Mark6
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Also unrealistic, because as GlennB pointed out, there is no known way to land all this stuff on Mars. MarsDirect people simply sweep this problem under the rug.
Human colony on Mars in 2023?
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Justin39640
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If anything is going to go out and colonize into space it will be exobots, and ships perhaps carrying the seeds of the earth on board ready to incubate when planets are terraformed / made inhabitable enough to plant.
As much as this stuff (human exploration of space etc) is exciting and fantastic to ponder on and create stories about, it simply isn't viable as something which can actually happen.
If only so much fantastic thought could be put into what can be achieved with technology which can benefit everyone equally was invested into what we actually have got (the planet earth) the changes which could actually come about are even beyond these wild dreams.
As much as this stuff (human exploration of space etc) is exciting and fantastic to ponder on and create stories about, it simply isn't viable as something which can actually happen.
If only so much fantastic thought could be put into what can be achieved with technology which can benefit everyone equally was invested into what we actually have got (the planet earth) the changes which could actually come about are even beyond these wild dreams.
Justin39640
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(bangs head on desk... Ouch! lol)
The way you're coming off in the thread is that there's no reason to justify the expense to solve the problems so we should never try to. And I disagree. I think it's worth it to get the ball rolling sooner than later. 50 years ago we figured out how to send men to the Moon. Mankind is long overdue to set the bar again. IMO
Justin39640
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Oh, and if we're gonna go there... don't let the Russians design, build, launch, or control it. lol
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/programmissions/missions/log/
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/programmissions/missions/log/
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(bangs head on desk... Ouch! lol)
The way you're coming off in the thread is that there's no reason to justify the expense to solve the problems so we should never try to. And I disagree. I think it's worth it to get the ball rolling sooner than later. 50 years ago we figured out how to send men to the Moon. Mankind is long overdue to set the bar again. IMO
I still don't know why we're doing this. Aside from avoiding having all of our eggs in one basket (which I think has been adequately shown to be an insufficient reason), what is the purpose of a colony on Mars?
Honestly I am very much for space exploration. If you want to send science missions to mars to look for life, to understand martian geology and climate, etc. I'm very much for that and think that we should be willing to put considerable investment into that.
I'm also very much for space exploitation: if there is some viable plan to make use of off-earth resources I say let's go for it. Even if the investment need to be extremely long term before it pays off, and even if the technology has not yet been developed, I'm for that as well.
The problem is I don't see how a Mars colony ever pays off.
Want to send people to Mars as a proof of concept? We already did that with the moon. Now it's time to move beyond proof of concept and actually get things done.
Justin39640
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Ok. I'm not suggesting that we go to Mars with the primary reasoning being to help avoid extinction. I'm saying by developing the skills and technologies needed to have large colonies (many centuries from now) a side benefit would be having our eggs in more than one basket. Nudging potential problems with lasers, mirrors, etc is probably the best solution, colonies on Mars (and elsewhere) or not.
I also don't agree that the dangers from asteroids are imaginary or as infrequent as some here are suggesting. Someone said it's been over a billion years since the last impact big enough to take us out. Tell that to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 250 million years ago one wiped out 90% of life on Earth. On average, we get hit with a substantial asteroid every 100k years. We're long overdue and woefully unprepared. We're pretty much defenseless right now. I'd rather have systems and contingencies well in place WHEN the situation arises. Not to have to scramble at a last ditch effort.
As far as a "colony" in the short term. I think I'd refer to it more as a research outpost. The technologies needed for such a trip by themselves could have an enormous impact on humans I would think.
So Justin39640, I see most of us are just not the ga ga visionary you are. If we nay say then we must not have a lot of faith in mankind. This thread is about a Mars Colony in 2023, nine years from now. If you at least read some of the opinions here you might be a little skeptical of 2023. Must I invoke the booby Raelians again and their lamebrain scam to divert a lot of naive peoples money into their "proof" of human cloning. This Mars project is right out of the Raelian playbook. Don't be duped and please give up on those annoying juvenile emoticons.
As much as I'm opposed to the Mars colony idea, most of my opposition is based on the Mars climate. Any sort of construction, repair, digging, etc. operation is so difficult (on a planet with no or ultra-minimal heavy machinery) and so risky (on a planet where nicked spacesuit will kill you, and one HVAC-operation error can kill the whole colony) that ordinary maintenance is barely possible. Operations which would be difficult on Earth---things like "locate nitrate and phosphate resources, mine them, and make fertilizer", or "smelt steel from ore and make a habitable pressure vessel"---are so far from reality that it's hard to take the idea seriously at all.
That changes a little if Mars isn't quite so harsh. Terraforming is great, but even a little terraforming might get you over my objections above. Construction/repair/mining work might be difficult-but-not-THAT-difficult on, say, a planet with a 500 mbar CO2 atmosphere and a subarctic continental climate---one where you can go outdoors with, say, a parka and an oxygen mask.
That changes a little if Mars isn't quite so harsh. Terraforming is great, but even a little terraforming might get you over my objections above. Construction/repair/mining work might be difficult-but-not-THAT-difficult on, say, a planet with a 500 mbar CO2 atmosphere and a subarctic continental climate---one where you can go outdoors with, say, a parka and an oxygen mask.
I also support work to deal with the dangers from asteroids. As I said, let's catalogue the near earth objects, and let's at least try some missions to divert the course of an asteroid (not necessarily by much, but a small shove as a proof of concept).
However, regarding the comment about it having been over a billion years since the last impact big enough to take us out: that poster was talking about human extinction. I suggest that we are much hardier than were the dinosaurs. We would have at least some advance warning, and there are already people living in places that are pretty safe from the direct affects of impact (see my example of submarine crews). Moreover, when it comes to dealing with the after-affects we are more resourceful than dinosaurs as well. It would take a lot to put homo-sapiens extinct. To destroy modern civilisation is another matter, however. And even a small asteroid strike could do enough damage that it's worth finding ways of preventing such.
That's a different issue than a colony. I can see some valid reasons for that. There's plenty of good science to be done on Mars.
Mind you, my bias is that I see our future in space as mostly un-manned, and thus grand schemes to put people on Mars, or elsewhere, just don't look to me to be worthwhile.
But there are some good arguments for manned missions. At least at present there are some things that we just can't do well with robots. A project with large enough goals will likely (currently anyway) require some manned presence.
Any idea of what would be required for that level of terraforming?
ETA I see that Mars' current atmospheric pressure is only 6 millibars, though it's about twice that in Hellas Planitia, perhaps that's the place to put a colony, if you were to try the terraforming approach?
Some other important details I'm seeing on wikipedia:
Which suggests a pretty crazy amount of CO2 would need to be added to the atmosphere.
We could add atmosphere by adjusting the orbits of comets and impacting them with the surface of Mars. Halley's comet (just the first one I could think of, don't know if it's an average size or reasonable candidate) has a mass of 2.2 × 1014kg. If I'm doing this right, the mass of Mar's current atmosphere is 2.5 x 1016 kg. Which means we've added a negligible amount (1%) to it's total mass from 1 comet.
If we want 50 times the pressure, I doubt we need 50 times the mass, but even if we only need to add 5 times the mass to Mars' atmosphere, that's 500 such comets. Maybe we've got bigger comets to choose from?
Hmm, this looks promising:
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Beelzebuddy
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Okay, glad to be on the same page. If you want to talk funding, there's a point of curiosity that I hope you'll satisfy for me. During the settling of the New World by the English, how much and how long of a trade imbalance did they sustain, as a fraction of England's GDP? Recall that the early colonies, especially Jamestown, were settled with the expectation that they'd find comparable amounts of gold as Cortez and Pizarro brought back, and/or a quick route to the Orient, neither of which were realized.
An interesting link, thanks for that. I'll draw your attention, though, to the number of times they qualify the problem with variations on "using existing capabilities." They aren't talking about any theoretical limitation, just the fact that no one's developed a viable landing approach yet. The article also describes several potential solutions - a heat shield would work, if we had a rocket big enough to bring it up in one piece; a parachute would work, but it would be the largest parachute ever; some kind of fancy new parachute might work, but we don't have it; or plain old propulsive landing would work too, if we sacrificed most of our payload for it.
Which still leaves it sounding like a real problem, until you remember that Mars Direct already involves building a sufficiently ginormous rocket, until you notice the article says companies are already shopping around designs for fancy new parachutes, or until you think about how Mars has ample resources for fuel and we're already planning to have a SSTO vehicle capable of returning to orbit and enabling the use of local fuel for a cheaper descent. Then it seems much less of a big deal.
The NASA specs put the lander development costs at a skosh under $4 billion. With our doubling, that's 8. Certainly Manning is describing an important, interesting problem that would be tough to solve with current technology. But is it much more than an $8 billion problem?
See, here's why I dislike arguing in these threads: it's a constant uphill battle against people who adopt the absolute worst interpretation of everything, and poison each well they come across. Do you have any evidence that proponents of the Mars Direct plan, which predates the 2004 conference that spawned GlennB's link by a full decade, are deliberately "sweeping the problem under the rug?" Or did you pull the accusation right out of your ass?
As do I. But it will pretty much require AI before unmanned platforms will demonstrate real performance, and given that AI is an even grander scheme than a Martian colony, it just doesn't look to me to be worthwhile to wait.
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Justin39640
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That's rude.
(see what I did there? lol) I'm ga ga if you're talking long term. In the short term, I'm not blind to the scope of the challenges and expense. A lot of people in this thread seem to think we should abandon any idea of manned space missions (past LEO) in the future. Manned mission proposals like this are the baby steps that lead to those grand visions of the more distant future. If we refuse to crawl, we'll never run.
I do agree, 2023 is pretty optimistic. I think it would probably take longer. At least it's something to shoot for. Then again, we got to the moon in a decade with archaic computers/hardware and a fraction of the knowledge we now possess. So who knows, with the right motivation and funding, it might be possible.
I'm curious: how likely a chance do you (referring to people here in general, not a specific individual) give this particular shot at a Mars colony to succeed? It seems like a very big leap to me -- we haven't even built a colony on something as close as the Moon, heck, we haven't even sent more people there since the end of Apollo -- and these people want to try not just going to Mars with people, but building a colony! It seems like such a huuuuge stretch, seeming like it'd try to skip over lots of intermediate steps or trying to race through them at breakneck pace (you have to R&D vehicles capable of reaching Mars with that kind of payload, have to R&D doing building on a body other than Earth, R&D any robotic technologies that would be required, etc.). What do you think?
Space exploration is great, but I think that this might be getting ahead of ourselves with jumping all the way to colonization that fast.
Space exploration is great, but I think that this might be getting ahead of ourselves with jumping all the way to colonization that fast.
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Justin39640
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Redundancy! And leave the nickel plating at home. There's a reason you only hire the top minds in the world to help design this stuff. Exploration is dangerous. It always has been. It's been said here before, people will line up around the block to volunteer.
I was also wondering, what about gravity? 40% of Earth's. That might make some operations easier? Any opinions? We fix stuff in zero G in a vacuum now. Anywhere else has to be easier to work than that.
theprestige
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I think the real long-term problem for Manned Mars enthusiasts is that robotic technology will keep advancing along with everything else. Every gain they make in manned mission feasibility will be paralleled by a gain in robotic mission feasibility. I suspect that between here and the Singularity, for any given point in our technological evolution, probots will always be the more cost-effective, less-risky option for Mars science missions.
Yeah, to be honest I think so too.
Justin39640
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I absolutely think we should be practicing for the real thing. You don't want to have to prove your concept when it really REALLY matters lol.
As far as being hardier, yes and no? While we're a billion times smarter, most of us extremely dependent on civilization to survive. Remember, those asteroids didn't kill all those species off by burning them to death, they died cause they were too big (as individuals) for the food supply during the resulting nuclear winter.
We can barely feed the world now. How do you get enough food and shelter for billions of people to survive for decades after? I feel a lot of people have the attitude of "everything's fine today so why should tomorrow be different?" I think that's foolhardy. If you have the means to avoid catastrophe in the first place, why isn't everything you have already thrown at it?