Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#581

Post by nickff »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #260
justrossthings wrote: post #101

Required reading: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/...

fwiw I found Red Mars to be a pretty boring, badly-written space soap opera (and murder mystery for who-knows-what-reason) with caricatured ethnicities.

Having read the trilogy (as well as "2312"), I must agree that it was poorly written, with some very poorly constructed characters. Having said that, and despite my distaste for and disagreement about the political outcomes, the technical vision was very interesting.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#582

Post by elihu »

M_Grey wrote: post #119
aerovistae wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but you seem to be saying "Let's not be excited about colonizing another planet-- life will be just as depressing there."

I think anytime someone plays to the deeply held hopes and dreams of a given community, especially ones that are related to long-term survival, "destiny" and the like... be very very careful and very very skeptical. That's not to say you should be depressive and cynical, but you should ask questions and seek motives. We're really not close to being a "multiplanetary species", and the major bottlenecks have nothing to…

> We're really not close to being a "multiplanetary species", and the major bottlenecks have nothing to do with the rockets to get us out there.

They're not? If getting stuff from Earth's surface to low earth orbit and beyond weren't prohibitively expensive, we'd be doing a lot more of it.

Sure, there are many other technical (and some social and political) challenges inherent in sending people to Mars but if we don't solve the launch cost problem it'll be difficult to make rapid progress on the other problems that would suddenly become more pressing if launch costs weren't an issue.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#583

Post by vex »

ravenstine wrote: post #107

I have a better idea: Let's focus all the money and effort we would spend on getting to Mars and living on its wasteland, and use it to understand the human mind and digitize it into a realm not individually constrained by physics? I actually think that may be a more realistic and practical goal, and our quality of lives could be much better. I mean, what do we really get from living somewhere like Mars? A storage co…

I'm trying to work toward that goal every day in my lab! Sure would be helpful if a billionaire hired me though. Kernel is the closest thing we have to an industry effort, but they don't quite know exactly what they're doing yet.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#584

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

wmccullough wrote: post #184
mikeash wrote: post #148

Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out. Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff,…

You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.

What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?

One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.

Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.

Edit: fixed a word

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#585

Post by JumpCrisscross »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #570
redditmigrant wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab. I think you are assuming that being wealthy is just a state someone gets into magically. While the things you mention aren't on their own crazy species changing ideas, the selling stuff, the getting a cab is what allowed some folks to become wealthy and go after crazy t…

Hardly discounting. Or downplaying ability to make a successful huge business from formation - most can't after all. It's the means to the end. Nothing wrong with that either. Bezos was being connected with space as the destination in the 90s long before Amazon was even a certain hit or Blue Horizon. Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream. That's not to trivialise an Amazon, but had Amazon failed, wh…

> Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream.

Lots of people have wacky childhood dreams. Our society picks who gets to pursue theirs based on money. Some inherit it. Others execute magnificently on something daring.

For the latter, their dreams seem like good bets to bet on (but only given the prior performance). For the former, I suppose it's a plus they mostly remain in a holding pattern.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#586

Post by ekianjo »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #584
wmccullough wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.

What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents? One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs. Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques. Edit: fixed a word

Exactly. HN is not a fanboy driven community usually, so it's where rational and educated conversation can take place. On the contrary I find criticism helpful in this kind of context.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#587

Post by sampo »

josu wrote: post #435
grecy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me. Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

I don't think this is a recent trend, look at the presentation post of Dropbox[1] from 9 years ago. On the one hand, YC is a relatively contrarian community. On the other hand, if you agree with something you may not have much to add, but if you disagree you'll probably want to express why. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Well, the top 2 comments are dismissive, but after that there are lots of positive comments.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#588

Post by Debugreality »

beloch wrote: post #302

This new launch vehicle has a realistic chance of getting people and materials to Mars in sufficient quantities to build an outpost. I'd like to hear more about how they plan to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars though. There are some pretty big challenges to overcome, such as the relative lack of Nitrogen. A colony is going to have to grow plants but, to do that on Mars, we're going to need a way of fixing Nitr…

I noticed Musk tentatively mention nuclear - I think that's because it will be the only logical way to generate enough power to support a city in such an inhospitable climate. There is going to be a huge and ongoing energy need just to survive.

Unless we build a battery/solar panel factory there is no way solar is going to cut it.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#589

Post by BurningFrog »

cbhl wrote: post #421
BurningFrog wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the 2 day vs 6 months commute outweigh that. Then again I haven't done the math. In the long run, there should of course be settlements on both bodies.

When the pilgrims originally sailed to North America from England, it took on the order of two or three months. A six month trip to Mars seems reasonable in that context.

Yeah, but they went to fertile land.

A space colony would have much more need to get supplies from Earth.

Once we've learned how to run a space colony on the Moon, building a second one on Mars would be much easier.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#590

Post by grkvlt »

codeulike wrote: post #136

The Mars colonial fleet would depart en-masse - about 1000 ships

> As of 17 September 2016, there have been 310 manned spaceflights [...] 8 of which were sub-orbital [1]

There have been 302 manned orbital launches according to [1] and from adding up the successful launches in [2] there seem to have been a total of 5057 orbital launches so far, in the 70 or so years of spaceflight.

Apparently the Mars fleet needs from 3 to 5 tanker launches per manned craft, so this program will require between 4000 and 6000 orbital launches, so around 5000 - which is about the same number as the total number of (successful) human rocket launches to date!

Looking at the table in [2] we can see that the best success rates for manned launch systems are 97% for both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle. using this as a worst-case estimate, out of those 5000 launches we can expect 150 to fail. Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program.

I guess that we can expect improvements in reliability with a program this size, and using a mass-produced vehicle which is re-usable is not something we have safety data for in the space-flight arena yet. You would hopefully expect reliability and safety to improve, getting towards the standards of modern aircraft, or at least experimental aircraft or military systems perhaps. But even three nines (99.9%, or one failure per 1000 lanches) is still multiple orders of magnitude better than we can achieve with spaceflight right now, so SpaceX are setting a pretty tough goal for themselves here. Still, I really do hope they succeed, and it will be exciting to watch them try...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights [2] http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logsum.html

Post reply on HN