You’re forgetting that humans are irrational, and approaching this from a rational basis.
Again, based on history I would expect spending and popularity of the effort to increase markedly if some dramatically lethal (or better yet, almost lethal) event occurred.
The ones Musk has talked about certainly are conceivable. Grey goo, planetkiller meteor impacts and the Robot Uprising, for starters. At least on Mars, nothing quasi-intelligent is actively attacking you. Yet!
Mars is halfway to living in space. No magnetic field, very little atmosphere and water, but a decent amount of gravity. Once you’re self-supporting on Mars, the Belt is just a matter of managing the health effects of weightlessness…
I’m going to split the difference in this conversation between being optimistic and thinking this is a waste of time.
Getting into space to deliver satellites cheaply or mine asteroids is something that private industry is going to be able to figure out because the profit motive is there. I don’t expect Elon Musk or any private enterprise to go into long-term exploration or colonization efforts with any consistency, and consistency and persistence is important in space exploration. NASA has not had a refueling explosion in how many decades? SpaceX had one the other month. NASA (and the military, let’s not kid ourselves) has, through iteration, been able to figure out and solve a lot of problems SpaceX is now rediscovering the hard way.
I do think that Space X can do great things for humanity and for space exploration, but a successful long-term mission to Mars needs a lot more time, expertise, and energy than Space-X could ever make worthwhile.
Frankly though, once you get into orbit you’re basically halfway to anywhere. Then you just need to work on a landing system. And if you can land autonomously on Earth with it’s heavy gravity and difficult atmospheric conditions, Mars or the Moon is a near cakewalk.
…And then when those colonists die of radiation exposure, because everything on mars is irreversibly soaked in high levels of radiation, including that microscopic grain of sand that hitched a ride in the folds of a space suit, and eventually pressed against the sole of your foot until a tumor formed around it, elon musk will send ANOTHER massive wave of colonists, armed with promises of technological solutions and misguided hope, right?
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
Radiation from space doesn’t make sand radioactive. Also, they’ll have shielding in their habitation. They’ll get some rads when out and about, maybe it’ll increase their likelihood of getting cancer, but it’s not going to be lethal very quickly, or to everybody.
Here on earth, we have a lovely, thick magnetosphere and an ecosystem that absorbs and deflects enough space radiation that we humans can enjoy a reasonable lifespan.
Apparently mars lacks enough of both of those things. And is mostly made of lovely, conducting iron.
They plan on using martian soil and water to shield the colonists against radiation…except those things, if sourced locally, are radioactive themselves.
There aren’t any crannogs in England. There are a lot in Ireland, and in Alba, and one in Britain where Irish adventurers carved out the kingdom of Brycheiniog.
You didn’t read the NASA article. It most certainly is radioactive, like getting a CT scan.
And solar radiation does make stuff radioactive when there is inadequate shielding. Which is why mars is radioactive.
As the NASA article points out.
The NASA article doesn’t say anything of the sort actually, and it mostly talks about the radiation encountered while travelling to Mars, not on the surface. In space the levels are sufficiently low to be largely blocked by the hull of the spaceships being designed to take us to Mars (even for the longer transit times of 200+ days, compared to the spacex plans for 80-120 days), as long as the astronauts retreat to more heavily shielded parts of the ship whenever there’s a solar flare heading their way (which might happen a couple of times during the trip), you might also reorient the ship in the event of an incoming flare to block most of it from hitting them.
The radiation on the surface of Mars comes from space, solar radiation for the most part - x-rays and gamma rays and the like (it’s mostly made up of high energy photons), on Earth that stuff is blocked by the magnetosphere, but Mars has an incredibly weak magnetic field (and no magnetosphere to speak of) so it all ends up down on the surface. The level of radiation on the surface is similar to what astronauts on the ISS live with every day. The Sun also spits out protons in the solar wind and coronal mass ejections, but these are much less energetic than the photons, and they mostly interact with the atmosphere and don’t make it to the ground (in fact this is why the Martian atmosphere is so sparse, since it’s magnetosphere disappeared it’s been slowly blown away by the protons in the solar wind), but even if some do make it to the surface they’re not travelling fast enough to make anything radioactive.
When the high energy photons hit the surface they don’t make the matter they interact with radioactive, they simply heat it up, or knock an electron or two out of an element, break a chemical bond maybe. In order to make something radioactive you have to bombard it with high energy protons, and these aren’t things you find much in solar radiation. It can all be blocked by shielding with martian soil or water though, which again, isn’t radioactive. Martian settlers will just have to limit their time out on the surface, and carry rad meters and keep an eye out for large incoming events to ensure they’re in shielded areas when they hit, no different from hiding away from a hurricane.
Apparently, his colonization plan does not involve figuring out how to actually live there, without air, water or food and under a lethal rain of cosmic radiation.
Yeah, we can reconstitute the atmosphere, given time and resources, but to do so, we’ll have to prevent it being blown away again by the solar wind, which means magnetosphere.
a) there’s no lethal rain of radiation.
b) water & air can be manufactured on the planet, from the copious amounts of water ice that are everywhere on the planet (they just melt the ice for water, and extract oxygen from it and mix with the martian atmosphere for breathable air). the ice is just under the surface, and mixed in with the soil.
c) they’ll bring food with them, and they’ll set up lots of greenhouses to grow food, they can probably even grow some stuff using the martian atmosphere, pressurized.
they’ll also manufacture the fuel for the return trips with methane factories they’re going to bring with them, they’ll bring lots of solar panels for energy (and later probably nuclear generators), flat pack construction materials, tools, rovers, spacesuits, etc.
he hasn’t released any detailed plans for that part of the program yet though, this presentation was all about the ship system. but it’s all stuff that’s been well researched and thought about by all involved in the space program for many decades.
there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and funding that needs to be secured, and I’m sceptical about his timeline, but there’s nothing that seems overtly ridiculous about the plan.
