Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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

- Portugal, 1490

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.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com