Understanding Musk's plan for colonizing Mars

boing
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a) there’s no lethal rain of radiation.

That’s wrong. Earth is protected from high energy particles in the solar wind and cosmic rays by having an atmosphere and a magnetosphere. Mars has neither to speak of. Consequently, the solar wind is blasting full force at ground level. There is also full exposure to extra intense blasts from solar flares. These are things that the ISS has an emergency escape plan so that astronauts aren’t irradiated to death.

In fact, the lack of a magnetosphere is thought to be one of the primary reasons for Mars’ lack of an atmosphere. The solar wind ejection of Martian atmospheric atoms has been measured by orbiting probes.That in turn means no real prospect of terraforming because any attempt to form an atmosphere without a magnetosphere to protect it will lead to the same end.

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.

And your evidence for “copious” is what, exactly? There is certainly water on Mars but it is by no means clear exactly how much remains. A lot of the surface stuff (including the entire south polar cap and a lot of the north polar cap) is actually frozen carbon dioxide. You can’t drink that. And this is something you need to know before you go, not after.

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.

The more bulk cargo you have to transport, the less feasible this scheme is. A supply line that stretches 100 million miles is just not going to work.

Further, a greenhouse by itself is not sufficient. You don’t just need dirt and CO2. You need nitrogen (not there - just 1.89% of a very thin atmosphere). You need symbiotic organisms in the soil. You need organic matter. All of this is bulk material that costs a lot to ship.

Methane Factories? From the poop they poop out I guess? Because there isn’t anything to make methane out of on Mars. They can’t make that much.

Certainly people have thought about this. The general conclusion is that it would be extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily dangerous, and with no clear purpose.

Musk, on the other hand, did actually address this. It is someone else’s problem. He’s just the transport guy, the Union Pacific of our times. Except that the previous Union Pacific wasn’t built until there was already something on the left coast that was profitable to connect with.

Cheap spaceflight is important on its own merits and I’m all for that. But colonization is not in the cards for a long time, if ever. There just isn’t any purpose for people in space.

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Radiation on Mars

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you should probably read the rest of this thread, I’ve already written several posts about the radiation. bottom line, it’s perfectly manageable, it’s pretty much the same as what they face on the ISS, and they can handle extreme solar events with sufficient shielding, water and soil will be enough for that. terraforming is not something people need to worry about in the short term, domed settlements will be fine for the time being.

water ice on the surface of the planet has been confirmed by the detection of hydrogen by the Mars Odyssey spectrometers, the average concentration in the surface rock/soil is around 14% across the whole planet, with concentrations varying greatly depending on the region (including solid slabs of ice in the polar regions), they’ll pick a site with abundant supplies, they’re already narrowing them down. there’s almost certainly even greater amounts of ice deeper in the ground as well, for when it’s time to terraform. the co2 ice at the poles sits on top of deeper layer of water ice btw, and it’s seasonal (mostly subliming away in the summer leaving the water ice exposed). it’s incredibly easy to extract the water too, just dig up the soil and heat it, collect the water (either via filtration or vaporising), electrolysis for part of it to produce oxygen.

transporting materials will not be a problem, they are planning on building hundreds of ships, making dozens of trips each. the reusability of the system is what brings the cost down. they will also be able to manufacture all kinds of stuff on the planet too, 3D printing will be quite advanced by the time we get there for example.

You can easily extract enough nitrogen out of the atmosphere to add to a pressurised environment (or to add to the soil), mix in some oxygen extracted from the water and you’ve got breathable air. human waste can provide fertiliser (and plant waste too once you’ve bootstrapped up a sustainable system). you don’t need to bring complex organisms, and micro-organisms don’t exactly take up a lot of space. life is quite resistant to changing conditions, there will all kinds of hardy things we can bring to get things started, work our way to more complex and self sustaining systems in time. some things will even be grown in the martian atmosphere as is, just under some pressurisation.

methane can be produced from water and co2, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction, though they’re using a different process, can’t remember the name.

saying there’s no purpose for this is ridiculous, it helps ensure the survival of the species for one thing, it will dramatically increase our knowledge of the universe, lead to unimaginable technological advances, and as such will help us fix our problems at home as well. it’d be madness not to do it, and it’s shameful that we’ve been mostly twiddling our thumbs as a species since we last set foot on the moon.

it’s definitely incredibly challenging, but so was colonising the new world. it could be a total failure, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

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So your solution is that people will essentially live in permanent igloos. Yeah. You should read Philip Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

saying there’s no purpose for this is ridiculous, it helps ensure the
survival of the species for one thing,

How much do you suspect a typical government will pay for that, let alone a typical corporation? The COP led Congress can’t even be convinced to pay its current bills.

it will dramatically increase our
knowledge of the universe,

No, not really. Robotic spacecraft will do that. People are worse than useless, and inordinately expensive to boot. The best thing people can do on Mars is contaminate it.

The uselessness of humans in space is something that has been vigorously argued by a lot of people, notably Robert Park, former director of the DC office of the American Physical Society.

lead to unimaginable technological advances,
and as such will help us fix our problems at home as well.

No, not really that either. Human space programs so far have lagged technological advances pretty severely and there’s no reason to expect that to change.

Yes, I’ve read all the noodling about what can be done and how. It all ignores costs. Just because you can do something does not mean you can afford to do it. Solving the transportation problem is hard, but it is by far the easiest part of the problem. Methane can indeed be produced by water and CO2, for example, because that’s what you get when you burn methane. That requires a substantial amount of energy input, which is going to be very slow going with current solar technology and the added distance from the Sun. And you do need to haul all that bulk cargo in the form of solar cells. And there isn’t that much CO2. Most of the Martian atmosphere is CO2 but it almost doesn’t have an atmosphere. Are you going to get it from the south polar cap? Then you’d better live there because there’s no transportation network. But you can’t live there because that’s not where the water is.

The thing that has always bugged me about these sorts of arguments, and similar arguments involving water on the Moon, is that (a) they assume energy is free and (b) they assume you can spend the same resource on several things without any of them impacting the other. There’s only so much CO2, it isn’t very much, and you can’t spend it on both agriculture and methane. The situation with nitrogen is 100 times worse.

Look, if we can’t manage our current biosphere (and we can’t – even with the Paris accords, we are headed for catastrophic climate change) then we are unlikely to be able to create a new biosphere and then manage it better.

I think it is a cool idea. That’s not the same thing as feasibility. If people want to waste their money on it, fine. After they go bankrupt, someone with some sense can make a go out of what is left. They can be the new Union Pacific – involved in one financial scandal and two panics before finally going bankrupt, assets bought up by Jay Gould for a song.

But at the end of the day, whatever money you want to put into this boondoggle – put it into constructing renewable energy sources here. THAT is an existential problem. With this planet on its current path, even if you could con someone into going to Mars, the endeavor is going to fail, with certainty. No one is going to continue funding it when life here is impossible.

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Unless it is a completely self-sustaining colony, it will contribute nothing to “the survival of the species”. Without support from Earth, non-self-sustaining Mars colonists are dead shortly after whatever hypothetical disaster trashes Earth.

We are currently unable to send a live human to Mars, but this may be a solvable problem within a human lifespan. Colonising Mars is another order of magnitude more difficult than that. Making it a 100% self-sustaining colony is another order of magnitude over that.

Self-sustaining human Mars colonies are, at best, several centuries away. And largely pointless (apart from “it’d be cool”) until then.

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If it comes to that, we can’t reliably get to Mars by throwing money. Yet.

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if we accelerate the money fast enough it will generate thrust. railguns with pocket change should work.

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The only way to get to a self-sustaining colony is to go there with a non self sustaining one and figure out what all the problems are and solve them. It can’t be planned in advance, would never get done that way.

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Elon Musk thinks differently, and he thinks it’ll only cost 200k per person (spread over the length of the entire program).

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Space is not an appropriate environment in which to rely upon the power of positive thinking.

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It sounds like you haven’t really researched this all that well, you keep saying things can’t be done, then I tell you how they can be done, then you pretend like you’ve known that all along.

The financing is definitely one of the biggest hurdles, the first phase, developing the technology to get there is within the reach of Spacex without external investment, they’re already finished a large chunk of it. The problems will come when it’s time to build the fleet, as well as the design and implementation of the colony itself. A single typical government or corporation isn’t going to pay for this obviously, it’ll have to be a public/private partnership, Musk is planning on spending his entire fortune on this for a start. It’s certainly achievable. Like I already said, I’m sceptical about his time frame, but aside from that it’s well within our capabilities.

Robotic spacecraft/rovers are good for very well defined problems, and even then they often only manage to complete a certain percentage of their experiments, and if something goes wrong there’s not much you can do to fix it. They’re good for basic science, though an actual human would still do it far better than a probe. The kind of technological advancement required to bootstrap a self-sustaining interplanetary civilisation it cannot be achieved by probes, it’s many orders of magnitude too complex to design all in one go and be implemented by unthinking machines, it needs to be steady incremental progress with people failing, and finding solutions. The only thing that would change that is general AI, which doesn’t look like happening any time soon (unless it takes us by surprise, which is certainly possible).

You’re wrong about human space programs lagging technological advances as well, the space race was a massive boon to technological progress, then it basically sat there and tinkering around the edges for decades, it got far too obsessed with safety and certainty, we need to get back to the initial rate of experimentation and success.

You’re wrong about the viability of the propulsion factories as well, they’ve all been pretty well worked out in theory at this point (including the payload capacities to get everything over there). You’re totally wrong that there’s no water ice on the polls, in fact that’s where most of the water ice is. You’re also wrong about the abundance of CO2 and the ease at which it, and other gasses can be extracted from the environment (they don’t need to create the fuel very fast either, there’s a 26 month window between transits, and they need far less fuel for the return journey). Also wrong about the power requirements to do all of this, solar energy is an incredibly stable source of energy on Mars, the distance is mitigated by the thin atmosphere (no clouds to speak of, though there is a uniform amount of dust, but the uniformity is preferable for steady power generation), solar cell efficiency has also been steadily increasing - this mightn’t be enough for the long term, but they’ll have nuclear for that. All of this stuff is going to be worked out by initial unmanned missions to test the technology. It’s not going to be easy, but they’ll learn a lot from the process of simply attempting it, even if it was a failure it would still be worthwhile.

EDIT : made a correction re solar power

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Positive thinking isn’t the only thing we have to get the initial colony off the ground though, we’ll only go if it can be demonstrated that we can actually go there and come back. The positive thinking is only required when looking to a self-sustaining future.

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I see your fiction and raise you reality:

A crew of 26 loses their ship to pack ice off the Antarctic coast, spends a year and a half camped on an ice floe, then several months sheltered under an upturned lifeboat on a freezing beach with nothing but raw meat to eat. Despite being underprepared and in incredibly hostile conditions, everyone survived.

And that’s to say nothing of Scandinavian explorers like Amundsen who actually had their shit together. When I read about the conditions that Martian explorers will have to face I always think, we’ve done it before. Shackleton’s expedition to traverse the continent of Antarctica had no other purpose than to do something that had not been done before (England still being bitter about losing the race to the South Pole), with a reasonable risk of death (again, the doomed South Pole expedition still fresh in the memory), and it had no shortage of applicants.

All evidence suggests that small isolated communities are the historical norm for human beings, and may in fact be healthier for the psyche than large cities, where feelings of malaise and isolation are surprisingly common. You know everyone and everyone knows you, and life is given meaning by the fact that the people around you depend on you for their survival. I would cite the popularity of the fantasy portrayed in survivalist shows such as The Walking Dead as evidence that shared hardship is something that many people find lacking in their modern lives.

It might be hard for those of us who have grown up in a time of plenty to grasp, but the human is by nature a brave and hardy animal. Understand for example that most of the people living in the Calais Jungle are there by choice; they have every right to declare themselves as refugees to the French government, but they don’t. Instead there are people who have chosen to live there for years on end in abject conditions, having left behind relatively comfortable lives and with thousands of euros still in the bank. Whatever else that is, it shows that there is an abundance, indeed a surplus, of the kind of determination, spirit and perseverance that would be necessary for any kind of success on Mars.

We’ve done it before, and the only reason the “Heroic Age of Exploration” ended was because we ran out of terra novum. All we need is someone to supply the boats and we’ll do it again. I find it weird the people arguing here that it will be difficult to find funding. “Crazy people like Elon Musk” is a valid answer.

As for “fixing the Earth’s problems first,” I don’t think it works like that. It seems like the most pressing problems are about politics and high-level cooperation, not the sort of things that can be solved unilaterally by a crazy cash-man. Typical philanthropic-billionaire projects like curing cancer or solving death would possibly put us in an even worse spot right now. If we’re all going to work together to stabilise the planet, then grand projects that capture the imagination and inspire people to look beyond their own lives and see themselves in the context of humanity’s long-term future might actually have a significant impact, beyond the usual trickle-down effects of giving engineers a pile of money and a fun problem.

We went to Antarctica because “it’d be cool,” but research since conducted there has contributed a great deal to our understanding of Earth’s past and present climate. If we manage to pull ourselves out of our current death-spiral in time, it will be in part thanks to the efforts of dudes like Shackleton, who basically just wanted to kickflip over a continent.

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So far, the only thing that has advanced human technology more notably than manned space exploration has been Total War.

I know which one I prefer!

Caze is correct about the radiation hazards. It’s essentially a solved problem. The remaining issue related to the radiation is psychological; not all humans can tolerate living forever under seven meters of soil. Some folks simply aren’t going to be able to live on Mars (or in space, for that matter, or at the bottom of the sea) without major advances in our understanding of the human mind.

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This makes me wonder why Antarctic research bases aren’t entirely populated by robots. Show me a robot made of self-repairing tissues. Show me a robot that can react intelligently in real time to unforeseen circumstances. I think in the long term (supposing there is a long term) that digital AI and autonomous robotics will go the way of steam power in favour of advanced genetic and bioengineering techniques. The advantages of biological organisms are fundamental, and insurmountable to prefab systems, for which the graceful degradation required to function indefinitely in adverse conditions is a seemingly intractable problem.

Show me a robot that’s this fuckin’ badass:

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Also, consider Nansen’s Fram expedition…

This boat was deliberately frozen into the ice, so it would drift with it close to the North Pole. The expedition had 12 people, with enough supplies for four and a half years in a boat 127 ft x 30 ft.

The 20-year old Roald Amundsen wanted to go too, but his mum wouldn’t let him. Most of his later survival stories are on the same scale. Musk might consider sending a crew of Norwegians - they seem to have the mindset for this sort of thing.

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Nansen! I wanted to mention the Norwegian madman who got himself deliberately stuck in ice for a couple of years, but I could only think of Amundsen. Thanks! :smile:

The same boat used for Amundsen’s South Pole expedition. Makes a case for Musk’s reusable spacecraft.

Totally. Somehow I feel like Icelandic people would be a good fit too. They’re already living on some kind of moon colony.

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I don’t say things can’t be done. Clearly, all this can be done. A lot of things can be done if you throw enough money at the. We could switch the entire planet from fossil fuels to solar and wind in five years. All it requires is money. Money to move the workers from, say, Africa to Europe and the US. Money to train them. Money to build factories to churn out hardware. Money to rebuild the electric grid.

I regard that and Martian colonization as equally likely. You can’t make a business case for it as there is no clear return on investment. At least Union Pacific got free land if it put rails through it. Only a few governments can spend that much money and not expect a return on it and they have better things, at least as governments see matters, to do with that money.

Robotic spacecraft have been essentially the only source of scientific discoveries in spaceflight for decades. The ISS doesn’t produce much as they spend most of their time maintaining the systems needed to keep them alive. You’re also assuming that technology stands still while colonization advances when the likelihood is the opposite. The ISS has already demonstrated that humans in fact do not do it better. They just do it far more expensively. Humans contaminate their environment, cause unwanted vibrations, load up the spacecraft with life support that limits the room for scientific equipment, and spend the great bulk of their time not doing research.

Quite a lot of people disagree with you on AI, but in any case that already is not needed for robots to do more better than people.

Quite a few economists have looked at the impact of the space race in the years since. They’ve concluded that it benefited from technological changes that were already under way but its economic impact was primarily in terms of jobs created.Because of the long lead times needed for design and construction, every spacecraft we’ve ever flown used technology that was ancient by the time it actually got into space. My desktop computer could compute rings around those used on the shuttle, for example.

When you say “far too obsessed with safety,” I assume you mean it should be less obsessed? Then you’re talking about an experimental venture, not a commercial one.

I didn’t say there was no water ice at the polls [sic]. There is water ice, but not at both poles.

The Martian atmosphere is indeed mostly CO2. But the entire atmosphere is only 1% of Earth’s, and somewhere around 16% of that freezes out during the Martian winter. I don’t question the viability of fuel factories. I question the economics. And I question the same issue as with Lunar water. You can do a lot of different things with it. But everybody who has a theory of what you can do with it assumes no one else is using it for something else. So after everyone has done everything the need to do, the resource budget has been spent five times over.

Frankly, if someone wants to spend that much money on a problem, spend it on population control and sustainable energy. Those problems can actually be solved for the benefit of everyone, not just a handful of people who want to go die in an igloo.

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And will. The money, we have.

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Actually, I’d say doing that is far less feasible than creating a Mars colony. We could switch the planet to nuclear power if we threw enough money at it though.

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