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Consider all the businesses where people lose their lives, yet we carry on. It takes something like a Hindenburg disaster to derail an industry; public, dramatic, and illustrating a fundamental problem. If dirigibles had been seen as the solution to one of mankind's greatest problems, even the Hindenburg fire wouldn't have stopped that effort. But given that dirigibles were just a convenience, that killed it off.
Certainly Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia and VSS Enterprise are examples of public and dramatic disasters that didn't destroy an industry. They hard paused them, but the efforts continued afterwards. The deaths were treated as a harsh learning experience because everyone involved, including those who died, believed that what they were doing was worth the risks. OceanGate, on the other hand, involved some adventure seekers and an apparently unwilling boy of 19. It was a submersible Hindenburg event.
So is settling Mars more towards the existential end or the convenience end of the spectrum?
That is not “news”, it’s the way the ISS has worked for decades. It’s what you have to do on a space station, you can’t throw water away.
If SpaceX gets Starship to run around the solar system then they can attach a few motors onto some ice asteroids and have them impact into Mars.
When I think of “terraforming” Mars, the primary aspect of that is warming up the atmosphere, which requires greenhouse gases like CO2. Diverting a few icy asteroids so that they impact the planet won’t have any significant effect.
Or maybe your post was in jest?
Or maybe your post was in jest?
I'm with you on this one. I am all for humanity becoming multi-planetary. I'm not sure that a "city" on Mars first thing is the best way to get it done. Just having lots of ships (a thousand or more) like Elon wants should get humanity to the point that becoming "multi-planetary" becomes inevitable. Mars, Moon, asteroids, or whatever works. I'm sure there is some place in the solar system where a methane and LOX generating fuel depo can be set up to refuel Starships.
My version of "doing anything useful off-planet" was more about ensuring that we don't experience another Chicxulub. We could also consider robotic collection of resources, space solar, and so forth, but as a species, we aren't even close to having our act together. I'm not even sure that additional resources would be a good idea given that those resources will just allow us to screw up things faster (e.g. oil). Ultimately, to make sure that humanity is safe, we need to address the flaws in our own nature. We're our own worst enemy, and expanding to other planets isn't going to change that. We'll just be our own worst enemy while living on multiple planets. Yay us.
That is something I comment on a lot. We are sadly still childish, selfish, and wasteful. I expect that colonization and becoming spacefaring will force a correction of that. Continuing any of that behavior will just get you dead in such harsh and deadly environments.
And that is one item on the list of potential Earth civilization extinction events that motivates Elon/SpaceX to establish a self-sustaining human presence on Mars. My other items are:
- Nuclear warfare producing a “nuclear winter” that devastates human agriculture resulting in mass starvation
- Biosphere collapse due to ocean acidification (currently in progress) causing cascading effects through the food chain and declining atmospheric O2 levels (most of the oxygen we enjoy breathing today is produced by marine plants)
- Radical climate change that destabilizes societies globally and results in massive migrations, conflicts, mass heat deaths, and freshwater shortages
- Weaponized AI that its inventors lose control of
Possibly true, but…
Excellent point. The first humans to colonize Mars will have to score high on the discipline/cooperation/altruism/non-violent scale or they will die. And by “first humans” I mean thousands. It will be a very different society from anything currently on Earth. Such group behavior should be self-reinforcing and newcomers will have to adopt and adapt to it. I am cautiously optimistic that such a scenario could happen.
Those are all of our own making, underscoring the need to address the flaws in human nature. It is the external threats that require an application of technology because we are incapable of dealing with them in any organic fashion.
Any correction will be temporary because if we go to Mars we will master Mars. By nature, we don't want to endure a harsh and deadly environment (it makes raising children difficult), so we change that environment to be more amenable. That's the beginning of the end. As the environment becomes more comfortable, less responsible people can survive more easily. This is a pattern as old as time. The United States itself went through the very process that you guys are talking about; a harsh environment demanding that people be capable and responsible. Yet here we are, 250 years after its founding, decadent as can be, the wealthiest country in the world, filled with plenty of irresponsible and inept citizens.
@Grendal
speaking of fuel depots,
here is a small NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) funded project for a robotic fuel depot that collects volatiles & such for reuse
might work, might not, but if you don't try
You may want to do a little research on the rate of those effects. The MAVEN spacecraft studies Mars' atmosphere. A planetary scientist on the MAVEN team apparently gave a presentation at UC Davis where he predicted that a terraformed Mars would keep its atmosphere for about a million years. I don't have that presentation, so I can't point you to it, but it matches my expectation that the atmosphere would be stripped away, but it would take so long that it really doesn't matter.
That said, I continue to assert that terraforming Mars is a rubbish notion because we know essentially nothing about what we'd be getting into. We're busy screwing up our own planet, yet we're going to capably terraform another planet? Rubbish. We don't even know what the planet's makeup is. Are there pools of hydrocarbons under the surface? Water lakes? Bacteria? Viruses? Toxic chemicals in the soils (beyond perchlorates)? Let's understand Mars before we try to transform it.
Yes, I’ve read similar in multiple sources. The lack of a magnetosphere and relatively low mass — planetwise — means Mars can’t keep an atmosphere but on a human civilization timescale that’s not an issue.
Absolutely. And with multiple robots currently feeding us data, and more planned, our understanding is increasing rapidly. Such understanding will continue once humans are on Mars. Obviously any terraforming efforts are not going to start for several decades, maybe not even in this century, so before they do we will have a much better idea of the many challenges and if there are possible solutions. Maybe it’s not possible, but I would not bet against human ingenuity and drive to succeed.
Just because humans have done tremendous damage to their Earthly environment that does not guarantee they will do the same wherever they go. Assuming the future will always be like the past is a basic error of reasoning that has tripped up many a prognosticator.
All good points except the bacteria and viruses. Those are absurdly remote. Whatever bacteria or virus is discovered (if there are any at all) would be incredibly unlikely to have any relation to anything that could or would effect us. Even transmission of viruses on Earth are incredibly rare between different species. We aren't catching dolphin viruses because we're too different.
That said, I'm sure we would know vast amounts of knowledge about any planet before we even attempt terraforming. No matter what, it would likely be a hundred or more years and tens of thousands of starship launches before even considering such a thing.
The interesting thing is what will come first: an attempt at terraforming or building a colony? I'd bet on a colony. Let's say we do build a colony or city. Would you terraform the planet with the colony there? My understanding is that such dramatic and massive disruption would probably not be so good for that colony/city. Dropping ice asteroids on the planet or nuking the poles would not make colonists feel safe.
Eric Berger analyzes a new PEW Research survey on American’s attitude towards space exploration. The results reminded me of a friendly back and forth that @Grendal I were having a long time ago early in this thread:
eality, sorry, I mean Gravity.
NASA can make grand statements about going to Mars in the 2030’s but has no budget for it and I don’t expect Congress to ever authorize funding for such an endeavor. So it’s going to up to private companies to move forward.
The Chinese, government on the other hand, very likely will launch a human mission to Mars within 20 years, in my opinion. The technological prowess of that country is formidable. Could such a mission motivate Congress to fund NASA to do the same? I don’t think so, because by then I believe SpaceX will have already put humans on Mars many years earlier and there would be no reason for the US government to pay for something that has already been accomplished by a US company.
that @Grendal I were having a long time ago early in this thread:The new survey shows that, when asked to chose from a list of possible things NASA should spend money on:
I’ve said this many times; when I talk to people I know about SpaceX, the vast majority of them either don’t know anything about the company, or if they do, they pay almost no attention to it. Only a small fraction of the population is interested in what humans can do in space, unless it’s watching George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in a movie that is only tenuously connected to r
NASA can make grand statements about going to Mars in the 2030’s but has no budget for it and I don’t expect Congress to ever authorize funding for such an endeavor. So it’s going to up to private companies to move forward.
The Chinese, government on the other hand, very likely will launch a human mission to Mars within 20 years, in my opinion. The technological prowess of that country is formidable. Could such a mission motivate Congress to fund NASA to do the same? I don’t think so, because by then I believe SpaceX will have already put humans on Mars many years earlier and there would be no reason for the US government to pay for something that has already been accomplished by a US company.
I admire your optimism, but that has also tripped up many a prognosticator.
You can't terraform without a colony. The infrastructure of terraforming requires it.
I'm always surprised by that, but I guess I shouldn't be. Rocketry has no connection to their lives other than satellites, and those are certainly not visible. We're the gearheads of space exploration, and we can only talk with enthusiasm amongst ourselves.
you might want to take a few college level virology classes and revise your comment
Zoonotic Diseases: Disease Transmitted from Animals to Humans - MN Dept. of Health
btw, where the heck did, Covid-19, SARS, MERS, the flu, "jumping genes', many of the last 7,000 years of pandemics come from
catching stuff from other species
@Grendal is correct. If there is life on Mars it will be fundamentally different from anything on Earth. And interspecies viral transmission on Earth is incredibly rare. There are about 38,000 described species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles (plus over 1 million insect species) and only a tiny fraction of those have been shown to transmit viral, bacterial, and fungal infections to humans. The MN Dept of Health web page you linked to makes clear that it is indeed rare.
I didn't say it was impossible. It is hard to do though. Once you get them though they transmit around very well because we have little immunity from a different species' virus. It happens more in modern times because humanity is now everywhere. We all have DNA. So, under the right conditions and exposure, it is possible. Something on Mars would likely not be DNA based. Whatever might be there, if there is anything there, is unlikely to connect to us in any way.
I fully admit I am not an expert though.
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