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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.

Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.

I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.

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100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.

Eh, it's a reasonable prior. The timeline is "it will never happen" until the leap forward happens that makes it "within 2 years." Basically the same as air flight.

You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.

It doesn't require a leap forward, we could put boots on the ground with 1990s tech.

aye we could have. and they'd all be long dead on the surface of Mars by this point. getting them there isn't enough.

Keeping them alive and returning them doesn't require "a leap" which is the central point of OP I am disagreeing with. We have all the technology, material science etc to do it.

Sure, it requires some research, engineering and a crapload of investment, but it doesn't require anything that is currently "science fiction".

Have you read about the natural conditions on Mars?

I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.

I think you are both on different pages about settlement vs just a visit.

that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.

i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.

100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.

Add to that a soil and dust that's toxic to humans. Our biology, unsurprisingly, is only compatible with a single planet.

We purposefully decided not to settle there socially, yet we have settled there permanently with research and military stations.

Just as we will with Mars.

And yes we grow things there, even if just green onions and herbs.

Not to mention the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.

100 years is beyond pessimistic. We could easily have settled Mars with 1970s tech.

> the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.

times a few orders of magnitude and this is the main reason to doubt a settled Mars colony.

Possibly a research outpost, but why would that be staffed by humans rather than robots?

There is no 'few orders of magnitude', because it's conquered, you're not allowed to settle there, and it's not a new frontier.

Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat.

Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars.

We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boats, of starvation the first year, on and on.

Modern tech does not remove said risk, but it tips the playing field.

Given that no one has yet traveled to Mars, “faced a far more dangerous journey” seems a ridiculously hyperbolic statement. (Thinking even about the lost colony at Roanoke.)

It's also particularly awkward to land on, as it has just enough atmosphere to be annoying, but not enough to be particularly helpful. Most Mars landings have involved some sort of ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine or other (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder#Entry,_descent... ) which would not be viable for humans (and were only arguably viable for the probes they were used for; the risk of failure was high).

Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.

If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.

If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.

Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.

100 years optimistically?

We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.

We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.

It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.

If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.

Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.

I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.

Remember that the quote is coming from the same guy who has been promising FSD for years and hasn't come any closer to delivering it because it turns out that the devil is in the details. Elon Musk allegedly has a photographic memory that allows him to commit entire science books to memory but he apparently fails to appreciate real-world complexity. Even if you would want to give him credit for being a hype man, ideas guy, visionary, whatever, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't concern himself with the nitty gritty of every step of the way and he also doesn't seem to actually conceptualize them.

It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".

Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.

I think you're imagining a limited mission that's pretty far outside the tradition of space travel up 'til today. Consider the public reaction to Apollo 13 or Vladimir Komarov. Certainly, we could deliver a one-way small number of people more quickly, but I didn't think that's what we were talking about (it's certainly not what the article is talking about).

Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.

I suppose grandparent comment is saying that a possible timeline is to send some people there today and finish building the rocket to pick them up and bring them back in say 5 years. A bit like the Boeing clusterfuck last year...

It'd also be cool to send an empty rocket with auto-landing capabilities and supplies way before the manned mission, and when those Mars visitors arrive, they can move the tech needed for survival (which would've been invented/improved in-between) to the return rocket.

But that all sounds like Kerbal scenarios rather than real life ones.

We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night.

Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.

There’s always an element of risk in any endeavor, just because prior space missions (the ones that get recorded and remembered) were successful does not mean that this outcome was certain. There are records of space missions that were known to be unlikely to sustain human life prior to launch.

The same is true of early expeditions around the world. The odds of making it back alive were low, yet plenty of people signed up. We remember the ones who made it and forgot the ones who didn't.

There is the odd school of thought that sending a bunch of tardigrades would be better. They'd have a chance of surviving, and they'd evolve there, and in only a few million years we might have another planet teeming with life. In the (very) long term, a much better use of our resources than trying to colonise Mars ourselves.

To some degree, wasn’t the exploration of the poles that took place at the beginning of the previous century similar? For country and glory. Motivated tons of men to have a go at the foolish. Many died, some prevailed. After all that we get to maintain a station there.

Don’t take this as support of mars colonoziation which I think is a fools errand. Just pointing out that “suicide mission” seems to actually be motivational to the intrepid adventurer.

There's a big difference between being wildly over-optimistic about your odds of making it back and expecting from the get go you won't make it back.

Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet. I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it.

From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.

It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...

Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly.

Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.

10% is not even 100 billion. You are wildly optimistic. 100B a year is likely closer to the cost of just maintaining a mars base. The cost to actually build one is likely an order of magnitude higher.

The defense budget is a subsidy to oil companies to protect oil supply chains and pipelines. Which rich person/companies assets are being protected on Mars? Tax money is spent mostly as a direct/indirect transfer of money to the super rich while using words to manipulate the gullible: security, defense, laws, etc.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL.

This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss.

What would be the point?

If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year.

If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot closer.

The post at the top of this thread is correct in saying the logistics of supporting a colony on Mars would take decades, and cost billions (at least).

I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.

> there's no reason the trip can't be one-way

If the crew includes elon, I am actually in favor of this...

Humans are better at exploring and doing science than rovers, they could get things done a lot quicker and better. They can repair things and are very adaptable. A mission to spend 6 months on the surface would be great. Perhaps not worth the risk and expense though.

When it comes to doing science where there is no food, water, or air, robots are actually much better at it.

It depends how you are defining "better". Much cheaper and safer sure, but also much slower and much more limited. If it was me making the decisions I'd still go with robots, but I wouldn't call them "better".

Apollo 17 astronauts drove roughly 12 miles in around 8 hours to get to a site and do some science. The curiosity rover's longest drive in a day is around 150 meters. If it drills a rock and encounters some difficulty, it has to wait send a reply home, wait another 4-24 minutes for the message to get there, wait 4-24 minutes for a message to come back before proceeding. It's also obviously unable to conduct repairs on itself or it's tools, or even do something as basic as cleaning the dust from itself.

Robots certainly have the advantage in longevity; curiosity has been operating since 2012 and is still going, but it's like comparing a roomba vs a team of professional cleaners. I think if you asked a planetary scientist if they'd could go back in time and instead of sending curiosity, send a couple of people for six months, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

There's no reason a robot couldn't do repairs on itself or clean dust from itself.

Think of all the science the robot will get done in the decades of research and engineering necessary to figure out how to get a human there and back to do science without immediately dying.

There are many reasons why that you're dismissing with a wave of the hand. But regardless, we are both in agreement that sending robots right now is the wise decision.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go west, AT ALL

- Portugal, 1490

Except that the Americas were already inhabited prior to 1490 because they were in fact relatively easily reachable at an earlier point in history and extremely habitable. Mars by contrast is an environment that is actively hostile to life. Even the dust is lethal. And you're so far away from the rest of humanity you can only get resupplies every few years. The Americas had water, soil, edible plants and animals - and practically infinite amounts of breathable air. If you want to go homestead on Mars, dysentery is going to be the least of your worries.

The explorers were seeking new trade routes with clear routes economic purpose.

there were lots of reasons to go west, since Europe was desperate and starved for spices and goods from the Silk Road.

the Ottomans had cut them off following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or where they didn't they taxed the hell out of them).

they knew for sure there was good stuff over there, and just wanted a new way there.

we know for sure that Mars is blasted, toxic, rock ball with less metal than Earth. what great and grand spices will future explorers be returning with? the Portuguese could prove that nutmeg and silk existed...

A lot of people would have been better off if they hadn't. This argument only works if you value the lives of Europeans (and their descendants, who often were equally racist against the indigenous peoples) over the native inhabitants.

> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.

Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Consider all the developments from the Apollo program. This level of pessimism always shocks me, shouldn’t we rise to the challenge?

A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.

A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.

It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.

I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.

PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.

There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.

I'm not saying we won't possibly land someone on Mars eventually. I just don't think that's going to happen in a reasonable near future. The resources involved are too much for one person willing to go on a suicide mission to do it themselves (and those who do have the resources are very much not interested in dying) and for a government to sponsor this you would need a culture of self-sacrifice rather than rugged individualism - in other words, a country like China might be more likely to take the lead here than the US and even that seems unlikely.

Again, the big problem here is scale. It takes a lot more resources to send someone to Mars than to Antarctica and it takes a lot more resources to keep them alive there. Your friend in the high arctic trundra probably also isn't living in collapsible tents and foraging for food - all the infrastructure available to him (even if it's just shelter) needs to be built on Mars too and is orders of magnitude more complex and more resource intense and the materials are much harder to ship and assemble - plus of course material failure is signficantly more lethal.

Hate to break this to you, they do in fact go on expeditions in tents for quite a bit, with guns (polar bears). You've got them insofar as they don't forage for food, turns out we have portable food tech. There is a base camp but there are areas where they go far. They get govt issued Canada Goose jackets! What a perk! O Canada!

I agree with all you are saying, and those techs can be developed. I am a tech optimist. I see these as problems to try to solve, not a list of reasons why they can't happen.

We can agree as well that it will be fantastically more expensive and yes an order of magnitude etc etc. These are engineering problems, not physics problems. Probability vs possibility in my mind. We can disagree about if the resources are worth spending (that's not my call, I vote, which doesn't seem to do much). I can't predict the future.

Another point against it is it used to be a boat with dudes sent into the unknown with no way to know what to know what was happening. This was totally affordable for imperial seafaring nations at the time relative to the cost of rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Explor...

After this age there was a rise in using tech to do it. (mechanical age I think?)

It will be an insane feat to pull off, and I hope it happens in our life time.

>Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

This is the ultimate admission that it can't be done. Anyone sane would at least propose a free-return trajectory like Artemis 2. Even if you are crazy enough to sacrifice your astronauts on a one way trip, you would still need to practice a lot of free-return trajectories just to train your astronauts and test the hardware.

This is a dumb argument. We are doing it now, already, no crazy budget explosions needed. Just some medium expansions of existing projects.

Orion is going to send humans past the moon this year, and could theoretically send humans to mars not much further out than that. It is literally on the Lockheed Martin website that they would like to send humans to mars sometime in the 2030s, provided they can get the funding.

I'm not involved in the project any longer, but this has been the ideal vision of the project since the mid 2010s. Currently the plan is to put people on the moons of mars, as we have no way of getting them back if we actually put people on the surface of mars.

Rockets are the easy part. More:

The Shape of a Mars Mission: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Why Not Mars: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.

Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.

>actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future

I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution.

People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime.

Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.

There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6

Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.

Were there any serious claims that street lights would entirely eliminate crime? A "sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes" sounds like a pretty positive result.

I can't claim anything objectively because I never truly looked at it scientifically.

I simply come from bad neighborhoods and the amount of times I heard "shhh, don't go there, people will see you" from guys who clearly were looking to start for trouble, was substantial in its own right.

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but from a psychological point of view the people who want to steal or harm others feel much safer doing so in the darkness, I have found.

Doubled or tripled NASA's budget? NASA has spent 32 BILLION on SLS with nothing to show for it. Each launch is expected to cost 2.5 BILLION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System.

Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this.

Starship does not exist.

Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO.

The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship.

They are impressive, but are not Starship.

They are called Starship, but are not Starship.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist.

What I am saying is that today, right now, Starship does not exist and SLS does.

You implied that Starship does exist, and is cheaper.

Nobody, not you, not me, not Lord Ketamine, can predict when it will exist or how much it will cost with any degree of accuracy.

I genuinely, sincerely, and earnestly WANT Starship to exist, but as of today, April 24th, 2025 it does not.

We can argue technicalities all day long but to me, this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGiNKcVSek

The payload on that flight was a single stuffed toy banana, for scale.

On all test flights with a payload exceeding the mass (~300 grams) of a single stuffed toy banana (for scale), the flight has failed.

Flight 7: 20,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 7m39s

Flight 8: 8,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 8m04s

Flight 9 is not currently planned to carry a payload.

None of this is a technicality. It is technicreality.

Agree there are obviously still issues, but you've just made the case yourself. We are discussing Flight 9 for Starship ~5 years into development. 10 years into the development of SLS we won't even see launch 2.

They just operate in different universes no matter how much you dislike the CEO.

You are misunderstanding me.

I am on two embryonic programs that are not viable without starship or an equivalent.

If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.

I want starship to exist and do not care who builds it.

It does not exist and I know this because I am currently on the third floor of a boring cookie cutter business park building right now staring at computer screens and not off the coast of Gili T doing mushrooms after a dive.

>If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.

Highly doubt this is true. Everyone's rich on their wild little minds.

For one, where is Starship and when did it last launch?

For another, this hypothetical spacecraft (which does not yet exist) would not be wherever it is in terms of completion had NASA not existed.

1. More recently than SLS :) 2. Agree 100%.

lol - fair.

> Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that,

"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.

We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.

I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.

These articles which are little more than blind scarequotes peppered with ad hominems invite little more meaningful discussion than more ad hominems. What is the value of a comments section filled with little but "this is stupid and anyone who believes it is a snake oil salesman"?

> low-information escapism

What a great way to describe it.

It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.

There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.

Most of the criticism on display here is the outrageous, implausible lies that the tech industry leaders are telling to stupid people who believe it for propaganda purposes to avoid regulation and scrutiny.

None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.

No you

Well said, I can’t imagine what the perfect tech company to the NyT journalist is, I assume it is something run by committee that uses 100’s of their journalists opinions to make every simple decision.

>wants to get paid for the idea of the future today

One response (also by an abundance crowd?) to a similar sentiment:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/serbia-limits-academics-...

"Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day"

Why "of course" you support colonizing mars? What's your reasoning?

Climate change can near certainly be served with technology, if society didn't stand in the way. We could all switch to nuclear - France did it decades ago, technology is not a problem, society is - hence the subjects of these articles. Looks at solar in China or even Texas vs California. Everything is like that.

Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.

Inequality is not a real problem.

Getting paid before delivery is clearly an Elon Musk strategy and in some cases it does mean that he (Tesla) will be able to deliver but he's clearly full of shit with crazy ideas like living on Mars because the Earth is doomrf or whatever. BS does also bring money or fame or whatever sometimes.

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