Everything about Mars is the worst (2017)
fivethirtyeight.com
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Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere. It's just enough to complicate landing and to cover all your equipment in dust when there are planetary-wise dust storms. The ground is poison. Energy production is an issue. Low gravity is a problem. It's a long way from Earth. Terraforming Mars is a fantasy.
Now compare this to the Moon. Inhabitants can remain in real-time contact with Earth. Getting there is far easier and quicker. You can cover large areas with solar panels that will generate way more energy and won't get covered in dust. There's evidence of extensive lava tunnels that can be pressurized and inhabited without the need for massive excavation.
The only real issue with the Moon where Mars actually wins is day length. Mars has almost a normal Earth-like day length. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth on a 28 day orbit so has... a 28 Earth day "Moon day".
You see this same psychology at play every time some fringe scientist comes up with another completely unworkable idea for FTL travel (warp drives,, wormholes, etc).
But really living in another gravity well doesn't mmake much sense in any case. It's further compolication for not a lot of gain. I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
- 2x distance to Earth compared to Venus
- No magnetosphere
- Thinner atmosphere = you boil at room temperature
We know the long-term health consequences of microgravity (as in LEO) are significantly negative.
But, we lack data on long-term health effects of Martian or lunar gravity. Pessimistically, humans really need close to 1g, and anything significantly less causes serious problems-lunar isn’t going to be much better than microgravity. Optimistically, humans just need “some gravity”, and while close to zero is harmful, lunar or Martian isn’t.
The way things are going, we are likely to find out in the next 10-20 years, at least for the lunar case. If lunar gravity avoids most of the negative health effects of microgravity, Martian gravity will too. If it doesn’t there is still the chance that Martian gravity might be “just enough” even if lunar gravity isn’t
I was just pointing out that some things that are bad for humans actually make the rocketry problem for returning easier for this bullet point.
If you want to launch without that issue, you're then into the world of using more delta-v, which is catastrophically expensive, unless you've got some form of propulsion for your craft beyond what we've got now. So yes, but with caveats.
Obviously, there's a giant pile of detail beyond this in terms of the calculations for trading off time of flight vs distance between bodies, vs delta-v to accelerate towards the body, and then accelerate away from it to slow your descent into an orbital trajectory, but that's more depth than I'm going into for a quick HN comment.
There are tons of things humans do that don’t make sense. IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense. We did end up benefitting in unforeseen ways from the technology developed by doing so.
If people want to sign up to fly to Mars or send hardware there to terraform, why should we stop them? I take lots of unnecessary risks mountaineering, because it’s what fills my cup.
You make great points about orbitals, and I do agree from a logical standpoint. Maybe Mars proves too impractical, but the technology developed leads us in that direction instead. I’m excited for the future either way.
Maybe we'll even get a version of the show Alone that's set on Mars. "We dropped ten astronauts off in isolated locations on the Martian surface. Let's see who can survive the longest!" I'd tune in to that.
Life helps entropy along! Humans are great at taking organized things and reducing their energy states.
There's actually an argument that says life is inevitable as a result of it the universe trying to heat death itself sooner.
The Space Race made perfect sense. It was a political exercise. a proxy for war between nuclear powers. As long as civilizations have existed they've built monuments and undertaken massive tasks as a political exercise.
> ... why should we stop them?
Who said anything about stopping them? My argument is it won't happen because the costs are so high and there's no hope of a return from that.
People like to bring up human exploration as some kind of argument but every aspect of human exploration has been an economic activity. In the Middle Ages, European colonialism was pure exploitation. Columbus's famous journey West was to find a faster way to India... for exploitation.
There is literally nothing we could produce or extract on Mars that would make economic sense to bring back to Earth.
I’m of the opinion that if you want real space industry, leave the planets alone and go to the near-earth asteroids followed by the belt. If you want space tourism and money-sucking colonies then it doesn’t really matter which location you pick - they’re all bad.
More pertinently, when we actually develop a fusion reactor, the gas giants are a far easier place to get fusion fuel from than the parts-per-billion in regolith.
Cheap — and resources to extract.
I always thought this was a specious argument and that despite a lot of social media threads and Elon ravings, no one is really taking it seriously. The reason I think this is because no one ever brings up the idea of having a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica.
I mean to build a proper threat model you need to understand exactly what threats you're trying to mitigate I guess. But let's say it's the usual doom and gloom stuff, a) climate change, b) nuclear war/winter, c) meteor strike.
If anything an Antarctic colony stands to benefit from climate change. A nuclear war is scarier, but none of the fallout is going to reach the South Pole, and to be self-sufficient you had to solve your energy needs without much sunlight anyway (there are surely tons of undiscovered hydrocarbons down there waiting to be dug up and refined).
A meteor strike, well as long as it doesn't land on the colony, the problems are similar to nuclear winter.
So if you want to have a "backup" for the human race - the Antarctic Plateau is sufficiently remote, and about 10,000x easier than anything off-world.
But we don't even talk about it because everyone knows life on Antarctica is pretty depressing and PEOPLE JUST WANT TO DO SCI-FI IN SPACE.
The South Pole is within easy reach though, why wouldn't a colony on it get targeted as well?
1. A meteor strike can be big enough to obliterate anything on what was once the surface. It can heat the entire globe to 100 degrees Celsius due to tektites bombarding the surface. 2. Due to millennia of snow and ice covering it, the surface of the continent is just bare rock. Nothing will grow there without significant amounts of soil moved to it. Yes, this is also a problem for Mars, and a boat is more proven tech than a spaceship, but the removal of all ice off the surface will not change Antarctica into a bountiful oasis. Making a self-sufficient colony there is going to be extremely hard.
Musk is using SpaceX to drive down the cost of sending things into space. This greatly reduces obstacles for going to space, and makes a self-sufficient Antarctic base a bit obsolete.
I dont think we are even close to be able to make it self sufficient.
Self sufficient sounds nice in principle but is way more complicated. You need industry for every single part used to build colony - that is replace everything you rely on.
Soil enrichment, material wear, silicon chips... you need to have uranium mine and processing to sustain energy production.
The scale of the operation is massive. And all done underground.
Not impossible, just unlikely we will ever get there.
That's actually much, much harder than it sounds, and this is the key part that everyone just hand-waves away.
On Earth, it is already unaffordable to move to many places for even relatively rich westerners. As in, your own personal economic output is unable to pay for the cost of moving the materials there, setting up a habitable abode, and then keeping you alive until the age of retirement. That's with normal-ish housing in normal-ish conditions.
We can only afford our current lifestyles with the "cheat codes on": free oxygen, free water, free temperature control, and free energy growing out of the sky[1].
On Mars, you have two compounding challenges:
1) Every aspect of staying alive is harder. Housing has to be air-tight. Instead of a mere air conditioner, you need a life support system. Instead of just food, air and water also need to be made. Space suits are needed to go outside. Etc...
2) Productivity itself is lower. The supply chain is tiny, raw materials are much harder obtain, cooling water and air is not available in bulk, and so on. Just think about how dependent modern technology is on plastics, which are made from oil. Mars has no oil!
The combination of both lower productivity multiplied by higher cost of living and ridiculous supply-chain issues for the first century (or more!) means that self-sustainability will be out of reach well past all of our lifetimes.
[1] Trees are made of air and hence grow out of the sky. Trees make wood that we can use for energy. https://www.lawctopus.com/do-trees-grow-out-of-air-richard-f...
And of course limitless water and air, and not seething with radiation.
Regarding #2, the solution for self-sufficient agriculture in Antarctica and on the Moon/Mars is the same: hydroponics.
Only it's much easier to do hydroponics in Antarctica. You can melt that ice for fresh water. You can harvest all kinds of nutrients from the ocean. The Antarctic seas have huge oil deposits to provide limitless energy. An Antarctic colony pretty much just needs lots of weather-hardened infrastructure, it's tough, but well within reach of current tech.
Self-sufficient Moon/Mars hydroponics is way harder. Water is far more scarce. Where do you obtain the nutrients for plant life in situ? Not sure it will all require exotic systems that haven't been invented.
My premise is basically that the political will for a self sufficient colony that "backs up" human society doesn't exist. If it did we would just have some countries agree to amend the Antarctic treaty and do it. It could probably even pay for itself by exporting oil. But no one genuinely cares so we just write scifi stories on the Internet instead.
That said, given the unknowns and uncertainties, I believe it’s rational to devote some small amount of our resources to trying to achieve multiple sustainable off-earth communities, including in orbit, on the Moon, and yes, on Mars.
Two wrinkles, not really disagreements:
> Low gravity is a problem
It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem.
> Mars's atmosphere is the worst of both worlds. It's of absolutely no use to build a breathable atmosphere.
Not directly, but it does mean (1) leaks can be represurised from outside, and (2) is a source of carbon, useful for plants and ISRU fuel manufacturing.
The fuel point is useful for any initial colonisation creation, but by the time we seriously consider a million people we should be able to build a mass driver… which works better on the airless moon than the thin atmosphere of Mars.
> I firmly believe humanity's future is in orbitals (aka an incremental Dyson Swarm). This approach has so much more going for it, except perhaps the added protection of living deep underground on a planet or Moon.
I understand the appeal, but I strongly suspect they only seem good due to the failure modes having not yet been deeply investigated.
>It might be, we don't know. This ignorance is also a problem.
We did a study of prolonged stay on ISS - lower bone density, muscle loss, problems with eyes.
Our bodies evolved and adapted to live in 9.8m/s2 its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
Indeed, but the ISS is also zero gee.
> its not a leap of faith to think there will be issues in 3.7
I'm not suggesting it requires a leap of faith, merely that it is currently untested. Until we try, either hypothesis is plausible.
Is there an obvious reason this would not work ?
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but generally it’s considered that the issue is more that if you’re standing on a spinning cylinder, you might have weird balance issues due to speed differences between head and feet. Also, you have to remember you don’t have gravity, so as you intuit, entry and exit are trickier.
Two broad ideas for entry/exit: do it at the center where the physical position is stable, then “spin up” some how, or alternately get up to external speed and lock on to something that you then elevator through the surface.
If cable holds you have gravity, if it fails you risk being slingshot into deep space
But also, the forces are never more than the apparent gravity times the mass, so when someone does finally end up experiencing this, it will be part of a larger pattern of bad maintenance and/or engineering that likely has other things going wrong at the same time.
I am only slightly exaggerating
Nah, it's fine.
It's just big and expensive and we've already got gravity under our feet, so it's a very expensive way to remove one of the few reasons to do stuff in space in the first place.
We'll get around to it at some point, for sure. Just no hurry.
Isn't it a bigger problem on the Moon?
Once there are regular landings on the Moon, dust management will be an issue, either at source on the landing pad, or where it lands, which will be just about everywhere on the moon.
https://www.space.com/4956-lunar-landers-sandblasted-moon.ht...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunar-dust-could-...
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-seeks-student-solutio...
> moon dust is nasty stuff. The jagged material
It has never been smoothed by wind and water erosion or reacted chemically with the same.
Why would you do that?
Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now.
That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing.
But eventually something pays of big time.
And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively.
It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive.
I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds.
I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same.
It's always a different situation. That's the point.
That's what discovery is about.
Because there was fertile land on the other side.
Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert.
> I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot
Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never.
Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert.
Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG.
Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas.
> But eventually something pays of big time.
There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.
The fallout will eventually decay, but Mars will stay an irradiated hellscape forever.
It's not about what you know is there. It's the potential.
There is no point for Usain Bolt to run that fast. There is not point in building the tallest tower in the world once again.
Meanwhile, the mars goal already managed to bring us spaceships that land and divide the cost of putting satellites in orbit by 10.
No other path lead to it because there was nothing to motivate it enough.
> Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious IF the colonisation of Mars is successful (however you define that), the benefits of it MIGHT be obvious. Those are 2 huge conditionals; it may not be possible to colonise Mars, and if it is possible, we may still not be seeing any benefits in 200 years time.
*Of course, some did, but very much by exception. And it rarely ended well for these people, or their tribes, or humanity at large.
What I believe the moon is especially good for is as a launch pad for further exploration. Build mostly-automated factories in low but non-zero gravity and launch with a much smaller escape velocity. Lots of raw materials right there, easy energy from the sun (with solar panels in space for the night).
Unfortunately, the moon is "old hat" now that we've walked on it, and people want exciting new goals, not just a space factory.
I thought moon dust was a terrible problem, esp because with no atmosphere it's statically charged and so sticks to everything?
>> Now compare this to the Moon.
Maybe in 50 years the Moon can be colonized by machines, but for humans if they really want to experiment with self sufficiency, they can try building Biosphere 3 in the Sahara and see if they can survive for a few weeks without constant support from the outside.
McMurdo on the Moon is entirely possible and I think there's a good chance we'll see it. This would get us started trying to live elsewhere and we'd start learning how to deal with the challenges. We'd also find out about the challenges we don't know.
See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736225 "... So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical prototypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossiped about by academics.) ..."
As humans start moving beyond Earth, I think that it’s more likely that we change ourselves. We can probably make our bodies more tolerant of lower gravity and higher radiation.
Perhaps it's about more than mere practicality.
There are peaks of (near) eternal light at the poles. Put up a tower there with solar collectors and you have power. Nuclear power works too and there is probably fissile material on the Moon if it can be found.
It’s only a few days away, meaning it’s close enough for people to come and go and supplies to be sent in an emergency. It’s also close enough for tourism while Mars is definitely not barring fusion rockets or something.
Magnetic or gun launch from the Lunar surface could export minerals from the Moon to Earth, another possible industry that could at least offset the cost.
There are some compelling scientific and industrial possibilities.
For science the Moon would make an amazing place to build massive telescopes. The low gravity would make huge structures easier to build too.
Spacecraft could be built on the Moon and launched into space easily, making it an ideal place to construct really huge craft that would probably be needed for any serious forays elsewhere. Nuclear powered launch from the Moon is fine too unlike Earth where this would be an environmental disaster.
The environment on the Moon is a bit harsher than Mars but not as much as it first appears. There is water and probably lots of minerals. A vacuum isn’t that much worse than the thin wispy Martian air. The dust may be more abrasive but otherwise is probably not much worse.
Edit: peaks of eternal light:
Moonquakes happen too.
tremors are typically weaker than the tremors that occur on the Earth, though they do tend to last longer.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2022...
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experiment/display.action?id...
Moonquakes don't seem to be showstopping events, more something that can be worked around by avoiding faults and steep slopes that might collapse.
It would all probably end like Antarctica, we had one reactor down there, but the cost of sending people there just to run it and the infeasibility of any repairs of upgrades ended the entire effort after one generation.
Real world non spherical cow technology has a pyramid of support issues that many tend to forget about.
The decision to close McMurdo Station's "Nukey Poo" nuclear power station in 1972 wasn't just due to cost of running it, it was also due to environmental concerns. On the Moon, those environmental concerns don't exist – there is no living environment to be harmed.
Also, Nukey Poo was 1960s technology. State-of-the art nuclear reactors are more reliable and less maintenance-intensive than their 1960s forebears. So just because Nukey Poo required an on-site crew of 25 people, it doesn't necessarily follow a lunar reactor would.
The reactor could be remotely monitored and controlled from Earth, and some maintenance tasks could likely be performed by robots–not possible in Nukey Poo's day. There would still likely be some maintenance tasks that would require humans on-site, but that might require significantly less than 25 people.
For improved safety, a lunar reactor could be situated several kilometres away from the nearest human settlement, and left unattended most of the time. Humans (travelling in pressurised lunar rovers) could visit on those occasions when in-person maintenance was necesary.
Another factor which added to the cost of Nukey Poo – under the Antarctic Treaty, it is prohibited to dispose of nuclear waste in Antarctica, so the whole site had to be disassembled and cleaned-up and all waste shipped back to the US via New Zealand, at great expense. By contrast, a disused lunar reactor could likely just be abandoned in-place.
https://theconversation.com/remembering-antarcticas-nuclear-...
A meltdown on the Moon wouldn't be nearly as bad as Earth. The thing that makes it bad here is all the water, wind, etc. and the thick atmosphere that spreads nasty radioactive material everywhere. On the Moon you would end up with one site that was radioactive AF but it wouldn't go everywhere unless it exploded and a reactor prone to that would be stupid.
Different reactor designs would be much easier on the Moon too like liquid sodium fast reactors. Liquid sodium is problematic on Earth because it loves to react with water and oxygen but on the Moon if it were exposed it would just sit there.
Of course the whole surface environment is bathed in radiation because it's sitting underneath an unshielded open fusion reactor called the Sun. This also makes radiation incidents less of a concern. It doesn't change all that much except for right next to the thing.
Edit: BTW I do think if solar towers at peaks of eternal light work that's probably easier than a nuclear reactor at least in the short-medium term and maybe forever.
The USSR landed a probe on mars, the unimagetivelly called Mars 3, it's mission was aborted in less than 2 minutes due to communication failure, but it acchieved a successful landing, and was actually the first one to do so succesfuly.
Its predecessor, Mars 2 reached mars, but crash landed, but have the honor of being the first man made object to land on mars surface.
1. For one there’s the perchlorates. Basically the dust is poison.
2. After that, there’s pressure or I suppose the lack there of basically You might as well be in space.
3. Solar panels don’t work for shit on Mars, because it’s so much further away in the inverse square law is a bastard.
4. It’s a long ass way away.
5. The lower gravity has implications long term for having babies.
Like, I think we should explore space, and become a multi planetary species, but I don’t know that Mars is the place for a viable long-term colony. I’m much more partial to Venus-cloud-cities or something similar.
Whether this is worth it is questionable. What isn’t questionable, is the fact that we will never, ever, ever be able to have a viable independent colony on mars.
> Granted it doesn’t look like low-hanging fruit but never, ever is a very long time.
I believe the applicable qualifier here is, "on the surface of the planet." And since this would relegate any long-term occupation to be subterranean, the GP's assertion is difficult to refute.
Long enough term, hard things are possible, if we don’t kill ourselves first.
Terraforming Mars isn't completely impossible. It's well within the realm of possibility... given about 10,000 years of continuous effort.
https://www.universetoday.com/153368/an-absolutely-bonkers-p...
Also Venus and Earth orbit at different speeds, so in best case you have to beam the power "only" about 40 million km, and sometimes it's over 250 million km and the sun is in the way. The cycle is a little under 2 years long, so there are many-month-long periods of time where your power capacity is reduced massively, and you need alternative sources on Earth anyway.
If you were going to generate power from the Venusian sunshade, you may be better to use it to locally refine something very energy dense like nuclear fuels and physically ship them back. Luckily for us, refining Venusian CO2 into synthetic hydrocarbon fuel and shipping that back is probably not practical either (you'd need to move millions or billions of tonnes of it) or we'd have to contend with VenuGas Inc. adding "alien fuel" carbon to the atmosphere as well.
You could also put a sunshade up at earth and use it to offset the global heating problem (but not things like ocean acidification). Due to the magnifying effect of greenhouse gases, blocking solar radiation before it enters the atmosphere is disproportionately effective, rather like putting shutters outside a window rather than leaving it clear and using air-conditioning.
Add water: perchlorate dissolves readily in water, so by bathing the dust in water, you remove the perchlorate from the dust and transfer it to waste water. You can then process the waste water further to remove the perchlorate from it and recycle it. (Assume this is happening inside a pressurised habitat/greenhouse/airlock where water can be liquid.)
Another option is heating it, which decomposes the perchlorate, liberating oxygen
There are also microorganisms which consume perchlorate
I think the main thing it produces other than oxygen is HCl. Filter the produced gas through water, the water will absorb the HCl and start to turn into hydrochloric acid. Then we just need to add a base such as NaOH to neutralise the acid. (Not sure what bases are readily available on Mars but I’m sure people will be able to come up with something.)
> Also water isn't exactly easy to come by on Mars. I doubt there will be a whole lot of bathing going on.
There is evidence that Mars contains substantial quantities of subterranean water ice, at varying depths and ease of access. SpaceX’s plan for fuelling Starship for return to Earth is to manufacture CH4 using atmospheric CO2 and mined H2O. If they manage to mine enough H2O to produce the fuel to refuel a Starship, they’ll have enough H2O to fill swimming pools for the crew to swim in - and to rinse perchlorate out of the soil.
At least on Mars, you could potentially do mining. On Venus, you can't do anything really, because you'd have no access to the natural resources there. So what's the point?
The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.
You can also take that idea further and just do mining in space. One of the most interesting regions is simply cislunar space. Human development there means you can haul asteroids in, you could potentially move polluting industry there, do science in environments that you can't do on earth, and so on. It's much safer than being stranded far away, it's relatively easy to get people back to earth, etc.
The entire idea of going to another planet simply has the huge problem that you need to waste a ton of energy to get things off the damn planet again so really why not just built habitats in space.
And yes, asteroid mining looks very promising. Facilities on the Moon might be good for this industry, by providing a place with some gravity to do work, and not be worried about environmental issues (or an atmosphere to get in the way of transport). And it's not far from Earth, so you can take all the products of asteroid mining and easily ship them to where they'll be used on Earth, or launch them out into orbit to build space habitats.
The reason industry pollutes is that they either DGAF, or it's part of the process. Those industries either won't care to move to space in the first place, or the re-design of the whole process would have been better spent improving the process on earth.
Depends what you're trying to make. The atmosphere soup on Venus contains more interesting chemicals than the Martian surface, and there's a whole lot more energy going around to power whatever you're doing.
> The Moon is the only place that really makes any sense at this point. It's close, it probably has lava tubes, it has lots of natural resources for mining, it would be relatively easy to set up habitats and maybe do things like build low-g factories (could be many industrial applications there that we haven't thought of), and aside from being airless, the surface isn't going to kill you like Venus will.
IMO Phobos is actually the best option - most of those advantages apply, and being smaller makes it easier for spacecraft to go to or from.
I mean, that sounds freaking awesome tbh.
But you may have to make do with fresh air and water unless you make your own recirculating scrubbers.
Give it a few years and Amazon will do housing and then you can even buy everything from the same entity that provides your living volume.
I wouldn't want to bet that the operators of a space habitat wouldn't take some cues from the company town era, except with even less oversight.
Retirement homes. 90% Earth gravity probably high enough to keep you fit and avoid weightlessness adverse effects, but low enough to help with joint pain, reduced motility and fall risk.
Proximity to friends and distance from crime has real value. It’s absolutely classist. But every social system we invent contorts to provide it to its elite.
I imagine it would resemble a giant cruise ship, with luxurious surroundings, plenty of stuff for older people to do, etc. Of course, there would be a very large crew/staff aboard to clean and maintain it and provide services, such as medical care. Salaries for the staff would have to be huge, since they wouldn't be able to go home for years, and gigs on this floating city would probably be contracted fixed-length terms, similar to Saudi Aramco workers, so prices to live in this city would be enormous, making it something only very wealthy retirees could afford.
Considering the view would be pretty boring after a while, and the prices astronomical, it's hard to believe that 0.9g gravity would be enough of a draw to make this project economically viable.
So, as you say, there's only one benefit, 0.9g, and is that really enough to justify this entire thing?
To be honest it seems like people are clutching at straws to justify space colonisation
But yeah, 0.9g doesn't seem like enough of a draw to make it economically feasible.
But you need a civilisation on Earth in order to maintain a Venus cloud city anyway
It's like a criminal that points a gun at your kid and threatens to shoot unless you do X.
Ok I love this as a sci-fi premise. Especially as a spiritual successor to Logan’s Run.
But how does this actually work? Who cares for these people? Are these retirees the opportunity young caregivers will seek?
Robots. I think we're way closer to having robots care for elderly people than having an independent colony on Venus :-P.
It'd be a pretty extreme way to make web developers think about latency of their bloated websites, sorry "immersive app experiences", but it might actually be the one that works.
Cloud computing, duh. We need big clouds and big cloud cities for that.
Odd, why would a chaperone protein require Mo?
edit: Ok, I see. Seems like pcrD is homologous to a part of the DMSO reductase and that has a chaperone that inserts the Mo cofactor (Molybdopterin) into the complex
There's an alternate timeline out there where everyone always listened to the "experts" telling them their dreams are stupid or impossible. No-one in that timeline has ever even run a four-minute mile.
> The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) was a NASA Discovery Program mission that placed a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior. But InSight was more than a Mars mission. It addressed one of the most fundamental issues of planetary science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago. The mission ended in December 2022 after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars.
In case you wanted to find out what happens next.
You'd run into problems with the atmospheric acid eating away at the skin, but I wonder if you can at least float high enough to have a pleasant outdoor temperature.
At least the Sun wouldn't appear tiny and cold as from Mars!
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsts/14/1/14_1_11/_arti...
Besides, you can mine the material for tefflon right from the atmosphere. You can't do that for steel.
But people on your link are mostly unanimous:
"Quite often the caps are the weakest point. And as mentioned above HDPE bottles tend to sweat over time. I would vote against long time storage (years on end) of sulfuric acid in HDPE bottles."
> I have also a HDPE bottle of 98% sulfuric acid over a decade old without single hint of issue.
And they're talking about almost pure acid, which is not nearly what's going on in at atmosphere that's mostly CO2. Venus is probably not even as strong as drain cleaner.
So surviving H2SO4 isn't highly salient.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus:
In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 kilometres (31 mi) above the Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the Solar System beyond Earth itself – a pressure of approximately 1 atm or 1000 hPa and temperatures in the 0 to 50 °C (273 to 323 K; 32 to 122 °F) range. Protection against cosmic radiation would be provided by the atmosphere above, with shielding mass equivalent to Earth's.
Humans working outside could wear simpler breathing masks rather than full pressure suits.
In fact I came here to offer a counterpoint to this statement in the article:
"Nearby Venus has far too much atmosphere, whose pressure and noxious gases would crush and choke visitors from Earth."
Of course high windspeeds and the constant bombardment of acid rain would be a problem.
I could imagine Venus one day being an exotic, cloud-top paradise for the rich (reminiscent of BioShock Infinity) that's expensive to maintain, and Mars a brute workhorse that eventually displaces it as a more resilient habitat over the very long term (eg. after terraforming).
We can deal with all martian problems.
1. Perchlorates in the soil? You can deal with them, say, chemically if you need some patch on Mars which is more Earth-like. After al you don't need to have the whole Mars immediately fertile.
2. Low pressure? Yes, but it's still better than vacuum, so spacesuits could be simpler, and also the cold atmosphere won't freeze you as much.
3. Far from Earth so Sun is too dim for solar batteries? Then take more of those batteries, they are becoming good, cheap and even light.
4. Far away from Earth? Yes, true - but we can survive for the year to get from here to there, and we routinely had ISS missions for half a year, comparing to ~9 months flight with today's technologies from Earth to Mars.
5. Low gravity on Mars and weightlessness in flight? Some are optimistic about artificial gravity during flights or even on the surface, and if we don't yet consider permanent settlements, it's imaginable to live a couple of years in that artificial gravity, and come back in a relatively good shape.
0. Radiation? How about better shielding for spacecrafts for the flights - both using e.g. water onboard and plasma clouds around, so different kinds of radiation would be at least reduced. Just like with artificial gravity, there are much more questions than answers in these areas, but at least we have physically plausible ideas. On the surface we can use underground houses - even with centrifuges.
Not strictly accurate - varies significantly with elevation, and the bottom of Hellas Planitia (which is 2300km across) is over 1% of earth's.
But your overall point stands, nowhere on the surface of mars is above the armstrong limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_limit
Plus if you're flying/driving drones with cameras outside of that tunnel it would also help to keep you on a more normal circadian rhythm.
Summarizing: space will kill you fast, moon will grind you down with the regolith, and Mars will poison you. There are some interesting bits about international/space laws and treaties too.
A multi-part review [1] is available which detailed more aspects quite well.
In short, people will go for a multitude of reasons (whether it is sensible or not).
[1] https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i
Mars is incredibly cool as a science fiction destination, but I'd much rather see us target near earth asteroids as space habitats first.
We may end up just as cleaners for the power supply, or as a collection of past oddities, but it will save us from destroying ourselves.
That said, such an event might well cause problems on a (far more generally vulnerable) Mars colony as well (e.g., ejecta subsequently impacting Mars).
And the odds of such an event are quite low. Most killer asteroids would disrupt the biosphere, and quite considerably, but not significantly rearrange the Earth's structure itself. The one time that's happened which we are reasonably confident of is the hypothesized Theia impactor, roughly the size of, erm, Mars, which is thought to have impacted the proto-Earth as the latter was forming 4.53 billion years ago, and forming the Moon as a consequence.
Other cosmic events such as a gamma ray burst or rogue star disrupting solar system orbits would have impacts affecting Mars as well, and even a well-established self-sufficient Mars colony would not be a sufficient mitigation.
(I'm generally not in the "Mars as a lifeboat from Earth" camp.)
What are the odds of a successful Mars mitigation?
Then computers crunch the data and screens display it…all directed by humans.
Where is your line between tool and tool wielder?
Pennies.
Seriously, this depends on the propulsion system. It’s like asking a Roman what it costs to ship silk from China.
A mars outpost after a nuke party on earth would simply die, as it is completely unfeasable to both a) develop it so far that it becomes self-sufficient and b) not become a military target along the way simply because of its size.
As others have pointed out, it doesn't have to be Mars, it just needs to be not Earth.
Long term we obviously need to escape the solar system too.
He used the wrong earth circumference calculation to estimate his trip to the Indias to convince the queen (it was way off, that's why the Portuguese went around Africa instead), he got really lucky, and the end result was way better than what they set up on to obtain in the first place.
Exploration is a bit crazy and a bit stupid, some people die and a few times we find something amazing that was in non way near what we thought we would find.
I think Mars is - hopefully - going to be a bit like that. We go for one (maybe the wrong) reason, yet we stay for a different one.
Your comparison is WAY more terrible than my own.
A mission to a dusty rock while your own beautiful planet is dying is a weird way to help a tech bro claim more tax resources for himself.
Exploitable constrained human power shipped across a sea by way of a costly, lossy transport system. Colonising the Americas without a latent labour pool and social hierarchy to swap over would have been near impossible for pre-industrial Europe.
It would have required long-term support across months of shipping and communication time for purchase of unknown resources in unknown time scales in respect of unknown risks. Sound familiar?
Except they weren’t, and they aren’t.
…like Mars. Hence the analogy.
At the 1400's tech level it was not an easy voyage, maybe easier than going to mars at our current tech level, but not a lot easier.