Human colony on Mars in 2023?

Justin39640 said:
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.
Click to expand...

And we're investing in "grand visions of the more distant future" why, exactly? I invest in the future, I'm talking about my grandkids, who I'll at least be alive to see a bit of, and get to know, and maybe even enjoy a few years of seeing them benefit from my investment, before I kick off. I invest in the future, I'm talking about my own "bucket list", or whatever you want to call it. Experiences I want to have before I die. What do I owe to unborn generations, centuries hence? Seriously. Sell it to me. Why should I invest in your grand vision?

The science fiction section of any bookstore is full of grand visions. In my experience they're just as satisfying as yours, and they cost a whole hell of a lot less. So why, exactly, should I invest in yours?

I mean, it's too bad the Vikings didn't invest in a grand vision to colonize the New World centuries ago. Why, if only they had!

...

... Why, if they had, none of them would be alive to see it today, none of us would be alive to appreciate it, and none of the people who were alive in our place would seem much like the Vikings who made their existence possible. So how much Viking blood and treasure should have been spent on that grand vision, rather than on more immediate and practical investments, with benefits to be enjoyed within one or two generations?

What did those Vikings, dead now for hundreds of years, miss out on, by not investing? An Internet that they would never live to see anyway? A manned moon mission they would never live to see anyway? Jennifer Lawrence, whom they would never live to see on a movie screen they would never live to see?

Didn't they have enough to deal with in their own place and time? And isn't that true for us as well?

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
 
Beelzebuddy said:
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.
Click to expand...
I guess we just disagree about the highlighted bit there.
 
Justin39640 said:
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?
Click to expand...

We're not talking about "billions of people" surviving for decades after. We're talking about communities of tens or hundreds. Hell, one community of tens or hundreds is enough. We're not talking about carrying one with business as usual, we're talking about avoiding extinction.

If a few dozen or a few hundred people surviving (long term) on mars is success, then a few dozen or a few hundred people surviving on earth is a much greater success.

As I said, we can farm food with artificial lighting. We can farm hydroponically. We can build underground shelters. We can preserve food long term. Dinosaurs couldn't.
 
mike3 said:
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.
Click to expand...

I agree. There's a lot to get accomplished first including a moon base at least. I think the primary reason for jumping right towards a long stay is the launch window (IIRC every 18 months) when the orbits of Mars and the Earth are closest to save the most time/fuel. At that point if you could build a habitat for 18 months of occupancy, why couldn't it be permanent but with new crews every cycle?
 
Regarding my previous post about terraforming:

We want a Martian atmosphere about 100 times thicker than it is now.

The total CO2 on earth as a proportion of it's atsmophere is about 400 ppm. This is about half man made. Because about half of man made CO2 doesn't make it into the atmosphere (much of it ends up in the oceans), this is also about equal to the total amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere by human activity since the industrial revolution.

The atmosphere of Mars is about 1/200th that mass of the atmosphere of the earth. The mass of earth's CO2 is about 1/2500 of the total mass of the earth's atmosphere.

Which means that if we put all the CO2 produced by human activity on earth since the start of the industrial revolution into the atmosphere of Mars, we'd increase the total mass of it's atmosphere by about 10%. Not enough to do much good at all. And that's what we've managed to do on earth where it's easy to build coal fired power plants, and we've got plenty of use for them.

Of course, I may have made a mistake in my arithmetic or unit conversion which could invalidate what I'm saying. But if that above is correct we need about 1000 times as much CO2 as has been produced by all of human industry.
 
Roboramma said:
We're not talking about "billions of people" surviving for decades after. We're talking about communities of tens or hundreds. Hell, one community of tens or hundreds is enough. We're not talking about carrying one with business as usual, we're talking about avoiding extinction.

If a few dozen or a few hundred people surviving (long term) on mars is success, then a few dozen or a few hundred people surviving on earth is a much greater success.

As I said, we can farm food with artificial lighting. We can farm hydroponically. We can build underground shelters. We can preserve food long term. Dinosaurs couldn't.
Click to expand...

I understand. It might hold it off a bit but I don't think it would avoid it. You fail to mention famine, disease, anarchy, etc. Like you said, not business as usual. That also implies lack of access to modern medicine and proper facilities. Pretty ****** with a world of death around you. No? I'm not saying it's impossible to avoid extinction, just unlikely lol.
 
Justin39640 said:
Redundancy!
Click to expand...
Why is it always so much easier to double the cost of the mission than to demonstrate benefits sufficient to justify the cost?

And leave the nickel plating at home.
Click to expand...
Unless it's a necessary part of the design, presumably.

There's a reason you only hire the top minds in the world to help design this stuff.
Click to expand...
And if the top minds in the world could be better employed solving some other problem? Why is designing redundant Mars Colony infrastructure the best use of their time?

Exploration is dangerous. It always has been. It's been said here before, people will line up around the block to volunteer.
Click to expand...
And if they're willing to invest their own resources, they can be my guest. I've long felt that manned space travel of any significance will be pioneered by wealthy hobbyists, not practical scientists or businessmen.

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.
Click to expand...
We fix things in low Earth orbit, with relatively cheap and easy access to all the industrial wealth and capability human civilization has to offer, and relatively cheap and easy access to prompt rescue if fixing stuff in zero G in a vacuum isn't feasible.

Take away easy rescue, take away easy access to civilization, multiply the cost a hundred-fold, and suddenly an atmosphere too thin to breathe and gravity half that of Earth's doesn't seem like such a big value in exchange.
 
Roboramma said:
Regarding my previous post about terraforming:

We want a Martian atmosphere about 100 times thicker than it is now.

The total CO2 on earth as a proportion of it's atsmophere is about 400 ppm. This is about half man made. Because about half of man made CO2 doesn't make it into the atmosphere (much of it ends up in the oceans), this is also about equal to the total amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere by human activity since the industrial revolution.

The atmosphere of Mars is about 1/200th that mass of the atmosphere of the earth. The mass of earth's CO2 is about 1/2500 of the total mass of the earth's atmosphere.

Which means that if we put all the CO2 produced by human activity on earth since the start of the industrial revolution into the atmosphere of Mars, we'd increase the total mass of it's atmosphere by about 10%. Not enough to do much good at all. And that's what we've managed to do on earth where it's easy to build coal fired power plants, and we've got plenty of use for them.

Of course, I may have made a mistake in my arithmetic or unit conversion which could invalidate what I'm saying. But if that above is correct we need about 1000 times as much CO2 as has been produced by all of human industry.
Click to expand...

I think it's more of an exponential process. as you begin to heat the planet it releases previously trapped CO2 (in ice) which helps to trap more heat, repeat for 100 years, plant a lot of trees and wait a LONG time before you can take off your oxygen mask.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. I just don't think we should wait around sitting on our hands until we find out which it is.
Click to expand...

First, just because we're not investing in your vision at the level you would like, doesn't mean we're sitting on our hands.

Second, it's not about whether we'll ever have AI that makes robots as good as humans for every application. It's about whether humans will ever narrow the gap of risk/cost/results to the point where it makes more sense to send a human than a resource-equivalent amount of robots.

I don't see that happening any time soon. Do you?
 
theprestige said:
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.
Click to expand...

I think the biggest problem with robotic missions is the communications lag. Especially with landers. By the time you find out on Earth that you need to make a split second decision it's already too late. (boom)
 
theprestige said:
Why is it always so much easier to double the cost of the mission than to demonstrate benefits sufficient to justify the cost?


Unless it's a necessary part of the design, presumably.


And if the top minds in the world could be better employed solving some other problem? Why is designing redundant Mars Colony infrastructure the best use of their time?


And if they're willing to invest their own resources, they can be my guest. I've long felt that manned space travel of any significance will be pioneered by wealthy hobbyists, not practical scientists or businessmen.


We fix things in low Earth orbit, with relatively cheap and easy access to all the industrial wealth and capability human civilization has to offer, and relatively cheap and easy access to prompt rescue if fixing stuff in zero G in a vacuum isn't feasible.

Take away easy rescue, take away easy access to civilization, multiply the cost a hundred-fold, and suddenly an atmosphere too thin to breathe and gravity half that of Earth's doesn't seem like such a big value in exchange.
Click to expand...

Yet thousands would volunteer and many of those top minds would be honored to work on such an project. No?

Also, by your reasoning, sending up the Apollo missions was a really bad idea? Same creek, no paddle.
 
Justin39640 said:
I think it's more of an exponential process. as you begin to heat the planet it releases previously trapped CO2 (in ice) which helps to trap more heat, repeat for 100 years, plant a lot of trees and wait a LONG time before you can take off your oxygen mask.
Click to expand...

How much CO2 is trapped in ice?

Here's some figures that might help:
During a pole's winter, it lies in continuous darkness, chilling the surface and causing the deposition of 25–30% of the atmosphere into slabs of CO2 ice (dry ice).
Click to expand...

That doesn't seem like enough to make much of a dent in atmospheric pressure (remember we're trying to increase atmospheric pressure by a factor of 100). Is there more CO2 somewhere else that we can access? 300 times more?

And:
The caps at both poles consist primarily of water ice. Frozen carbon dioxide accumulates as a comparatively thin layer about one metre thick on the north cap in the northern winter only, while the south cap has a permanent dry ice cover about 8 m thick.[4] The northern polar cap has a diameter of about 1000 km during the northern Mars summer,[5] and contains about 1.6 million cubic km of ice, which if spread evenly on the cap would be 2 km thick.[6] (This compares to a volume of 2.85 million cubic km (km3) for the Greenland ice sheet.) The southern polar cap has a diameter of 350 km and a thickness of 3 km.[7] The total volume of ice in the south polar cap plus the adjacent layered deposits has also been estimated at 1.6 million cubic km.
Click to expand...

Which gives us a total of 3.2 million cubic km of water ice. That's not a bad amount of water, but we're not going to be able to get much of it into the atmosphere as far as I can see. Best case it's liquid water with some water vapour.

3.2 million cubic km = 3.2 trillion liters of water. Which is 3.2 trillion kg of water. Still only about 1/1000 the total mass of Mars' atmosphere.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
I'll be happy to be proven wrong. I just don't think we should wait around sitting on our hands until we find out which it is.
Click to expand...

Computers and robotics become more versatile and more powerful every year. That's not sitting on our hands, is it?
 
theprestige said:
And we're investing in "grand visions of the more distant future" why, exactly? I invest in the future, I'm talking about my grandkids, who I'll at least be alive to see a bit of, and get to know, and maybe even enjoy a few years of seeing them benefit from my investment, before I kick off. I invest in the future, I'm talking about my own "bucket list", or whatever you want to call it. Experiences I want to have before I die. What do I owe to unborn generations, centuries hence? Seriously. Sell it to me. Why should I invest in your grand vision?

The science fiction section of any bookstore is full of grand visions. In my experience they're just as satisfying as yours, and they cost a whole hell of a lot less. So why, exactly, should I invest in yours?

I mean, it's too bad the Vikings didn't invest in a grand vision to colonize the New World centuries ago. Why, if only they had!

...

... Why, if they had, none of them would be alive to see it today, none of us would be alive to appreciate it, and none of the people who were alive in our place would seem much like the Vikings who made their existence possible. So how much Viking blood and treasure should have been spent on that grand vision, rather than on more immediate and practical investments, with benefits to be enjoyed within one or two generations?

What did those Vikings, dead now for hundreds of years, miss out on, by not investing? An Internet that they would never live to see anyway? A manned moon mission they would never live to see anyway? Jennifer Lawrence, whom they would never live to see on a movie screen they would never live to see?

Didn't they have enough to deal with in their own place and time? And isn't that true for us as well?

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Click to expand...

No one said you had to. You'll still pay your taxes! :p

Also, tomorrow is a lot closer to today than it was when that quote was written. :D
 
Roboramma said:
How much CO2 is trapped in ice?

Here's some figures that might help:


That doesn't seem like enough to make much of a dent in atmospheric pressure (remember we're trying to increase atmospheric pressure by a factor of 100). Is there more CO2 somewhere else that we can access? 300 times more?

And:


Which gives us a total of 3.2 million cubic km of water ice. That's not a bad amount of water, but we're not going to be able to get much of it into the atmosphere as far as I can see. Best case it's liquid water with some water vapour.

3.2 million cubic km = 3.2 trillion liters of water. Which is 3.2 trillion kg of water. Still only about 1/1000 the total mass of Mars' atmosphere.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I should have went to bed an hour ago lol. Great thread. I really do appreciate everyone's opinions whether or not I agree.

Too late/tired to remember or look it up but that was the basic gist of it. If you could do it at 100% efficiency, they say it should take about a decade. With existing technology (again, logistics aside) it would take 100 years before you could get it thick enough to plant vegetation and take off the pressure suit (still need oxygen masks).
 
Justin39640 said:
Honestly, I should have went to bed an hour ago lol. Great thread. I really do appreciate everyone's opinions whether or not I agree.

Too late/tired to remember or look it up but that was the basic gist of it. If you could do it at 100% efficiency, they say it should take about a decade. With existing technology (again, logistics aside) it would take 100 years before you could get it thick enough to plant vegetation and take off the pressure suit (still need oxygen masks).
Click to expand...

Wait, according to the numbers I gave you can't take off your pressure suit. So, how is that the basic gist of it? Where do you get the extra CO2 (or whatever you want to add to your atmosphere) necessary to get to the right pressure levels?

Maybe the pressure at the surface increases non-linearly with the increase in mass and we don't need 100x the current mass of Mars' atmosphere? If so, please explain or support that, and give me a number for the total mass we would need. I'm thinking it's still going to be at least 10x the current total mass, which does nothing to change my arguments so far.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom