Someone’s already working on that too! (sort of, in a libertarian fantasy private nation way)
I could just as easily ask you to provide those figures since it was your assertion that it is folly. My position is simply that those who say something is folly are oft proven wrong. Now, there is a man who owns a space company and is worth billions of dollars. He thinks it’s not folly and has access to the tools and money to realize his vision. You on the other hand do not have these things and are saying, without evidence, that the plan is folly but you ask others to provide the evidence proving that the claim you made is wrong. Nice try kiddo.
Progress on a problem intimates possibility not impossibility. Ergo, they are likely possible due to the progress that has been made thus far. There is no science saying these goals are impossible. Quite the contrary, the science informs us there is nothing other than an engineering problem standing in our way.
Because no billionaire or nation has built an undersea city. Again, this is an engineering problem and those are eventually solved.
Only the press NASA has released that we all have access to. I’m sure if you dig, you can find their methodology.
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- You have one big problem and you break it into a bunch of little problems. The fact that you can solve little problem A is no guarantee than you can solve little problem B. Unless they’re very closely related in very specific ways, it doesn’t even provide any evidence that problem B is solveable. This is a simple matter of logic and evidence.
- “There is no science saying these goals are impossible” seems to betray a rather startling lack of understanding of what science is. Scientific research can never definitively prove that any particular phenomenon is impossible – that’s just not how scientific research works. Lack of evidence that something is impossible does not imply that that something is possible. This is another simple matter of logic and evidence.
But:
- Why haven’y any billionaires tried?
- Why is a billionaire needed to implement this in the first place? The Apollo program was not financed by a billionaire or billionaires.
It’s asinine for you to base your arguments on a figure and then make me do the research to justify that figure. Really poor form, dude.
Since you’re going to completely drop the ball on supporting your part of the argument, could you at least link to the press release to which you’re referring?
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Musk said in his Mexico presentation that the current SpaceX focus is on improving the technology and decreasing the costs of getting people off of Earth. And that they are merely facilitating those actually doing science and inhabiting the place. Somebody needs to make the transportation viable first, otherwise the rest of it won’t happen. I think it’s funny that people complain his 100 year plan is insurmountably difficult, and yet criticise him for not also working to solve all of the other (very real) problems.
Also, a reminder that Musk says that Mars is useful mainly as a launch platform. It is not a goal in and of itself. Yes it is difficult to get there, but when we do, it is a smaller jump have access to the whole solar system. It is not because Mars is an easy or great place to live. Founding a city in Antarctica and making rocket fuel there would also be a large exercise, but would not get us to the solar system. It would destroy a real terrestrial ecology for a mere exercise.
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[quote=“anotherone, post:62, topic:87616”]
I could just as easily ask you to provide those figures since it was your assertion that it is folly. My position is simply that those who say something is folly are oft proven wrong. Now, there is a man who owns a space company and is worth billions of dollars. He thinks it’s not folly and has access to the tools and money to realize his vision. You on the other hand do not have these things and are saying, without evidence, that the plan is folly but you ask others to provide the evidence proving that the claim you made is wrong. Nice try kiddo.[/quote]
I’m not the one pumping the tires of a proposal that goes beyond wild ambition to incredible hubris, and apparently taking it on faith just because a billionaire says so.
And I tried to make it so easy for you, sport. All I asked is that you show (or link to something that shows) that it’s economically and environmentally feasible to get all the people and all their shit just as far as low earth orbit, never mind all the other hurdles. Just the first and lowest hurdle.
I’ll ballpark it at 20,000 Falcon Heavy launches at a cost of $2 trillion for the launches alone, not the payloads and crew salaries etc. Hey, that’s not bad. About one medium-sized war. Does that sound about right?
So how much does the Mars part cost?
How about the emissions from 20,000 rocket launches? Have there even been that many launches in the entire history of rocketry to date?
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But the plan as it stands seems to boil down to “once we get people to Mars they can figure out how to solve the huge challenges we haven’t even figured out how to solve on Earth.”
If we can’t build a closed biome capable of supporting human life even with all the resources available here then there’s no reason to think we will be able to do it there.
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Necessity is the mother of invention. The people trying to survive on Mars will be highly motivated to do so.
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What I’m saying is that our current model of physics allows for time travel. It does not violate our understanding of timespace in any way. Several prominent physicists have looked at Mallett’s models and have concluded that, in theory, his device could work but currently we may not be able to actually build it. And that’s my point. A present lack of technology has never in the past been a significant barrier to achieving what people say cannot be done.
I can only speculate.
I said no billionaire or nation.
Gosh, I didn’t mean to use the internet in a way you don’t like. I had assumed you were capable of typing due to all those words on my screen. Here is one example where the figure is placed at 8 to 1.
This Huffington Post article cites two studies at 7 to 1 and 14 to 1
And another that puts it at 10 to 1 http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/sep/HQ_07193_Griffin_lecture.html
Perhaps not but you are the one attempting to shift the burden of proof. You made a claim and then asked someone to provide evidence you are wrong.
There have been roughly 8000 so far. Do you have any information on the harm emissions from a launch cause or is that speculation? Since you claim harm, are you going to expect other people to prove you wrong again?
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“If we can’t” is a big “if”. How much work has been done on this so far? The problem seems to be that we haven’t done it, not that we can’t.
The goal of a closed biome is something that can and will - if possible - be achieved gradually. Not dissimilar to how humans currently build habitats where they can live for a time underwater or in low Earth orbit. As long as there can be supplies and crew rotation, it doesn’t need to be closed. I think that “space medicine” has been one of the most interesting and valuable areas of research to result from the space program to date, and see our further work in space as continuing this.
Wasn’t it KSR’s own pessimistic article about interstellar travel which intimated that a huge biome is needed to be sufficiently robust to support human life? In this solar system we have several large bodies we can test this with.
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which is why we’re surrounded by perpetual motion machines and faster-than-light spacecraft.
But hey, at least we have flying cars.
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Last night I stood on the hill above my house and watched an Antares rocket, powered by an incredibly primitive Russian kerosene/LOX engine topped with a 1950s era solid second stage, lift off from the aging Wallops Island facility to deliver a Cygnus “space truck” to the International Space Station.
The stuff people say can’t be done, we were capable of doing in the 1960s.
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[quote=“popobawa4u, post:69, topic:87616”]
“If we can’t” is a big “if”. How much work has been done on this so far?[/quote]
Very little. That’s my point: the current plans for Musk’s Mars colony focus almost exclusively on “how to get there” instead of “how to survive there.”
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Ultimately, the burden of proof rests with those who advocate spending trillions of dollars on a luxury project.
By all means, let’s send people to Mars. Like, five of them. Not five thousand or five hundred, five. Let’s study the hell out of Mars. Let’s advance science in every way imaginable. Let’s improve space propulsion dramatically. And so on.
But the burden of selling (not even proving!) the extraordinary idea that it makes any kind of sense to found a self-sustaining Mars colony with a population of one million rests with those who say it can and should be done. So far, you guys are failing badly on this one.
Perhaps naively, I assume that burning large quantities of fuel produces heat and perhaps pumps carbon into the atmosphere, depending on the fuel, and these things can contribute to climate change. Since you advocate burning all that fuel and I don’t, maybe you should make a case for burning it.
After all, not burning it, and not going to Mars in a massive way are the status quo positions. You and your hero propose to upend the status quo with the single largest, most expensive and most ambitious project in history. It’s on the people who are for it to provide not just plausible but convincing answers to:
Why?
How?
When?
The argument against going by the millions is fairly clear: it’s an unnecessary, poor use of scarce resources (or have we reached post-scarcity and nobody told me?), and it has little or no value as a “plan B” when we can work with Earth much more effectively.
You can try all you want to get us naysayers to prove it isn’t feasible, but eventually you’ll have to realize that it’s you and those on your side who have to do a sales job. Elon Musk started the sales job with the claim that “we” need a Plan B and Mars is it. That’s an absurd proposition on the face of it, so consider the sales job a failure with this skeptic. Try harder.
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Yes, in the same sense that a person equipped with concrete shoes would be highly motivated to evolve gills.
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Under your rules perhaps. I’ll continue to work under the common rules that those who make a claim are saddled with the burden of proof. Since it seems you will just say anything without a sense of decorum, I’ll just leave you alone now to shout impotently in to the void.
We don’t have a single model of physics. We don’t understand spacetime in the first place. Even if we did, the model could be wrong like every other scientific model ever devised, so simply having a model that says it is or isn’t possible doesn’t actually determine whether it is or isn’t possible.
That’s my point too, likewise about the undersea cities. Something can be theoretically possible, but we may not be able to actually build it. Assuming we will definitely someday be able to build it makes all kinds of assumptions about economics and physics that are unwarranted. The claims you’re making are, as far as I can tell, completely faith-based rather than evidence-based. This is made abundantly clear by the fact that the argument you are using to support your position is a science-of-the-gaps argument (analogous to God-of-the-gaps argument for theism):
A present lack of technology has never in the past been a significant barrier to achieving what people say cannot be done.
Not really different from saying, “Well, there’s no evidence that God doesn’t exist!”
It’s not about “using the internet in a way I don’t like”. It’s about:
- making an argument based on a claim that X
- making a snarky comment when someone asks you to corroborate X
It’s bad form for any kind of argumentation, borderline intellectual dishonesty and it’s a good indicator I’m wasting my time talking to you in the first place, especially when you double down on being a dick instead of apologizing. You’re the one making the claim, and so the burden is on you to support it if you want any credibility.
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We certainly have a current and widely accepted model. While there are alternatives, the mainstream works within the same one we have had for almost 100 years.
I disagree. Sometimes we expect those we debate with to be able to verify or not basic information.
You may be right. I see no need to apologize for assuming you are handy with a keyboard.
Of course, which is why I provided 3 different sources that state the ROI is better than 1:1. Any investment with a better than 1:1 return is a good one. Others may be better but any profit makes a venture worthwhile.
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You seem to have forgotten that at the root of all this is the extraordinary claim that humanity can, should and even needs to colonize Mars. That claim remains entirely unproven.
Umm, the entire point of the project is to prove it can be done. As far as should, well that’s a matter of opinion and perspective.
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- We don’t have a single model for quantum gravity, which is what we’d need to understand whether time travel or FTL travel is possible.
- You need to be able to verify your own information.
- When i ask you how a particular figure was derived, it is not a sufficient substitute to provide similar figures without providing the means for how they were derived.
You’re rude, refuse to back up your own arguments, and you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. I’ll leave you with the last word.
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