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Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

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Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#51

Post by philwelch »

rbanffy wrote: post #5

Mars is a very harsh environment - and it's very far from Earth (6 months best case with current propulsion technology). I'd suggest a permanent base on the Moon as a useful first step - it has some water, abundant energy, plenty of Aluminum, Magnesium, Titanium and a lack of atmosphere that makes metallurgy easy. Radiation is worse than Mars, but, in both cases, buried housing structures make sense and the Moon's lo…

If you're going from Earth to Mars, you waste a lot of delta-V going to the Moon first.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#52

Post by ramidarigaz »

chc wrote: post #42
ramidarigaz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air is just one of many possible infection pathways. You would also need to quarantine people, food shipments, water supplies, equipment.

Food shipments? Water supplies? We're talking about the kind of technology that would allow you to live on Mars. If you need to rely on those, then 1) Your Martian colony is not really independent and thus doesn't carry any survival benefits, and thus 2) You're wasting resources shipping them to Mars. If you don't need those for your Martian colony, then why would you need them for your Earth colony?

If Earth were in a situation of having to segment populations to prevent the spread of disease, all it takes is one little mistake to wipe out an entire intermingling group of people. I'm not saying we wouldn't have the tech to prevent that from happening, but humans are fallible creatures. Is it worth risking the entirety of humanity when we could have a remote colony that would be very well protected from those types of events?

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#53

Post by ceejayoz »

ars wrote: post #44
ceejayoz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mars colonists won't need to, either.

They might not take it, but they would have to make it. Almost no free oxygen on mars. But making oxygen (from rocks presumably) uses lots of energy (electricity - it's basically the same process used to make aluminium from ore).

Rocks? No. Water ice. Solar powered electrolysis, and you get to use the hydrogen for fuel too.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#54

Post by ceejayoz »

ars wrote: post #43
ceejayoz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, an asteroid could wipe out humanity with pretty minimal warning. There's something major to be said for at least a small self-sustaining colony somewhere else.

> Right now, an asteroid could wipe out humanity with pretty minimal warning That isn't true. There are no asteroids big enough to do that, that we haven't seen. The asteroid risk is a regional one, not a global one.

> There are no asteroids big enough to do that, that we haven't seen.

How exactly are you proving that negative?

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#55

Post by philwelch »

> In January, Newt Gingrich’s space ambitions were mocked by many experts as well as the public, particularly his vow that a moon colony would be established by the conclusion of his “second term.” Musk isn’t committing to a timeline nearly so ambitious; when pushed by Wright, he suggested that this could be a reality within the next 30 years.

Gingrich's moon base by 2020 is probably less ambitious than Musk's Martian colony by 2042. The moon is orders of magnitude closer, doesn't involve leaving Earth orbit, doesn't involve the radiation hazards, and we've actually been to the moon before. I don't want to get into a political argument, but going back to the moon and staying there is not an especially difficult or onerous goal for the next eight years.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#56

Post by philwelch »

pjscott wrote: post #31
Cushman wrote: post #11

I'm with Carl Sagan. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting to go to Mars as a hobby, as a tourist-- if that's how you want to spend your billions, fine. But I worry that too many impatient sci-fi lovers see space travel as some way to escape from the problems of Earth, which it will never be. If we can't figure ou…

Is that just a fancy rhetorical flourish, or do you actually expect "living unsustainably" to potentially cause our extinction? If so, I would be interested in hearing a mechanism.

By definition, if you cannot live sustainably, you cannot sustainably live. Though sustainability, more or less, is about sustaining current populations and quality of life; most failures of sustainability won't extinct the human race, they'll just kill a lot of people off and deprive us of the massive amounts of energy needed to maintain our present quality of life.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#57

Post by philwelch »

ceejayoz wrote: post #39
greeneggs wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we can defend the earth from an asteroid for probably five orders of magnitude less money than establishing a self-sustaining colony somewhere else. And if self sustaining is all you need, setting up a self-sustaining colony a mile underground is also five or six orders of magnitude cheaper. I can't think of any risk to humanity where going to the moon or Mars makes sense as insurance.

> Except we can defend the earth from an asteroid for probably five orders of magnitude less money than establishing a self-sustaining colony somewhere else. If we find out about it decades or centuries out. If it's a year out when we spot it, there's very little we can do with current technology to head it off (asteroid disaster movie plots notwithstanding). > And if self sustaining is all you need, setting up a sel…

It's also much more accessible by the planetary disaster itself, be it some sort of pandemic or war.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#58

Post by philwelch »

pjscott wrote: post #35
_gd3l wrote: post #30

Why don't we focus on the shit here first? I'm sorry, but I just get frustrate with all these wondrous predictions that always seem to be about 30-50 years in the future. Short enough away to be enticing, but long enough away where no one making these predictions will really he held accountable for their ridiculousness. It just seems that every single generation a) has some "new threat" for "how the world will end" a…

We can do both. Hell, even Elon Musk can do both; he also runs Tesla Motors, which makes electric cars on Earth. Also, I notice that people are much more likely to condemn space development as frivolous than they are to criticize, say, football or whittling. Does that seem like a double standard to you, too?

Football and whittling are sustainably self-funding.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#59

Post by ars »

ceejayoz wrote: post #53
ars wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might not take it, but they would have to make it. Almost no free oxygen on mars. But making oxygen (from rocks presumably) uses lots of energy (electricity - it's basically the same process used to make aluminium from ore).

Rocks? No. Water ice. Solar powered electrolysis, and you get to use the hydrogen for fuel too.

Water ice? No.

Water ice is much harder to find than rocks. It's more useful for drinking, and the binding energy of hydrogen is greater than the metal in rocks. (I.e. it takes more energy to get oxygen from water ice than from rocks.)

And how exactly do you plan to use the hydrogen for fuel? What's your oxidizer? Other than the very same oxygen you just worked so hard to make in the first place.

Also, although the most common metal from rocks is silicon, iron is not uncommon on mars, so if you pick your rocks properly you get iron as a waste product, which you can use for building.

Re: Why Elon Musk Wants To Bring People to Mars—and Go There Himself

#60

Post by ars »

ceejayoz wrote: post #54
ars wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now, an asteroid could wipe out humanity with pretty minimal warning That isn't true. There are no asteroids big enough to do that, that we haven't seen. The asteroid risk is a regional one, not a global one.

> There are no asteroids big enough to do that, that we haven't seen. How exactly are you proving that negative?

By searching. Which we have done, and there isn't anything. The bigger the asteroid the easier it is to see. We would have certainly seen any large enough to kill everyone on the planet.

There are plenty of undetected asteroids, and while they could cause damage they are not big enough to wipe out all life.

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