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Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

newscientist.com

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Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#91

Post by [deleted] »

hagbard_c wrote: post #26
dsr_ wrote: post #2

Mars is only a few billion dollars of investment away from being quite habitable, and Mr. Musk should make plans to retire there along with his friends and senior execs within the year.

Imagine what you would say if they actually did so: invest (more than) a few billions in making part of Mars habitable by, say, building one of those 50's SF domes or something outlandish like that. Move there with their billions locked up in the new colony. Make it work, prove it actually was feasible. Manage to stay alive long enough to make the colony largely self-sustaining. Never mind the how, never mind the lik…

[deleted]

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#92

Post by pavel_lishin »

flenserboy wrote: post #90
pavel_lishin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.

but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain wil…

> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.

I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.

Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#93

Post by inaros »

wongarsu wrote: post #73
inaros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know deGrasse is apparently in private, a bit of a ahole, but in this case he is completely correct: https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY https://youtu.be/IdjtK54Lprw?t=266

That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here

And you are going to explain why instead of just stating an opinion...since an opinion is not an argument...right?

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#94

Post by skeeter2020 »

wongarsu wrote: post #52
inaros wrote: post #27

Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic event, that will force the US government to spend more than 70% to 80% of tax revenues on servicing said debt. There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is n…

Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days. Our latest and greatest model (Perseverance) has traveled 40km (25mi) in 5 years, with the support of a scout helicopter. Which is more than what Curiosity managed in 13 years. But that's approximately what they did in Apollo 17 in five hours. Granted, Apollo 17 didn't make quite as many stops to analyze rocks, but it sho…

>> Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days.

What? The unmanned space program has been beyond the edges of our solar system. Meanwhile humans have been day tourists in space. I don't know how you can come to this conclusion that "humans > robots" when humans have never even been close to the surface of Mars.

>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet

How many robots could we land with the equivalent resources, or telescope satellites, or autonomous probes?

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#95

Post by flenserboy »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #66
flenserboy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.

You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right? How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years? We can't even keep our society stable…

this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#96

Post by skeeter2020 »

flenserboy wrote: post #63
pavel_lishin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that toe-hold actually survive without constant resupply vessels? There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.

not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.

>> not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic

It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#97

Post by triceratops »

AngryData wrote: post #77
triceratops wrote: post #23

Between the realism about terraforming Mars and the strong likelihood that faster-than-light travel may never happen, is anyone else feeling a bit melancholic? It feels like a possible future has been taken away from us.

If we solve fusion to the point where it is easy in a relatively light reactor or manage to "safely" contain significant amounts of antimatter, it is possible to travel the stars by maintaining 1g acceleration for years or decades. But of course maintaining 1g acceleration for even just an hour, not to mention years, while theoretically possible, is still so far outside of practicality that I don't expect to see any…

Accelerating at 1g and attaining relativistic speeds is not quite the same. Because of time dilation any interstellar travel is effectively one-way. If you try to return, centuries will have passed.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#98

Post by card_zero »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #32
empressplay wrote: post #12

> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant. Which is a fair point, but the other points (about soil toxicity, cosmic rays and lower gravity) are all things that can be mitigated. Yes, it would be extravagantly expensive in per-human terms to house people on Mars. But the main reason for doing so -- that should something cataclysmic happen to…

We have never, even as a proof of concept, been able to develop a closed system capable of supporting mammalian life separate from earth's ecosystems. We assume it's possible based on no particularly rigorous evidence and in spite of our numerous failures to even come close. "Mars as backup" is not a credible plan based on science within even our optimistic grasp. The technology & social systems capable of doing this…

They did a year in the moon base simulator Yuegong-1, apparently.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#99

Post by inaros »

b112 wrote: post #41
inaros wrote: post #27

Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic event, that will force the US government to spend more than 70% to 80% of tax revenues on servicing said debt. There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is n…

There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge. If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.

We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon. I dont think you realize what you are up against...Do you know what radiation does to humans?

For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...

FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:

Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)

In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day

for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day

Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...

And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.

Send lots of robots...

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#100

Post by stephc_int13 »

triceratops wrote: post #23

Between the realism about terraforming Mars and the strong likelihood that faster-than-light travel may never happen, is anyone else feeling a bit melancholic? It feels like a possible future has been taken away from us.

I also feel that a good solution of the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar travel is either impossible or too unpractical at scale and that humanity may be trapped in this system forever.
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