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Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

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Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#71

Post by squirrelicus »

alexgmcm wrote: post #20
squirrelicus wrote: post #16

Underground is the only way to live on Mars. So if you can find people on Earth who want to spend all their time underground (with no external food/water/air supply network to fall back on), you have a start. The next step is finding people who want to live in a permanent totalitarian technodictatorship, given that one small act, say a minor hvac compromise, is all that it would take to kill everyone in the Mars colo…

Isn't this quite similar to the scientific bases that exist on the Antarctic though? I mean I imagine any Mars colony could be incredibly selective about who to take.

Not quite because you can still go outside where there's air and water and you can bring fire with you to keep warm.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#72

Post by gnode »

I see no technical reason for why Mars could not be home to humans, or even an economically self-sufficient society, in the future. That said, it is inhospitable, and once the first people have set foot there, I see little reason why it would be more attractive a place to live than Antarctica.

A major appeal of Mars is stated to be in case Earth becomes inhospitable, although it seems to me that it would be easier / cheaper to create self-sustaining colonies underground on Earth with nuclear energy and hydroponics, yet even this isn't being done.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#73

Post by p1esk »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #66
perardi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want proof, just compare today's Google Docs to Wordperfect. It's like, a million times better." Really? There's collaborative editing, but in the end it's still just a writing tool. It's not like Google Docs can write my progress report for me. "now that we have AI that can tell the difference between a bear and a mouse after the millionth try, we basically have everything we need to build a super-intelligen…

Machine learning is exactly like human intelligence, only less powerful. We know this because GPT-2 can't count, and babies can't count either. It follows that all we have to do is use more powerful hardware, and then we'll have general intelligence, which is the same as super-intelligence. Intelligence is the only thing necessary to accomplish any task. We left the the so-called laws of Physics behind at around the…

Sarcasm, or just trolling?

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#74

Post by squirrelicus »

Filligree wrote: post #27
alexgmcm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this quite similar to the scientific bases that exist on the Antarctic though? I mean I imagine any Mars colony could be incredibly selective about who to take.

You can be selective about who you take, but only so long as it's a small group. I'd hesitate to call it a proper colony if there's no way they can ever raise children there.

Some people barely want to birth on Earth, where there's freedom and opportunity and sights to see and a very vague threat of potential modest temperature increase where you can just walk away at a snail's pace from the climate change threats. I wonder what kind of people would want to raise a child in underground technodictatorial Mars colonies

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#75

Post by cbanek »

jandrese wrote: post #51
cbanek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many deep space probes in vacuum have RTG's as well (like Voyager), and they can radiate the heat just fine. Also, over time of course the amount of power and heat they generate lessens.

Isn't the power reduction due to radioactive decay of the fuel? Not that the radiators become less effective over time.

Yes, but RTGs are not particularly efficient, so much of the energy is heat.

From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...):

efficiencies above 10% have never been achieved and most RTGs have efficiencies between 3–7%

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#76

Post by cr0sh »

mr_crankypants wrote: post #35
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…

I honestly think that both of those are weak reasons. The first is a problem for other generations; on our own time scale we should focus on the problems that affect us on our own time scale. The second is just not compelling; space exploration is hardly the only endeavor that produces spinoff technology, and it's far from certain that it's the best or most productive way to do so. There has only ever been one goal t…

I honestly think the first one mentioned will become a "primary" reason as soon as the first largish "came from the direction of the sun" doomsday asteroid slams into us, and makes us rethink some of our priorities.

Assuming we survive the event - and assuming it isn't "The Killer Event".

You know - something largish that takes out 3-4 major cities, and we didn't see until much too late (like the near-space flyby we just had - though it was smaller).

Then again - we are talking human society here - so even that probably wouldn't cause us to sit up and think "you know, we're kinda sitting ducks here" and do something about it collectively.

I mean, look at the number of natural disasters that happen all over the world virtually every year in the same spots, yet do people really do anything to improve their chances next time, or do they say "it won't happen again next year" - and it doesn't, until a few years later when it does.

We're such a short sighted species for these kinds of things, and the dumb thing is, we know for absolute certainty that these events will happen, but because we don't know when, for some reason we decide to put off what we should be doing NOW, because when it happens, we'll either not survive the event (and everything we have ever done was all for naught - a footnote at best), or what remains won't have the means, perhaps ever, to rise to a similar level of technology to prevent it happening again.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#77

Post by dotancohen »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #34
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…

help me wrap my head around that. If you’re in -40 in a low pressure atmosphere, it doesn’t cool you down faster because there’s less mass for your heat to transfer to? Does that mean things don’t cool down in a vacuum? Is there a weird curve where by at some point having less cold gas arounds you means you’ll cool down faster instead of slower?

One of the major sources of headaches for designing satellites is thermal management.

In fact, during some weeks of the year the Space Shuttle could not visit the International Space Station because at the ISS inclination, the Shuttle would have spent too much time in the sun. The ISS, Space Shuttle, and other satellites have large radiators to cool them down.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#78

Post by scott_s »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #68
bsmith wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree and actually think humans are very prone to overestimate how quickly certain technologies will develop. A good example is self-driving cars, which are still years – if not decades – away from being truly production-ready. I'm not even close to being an artificial intelligence expert, but I know its current capabilities are extremely limited and we are nowhere close to having a general AI; we don't even see…

Well that's obviously wrong because some people used to think that a computer would never beat a human at chess. It follows logically that no one can ever overestimate how quickly technology will develop.

The form of your argument is that some people were wrong about a subset of X, therefore the opposite attitude of those people must be true for all of X. That's clearly not a valid argument.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#79

Post by Balero »

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…

Manufacturing in micro-gravity could also provide some interesting benefits.

Re: Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

#80

Post by pgcj_poster »

scott_s wrote: post #78
pgcj_poster wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's obviously wrong because some people used to think that a computer would never beat a human at chess. It follows logically that no one can ever overestimate how quickly technology will develop.

The form of your argument is that some people were wrong about a subset of X , therefore the opposite attitude of those people must be true for all of X . That's clearly not a valid argument.

And Bill Gates said that 640K should be enough for anybody.
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