Hacker News Reader

Comment by n3rdy | Hacker News Reader

My biggest fear would not be dying on Mars or on the way to it.

My biggest fear would be having the novelty wear off and coming to the realization that I just moved to a trailer park.. on mars.

View on HN

Definitely the first people on Mars shouldn't do so merely to live on Mars, they should be the sort of people who are going to build Mars up. And if that's the case then it's unlikely the novelty will wear off quickly. There is a lot to do on Mars and a surprising amount can be done with fairly small amounts of capital equipment. Within the first few trips there could be enough equipment to bootstrap a Martian industrial base with production of Water, Oxygen, Methane, and Carbon Monoxide from the ground and the air. Which means you can provide resources for living, of course, with water and Oxygen, but also you can provide rocket fuel (liquid methane and Oxygen), and fuel for combustion powered surface vehicles (compressed methane and Oxygen), and resources for growing plants, and resources for smelting Iron (CO). In a few short years a Martian colony could be producing food, concrete, Iron and steel, even plastics, all from local materials. And in not many years after that it could be producing everything from fully functional Mars habitats to microchips to spacecraft.

For people with drive and know how there would be as much excitement as they desire.

Yup, it just depends on what mentality you take with you. If you sign up for this with the mentality that you're going to have lots of fun and how amazing Mars is going to be, obviously the disappointment is going to set it very quickly. But if you go there with the goal of building everything from the ground up and knowing that it's going to be a very crappy place to live in for quite a while, then I think it would be hard to be disappointed. As you said, there is a lot of work to do and each little project would just add to the excitement of living there. At least for me it would.

Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days on the space station "Mir" - an environment at least an order of magnitude more limited than Mars, I'd say. Wikipedia has this information about his mission:

"Polyakov underwent medical assessments before, during, and after the flight. He also underwent two follow-up examinations six months after returning to Earth. When researchers compared the results of these medical exams, it was revealed that although there were no impairments of cognitive functions, Polyakov experienced a clear decline in mood as well as a feeling of increased workload during the first few weeks of spaceflight and return to Earth.[6][7] However, Polyakov's mood stabilized to pre-flight levels between the second and fourteenth month of his mission. It was also revealed that Polyakov did not suffer from any prolonged performance impairments after returning to Earth. In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a stable mood and overall function could be maintained during extended duration spaceflights, such as manned missions to Mars."

>My biggest fear would be having the novelty wear off and coming to the realization that I just moved to a trailer park.. on mars.

The problem with trailer parks is not the trailers; it's the other people

and the ownership model. It's a terrible ownership model, really; you usually own a (not actually mobile) manufactured home, but you rent the land.

The screwed up thing is that when the rent goes up in the park, the value of your mobile home drops, making moving even harder.

I'd be happy to live in one of the bay-area mobile home parks if the ownership model of the land was more like the condo ownership model, where the tenants own the common areas, well, in common.

But yeah. "who else is on the trip" would certainly be my first question, but I would imagine that you'd mostly get interesting people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com