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Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

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Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#111

Post by stcredzero »

Very wrong: https://www.amazon.com/CASE-MARS-Robert-Zubrin-dp-0684827573...

Everything they object to can be dealt with, including radiation and low gravity. If close to 1 G turns out to be necessary for human health, we could build cities as inclined racetrack centrifuges.

Given enough energy, we could not only make fuel in-situ, we could even make plastics out of the Martian atmosphere. In addition, Mars had geologic processes which would produce mineral ores. An entire human civilization could be started on Mars. Historically, this would be analogous to the founding of the United States, just without the smallpox and killing-off the people already there, also starting from more desolate conditions. (Instead of just starting agriculture and industry, we would have to start biospheres.)

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#113

Post by jnurmine »

Robert Zubrin figured out a plausible plan to put a colony on Mars, yet the article fails to mention Zubrin and his Mars (Semi-)Direct plans.

Colonizing Mars with a small team of experts is possible and within our technological and financial means to do so within a decade or so.

However, the interesting question to me is not "can/how can Mars be colonized" but rather why would people move to Mars in the first place.

"Freedom from Earthly oppression (perceived or imaginary)" cannot work as an argument: a Mars colony will basically have to be run like a prison with 1984-level surveillance. A single crazy person blowing up airlocks or sabotaging the water or food supply can deal a death blow to the whole colony, and the cost to rebuild/repopulate will be tremendous, therefore the entire investment will be watched very closely.

Secondly, the monetary cost of moving to Mars will be huge and will be even beyond the means of Earth multi-millionaires, reducing the number of possible colonists. Also, because of the extremely high cost of getting anything to Mars and a lack of native manufacturing, there can not be a co-operative ownership of Martian infrastructure, so in practise everything will be owned by some entity (corporation/government) operating from Earth.

These points might change and "freedom from Earthly oppression" might become a driver once the colonists become self-sufficient enough to build self-sustaining underground dwellings with locally produced tools.

Therefore I think a succesful colonization must have two things: firstly, some kind of business force to fuel the flow of colonists, and secondly colonists who are not idealists looking for a frontier world freedom utopia, since it will not be such, at least in the beginning.

As for the business force, I don't know what this could be, maybe mining or manufacturing or such.

So I don't think the colonization is gated by things like lack of gravity, surface radiation, or impossibility of terraforming, etc. The lack of a plausible business model which could profit from having people live on Mars is the main gating factor.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#114

Post by Balgair »

nolok wrote: post #7

The way I see it, there are two goals to human space travels. The first, very distant one, is to seed ourselves among the stars to avoid being erased from existence by anything that would threaten our existence on earth, from man made cataclysm to natural event. The second, with much more immediate result on a human scale, is that every time we face such a challenge it's only an opportunity for us to develop a new te…

To get a self-sustaining Mars base working and to be able to leave the base and go back to Earth would require some real nifty engineering and automation. Stuff that would transfrom the Earth before lift-off.

Think about it. To get off of Mars, you have two options really. Land the take-off rocket with the fuel in it or land it dry and then fuel it up. Landing a take-off rocket wet is super hard, especially on what amounts to virgin regolith. Fueling up the rocket means you make the fuel on the surface and transport it to the rocket. Also, super hard.

Supposing that you did manage to find a good pocket of the raw materials that you need for the fuel, you still have to have astronauts do that mining, or you need to invent reliable robots to do that for you. Such robots would completely transform the mining and resource extraction economy of the Earth. Then you need to get that fuel to the rocket somehow. Again, either you use astronauts or you invent a hell of a self-driving tanker, which, again, transforms the lives of all humans on Earth. There is the other issues of building the landing pad, the job site for mining extraction, the issues when the fuel spill everywhere with Earth 8 lightminutes away, the scientific issues of just mining willy-nilly into the regolith, the static electricity issues of super dry and thin air, yadda yadda yadda. Even with astronauts on Mars directing all the chaos, it's a nightmare of logistics and black-swan events to refuel a rocket.

Like, comparing the Apollo missions to the eventual Ares missions is foolhardy. The tech we got out of going to the moon is going to seem like brightly colored wood blocks compared to the F-35 that is the tech the Mars missions require.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#115

Post by not_a_cop75 »

DannyB2 wrote: post #88
693471 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor understanding of physics are exemplified everywhere these days. It's tiring seeing so many armchair experts trying to take over the discourse with their incessant posturing.

> Poor understanding of physics are exemplified everywhere these days. Please allow me to quote former vice president Dan Quayle... https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dan_Quayle Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that…

Oxygen can be harvested from the water, so in that sense he's not wrong. It seems like everyone wants to make every politician into an idiot.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#116

Post by danbruc »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #107
danbruc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep repeating a point I never disagreed with, a perfect vacuum has no thermodynamic temperature . My issue with that is that I think it is a too narrow viewpoint for the comment I initially replied to. If one understands temperature as what a thermometer measures, then the temperature of a vacuum will be the temperature of its walls, it will not magically show »undefined« because you insist that temperature mean…

You say you don't disagree but you keep disagreeing... I made a simple, yet fundamental statement. It's either true or false. There is no need to argue as if you had to out-do me in any way. Vacuum cannot have a temperature. This follows immediately from the definitions. This also means that the temperature of a vacuum's "walls", by which I'm guessing you mean particles in 'contact' with the vacuum, is just the tempe…

Try to look up the definition of temperature and you will see that it is not as simple as you think. One possible definition defines temperature as the partial derivative of the internal energy with respect to the entropy. Why wouldn't that be applicable to an ideal vacuum or a radiation-filled vacuum? Maybe it is not, I am neither a physicist nor particularly knowledgeable in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, but it is - at least to me - not obvious that it is not applicable. There are also generalized definitions of temperature applicable to system of few particles, i.e. not relying on the statistics of many-particle systems, which sounds like it should be applicable to any real vacuum as any real vacuum will never be perfectly empty.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#117

Post by not_a_cop75 »

ashtonbaker wrote: post #8

> Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. > The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. > Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes. Such a thin atmosphere will not transfer heat as effectively as it doe…

Those that are used to hiking the Himalayas could live on Mars with a little extra pressurization and some basic filtering. It doesn't seem that unfeasible.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#118

Post by DuskStar »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #107
danbruc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep repeating a point I never disagreed with, a perfect vacuum has no thermodynamic temperature . My issue with that is that I think it is a too narrow viewpoint for the comment I initially replied to. If one understands temperature as what a thermometer measures, then the temperature of a vacuum will be the temperature of its walls, it will not magically show »undefined« because you insist that temperature mean…

You say you don't disagree but you keep disagreeing... I made a simple, yet fundamental statement. It's either true or false. There is no need to argue as if you had to out-do me in any way. Vacuum cannot have a temperature. This follows immediately from the definitions. This also means that the temperature of a vacuum's "walls", by which I'm guessing you mean particles in 'contact' with the vacuum, is just the tempe…

Vacuum cannot have a temperature, by the definition you are using. This makes it useless for certain tasks, such as determining the temperature an object within a vacuum will stabilize at over time. Thus, we use a different definition of temperature - because saying 'the temperature an object will stabilize at' every time instead of 'temperature' is really wordy.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#119

Post by rland »

thisisbrians wrote: post #70

Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our envir…

This is the true reason. Although, we should have the ideological goal of colonization, as a failsafe option to prevent extinction.

Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#120

Post by alanfranz »

timbit42 wrote: post #81
alanfranz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the 640k limit was imposed by the cpu, not the os. It was a widespread nonsense that Gates invented it.

The memory limit of a CPU is based on the address lines. The 8088 and 8086 have 20 address lines permitting 1 MB of RAM. Of course more can be banked utilizing an MMU. So the 640K limit was not imposed by the CPU. The system designers needed some memory for ROMs, video memory and other I/O. They decided 384K was needed for those things, leaving 640K for user RAM.

But the 1MB limit for address space was the hard constraint. 640kb was not a number invented out of the blue by some MS designer. It could have been 800kb or 900kb, would that make a difference?

Also, 8086 and 8088 had no MMU afaik.

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