Mars One Project: “Humans Will Live On Mars In 2023″
techli.com
techli.com
That right there is complete, unadulterated bullshit. The cost of getting a pound of supplies to Antarctica is several orders of magnitude cheaper than getting a pound of supplies even as far as orbit, let alone Mars. And Antarctica is a much less hostile environment (breathable atmosphere, for one).
That line alone tells me this isn't remotely a well-thought-out, plausible venture.
Also, if you look at the context of the quote, you can see that they're making an analogy:
Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides
similar challenges. However, the South Pole now has a number of very advanced,
large research stations that boast a great deal of modern facilities that provide
a good quality of life. These looked very different 50 years ago. The Mars
settlement will develop in the same way.* Internal combustion engines work in Antarctica.
* The atmosphere is breathable.
* The atmosphere is livable if heated first.
* The gravity is the same as Earth.
* (I'm guessing) more sunlight falls on a given area of Antarctica per year than Mars.
* There's no communication delay with Earth.
* Earth-orbit communications satellites are reachable from Antarctica.
* The ground is covered in water, if you heat it first (I don't know how useful this is, but it's probably more useful than Mars soil)
and finally:
You can come home from Antarctica.
Wait what? Isn't that a really important part of the problem that shouldn't be just skimmed through as a mere detail on the video? Aren't the ethical issues that would arise from this, by itself, be enough to make everything else unviable. Humans live for a long time. What if after 10 years living there, the show just didn't raise enough money. "Hey crew, you'll just have to suicide, we won't send anymore food". Just so many huge issues come to mind. With not many obvious solutions. I would be interested to hear to which solutions they have, if any.
edit: their incredibly short FAQ answer about ethics doesn't make me anymore hopeful. They don't touch on any of the obvious hard problems and even dare to make an absurd analogy with immigrants from Europe to the Americas:
http://mars-one.com/en/faq-en/19-faq-health/231-is-this-ethi...
If someone announces his intention to build a time machine I wouldn't get too worked about the ethical concerns of changing history.
How do you know?
But, if you want to know exactly why going to Mars is so difficult, and why so many projects have failed, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_dif...
Or simply do a quick search on the internet for 'Mars difficulties' or 'Mars curse'.
Would that be ethical?
I sure think so. I know some people would disagree, but that doesn’t matter. As long as those involved know what they are getting into, it’s ethical enough to work.
With the risks involved, and the $6 billion price tag (that will surely bloat out), there would need to be at least $50-60 billion in profit potential for rational investment.
Seinfeld is the top grossing show in history, at $2.7 billion.
Maybe they're hoping that billionaires with nothing else to spend the money on will cough up hundreds of millions to sponsor the project, just to get their name on it.
Either that, or they're not revealing the whole plan.
I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.
How will humans survive the radiation?
How will humans remain mentally healthy?
I don't think we can feasibly become space faring until those challenges, and probably some others, are addressed.
Edit: Oh, I just had an idea. How do people with Asperger's deal with isolation, boredom, continuous contact with a handful of other people? Maybe there's a subgroup of people who are mentally perfectly adapted for space travel.
Q: How will humanity survive the radiation?
A: Build igloos or inhabit caves or just plain dig into the ground. Problem solved.
Q: How will humans remain mentally healthy?
A: The Internet and social interaction with other colonists. Also, there is a lot of work to be done growing plants, managing systems, exploring robots, documenting and cataloging all that we find.
People, today, already live in extreme isolation for extended periods of time by choice.
Those aren't even the hard problems to solve.
I'm more worried about the time in transit.
For sanity, my assumption is that humans will need the ability to easily increase / decrease metabolism. So that 6 month, year, century trip would seem like a few days.
For radiation, I think space faring humans will need to be radiation hardened somehow.
Discovering feasibly concentrated pockets of ice in polar craters on the Moon would help, but still not with carbon or nitrogen, and whether any ice could be found in useful concentrations is an open question.
A Mars settlement could quickly become largely self-sustaining, without having to wait to be able to terraform first.
I realize this is barely related, just an interesting memory :) I can't remember who or what company that was, but I'm pretty sure it was a private one. Does anyone recognize this? I don't think it ever saw any sort of fruition.
Well, if each of them would replicate on average into two or more new robots, then yes, they probably could eat Moon very quickly. Exponential growth is a pain :).
Also, the moon would not disappear. In the end, there would be an entire moon, made out of robots.
And you don't know, but other people do. You have no say on what they will try. Believe it when we tell you (and people less kind than me will eventually do so) your lack of knowledge and unwillingness to learn is far more dangerous than reducing the mass of the moon.
You're completely wrong that I, or you, have no say in what they will try. I can voice my thoughts, just as you can. Not sure why you feel so disempowered about your voice to project on me that I'd have no say. Same goes for your assumption about unwillingness to learn? How do people learn? A person makes statements, create discussion. We learn from eachother.
Diary Day 662: "Today we explored another crater, the dirt was quite similar to the last 83 days. John is still with Dianne and I haven't had sex in nearly 2 years. I've read the Harry Potter series 97 times now, maybe I'll make it to 100 by the end of the year."
I can imagine it lasting a few months or maybe even a year, but what happens after then when viewers stop tuning in?
I guess by then they're hoping they'll have set up a mining expedition or maybe other tourist flights and can raise money that way.
You don't have to take my word for it, though. Take a look at what they say at their own site, and see if it actually makes sense. A few examples:
"In addition to this, the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe."
And we will extract these resources how? We theoretically know how to build such systems, but that's not the same as actually being able to build them on Mars. Are they just going to experiment during the project, and if it doesn't work then "oops, well, I guess you're all going to die"?
But, most ridiculously: "Of course most of the elements we need are not yet exactly in the form we would like, but crucially: no brand new inventions have to be conceived, designed, tested and built for the mission to become reality."
That's like saying we can also build a colony on Venus right now. Or Mercurius. Or Jupiter. Because we have a theoretical understanding of how to launch rockets there and how to build space colonies, and of course the technology to do both these things already exist. What these people fail to see is not that we don't have a theoretical understanding of how we might do all this, but that without any practical experiments in several areas AND many failed tests the chances of this project going perfectly as planned (which almost never happens to begin with) are VERY slim.
</rant>
Yes I don't think they have a real understanding. The founder of Mars One did two AMAs (ask me anything) on Reddit a while back [1] where he said "We are not scientists, we are entrepreneurs" [2]. A choice quote from a user:
> You have no one (I repeat NO ONE) on your team who is experienced or competent in anything related to space travel. The one guy on your team who you're showcasing has experience in land based telescopes and a small role in an experiment that was taken up by NASA... Which is pitiful compared to the amount of expertise needed in a lead on a project this ambitious.
If you check out the AMAs you'll see the above comment in action via the founder's answers to questions. Most of his answers are vague or difficult questions are just completely ignored.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ufb42/ama_i_am_fo..., http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/iama_founder_of_...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/uta10/_/c4yd59u?contex...
You're advertising that you want to send humans to Mars by 2023 and you have NO idea how to do that. Your entire company is based on "wouldn't it be cool to go to Mars?" As a real entrepreneur building real things, this is like the new influx of business and marketting students (no offense to those that are in these fields) running around blabbering about these great ideas they have and all they need is an engineer to make it for them.
The idea of a one-way mission is terrible.
I mean we could use it as a prison. Ship prisoners off to space ;)
I don't understand why they would send the supplies there so early. Can anyone explain this timeline to me?
And yes, no sane human being would consider launching to Mars before a return vehicle is already settled at the destination and ready to take off. The return vehicle and its backup. And the habitats, supplies and everything else.
1. Humans never go to Mars
2. Humans eventually decide it's interesting enough to go to Mars out of curiosity and find a way to get there
3. Earth looks doomed, but there's a slim shot at saving humanity by sending some people to Mars
I'm kind of disappointed there isn't more interest in something like this. Let me ask you all something. If someone in 1960 told someone else "I bet we'll have a man on the moon before the decade is over", what do you think the reaction would be?
It's not a lack of capability that's keeping us from getting to Mars; it's that people just don't care enough.
That's all you need to know about the feasibility of these claims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_%28TV_series%29
Too bad only the pilot was ever aired (to my knowledge).
You could build up the exact same media hype and have less costs! Good thing they have a team member who has "...worked for over 20 years in the graphics industry".
it's a joke. we don't know what are the effects of spending one day on mars let alone be there for the rest of the astronauts life. and we'll just make it a $6 billion dollar reality show out of it... oh and the astronauts, will learn how to work on mars. they better do because with 6 billions budget to get there and provide them with life support for the rest of their lives is not gonna be easy.
They're going to miss by 20 to 30 years, at least.