Mars has a layer of molten rock inside
nature.com
nature.com
Also, they use the term "marsquake". Never stopped to think about how geocentric the term "earthquake" is!
My thinking is that the mass is in all directions so the gravity would cancel out in the middle. You’d then have an inside surface you could run around on which would have gravity.
Now, this is the fun part, the 42 minute time frame is true for using gravity to coast through a straight hole between any two locations on Earth's surface!
(Assuming a perfectly uniform density sphere and no friction on your journey of course)
>The eagle has mooned !
On Titan, this could be called an améthanissage (for methane).
Or can we just accept that orange-the-color is a fundamentally different idea than orange-the-fruit, despite the fact that the former is named after the latter? Can we accept that "earth" can simply refer to the material that makes up the hard surface layer of a planet, as a different idea than "Earth" the planet after which it's named? Is that OK? Do we really need to come up with a new word for "Solar Power" if the power comes from a light source other than our own sun? Can we call the large-scale geoengineering of Mars "terraforming", or must we insist that it's "marsaforming" (and not "geoengineering", but "marsoengineering")? Can we call something "romantic" even if it isn't actually written in Latin ("from Medieval Latin rōmānicē, Vulgar Latin rōmānicē (“in the Roman language”, adverb"))? Is that OK with everyone?
It's a damn earthquake.
Marsquake is a fun word. You can also call it an earthquake and no one will bat an eye.
It could be argued that doesn't work very well on a human scale either. after all when there's an earthquake, barring a civilization-ending apocalyptic situation, it's not the whole Earth that's quaking (at a human scale perspective), but rather a localized crustal region of it. A patch of earth (lowercase).
"Oh my god, what are we going to do when the rest of it comes?!"
Although originating as basically meaning "dry land", the word "Terra" became a proper name for the Earth in Latin around the Renaissance. The prefix "Geo" comes from the Greek for "Earth", the name of our planet. If you argue that "geo" really just means "land, ground, soil", etc., then you are exactly agreeing with me, since the word "earth" went through the same evolution: Geo-the-planet was named after geo-the-dirt. Earth-the-planet was named after earth-the-dirt.
I would suggest going for generic terms like "planetquake".
So you say: "geo-" and "terra-" don't refer to a specific planet in this context and I agree with you. That's the point. Neither does "earth-" in "earthquake". Are you trying to make the argument that "earth-" in "earthquake" refers to the planet Earth (rather than the material), unlike "terra-" and "geo-", or are you just completely agreeing with me on everything? I'm having trouble telling which is which.
It's very much the same thing as "a gaggle of geese" or "a murder of crows." It's just a bit of fun. Nothing to get worked up about.
or even 3
Language is pretty robust and we're able to deduce a ton of meaning from context. The term by itself is already used to refer to earthquakes. For all the other things that quake, we don't need to prefix them with the quaking entity to understand the meaning. You aren't going to say that someone was humanquaking in their boots so that people understand that the person wasn't actually experiencing anything on the Richter scale. Similarly, if I mention a quake on Mars, it's pretty apparent I'm not referring to Mars trembling in fear.
As a suggestion, using the term "seismic" to refer to subsurface vibrations would be more specific than "quake."
An earthquake on Mars very quickly becomes the local Martian government's problem when it is insanely expensive to fix.. and the vocab would follow..
No, the planet is named after the substance, not the other way around.
But of course I realize it's completely unimportant. Arguing is fun. It's not trolling: I'm not trying to get a rise out of people. Nor is it a bit: I'm not kidding or falsely representing any of my beliefs. I'm just having a bit of sport arguing with strangers online. If you see someone online making passionate arguments about minor word-use issues, or which superhero would win in a fight, or whether the Byzantine Empire was actually part of the Roman Empire or not, you're witnessing the same sport, and you're free to engage or not as you choose.
Planetquake. Or just quake.
Incidentally, Sol isn't an 'official' name for our sun. The term 'solar power' is more like a brand-name that's been genericised.
Are you saying "The Martian" was inaccurate?
> Because the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, one side of the Moon always faces toward Earth. Interpretation of this fact would lead one to believe that the Earth's position is fixed on the lunar sky and no earthrises can occur; however, the Moon librates slightly, which causes the Earth to draw a Lissajous figure on the sky. This figure fits inside a rectangle 15°48' wide and 13°20' high (in angular dimensions), while the angular diameter of the Earth as seen from Moon is only about 2°. This means that earthrises are visible near the edge of the Earth-observable surface of the Moon (about 20% of the surface). Since a full libration cycle takes about 27 days, earthrises are very slow, and it takes about 48 hours for Earth to clear its diameter.
In other words, not only are they not the same, they are not similar in any way, nor is "rise" an applicable term.
(Geo is the Greek word for Earth)
The current theory looks like, at best, a work in progress:
Internal dynamics are weeeeird.
Wonder if the moon affects this.
If both Mars and Venus have liquid cores and not much in the way of a magnetic field, it seems like there must be more to it, and it's likely to be one (or a combination) of factors that makes Earth unique in the solar system.
The problem with solar is it’s really easy if you have a settler there, they just wipe it. But trying to get a robot to wipe itself means dealing with all kinds of edge cases. What if it’s windy and the wiper snaps off, what if the wiper gets jammed with dust, what if the wiper scratches up the panels.
Edit: Without a self-sustaining colony and next generation propulsion tech, any humans on Mars as a backup plan will die lonely deaths. Surprised people seem confused on the necessary and sufficient conditions. Show me that robots can set up a self-sustaining colony with self-generating resources to get to other worlds, and that’s a legit “backup” plan. Otherwise we’re just arguing about edge cases with no viable solutions. You don’t need humans on Mars to show what’s possible.
A human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history. It's exciting. That excitement is what inspires people to get involved (and governments to fund projects.)
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Sending humans to Mars isn't about exploring Mars. It's about the impact this would have on society as a whole. Suddenly, there's another planet out there that we care about and focus on. Perhaps wars on earth seem just that much more petty? At a minimum, it will likely inspire a whole new generation to explore the cosmos.
* Neil has his flaws, I get it, but I've sort of come 360 on him. His exuberance is contagious and as ambassador for space exploration, his approach does have a certain "public resonance" to it that I've not seen from others even if he tends to embellish things...
That doesn't make any sense at all. The "pioneers of space exploration" would obviously include the people who did Apollo [and Sputnik, and Mercury, etc], and they obviously did not grow up during the Apollo program, unless NASA has a time machine they're not telling us about.
1) that "TODAY" is a pretty important qualification, and 2) it's a stretch to call those people pioneers. I live in the American West TODAY, but I certainly shouldn't be labeled a "pioneer" like the people who moved to this area 150+ years ago.
And still we try To justify the waste for a taste of man's greatest adventure
Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satelite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ck38Cl474
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg
Now imagine if those same resources were spent on fusion propulsion…
I don't think he's confusing anything. He's saying the only reason those funds were allocated were because:
1) The government wanted to do it (military reasons)
and
2) The public found it exciting (we're putting a man on the moon)
Without either of those, this wouldn't have happened.
I'm actually skeptical about that. It certainly would be the "single most watched event in human history" among geeks interested in space, and probably among geeks in general and nationalists of the country that did the landing, but I suspect it's a biased projection to extend that attitude to all of humanity. Objectively, it's likely that stuff like the opening days of some war or the 9/11 attacks would be more watched than a Mars landing.
Apropos: Gil Scott-Heron - Whitey On the Moon (Official Audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
Of course "most watched event" is more complicated, but I'd still bet on the moon landing, soccer and the Olympic opening ceremonies making up the top, rather than war or terror attacks.
IMHO, that makes my point much stronger. If sports got higher ratings than the Moon landing, it's a clear indication we're in a bubble that inflates the importance of and interest in space exploration.
My only point is I think geeks over-estimate the popularity of space exploration, incorrectly generalizing "it excites me/my type" to "it excites everyone/humanity." If regularly-held sporting events eclipse singular events in space exploration, it deflates high-flying rhetoric that expects the latter to be "the single most watched event in human history."
I make no comment on the importance of sports. But I'd argue that professional sports are probably more abstract (ultimately counting according to some arbitrary rules) and (practically, in a human sense) about as distant as space exploration.
I agree that a televised Mars landing would be the most watched televised event in history.
Though that introduces the problem that you're not really measuring what you're talking about, sort of like how lists of the "highest-grossing films of all time," are mostly about inflation and not popularity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films:
> As the motion picture industry is highly oriented towards marketing currently released films, unadjusted figures are always used in marketing campaigns so that new blockbuster films can much more easily achieve a high sales ranking, and thus be promoted as a "top film of all time",[24][31] so there is little incentive to switch to a more robust analysis from a marketing or even newsworthy point of view.[30]
The sixth landing wouldn't pull anyone away from this week's Monday-Night-Handegg game. The sixtieth would be fighting for ratings with Charlie's Angels.
The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.
Everyone who actually has to make a mars colony work.
Because, yes "yearning for the vast and endless sea" is certainly more poetic than figuring out how to make beams from tree trunks.
But without lots of people who think alot about trees and carpentry figuring out how to reliably produce good quality beams and techniques that allow for them to be fitted together into a hull that won't break apart when hit by the first few waves, no amount of yearning will result in a working Carrack.
> human being landing on Mars would probably be the single most watched event in human history.
Probably. And now imagine the reaction of all those people watching, when the landing vehicle crashed and exploded, or the Astronauts died horribly from thirst or starvation.
That's why there are people who care about building a sustainable colony in the arctic dry valleys.
To get excited about watching one man eking survival on Mars, you have yourself to be quite far away from any concern for your own survival here on earth.
To say it differently, this is very high on Maslow's pyramid.
For reference maybe check out Gilles Scott Heron's "Whitey on the moon"...
On the contrary, many of us agree very much with this. Mars is not a practical goal at the moment and it doesn't make sense from a resource perspective.
What might be more exciting, I think, is to develop such a well-functioning, resilient terrestrial society, such an abundant, adaptable community of life, that we could realistically take ourselves and our companions to Mars and hope to persist there. But that takes a lot of know-how, a lot of materials and energy, and (most importantly) a lot of wisdom.
Is a species steamrolling its paradise of a homeworld's living fabric really capable of planting a viable colony on a dead planet?
You can get humans on Mars with a big effort. Fine. Now get them back off.
Simple hand waving shows it's a really really hard thing to do. Let's assume current rocket science. You somehow have to get a fueled launch vehicle off the surface. The gravity is less, ~3/5ths, so it's a lot less fuel than on Earth, but it is still a lot of fuel. Somehow, without nearly any infrastructure and in a near vacuum, this rocket has to successfully get off of the surface. We can see that it's really hard to do this just on Earth with huge hangers and loads of experts and tools on standby. Doing this on Mars with a few astronauts and lord knows what sort of repair and maintenance facilities is just going to be a lot harder to pull off.
Fine, sure, now let's assume that we've somehow managed to have improved the science of reliability engineering to the point that we can just have fully fueled rockets just sitting on Martian dirt for years on end [0]. How do you get that rocket down from orbit? Like, how do you land that much fuel? That's a really hard problem to solve. Sure, fine, lots of little payloads all over the place. But then you have to have some sort of industrial machinery to go retrieve all those fuel pods and then load up the rocket. Who or what are going to drive all over Utopia Planitia to grab it all and then handle fueling? Astronauts? AI? Whatever it is, it's really expensive and has to be really safe. Why not build the rocket on Mars too?
Any return from Mars requires sciences and industry that we currently do not have, full stop. Iterating our way to that future is possible, but is currently outside of our skill sets. A lot of money and time is going to be needed to get to return missions. Ideas that this mission requires also upset the state of current industrial manufacture, repair, and maintenance here on Earth. Not in a bad way, mind you, but those techniques are miles beyond what we currently can do and will very much change the future of Earth just as much as it changes Mars.
[0] By the by, do you have any idea what that science will do to our Earth based industry? Nothing will ever break ever again!
Needing "a lot of money and time" is irrelevant. Money is a fiction and time we have in spades. Would we instead prefer the brightest minds of humanity spend more of their days optimizing algorithms that encourage other humans to sit on their asses consuming ads? Or maybe it would be better if, instead of designing Martian space-suits, we spend more time designing fast-fashion clothing meant to be worn once or twice, basking in hitherto unimagined heights of navel-gazing.
You can say the same thing about literally any other hard problem, most of which have a far better ROI, and are still not getting much traction.
There's a reason nobody's built a moon base.
If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood.
But then, the great thing about markets is that they can see more broadly than me. (And the bad thing is that they can't see as far.)
Anyway, if we decide to invest on space exploitation (instead of just exploration), I'd bet on asteroid mining much before planet colonization. Settling down on a planet seems to be a completely useless action.
> If I had to allocate them, I'd put them working on renewables, useful carbon capture, and artificial "slow organics" like wood.
All of these things would probably be worked on as part of Mars colonization, no? It's just the Mars colony excites smart people. Working on solar on earth, with loads of fossil fuels and an associated lack of appreciation for your work, is much less exciting.
Someone who fixes solar panels on Earth is making minimum wage. Someone who fixes the solar panel array at the Mars Colony is a hero.
Realistically, we need things like autonomous self-replicating robot factories in the asteroids chucking payloads of metals onto designated landing targets on Mars, and their cousins maybe retrieving the odd iceberg from the Oort to make a long trip over. We'll need boring machines, Mars specials, that can leave sealed tunnels several yards underground where the radiation won't be as annoying. We will need to create thirty Biospheres a year here on Earth, each year a new generation, and learn from them. Thirty is a good number if you want to do stats and discount one-offs. And we'll have to start tweaking the genes on what is in those Biospheres to figure out what will make them compatible with, say, underground caverns built by those boring machines.
This isn't like a trip to a remote island.
We should be able to go anywhere there's large enough of a fraction of the resources required for human life. For instance, if there's NO phosphorus, instead of just a smaller percentage, it's no-go, unless we're willing to live off a stockpile imported from elsewhere.
So, ambient temperature and pressure, along with elemental composition, are really the only hard limits.
However, we also need to factor in human psychology. It would inspire billions of people worldwide to see a person on Mars. This is not something that can be replicated by sending robotic missions. It's possible that this could increase public support for funding space exploration, and drive more people to go into careers in science.
It's hard to predict the benefits of human exploration of space because we don't know how the world will react. But it's a lot more significant than just measuring the scientific output of the mission.
Think about it this way: who were the astronauts on the first lunar landing mission? Who were the astronauts on the last? Why do you think that we remember the first ones to do it better?
A colony on the moon is technically possible, albeit very expensive. Many nations could create one today. People are choosing to spend their limited resources on better forms of progress.
Regarding your second point, you were the one that said we should spend the same resources of a manned mission on robotic missions. So if it is going to cost $2 trillion dollars for a manned mission we should spend $2 trillion instead on robotic missions. Now it seems you are arguing that we should spend the money elsewhere. If that's your point it is a different discussion.
I don't see much that's safe about robotics in our future. In space they'll be great (until they turn on us), but on Earth it seems like they'll mostly be used to kill people and if we ever do get robot butlers and maids you can bet that they'll be sending a continuous stream of audio and video of our homes, conversations, and sex lives back to at least one remote server as "telemetry" that will be sold off to data brokers and our government.
https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/19/robot-vacuums-can-be-hacked-a...
Unless the cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is true, in which the solution is to get as many of us off this ticking time bomb before it happens next.
As long as those colonies are self sufficient (the biggest handwave of the whole deal), they would survive while the majority of Earth would have a rather bad time of things.
Then again, it's likely that more humans would survive on Earth than elsewhere - nuclear submarines, underground government complexes, maybe even the Antarctica base depending on the angle.
We are one bad cosmic event from total known life annihilation. That would be a bad day
Stick a few people on an already-annihilated planet where they will never become self-sufficient, anyways?
If you want humanity to escape vulnerability on earth, your best bet is to not go into another gravity well at all. Esp one with no ionosphere, thin unusable atmosphere, brutal storms, and toxic fine sand everywhere.
The moon makes a lot more sense -- easier to manage shipping/trade with earth, no gravity well. And if you need off a planetary body completely, build orbitals.
Also many life-terminating events for earth -- local (galactic region) supernovae or other mass irradiating event, our own sun flaming out, etc. would just do the same to Mars.
How? I have no idea.
Then again, we also have no idea how to build an actually working generation ship :D
Grey goo?
We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics. In 100 years your kind of thinking will be considered ludditean and playing russian roulette with 5 in the chamber for no reason.
Nuked Earth that's also climate-changed so bad that only the poles are temperate is still a whole lot better than Mars.
Why is the solution for this "establish a colony somewhere already 100x worse than a multi-catastrophe-stricken Earth would be, and is also very-expensive to get back to Earth from" ? It makes no sense.
Asteroid strike? There are (much) cheaper ways to guard against that—hardened, distributed bunkers with paid inhabitants, increasing asteroid-hunting programs and interception research. Orbital habs or even the Moon if you're worried about a whole-crust-liquifying event that you can't stop in time. And we're not doing those. Why would we do Mars? It's worse than those options in basically every way. It's a really really bad place.
Most the other threats those measures couldn't guard against, would probably also take out Mars.
Going to Mars is cool and romantic and I hope to see it, but I think people trying to pin some practical reason for colonization other than "because it was there" (romantic) are misguided.
There is simply no argument against just not having all your eggs in one basket.
Why? What purpose does a human presence on Mars have? Exploratory activity can, is and should be done by robotic drones. Mars has zero resources Earth doesn't already have in abundance, is inimical to almost every lifeform on earth and confers no advantage as a launch platform for furture space exploration over the moon or a space station.
> We're focusing everything on the easier planet that might not be livable after one year of bad politics.
Fun fact: Even after a full-scale thermonuclear war, Earth would still be a more liveable planet than Mars.
So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
I bet some people said the same about america in 1400s.
You never know what can come from this in the future.
If we can we should.
> So what policy decisions could possibly make Mars attractive as a living space, or a "backup planet"?
Large asteroid impact might destroy us entirely like this: https://youtu.be/02S3_DEaQWA?si=urqC47r14cFxbNjD
Here is what I bet noone said about america in the 1400s:
"Man, it sure would be nice if there was air, arable soil, and building materials in america."
> If we can we should.
Humans can do lots of things that they absolutely shouldn't.
> Large asteroid impact
Ah, so we moved on from policy decisions. Good. Okay, let's talk asteroids.
a) I would be alot more worried about asteroids if I were on Mars. Mars is closer to the asteroid belt after all, and it's thin atmosphere is a lot less of a hurdle to evil space rocks than Earths.
b) Humanity has already proven, that it has the technical capability to alter an asteroids course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te... So far, humanity has NOT proven that it can build a self-sustaining colony on mars. As a matter of fact, we have not even done so in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, and they would at least have air there. So purely from the perspective of resource-allocation, it seems there are better ways to protect humanity from asteroid impacts, than trying to build a mars-colony.
The point I made is you can never know the benefits.
Asimov, end of eternity is a pretty nice book to see how your point of view might be flawed.
> Humanity has already proven, that it has the technical capability to alter an asteroids course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Te...
Sure... we can barely detect asteroids and you're saying we can deflect them, is the argument in good faith?, do you really believe we can detect and deflect a planet killer?
> So purely from the perspective of resource-allocation, it seems there are better ways to protect humanity from asteroid impacts, than trying to build a mars-colony.
So you don't want humanity to waste resources on space. That is your point of view which I hope is a minority at large. I disagree, but I doubt I can convince you otherwisr.
Yes we can know the benefits, and for the exact example you mentioned, we did. It was pretty clear to every major seafaring nation, that securing as big a piece as possible of that new continent, would be very beneficial in terms of resources, generated taxes, and geopolitical power.
And we also know that there are no benefits for a Mars colony. It would be a giant resource sink, and, based on what we know now, probably never able to sustain itself without constant help from earth, making it useless as a "backup plan" in case of some global catastrophe on Earth. If Earth dies, martian colony dies with it.
> do you really believe we can detect and deflect a planet killer?
I know we successfully tested a method that could, with further refinement and development, have a fighting chance at deflecting one.
> So you don't want humanity to waste resources on space.
Waste? No.
Use for useful projects regarding space exploration and defending Earth against catastrophes? Gladly.
You seem to assume that, I disagree, to quote you: "would be very beneficial in terms of resources, generated taxes, and geopolitical power."
> It would be a giant resource sink
So were english colonies in america at first.
> probably never able to sustain itself without constant help from earth
Again, your assumption, what if you're wrong?, check out 'The Expanse' for what I think we might achieve long term.
> I know we successfully tested a method that could, with further refinement and development, have a fighting chance at deflecting one.
So your answer is no, we cannot right now or near future. You also didn't answer if we can even reliably detect such a threat...
> Use for useful projects regarding space exploration and defending Earth against catastrophes? Gladly.
Sure, let's spend resources on that too. Doesn't seem like we are though, perhaps we might need some inspiration in order to get it?, something like some mars colonies might do?
Well, considering that Mars is currently a frozen, low-gravity, toxic, airless, irradiated, soil-less desert with barely any water, no nitrogen to speak of, very few options for energy generation, no protection from cosmic radiation and constantly wrecked by planet-wide duststorms, I honestly cannot imagine how we could possibly make it worse, even if we actively tried.
Things that incentivize lazing away do not incentivize progress.
Primarily, it would be something that forces us to send rocket after rocket of supplies there, wasting countless resources in the process for very little, if any, practical benefit.
Because, no, there is nothing to be gained on Mars that can't be gained much more effectively via robotic probes, and no, a Mars colony will not be self-sufficient.
Investing resources for no good reason, is to me the exact opposite of "focusing on the important".
Robotic probes are irrelevant to colonization. It's like saying why don't Russians stop at just fly drones to Ukraine lol
Lest you forget it took 300 years for North America to generate self-sustaining colonies from the first Europeans. And those didn’t require life support for oxygen and water for every second of survival.
But are being worked on. This statement would've been true about landing Falcon 9 stages less than a decade ago.
> The sort of people that advocate otherwise have killed innocent civilians deep in the North Atlantic and are failing to run a previous healthy, if unspectacular, social network.
The differences between SpaceX's approach to safety and how Twitter's being run are pretty stark. Same guy, very different cultures. SpaceX's safety record is good enough for NASA, and they're hardly the #yolo set.
I respect SpaceX, but I also respect the real challenges of responsibly sending a crew to Mars.
So maybe it’s fine if we spend a bunch of money on getting to Mars. There are plenty of interesting arguments for doing it, and it would be a way better use of resources than just flushing it down the toilet on useless infrastructure. Could be much worse.
And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean.
Humanity has to do grand projects like this that seem ridiculous, because once in a while, it changes everything.
And even if it doesn't, the cheer amount of ingenuity it requires brings benefit on their own.
Yep. And those reasons are why people touched it a few times and never came back.
> And people probably said things like that to Columbus about sending boats across the ocean.
Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries.
And it changed the world forever. Probably contributed to avoid the cold war to turn hot. Not to mention we got diapers out of it, and a healthy space program that made amazing things possible like the GPS.
> Hum... Nope. People were already sending boats across that specific ocean for centuries.
Nick picking. People didn't know that.
Fun fact: No human has set foot on the Moon since 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17
Also: When Columbus set sail, he could reasonably assume that he would see his home again. Big boats and long sea voyages were not a new technology in his time. When NASA started the Apollo Missions, they had them planned out from start to finish and knew exactly how that would work.
So yes, once in a while, humanity does something amazing, that seems a bit far fetched, but still reasonable. What humanity usually doesn't do, is something that it has absolutely no plan on how to do it.
Actually there are elder scientists wanting to volunteer for such a mission. See https://philpapers.org/rec/MAKTBG
Relevant reading: "Why Not Mars" [0]
Some kinds of caution aren't very careful at all.
Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel.
Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose?
We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?)
I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63221577
Added bonus: Investing resources into this saves Earth and everyone on it.
Can we bootstrap up an energy economy there? Dunno, that's the first step. With a large enough energy budget, food's doable. Water is likely in situ.
> It seems like surviving the loss of Earth is a long way off regardless.
Even longer if you wait to try.
If you asked me to guess, it would be somewhere between impossible and 1000 years of terraforming.
If there was significant uncertainty in what resources needed to be deployed to where then I could see a benefit to having an onboard team of humans who could assemble workers or payloads on the fly from orbit. However this would be a big shift from current mindset of designing robots for exact problem/solutions with precise payloads to instead having an excess of resources on board.
If the perspective shifted to "we're colonizing Mars so every ounce of metal in orbit will get used at some point" this is less of a concern.
Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust.
And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to keep the cameras running!
IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper, to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly independent colony on Mars.
At our stage, having that come from the private sector versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation of ancient cultures), governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things, in my opinion worth preserving across several planets, solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
These eyes, and the attached brains, can safely study the images that the aformentioned cameras send back to earth, and spend their valueable brainpower developing ever new and better robots instead of worrying about unpleasantries like explosive decompression.
> governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
The problem is, there is no reward to be had on Mars. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. The red planet has nothing to offer that isn't already available in abundance here on Earth. What there is an abundence of on Mars, is cosmic radiation, toxic perchlorate salts, microabrasive powdered regolith, planet-wide dust storms, and many many many ways for would be settlers to perish.
> But we should grow and expand as a species.
Absolutely. The thing is, trying and likely failing to somehow establish a colony on a dead, irradiated, freeze-dried wasteland isn't exactly going to help us much in that regard.
If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive (for a time).
Probably will depend on whether there is a difference you can taste from earthy to "marsy" potatoes. Some experimental trials [1] have indicated that growing potatoes on Mars will be difficult, but possible.
Google is telling me Geosmin is the chemical typically associated with earthy odor and taste [2]. The mars regolith is apparently quite salty, so it's completely possible that "marsy" taste may become associated with some similar common chemical product of martian agriculture?
1. https://cipotato.org/annualreport2016/stories/mars-potatoes/ 2. https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/g/geosmin.h...
There isn't a relationship between the word "colonize" and Columbus.
Also I'm not sure how we've "given up" considering there are two rovers on Mars right now, the last one going as recently as 2021, plus several more in development. People expecting Mars colonies by now have been reading too much sci-fi.
We have had the capability to develop ourselves to send a colony to mars in 10 years if we really wanted to, for 50 years, so yes we're late. But I for one am very happy we've got some real vision and development towards it now.
True.
You know what else is true? We could breathe on that new continent, there would be enough nitrogen compounds to grow food, anyone who wanted to go back home could eventually do so, our colonists bodies would not deteriorate due to the low gravity, and if our colonists there got into trouble, we could send help before they all died horribly.
But yes, it does mean bringing your own air and being self sufficient, but we do both of those things on the ISS already
The martian atmosphere is 2.8% N2. For comparison, Earths atmoshpere is 78.08% N2, while also being more than 100x as dense. And Earth already has soil, and a developed nitrogen cycle, while Mars doesn't.
So there is nowhere near enough Nitrogen in-situ on Mars to support any form of agriculture. It has to be brought from Earth.
> mars has enough gravity to prevent bone loss
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/07/407806/traveling-mars-will...
So yes, lowered gravity has negative impacts on our bones and physiology in general. The gravity on Mars is 1/3 that of Earth. And that's after spending several months in-transit at microgravity.
> But yes, it does mean bringing your own air and being self sufficient, but we do both of those things on the ISS already
The ISS is not self sufficient, and relies on continuos supply runs from earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncrewed_spaceflights_to_the_I...
We just don’t know if the 1/3 gravity will cause bone loss problems - going to the moon is the best way to study it, but who knows. Probably, people will just age 3x faster in terms of bone mass on mars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia
And yeah, the first years of a mars colony are gonna be dependent on earth. We’d definitely make sure we have enough rockets that they can abort if shit goes south on supply missions, but there’s no reason earth can’t supply them at first.
Nitrates on mars will probably be in the form of nitrate salts.
Btw. agriculture also requires soil. Which the martian regolith isn't.
> We’d definitely make sure we have enough rockets that they can abort if shit goes south on supply missions
Have enough rockets where? On mars? Using what fuel? Using what ground installations like scaffolds and launch pads? Also, launching between Mars and Earth is only possible during specific time windows. For an Earth-Mars transit, these occur ~once every 2 years. So if "shit goes south" outside these windows, the amount of rockets won't matter.
Chances are, Mars may have local concentrations of nitrous minerals (as does Earth), and these can be used to run a large enough agriculture. Few plants know how to consume atmospheric nitrogen anyway.
Air pressure and temperature can be maintained below transparent domes, greenhouse-style.
Dim sunlight looks like a much bigger problem, which can't be fixed by any terraforming.
Like I said, pure delusion. We can still barely manage to launch rockets into space, and it still costs thousands of dollars per kg of cargo just to get to LEO. No human has lived in space for an extended period of time at a range beyond the ISS (400 km, while Mars is 400 million km).
The Moon is very inhospitable, but it's close enough we could have just shuttled an endless stream of ready-to-live habitat modules there, one after another. The tech was there. The will was not.
I'm not saying it would have been rational to do it in the 1970s, but we could have!
On the other hand, what we actually did do (to the Earth) wasn't exactly rational, either.
Really? What machines would be used to build these shelters? How do they get to Mars? How would they be powered? What auxilliary materials will they require and how do those get to Mars?
Launch? Maybe.
Launch while also having to launch everything the people we send there need for the rest of their lives, and also launch everything needed to power and maintain that robot for as long as it's required? Hmmmmm...
But okay, let's say we do all that. We can now dig up Mars-dirt. How do we make that into airtight shelter that is also proof against cosmic radiation?
Is that true? Maybe if you never ever go outside but you might as well just dig a very deep cave here on Earth if your entire is to prove that humans can live in extremely inhospitable environments.
Back when Kennedy first harnessed the whole US towards something truly greater, the odds seemed infinitely worse. But they got it done. Including minituarizing a room-sized computer to fit in a box just to serve as cruise control for Apollo.
There is something even rarer than gold on the moon: helium-3, usable for cryotechnology and potentially in nuclear fusion reactors. Helium on the Earth is about to run out (partially because the US keeps on selling their stockpiles, that are then wasted for stuff like party balloons) - that is why everyone and their dog are pushing moon missions at the moment.
When some if the new 3He-based fusion reactors with huge magnets actually breaks even, this maybe become potentially practical. You don't need so much 3He for generation if you produce it from Li in the blanket.
Note that there is already a huge amount of gold in the oceans, but it's very diluted so it's too expensive to extract. You don't want to just know that there is gold. You want to know how much profit you would get after the gold bars arrive to Fort Knox.
edit: this is assuming we're not allowed to set up nuclear reactors there
Feasible? No.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wum8_8sWdeU
We really lucked out with all of that ancient unmetabolized biomass.
Without that, we might not have had our fancy computers by this point.
I'm genuinely curious: why do you say this?
What's the price of gold on Earth? Is it the same as now? What if I could email someone on Mars and buy 50oz of gold? Could I sell it to someone here? What if it's cost prohibitive to move all of the gold to Earth? Or any of the gold to Earth? How refined does the Martian gold have to be before someone on Mars can say the own it?
The answers to all of those are clear (or at least only marginally unclear) for materials that are intrinsically valuable but for the "store of vaule" as opposed to industrial use of something like gold it gets weird for me.
I guess the answer to all of those questions is - whatever someone will pay.
In Micronesia there was a practice of carving massive "coins" out of stone. These "Rai stones" were often too large to move. Yet individuals could "own" them and they were traded often for things of great value. I believe I even read an account of one that had sunk in a shipwreck, but the owners went on to trade it even though it was at the bottom of the sea.
Just cause a physical item cannot be possessed physically doesn't mean it is valueless.
However, for gold specifically, part of what makes it valuable is that it has some manufacturing uses and people like making jewelry out of it. There is no doubt a much larger supply of gold throughout the universe than on earth and it has no effect on the price here.
So I think while you can buy and sell gold on another planet (provided people can widely agree on it's transfer of ownership), that would be a completely separate market from the terrestrial gold market.
We'd need something much more valuable, although the usual go-to, diamonds, also wouldn't work since it's a highly controlled market.
At that point you're in exotic materials territory. Maybe a natural source of Californium which on Earth is only produced in reactors or particle accelerators, and actually has industrial uses? Even if its price dropped substantially, we'd probably find new uses for the new supply and the stuff costs millions of USD per gram.
I imagine it must be hard to participate in the conversation without simply pointing people at it, so I've decided to let you off the hook :-)
Still occasionally refresh hoping to find the sequel ...
True.
For example: suffocating, starving, dying of thirst, getting sick, suffer psychologic breakdowns, having their bodies deteriorate due to low gravity,...
Robots cannot do any of these things.
With more advanced robots that might be possible, but currently robots can only do, what you exactly told them to do. Depending on the real parameters, that might be enough, or not. And they certainly can get "sick" and broken as well. Hardware as well as software.
Which is hardly a disadvantage given that this includes not understanding that we send them on a mission with no return, and a high likelihood of something going horribly wrong.
> Also, they can "die" of thirst for energy as well.
True, but that energy can be collected via a few solar panels, or provided for decades from a relatively small nuclear battery. Human supplies for a prolonged stay cannot be collected on Mars, and take up alot of space and payload capacity for even a single human. And that's not including the fact that with humans we also have to take many many extra steps to be able to bring them back.
> but currently robots can only do, what you exactly told them to do
Depending on the situation, that can easily become necessary for humans as well. Astronauts on missions do very few things that ground control doesn't know about or didn't order them to do / plan ahead for them to do. Yes, this includes procedures during emergencies. Given the more severe resource constraints and even slimmer margins for error, the situation won't be any different on Mars.
Sorry if that sounds un-romantic, but the movies of brave buckaroos McGuyver-ing their way out of trouble on the Red Planet, relying on their wits, duct tape and tons of plot armor, isn't how this will play out in real life.
We've proven that we can keep humans alive indefinitely in space with the International Space Station. Expanding that practice beyond Earth's orbit can and will go a long way in advancing our understanding of our solar neighborhood.
The initial human explorations of the planets will be more limited than the rover projects. But I think we are getting very close to being able to mount much more significant investigations of our closest neighbors. We just need to choose to go.
In contrast, there's enough atmosphere available on Mars to make it possible to build larger, pressurized structures and even use aerial flight, and more gravity than on the Moon.
The average surface pressure on Mars is a few millibars; from an engineering perspective it's the same as building pressurized structures in vacuum. If anything, it's more difficult, since your design will have to deal with wind loads and airborne dust.
Not to mention the phenomenal effort required to grow food there or transport who knows how much food per person to provide the kinds of safety margins you would want to avoid your first Mars astronauts starving.
BTW the Earth/Mars synodic period is not 18 months, but 26 months.
The martian atmosphere has less than 1% the pressure of Earths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
So for the purposes of building habitats, it might as well have none.
> and even use aerial flight
Yes, if we are talking about very small, very light robotic probes, that can rotate their blades 10 times faster than what's required on earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)#Mechani...
True, though the atmosphere there brings challenges of its own:
“Every year there are some moderately big dust storms that pop up on Mars and they cover continent-sized areas and last for weeks at a time,” said Michael Smith, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/the-fact-and-fiction-of-ma...
Not when I compare it with the range of activities a human can do on Mars.
Wouldn't we able be to build much better robots which would probably be more effective than humans for the same cost it would take to send a manned mission to Mars?
We wait decades to maybe get a tiny sample of a rock.
Robotic Mars exploration has made huge progress on what is a shoestring budget compared to boondoggles like Artemis or ISS. Just look at the improvement between Sojourner and Ingenuity and imagine what an adequately funded robotic exploration program could look like.
You may have seen China launching their youngest ever crew to their space station this week, and I noticed the quotes from the three crew members:
"I'm solely focused on the mission, on how to accomplish the mission successfully. I have to get prepared every minute, every second, and this was my aspiration when I joined the Air Force, and that aspiration has never changed," said Tang Hongbo, Commander.
"I feel that I am fully prepared physically, mentally and technically. I am confident to complete this upcoming flight mission. In fact, to be honest, I can't wait to carry out the mission now." - Tang Shengjie, Operator.
"Talking about the roles and responsibilities, I will try my best to complete the routine maintenance of the space station" - Jiang Xinlin, Operator.
One of those sounds less exciting than the others.
[1] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-10-25/China-unveils-Shenzhou...
I kid. I agree we should go there. But not because of Columbus specifically.
Google says his whole expedition cost about 1.5 million maravedis. I'm not finding what fraction of the Spanish crown's budget that was. Do you know?
Earth to the moon is 240,000 miles. Earth to Mars at it's closest approach is 34 million miles. So this would be like telling Columbus to sail not for 2 months and 9 days, but for 27 years to get to India. He wasn't even willing to sail for 10 months to do it! (Also bear in mind that's the one-way timeframe; the return from Mars would be about twice as long in this scenario.)
And not only that but also let Columbus know there won't be any gold, spices, or slaves at the end of the trip. See how willing he is to dedicate the next 81 years of his life to it.
Hopefully this puts the interplanetary distance in perspective.
The only thing that would accomplish, compared to sending robotic probes, is wasted payload capacity that could otherwise transport scientific instruments.