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Comment by dinkumthinkum | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying we should or shouldn't go. I'm just responding the comparison that this is just like the early explorers. I don't think that is a proper comparison. The early explorers didn't have to contend with vastly different atmosphere's. Life in the New World was much like the old, with negligible differences compared to what awaits on Mars. The expense is also much, much more.

Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.

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If anything I'd say exploring Mars is easier today than early exploration was.

In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died.

I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans.

Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails.

In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.

I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I would caution against thinking its too easy. This is a very hard, very expensive problem. Your other comment about mass/weight ratio is spot on. What we're lacking in space is industrial capacity. We have to build and test everything on the ground, and the it can easily get lost on the way up. Very expensive eggs in highly fragile and expensive baskets, as it were.

One thing I've not really heard talked about is orbital industry. What I envision would be factories in orbit that do everything from processing raw materials to making finished products. Typically people assume that those facilities would only support resources mined from the moon and asteroids.

But as an early step, what about just launching raw materials into orbit. Build cheap, reliable rockets. Stuff them full of cheap, bulk materials. Iron, aluminum, copper, etc. If 10% of launches fail, it's not cheap but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than losing high end equipment and people. In many cases, it might even be feasible to scavenge some of the raw materials on the ground after an accident.

This might be a good way to bootstrap a reliable orbital infrastructure. Build stuff in space so it can be cheaper, bigger, and more robust. If your ship to Mars doesn't need to land, and makes the trip many times, the lifetime cost of such vehicles drops dramatically.

It's a fairly hard problem. But on the scale of problems that have been tackled by humans in the past, say, 50 years, it's not that hard. Mostly it's just engineering.

Bootstrapping colonization is a slightly harder problem but there are some promising signs for that. First, research on reusable launch vehicles is coming along (at SpaceX for example), and if that works out it should lower launch costs by a factor of 10 to 100. Add to that the ability to use local resources on Mars and things start to get a lot easier. Within the earliest generation of manned missions to Mars we will likely have infrastructure for manufacturing rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) as well as producing building materials (concrete) and iron based materials (such as sintering iron rich regolith to manufacture rectenna arrays). That infrastructure will develop fairly rapidly and in a few years we'll start to see a real industrial and agricultural base develop on Mars. Of course the more mass we can throw at the problem early on the easier it will be to bootstrap.

One of the exciting things about Mars colonization is that it would likely serve as a proving ground for many technologies that could have applications on Earth. For example, solar power satellites are one of the best methods for providing power to a Mars base/colony. They're also one of the most promising technologies for Earth-based power generation, but the barrier to entry and the perceived financial risk has been too high.

I think this post is an odd response and just proves my point. Most of this is an appeal to how amazing ancient people were. That's great. They were.

You claim stone age people did a lot of exploration .... But yet you say early exploration was harder than Mars exploration. I find this humorous.

Stone age people could never explore Mars, we can explore Europe and Asia just fine. Which one is more difficult? I'm being serious ... You could say "oh but it was hard because they were stone age" or whatever, but the fact is, though it was hard, it was not so hard that it huge economic factors, advanced life support, contend with temperatures very extreme, etc, etc. When you say "it was amazing what they did in the bronze age with just sails," I say "Yes it was amazing and all they really needed was sails." Well, it's going to take much more than sails to explore Mars.

It is just an entirely different thing. It doesn't seem like a very controversial view.

I would suggest that there is some hindsight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight) creeping in to your statement. Using your example of the new world, explorers had to at least deal with ocean voyages, new diseases, and possibly dangerous flora and fauna. All of these dangers were unknown until they were known. In the same vein, the dangers of a "vastly different atmosphere" were unknown, but are now know via experiments in deep sea diving, not to mention going to the moon. Death via exploration in a new environment (ocean, deep earth, space, etc) is certainly not a new risk. Looking back from this point in time in history, it is easy to suggest that those risks were minimal.

No there is no hindsight, it's just obvious.

Your examples are not very good comparisons. We can't breath Martian air, temperatures are extreme, radiation, etc, etc.

This is vastly different from "Oh, that's a strange plant" or scurvy or whatever you're coming up with.

Deep ocean exploration is an interesting point, we haven't really done much of that and I promise you Hernando Cortez didn't either.

The fact is, comparison to early explorers is misplaced, at least as put in what I responded to. I mean it's sort of funny. The explorers were going places that humans already lives. The inhabitants were more impacted than the explorers. I can poke holes in this all day. No hindsight, just common sense. :)

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