Mars, interestingly, was just determined to have a core almost identical to Earth’s as I understand it. This is not the sole determinant of course - you still need enough volatiles, enough gravity to maintain a hold on the lightest elements across billions of years, and tectonics to keep refreshing the atmosphere. Unfortunately for us all, Mars has none of those. There may be other significant factors as well.
I've seen increasingly credible arguments that you also need a large satellite. To stabilise the planet's wobble. And, more importantly, create the sort of tidal cycles that prompt RNA worlds in the lab.
Where can I read more about the tidal cycles' influence on RNA synthesis?
Without tectonics, is terraforming Mars even possible as a long term solution? This "Mars colonization" strategy seems like a pipe dream, no?
The lack of tectonics would only be a problem if you want your terraforming to be 'one and done'.
If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort, it's simple (but not easy). Eg you can use satellites to spin up an artificial magnetic field to shield against solar wind.
However, I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch (eg out of asteroids), than to go down another gravity well. You can spin them for artificial 'gravity'. And you can situate them close to earth where logistics of resupply and communication and trade are much more favourable.
Otherwise, Mercury is the planet to colonise, not Mars.
Mercury gets extremely hot in the sun, and extremely cold at night. So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like, including a comfortable 20C.
(Otherwise, even on the surface it's easy to get comfy temperatures, if you bring retractable parasols. Just don't expect to stroll around outside the base.)
Mercury has the benefit compared to Mars that solar power is extremely plentiful.
It's worth mentioning that one of the more sane ways to terraform a planet is to redirect specific comets to crash into the planet. It would be "free" in the sense that redirecting an orbit is already actively being studied by NASA for planetary defense reasons. To actually terraform a planet in this method would be unreasonably affordable compared to anything else I've ever heard.
edit: Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets. And I suspect people would feel a bit happier living on the surface of a chilly Mars than to become mole people on Mercury, even if it is easier. Maybe summer and winter homes?
I didn't think reasonable really has a definition here. The rendezvous with these comets will take centuries or millennia even if we can get out there and kick them the right way (which is much harder than arranging a miss). Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition. Who/whatever we're preparing the planet for probably wouldn't be "people" anymore. :)
> Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition
The methods we could realistically launch into in our lifetimes would take thousands of years, not millions (but also not hundreds) [1]. Projects of these timescales have precedent in human history, usually with a healthy dose of religious zeal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars
My impression was that pulverized rock/iron is not actually "soil", so after forming the atmosphere you need lengthy biochemical processes playing out on the surface. I admit though, I don't know too much about this.
> pulverized rock/iron is not actually "soil", so after forming the atmosphere you need lengthy biochemical processes playing out on the surface
We're already working on crops that can grow in lunar and Martian regolith [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4146463/
I think that we should consider "the future". Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year.
They'd think you daffy.
Now beyond that, ask them to produce any manner of modern device with the precision and high consistency we have. Again, they'd think you mad, and think that such was impossible.
Yet here we are.
The next stage in our development via LLMs is not about AI helping humans. It's about robotics. Automated assembly. Robots (not Androids) able to interact with the environment and able to problem solve akin to say.. a mouse.
Soon, entire factories will be entirely automated. Many almost are. We don't need Von Neumann machines to see this future, but we will certainly have robots capable of building entire factories, collecting resources and processing them, and further building machines to spec. And those machines will be able to self-drive, self-operat autonomously.
Anyone playing typical resource games knows about bootstrapping, but once in the asteroid field we're basically resource infinite. Building engines to attach to asteroids, mining asteroids, building factories to create more robots and engines, all of it will be automated.
We toil at self-driving cars, yet this same tech enables self-driving robotics of all types.
So I honestly think that once we bootstrap in space, this sort of thing can happen fast, fast, fast. Decades to send hundreds of thousands of ice-rich resources to Mars.
The soil? Ah, genetic engineering. Really, this is an entirely new field, and frankly is beyond the danger yet benefit of nuclear science. We have the bomb, yet we have nuclear energy and medicine. Well genetics can obviously be far more deadly, and research all over the world, and startups, are already working on employing bacteria and organisms as self-replicating machines to do our bidding.
The dangers are in our face, but oh well! So if we presume survival, then once an atmosphere is produced we can seed the planet with organisms which can survive on rock and yet work with a mania to process it. It's OK if we immediately have moss like grass substitute everywhere. As long as it's working its magic, we get continued O2 production, and we can always create a rabbit pet or something that licks moss to survive. Or are tasty.
My point is, there are indeed many barriers. But we need to view them with where we will be in decades, not where we are now.
> Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year.
To go off on a tangent: two centuries ago was the height of the first industrial revolution (at least in Britain). The first time in history when this actually became realistic.
The Industrial Revolution was the first time we had sustained, broad based productivity growth year after year (even if only around 1%, which is quite low by modern standards).
Weirdly enough, we can see sustained productivity growth in artillery and guns long before the wider industry.
Another weird connection: sometimes people look at a toy 'steam engine' that the ancient Romans had access to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) and wonder if they could have had an industrial revolution. But, to make a proper steam engine you need a lot more than just the right idea. You need a lot of metallurgy and precise crafting.
Specifically one thing you need is precision crafted cylinders that gas can expand in to move a piston. Well, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, European nations had just spent several hundred years locked in existential competition over who can make precision crafted cylinders that gas can expand in to move a bullet.
That is interesting.
I wonder though, if not it would have been possible to build stationary steam engines with Roman tech using oversized bronze castings for cylinders. Perhaps set in bedrock to give extra strength.
Weirdly though, electric generators in watermills would have been much more attainable - except nobody had any understanding of electricity.
Steam engines were stationary at first. They were used to eg drive pumps.
> Weirdly though, electric generators in watermills would have been much more attainable - except nobody had any understanding of electricity.
Yes, and proper dynamos were invented only quite a long time after batteries. (So called self-excited generators.)
And you have to compare the early bad electric generators they could have come up with against the gears and shafts they knew to transmit the motive force of the water over short distance eg to the mill stone.
You make a lot of good points. Including that the technology to do all that incredibly dangerous to develop - I still can't see a path to terraforming where in the end it's human people left to take pleasure in Mars.
I had thought due to the eons we'd simply have evolved, but even on shorter time frames there is the transhumanist possibility. When we can engineer rabbit that eats chlorine moss, I don't know what we're aiming for at all. "People" by then could have robust gut culture that just digests the regolith.
There's a difference between considering all this vs thinking it's realistic. It's speculation, as any forecast into the centuries ahead must be.
> Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets.
Multiple baskets is good, but why planetary?
We probably won't get hit by a planet-ending meteor any time soon, but who really knows? Good for that not to be our end.
Yes, so? You can have spinning space habitats, instead of needing another planet.
People would almost certainly prefer a planet.
Too many dickheads with a bright idea of putting nuclear warheads on submersibles with a dead man’s switch on this planet.
Even in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, Earth would still be a more comfortable and safe place to live than Mars.
It's like going to the gladiator pits to fight because someone was robbed and shot on the next street yesterday and you don't think your street is safe enough.
[dead]
> Too many dickheads with a bright idea of putting nuclear warheads on submersibles with a dead man’s switch on this planet
If we're nuking each other on Earth, I find it unlikely we wouldn't aim a nuke or two at that group's colony on Mars.
The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say hi.
> The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say hi.
Even then, Mars is colder than the Antarctic, drier than the Sahara, has lower air pressure than the top of Mount Everest, has soil poisoned like a superfund cleanup site, has no meaningful ozone layer, has no magnetosphere protecting against CMEs, has half our solar irradiance level, and occasionally has planet-spanning dust storms, so the bare minimum for colonising Mars must be able to survive worse than any possible thing we can possibly do to Earth and also some of the bigger rocks coming by to say hi.
Mostly agreed, though the dust storms aren't really that much of a problem, exactly because the atmosphere is so thin.
My understanding is the dust storms still block out a lot of sunlight, so even there a base needs something more than PV + overnight batteries.
A nuked Earth is still more habitable than Mars, even on their best day.
Wouldn't it be far easier and much more useful to colonize the ocean floor than other planets? It is, after all, 70% of the surface area that just sits there.
I think you'd be better off colonising the ocean's surface than the floor.
I mean, we can build space habitats, we don't need to settle planets.
> If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort
The Earth hasn't always been hospitale to humans, much less technological civilisation. Chances are, we'll have to do similar "maintenance" at home, too. (Easiest to grasp: deflecting asteroids.)
> I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch
This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g. One of the most useful set of experiments we could be doing right now, in terms of colonisation, is putting lots of rats and whatnot in tiny space stations and letting their life cycles play out.
Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausible than not ending up with rats and cockroaches.
> and rats will become super adapted to space
That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/
> That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too.
Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve.
And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.
Rats can be pretty tasty.
And: if rats can survive somewhere, it's a pretty small step to make it survivable for humans.
So we'll need responsible stewardship over Earth's Habitability? No problem!
> we'll need responsible stewardship over Earth's Habitability
This is just a semantic punt to "stewardship". (Why is habitability capitalised?)
typo. Also I'm being sarcastic.
> This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g.
Why? Just spin the thing.
> Why? Just spin the thing
Sure. Let's put rats in centrifuges in space and see if they can reproduce successfully. Maybe there is a coriolis boundary. Maybe something weird happens.
If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine.
But yeah, sticking rats in a centrifuge is probably a better first step than starting with humans.
> If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine
We don't know this! We don't know how (or even if) an embryo develops under the Coriolis force, or with a gravity gradient.
If you make it big enough, there's no discernible gradient and not much of a Coriolis force.
> So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like
It seems hard to believe that this would actually work, even though I understand why it should. Although you have to do the digging starting in extreme temperature conditions without an atmosphere.
The Moon has zones like you describe on Mercury, and is a lot closer to colonize. Lack of large magnetic field probably won’t matter as terraforming either is hopeless.
Yes, you can also do a similar strategy on the moon.
You can in principle create artificial magnetic fields. But yeah, you are better off just staying indoors most of the time under a big fat layer of regolith.
That is some out of the box thinking!
I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.
> That is some out of the box thinking!
Thanks. I'm just parroting some lines I read a decade or so ago on a website that I didn't manage to dig up again. (I wonder if it's still online?)
> I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.
Why? What are you afraid of?
First, night lasts 88 (earth) days on Mercury. So if you start digging at dusk, you have plenty of time.
Second, Mercury's daytime surface temperature is around 430C (~ 800F ~ 700K). We have plenty of materials, like steel, that can withstand these temperatures easily. Even aluminum only melts at 660C.
So you make a parasol out of steel and span it over your equipment. Important: you make the parasol just big enough to shade your equipment, but otherwise let it see as much of the sky as possible.
Mercury has no atmosphere. So during the day you normally have a small patch of the sky at around 5772K, the sun. The sun has about ~6.6 times the angular area on the sky as from earth. The rest of the sky looks as if it's about 3K in temperature, ie very cold. The effect averages out to Mercury's 700K surface temperature.
The parasol itself will attain the same average temperature as the rest of Mercury's surface (because it's exposed to the same conditions).
But for anyone in the shade under the parasol will replace a patch of sky at 5772K where the sun used to be with one at only 700K where the parasol now blocks the view.
If your parasol is supposed to cover more than just a single point with its shadow, than it needs to be big. From the perspective of each shadow covered point, the parasol will have a bigger angular area than the sun it shades.
So you not only replace some 5772K area with 700K, but also some of the previously 3K area with 700K. Overall, you can probably set up things so that you get something like a balmy 15C on average.
> I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.
To come back to this: Mercury has lower gravity than earth, so I expect that 'soil' will probably not be as dense?
Seems like Mercury could be a good opportunity for automated drones and research
Tectonics isn’t the issue
There would be little point in terraforming Mars. There’s plenty of places on Earth to terraform
The whole point of Mars (or any other second planet) is redundancy. If something happens to earth we have a backup plan, as a species.
There isn't anything that can happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars.
>The whole point of Mars (or any other second planet) is redundancy.
No. It's some combination of cowardice, greed and ego, by those involved.
You can bet your ass those guys are not thinking about saving the species. Lol. Furthest thing from their minds.
Solve the Earth's problems on Earth instead, no need to run off to Mars.
That's just kicking the can down the road.
> those guys
Who do you think are "those guys"? Talking Musk? NASA? All the people who have dreamt of traveling the stars the last 100 years?
Remember, we landed on the moon before Elon Musk was born. He's also not the first to talk about landing or living on Mars.
And it's not to hedge against us destroying the planet. It's to hedge against an asteroid or other occurrence we can't control.
Musk has a proven track record of using govt subsidies to fund companies to enrich himself immeasurably, and his Nazi turn proves that personal enrichment, not technological advancement, is what is at stake. I don't mean to be preachy but anyone who is providing support for the most racist and perfidious elements of society in Germany and the UK should be disavowed in the strongest terms.
Wow Musk really lives rent free in your head eh? My comment literally about the fact that space travel predates Musk's ambitions by generations, and y'all just double down...
Fun fact, the first person to mention colonising other planets is John Wilkens in the 17th century. I'm sure you'll find a way to connect that to Musk though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization
Are there? Most places on earth have an established environment. There are things living in some very hostile to human areas.
Yeah I don't think we could terraform large pieces of Earth without throwing a very serious wrench into things. The Sahara fertilizes the Amazon, right? So even a nearly lifeless desert isn't acceptable. Maybe the poles?
Agree. But my understanding is the main idea is Mars is supposed to be a "backup" for humanity in the event of a very-low-probability catastrophic event on earth (total nuclear war, solar flare, meteorite collision).
In our lifetimes, unlikely. Over the next 1 million years? Maybe.
I think people misunderstand this goal. It's not 'backup' as in, 'ok, Earth is toast - everybody go live on Mars now.' One of the thing critics get right is that in the overwhelming majority of species ending events on Earth, Mars would still be less hospitable than Earth would. For instance take a massive asteroid impact. It's not the impact that kills you, at least not most people.
But what would happen following a major asteroid impact is a massive amount of matter entering into the atmosphere and effectively blocking out the sun. This results in plantlife dying off which then results in the rapid death of everything on up the foodchain - we starve to death. Yet you'd still mostly be able to breathe the air, your blood wouldn't boil on atmospheric exposure, and so on - it'd still be a rather more pleasant place than Mars.
What Mars can offer is (1) a parallel civilization that can continue on and (2) a lifeboat to Earth. People can return, help reorganize systems of governance and restore order, rescue survivors, and generally get started rebuilding Earth in the case of a mass extinction event. "All" we need from Mars is for it to be relatively self sustaining. I say relatively in that it can provide for the basic necessities - food, habitation, energy, reproduction, and maintenance/repair/replication of those basic necessities. Everything else is a luxury.
And the timelines for that are far closer, even within our own lifetimes. I think this will become more clear over the next decade. China has generally been quite conservative with their space goals and overperforming, and their stated goal for the first crewed mission to Mars is 2033, and every 2 years afterwards to follow indefinitely, as part of a plan to establish a permanent presence on the planet. The first Starship launch to land on Mars will also likely be a game changer for people.
2033 is really not conservative estimate for crewed Mars mission.
It's simply a flyby, not a landing, which will likely happen in 2035 for them. NASA was laying out various plans for exactly this in the 60s, with a timeline of the first crewed flight to Mars somewhere between the mid 70s and early 80s. And it was completely viable. The only reason this didn't happen is because Nixon defacto cancelled human spaceflight in 1972, in part because he was worried that a loss of life in space would imperil his reelection chances. So we get to live in the timeline where space stagnated for decades.
The only fundamental tech we're missing is a heavier launch vessel, which we've already developed in the past - and have actively in development in the present via Starship. China is also developing their own super heavy vessels. But these developments taking 8 years is quite conservative. We went from practically nothing in 1962 (having only just put a man into orbit, and barely at that) when Kennedy gave his to the Moon speech. 7 years later in 1969 - we'd be landing on the Moon. And that landing posed far greater difficulties than just an extended flight, let alone when they were building from nothing, and we have all of this knowledge and prior experience to build from.
A Mars flyby?? With humans? I don't doubt it, but at the same time I can't imagine spending months in a ship just to look at your destination without ever getting out. Talk about cabin fever.
Haha, well depending on the exact ship they go on they'll probably have substantially more room than the ISS. That was the main motivation for things like people staying 370+ days on the ISS. And long before the ISS even existed, the USSR was also actively pursuing this. In 1988 Valeri Polyakov stayed aboard the Mir Space Station for 240 days. His first words after landing were, "We can fly to Mars." [1]
After that he spent a whopping 437 days on Mir (which had about 1/3rd the pressurized volume of the already claustrophobic ISS) to see how the human body would respond to long-term duration in minimal gravity. Upon landing back on Earth this time he decided to get up and walk from the capsule to his rest point (astronauts are normally carried/rehabbed due to muscular atrophy + dysfunctional balance/orientation, even for far shorter stays), making a point of the fact that he was just fine. Dude was just a complete badass. The USSR would have beaten us to Mars if they hadn't collapsed in 1991.
In any case, it's probably a good idea to do a flyby because there will be, with near 100% certainty, some thing things we hadn't considered and others that we simply were not aware of. By first doing a flyby and then a landing you increase the chances of success. And the people doing the flyby will probably be mostly the same people doing a landing a couple of years later - so it'll be more like "See you soon."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov#Cosmonaut_care...
Yeah, it's full-on fantasy. Why would we as a species waste time terraforming a planet proven to let its atmosphere evaporate into space? Why waste energy to drag materials from Earth there instead of spending the same energy and materials to fix whatever problems Earth has?
At least in a billion years we can expect we would be either extinct already from our own actions, or hope to be advanced enough as a species to move Earth's orbital path out a touch every couple millennia to keep us in the Goldilocks zone.
Maybe by then we can terraform the Mars by crashing a few dozen comets and detritus from the asteroid belt into Mars to keep the Martian iron core, add heat enough to keep it molten and spinning for a while, add enough mass to get the gravity about 9.8 m/s2, reboot a tectonic cycle, combine 2 satellites into 1 good one, and try to add water to the system overall.
You know, just a regular Tuesday for whatever species we evolve into.
> Why waste energy to drag materials from Earth there instead of spending the same energy and materials to fix whatever problems Earth has?
One of these is a challenge at the frontier, the other an exercise in stewardship. They attract different personalities.
I guess the argument is, that there is just some initial resource usage to get a self sufficient mars colony and all further development can happen without resource strain on earth
I’m of the opinion we’ll just do massive structures in space, lifting out of a gravity well just doesn’t make sense, if you can manufacture in space and we know there is a tonne of resources off plant in the solar system I don’t see why terraforming a plant is the smart play.
That makes sense, but it can easily take a century to get that production ready.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is preparing to start prepping Mars colonization in a few years.
I know, Elon's timelines always break. But his insane goals are also always reached after considerable delays.
My cat always comes when it's called. Not right away though.
I believe the TV show "The 100" experimented with this idea. The inhabitants of the orbiting colonies wait out the contamination of Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series)
AFAIK - of those, collision is the only one which could plausibly make earth less habitable than a substantially terraformed mars.
The Sun will get hotter over time and expand, eventually descendants will have to decamp to elsewhere, like Mars.
If humanity develops the need for "burner planets" then maybe we don't deserve to expand past our solar system...
It's funny that you're using the word "deserve". Based on whose moral framework? I'm not sure current moral frameworks on Earth would be against colonizing the Universe if it was possible.
Its not even about deserving it. How are going to maintain a terraforming project or build habitable orbital platforms if we can't manage keeping our natural habitat habitable?
Maybe projects like this would distract us from stupid tribalism ?
Maybe it would profoundly exacerbate preexisting inequality under the guise of betterment for "all" mankind.
distractions don't solve problems. "just do the projects" doesn't resolve the management issue anyway. the climate crisis is a result of our inability to coordinate mass actions on a planetary scale to avoid damaging our habitat.
Someone gets to choose who lives on these outposts.
Maybe if we worked together, we could actually use robots to do a lot of the initital work, then head over for fun when it's getting nice?
Once can dream I guess...
Not the argument. The elimination of life on earth can happen due to non human causes. An impact of the sort that created the moon would do the job.
We are the only known intelligent life the universe has ever produced. Anti-natal ecoism is a bit of a fallacy.
Read about the great oxidation event other commenters have mentioned. Biology doesn't so much care about an ideal of balance.
Our beloved natural balanced ecosystems are just an artifact of the fact that unbalanced systems change until they reach some equilibrium.
Thinking about wild scenarios is fun and sometimes even prudent.
But acting on it at this point is tragic premature optimization. Musk isn't a stupid person so I have to think in his heart he knows his story is more about PR and being seen as a visionary as something that will actually be done in the next thousand or ten thousand years. Even if there is some climate catastrophe that causes 99% of the population to die out and any civilization to collapse, the remaining 1% are better off on Earth than trying to spend their limited manpower to get to Mars, even if some crazy trillionaire has established a beachhead there.
As an analogy, it feels like some person living paycheck to paycheck and having only $20 to spare at the end of each pay period and saving up that money ... not to invest it in some way that improves their lot, but to hire a tax attorney to help them plan how to shelter $1B in income in case they win the lottery.
The crazy ones are the ones that get sh*t done.
Musk was initially written off initially as crazy for every one of his successful business ventures.
And it's his money to spend as he sees fit.
Walter, I never said he couldn't spend his money how he wants, so that really isn't a counter argument to what I was claiming. Personally, I think most people (Musk is just one) who thinks terraforming Mars is realistic have read too much science fiction and are more enamored of the cool Robinson Crusoe aspect more than it would really serve any purpose.
As for "every one" of his successful business ventures being called crazy, the first one was a dot-com online map of businesses in a given city. Did people say that was crazy? His next venture ended up getting acquired by Paypal, was that considered a crazy business? He invested in/took over Tesla -- I don't know if it was considered crazy or not at the time. SpaceX obviously is a great success. The brain control company -- we'll see. Grok -- nobody called that a crazy idea. Some of his other ventures, like hyperloop and the boring company, do seem more crazy but those escape your claim because they are in fact not successful. His solar roof company wasn't crazy, but it also isn't a success.
In short, Musk has no doubt had great successes, but there is no need to alter history to claim that at every turn he broke new ground when everyone else said it was crazy or impossible.
Agreed, and adding: Hyperloop wasn't original to Musk (other than name). RAND explored the concept in the 1970s, and there are further earlier concepts:
Look up Robert M. Salter at RAND:
"The Very High Speed Transit System" (August, 1972)
"Trans-Planetary Subway Systems -- A Burgeoning Capability" (February, 1978)
<http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html> PDF: <http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P4874....>
<http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html> PDF: <http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P6092....>
Similar / more: <http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/6107059>
All talk and no action.
Going to Mars isn't a new concept, either. There are probably a thousand scifi stories about such.
But Musk is the first to take action.
> Did people say that was crazy?
Nobody did it before.
> acquired by Paypal, was that considered a crazy business?
Before he proved it was profitable. BTW, every business venture I started was considered crazy by my peers.
> Grok
Musk was an early investor in AI.
The Boring Company is successful. It has found a profitable market boring holes for infrastructure cables and pipes.
People said him buying Twitter was crazy. Oops! (What annoyed me about that was I had some Twitter stock, and it was forcibly sold to Musk. I wanted X stock instead! Alas, it is private.)
I put my money where my mouth is. I've invested in TSLA and am a happy shareholder.
There is a long list of crazy ideas that businessmen took on, that became so successful everyone later thinks that those ideas were obvious.
Such as an internet phone. Like a personal computer. Like a Xerox copier. Like jet engines. Like a pencil with an eraser on the other end. Like interchangeable parts. Like the circular saw. Like electric power utilities.
BTW, I think Musk's biggest barrier to getting to Mars is his age. He's running out of time. He can start it, but I expect others will finish it.
What he's doing is freakin' awesome, and I wish for him (and humanity) to achieve it!
Musk is a visionary in the sense that he bought an EV company and took government contracts to mass produce NASA engine designs and launch military and civilian coms networks. Nobody has deeper pockets than Uncle Sam.
The "EV company" he bought consisted of an office and a desk and a kit car. There was no design, not even a plan.
If it was so easy designing and launching rockets for 10% of the cost, why didn't anyone else do it? Why did nobody else make reusable rockets? Rockets that could land on the launch pad? The rapid turnaround and cadence of launches?
Musk did what NASA was unable to do.
BTW, the Saturn V rocket engines were scaled up V2 engines. The essential bits were from the V2 engine - cryo fuels, turbo pumps, nozzles cooled by the fuel, boundary layer cooling, baffles to make the engine stable.
The Saturn V engines were lovingly built by hand. Musk's engines are mass produced.
NASA is a government agency, the US government made SpaceX happen by pushing polices to privatize various aspects of the space agency. I'm not denying the Musk is a good business guy, but his imaginings have nothing to do with the actual work that happens at the companies that he owns. Mars is a neat sales pitch, but SpaceX makes money from mass producing NASA rockets and selling launch services to starlink (and the military version of starlink). The "vision" there is landing a juicy government contract and agreeing to mass produce a proven rocket design.
That’s an incredibly good analogy.
If you want a backup, why use Mars?
You can create habitats from scratch, or you can have colonies on the moon.
Even Mercury is better than Mars.
Lots of reasons for this. The Moon is a complete hell hole - 2 week long nights, night time temperatures that drop to around -200f, daytime temperatures in excess of 250f, extremely low gravity (to the point that one might expect a higher impact of the countless health consequences of 0g exposure on humans), minimal material resources and so on. There is also no atmosphere at all which complicates landing, means even the smallest micrometeorite will impact the surface (which is why the Moon looks like it does), and contributes to highly dangerous particular dust everywhere - much worse than than on Mars.
By contrast Mars is bizarrely similar to Earth. It has almost identical axial tilt resulting in a similar seasonal cycle, a similar annual cycle, extensive mineral resources, some atmosphere simplifying landing - providing protection from meteorites, etc. It has temperature ranges that, like Earth, vary wildly due to seasonality, but are locally consistent. For instance on a summer day near the equator, it hits about 20C on Mars. If not for the blood boilingly low atmosphere, it'd be down right comfy.
Anyhow, kind of a rambling disorganized comparison because I'm in a rush - but yeah, Mars is almost eerily Earth like. In that if life was a video game Mars would be the kind of obvious 'next level', to a degree that makes it feel scripted. Even some chemical reactions like the Sabatier Reaction [1] (Martian atmosphere + electrolyzed ice => methane + oxygen + water) just feel too convenient to be true, but they are.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
> Lots of reasons for this. The Moon is a complete hell hole - 2 week long nights, night time temperatures that drop to around -200f, daytime temperatures in excess of 250f, extremely low gravity (to the point that one might expect a higher impact of the countless health consequences of 0g exposure on humans), minimal material resources and so on.
Dig a bit, and temperatures even out. Same as on Mercury.
About the light: you are going to stay indoors anyway.
About gravity: spin! You can build something that looks a bit like a giant funnel, spin that, and live on the inside. If you set up the speed of rotation and degree of incline right, the centripetal force and the moon's gravity will combine to point perpendicular to the surface you are standing on.
You are right that Mars has some interesting peculiarities. But the logistics are a million times harder than getting to and from the moon. So good luck getting a rescue mission there.
In addition, I would advice against contaminating Mars with earth life, if we still want to study it, and figure out if it ever had life. (The moon is and always has been almost certainly sterile.)
With radical ideas it's likely that anywhere can become habitable - there have even been ideas to create floating cities in the thick atmosphere of Venus. But places that require esoteric and ever more complex solutions are obviously less desirable than those that don't. And Mars is 100% 'easy mode' in terms of our first colonization outside of Earth.
Yes, the higher atmosphere of Venus is surprisingly habitable. You call Mars 'easy mode', but you can fill (acid-proof) balloons with Earth atmosphere, and they will float in Venus at more or less exactly the spot that has a nice temperature and pressure for humans to enjoy.
> Even Mercury is better than Mars
...how? It's further. It has no atmosphere. There is no water or carbon.
How is Mercury further? On average it's the closest planet to earth.
Mars's atmosphere is pretty useless for humans.
> How is Mercury further?
Δv, the only metric that matters. Mercury is at 5.5 km/s from LEO, vs 3.6 km/s from LEO for Mars.
To be fair to JumpCrisscross, he never claimed Mercury was further away. It's just "further".
> Mars's atmosphere is pretty useless for humans
Oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen make up 95+ percent of a human by mass. Mars has all four, the first three in the atmosphere.
It's just going to be come a place for the ultra rich Musk types to seclude themselves from the rest of us so they can finally build their dream libertarian paradise that is "totally self sufficient" and absolutely, we assure you, not reliant on earth in any way.
Heh, apparently ChatGPT gets touchy when you explore creative ways to make earth less inhabitable than Mars, especially around pathogens and grey goo
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> There’s plenty of places on Earth to terraform
I'm going to steal this.
If we fuck up terraforming Mars, it's bad, but not ecological collapse level bad. On the other hand, we're already fucking up terraforming Earth.
Was it ever anything else then a dream?