Elon Musk Says Humans Will Go To Mars by 2024

boing
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[quote=“Shuck, post:15, topic:79049”]
I mean, Holy Tilda Swinton, finding life - or its remains - on Mars would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time.[/quote]

Personally I hope they don’t find it, or better still, find a way to conclude that it never developed on Mars.

I want Mars terraformed. A second habitable - and inhabited - planet is the best insurance we’ve got. Discover even microbial life there, and Mars if off-limits probably even for enclosed colonies. And if those microbes are discovered by a human astronaut, you’ll see many demands to prevent them from returning to Earth.

Putting people on Mars is just a dick-measuring contest and/or libertopian wild-west fantasy.

Why? There’s no technical show-stoppers for it, and plenty of reason to do it.

(If you refer to the robot vs human exploration argument, there’s still plenty of reason to send humans. Even the team behind the Mars Rovers points this out. The ideal though, is humans backed by robots.)

So yeah, all these techbro narratives about how we’re going to be on Mars within 10 years…

Here I agree. 20 years is the edge of plausible, but not 10.

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Well, that all depends on who we’re thinking about sending, doesn’t it?

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Why do they need to be alive? Handwave it away like a proper rules lawyer and call it a win!

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"[quote=“robulus, post:18, topic:79049”]
I like the cut of his jib.
[/quote]

“It’s the only jib I’ve got, baby!”

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Gotta get nuking first.

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Except if said humans understand from the very beginning that it’s a one way trip…

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Are you suggesting that the first transport ship should be called the Australia II?

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To the people who think he can’t do it…

Phil Plaint has looked into it, and he thinks that SpaceX can launch an unmanned rocket [by 2018] (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/03/spacex_announces_a_mission_to_land_on_mars_by_2018.html) to land on Mars.

It’s a huge logistical step to go from “unmanned” to “manned,” but Musk has the technology to at least get things started.

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I think we should use something more mythological. We are, after all, going to a planet named after a Greek/Roman god. Maybe something paying homage to the parents of those gods.

I know! How about Titanic II?

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It wouldn’t exactly be doing any favors for long-term public support of human space flight if all the first crews on Mars died shortly after landing.

Plus, is it even LEGAL to knowingly send people to certain death in the name of exploration, even if they volunteer?

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The plan is for them to die of old age on the other end. It’s a lot easier to set up the infrastructure for them to survive on Mars than to fuel and launch a rocket back to Earth.

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But there is no reason to believe we’d have the ability to sustain a Martian colony for that long. We can’t even build a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica, and that place has air and water.

Some day probably, but we’re not there yet.

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It’s not going to be self-sustaining; the plan is to send more supplies to them whenever a launch window opens.

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A one way trip is not the logical equivalent of “certain death.”

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It is if there’s no reason to think they’ll survive very long. “We thought we’d just solve that fundamental engineering challenge later” would be a novel legal defense though.

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I mean, I realize I’m running against the grain in this thread, but I’m just meh on Musk.

NASA’s budget is a drop bucket compared to, say, the rest of the pentagon. NASA worked fine for years and gave us major benefits, so I don’t mind the expense. I’m suspicious of privatization at the best of times, honestly. Privitization means that the goals are those of the private corporation, not us (the tax payers). I’d much rather see an international organization that works on this stuff.

But yeah, I’m clearly against the grain here, so I’ll stop interjecting.

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The problem is that Mars is too close to Earth to be sufficient for this - most things that are going to wipe out life on Earth (e.g. gamma-ray bursts from supernovas) would equally impact Mars. (Not to mention all the things that would remove life on Mars that wouldn’t impact the Earth, making life there so much more precarious.) Then there’s the huge population that Mars would have to support to recreate a fully modern technological, spacefaring society and all its industry before it would be anything more than a colony fully dependent on the Earth. Even if terraforming were possible, life evolved on Earth and Mars will always be a poor - and temporary - substitute.

Given that the costs are orders of magnitude higher, the benefits would have to be, too. But they aren’t. The best bang-for-your-buck is always going to be robots. We have to admit that sending people isn’t actually about concrete benefits.

Sending (soon-to-be) corpses on a trip to Mars is just too goth for most people.

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Actually, I thought you represented the general tone of this thread. In any event, I understand your suspicion of “the goal…of a private corporation” however I note the nature of the funding for Spacex and some other of Musk’s interests (the AI initiative, for example ) suggest a different approach. One of the “CODE” videos I watched yesterday he referred to his being wary of being bound by “fiduciary duty”. IOW, I think, he wishes to put other goals ahead of pure profit. Others in this thread have noted the businesses he chose to found or fund are not traditional money spinners.

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Agreed! However…

Constellation, SLS, Atlas and all of NASA’s other launchers are already private. Worse, they’re private through companies (Lockheed, Boeing) that have combined their launch services to create an effective monopoly. And they act and bill like a monopoly. And bribe politicians to ensure their monopoly remains. The worst things you can imagine of private corporations, they’re already doing.

You may remember the X-33 / VentureStar program, designed to replace the Shuttle (and Atlas, etc.) with a far cheaper alternative. It’s said that the real reason for the program’s failure was that while Lockheed Martin was the contractor, Lockheed Martin had the most to lose from a cheaper alternative to their existing launch business.

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It’s the best we’ve got. If there’s a virus that wipes out humans - or all plant life, which would do the same thing - Mars is a safe haven. If there’s a major comet impact or major nuclear war, Mars is a safe haven. With a gamma-ray burst, most everyone on Mars is underground anyway.

Even if terraforming were possible, life evolved on Earth and Mars will always be a poor - and temporary - substitute.

I don’t buy that for an instant.

The best bang-for-your-buck is always going to be robots.

Only on small-scale exploration. The larger the scale, the more humans start to make sense.

Robots are best for taking pictures and scraping the surface of easily accessible objects. Once you want to start digging trenches and taking core samples, you quickly run into the limitations of robots.

But again, the best solution is a mix. Instead of a large team of humans, you send a small team supplemented by lots of robots.

And robots won’t colonize. They’ll help you colonize though.

Sending (soon-to-be) corpses on a trip to Mars is just too goth for most people.

NO-ONE is talking about doing this.

The idea - around long before the rather scammy Mars One project - is that you’d send people to Mars to stay. It’s simpler and cheaper to send them supplies for the rest of their natural lives than to return them to Earth. They’d still live long, highly productive lives.

And once you’ve demonstrated that you can keep people alive in the long term - growing a small percentage of their food locally - you might keep sending habs, greenhouses etc. and a few more people until you build up a self-sustaining colony.

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