If we can't rejuvenate the ecosystem of the Earth it's pointless to think about settling Mars.
Every technology required to settle Mars is indefinitely easier to prototype on the Earth, particularly soil enrichment.
Every technology required to settle Mars is indefinitely easier to prototype on the Earth, particularly soil enrichment.
Rich people seem to be happy to pump money into the idea of breaking free from Earth, and that's great. I'd rather have Musk and Bezos than Buffet and Ellison
Which technologies, and which problems, specifically?
If Earth reaches a point where we require Martian survival habs to stay alive - on Earth - then it is essentially game over for the massively interconnected ecosystems that make Earth our unique and precious home.
That’s why SpaceX/Elon are doing carbon capture funding: it’s necessary in order to get your rockets and people back from Mars. Essential to make it viable to figure out how to not rely on our biosphere as there isn’t one there.
All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with.
It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste.
These types of technologies may be very valuable in supporting us in the future on Earth. My concern is that if people think we (or the billionaires that care) can solve environmental problems just be throwing future tech at them, then they aren’t motivated to cut their resource consumption in the first place. This is why ‘reduce’ is a higher priority than ‘recycle’.
> All probes designed to last longer than a few hours HAVE to use solar or nuclear. No point bringing fossil fuels with if there is no oxygen to burn it with.
Developments in renewables (solar and otherwise) are not being driven by a desire for planetary exploration / colonization. Perseverance is powered by Plutonium-238, which is not a good model for terrestrial nuclear power at scale.
> It also forces a sort economy of resources. Every attempt is made to recycle air and water, packaging, even from human waste.
This I do agree with – if we treat Earth and its resources as things to value rather than as things to consume and exploit, we stand a much better chance of achieving a future where our children and their descendants can enjoy them as well. Which is sort of the point of the original Spaceship Earth concept :-)
The thing I keep going back to is the Ozone Hole. Opponents of banning CFCs argued we’d have to reduce our quality of life, stop using refrigeration and air conditioning, in order to reduce the release of ozone-depleting chemicals. But we DIDN’T. We simply developed alternative refrigerants that didn’t have the Ozone-depleting effect and now the ozone hole is healing (see here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452) and we still definitely have refrigeration and air conditioning (and both are massively helpful to human quality of life). Ultimately, we likely CAN just apply technology to fix the problem of CO2 (and methane) emissions, and we really ought to do it! The fact that consumption doesn’t need to be reduced is a BENEFIT of this approach because it means its political economy is much more viable (I imagine that if we had forced the world to choose between refrigeration/airconditioning and the ozone layer, they would have resisted strongly any effort to address ozone depletion). Folks arguing against technological fixes to climate change are doing the work of those arguing against climate action!
Don’t stop heating and cooling your house, get it insulated and get a good heat pump. Don’t stop traveling, use electric vehicles. Don’t stop using electricity, use solar power.
Because:
1) We don't yet in fact have the tech in general. We did with Ozone, I agree with your argument there, but it is going to be ages before we know how to make carbon neutral concrete, for example.
2) Speaking for myself, I'd rather live in a green biosphere rather than Trantor.
The fact that you don’t think we have the tech (which is different from deploying the tech broadly, which no one did for CFC alternatives, either, until there was policy pressure to do so) is exactly the problem I’m referring to: the engineers and technologists proposing to settle Mars actually KNOW of the technology needed to operate completely carbon free. It’s ironically the environmental activists who lack the knowledge of the necessary technology and therefore propose we have to not have any children around and abandon any pretense to luxury or comfort in order to solve climate change.
"Climate change" is a misnomer in that it is a stand-in for a larger set of environmental issues that all have their root in cheap, subsidized consumption. If you become too narrow minded and focus on a small set of factors, say transport emissions and crypto mining costs, you end up losing sight of the interrelationships which actually carry the causal weight of ecological collapse (with or without temperature changes.)
For instance, the most cost-effective carbon sinks we have control over are forests. Rather than doing forest farming to coexist with existing resources, and allowing more variance in our diet even if its caloric volume will have to decrease (something we already have too much of and waste too much food with anyway), we would rather destroy this land for monocropping purposes, which also leads to climate change problems which further feeds ecological collapse. It's a backward set of expectations and it's rooted in our greed.
If the technological means are available like you say they are, and I don't disagree with this, then social coordination problems are what's leftover. You can't use tech to evade them, but you discount them here by saying it's "a different thing". Yet if it's the limiting factor because the technology is already available, then it's the only thing that could matter.
And you can't just process these issues in terms of utilitarian calculus because if you think like a utilitarian, and you aren't in a position of influence, you will weigh out your individual contribution to collective problems as being marginally irrelevant.
This is why some environmentalist moralizing is necessary. Because if individuals don't take satisfaction in just doing the right and virtuous thing, even if it's a sacrifice, even a small one, they won't see a point to contributing to the commons at all.
Technology can stave off the need to make these sacrifices but it can't go on indefinitely. And even if it could, innovation takes time, which as I outlined in my comment to the grandparent post is what makes the difference between delivering energy just in time to turn the climate around, or overshooting until you can't even do that. Slowing down helps.
In the mid-run, allowing for unbounded consumption makes you hit resource elasticities more quickly. In the long-run, it's possible to hit an elasticity you can't recover from, because you've overpriced a critical resource which would have been necessary to innovate away from what was constraining your current level of consumption. The result is a major crash. [0]
Slowing down consumption makes the rate of change manageable and can ablate these shocks. Counter-intuitively, emphasizing more efficiency over less consumption can raise the total cost of consumption, as it just increases the room to grow and the potential diversity of the economy. [1] People take those things as "goals in themselves" even when doing so ensures that on some timeframe they'll get a lot less of them. If they expect it to occur after 80 years or so, they don't give a shit.
It's a no-win scenario that can only be matched either by physically improbable super-abundance, or a temperance of individual expectations with quiet, lean living.
[0] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brookes_postu...
This is wrong to assume confidently for several reasons.
It is wrong to endorse as being a good idea because when you apply that attitude to Earth first, you extend the possibility of further Mars missions. But the converse doesn't necessarily hold; we could fail to make breakthroughs on Mars, in which case we've wasted resources that could otherwise have been used to improve the efficiency of civilization on Earth.
It is also wrong to hold that there is anything particularly special about Mars when it comes to developing this technology. The only thing special about Mars is that it's hard. I'm assuming there's an intuition that because something is hard, if innovation occurs, the technology that will come out of it must be fantastic. But if such technology is required for Mars, then it will at least be developed in prototype form on Earth.
So Mars is neither necessary as an incentive or a testbed to develop environment rejuvenating technologies. And if the point I made above holds, then we should just turn this on its head, and focus on technologies for Earth first, then use those lessons for Mars.
It also makes the assumption that there are going to be incentives that will cause technologies developed on Mars to be applied to Earth. We have technologies and practices on Earth that can solve our own "terraforming" problems now. But they are long-term projects that only get their returns after several decades. Very few financiers care about this kind of investment, particularly when the economy is experiencing nominal growth elsewhere in sectors that are not physically sustainable.
Elon sort of gets bail on this because of his stake in SolarCity. He's still wrong in the sense that solar power will not produce energy at the density required for current civilization. Nuclear is the only form of energy that will satisfy our energy constraints in the long run. But you can't easily scale nuclear, it requires a lot of capital to upstart, and the payoff is longer. It's not Silicon Valley friendly because SV is about horizontal scaling and rent capture.
So it's understandable why Elon picked solar, but it shows the limitations of self-interested billionaires in solving humanity's problems.
I have little positive to say about Bezos.
My point is - I feel like fixating on Mars is doing more harm than good in terms of our progress as a species. But you're right - it's not my money being spent.
Gravity and the hope of terraforming.
You’re underestimating the power of inspiration. Saving the planet is dreary business. Colonising a new one is exciting. Those callings motivate different people in different ways. Constraining us to one problem means those who might have been inspired to study chemistry to terraform Mars find it more attractive to go into finance.
The round trip is harder, sure, but we're talking maybe a factor of 10 rather than infinity.
Except we DIDN'T learn them. We've only developed these technologies when necessary and not before.
Look at space power sources. Sure, Earth could have been using solar power for longer than it has (and we could've started the process cost improvement curve much earlier), but we didn't. We pretty much used fossil fuels. But for space, we've been using almost exclusively solar power nearly from the beginning. Space provided a critical early demand for improving solar power.
Also, Mars has a CO2 atmosphere that (at likely altitude) shields from all micrometeorites and virtually all solar flare radiation. At Curiosity's site, an astronaut could spend 35 hours a week unshielded on the surface (which is much more than a typical American spends outside in a week) without exceeding terrestrial radiation limits. Mars also has lots of free iron in the form of iron nickel meteorites spotted by rovers and just sitting on the surface. It has water all over the surface in the soil and even in the air (not to mention vast glaciers). And the air provides CO2, which can be split into Oxygen plus CO fuel. In addition, the atmosphere provides nitrogen and Argon. The geology of Mars has been greatly impacted by hydrology, like on Earth, so you have similar concentrations of ores. And the gravity is significantly higher. So there are all sorts of advantages of Mars over the Moon.
And the act of terraforming Mars to be Earth-like is nothing less than a titanic feat. The ways in which our world are fine-tuned to be bountiful would take more than several decades worth of missions - at least! - to even be mostly tractable on small segments of Mars, even with internal habitation. There will be failures. We will occasionally overextend like we do in every large project on Earth. What resources these projects? What's our buffer when they fail, even temporarily?
Meanwhile the physical means exist now to regenerate the Earth's environment and live sustainable yet happy lives. But the move from here to there requires decades long initiatives with little in the way of immediate profit. Things like safe nuclear power, permaculture and forest farms plus directed soil renewal, scalable water filtering, plastic substitutes; or scaling back conspicuous consumption and eliminating planned obsolescence in favor of efficient use of existing products along with the repair and maintenance of older ones.
Yet the reason why these problems are intractable is collective action, not unknown means. Dealing with Mars is both a longer term project than rejuvenating the Earth, and its perceived tractability stems from the way it looks conceptually simpler from a coordination standpoint if you ignore the civilization that makes it possible - just NASA and Elon right?