iirc Musk wants to build a fleet of 1000 Starships and have them run three flights a day to LEO mostly as tankers for fueling up Mars bound convoys. 3000 superheavy flights a day. 100 tons each… we are talking some several orders of magnitude over what we can lift right now. Of course, he MIGHT have been high when he said that. ahem
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Yes, but that’s a huge thing to take issue with. I’m talking about a small crew on a round trip expedition. They can carry with them all the habitat and food they need.
Colonization is about sending thousands? millions? of people on a one-way trip to a place that currently has zero habitat for humans.
The difference in scale is like building a model airplane vs. a functional Noah’s Ark.
That’s not exactly a quibble.
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Others have answered, but my question is: where did you get the idea that “exploration” means “robots”? In case it isn’t clear, I don’t object to sending people to Mars. What I object to is the idea of sending more than a tiny crew who would be on a round trip.
Fortunately, building a large colony on Mars is just an idea. It’s a bad, pointless, massively expensive and currently technically impossible idea. Whenever Musk talks about it, he’s just engaging in fan service. If you seriously believe it’s really going to happen in your lifetime, prepare for disappointment.
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It’s good to see this being compared to the South Pole and to Biosphere 2, which are both places that illustrate how hard it is to build this sort of city even here on Earth. I’ve had the pleasure of spending time in both of those places. Life is hard there, even when you can breathe the air and walk normally.
The thing that keeps the South Pole station alive is South Pole Transport (SPT), the folks who carry tons of jet fuel there from McMurdo Station on sleds. Mars doesn’t have any fossil fuels that I know of, and sunlight there is pretty weak. A bottle of Laphroaig would cost a few grand in the Mars commissary.
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Its telling that the existential threats cited to justify a second human outpost- they’re all natural disasters, not human created. If you expand the list to include human created problems, it makes a hell of a lit more sense to reform our current methods of living on this planet.
Exporting our current fucked up ways of doing things to Mars seems like a sure recipe for disaster.
I do like Musk’s idea that there is a limited window of time to accomplish grand projects like these… but I think this window is much better exploited to securely bury our nuclear waste buildup while we still can. Leaving this problem for the survivors of global warming is exactly the kind of irresponsible priorities that make me want to leave this planet in the first place.
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Even more than colonizing Australia crazy.
If you build it, they will come.
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I think exploration and the eventual establishment of outposts outside of low earth orbit is a good thing that we will want to do, eventually.
But I just keep thinking that we need to have an understanding that there is no Plan(et) B. If something happens to Earth, for the foreseeable future, it would just allow a human to write the final chapter in the book of Humanity down. Humanity cannot survive based on a Mars base; or as a plucky band of 200 people on a starship on it’s way to the Alpha Centauri system.
Space won’t solve our problems. Only we can do that.
Perhaps one day, centuries or even thousands of years from now, if the laws of physics allow it, we may be a true multi-planetary species. But we have to take care of our planet to get us there.
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Colonize and Terraform the moon first. Great place to learn survival in off Earth conditions.
Never mind the moon, how about Detroit?
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With such low gravity and no volatiles other than a little bit of water ice at the poles, the Moon is unterraformable, unfortunately.
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I would be unsurprised if we didn’t have colonies on Mars when I died, or ever. I grew up in an era or rotary phones, so have seen some change. Given our current politics and world history, the decline into savagery is clearly a possibility too. I remember hearing fervent arguments how electric cars could never be a thing. And I personally argued that we’d never elect someone as famously stupid as Trump. We don’t know what developments will occur in physics/chemistry/material science/computing/robotics in the next week, let alone the next decade. Or a meteor could extinguish us tomorrow. Making predictions about things we’ll NEVER do seems iffy. Assumption is the mother of fuck-up. What if controllable man-made fusion works? Would that change the scenario?
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I’m also old enough to have seen plenty of changes, and plenty of surprises.
You seem to be thinking of this in terms of technical feasibility. Sure, some breakthroughs could make a Mars colony feasible much sooner than I think.
That still doesn’t get around the other problem: the complete lack of any reasonable or rational justification for building such a thing.
More specifically, there is no good reason for devoting massive resources to such a project when there are still so many things on Earth that we’ve collectively fucked up and either need to fix, if possible, or learn to live with. How would building a huge rocketry-based industry to shoot many thousands of people off to Mars help with any of that?
I’ve asked for good reasons to do this, but nobody has been able to post a single one that couldn’t be achieved with a small exploration party.
BTW, electric cars may be “a thing” but it’s debatable whether they’re truly a good thing. In places where electricity is generated with fossil fuels, I suspect the benefit is marginal at best.
Some finding that contributed to our understanding of osteoporosis, which effects the majority of humans of a certain age and limits human lifespan and quality of life. Also, we didn’t expect to increase our understanding of bacteria virulence on the space station, but that happened, given the diminishing power of antibiotics, useful data.
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Very good point
Also the Gobi Desert, as Bruce Sterling mentioned in an interview 16 years ago
And Charles Stross got into the details of why space colonisation is a very hard problem.
Some of Canned Monkeys Don’t Ship Well by Frank Landis is also relevant, but it is more focused on interstellar travel.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/canned-monkeys-dont-ship-well-.html
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If people want to volunteer, let 'em go. I just ain’t paying for it.
While we’re at it, I’ll volunteer Trump and his lackeys, Barr and Limbaugh, to go. For them, I would consider donating…
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They’re scheduled to go on the Space Ark “B”.
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Ah, the beta group… I see what you did there, newfound friend.
Will they also wear red shirts? 
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