101–110 of 132 posts
Even an 'offplanet' bank will fall under FATCA and FBAR.
Renounce before blast off!
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> Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there. Have you ever been backpacking in a desert, mountains, wilderness? It continues to be amazing for days. Anything that new and different definitely induces novelty more tha…
This strikes me as the usual motivated denial that you get from Mars enthusiasts. You're not going to "go exploring" forever. At some point, it's just more rocks. A better analogy than backpacking would be permanently living underwater at great depth. To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world. Your skin touches the ins…
But I'm sure some people would love to explore places where no human has ever been before for the rest of their lives.
There is also the work of building a new society, settling in new immigrants, improving infrastructure in your settlement etc, that has to be fun for the right kind of person.
So I'm sure that a small percentage of the populations would genuinely like living on Mars. Maybe he biggest problem is predicting who those people are before you ship out :)
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This strikes me as the usual motivated denial that you get from Mars enthusiasts. You're not going to "go exploring" forever. At some point, it's just more rocks. A better analogy than backpacking would be permanently living underwater at great depth. To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world. Your skin touches the ins…
> To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world. Your skin touches the inside of your suit. You smell only the air from your breathing apparatus and your own breath. Forever. This sounds close to the neck beard trope, of people living in their parents basement and never seeing sunlight. Could we inadvertently be adapting t…
It will totally be worth lifting 250kg of human adipose tissue into LEO, I swear. If the food supply fails, you'll need someone that can survive without it until the next available harvest. Not that I weigh that much now, but with some intensively sedentary neckbearding, I can probably get that high by the time we're ready to launch.
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I'd be more impressed with Mars pessimists if they'd admit that it's just not really the kind of thing that interests them rather than insisting that it's going to be a terrible nightmare for anyone. The GP said the novelty will wear off in one hour, tops. Sorry, to some people, that's a ridiculous statement. Pointing out that it would probably last longer than that is not insisting that it's going to be one big brea…
Common among computer geeks: "I don't like this thing, and I'm perfectly rational, therefore nobody else would either."
... wait a minute... DOH!
I think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip. First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years. Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mar…
In the 1800s, being on a European wooden sailing vessel in the Pacific was, relatively speaking, very similar to being on another planet: - Takes months or years to get there: check - Fire could kill everyone on your vessel: check - "Nature" could kill you in innumerable ways: check - Some life sustaining and necessary items could be found along the way but many had to be brought with you: check
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Isn't this essentially what the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is doing? Albeit they're only isolated for 9 months at a time, not years, but still: 1. They have a small group of 50 people. Issues with crew psychology and relationships are mostly covered. 2. They live entirely indoors in small, manmade habitats. They're actually under the snow in much the same way that Martian hab units would be under regolith. 3.…
I wonder how well the South Pole station would do if they got a only very limited supplies to start with, had to wear pressure suits outside, couldn't afford any air leaks and didn't get supplies for several years.
I remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.
Isn't this essentially what the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is doing? Albeit they're only isolated for 9 months at a time, not years, but still: 1. They have a small group of 50 people. Issues with crew psychology and relationships are mostly covered. 2. They live entirely indoors in small, manmade habitats. They're actually under the snow in much the same way that Martian hab units would be under regolith. 3.…
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No need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube
genius, we just need to send airlocks.
I think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip. First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years. Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mar…
The first people to go to Mars may be scientists and explorers, but the second wave will be a very different kind of people. That group will have the job of building a technologically advanced, industrialized, self-sufficient civilization on Mars. That is no small task, nor is it one we have a simple template for. The people who will be drawn to it won't be the "science is f'ing cool!" spectators, nor will they even be hardcore research scientists. They'll be hyper-competent workaholics and overachievers. They'll be people with broad expertise in multiple subjects who just enjoy getting stuff done. The sheer amount of work ahead of them will be mind-boggling. But by the same token, the amount that they can get done, what they will be able to achieve will be equally mind-boggling.
Every single day they'll wake up and they'll have a hundred lifetimes of truly challenging work ahead of them. And every single night they'll go to bed having made real, material, significant progress on advancing Martian colonization and making human civilization multi-planetary. Most days they'll do something that was never done on Mars before. They'll build something that will have a tangible impact on what is possible in the future on Mars, and on many other people's lives. They won't just be spending their days reading facebook and occasionally making a git pull-request, they'll be building greenhouses, they'll be farming, they'll be making habitats, and they'll be building up all of the industrial infrastructure to do that. They'll be mining ice, and iron ore, and sand, etc. They'll be figuring out how to setup iron smelting operations. How to make plastic out of methane. How to make concrete on Mars. How to build habitats with the maximal contribution of Martian resources that are safe and robust. They'll be min/maxing like crazy, and innovating like crazy. They'll be spending a crap-ton of time in shops using machine tools. And they will constantly see the fruits of their labor, day by day, hour by hour.
They'll be able to look around at their growing colony and think to themselves "I built this". It will be like the ultimate start-up experience on steroids. Some of them might find it overwhelming, but I doubt many of them will find it boring, they won't have time.