Well, of course people are going to volunteer for this thing. It looks great in the brochure.
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Given the necessity of sending goods to Mars, things like deadly viruses arenāt going to be stopped, either. Thereās a very small list of existential threats that a colony on Mars would protect against. Not to mention if the Martian colony didnāt at least have tens of millions of people and full manufacturing capability, the destruction of Earth would necessarily mean the eventual destruction of life on Mars, too. If we think itās worth that kind of investment, why not invest that in protecting people on Earth? (Also I guess I question this whole idea - itās not about saving people or even whole cultures, itās about saving the idea of human beings as a species. But if we all got wiped out, we wouldnāt care. You donāt care youāre dead when youāre dead.)
The problems of manned exploration was pretty clearly shown by the Moon missions - they were limited in the distances and scope of their exploration by safety issues. If you want to dig trenches, sending a trench-digging robot (and an exploration robot and a core sampling robot, andā¦) is still orders of magnitude cheaper and easier (and safer) than sending humans with those tools (and who are going to be limited to only working in one area by safety concerns).
I donāt know what to say to you, then - weāre creatures of this environment, and currently have no clue about replicating that anywhere else (or even if itās possible).
Until we have the technology to provide sufficient shielding from solar radiation, thatās exactly what we are talking about.
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Kennedy gave us ten years to the moon, and that was with the other guys trying at the same time. Musk is no Kennedy.
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Well, in part BECAUSE of the other guy tryingā¦ But yeah.
Once the colony is self-sustaining, thereās no absolute need to send goods to Mars.
But you could send goods anyway. Sterilizing a small amount of goods is a whole lot easier than stopping a virus from entering a country from the rest of the world.
Not to mention if the Martian colony didnāt at least have tens of millions of people and full manufacturing capability, the destruction of Earth would necessarily mean the eventual destruction of life on Mars, too.
Not ātens of millions.ā A few thousand would do.
If we think itās worth that kind of investment, why not invest that in protecting people on Earth?
Why wouldnāt ALSO do so?
If you want to dig trenches, sending a trench-digging robot (and an exploration robot and a core sampling robot, andā¦)
Thatās just it. Youāre talking about a different robot for each task. Humans are multi-purpose in a way that robots wonāt be for a long time.
And when your limited-lifespan trench-digging robot encounters a large rock, it has to start over elsewhere. A human could get out a pry-bar and pry it out of the way. A core-sampling robot - large core samples, let alone the few inch deep core sample planned for an upcoming lander - is probably going do drill that core sample in one (1) place only. A human could dismantle the rig and move it elsewhere.
I donāt know what to say to you, then - weāre creatures of this environment, and currently have no clue about replicating that anywhere else (or even if itās possible).
Sure, zero gravity is a problem for bone growth. We donāt know how much gravity is needed. 1/3rd gravity may not be problem-free, but it also probably wonāt be a show stopper.
Even if you needed full gravity to raise children, thereās still a low tech solution thatās popped up in old science fiction: A big carousel, sloped inward, the rotation providing higher gravity. With essentially a hotel on it. Pregnant women, and children would spend most of their day there.
Until we have the technology to provide sufficient shielding from solar radiation, thatās exactly what we are talking about.
Thatās still a problem out in space. On the moon or Mars itās a solved problem: A couple feet of dirt covering your habitat. We have the technology.
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Musk is doing it for a VERY tiny fraction of the cost. And only a tiny fraction of THAT coming from the tax payers. And even then, providing services to the taxpayers at a lower cost than they were already paying.
I donāt think we yet have evidence that this is a viable idea.
I brought up Antarctica earlier because itās arguably the closest thing we currently have to a Martian colony, only with the considerable advantages including
- Regular supply deliveries (which take much less than two years to arrive)
- The ability to ship large cargo
- Breathable air
- Drinkable water
- Opportunities to walk around outside without a pressure suit
- The ability to leave
Even with all these advantages the longest continuous period any individual has ever spent on the continent is about two years. We simply havenāt yet demonstrated the ability to address all the technical, biological, social and psychological issues that a permanent Mars colony would entail. Thatās why Iām highly skeptical of any claim that a bunch of colonists sent on a one-way trip would live ālong, highly productive lives,ā at least given the current state of our technology. (And tech issues are just one set of problems).
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If and when humans land on mars, it wonāt be from the Earth. The Martian hop will be from and to Phobos, which in turn is much easier to get to and back from Earth.
But what if you have phobophobia?
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Weāre always talking about āgoingā to Mars, or wherever. Iām much more interested in what you can make and do out there and how peopleāmainstream society, not elitesāwould actually participate in that. One-off flag planting exercises, historic stunts, and heroic camping trips donāt interest me. We are beyond the heroic era of space. We areāor should beābeyond the nationalistic dog & pony shows. And space tourism? Maybe Iām too much of a nerd, but floating around in adult diapers staring out windows and drinking champagne from squeeze bottles isnāt my idea of fun. I want to make stuff. I think the role of national space programs is to build highways. To develop venues of publicly accessible activity.
But no one in the space establishment is offering us anything remotely close to a plausible, contemporary, vision of a spacefaring culture that real people can exist in. From childhood to present, I have yet to see space agencies or the New Space oligarchs offer a single plausible vision of space settlement. Their visions are all retrofuturist, often militaristic. Recycled Big Machine futurism. Nothing in Elon Muskās vision of space is even remotely novel. Weāve long been sold a Big Lie about the human role in space rooted in the erroneous notion that the only way to make us care enough to spend tax dollars is to engineer state heroes for us to identify with. But EVA is not routine and never will be. We canāt all be astronauts. Itās not a path anyone in this forum right now can follow. It takes special people. Your odds of becoming an astronaut are about the same as your odds of becoming a professional basketball star. And if we want to really make significant stuff out there, it makes no more sense to expect astronauts to be doing the heavy lifting than it would be to rely on Olympic athletes to build houses.
Telerobots will be doing the heavy liftingāweāve known that fact since the '70sāand that means the only practical role for human beings in space is to be a solution to telecommunications latency. To be a mind operating those telerobots from a shirtsleeve environment at a convenient distance. If you want to see what the future of space looks like, look at this. If this seems disheartening, then youāve missed the point. This is how normal people canāmustādo stuff in space. This is what CATS is really about. Iāve long suggested that there is a kind of overdue epiphany on the horizon in the space establishment, akin to that of Bob Ballard when he first experienced the use of underwater ROVs. In my opinion, we donāt need more flag planting. We need to imagine a kind of community model train layout that spans the solar system. To start that, we need a new TMRC. If you can get that analogy, youāre close to a plausible vision of the future in space.
But the window of opportunity for us may be closing. All those moonshot proposals we hear about lately fall within the same time frame a lot of experts suggest for the realization of Artificial General Intelligence, and as soon as that emerges in some sufficiently adequate form, our last paying job in space is gone. It will become the cheaper way to do everything out there. I find it ironic how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will talk about millions of people working in space when their own businesses are systematically eliminating all human jobs. What do they expect these people to be doing out there? Mining asteroids by hand? No matter what fanciful spacecraft we might imagine in the future, it canāt be cheaper or more convenient than the mind that can travel space by telecommunications and deploy hardware by a ātolerable yieldā paradigm. We donāt live in a culture that usually lets us do things that canāt be economically rationalized, and weāre a very long way off from being able to homestead space individuallyāautomation being our only hope for that. This may be why thereās so much hype about new moonshots lately. The establishment knows that window is closing and this may be their last chance to get in those history books before those space centers get replaced by nerds in offices sitting in CAVEs. Maybe theyāll succeed, but it seems increasingly likely to me that the first true settlers of space may well be a community of artilects. Unless we can figure out how to join them, weāll be following in their wake.
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Yeah, his PR team hasnāt learned the art of subtlety.
Remember last year when a slickly professional parody of āUptown Funkā appeared just in time for some SpaceX benchmark test? The one with flattering references to people five layers deep in SpaceXās senior management (sort of like the IBM songbook)? Yeah, Iām sure the thousands of person-hours put into that video by Cinesaurus, āa creative powerhouse obsessed with telling stories through branded digital content that people actually want to watch and share,ā was done out of the sheer love for brave Elon Musk and his noble, heroic vision ofā¦ etc. etc.
I donāt begrudge him his talents or successes, but sometimes I feel like Iām going to be sitting at a bar when a beautiful, elegant woman sidles up to me. Sheās alluring, sheās confident, and sheās interestedā¦ in telling me all about the transformative vision that Elon Musk will bring to us all through his TeslaĀ® Powerwallā¢ home battery technology.
Iām not so sure you are running against the grain, he seems to be pretty polarising!
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Hereās like the crazy idea, instead of producing MORE consumer products that may be superficially sustainable but consume a ridiculous amount of resources, are for individual (or family) use only, and are constantly upgraded, why donāt people in the US think of investing in sustainable public transportation? Or is that too communist and weirdly European?
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Now right around the stroke of twelve the dance had just begun
They earth kids parked their spaceship down on Mars to have some fun
And so I left my friends, the Martians, stomping on the ground
And even though Iām back on earth I still can hear this sound.
Ee-ee-ee ee-ee the Martian Hop ee-ee-ee ee-ee-ee-ee
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The ULA companies are every bit as āprivateā as SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Itās just that (a) they spend so much money on greasing politicians that they have little left to actually build and launch rockets and (b) they have a failure-averse corporate culture that does not remember how many rockets we had to have blow up before Neil stepped off that foot pad.
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Actually, I answered that question here about a year ago. Itās all about the layers of graft involved in big projects here in the USA.
Given recent history - for example, the Boston Big Dig and the $11 billion price tag for a new NYC bus terminal - itās clear that there is not enough money to build high performance trains in the USA absent the hiring of a magic dwarf who can spin straw into gold.
The announcement of such a project would attract a sky-darkening swarm of featherbedding consultants, bureaucrats looking for another two decades of locked-in āworkā, cost-plus contractors, and NIMBY protest groups with their attorneys, all well equipped with wallets full of political grease and ready to settle in for the long term like lampreys hooking into a fat sea trout.
Five years in, not a mile of track will have been laid, the cost estimates will have quadrupled, and taxpayers will be screaming to be let off the hook.
Everyone knows this. And this is why you canāt have nice trains.
Watch the high-speed rail project in California. Youāll see every single thing I described above come to pass.
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Fair enough, but Iām not sure the answer is even more privatization and less scrutiny from the public. Because I doubt that public funds wonāt be used by these new corporations eventually.
I donāt care what the combination of private/public funds and oversight is, as long as they get building and get launching.
If NASA was on a path to get us back in the spaceflight business faster than the privateers are, Iād be rooting for them.
It would be a heck of a lot easier if there hadnāt been that big push for everyone to live in suburbs.
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