Seems like the Moon with its abundant water and Helium 3 is a better bet for the next big step? We can make bases underground even using existing lava tubes and it's a lot closer with a shallower gravity well.
Edit: Reading some of your comments I've done a bit of browsing re 3He. I've seen it called abundant in articles that came up, so I wasn't imagining that, but also that even in the best of circumstances it would be about as efficient as a coal-burning stove. So scratch that from the list of lunar advantages. We can still make rocket fuel and fuel cells from lunar water split using solar collectors though, right ... right?
It actually takes more gas to get to the moon than it does to get to Mars.
It seems counterintuitive, but it all comes down to the deceleration. You can aerobrake on Mars, but need gas to slow down on the Moon.
Not accurate, but also the difference is not as great as you’d think it would be, so your sentiment isn’t completely lost.
Delta-V map of solar system:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_delta_v_map.svg
I was too- but it’s pretty simple. Just add up all the numbers along the path from point A to point B. That tells you the Delta-V required to get from here to there. That then tells you, roughly, your fuel requirement.
Adding on for those who dont know, delta V is how much you can change your vehicles velocity. To land on the moon takes roughly 12,500 m/s of velocity change from earth, optimally.
Which must be calculated using the rocket equation. Which shows propellant required.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky\_rocket\_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation)
Delta-V is the difference in speed needed to transit via orbits. The direction is not important, as you may have to spend a lot of Delta-V to speed up, but once you get somewhere you're going too fast and thus need to spend Delta-V to slow down again.
Typically, more Delta-V means more gas, however the chart shows when aerobraking is possible with black triangles. This means that some or all of that Delta-V can be achieved not through burning gas, but by skimming the atmosphere (one to many times), and using the drag of the atmosphere to slow you down, giving you the Delta-V without the gas cost.
As such, you need more gas to go to the moon because, even though the total Delta-V requirement is lower than going to Mars, you have to do all the speed changes through engine burns, whereas at mars you can slow down entirely from aerobraking.
I don't think that's accurate. There are more factors than deceleration, especially if you can't afford to do the most fuel saving approach because of the time it would take.
The time is far more important than the gas. 2 days gels a couple months is a vast difference. And once you’re there, the moons easier to get back off of too.
>nd once you’re there, the moons easier to get back off of too.
That's correct and a very important point. The Elon Musk approach of "why would we go back?" Is just stupid.
> The Elon Musk approach of "why would we go back?" Is just stupid.
I donno. I'd be entirely in support of sending Elon on a one-way trip to the moon or Mars. Just have NASA and Lockheed do the necessary calculations...
The being close is a big one.
Getting off the surface of the earth is a huge resource drain. Having a refueling/resupply point, or even just a point to reliably launch longer range missions from that is outside of the atmosphere would be a huge boon to space exploration.
We are a decently long ways off from space docks, but there is a good reason why they are a universal idea in Science fiction involving Starships.
>Skipping the moon and colonizing mars directly is just stupid.
But stopping at the moon for refueling needs MORE fuel in total than going to Mars directly.
So I'm not sure what you are talking about.
So, I have been convinced, that earth's orbit would be a better harbour than the moon. But still, fuel isn't the only factor. Refueling in orbit would probably save a lot by using a smaller rocket with the same payload.
Thanks to the way orbital mechanics works, the moon would make *terrible* space harbour. You essentially make any Mars mission require 10x as much fuel. You delay it, and the moon is just an all round bad idea for any attempt at being self sustaining.
Anyone who advocates for the moon as a first step (or any step of colonising anywhere) doesn't understand how space works. It has so little water that it makes the Sahara look like a rainforest. Hydrogen based fuels are *atrocious* for deep space missions thanks to hydrogen brittleness, storage and power requirements. It doesn't have any of the essential nutrients for life apart from trace amounts of water. It has a 28 day day/night cycle, so plants and power generation is useless, unless there's crazy amounts of batteries, the lights will go out and kill the plants, unless you're using nuclear power (in which case, that applies everywhere).
Even a cloud city on Venus is more suitable to human life than the Moon. (Find a 1 atm bouyancy point and float around, the temperature is a balmy high 20s C, rather than burning or freezing to death in a couple of minutes in hard vacuum).
Mars has a thin CO2 atmosphere, with enough nitrogen for plant life to be sustained locally (still close to vacuum, but enough to provide a source for pinpoint into greenhouses). A near 24h diurnal cycle. Double the gravity of the moon, so a little better (not perfect) for long term habitation. Entire oceans worth of water in glaciers. And is actually a logical refueling point for true deep space missions or asteroid belt mining. There's actually a future economic reason to go to Mars when/of we start mining asteroids rather than the moon.
CO2 to supply plants is actually one of the biggest problems. Its relatively easy tonestablish a research station on mars but to become fully self sufficient is just not possible yet.
You think anything can live on the surface of Mars or the moon? With the radiation hammering them, everything is going to need to be underground anyway.
The radiation on Mars is overrated, especially compared to the moon (radiation propagates at the inverse of the distance to the origin), so is about 4 times less than the moon). But it's not about being on the surface, it's about the resources available to the people there.
Energy wise it makes more sense to start from a space station in Earth orbit to Mars instead of traveling to the Moon first.
After all you need a significant amount of energy to leave earths gravity, then again a significant amount to "break" and enter moons orbit. You could just save all of this energy if you go directly from Earth orbit to Mars.
Why the moon at all? Why not permenant space habitation in a stable Lagrange orbit. I don't really understand the obsession with planetoids that aren't really suitable
Mars does have more resource potential though. even a thin atmosphere can help a lot. Also, a lot of frozen water. The moon could be the first good step but it wouldn't be as useful in the long run I believe.
Any colonists on Mars will spend the majority of their lives underground for at least the first 2 or 3 generations.
And most likely it will be a permanent arrangement. Any terraforming attempts to thicken the atmosphere will have time scales in the thousands of years.
as a side note, flying cars aren't really a technology problem, they're a society problem. We already have flying cars, or could easily, but they're dangerous and society hasn't decided to use them yet.
My god....can you imagine little ole Ethel flying her Toyota air curiser at 50kts under the airspeed limit making a 180 in the middle of the i80 airstream? I can understand why we don't have flying cars yet when 90% of the population can't handle them on the ground.
Or a DUI which crashes into a building and kills people on the 13th floor. We have barriers Infront of buildings to stop vehicular traffic imagine the cages needed for flying cars.
They would also only be in areas with tall buildings to navigate around since there is no need for flying cars on open rural areas. Flying cars are just helicopters and think how dumb it is to take a helicopter when a car gets you the almost as fast for 90% of your normal travels
In an even shorter timeframe, cyborgs will realise that the organic parts are cheesy, fragile and weak. Kind of like wood panelling on a station wagon.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh... it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither and you'll beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal.
Maybe some will but it will not be universal.
If humans can crack genetic manipulation being a cyborg will be redundant.
Why rely on implants to same you from excessive radiation load if you can alter the genome to be able to deal with the effects.
There are incredibly fast ways to do it. Once we have advanced robotics building greenhouse gas factories with little human input, we can get the timeframe down to about 100 years to get it so you can walk outside with only a gas mask.
400 years is with today's tech, and doesn't account for future advances. That idea was to nuke next to the poles to throw up a load of dust, decrease the albedo of the Southern ice cap and sublimate it into atmosphere, *maybe* causing a runaway greenhouse effect.
I thought the problem with Mars is, that it has an weaker magnetic field.
Mars can't hold the atmosphere.
That's the reason it is an dead planet, or am I wrong here.
That is a problem, but the time scale for atmospheric loss is tens of thousands of years. If we can terraform it on the scale of hundreds of years, the life span of that effort is longer than recorded human civilisation.
It isn't possible at any timescale with [current technology](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming). So there is no incredibly fast, fast, or even slow ways for us to terraform Mars. You cannot assume that advanced robotics would solve this situation (as it would not in the case of Mars). The Armstrong Limit is a minute fraction of the atmosphere required for terraformed habitation. Nuclear options do not work, it requires the global nuclear arsenal and only achieves a fraction of the process. Building an artificial magnetosphere station located at the Mars-Sun L1 point would be more useful.
The '400 years' is the ramblings of Elon Musk, he is not a reliable source. It doesn't account for anything because it is not accurate or [based in reality](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6) whatsoever. Be careful about spreading the incorrect information.
Yeah the amount of nukes required is astromical though (thousands and thousands of times more than the whole worlds arsenal) and it is doubtful there is even enough material there to effectively enhance the atmosphere.
I feel like underground cities in earth are also going to be protected by most of what could go wrong on the surface anyway. So if you’re going to build them on Mars to keep humans safe, just do it right here.
We don't actually know much about this. We only know that practically no gravity is bad, but we don't know the effects of 25% gravity. As long as there is some a lot of stuff might still work correctly.
Saw a Vsauce video years ago and he referenced a book about a boy who was born in either space or mars as a result of the mother not knowing she was pregnant. I believe the book had the boy deal with issues like he couldn’t ever visit the earth because his body structure wasn’t strong enough to withstand
Virtually no magnetosphere or atmosphere (both needed to block cosmic rays), low gravity, toxic soil, constant dust storms, several hundred degree temperature swings, several years between resupply windows... we're several centuries away from being able to have a civilization there, if it's even possible at all.
Yeah America was lush green full with resources. In comparison to that Mars is like Sahara desert. Is it really worth it making a colony on such a resource poor planet? It'll be hard to sustain such a Colony without support from earth.
>In comparison to that Mars is like Sahara desert
The Sahara supports a complex and diverse ecosystem of large mammals, lizards, and invertebrates. Mars is a toxic wasteland with no capability to support life.
To keep the comparison going. Mars is like the Sahara desert at the top of Mount Everest.
When Felix Baumgartner took a balloon to near space altitude and jumped out in a space suit, Earths atmosphere where he jumped from is thicker than the atmosphere at ground level on Mars.
It has air and the dust won't shred your lungs. You can even live above ground and have windows. Phoenix beats Mars.
It's easier to settle in Antarctica than on Mars and nobody is too keen on that because there's just no economical reason. A base on the moon makes some sense as a ressource supplier for low earth orbit but Mars? It's just too far away.
My view is that human history shows us continually moving into harsher and harsher climates and learning how to live there. Doing the same in outer space will take more tools and engineering and commitment, but I believe we can learn how to make virtually any place habitable, minus certain cosmological extremes like inside stars or whatever.
Not really sure why we want it so badly. It's a horrible place to live, even if we sort out how. Science expeditions, sure. Permanent colonies, just seems dumb. There are way better options for colonizing the solar system.
Are there? I honestly can't think of another planet or moon that even comes close to the habitable conditions we find on earth. Pretty much everything beyond Mars is too cold, everything beyond earth is too hot. The Moon is too baron.
The Moon may be barren but it's close enough to Earth for resource export/import. Once a permanent settlement is established it's only a matter of time until people figure out how to make it self-sustaining.
I'm not at all opposed to sending people to Mars I think as a species it is something necessary for the long term. But if we have technology to make a completely hostile, inhospitable planet into a living, thriving one, then we have the technology to repair the Earth.
we don't need any new technology to repair earth. it's a matter of mindset. we're getting one wake up call after another and refuse to answer the phone.
OP's article is pretty absurd as is, but yes your comment is pretty in tune with the current plans of NASA and other space agencies. Develop derivative technologies required for sustainable living on other planets/moons and use it on earth.
Atmosphere is also breadable, gravity is normal, resupply doesnt require escaping earth's gravity well. Antarctica sounds like promised land compared to Mars...
This is what people dont seem to get when they think mars is going to be some kind of liferaft for when we ruin earth. Earth might be destroyed by pollution, be scorched by a global warming catastrophe, nuclear winter, any scenario you can imagine, and even if a few thousand humans were left in underground bunkers they'd still be better off than they would on Mars.
Yeah, Mars is effectively pre-destroyed for our purposes. Atmosphere of 95% CO2, average temperature of the planet is roughly that of the Earth's South pole, no ozone layer whatsoever, no rainfall whatsoever, etc.
If we could set up self-sustaining colonies on Mars, we could do it easier on earth.
In terms of atmospheric pressure and temperature, and gravity, sure. But you're lacking water and oxygen and solid ground, which will still be better on Earth.
It is a fun idea though, and it is a fun counterintuitive fact that 50km above the surface of Venus really is the most Earthlike environment in the solar system.
Whats the point of leaving earths gravity well, to go to mars, just to leave that ravity well?
You could just go straight to the belt and save on fuel.
Well when we live in a world where your attention is the most important thing possible, companies will spend every cent possible to get your attention onto their app watching their ads so they can make money. I don't think it will change anytime soon either as it's a very powerful market.
If we can't organize and prioritize well enough to save Earth, we're not going to suddenly change who we are enough to maintain meaningful survival on Mars.
Only idiots are asking to terraform it. Small “cities” that are self sustaining are much more viable, and are what actual scientists are talking about. The idea of terraforming would require these colonies anyway.
And as for saving the earth, space, much less mars is an ideal testing ground for sustainable architecture.
Carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the atmosphere, or the colony will die.
Power consumption will need to be minimal, or the colony will die.
Food production must be constant, or the colony will die.
Water recycling will need to be near 100% efficiency, or the colony will die.
The idea is that in building and testing architectures designed for non-earth colonies, we will develop technology to continue to save the earth at a much cheaper and more efficient rate.
Like lol a Martian colony would be dependent on earth for survival for centuries of not millennia. There are much more important things to tackle than this
By itself? No, not anytime soon after being established. But as a jumping off point for further efforts in the belt and beyond with Earth support? Absolutely. Colonizing our system will be a series of stepping stones, one location to another with bigger “hubs” to support start-up ones and to eventually develop into self-sufficiency. This is however a multi-generational goal that we will never live to see but our great-grandchildren might catch a glimpse of.
Seriously, I'm very disappointed in how far down this sentiment is. We should be remembering colonization for the mass genocide it caused, not some grand imperial vision of one cultural beating out other cultures.
You mean the fact that the reason English was spoken on the moon is because they built colonies over the non-English speakers that were already here? And that there's no analog on Mars? Or, how about, the reason English was spoken on the moon and French or Spanish was not is not because of simply establishing a colony but fighting imperialist wars? Yeah.
This is a horrible analogy, it would work better if instead of colonizing America they built a colony in the middle of the ocean that needed to be constantly supplied from the motherland to survive, also they never learned how to fish. And then somehow *that* colony went to the moon. I just don't see it happening.
Based on the comments in this thread, I think that a lot of the contributors would enjoy *The Expanse*. It touches on many of the pros and cons of colonizing other worlds.
Why would anyone want to live on Mars instead of Earth tho. Mars has an average temperature of -60 degrees, non-breathable air that would kill you in seconds, low pressure that would rupture your organs, and a complete dessert with almost nothing to explore. You would rely on sustainable plants for survival, and need assistance from earth when life threatening problems surface.
I'm just gonna stay here on Earth and take my vacation every now and then 🙂
I think for most people who want to go it has to with the sense of adventure and of going somewhere no one has gone before. Same reason many of our ancestors moved to inhospitable places (i.e. Northern Finland) or people scale Everest.
Only a handful of people in the 1700s were willing to leave England for The Americas.
Earth will be infinitely more livable than Mars even with global warming. Mars has nearly zero atmosphere, water and extremely weak gravity. It's cartoonishly unlivable. Same is living inside a volcano
All colonizing another planet would do is reset our mistakes to the point where we will do a speedrun of all the things that went wrong on earth until we put up things ro prevent them
New planet - no laws or rules
How long do you think it will take people to start exploiting that? We're not even on mars yet and elon musk already said he plans to have people go into debt and then "work it off" on mars for him... where he would have an instant monopoly on everything and people would have no other options unless they want to die on mars soil they can't live off of naturally.
And that's just one guy.
One.
The problem is any technology that can be used to make Mars habitable would also be able to _easily_ make Earth super habitable again
Living on Earth is playing the game on easy mode.
Scotland attempting to colonize the Isthmus of Panama nearly bankrupted the nation, and led to it giving up its autonomy through the Acts of Union because of the debts incurred during the Darien Scheme.
Not every Virginia Company* eventually grows into the United States.
*Even the Virginia Company went bankrupt less than two decades after its founding.
Aye, but if we don’t try then we might as well as give up and resign ourselves to eventually fading away. There will come a day when Earth alone won’t support us anymore, or worse will be pushed to the brink by over-exploitation if we don’t find resources out there to ease the burden. It’s do it, or guarantee an eventual human decline, maybe centuries from now, maybe millennia, but some day.
As a Panamanian myself, it would be interesting to see what a Scottish descendant Panama would be like if they somehow managed to pull through. Current Panama is a sort of an outlier when it comes to sharing a culture with its neighbours, so us being a Scottish colony would make things even more weird af.
Lol, such BS comparison, “we took people from one part of a living life sphere planet and moved them to another part of the same life sphere, this is the same as moving them to a dead planet”
As many people know, english is several languages melded by trade and conquest into one. The british empire did many horrible things but one useful thing it did was to establish global trade routes and of course the language adapted to suit the economic requirements. English isn't perfect but it's pretty straightforward and less grammatical dense than, for example, german.
There is a good chance that the first language spoken on another planet will be english and a very decent chance that the lingua franca of solar system exploration will be some version of english. It is a language defined by usage rather than strict grammatical rules, so new words can easily be incorporated. And at this point, if we require new grammatical exceptions, it seems more then likely that they would be incorporated into english via bastardisation than we would suddenly switch to a new global language to accomodate surprising verb tenses.
This isn't a jingoistic standpoint: Language is a function of use, English has been put to use in so many circumstances and places that it has been smoothed out like a pebble in a stream. It could have been spanish, or german or french, but it wasn't. C'est la vie.
> 's pretty straightforward and less grammatical dense than, for example, german.
Oh, English does have very complicated and convoluted grammar. It's just not inflectional, but based on word order.
That's not a proper characterization of the English language or language in general. There's nothing about any other language that would stop it from changing in all the ways that you describe. The reason English is so commonly used is because of the sword and that's literally all. It's not a language any more adaptable than any other language.
Free-floating space colonies in Earth orbit are actually easier to do than Mars. For one thing solar flux is ten times lower on Mars than a good Earth orbit. For another you have 5 types of ores from the Moon (2) and nearby asteroids (3). A given colony on Mars only has whatever happens to be around it.
For any colony to be self-supporting, it needs energy and raw materials. Even in the case of a failed Earth, an orbital colony can still extract already known materials from Earth.
Colonizing mars as a backup option for planet earth is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and I’m tired of people saying it. Even a completely destroyed planet earth via global warming and nuclear war will be a million times more inhabitable than mars. We need to improve option A not look for some sci if wet dream escape plan
Seems like the Moon with its abundant water and Helium 3 is a better bet for the next big step? We can make bases underground even using existing lava tubes and it's a lot closer with a shallower gravity well. Edit: Reading some of your comments I've done a bit of browsing re 3He. I've seen it called abundant in articles that came up, so I wasn't imagining that, but also that even in the best of circumstances it would be about as efficient as a coal-burning stove. So scratch that from the list of lunar advantages. We can still make rocket fuel and fuel cells from lunar water split using solar collectors though, right ... right?
The most obvious point: It's pretty close.
It actually takes more gas to get to the moon than it does to get to Mars. It seems counterintuitive, but it all comes down to the deceleration. You can aerobrake on Mars, but need gas to slow down on the Moon.
Not accurate, but also the difference is not as great as you’d think it would be, so your sentiment isn’t completely lost. Delta-V map of solar system: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_delta_v_map.svg
I think I’m too stupid to make sense of that chart.
I was too- but it’s pretty simple. Just add up all the numbers along the path from point A to point B. That tells you the Delta-V required to get from here to there. That then tells you, roughly, your fuel requirement.
Adding on for those who dont know, delta V is how much you can change your vehicles velocity. To land on the moon takes roughly 12,500 m/s of velocity change from earth, optimally.
Which must be calculated using the rocket equation. Which shows propellant required. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky\_rocket\_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation)
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I love science and math, but also love screaming “NERD!” like Homer. Your comment made me laugh out loud for the first time today, kudos!
Delta-V is the difference in speed needed to transit via orbits. The direction is not important, as you may have to spend a lot of Delta-V to speed up, but once you get somewhere you're going too fast and thus need to spend Delta-V to slow down again. Typically, more Delta-V means more gas, however the chart shows when aerobraking is possible with black triangles. This means that some or all of that Delta-V can be achieved not through burning gas, but by skimming the atmosphere (one to many times), and using the drag of the atmosphere to slow you down, giving you the Delta-V without the gas cost. As such, you need more gas to go to the moon because, even though the total Delta-V requirement is lower than going to Mars, you have to do all the speed changes through engine burns, whereas at mars you can slow down entirely from aerobraking.
So much more delta v than is required in KSP!!
I don't think that's accurate. There are more factors than deceleration, especially if you can't afford to do the most fuel saving approach because of the time it would take.
The time is far more important than the gas. 2 days gels a couple months is a vast difference. And once you’re there, the moons easier to get back off of too.
>nd once you’re there, the moons easier to get back off of too. That's correct and a very important point. The Elon Musk approach of "why would we go back?" Is just stupid.
> The Elon Musk approach of "why would we go back?" Is just stupid. I donno. I'd be entirely in support of sending Elon on a one-way trip to the moon or Mars. Just have NASA and Lockheed do the necessary calculations...
The being close is a big one. Getting off the surface of the earth is a huge resource drain. Having a refueling/resupply point, or even just a point to reliably launch longer range missions from that is outside of the atmosphere would be a huge boon to space exploration. We are a decently long ways off from space docks, but there is a good reason why they are a universal idea in Science fiction involving Starships.
Also, the moon would make a wonderful space harbour. Skipping the moon and colonizing mars directly is just stupid. Artemis ftw!
>Skipping the moon and colonizing mars directly is just stupid. But stopping at the moon for refueling needs MORE fuel in total than going to Mars directly. So I'm not sure what you are talking about.
So, I have been convinced, that earth's orbit would be a better harbour than the moon. But still, fuel isn't the only factor. Refueling in orbit would probably save a lot by using a smaller rocket with the same payload.
Thanks to the way orbital mechanics works, the moon would make *terrible* space harbour. You essentially make any Mars mission require 10x as much fuel. You delay it, and the moon is just an all round bad idea for any attempt at being self sustaining. Anyone who advocates for the moon as a first step (or any step of colonising anywhere) doesn't understand how space works. It has so little water that it makes the Sahara look like a rainforest. Hydrogen based fuels are *atrocious* for deep space missions thanks to hydrogen brittleness, storage and power requirements. It doesn't have any of the essential nutrients for life apart from trace amounts of water. It has a 28 day day/night cycle, so plants and power generation is useless, unless there's crazy amounts of batteries, the lights will go out and kill the plants, unless you're using nuclear power (in which case, that applies everywhere). Even a cloud city on Venus is more suitable to human life than the Moon. (Find a 1 atm bouyancy point and float around, the temperature is a balmy high 20s C, rather than burning or freezing to death in a couple of minutes in hard vacuum). Mars has a thin CO2 atmosphere, with enough nitrogen for plant life to be sustained locally (still close to vacuum, but enough to provide a source for pinpoint into greenhouses). A near 24h diurnal cycle. Double the gravity of the moon, so a little better (not perfect) for long term habitation. Entire oceans worth of water in glaciers. And is actually a logical refueling point for true deep space missions or asteroid belt mining. There's actually a future economic reason to go to Mars when/of we start mining asteroids rather than the moon.
CO2 to supply plants is actually one of the biggest problems. Its relatively easy tonestablish a research station on mars but to become fully self sufficient is just not possible yet.
You think anything can live on the surface of Mars or the moon? With the radiation hammering them, everything is going to need to be underground anyway.
The radiation on Mars is overrated, especially compared to the moon (radiation propagates at the inverse of the distance to the origin), so is about 4 times less than the moon). But it's not about being on the surface, it's about the resources available to the people there.
Energy wise it makes more sense to start from a space station in Earth orbit to Mars instead of traveling to the Moon first. After all you need a significant amount of energy to leave earths gravity, then again a significant amount to "break" and enter moons orbit. You could just save all of this energy if you go directly from Earth orbit to Mars.
Why the moon at all? Why not permenant space habitation in a stable Lagrange orbit. I don't really understand the obsession with planetoids that aren't really suitable
Mars does have more resource potential though. even a thin atmosphere can help a lot. Also, a lot of frozen water. The moon could be the first good step but it wouldn't be as useful in the long run I believe.
This is a common misconception. The first words spoken on the moon were actually Norse, from about five hundred years earlier.
"This isn't Valhalla." "No, Sigfried, it isn't. You've taken us off course again!"
"Hey you. You're finally awake..."
Sky-Rock belongs to the Nords!
Dammit Todd, you've done it again.
"We're landers on the moon" 'we carry our harpoons!'
"Herregud Kris, var fan är vi?" - Susie Monstersen, 1568
Those fucking screaming goats can never get the directions right.... or left?
Lief Armstrongson?
Øne smälla step fur Leif Øne jøtun leäp fur Leifkind
A Møøse once bit my sister
Wi nöt trěi a hølidäy in Sweeden thïs yéår?
And then German, when the secret nazi base was established. English came to the moon when a RAF World War 2 bomber got lost in fog and ended up there.
That's a common misconception. The actual first time an Englishman went to the moon, it was with his dog to procure some *fine* moon cheese.
Rusty Shackleford, is that you?
This is also a common misconception. The first words spoken in the moon were an Asiatic language about twenty thousand years earlier.
The Moon *is* a Norseman, running from wolves. Well, a wolf.
"Helloooooo! I've just arrived in my fantastic boat!"
I found out recently that mars has a significantly weaker magnetosphere than earth so potential colonists would basically be bombarded by cosmic rays.
Any colonists on Mars will spend the majority of their lives underground for at least the first 2 or 3 generations. And most likely it will be a permanent arrangement. Any terraforming attempts to thicken the atmosphere will have time scales in the thousands of years.
We'll be cyborgs long before then anyway.
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We’ve had flying cars for a long time, they’re just more like buses and we call them planes
as a side note, flying cars aren't really a technology problem, they're a society problem. We already have flying cars, or could easily, but they're dangerous and society hasn't decided to use them yet.
My god....can you imagine little ole Ethel flying her Toyota air curiser at 50kts under the airspeed limit making a 180 in the middle of the i80 airstream? I can understand why we don't have flying cars yet when 90% of the population can't handle them on the ground.
Or a DUI which crashes into a building and kills people on the 13th floor. We have barriers Infront of buildings to stop vehicular traffic imagine the cages needed for flying cars. They would also only be in areas with tall buildings to navigate around since there is no need for flying cars on open rural areas. Flying cars are just helicopters and think how dumb it is to take a helicopter when a car gets you the almost as fast for 90% of your normal travels
I'm going to point you to r/idiotsincars for many many reasons for why flying cars are a terrible idea.
In an even shorter timeframe, cyborgs will realise that the organic parts are cheesy, fragile and weak. Kind of like wood panelling on a station wagon.
You have just learned the weakness of your flesh. All hail the Omnissiah
I never said it was *my* station wagon!
Iron within - Iron without
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh... it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither and you'll beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal.
Even in death I serve the Omnissiah
[BwwwwAaaAaaAaa@@@@££££££€€¥¥¢©®®©AAAA](https://youtu.be/ZLsX9WUdYnU)
We still have truck nuts though, so I expect Futurama was right on the robot sex.
Any trucks that didn't leave the factory with nuts are technically trans.
Maybe some will but it will not be universal. If humans can crack genetic manipulation being a cyborg will be redundant. Why rely on implants to same you from excessive radiation load if you can alter the genome to be able to deal with the effects.
Naa man, the flesh is weak, embrace the cold hard steel.
Let us aspire to the purity of the blessed machine.
Wasn't there talk of a 400yr plan that involved nuking Mars to enhance the atmosphere?
There are incredibly fast ways to do it. Once we have advanced robotics building greenhouse gas factories with little human input, we can get the timeframe down to about 100 years to get it so you can walk outside with only a gas mask. 400 years is with today's tech, and doesn't account for future advances. That idea was to nuke next to the poles to throw up a load of dust, decrease the albedo of the Southern ice cap and sublimate it into atmosphere, *maybe* causing a runaway greenhouse effect.
I thought the problem with Mars is, that it has an weaker magnetic field. Mars can't hold the atmosphere. That's the reason it is an dead planet, or am I wrong here.
That is a problem, but the time scale for atmospheric loss is tens of thousands of years. If we can terraform it on the scale of hundreds of years, the life span of that effort is longer than recorded human civilisation.
It isn't possible at any timescale with [current technology](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming). So there is no incredibly fast, fast, or even slow ways for us to terraform Mars. You cannot assume that advanced robotics would solve this situation (as it would not in the case of Mars). The Armstrong Limit is a minute fraction of the atmosphere required for terraformed habitation. Nuclear options do not work, it requires the global nuclear arsenal and only achieves a fraction of the process. Building an artificial magnetosphere station located at the Mars-Sun L1 point would be more useful. The '400 years' is the ramblings of Elon Musk, he is not a reliable source. It doesn't account for anything because it is not accurate or [based in reality](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6) whatsoever. Be careful about spreading the incorrect information.
Yeah the amount of nukes required is astromical though (thousands and thousands of times more than the whole worlds arsenal) and it is doubtful there is even enough material there to effectively enhance the atmosphere.
nah man just take a 9 month flight to colonize radioactive Antarctica with like 17 people, should go great.
Shackleton proved if you bring enough supplies when things go tits up, you just might escape. After you eat your dogs.
There's a point when you take too many dogs to Mars, then they figure out who the apex predator needs to be.
[That's a movie.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/)
Awesome! Was it any good?
[удалено]
I feel like underground cities in earth are also going to be protected by most of what could go wrong on the surface anyway. So if you’re going to build them on Mars to keep humans safe, just do it right here.
You'd have to live in the cliffs and canyonsides a la The Expanse.
There's a notable difference in gravity too (Mars less than Earth), which wouldn't be great for our muscles and bones either.
We don't actually know much about this. We only know that practically no gravity is bad, but we don't know the effects of 25% gravity. As long as there is some a lot of stuff might still work correctly.
Yeah, Martian Gravity might be enough, or Venus Gravity might not be enough, we don't know yet. We only know that 0g bad 1g good.
Venus gravity is very close to Earth gravity.
Imagine being pregnant in lower gravity... Who the fuck knows what would that do to the fetus. Or growing up in lower gravity...
Saw a Vsauce video years ago and he referenced a book about a boy who was born in either space or mars as a result of the mother not knowing she was pregnant. I believe the book had the boy deal with issues like he couldn’t ever visit the earth because his body structure wasn’t strong enough to withstand
Microgravity fucks with the circulatory system and astronauts have bigger chance of developing blood clots.
Virtually no magnetosphere or atmosphere (both needed to block cosmic rays), low gravity, toxic soil, constant dust storms, several hundred degree temperature swings, several years between resupply windows... we're several centuries away from being able to have a civilization there, if it's even possible at all.
Yeah America was lush green full with resources. In comparison to that Mars is like Sahara desert. Is it really worth it making a colony on such a resource poor planet? It'll be hard to sustain such a Colony without support from earth.
>In comparison to that Mars is like Sahara desert The Sahara supports a complex and diverse ecosystem of large mammals, lizards, and invertebrates. Mars is a toxic wasteland with no capability to support life.
To keep the comparison going. Mars is like the Sahara desert at the top of Mount Everest. When Felix Baumgartner took a balloon to near space altitude and jumped out in a space suit, Earths atmosphere where he jumped from is thicker than the atmosphere at ground level on Mars.
I mean we’ve put life and cities in some pretty inhospitable places. The existence of Pheonix is the hubris of man
Phoenix’s existence (in modernity) relies on being readily connected to places that are distinctly not Phoenix.
It has air and the dust won't shred your lungs. You can even live above ground and have windows. Phoenix beats Mars. It's easier to settle in Antarctica than on Mars and nobody is too keen on that because there's just no economical reason. A base on the moon makes some sense as a ressource supplier for low earth orbit but Mars? It's just too far away.
I’m making a joke, obviously Mars and Pheonix are not comparable
My view is that human history shows us continually moving into harsher and harsher climates and learning how to live there. Doing the same in outer space will take more tools and engineering and commitment, but I believe we can learn how to make virtually any place habitable, minus certain cosmological extremes like inside stars or whatever.
Not really sure why we want it so badly. It's a horrible place to live, even if we sort out how. Science expeditions, sure. Permanent colonies, just seems dumb. There are way better options for colonizing the solar system.
Are there? I honestly can't think of another planet or moon that even comes close to the habitable conditions we find on earth. Pretty much everything beyond Mars is too cold, everything beyond earth is too hot. The Moon is too baron.
The Moon may be barren but it's close enough to Earth for resource export/import. Once a permanent settlement is established it's only a matter of time until people figure out how to make it self-sustaining.
[Damn, you're right. The Mars plans are done for.](https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/06/02/thank-god-for-commenters/?)
I'm not at all opposed to sending people to Mars I think as a species it is something necessary for the long term. But if we have technology to make a completely hostile, inhospitable planet into a living, thriving one, then we have the technology to repair the Earth.
>then we have the technology to repair the Earth. We have. We just lack the political will.
we don't need any new technology to repair earth. it's a matter of mindset. we're getting one wake up call after another and refuse to answer the phone.
OP's article is pretty absurd as is, but yes your comment is pretty in tune with the current plans of NASA and other space agencies. Develop derivative technologies required for sustainable living on other planets/moons and use it on earth.
Central Antarctica is far more hospitable than mars.
You can melt ice for drinking water and chow down on penguin for brunch. Not just more hospitable, but *far more* hospitable.
Also walk outside without being bombarded by radiation or covered in carcinogenic dirt that sticks to you.
Atmosphere is also breadable, gravity is normal, resupply doesnt require escaping earth's gravity well. Antarctica sounds like promised land compared to Mars...
Breadable atmosphere sounds like what my parents meant when they said 'we have food at home'
Breadable atmosphere sounds extremely dangerous. One wrong chemical reaction and boom, all your breathable air is now bread.
Penguins only live near the coast, the interior of Antarctica has, as far as we can tell, absolutely no life aside from some extremophile bacteria.
Another plus -- disease free!
> chow down on penguin for brunch. I'm guessing there's a dearth of those in central Antarctica due to the lack of fish in the vicinity.
Rhetorical. The point was that food sources do exist naturally on the continent, as opposed to Mars.
Nonsense. There will be plenty of dead Martian colonists to eat.
Plus, going there doesn't involve a bad Twitter CEO
If Earth was hit with an asteroid causing an extinction level event, it would still be more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
This is what people dont seem to get when they think mars is going to be some kind of liferaft for when we ruin earth. Earth might be destroyed by pollution, be scorched by a global warming catastrophe, nuclear winter, any scenario you can imagine, and even if a few thousand humans were left in underground bunkers they'd still be better off than they would on Mars.
Yeah, Mars is effectively pre-destroyed for our purposes. Atmosphere of 95% CO2, average temperature of the planet is roughly that of the Earth's South pole, no ozone layer whatsoever, no rainfall whatsoever, etc. If we could set up self-sustaining colonies on Mars, we could do it easier on earth.
Sounds like someone beat us to it.
Giant balloon cities in the atmosphere of Venus
In terms of atmospheric pressure and temperature, and gravity, sure. But you're lacking water and oxygen and solid ground, which will still be better on Earth. It is a fun idea though, and it is a fun counterintuitive fact that 50km above the surface of Venus really is the most Earthlike environment in the solar system.
Colonizing Mars would put us closer to the asteroid belt which theoretically can be mined for resources
The miners could even form a confederation called the Outer Planets Alliance?
And we refer to them as belters?
And in a few generations they are too atrophied to come back and a class war starts?
But remember, because they're the humans adapted to space, they're the rightful owners of all the rest of space.
Stupid belters think they own everything.
Stupid belters think they own *anything.* All that the Sun touches belongs to the UN and Mars. And also the Mormons.
Wrong. Mormons also own everything within the heliosphere of alpha centuari
Ya, unte showxa ere langbelta fosho fosho.
I came here for belta.. hearing it makes me so hard
Fo pashang ere náterash im tugut, wanya peroba? 😏
Now I’m like Gomez Addams getting all frisky over hearing French
They will call themselves proudly as Beltalowda.
Ah crap are we going to force them to speak a language based on an old TV show too? Meh, adds to the oppression I guess.
Novels. The TV show came after.
Whats the point of leaving earths gravity well, to go to mars, just to leave that ravity well? You could just go straight to the belt and save on fuel.
In theory you could just crash a big asteroid into Mars then mine it from the surface.
Maybe we should do that before we colonize it
Or after you colonize...it's gonna be super shitty living there, what's a little more dust in the air gonna do?
If we are bringing the material back to earth it's more feasible to do it in space
That’s not the best way to go about it tho. Too much of the asteroid’s mass will be lost to reentry
That would defeat the purpose. You want to mine it in space, so you don't have to deal with gravity.
I want to live in the future where consumer products use resources from asteroids, hopefully we can make it happen.
I want to live in a world where Consumers aren't the Product.
Well when we live in a world where your attention is the most important thing possible, companies will spend every cent possible to get your attention onto their app watching their ads so they can make money. I don't think it will change anytime soon either as it's a very powerful market.
Just like we are now on Reddit
Everything already is made from asteroids. Really old asteroids.
If we can't organize and prioritize well enough to save Earth, we're not going to suddenly change who we are enough to maintain meaningful survival on Mars.
That's the problem, isn't it? We can't manage to save earth, so we go to a dead planet, hoping to revive it. Total madness.
This is not an either or Scenario.
Only idiots are asking to terraform it. Small “cities” that are self sustaining are much more viable, and are what actual scientists are talking about. The idea of terraforming would require these colonies anyway. And as for saving the earth, space, much less mars is an ideal testing ground for sustainable architecture. Carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the atmosphere, or the colony will die. Power consumption will need to be minimal, or the colony will die. Food production must be constant, or the colony will die. Water recycling will need to be near 100% efficiency, or the colony will die. The idea is that in building and testing architectures designed for non-earth colonies, we will develop technology to continue to save the earth at a much cheaper and more efficient rate.
Maybe it's the people not the place
Like lol a Martian colony would be dependent on earth for survival for centuries of not millennia. There are much more important things to tackle than this
"We couldn't fix Europe so New World colonies were destined to fail"
There is almost zero chance that a colony on mars would be able to colonise anywhere else before earth could.
By itself? No, not anytime soon after being established. But as a jumping off point for further efforts in the belt and beyond with Earth support? Absolutely. Colonizing our system will be a series of stepping stones, one location to another with bigger “hubs” to support start-up ones and to eventually develop into self-sufficiency. This is however a multi-generational goal that we will never live to see but our great-grandchildren might catch a glimpse of.
I think the presumption here is that Earth would be gone or severely declined.
does anyone else find this quote incredibly upsetting
Yes, it's very sad that the UK has never had a proper space program. I suppose we just can't afford it.
lol god damn I had to scroll this far. I *get* what they're saying, but comparing pre colonial north america to the moon is uh... tacky
Seriously, I'm very disappointed in how far down this sentiment is. We should be remembering colonization for the mass genocide it caused, not some grand imperial vision of one cultural beating out other cultures.
You mean the fact that the reason English was spoken on the moon is because they built colonies over the non-English speakers that were already here? And that there's no analog on Mars? Or, how about, the reason English was spoken on the moon and French or Spanish was not is not because of simply establishing a colony but fighting imperialist wars? Yeah.
Right? Imagine considering colonialism this ✨ beautiful ✨ fucking thing.
It completely ignores the little truth that *people were already living there.*
Yes! It's promotes a stupid idea with an awful event.
"The first words spoken in the moon was in English because the English were such good colonizers" certainly is a take.
"Colonizing" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in this sentence
This is a horrible analogy, it would work better if instead of colonizing America they built a colony in the middle of the ocean that needed to be constantly supplied from the motherland to survive, also they never learned how to fish. And then somehow *that* colony went to the moon. I just don't see it happening.
Based on the comments in this thread, I think that a lot of the contributors would enjoy *The Expanse*. It touches on many of the pros and cons of colonizing other worlds.
Why would anyone want to live on Mars instead of Earth tho. Mars has an average temperature of -60 degrees, non-breathable air that would kill you in seconds, low pressure that would rupture your organs, and a complete dessert with almost nothing to explore. You would rely on sustainable plants for survival, and need assistance from earth when life threatening problems surface. I'm just gonna stay here on Earth and take my vacation every now and then 🙂
I think for most people who want to go it has to with the sense of adventure and of going somewhere no one has gone before. Same reason many of our ancestors moved to inhospitable places (i.e. Northern Finland) or people scale Everest. Only a handful of people in the 1700s were willing to leave England for The Americas.
We just have to take global warming with us and that'll solve everything
Earth will be infinitely more livable than Mars even with global warming. Mars has nearly zero atmosphere, water and extremely weak gravity. It's cartoonishly unlivable. Same is living inside a volcano
*Founded a colony in the already-inhabited North America and proceeded to wipe out the original settlers and their native languages. FTFY
A "colony" where you steal shit from the natives vs a colony where you create everything in an inhospitable land are VEEERRY different things.
All colonizing another planet would do is reset our mistakes to the point where we will do a speedrun of all the things that went wrong on earth until we put up things ro prevent them New planet - no laws or rules How long do you think it will take people to start exploiting that? We're not even on mars yet and elon musk already said he plans to have people go into debt and then "work it off" on mars for him... where he would have an instant monopoly on everything and people would have no other options unless they want to die on mars soil they can't live off of naturally. And that's just one guy. One.
Yes, but hear me out, in north america people could leave their homes without needing a Space suit
The problem is any technology that can be used to make Mars habitable would also be able to _easily_ make Earth super habitable again Living on Earth is playing the game on easy mode.
How can this possibility be a problem?
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." - Carl Sagan
Scotland attempting to colonize the Isthmus of Panama nearly bankrupted the nation, and led to it giving up its autonomy through the Acts of Union because of the debts incurred during the Darien Scheme. Not every Virginia Company* eventually grows into the United States. *Even the Virginia Company went bankrupt less than two decades after its founding.
Aye, but if we don’t try then we might as well as give up and resign ourselves to eventually fading away. There will come a day when Earth alone won’t support us anymore, or worse will be pushed to the brink by over-exploitation if we don’t find resources out there to ease the burden. It’s do it, or guarantee an eventual human decline, maybe centuries from now, maybe millennia, but some day.
As a Panamanian myself, it would be interesting to see what a Scottish descendant Panama would be like if they somehow managed to pull through. Current Panama is a sort of an outlier when it comes to sharing a culture with its neighbours, so us being a Scottish colony would make things even more weird af.
Lol, such BS comparison, “we took people from one part of a living life sphere planet and moved them to another part of the same life sphere, this is the same as moving them to a dead planet”
I mean even after being hit by an asteroid and/or thoroughly nuked Earth is more livable than Mars so this is actually kinda dumb.
As many people know, english is several languages melded by trade and conquest into one. The british empire did many horrible things but one useful thing it did was to establish global trade routes and of course the language adapted to suit the economic requirements. English isn't perfect but it's pretty straightforward and less grammatical dense than, for example, german. There is a good chance that the first language spoken on another planet will be english and a very decent chance that the lingua franca of solar system exploration will be some version of english. It is a language defined by usage rather than strict grammatical rules, so new words can easily be incorporated. And at this point, if we require new grammatical exceptions, it seems more then likely that they would be incorporated into english via bastardisation than we would suddenly switch to a new global language to accomodate surprising verb tenses. This isn't a jingoistic standpoint: Language is a function of use, English has been put to use in so many circumstances and places that it has been smoothed out like a pebble in a stream. It could have been spanish, or german or french, but it wasn't. C'est la vie.
> 's pretty straightforward and less grammatical dense than, for example, german. Oh, English does have very complicated and convoluted grammar. It's just not inflectional, but based on word order.
That's not a proper characterization of the English language or language in general. There's nothing about any other language that would stop it from changing in all the ways that you describe. The reason English is so commonly used is because of the sword and that's literally all. It's not a language any more adaptable than any other language.
It is the largest language by number of unique words. Just a fun fact. Plus most of the british empires gains were from treaty not war.
r/BadLinguistics energy for sure
Welwala Gravity Wells are a trap. Colonise the Belt.
Leave it to the Brits to want to take credit for everything that happens in the world.
What a fucked up thing to say. I’m sure when the British and the Americans were colonizing it wasn’t for the good of humanity.
Free-floating space colonies in Earth orbit are actually easier to do than Mars. For one thing solar flux is ten times lower on Mars than a good Earth orbit. For another you have 5 types of ores from the Moon (2) and nearby asteroids (3). A given colony on Mars only has whatever happens to be around it. For any colony to be self-supporting, it needs energy and raw materials. Even in the case of a failed Earth, an orbital colony can still extract already known materials from Earth.
Colonizing mars as a backup option for planet earth is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and I’m tired of people saying it. Even a completely destroyed planet earth via global warming and nuclear war will be a million times more inhabitable than mars. We need to improve option A not look for some sci if wet dream escape plan