Perhaps, but I feel like NASA is at a point where if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night.
Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.
In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.
Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled. Mars is vastly more difficult to get to and provides an even more severe environment. It's going to be just like the moon - once we're there, we'll wonder why we ever bothered to go to this miserable rock. Leave the private industry to go there and do as they wish. After sending a small band of rovers there we haven't found any compelling reason to go, have we? Other than exogeology?
NASA should be dreaming much bigger. How about manned missions to Jupiter? Maybe after failing at the impossible for a while we'll at least get a better concept of how far away the rest of pretty much anywhere in space is, and stop thinking about planetary exploration as a lifeboat for our species.
"Mars will never be settled any more than Antarctica is settled."
This is a broken analogy in two ways.
One is that there's a huge qualitative difference between going elsewhere on Earth and settling another planet, and I don't think you can hand-wave that away. You might have no interest in settling another planet, which is fine. There are seven billion plus people on Earth, and all we need is about 10,000 over, say, a century or two who do have that interest. I think you'd have so many applicants for a serious mission you'd have to be very picky.
Secondly, it's illegal to settle Antarctica. It's all "claimed" and tied up in various treaties and conservation laws. What would happen if you opened Antarctica to settlement and allowed squatters' rights or land claim rights? I think a whole bunch of people who are interested in trying new political ideas, etc., would jump at it. It'd be significantly easier and cheaper than seasteading. There'd also be natural resources to be found, so you'd probably have a gold rush.
If making a lifeboat is the real goal, then let's colonize the moon. It's much closer, and about equally inhospitable.
The best option is not screwing up our planet. If asteroid strikes is the concern, then funding a planetwide network of residents living in underground bunkers with supplies to last decades is probably cheaper and more effective than going to Mars.
> That's like saying: "don't make backups, just don't screw up."
That does not even belong in the same category. Data backups in computer systems are cheap, and people/organizations not doing them even cheaper!
On the other hand, doctors don't make backups of the gravely ill[1] before a dangerous surgery. That is beyond our current capabilities, so "do not screw up" is as good as it gets.
Yet another example, civil engineers do not make backups of skyscrapers[2] before doing maintenance work, even major maintenance work. While technically feasible, the economic cost would be prohibitive.
My gut feeling is that a "backup planet" would fall somewhere in between cases [1] and [2].
The top mosty likely existential threats, including "what the universe could do to Earth" would leave it more habitable than Mars.
If "lifeboat for species" is the goal, then going to Mars is a solution in that direction but not a particularly good one - building an underground colony in Antarctica or a self-sustainable isolated underwater colony would achieve the goal better, be reachable quicker, and at a lower cost. However, 'lifeboat for species' right now is not an explicit end goal for anyone who would be capable to fund that.
While this argument isn't untrue, I personally prefer forward-thinking positive arguments like:
- Expanding into a new environment drives evolution.
- The technological innovations that will be needed to sustain a settlement on Mars will be hugely valuable back home.
- There is presently no frontier where new political or social ideas can be attempted without interference. Again -- the results of these "experiments" can be exported back home.
The last two are huge. The main exports from a Mars colony would probably be ideas and technology. Those also have the advantage of being able to be transmitted wirelessly and having no mass.
We could likely skip some of that via genetic engineering and other medical methods. But I'm also referring to cultural and technological evolution.
BTW... if we don't transition off fossil fuels in the next 50-ish years we are going to experience some of Ye Olde Tyme Evolution here on Earth. Personally I think Mars would be a better place to be in that scenario. There was a sci-fi film called Alternative Three made about that.
We have some exoplanets 100-500 light years away that seem very earth-like. I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful. Something is bound to work. We only need one of these to be able to travel farther in human time. And it is only then that we should even think about sending manned missions to these potential planets.
We are looking at space exploration in the wrong way. All space organizations seem to have entered this sort of competition where manned missions to just about anywhere currently reachable in limited time is the goal. Nobody is pausing to think that maybe we should look into better travelling options to be able to explore far off planets and objects. The probability increases with reachable area.
It absolutely isn't. It is very, very unlikely that one can break the laws of physics no matter how much time it takes to research it or how advanced one becomes.
Still - it is important to research it in-case we've missed or gotten something wrong.
Your point is valid, but my understanding is this: if FTL in any form is possible, then the universe is VERY weird-- it would allow "closed time-like curves" and causality paradoxes and all kinds of other wackadoodle.
Many theories of "FTL" do not actually involve travelling faster than light, just taking a shorter path. While these theories are still far-fetched they do not result in the kinds of wackadoodle you describe.
> I think the first step to finding a lifeboat is to start researching on space shuttles speeds (faster than light), wormholes, teleportation etc. As far-fetched as these may seem, its unlikely that with sufficient time and investment neither one of these alternatives will be successful.
FTL travel is completely unnecessary for interstellar travel, thanks to relativity. If you're traveling 1000 light years at 0.99999999999999999c, you will get there very nearly instantly. Of course, you've basically taken a one way ticket - if you turn back around, 2000 years will have passed back home even though you're only a few seconds older.
Of course, 0.99999999999999999c is itself no mean feat (to say the least - the energy costs for even 0.5c would be incredible), but there's nothing about it that violates the laws of physics.
"if they don't "ship" something big they're going to fade into the night."
If that is true, they have already lost. Doing "something big" for the primary purpose of "avoiding fading into the night" is doomed to failure. (Again, per the other comments.) Take all that money and give it to Elon Musk and we'd probably get further. And I mean, just give it. Free and clear. To spend on hookers and blow if he wants to. We'd still probably get more out of it as a species. He doesn't want to ensure the continued existence of a big bureaucracy... he wants to get to Mars.
I'm sure there are people within NASA that want to get to Mars... but are they the ones in charge?
So you want trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money to have your imagination captured? Isn't there a cheaper way? Like a good book perhaps? Is your brains power to imagine so insufficient that capturing your imagination requires an enormous government program?
I am sorry about being dismissive, but I wish people would be more contemplative before sending our government headlong into the next boondogle. This is important stuff. We are talking about a lot of money here. Democracy is a duty is as well as a right. There are a lot of government agencies that would like to "capture your imagination", i.e., get you to write them a blank check, but we have to be a little more discerning.
That would be a good argument against people that supported those wars, but I am not one of them. Furthermore, if NASA is serious about this, this may easily cost about as much as the Iraq/Afganistan wars.
Those costs are estimated at about 4 trillion. The apolo mission cost about 100 billion in today's dollars. A Mars mission will be much more difficult and building rockets has not gotten cheaper over these years. It might be more expensive, because quality engineers are much better paid now even after adjusting for inflation.
I would not be surprised if a manned mars mission costs a trillion or two.
Robotic space exploration is awesome, but it doesn't capture the human imagination the way a human mission does. I also think -- and the academic types be damned -- that there is a difference between sending a robot and actually going somewhere.
In the long term I think Mars will be settled by humans. Sending humans to land there for a bit is a first step, a fact-finding mission.