We tried that. It cost $15M and it didn’t even make that back in theaters, despite Pauly Shore being a pretty reliable comedy draw up to that point.
I’m not saying human ingenuity and better technology won’t ever allow us to get above a 4% rating on RottenTomatoes.com—FOUR PERCENT—but it’s going to take advances in scriptwriting and premise-building that we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
I rather enjoyed that movie as absolutely stupid as it was.
I agree. It seems crazy for people to talk about putting a colony on Mars in my lifetime. That always seemed like a far-away goal to work towards, and then Musk jumped on it. Think of the armored windows on the Tesla truck. Think of the Model 3 production debacle. Think of the Boring Company, whose solution to congestion is a single lane underground road for cars that is incompatible with 999 out of 1000 vehicles. What a confidence-inspiring company for colonists to trust their lives to.
I wonder if we couldn’t get a sufficiently (but not preposterously) large “Biosphere”-style… um… biosphere to work, if that were the actual goal.
As I understand the Arizona facility, it tried to replicate a bunch of different ecologies all right next to each other, which for ecological purposes basically means all in exactly the same place. I bet they could have made it much more stable if they’d treated it like one of those glass spheres you can buy with exactly the right ratio of brine shrimp to algae.
I can imagine this same conversation taking place in an English pub, say in the late 1400s.
Yep, I had to do a lot of reading on the ongoing research efforts in this area a few years ago for a project I was working on, and it seems to me that the studies are all inadequate. Not a single study actually replicates the psychological and sociological stresses associated with being not just isolated, but SO isolated that you and your crew, colonists, etc. are completely beyond reach. All the Earth-bound studies have had the promise of rescue, or of ending the experiment, should things get too tough. Without the element of true distance, I think the results are of limited use.
There’s evidence that part of the issue was the failure to have a stable microbiome of bacteria and other “bugs,” which is very hard to control. There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about things like soil bacteria and the little critters that make homes on our skin and inside of our guts. They have profound effects on human health (and, interestingly, mood and behavior) and undoubtedly also the health of plants and other living things that you’d like to have in a self-contained colony.
Why list Tesla’s “failures” without listing any of their success? You do realize they singlehandedly created the electric vehicle market? Maybe you’ve heard of SpaceX developing a heavy-lift rocket capability from scratch?
See Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora for a good scifi exploration of this problem.
In fact, it’s cold as Hell.
And how would that have gone?
“Cross the ocean ye say? Nay, not worth the bother, it shall never happen!”
“Not with that attitude, mate!”
One minor difference between then and now is that Europeans were exploring a planet with breathable air, habitable land and food supplies just about everywhere.
But I guess those are really trifling concerns when we consider the benefits of Mars colonization. Benefits such as… um, nothing?
That’s the first of many problems with Mars colonization. All challenges, no benefits. Seriously, can you name even a single real benefit to hypothetical Mars colonization?
Which has no atmosphere, no food, no shelter and poisonous dust.
probably not, for a lot of reasons. 
Summers of 126 fahrenheit, there is no breathable o2.
Like with a lot of research, we might not know the benefit until we got there. It is, literally, a whole new world, and there might be resources that we can’t conceive of, as we haven’t been there, outside of the landers/probes.
That’s a great argument for exploration. I support that. It seems reasonable to get a small crew there to do experiments and surveys that can’t be done by probes, and to prove that it’s possible to send people that far with current technology.
That’s a far cry from sending large numbers of people on a one-way trip to colonize Mars for no particular reason other than that there might possibly be some unsuspected useful resource. Which is, frankly, a preposterous idea.
If you get a chance, there was a great documentary on Biosphere- I think it was on YouTube- that shows what the facility is being used for now. Most of the biospheres are now fairly mature and established; the forest is beautiful. Ironically, they are having to crown the trees now because they are too mature and tall. The Physical hardware is doing fairly well still.
I think it’s really clear that the BS1 and BS2 missions failed due to human factors. Given the nature of the missions, the hardware, and the failure modes, I think it would be exceptionally important to figure out why those missions failed. I mean, NASA has run longer missions on the space station, there are some military jobs that are just as isolated and run as long; there is something human factor which we really need to explain. Was it that they chose the wrong type of people (psychologically speaking) for the mission? Was it a training issue? Is it environmental?
In that case wouldn’t it be much easier and cheaper to build better, more capable landers/probes to do cutting edge research before planning any colonies? There’s not a whole lot that a human researcher needs to be there in person to do. You can pack one hell of a lot of robotic scientific equipment onto a rocket and lander that’s big enough to otherwise carry the habitat and life support systems that would be necessary for even a short duration human mission.
Great property investment opportunities. Get in early when the land is cheap!
Yes, but the story of exploration/development/invention is full of follies. It was crazy to live in the United States, it was crazy to drill for oil, it was crazy to think oil could be refined in such a way to be economical, it was crazy to fly, it was crazy to think cars could replace horses, it was crazy to think people could happily eat vegetarian burgers at burger King, it was crazy to think someone could develop an electric car, it was crazy to think everyone would walk around with a small supercomputer/communicator that talks with satellites in their pocket. I’m not signing up to be first on Mars, but I would like to see it before it gets all touristy. But assuming that we’ll find no surprises on Mars that could be beneficial to humanity in general seems short sighted.
If it was only a matter of choosing the right personnel for the mission then I would tend to think that some organization, somewhere would have managed to carry out a more successful attempt in the 30something years since the last Biosphere 2 failure.
