Interest in Mars colonization benefits from the fact that photographs capture the best of Mars and hide the problems.
The best of Mars is that the terrain is something we are well-adapted to and familiar with, effectively a desert. We can stand, walk around, drive around, build things, etc., just like on Earth.
You can see that in the photo: it looks like a desert on Earth; I think many people unconsciously assume it's like New Mexico. In a way the photos are like old scams enticing pioneers to settle in wondrous unseen places.
Photos suit Mars perfectly because they omit all the worst information: Temperature, pressure, magnetic field, gravity, and to a degree, isolation and almost complete lack of water. You can't see those in the photo.
Articles like this always bring out the best comments. Obviously it’s a biased article but the two primary points, in my opinion, stand.
1. Even the most inhospitable places on Earth are orders of magnitude more hospitable than Mars.
2. Given 1 it seems much more reasonable to use resources to maximize the hospitality of Earth than to try and mark Mars hospitable.
Not only are they orders of magnitude more habitable, but they will continue to be.
You could have an extinction-level asteroid crash land in the middle of an all-out nuclear war, and Earth would still be orders of magnitude more habitable than Mars.
Colonising mars will be a lot like colonising the moon or asteroids, but the gravity will be more human-friendly.
Humans must either become a spacefaring civilisation or go extinct along with all life on earth , full stop. Not working on that problem means dying more or less right away from a geological time perspective. (Relatively) soon earth will be outside of a habitable dust from the sun. Maybe we can move it. But im pretty sure that moving the planet would be harder than colonising mars.
I don’t think anyone thinks that colonising mars means living or even going outside of a pressurised artificial habitat . It would be very much like living in a spacecraft…. But it would be relatively easy to make it really, really big.
I have lived in places where people live in one big building for 6 months at a time, with some of them having not left the building for years. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me that people could adapt to an essentially indoor environment.
Yes, at great expense, we bring in tons of life-sustaining supplies from habitable parts of Earth so that people can live briefly at the South Pole or on top of Everest. In the absence of those supplies, of course everyone on Everest or the Pole would die, quickly.
And the South Pole and the top of Everest are way, way, way, way, way, way, way more habitable than Mars is.
And there are no nearby habitable areas on Mars to get supplies from.
I don't know how I can spell this out for people: when Musk wakes up from a drug-addled haze and says "we're going to colonize Mars in two years" what he means is something like "I'm really high right now" or perhaps, if we grant him a little cunning, "I want my share price to stay high so I'll say some bullshit". It should not be interpreted as a factual statement.
> I don't know how I can spell this out for people
This part is unfair -- way too simplistic and dismissive. Elon is not drug-addled. He has high executive function, and is very consistent about his big ideas.
Elon is simply a smart guy with wild ideas (so far, so common) but, crucially, he commands and commits enormous resources toward his best attempts at making them happen.
That's what sets him apart from you and me, and it's a big deal. He deserves a lot of credit for the logistical success of diverting US government tax revenue to his attempts.
This article is a good summary of why the Mars thing is implausible. I love the phrase "Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell" and hope FARDH becomes a thing.
For Elon to be right about Mars (at least on anything near his timeline), a lot of sufficiently-advanced technology will have to be invented soon. If there's a 1% chance of him being right, maybe there's a reasonable amount of public funding for it.
TBF, even if there's a 0% chance, there are probably enabling technologies that will succeed, and have enough value to make the investment worthwhile.
It’s that there’s no life native to those environments. The authors is making the point that lay people, us, lack a frame of reference for how inhospitable Mars is.
Sadly the magnet at L1 needs too much metal to be economical. It would be cheaper to run a belt of copper around the entire equator of Mars! Calculating the amount of metal needed is a bit more complicated than it originally looked.
I failed to adequately convey the degree of uneconomicalness involved. No such simple fix would save the idea. The magnetic rings would have to be _larger around than Mars_. A ring around Mars’ equator would do the same job while being smaller!
Plus there’s the slight problem that the atmospheric loss rate on Mars is too low for us to really care about. Mars with an atmosphere as thick as Earth’s would lose about 1% of that atmosphere after a million or two years. If it will take us less than 10,000 years to build that atmosphere up then it will be much cheaper to just top it up every so often.
But you don't need to protect entire Mars with magnetic field, just a tiny piece of it where the colony is based. What about a lead roof and thick concrete walls?
A scientific outpost on Mars is actually feasible, but such an outpost would be funded by grants from the government or private foundations.
It's a self-sufficient colony that's not possible right now or anytime soon. You'd have to spend so much to create an air-tight and heated environment that could generate air, water, and food. How are you going to pay for, especially when anything you can't make yourself has to be rocketed in from Earth? Is there anything on Mars that you could sell back to Earth?
> This ordering of priorities, in which the sacrosanct goal is to extend "the probable lifespan of consciousness" and space colonization the means, is above all else a monstrous permission structure for this outspoken bigot's vile social ideas, a kind of reductio ad absurdum for what's been doing business as "effective altruism" for a while now.
The author is frankly, biased to the point of being deranged. Even if this rant were written in a more mature way, I would say that he lacks imagination and ambition. A lot of things that exist today - both good and bad - would have been only fiction fifty years ago. To me this sort of criticism feels like someone standing on the sidelines thinking they somehow know it all.
The best of Mars is that the terrain is something we are well-adapted to and familiar with, effectively a desert. We can stand, walk around, drive around, build things, etc., just like on Earth.
You can see that in the photo: it looks like a desert on Earth; I think many people unconsciously assume it's like New Mexico. In a way the photos are like old scams enticing pioneers to settle in wondrous unseen places.
Photos suit Mars perfectly because they omit all the worst information: Temperature, pressure, magnetic field, gravity, and to a degree, isolation and almost complete lack of water. You can't see those in the photo.