It's bizarre that an article this detailed would not delve into the likelihood that the word "human" can reasonably be stretched to include "future human-like technically evolved conscious beings who can easily thrive in a Mars environment, e.g. human 2.0, Mars version." In the timeframe we are talking about, this is far more likely than having to worry about life support for humans with current-generation bodies.
As early as 2012 or 2013 Elon was in an interview where he said, instead of humans, sending conscious beings to Mars. Then later he switched to using the word human, presumably because he didn't want to freak people out and complicate the conversations.
This article makes no sense whatsoever once you know that there is such a thing as the SpaceX Starship. And it’s not like in 2023 nobody had a clue that the Starship will be built.
The entire last section deals with this. It would be helpful if you could point to which of the author's objections are invalidated by Starship's existence.
A race suggests the presence of at least two participants that are running at the same time. As of now, I only see one contender with any chance to make it to the start line.
Maybe in 30-50 years there will be a race to build and sustain Mars bases, and attain some control of the territory there.
China just built their own space station and is racing the US to be the first to put boots back on the moon. Then there's the militarization of space and everything that's been going on there. The US wouldn't have its current moon plans and timeline if China wasn't also trying to put humans back there; it's all been timed to beat China by a year or so.
Certainly there is a space race, but it's mostly around Earth and somehow around Moon. I don't see anyone but Mr Musk seriously trying to settle on Mars, so no race there.
OTOH the Starship is also going to be a major player in the Earth and Moon business. Even just on Earth, it's basically capable of landing a few hundred tons of cargo and passengers anywhere on the planet within an hour or so. Or will be, once the landing gear is attached. It may have interesting military consequences.
Mars is extremely hospitable to humans, compared to almost every other planet except Earth.
Mercury: tidal lock to Sun, heavy solar radiation and solar flares up close, complicated orbital movement, low gravity, basically no atmosphere. May be habitable underground in particular belts with reasonable temperatures.
Venus: a runaway greenhouse effect, metal-melting temperatures and colossal pressure on the surface, colossal never-clearing clouds, very strong winds, sulfur and chlorine abound in the atmosphere. Could be habitable using artificial islands floating in the upper atmosphere where the temperature and pressure are comfortable. At least the gravity is close to that on Earth.
Jupiter is not habitable by itself, just due to the very strong gravity. Various moons of Jupiter are all pretty cold (though some have liquid water under the surface), and at his distance from Sun, the amount of sunlight reaching them is rather small, even when reflected by the giant disc of Jupiter in the sky. It's cold, solar power in impractical, uranium and thorium are not apparently abundant.
Saturn: see Jupiter, only even farther and colder.
Neptune: see Jupiter, but even without serious moons.
Pluto / Charon binary: not even a planet. At this distance, Sun is but another star in the sky.
Compared to these, Mars, with its conditions that resemble Earths's polar regions over large swaths of the surface, acceptable distance from Sun, serious amounts of water (as ice), acceptable gravity, acceptable amounts of sunlight, and relative closeness to Earth looks not that bad at all, and basically the only practical candidate for an autonomous, self-sufficient world.
There is a price you have to pay to make a whole new planet your own. The choice of accessible celestial bodies is scarce, to say the least. A long-term colony, and by this a mean centuries and many locally born generations, will certainly uncover a large bunch of problems, and develop a number of adaptations, possibly including eventual genetic changes.
I had a similar reply to someone else: by the time we can adapt to live on Mars, decades away at best, traveling there will be the least of our worries. Glad to be proven wrong, of course.
Maybe we can try and terraform it in the meantime.
There is a decent chance that our present biological basis is not congruent with the future of humanity. Mind-extension into synthetic cognitive structures is not as far fetched as it seems- we already extend our consciousness using machines, albeit with a very poor interface.
It is foreseeable that we will come to understand the nature of sentience - after all, many simpler organisms exhibit sentience- and beyond that it seems to be a scaling problem, which are inherently tractable.
If we can improve the interface between biological computation and synthetic computation, it will likely become possible to extend sentience across that divide, barring some kind of spiritual phenomenon or “magic “.
If we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot too badly, it is foreseeable that we may make very substantial progress in this direction over the next century. Establishing a toehold on mars during that century will be a huge strategic advantage.
The problem with “people these days” is that almost no one thinks a multi decade project is worth doing. If everyone waits for the future to “arrive “, the future you end up with is just driven by quarterlies.
The most important accomplishments will be remembered for centuries. If you aren’t working on one in some capacity, what are you even doing with your life?
If we can pull off synthetic bodies for our consciousness, then by that time going to Mars will be a walk in the park.
But I think you underlined the issue of timelines. Yes we can technically go to Mars in only a few years, but people living there permanently is going to be beyond my lifetime. Unless some people are willing to drastically sacrifice their health.
This is one of my reasons. I also believe that compared to the Moon, Mars is more likely to both give crewed spaceflight and human habitation of other bodies the big boost it needs and make it more of a permanent fixture — the Moon’s relative convenience is a problem in that it makes it just as easy to mothball as it is to get to. Lingering too long on the Moon as the focal point brings substantial risk of backsliding into Shuttle-era stagnation.
It’s a result of the much higher level of commitment required to undertake crewed Mars missions. You can’t lean on Earth being nearby and contingencies have to include e.g. uncrewed resupply missions failing… it’s the sort of thing you have to go all-in on, after which pulling out is costly and looks stupid.
By contrast, backing out of the moon is comparatively trivial. At worst it’d take a couple weeks and the expenses quickly lost in the noise.
With Mars, there’s also the possibility of a “Wild West” element once things are established enough where groups of people simply refuse to return and cutting off support from them would have really bad optics.
There's an assumption in the question that we are going to Mars.
We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars. We don't get a say and our opinion doesn't really matter, unless we also happen to own aerospace companies. As such what we might have to gain depends on what the men in the arena choose to share or sell from the results of their efforts.
I don't think it is. The hard part is building Starship, which is being done anyway.
After that, it's conceivable that the cost to travel there will eventually fall to a few million or tens of millions of dollars per person. At that point, a handful of rich people could drive enough demand for the development of colonization technology that it becomes self-funding.
We can't live on mars without living inside massive radiation shielding probably underground. There won't be enough industry this century for Mars to be self sustaining if we start tomorrow.
For the non-scientist living on mars would be living in a cave worse than that enjoyed by most poor people in absolute boredom 99.5% of the time.
Your martian adventure will cost an appreciable portion of a billion dollars, include a return ticket, and continual support from home. It will be a very high cost ammortized over few units and it will never be self funding.
> Its basically impossible to finance a meaningful try at colonizing mars without national resources
That's a separate point: Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed, though the theatre of elections certainly makes them think they do (Recall that dude at Davos who said, "There are 150 people who run the world, all of them are men, and none of them are politicians"?).
The point is: you and I, unless we own private aerospace companies, don't get a say and don't matter in the question of "why Mars".
We'll certainly be allowed and encouraged to "make your voices heard" and many, including politicians and "representatives", will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use". But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
> Again the capitalists will be contributing little […] The person driving the school bus risks more and contributes more than the parasites.
Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend. Certainly you seem to have strong feelings, which is cool and all.
> We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars.
> But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
> will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use"
There aren't any individuals that own the resources to implement space flight and mars colonization you yourself admitted as much with the "trillions of taxpayer dollars" Those last 2 quotes contradicting themselves are literally back to back
> Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed
Every two years we do in the US.
> Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend.
You have condescended to me but you haven't explained how I'm wrong and I don't think I am. If so pray tell.
Money as a fundamental unit of value outside of economics leads to nonsensical conclusions like taking a money guy who presently employs a stable of geniuses who themselves sit atop the result of man millennia of labor by singular irreplaceable people and assigning credit to the current idiot who owns the works.
It leads you to imagine that owning a hundred billion is as valuable a contribution as a million teachers or that someone who risks 90% of his fortune by ceding a bigger piece of the economic pie to another billionaire and thereby downsizing to fewer trips to space is somehow risking a billion times more than someone actually risking their life.
It's like listening to a psychologist try to understand the evolution of galaxies via their domain knowledge.
Capitalism is a method to allocate resources within a society it offers no meaningful truths about it. It is on the whole a massive failure only slightly less stupid than prior iterations of central planning.
Back on the topic of mars. It is fundamentally absolutely useless as a second home for man. It is at best a place where a small number of people can do interesting science. There wont be a meaningful number of people there because the entire idea is fundamentally flawed.
Would you like to talk about that or would you like to educate me about capitalism and government?
> Would you like to talk about that or would you like to educate me about capitalism and government?
Friend, you are really so boring and obtuse.
Here's the bottom line so you can write another thousand words coping:
Men are going to Mars. Men who own or run aerospace companies will make it happen. You aren't one of those men. Your protests and pontificating don't matter.
The costs will dwarf any projects humans have pursued so far. I hope the long term costs are in the trillions so that a quadrillion dollars of wealth is created!
To the extent that taxpayer dollar matter, it will be because nations don't want to miss out on the investment, not because they are needed.
Perhaps you haven't made your 1st million yet, so you really don't know how to create wealth or build substantial projects. It doesn't start with taxpayer dollars.
I want a scientific mission to mars I hope doing so pushes science and engineering know how forward.
Going to mars on a larger scale is presently nonsense because beyond the science there is no reason to go there. There just isn't anything of exploitable value there.
We can't at this level of technology teraform mars nor live there without massive radiation shielding eg live like rats underground 99% of the time.
Furthermore every aspect of our technological civilization is heavily dependant on a long chain of products with their own deps stretching back in a massive graph.
Any such endeavor would be incredibly costly per person, yield little more than hosting a half dozen people, and require a constant input of goods from home without which everyone does.
This isn't a frontier town because its too expensive and it doesn't have things that can enrich home base for less than cost on acquisition.
It isn't a backup plan if Earth dies because exploding a 1000 nukes would leave the bombed out husk 1000x more livable.
Its not a second earth because we can't teraform it at present level of technology.
It won't create a dragon hoard of wealth because there is no reason to believe it will create any.
Its just a science mission like the ISS. It does actually start with government money because nobody has multiple trillions to spend on something that won't create wealth because why would it.
Please refute something of what I said.
Let's start with how a large scale colony is going to be viable and earn money.
Please consider the cost of constant support, how they will achieve self sufficiency and on what time scale including everything from mining to pharmacutical manufacturing how they will deal with radiation and so forth.
Please cite actual sources. While you shift from trying to look cool to actual debate please leave this shit at the door.
> Perhaps you haven't made your 1st million yet...
> I want a scientific mission to mars I hope doing so pushes science and engineering know how forward.
I encourage you to implement this mission. No one is stopping you. I hope you succeed.
> Going to mars on a larger scale is presently nonsense
The history of humanity at every scale is men saying "x project is nonsense" while other men do stuff (I recall my grandfather telling me how he was told that building a 5 acre dairy farm in the middle of nowhere, with no roads and no technology was impossible and would bankrupt him. That farm eventually scaled up to a "larger scale" that he was assured was impossible).
You really are terribly boring, or terribly young, or both. Sad.
Here's the thing: you bore me. I feel no inclination to engage with your dull diatribe. I'm the wrong audience for you, and you're a waste of my time, as I am a waste of yours.
So, find someone who cares about or agrees with what you're saying and you'll have a more productive debate, I promise.
> Let's start with how a large scale colony is going to be viable and earn money.
Here's thing. If you answer the questions you raise, you win the prize at the next frontier. That's what innovation is about. You can be given infinite amounts of money anywhere in the world if you present solutions to questions that other men can't figure out. That's the game.
But you don't actually want to answer the questions: "how do we colonize Mars", "how do we build a 1M person base on the moon?" You want to moralize about your low expectations and treat your lack of imagination as a virtue. I categorically refuse to play that game. But good luck.
Phew. The pessimism here is kinda... exhausting. But frankly I don't have any material objections
"""
The Mars Religion
When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.
Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.
"""
Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone.
While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.
It's bizarre that an article this detailed would not delve into the likelihood that the word "human" can reasonably be stretched to include "future human-like technically evolved conscious beings who can easily thrive in a Mars environment, e.g. human 2.0, Mars version." In the timeframe we are talking about, this is far more likely than having to worry about life support for humans with current-generation bodies.
As early as 2012 or 2013 Elon was in an interview where he said, instead of humans, sending conscious beings to Mars. Then later he switched to using the word human, presumably because he didn't want to freak people out and complicate the conversations.
(2023)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34213549
This article makes no sense whatsoever once you know that there is such a thing as the SpaceX Starship. And it’s not like in 2023 nobody had a clue that the Starship will be built.
The entire last section deals with this. It would be helpful if you could point to which of the author's objections are invalidated by Starship's existence.
The cost.
From today's perspective, sending people to Mars will be, more than anything, part of a new space race.
A race suggests the presence of at least two participants that are running at the same time. As of now, I only see one contender with any chance to make it to the start line.
Maybe in 30-50 years there will be a race to build and sustain Mars bases, and attain some control of the territory there.
China just built their own space station and is racing the US to be the first to put boots back on the moon. Then there's the militarization of space and everything that's been going on there. The US wouldn't have its current moon plans and timeline if China wasn't also trying to put humans back there; it's all been timed to beat China by a year or so.
Certainly there is a space race, but it's mostly around Earth and somehow around Moon. I don't see anyone but Mr Musk seriously trying to settle on Mars, so no race there.
OTOH the Starship is also going to be a major player in the Earth and Moon business. Even just on Earth, it's basically capable of landing a few hundred tons of cargo and passengers anywhere on the planet within an hour or so. Or will be, once the landing gear is attached. It may have interesting military consequences.
What do we have to gain by going to mars?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars was (is?) one of the more in depth works making such an argument
The objective would likely drive lots of improvements to science and engineering.
Mars itself is very inhospitable to humans.
Mars is extremely hospitable to humans, compared to almost every other planet except Earth.
Mercury: tidal lock to Sun, heavy solar radiation and solar flares up close, complicated orbital movement, low gravity, basically no atmosphere. May be habitable underground in particular belts with reasonable temperatures.
Venus: a runaway greenhouse effect, metal-melting temperatures and colossal pressure on the surface, colossal never-clearing clouds, very strong winds, sulfur and chlorine abound in the atmosphere. Could be habitable using artificial islands floating in the upper atmosphere where the temperature and pressure are comfortable. At least the gravity is close to that on Earth.
Jupiter is not habitable by itself, just due to the very strong gravity. Various moons of Jupiter are all pretty cold (though some have liquid water under the surface), and at his distance from Sun, the amount of sunlight reaching them is rather small, even when reflected by the giant disc of Jupiter in the sky. It's cold, solar power in impractical, uranium and thorium are not apparently abundant.
Saturn: see Jupiter, only even farther and colder.
Neptune: see Jupiter, but even without serious moons.
Pluto / Charon binary: not even a planet. At this distance, Sun is but another star in the sky.
Compared to these, Mars, with its conditions that resemble Earths's polar regions over large swaths of the surface, acceptable distance from Sun, serious amounts of water (as ice), acceptable gravity, acceptable amounts of sunlight, and relative closeness to Earth looks not that bad at all, and basically the only practical candidate for an autonomous, self-sufficient world.
Just because Mars is better than the others doesn't mean its good enough as a long term habitat.
People would have bone density problems much sooner in life, as an example.
There is a price you have to pay to make a whole new planet your own. The choice of accessible celestial bodies is scarce, to say the least. A long-term colony, and by this a mean centuries and many locally born generations, will certainly uncover a large bunch of problems, and develop a number of adaptations, possibly including eventual genetic changes.
I had a similar reply to someone else: by the time we can adapt to live on Mars, decades away at best, traveling there will be the least of our worries. Glad to be proven wrong, of course.
Maybe we can try and terraform it in the meantime.
It is very inhospitable to biological humans.
There is a decent chance that our present biological basis is not congruent with the future of humanity. Mind-extension into synthetic cognitive structures is not as far fetched as it seems- we already extend our consciousness using machines, albeit with a very poor interface.
It is foreseeable that we will come to understand the nature of sentience - after all, many simpler organisms exhibit sentience- and beyond that it seems to be a scaling problem, which are inherently tractable.
If we can improve the interface between biological computation and synthetic computation, it will likely become possible to extend sentience across that divide, barring some kind of spiritual phenomenon or “magic “.
If we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot too badly, it is foreseeable that we may make very substantial progress in this direction over the next century. Establishing a toehold on mars during that century will be a huge strategic advantage.
The problem with “people these days” is that almost no one thinks a multi decade project is worth doing. If everyone waits for the future to “arrive “, the future you end up with is just driven by quarterlies.
The most important accomplishments will be remembered for centuries. If you aren’t working on one in some capacity, what are you even doing with your life?
If we can pull off synthetic bodies for our consciousness, then by that time going to Mars will be a walk in the park.
But I think you underlined the issue of timelines. Yes we can technically go to Mars in only a few years, but people living there permanently is going to be beyond my lifetime. Unless some people are willing to drastically sacrifice their health.
>It is very inhospitable to biological humans.
Current biological humans.
And as you allude to, updated and replacement body plans are easily in the cards on a decades timescale.
New wotlds seem to have a way of getting humanity out of a local maxima. Personally I'm hoping for luxury space communism.
This is one of my reasons. I also believe that compared to the Moon, Mars is more likely to both give crewed spaceflight and human habitation of other bodies the big boost it needs and make it more of a permanent fixture — the Moon’s relative convenience is a problem in that it makes it just as easy to mothball as it is to get to. Lingering too long on the Moon as the focal point brings substantial risk of backsliding into Shuttle-era stagnation.
Can you explain your thinking? Why would Mars be harder to mothball?
It’s a result of the much higher level of commitment required to undertake crewed Mars missions. You can’t lean on Earth being nearby and contingencies have to include e.g. uncrewed resupply missions failing… it’s the sort of thing you have to go all-in on, after which pulling out is costly and looks stupid.
By contrast, backing out of the moon is comparatively trivial. At worst it’d take a couple weeks and the expenses quickly lost in the noise.
With Mars, there’s also the possibility of a “Wild West” element once things are established enough where groups of people simply refuse to return and cutting off support from them would have really bad optics.
> What do we have to gain by going to mars?
There's an assumption in the question that we are going to Mars.
We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars. We don't get a say and our opinion doesn't really matter, unless we also happen to own aerospace companies. As such what we might have to gain depends on what the men in the arena choose to share or sell from the results of their efforts.
Its basically impossible to finance a meaningful try at colonizing mars without national resources
I don't think it is. The hard part is building Starship, which is being done anyway.
After that, it's conceivable that the cost to travel there will eventually fall to a few million or tens of millions of dollars per person. At that point, a handful of rich people could drive enough demand for the development of colonization technology that it becomes self-funding.
Hmmm "Eat the rich" has failed, but I like this "Send the rich to Mars" alternative ... where do I donate?
We can't live on mars without living inside massive radiation shielding probably underground. There won't be enough industry this century for Mars to be self sustaining if we start tomorrow.
For the non-scientist living on mars would be living in a cave worse than that enjoyed by most poor people in absolute boredom 99.5% of the time.
Your martian adventure will cost an appreciable portion of a billion dollars, include a return ticket, and continual support from home. It will be a very high cost ammortized over few units and it will never be self funding.
> Its basically impossible to finance a meaningful try at colonizing mars without national resources
That's a separate point: Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed, though the theatre of elections certainly makes them think they do (Recall that dude at Davos who said, "There are 150 people who run the world, all of them are men, and none of them are politicians"?).
The point is: you and I, unless we own private aerospace companies, don't get a say and don't matter in the question of "why Mars".
We'll certainly be allowed and encouraged to "make your voices heard" and many, including politicians and "representatives", will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use". But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
We already admitted we were talking about trillions eg almost entirely our capital by any definition.
The people doing the most innovation will be the scientists who be compensated a tiny fraction of the money earned by the capital.
The people taking the most risk will be the people going.
Again the capitalists will be contributing little and risking almost nothing mostly their position on a scoreboard.
The person driving the school bus risks more and contributes more than the parasites.
> Again the capitalists will be contributing little […] The person driving the school bus risks more and contributes more than the parasites.
Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend. Certainly you seem to have strong feelings, which is cool and all.
> We aren't. It's the individuals who own the resources and money to implement space flight and Mars colonisation that are going to Mars.
> But the people who are doing the innovation and taking the most risk with their own capital will decide.
> will protest about the trillions of "taxpayer dollars that could be put to a better use"
There aren't any individuals that own the resources to implement space flight and mars colonization you yourself admitted as much with the "trillions of taxpayer dollars" Those last 2 quotes contradicting themselves are literally back to back
> Citizens don't really get a say in how national resources are deployed
Every two years we do in the US.
> Your basic assumptions are wrong and troubled by motivated reasoning. But I'm sure you can already tell where you are wrong so I won't condescend.
You have condescended to me but you haven't explained how I'm wrong and I don't think I am. If so pray tell.
Money as a fundamental unit of value outside of economics leads to nonsensical conclusions like taking a money guy who presently employs a stable of geniuses who themselves sit atop the result of man millennia of labor by singular irreplaceable people and assigning credit to the current idiot who owns the works.
It leads you to imagine that owning a hundred billion is as valuable a contribution as a million teachers or that someone who risks 90% of his fortune by ceding a bigger piece of the economic pie to another billionaire and thereby downsizing to fewer trips to space is somehow risking a billion times more than someone actually risking their life.
It's like listening to a psychologist try to understand the evolution of galaxies via their domain knowledge.
Capitalism is a method to allocate resources within a society it offers no meaningful truths about it. It is on the whole a massive failure only slightly less stupid than prior iterations of central planning.
Back on the topic of mars. It is fundamentally absolutely useless as a second home for man. It is at best a place where a small number of people can do interesting science. There wont be a meaningful number of people there because the entire idea is fundamentally flawed.
Would you like to talk about that or would you like to educate me about capitalism and government?
> Would you like to talk about that or would you like to educate me about capitalism and government?
Friend, you are really so boring and obtuse.
Here's the bottom line so you can write another thousand words coping:
Men are going to Mars. Men who own or run aerospace companies will make it happen. You aren't one of those men. Your protests and pontificating don't matter.
The costs will dwarf any projects humans have pursued so far. I hope the long term costs are in the trillions so that a quadrillion dollars of wealth is created!
To the extent that taxpayer dollar matter, it will be because nations don't want to miss out on the investment, not because they are needed.
Perhaps you haven't made your 1st million yet, so you really don't know how to create wealth or build substantial projects. It doesn't start with taxpayer dollars.
The future will not be boring.
I want a scientific mission to mars I hope doing so pushes science and engineering know how forward.
Going to mars on a larger scale is presently nonsense because beyond the science there is no reason to go there. There just isn't anything of exploitable value there.
We can't at this level of technology teraform mars nor live there without massive radiation shielding eg live like rats underground 99% of the time.
Furthermore every aspect of our technological civilization is heavily dependant on a long chain of products with their own deps stretching back in a massive graph.
Any such endeavor would be incredibly costly per person, yield little more than hosting a half dozen people, and require a constant input of goods from home without which everyone does.
This isn't a frontier town because its too expensive and it doesn't have things that can enrich home base for less than cost on acquisition.
It isn't a backup plan if Earth dies because exploding a 1000 nukes would leave the bombed out husk 1000x more livable.
Its not a second earth because we can't teraform it at present level of technology.
It won't create a dragon hoard of wealth because there is no reason to believe it will create any.
Its just a science mission like the ISS. It does actually start with government money because nobody has multiple trillions to spend on something that won't create wealth because why would it.
Please refute something of what I said.
Let's start with how a large scale colony is going to be viable and earn money.
Please consider the cost of constant support, how they will achieve self sufficiency and on what time scale including everything from mining to pharmacutical manufacturing how they will deal with radiation and so forth.
Please cite actual sources. While you shift from trying to look cool to actual debate please leave this shit at the door.
> Perhaps you haven't made your 1st million yet...
> I want a scientific mission to mars I hope doing so pushes science and engineering know how forward.
I encourage you to implement this mission. No one is stopping you. I hope you succeed.
> Going to mars on a larger scale is presently nonsense
The history of humanity at every scale is men saying "x project is nonsense" while other men do stuff (I recall my grandfather telling me how he was told that building a 5 acre dairy farm in the middle of nowhere, with no roads and no technology was impossible and would bankrupt him. That farm eventually scaled up to a "larger scale" that he was assured was impossible).
You really are terribly boring, or terribly young, or both. Sad.
Here's the thing: you bore me. I feel no inclination to engage with your dull diatribe. I'm the wrong audience for you, and you're a waste of my time, as I am a waste of yours.
So, find someone who cares about or agrees with what you're saying and you'll have a more productive debate, I promise.
> Let's start with how a large scale colony is going to be viable and earn money.
Here's thing. If you answer the questions you raise, you win the prize at the next frontier. That's what innovation is about. You can be given infinite amounts of money anywhere in the world if you present solutions to questions that other men can't figure out. That's the game.
But you don't actually want to answer the questions: "how do we colonize Mars", "how do we build a 1M person base on the moon?" You want to moralize about your low expectations and treat your lack of imagination as a virtue. I categorically refuse to play that game. But good luck.
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Phew. The pessimism here is kinda... exhausting. But frankly I don't have any material objections
""" The Mars Religion
When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.
Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it's not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave. """
Something that’s frequently lost in the discussion I think is that in the long term, Mars is a stepping stone.
While proponents think that Mars should be permanently inhabited and have cities, the larger point is to light a fire under the development of the technologies and techniques involved in crewed spaceflight and human habitats beyond Earth’s gravity well. Mars does this better than the Moon does because it has a higher baseline level of self-sustenance due to its much greater distance, and so if you get to the point that getting people to Mars and having them live there long term is no big deal, you’ve also essentially made humanity a proper spacefaring species — we’d no longer be so tied down to LEO and could have substantial crewed missions traversing the solar system and beyond.
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