Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

This, combined with all the tech needed for a Mars colony, would make it trivial to build a permanent settlement in Antarctica.

A domed, self-sufficient, city in Antarctica would also be a cheap way to test most (not all) of the tech needed for Martian self-sufficiency, along with the psychological impact of living in a desolate wasteland where rockets are the only way in or out, and it would be a good insurance policy against many possible global catastrophes.

View on HN

We already have domed cities in Antarctica that test the psychological impact of living in desolate wastelands. It is in fact so desolate there that we can't physically access those places for months at a time and rockets wont change that one bit. You literally can not move a person to or from the South Pole research station for months of the year. Rockets aren't the tech needed.

We have domed villages, not cities. Musk is aiming for a million, dynamics might be different. Or not, I’m not a psychologist.

We already are doing that there is no need to do it in Antarctica since there is an atmosphere there and the soil isn't toxic.

Deserts, volcanic landscape like those of Hawaii and even a large enough basement would be just as good of a simulation without needing to worry about the environmental impact in Antarctica.

And plus we already have a "city" there.

I often think about this Bruce Sterling quote on The WELL from 2004:

``I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.``

Yep and while Mars can provide a possible plan b any disaster other than the planet disintegrating would likely leave a more hospitable environment than mars, and if we have the geo engineering needed to terraform Mars we can terraform the earth just as easily.

That said however settling the Gobi isn’t cool and as such it won’t drive innovation that could and would improve life on earth.

What is missing from life on Earth that is more improved by turning Mars green than by turning Earth’s deserts green?

Sure, Mars is cool and I intend to by a ticket, but making Earth deserts productive sounds like a great improvement down here.

Well turning the desert green may have an impact on the global ecosystem of the planet at least as far as local species go.

If that isn’t a problem for you then sure go a head.

Mars would require us to solves many more problems which can be then used to solve problems here on earth sometimes a bigger challenge is required to push for a breakthrough.

But if we go about geoegineering then I rather terraform mars which by all accounts is a dead planet than terraform the less livable places on earth as they are a host to their unique life forms.

Landing on ice, with a rocket firing down.

You sure?

They don't land on ground, it's a landing pad .

How big of a pad will you have to build in Antarctica to deflect heat from any ice that might be structurally supporting the base?

Would that matter? When it melts, it turns to water. There are already landing pads that float on water.

This doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, but my engineering skills are purely software — I really am asking if it would matter because I don’t know.

Question (I don’t know if the answer is known to anyone, nor where to look online): does Mars have significant CO2 permafrost that can be disturbed by landing a rocket on it?

> This, combined with all the tech needed for a Mars colony, would make it trivial to build a permanent settlement in Antarctica.

> A domed, self-sufficient, city in Antarctica would also be a cheap way to test most (not all) of the tech needed for Martian self-sufficiency

GP is talking about testing the rockets in Antarctica.

I am GP. I’m talking about testing colony tech somewhere where failure isn’t fatal. Rockets are only part of that, but it’s not really testing by the time you have the rocket capacity to make a colony in Antarctica.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com