources, I’ve already expressed my opinion that humanity routinely spends more on unnecessary luxuries than a trip to Mars would take, and that we are talking a drop in a very large bucket next to humanity’s total resources.

    In addition, I don’t think that I’m the one casting aspersions on other peoples’ motives.

  136. John Morales says

    springa73:

    As for waste of resources, I’ve already expressed my opinion that humanity routinely spends more on unnecessary luxuries than a trip to Mars would take, and that we are talking a drop in a very large bucket next to humanity’s total resources.

    Yeah. Every bit as stupid as the claim that it’s their money to waste, because it implicitly acknowledges the point you’re supposedly rebutting.

    (A bit like arguing small-time criminality is fine, since big-time criminality exists)

  137. springa73 says

    #149 – Well, since a society that didn’t spend any money on unnecessary luxuries would be a pretty gray and dull place, I think that the point is well made – wasting money on luxuries actually is an important part of making life enjoyable.

  138. John Morales says

    springa73:

    I suspect that Musk knows this too, and is deliberately proposing an over-ambitious plan just to get people considering the idea and some of the steps required to do it.
    […]
    I don’t think that I’m the one casting aspersions on other peoples’ motives.

    <snicker>

    Hey, other people have cast far more aspersion on Musk’s motives, so your little aspersion (that he’s bait-and-switching) is but a drop in the bucket, so it hardly counts.

  139. John Morales says

    springa73:

    … wasting money on luxuries actually is an important part of making life enjoyable.

    For such as you, I hardly doubt it.

    (But hey, nice that you explicitly acknowledge it’s wastage)

  140. wzrd1 says

    @ModZero #141

    WTF does Roanoke Colony have to do with the (so outdated it wasn’t ever real) idea that a company is an actual property in anything other than the name?

    Poor provisioning is poor provisioning, in both cases, due to technological limitations.

    It’s all mostly funded by taxing people who put disproportionate strain on the economy, like billionaires.

    Oddly, those billionaires considered the disabled as a disproportionate strain on the economy, as well as the elderly and children – aw hell, anyone that isn’t them is such to them.
    But then, it sounds like you are living in a civilized nation. Alas, I’m in the US.

  141. springa73 says

    #152

    “For such as me”? What kind of asshole statement is that?

    My main luxury purchase is probably books. I don’t know anything about you, but just from demographics I’ll bet there’s at least a 50% chance that you spend as much or more on luxuries than I do.

  142. wzrd1 says

    @springa73 #154,

    My main luxury purchase is probably books.

    One of my favorite and primary “luxury” purchases. :)
    Although, I did splurge during fairer economic times (personal economics wise) and picked up an e-reader. One can carry a small library that way. :)

  143. ModZero says

    @Vivec

    As a trans person in a world that is very not safe for people like me that often has to travel at night

    Okay, I know street harassment a bit more personally than I’d like to (including a damaged nerve in my cheek as a reminder), but that’s probably not best solved by cars. Pretty sure I’d meet some of the scarier people I knew on a parking lot if I were driving. Meanwhile where I live I feel quite a bit safer despite being carless after moving to a new country. Not safe, but at least I’m able to conform enough to only have issues sporadically.

    Anyhow, I’m not actually for banning cars altogether, that’s not necessary to radically lower consumption. Providing good bike infrastructure, high quality accessible public transport and walkable cities (so that I can go buy my groceries pretty much downstairs), together with certain changes to regulations (a bit higher prices on gas, yes, but also responsibility for accidents defaulting to the driver, for example) seem to be quite enough to reduce driving.

    @wzrd1

    Poor provisioning is poor provisioning, in both cases, due to technological limitations.

    That still seems to have very little to do with whether a company is actual property or not.

  144. lpetrich says

    In response to John Morales in #144, I was asking about where to live in the context of living on Mars. Why live on some planet which is as inhospitable as outer space when you can live in outer space itself? As to gravity, one can spin a space colony to create 1g of centrifugal acceleration in its outer parts, but it’s hard to get more than a planet’s gravity on a planet’s surface. So on Mars, one is stuck with 2/5 g, and on the Moon, one is stuck with 1/6 g.

    I will concede that The Mars Society’s habitation experiments are imperfect imitations of Mars’s surface conditions, but they do go part of the way. Isolation in desert landscapes, for instance.

  145. daddybartholomew says

    matt @55

    Apochryphal?

    I’ll see your Teflon, Velcro, Tang, and microchips from a Chicago Tribune article, and raise you Laser Angioplasty, Cardiac Imaging System, Advanced Pacemaker, Implantable Heart Aid, Implantable and External Pumps, Temperature Pill, Infrared Thermometer, Thermal Video, Body Imaging, Skin Damage Assessment, Gait Analysis System, Programmable Remapper, Computer Reader for the Blind, Vision Trainer, Ocular Screening System, Speech Aids, Cool Suit, Advanced Wheelchair, Vehicle Controller, Human Tissue Stimulator, Blood Analyzer, Microbe Detector, Space Technology for Firefighting, Food Processing Control, Radiation-Blocking lenses, Safety Grooving, Lightning Protection, X-Ray Imaging System, Electro-Expulsive Aircraft Deicer, Collision Avoidance System, Self-Righting life Raft, Landsat legacy, Weather Information Processing, Document Monitor, Corrosion-Resistant Coating, Air/Wastewater Purification Systems, Plant Research, Gas Analyzer, Microspheres, Power Factor Controller, Stirling Engine, Solar Energy, Heat Pipes for the Alaska Pipeline, Riblets for Stars & Stripes, ICEMAT Ice Making System, Cordless Products, Metallized Materials, Memory Metals, Scratch-Resistant Sunglass Coating, Heart Rate Monitor, Athletic Shoes, Water Filter/Conditioner, Pool Purification, Heat Pipes, Virtual Reality, Digital Image Processing, Structural Analysis, Parallel Processing System, Portable Computer, Fabric Structures, Flat Cable, Bolt Stress Monitor, Quality ControI System, Nondestructive Testing Tool, Pressure Measurement Systems, Laser Technology, Induction Heating Systems, High Pressure Waterstripping, Composites For lighter Structures, Dry lubricant Coating, Diamond Coatings, Ion Generators, Magnetic Liquids, Robot Hand, and Clean Room Apparel.

    I could find you much more, but I didn’t want to go to more than one web page – and since this one not only lists items but gives their histories, I thought it might be most useful.

    http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/spinoff.html

  146. consciousness razor says

    springa:

    My main luxury purchase is probably books.

    Forget about the word “luxury” for a moment. You don’t necessarily waste money on books, as a consequence of their definition (by you) as “a luxury,” whatever that means. That looks like a purely logical claim about an arbitrary definition, not an empirical claim about some matter of fact about what happens in the physical world. So let’s talk about the world, trying to describe/explain things about it in some detail, instead of merely shuffling vague concepts around to make something that looks like an argument.

    In fact, you can (and generally do) get some use out of books. You can read them. They make your life better in some (possibly difficult to express) way. You could even set a book on fire to keep warm, put one under a table to make it level, and so forth, if that’s how you decide to use it. They have uses. There is some clearly expressible goal or consequence that you can aim for (e.g., learning something from the book), such that spending time/money/resources on the book is a useful thing that you should do to achieve that goal or realize that consequence. Perhaps that is not a goal you should have (e.g., you shouldn’t use it to kill someone, since that would be wrong), but if is then it is a way you should go about doing that good thing.

    There may be better ways of achieving some such goals — maybe you should buy a better table, maybe another book is cheaper/less interesting/etc. and should level your table, maybe something else would be a better heat source, etc. — but books themselves are not intrinsically useless in that sense. In that sense, it is not a waste to have or use them.

    If somebody else offers a genuinely better idea of what to do or how to do it, you should listen to that person who is helping you and try to understand them, not proceed to tell them that it’s your shit to waste or that their claims are somehow invalidated by the fact that it is “your shit.” That would just be acting like an unreasonable, petulant, little child — there’s no reason for anyone to take that seriously. Even on the assumption that you ought to be afforded some right to that shit which everyone else ought to respect, it doesn’t follow that there are no constraints on how you should use it. If for no other reason (if it’s not for your own good, for example), we have to live with you in this universe, and very generally that is reason enough for us to care.

    Spending millions or billions on a suicide mission to Mars, or spending it on an attempt to colonize Mars (with a roughly 0% chance of success and no clear utility if it were successful), is not analogous to buying a book. That hardly needs to be said, but I’ll say it, since you’ve evidently confused yourself about some vague words or have forgotten what we’re talking about.

  147. petrander says

    What I don’t get is why, with all the dreams of creating colonies and even domed cities on Mars, why don’t we try that on, say, Antarctica first, to see if it is at all attainable!? I mean, we all remember Biosphere II being a failure. What ever happened to getting a “proof-of-concept”? Antarctica is somewhat closer to the cold, barren, less sun-irradiated milieu of Mars, but at least there is the option relatively easy escape and rescue, if only to get some oxygen from the outside! Oh, well…

  148. petrander says

    OK. I promise, next time I will read the ENTIRE blog post before commenting… (-_-)

  149. John Morales says

    [OT]

    springa73:

    “For such as me”? What kind of asshole statement is that?

    A true one, which (unlike yours) doesn’t ascribe to others one’s own predilection.

    (For such as I, wasting money on luxuries would make life much less enjoyable)

    My main luxury purchase is probably books.

    Feeble fallback; we both know that when you wrote “wasting money on luxuries” you did not merely mean spending money on things without which you literally could not survive.

  150. ModZero says

    @158

    List of everything someone in NASA could come up with, probably same person who treated EM drive and Alcubierre drive seriously

    That’s hilarious. Not one of those things was avoidable. Well, there’s a few strictly space related things, but that’s when the “spinoff” thing gets even more ridiculous. But seriously, you quote a list including “portable computers” and “infrared thermometer” and don’t stop and think for a moment?

  151. John Morales says

    lpetrich, petrander: as far as the hab goes, it doesn’t matter where it’s sited — it would be a shirt-sleeve environment. There is merit in having a similar local landscape for external activities (though it would not be a low-g low-pressure environment), but one hardly needs to go to remote desert areas for that.

    (Marketing, it is)

  152. John Morales says

    ModZero @163, it was the “Heat Pipes for the Alaska Pipeline” which amused me most.

    (In passing, WW2 led to many technological and procedural innovations* — but nobody defends it on that basis)

    * Including the first programmable electronic computers — cf. Colossus.

  153. wzrd1 says

    @ModZero,

    That still seems to have very little to do with whether a company is actual property or not.

    I apologize for not addressing that question. I had actually also intended to address that, but got distracted by a rather painful spasm and then entirely forgot about that question.
    I would say that a company is indeed actual property, especially under this definition.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property
    That’s used, as that article is reasonably well cited (although, I think I’ll refer that article to one of our teams for clean-up).

  154. ModZero says

    @John Morales, 165

    (In passing, WW2 led to many technological and procedural innovations* — but nobody defends it on that basis)

    You’d be surprised. Not in a good way.

  155. rietpluim says

    Musk’s rocket shares a lot of similarities with Ham’s ark. I’m sure that if it ever gets built, it won’t be a real rocket but just a tourist attraction.

  156. wzrd1 says

    @rietpluim #168, it could be a wee bit more than a tourist attraction if one exploded during testing.

    The as-yet unnamed booster is beefy. It’ll be 122 meters tall and about 12 meters wide (the Saturn V was 111 x 10 meters in size).

    OK, in the neighborhood of a Saturn V in size.

    If a Saturn V exploded on the pad at launch, 5.492 million pounds of RP-1 refined kerosene, liquid oxygen (LOX), and liquid hydrogen would contribute to its fireball. For a Saturn IB pad explosion, 1.11 million pounds of RP-1, LOX, and liquid hydrogen would fuel its fireball.

    High and Fletcher wrote that the fireball from a Saturn rocket launch pad failure would expand in a “nearly fixed location.” For the Saturn V, the fireball would expand to a diameter of 1408 feet. The Saturn IB fireball would expand to 844 feet. The fireballs would thus completely engulf the Saturn launch pads. For both rockets, fireball surface temperature would attain 2500° Fahrenheit, and heat would be felt up to a mile from the launch pad.

    A fireball would begin to rise when it reached its maximum diameter. Fireball ascent would commence about 20 seconds after a Saturn V launch pad explosion and about 10 seconds after a Saturn IB explosion, High and Fletcher calculated. The Saturn V fireball would reach an altitude of about 300 feet in 15 seconds, while the Saturn IB fireball would climb 300 feet in 11 seconds. The Saturn V fireball would persist at its maximum diameter for 34 seconds, while the Saturn IB fireball would last for 20 seconds. The fireball would then begin to cool and dissipate.

    Source:
    https://www.wired.com/2012/03/great-balls-of-fire-apollo-rocket-explosions-1965/

    That isn’t just an impressive firecracker, it’d likely cause severe pad damage.
    In the air, such as the infamous Saturn V pogo oscillation induced failure, it’d be about equally as impressive.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation

    Light shows like that do tend to attract tourists.*

    *Just count me out, I really don’t like loud noises. I’ll just wait for it to come out on YouTube.
    There’d be plenty, it takes a lot of successful and uneventful launches to get a rocket human rated.

  157. springa73 says

    #162 – Well, what do you mean by “luxuries”, if you don’t mean “things that aren’t strictly necessary for survival”? That was the definition I was going with, which is why it confuses me to see people arguing that wasting money on luxuries is a bad thing.

    #159 – If someone has a suggestion as to how I might better achieve a goal, the reasonable and intelligent thing to do would indeed be to listen to them. If, after careful consideration, I decide that my original idea is better, however, it is my right to go ahead with my original idea as long as I am not hurting someone or committing a crime. If the person who was giving me advice then starts to say that I am an idiot or ascribe the worst possible motives to me, I think that it is appropriate to tell that person to leave me alone, get lost, and let me get on with what I am doing. There’s nothing petulant or childish about that.

  158. says

    What drives me crazy about Musk is that he has 5 children. FIVE CHILDREN! Gee, how is it that rearing five kids doesn’t get in the way of being a busy billionaire entrepreneur? How often does he even SEE his kids?

    When’s the last time you saw a wealthy woman inventor and entrepreneur with five children and a stay-at-home husband who cares for all of them?

    Oh right, never.

    Because our culture doesn’t provide a way for women to pursue their (sometimes crazy) dreams and have a family at the same time. Our culture doesn’t even accept the IDEA of women doing this. Blargh.

  159. springa73 says

    Re: #170 – I actually misstated the definition of luxuries that I’ve been working with. Rather than “things not strictly necessary for survival”, I would consider luxuries to be “things not necessary for a minimal developed world standard of living”. I would not consider electricity , clean water, other sanitation, and decent medical care to be luxuries, but things like entertainment, culture and the arts, and any science that is not immediately applicable to human problems would be luxuries.

  160. consciousness razor says

    springa73:

    I actually misstated the definition of luxuries that I’ve been working with. Rather than “things not strictly necessary for survival”, I would consider luxuries to be “things not necessary for a minimal developed world standard of living”.

    Well, I’m glad you’ve settled on an idea. (However, “a minimal developed world standard of living” is too indefinite to be helpful, and you’ve also given no justification for why we should be using criteria like that to evaluate a Mars colonization program or anything else. Why, for example, assume that some “developed world” standard isn’t wasteful, that it is necessary or justifiable, or that the issue has anything to do with how you personally feel like defining a word mid-argument?)

    What makes you think PZ or anyone here had already settled on that particular notion, whatever it is, and said something in conflict with it? I mean, it’s bad when there’s a strawman argument, worse when it shifts around to two or more, and worse when we have no way to know what the claim is or how to respond to it. So, what exactly are you arguing against now?

    If someone has a suggestion as to how I might better achieve a goal, the reasonable and intelligent thing to do would indeed be to listen to them. If, after careful consideration, I decide that my original idea is better, however, it is my right to go ahead with my original idea as long as I am not hurting someone or committing a crime.

    If you don’t actually understand that you’re doing something wrong, even if you believe you’ve given it “careful consideration,” how is it relevant if you have some kind of a “right”? What kind of “right” are you talking about anyway? Whether or not it’s harmful settles the entire issue. So, how do you know that you’re not (directly or indirectly) hurting someone or not committing a crime (i.e., what ought to be a crime, even if it isn’t one legally in some jurisdiction)? What makes you so careful and so knowledgeable, that you don’t have to pay attention to the “suggestions” of other people?

    Again, the fact that you think you have a property right to something isn’t a justification — that kind of thinking is how every rich asshole has made a total clusterfuck of our lives, of political systems since the first king spit on the first peasant, and of the whole fucking environment for that matter. The fact that it satisfies a certain “minimal developed world standard of living” that you happen to fancy is not a justification. And in case you’re wondering … is colonizing another planet part of a minimal developed world standard of living? Hell no, and it wouldn’t matter if it were. The point is that it’s wasteful and harmful, and you seem to be interested in coming up with excuses for why you shouldn’t care about that, because luxuries. That’s pure bullshit. And when you arbitrarily decide that your “original idea is better,” there’s apparently no substantive reasoning or evidence that you think you need to give … it is just because you say so, and we’re supposed to assume you have some kind of a right on the basis of nothing whatsoever. Do you hear how all of that sounds?

  161. springa73 says

    #173. I guess I’m arguing against several things, all of which I believe to be fundamentally wrong:
    – the idea that space colonization would harm anyone other than the people who risk their lives by being involved with it
    – the idea that spending resources on luxuries in general is a bad thing
    – the idea that anyone who supports space colonization must not care about the earth and everything that lives on it
    – the idea that it is right to control what other people do with their lives and property simply because they have different ideas than you do

    The rest of your post seems to mainly support the last of these ideas. It sounds somewhat authoritarian to me, though that may not have been your intention. It leaves me wondering, however, why the opinions of strangers on what I should do with my resources are necessarily better than my own opinions, and why I would be morally obligated to follow other people instead of myself.

  162. wzrd1 says

    @Leslee #171, that’s something of a sensitive point for us. We wanted three children, had two live births and 16 pregnancies that failed to result in live births, to include one abortion of an ectopic pregnancy.
    Not a trigger warning, just a note.
    We wanted three kids, we could have devoted plenty of time to that many children.

    That said, we went forward and adopted families instead, guiding them forward and getting plenty of kid time until my wife became ill and later, I was injured.
    Babies taste great!**

    **Infants *love* adults putting their hand or foot inside of a mouth to tickle the roof of the mouth (eventually, they love it anyway).
    We’ve also loved just talking to infants, reading to them and generally sounding like village idiots with them. ;)

    Ours are now ranging from elementary school children through preschool and we dearly miss them, being over 1300 miles from them.

    I guess we’re just going to have to adopt a new family, once we’re both back into medical shape again.

  163. wzrd1 says

    @All, let me ask, do I really have property rights?
    Do I have the right to accept or reject people on my property?

    This is a very real world question.
    Just this Thursday, I awakened to hear youthful sounding voices making monkey sounds, assorted otherwise unnatural “wildlife sounds”, all terrorizing my wife, while she was trying to work on her art in our sunroom.

    Do we have a fucking right to our own property or was I wrong to go outside with a loaded rifle and send the miscreants off before they had the courage to rape her?
    It’s been an ongoing issue, previously, I thought it was due to her medical condition and medications until I heard it with my own damned near deaf ears.

    So, this is very, very real world.
    Do we have the rights to the fucking property that we pay out more than half of our income on?
    Or do we have no rights whatsoever to our own property?

    And I’m very deadly serious, I actually loaded a firearm and went outside after being awakened at 04:30 by the noise.
    Using the brightest light that I could buy.
    Hopefully, that’ll give them pause. It did leave them blinder than a bag of coal.
    But, I do have a problem, a disabled wife terrorized in the wee hours of the morning by local humans, but either we have property rights or we do not.
    On my property, I can shoot such a human in the taint with a BB gun and we’d both call it a day, as the voices sound juvenile. No property rights, I use a bullet to protect a disabled woman from harm.

    For the reality of my life is, I’m not about to take chances with my disabled wife. Take chances with your own family members.

    For the record, the last occurrence was on last Thursday, I’ve had people over ever since I finally witnessed the BS.
    So, this is a very, very real world question on property. And of course, life.
    As far as I’m concerned, anyone inside of my property line is fair game, I’ll determine specifics upon identification.
    A minor child gets a BB in the “taint”, to teach a lesson. An adult gets a live round, zero reflex.

    I’m not about to let my disabled wife be terrorized, then raped and whatever they want after.

    That is my very real world.

    Please excuse the lack of trigger warnings, I lacked them as well for the other idiots and this *is* a very real world, ongoing issue.
    And yes, I’d use a BB gun on a juvenile on my property under those specific conditions and aimed precisely under those conditions. I am a competition marksman.
    The other lawful alternative is a lethal round.

    Although, if it’s a kid, I do fully reserve the right to tie his shoelaces together around the tree and leave him there for the local law enforcement.

    Seriously, she’s been terrorized a *lot* over the past six months.
    I finally caught it by chance.

    I want to tie some shoelaces together!
    Please ignore where they’re tied.

    And in all of that, yes, I’m deadly serious. :)

  164. wzrd1 says

    @springa73 3173, I only argue that it’s logistically improbable. In the extreme.
    As in, landing on the moon is unity, Mars, near-zero, make it there, zero probability of survival in an unprepared site.

  165. John Morales says

    [OT]

    wzrd1 @177,

    @All, let me ask, do I really have property rights?
    Do I have the right to accept or reject people on my property?

    Depends.

    The universe is uncaring, there are no mystical natural law, only existence.

    Most humans have mores (personal codes of conduct) and most human societies adopt the idea of rights (societal codes of conduct), because doing so makes things better overall. But different societies adopt different systems.

    Then, there is law — a system of codified and supposedly enforced rules.

    If you’re asking whether your desired actions are lawful, you can probably determine the answer based on your jurisdiction. Where I live, your desired actions would be probably be considered unwarranted and certainly considered disproportionate, and you would be subject to penalties under the law.

    (You really should be asking how you can achieve your goal within your local law regime, and if that’s not practical, how you can achieve it outside that without getting punished for it; or, you might have other options than direct violence)

  166. John Morales says

    PS wzrd1, from what you’ve previously written, you should be familiar with OODA.

    (Don’t just react)

  167. consciousness razor says

    springa73:

    I guess I’m arguing against several things, all of which I believe to be fundamentally wrong:
    – the idea that space colonization would harm anyone other than the people who risk their lives by being involved with it

    How is this “fundamentally wrong”? Do you just mean wrong? Or are you saying there is something genuinely fundamental about reality or the human condition or what have you, to the effect that space colonization doesn’t (or can’t) harm others?

    Instead of “arguing against,” would you agree that in this thread you’ve just been denying it with some assertions?

    – the idea that spending resources on luxuries in general is a bad thing

    I doubt anyone was retroactively disagreeing with you about your new definition of “luxuries.” I still don’t see any reasoning from you to support this point though, or the idea that it has anything to do with colonizing planets even if you can get that first part of the argument off the ground.

    – the idea that anyone who supports space colonization must not care about the earth and everything that lives on it

    Replace the word “must” with “evidently doesn’t care much about certain specific things,” “probably doesn’t care enough about X, which would be a better use of those resources” … or any similar non-universal claim that doesn’t invoke necessity.

    – the idea that it is right to control what other people do with their lives and property simply because they have different ideas than you do

    The rest of your post seems to mainly support the last of these ideas. It sounds somewhat authoritarian to me, though that may not have been your intention.

    It isn’t, since I didn’t claim that “simply because they have different ideas than you do,” it is therefore right to control anyone or anything. I don’t care even a little bit whether the ideas are the same or different, and I honestly don’t get what you might be trying to say with that weird formulation, so I’m really at a loss here.

    It leaves me wondering, however, why the opinions of strangers on what I should do with my resources are necessarily better than my own opinions, and why I would be morally obligated to follow other people instead of myself.

    I said nothing like that. (By the way, other people are now “strangers”? Why couldn’t they be familiar to you? And again with “necessarily” where it doesn’t belong….)

    I did make the point that the fact the resources are claimed (by you) to be yours doesn’t imply your evaluations of which actions you should take (with those resources) are better evaluations, the best kind, the kind for which we should give preference/priority, or anything of the sort. That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the resources are legitimately your private property, so as far as I’m concerned you could omit references to whose resources they are supposed to be. You are morally obligated not to follow other people but to do the morally right thing, which is orthogonal to the question of whether you happen to claim certain things as your own. You didn’t seem to be wondering much about any of that (when you were using property as a proxy for an actual, coherent evaluation of which actions are better/worse), but maybe now you are.

  168. wzrd1 says

    @John Morales, thanks for snapping at the bait. :)

    I do indeed have property rights. But, as a property owner, I also have duties.
    Something that I was reminded of two days ago, when I was cleaning the garage and found the skin of a cottonmouth, which was fairly fresh.
    I have property rights, to enjoy my property, I also have a responsibility to the community alongside of those rights.
    Knowing that a poisonous snake is present on my property, I had someone by to clean out the brush (OK, hedges got cleaned up and whatever was growing in their midst), as my neighbors have small children.
    While the worker did that, I policed, yet again, for water collection points, as our region has a significant aedes aegypti infestation rate.
    My property rights end at my property line and then, within reason. If I have something that can spill into my neighbor’s property, there is a conflict that a responsible person would avoid.
    That last is something that seems to have been forgotten over the past generation or so, consideration of one’s neighbor. Granted, it was a novel concept, but following that sponsored a notion of community. While that’s somewhat novel in US culture, it’s also a more natural occurrence in human societies.
    Humans are social animals, indeed, to the point of interdependency for survival under primitive conditions, it’s how we evolved.
    That last is forgotten far too often in the US, in favor of the myth of the lone cowboy. That’s odd, as most cowboy stories begin when the cowboy comes to town and turns into a helpful outsider story.

    A man if an island – if his name is Gilligan.
    Otherwise, we have duties to one another, both at a personal level and property level.
    Which is precisely why we have a couple from a halfway house staying with us currently.

    I tend to play the coarse, tough talking maniac, in real life, I do much of the same, but one also sees my face. One that wins funny face making contests with small children, as it’s a naturally funnier face.
    Oddly, I’m far more articulate in person, compared to online. Probably due to a lack of visual perspective of that funnier face. ;)
    Where, why would horrify online, people do a double take, then begin to roll laughing.

    Now, excuse me, I do need to check with the couple from that halfway house. My wife has been having an odd drug interaction that doctor and I haven’t fully figured out and insurance companies hate to do in patient for (well, insurance companies hate to do in patient anydamnedthing).

  169. John Morales says

    wzrd1, no doubt you’re just like Hugh Farnham, Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw.

    (It’s cute that you imagine you’re hiding your face)

  170. wzrd1 says

    @John Morales, if you can’t find my face, you’re not really trying. :)
    Hell, this is one of my old call signs.
    Another was Keystone Associator Hotel Black Six.

  171. Crimson Clupeidae says

    I much prefer the approach of Planetary Resources. Although it isn’t as ‘sexy’ as a Mars mission/colony, it’s more practical. It also relies on human greed as a motivator, so IMO, it has a greater chance of success (I’m feeling particularly cynical today) and could provide the impetus for humans to actually go to space at the solar system level.