"""...we live on a planet that is perfect for us, and we seem to be unable to prevent ourselves from making it less and less habitable. We’re like a bunch of teenagers destroying our parents’ mansion in one long, crazy party, figuring that our backup plan is to run into the forest and build our own house. We’ll worry about how to get food and a good sound system later. Proponents of Mars colonization talk about “terraforming” Mars to make it more like Earth, but in the meantime, we’re “marsforming” Earth by making our atmosphere poisonous and annihilating our natural resources. We are also well on our way to making Earth one big desert, just like Mars."""
"Proponents of Mars colonization talk about “terraforming” Mars to make it more like Earth, but in the meantime, we’re “marsforming” Earth"
I never thought about that before, but this is definitely a way to speed up anything - literally change the destination reference to look more like the the piece in work.
Western governments seem to think that economic growth is absolutely necessary. Dunno why. But obviously that isn't sustainable for much longer on our current planet.
And the rest of the world would rather try to reach the same standard of living than voluntarily suffer more to save the planet for the western elites.
If Musk is able to do it, then he will beat all the governments from Earth. However, I expect to see a lot of politics in this. It's just too an important of an issue to remain uncontrolled.
I dunno, maybe we should work on our social decision making process as well, not just on technology. Progress is a function of both and we seem to be leaving the social one behind.
Maybe we should be working to transition to a kind of direct democracy, or a more evolved form with the help of technology. Leaving all the power in the hands of a few doesn't seem to do much good in the long run...
Or maybe we should count on Elon to do this as well, as he promised, once he becomes king of Mars...
The problem is not the kind of democracy, those are just definitions. Is that people don't care (not about their privacy, not about earth, not about anything). And sincerely why should I care? I'm going to die in 50/60 years. I exploit others as much as I can then farewell.
So you say, if they behave like cattle, I shall behave like the wolf. Fair enough, there may be some justice in that, but the predator behaviour is the one that brough us where we are in the first place. It's true that it' also the one that gave us our intelligence.
The thing is that one may expect that intelligence would change things, but apparently it doesn't. It's just another tool on the predator's toolbelt. But somehow I just can't settle with this, it seams there should be a middle way..
Teller may believe that the system and our leaders are just a reflection of us as a society? After all, it's society as a whole that allowed the system and our leaders to be put into power in the first place.
You make it sound like we've been destroying environment only lately and with current political systems.
Humans have been wrecking havoc various environments ever since Neolithic. Although there's no definitive proof, there are strong suggestions that they were at least contributing to the disappearance of the Mega-fauna, for instance.
Examples of small human settlements in small islands are very characteristic, IMHO. Everywhere it happened, endemic birds where usually eradicated very quickly.
Well the systems and their leaders come from the species, not from ether - and remain there because the species seems unable, for the moment, to decide to change them.
The root problem of all is that we discount too much the future, so we don't value enough the long-term effects of anything (votes, policies, environment, etc.). This is something instinctive and natural to us as humans, and it takes us a lot of mental effort to be rational to the e.g. LessWrong et al. ideals, to the point that we can't be indefinitely rational, just for brief moments of attention. Our irrationalities govern us.
If you look into international politics and even the financial elite, the will to change and adapt green policies is there, more so than in the general public.
Which is exactly the problem. Nobody is going to follow a leader preventing them from buying 7 different iPhones even though you probably only needed one.
Which is a simplification, but the middle class is completely dependent on economic growth. Both as consumers, but mainly as workers.
I think there is a lot of hope for change though, I mean, automation is going to make 60% of the current workforce obsolete over the next 20 years. With that comes a need for change.
Judging by the preview image for the live stream (yeah, I wish I had more to go on, too), this looks to be a long-haul plan for terraforming mars. I wouldn't hold my breath for the first actual settlements up there.
That being said: Yes. Oh yes. Fuck yes. All my yesses.
If we can't terraform Earth's deserts, do we really stand a chance with Mars?
I might be mistaken in my analysis. Still, the only way a colony might survive seems to be by sending tremendous amounts of resources to Mars yearly. They can never hope to be self-sustaining until either astronomically large amounts of time or astronomically large amounts of energy are spent.
Not a high chance. Earth has a molten core, which generates a magnetic field that shields us from harmful cosmic rays. It's been like this for so long that we've evolved to require this shielding.
Mars has less of a molten core, and a very weak magnetosphere. Therefore outdoor terraforming seems unlikely. We may have to walk around on Mars inside shielded colonies only, along with whatever other life we bring: plants, animals, everything.
Water seems to be a fairly decent shield, so it's tempting to imagine a human-made aquatic ecosystem. Fish would probably survive without any extra shielding besides water, so that's one natural resource we could start generating, assuming we could transport massive quantities of water to Mars. Unfortunately, the water would just evaporate or freeze, so we'd need shielding for that too.
So could we engineer ourselves to be able to withstand more radiation? Perhaps with advances in cancer treatment and CRISPR-style modifications on the most fragile parts of the genome we can make us more resilient so we can become a multiplanetary species...
On the other hand, sending life to Mars, due to that radiation, would make it evolve much faster, right? Perhaps we can start terraforming it and study the evolutions of plants and animals there to gain insight in how to overcome our frailties.
I just read they sequenced the Tardigrade DNA and have found a protein that protects against X-ray related DNA damage.
> Using human cultured cells, we demonstrate that a tardigrade-unique DNA-associating protein suppresses X-ray-induced DNA damage by ~40% and improves radiotolerance. These findings indicate the relevance of tardigrade-unique proteins to tolerability and tardigrades could be a bountiful source of new protection genes and mechanisms.
I'm not sure of the exact amount, but water can be used for shielding.
So maybe we end up with huge domes made of tanks with 20' of water in them.
Also, since Mars has CO2, I'm guessing once a dome is up, we simply pressurize it with the surrounding atmosphere? Once pressurized we could use O2 tanks and cannulas, or add plants?
I fear that there is going to be a huge political debate first -- a lot of folks are going to say that man isn't worthy/able/competent/etc to colonize another planet.
Oh, I didn't know that. But wouldn't a larger mutation probability result in more variability and hence quicker findings of improvement paths? (plus avoiding local maxima)
Sure more variability means stronger selection, but bigger mutations are less likely to be positive mutations so more selection events need to be spend to get them out of the gene pool again.
> If we can't terraform Earth's deserts, do we really stand a chance with Mars?
It's not that we couldn't, it's that we don't care to - partly because the reward isn't there, and partly because there are opposing interests. Humans absolutely have had (and are having) large-scale impact on the Earth's climate, and that's while mostly trying not to.
Now imagine building that house together with 20 people who all try to scream at, sue or shoot each other over trivial and irrelevant details. That's generally how all international affairs look like. In terms of lowering entropy, we're not even trying.
That's why I want SpaceX to success. If they manage to get some profits or find something interesting out there, the race for the colonization would be even bigger than the space race during the cold war.
> If we can't terraform Earth's deserts, do we really stand a chance with Mars?
To be fair, it can be done and it is slowly being done in some countries. It's still very difficult and expensive, though. That being said, indeed doing it on mars would be orders of magnitude more difficult.
"They can never hope to be self-sustaining until either astronomically large amounts of time or astronomically large amounts of energy are spent."
That might be true, but if we could divert even a small part of the global arms industry to something as constructive as colonizing a new world then I suspect we might help things here as well as achieving something wonderful.
Edit: "Oh yes. Fuck yes. All my yesses"
Can I second this. I remember reading Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" and getting quite enthusiastic about actually being a Martian colonist :-)
I'm just as impressed by SpaceX's achievements as the next guy but the Musk fanboyism is really getting out of control here. He's not going to terraform Mars, because we have no idea how to do it, the cost would likely be measurable in "percentage of all human GDP" terms, and it would take longer than a single human life, it'd probably have to be the longest-haul plan humanity had ever undertaken. If the announcement actually broaches the subject of terraforming it'll be the definition of vaporware.
I'm always confused about our priority for us to become a multi-planetary species. Planets are interesting to us for their resources, but they provide a far greater risk: they're another huge gravity well. This means that it's expensive/resourceful to leave these places (as it currently is for earth).
So I'm confused to why not make space habitats our priority instead of other planets. Certainly inhabiting planets is something that will happen regardless, I'm just baffled to why it needs to happen before we build something like a Stanford Torus.
Currently it seems space as an environment is not suitable for humans due to heavy radiation. Massive shielding needed. Also, from a psychological point of view - would you rather have your grandchildren stuck in cramped sodacans in space or colonizing a new world with a sky and mountains and other goodies. A planet based colony is probably a lot more resilient than a space based one. I have no opinion as such towards one or another.
Probably because planets help defend you really really well. The gravity well makes it much easier to keep an atmosphere, the atmosphere blocks UV rays and the majority of harmful falling objects, the planet's magnetic field helps block higher energy solar rays.
Plus, if there's a breathable atmosphere on the planet, your habitat isn't limited to the space you can enclose in a bubble.
I'm really not sure I want companies to have the capability to re-format entire planets. That sounds like entirely too much power for any organisation to have, if only given its potential for weaponisation.
And land sale? The Outer Space Treaty [1] prohibits governments from claiming ownership of planets, so where would the authority to sell land on Mars come from? Do we really want companies to own planets? Weyland-Yutani (Mars) Inc. anyone?
Edit: We're not even close to getting a grip on the social and legal problems of having access to habitable, off-earth environments. I suspect that the potential for conflict is huge.
Any country bound by that treaty can withdraw from the treaty with a notice of one year, considerably shorter time frame than necessary for terraforming Mars, I suppose. If the US won't withdraw, then other countries would. And there are already nations that haven't signed it.
Also, Spacex is not a party to the treaty. The treaty binds the countries, not their citizens or companies. I don't know if there are internal US laws banning sale of land.
Finally, the ban in many state laws on selling cars directly to consumers didn't hold back Tesla. I doubt a treaty from 1967 would hold back SpaceX
I know, and I didn't say it was. Only nations can ratify treaties. However, the OST states that "States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities" [1].
> I doubt a treaty from 1967 would hold back SpaceX.
SpaceX is a US corporation and is subject to US law. If maintaining the OST is in the interests of the US then SpaceX would absolutely be held back.
I think of the OST as a sort of Nash equilibrium. Given the current situation (no terraforming on the horizon), it is arguably the best place for everyone to be. If the rules change in the future them some different set of controls would come into play.
The legitimacy of a company or individual is derived from the country they belong to - the country who signed the treaty would have to enforce it against their citizens.
The Outer Space Treaty will be repealed as soon as practical colonization and commercial resource extraction is viable and profitable.
I think the Martians will determine what their laws are. You can only legislate over what you can control. All the 'space laws' are whistling in the dark.
I'm definitely not against terraforming, but I'd be against individual governments doing it for the same reasons that I gave for corporations. IMO it would have to be an international endeavour. Certainly wen we're talking about the solar system, where the number of candidate planets is basically two (plus Titan?). Does a Chinese planet and a US planet and a Facebook moon represent a useful and viable future?
In some far-future scenario where there are thousands of accessible planets suitable for terraforming then maybe it would be ok for corps and governments to do as they wish. But you're past the point where there is likely to be any overall political or legal system of control anyway.
> Does a Chinese planet and a US planet and a Facebook moon represent a useful and viable future?
I'd say it's a better future than the "no terraforming at all" future. And I suspect the "wait until UN-like bodies are competent and willing to organize terraforming" future is actually the "no terraforming at all" future.
In the sense that we need to remove our dependence on a single-point-of-failure planet to avoid existential risk, then I agree that terraforming is ultimately desirable.
But entire planets claimed by crushingly authoritarian political systems or uncontrolled profit-seeking corporations doesn't seem like a great way to safeguard humanity either.
Primarily avoiding the single point of failure. Extremely secondarily, to create a diversity of human cultures, because I think that will ultimately create a bunch of things people enjoy (better art etc.).
Well, to us, it means something of course. But to others, who knows? It's kinda naïv (and a bit cute) of us to just assume we can go ahead and start "owning" things in the universe now. But hey, maybe that's how it works out there too. We'll see :)
The Outer Space Treaty was written with the party states knowing that it was a medium term measure. Capitalism will come to The Moon, Mars, and Venus. It will start with people just building wherever there is available land, like we did on the frontier, then once a couple thousand or a couple hundred thousand people are in outer space a new treaty will be formed around the political realities of the day.
"Capitalism will come to The Moon, Mars, and Venus."
The thing is that the order on which capitalism relies on to exist is not uphold outside the recognized international treaties. So, good luck on defending whatever ownership claims you have or you'll just have to submit to whoever can reach you and has more power than you. Also, it's kind of pointless for a government on Earth to claim ownership of outer space unless the means of maintaining permanent connections with said properties will significantly change. Think about what kind of connection you'll have with "yours" when it takes years to step from one part to another of the same country with nothing in between.
Extraterrestrial contact aside, governments will recognize property in space because it is in their interests to coordinate teams and allocate resources. This is most easily done through state backed capitalism. Governments that act in bad faith will see a dramatic drop in wealth due to sanctions and there is always MAD as a final safeguard.
I agree. In some ways the OST resembles the Antarctic Treaty: intended to mitigate the near and medium-term problems until something new comes along.
And I don't have a problem with capitalism per se, but our legal and political systems don't seem to be doing a very good job of managing its excesses.
> And land sale? The Outer Space Treaty [1] prohibits governments from claiming ownership of planets, so where would the authority to sell land on Mars come from?
Possession is 11 tenths of the law.
The Treaty of Tordesillas gave the modern USA to Spain. How'd that go?
Thats the problem that the OST tries to address. If more than one party claims possession of a territory (say Mars) then they can either settle things legally or with gunboats (err.. space battle cruisers). Given the absence of an off-Earth legal system to adjudicate, and with no compelling need to create one then or now, conflict would therefore be a likely outcome. So the OST just tries to defer the problem for a while. At some point, extraterrestrial territorial claims will need to be settled though.
Amassing great wealth implies that metals and barren lands on Earth are currently rare & expensive. They're not.
Metals: choose an elemental metal you think is rare. Look up it's Wikipedia entry, and look at its availability. It will be expressed in terms of a percentage of the earth's crust, something like 0.01%. Multiply that by 2.6*10^22 kg and realize that we're not going to run out of it any time soon, nor is it rare. It may be expensive to mine, but compared to the cost of transporting on rockets? Cheap.
Land: you can buy prime farmland in Saskatchewan, Canada for USD500 per acre.
The problem with Venus is that the atmospheric pressure at surface level is about 92 times that of earth, the surface temperature is 735 K, and the atmosphere contains 96.5% carbon dioxide, while also containing significant amounts of sulfur dioxide. This is even more toxic than the Martian atmosphere.
If you want to terraform Venus to a (human livable) state you'd probably need to give it a solar shade to cool the planet to decent temperatures, shrub the 4.6 10^17 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and remove those 7.210^13 tonnes of sulfur dioxide.
edit
Also, please note that Venus has a 117 earth day solar day, while the Martian solar day is only 24h 37m.
Venus - like Mars too, is missing an essential element for terraforming: water. On both planets this is long lost, and the constituent elements, espcially hydrogen, is gone from the surface.
Unless there is a way to massively mine the rocks for the hydrogen and oxigen, there is no other way to terraform a planet like Mars or Venus. I am afraid that would put the terraforming efforts like hundreds of years ahead.
"More than five million cubic kilometres of ice have been identified at or near the surface of modern Mars, enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 35 meters (115 ft). Even more ice is likely to be locked away in the deep subsurface." [1]
Each time I'm hearing about minerals (like in asteroid mining) I'm wondering how do you deal with atmosphere re-entry ? Meteorites made of metal are melting so what's the plan here ? And which country will be ok to receive a ton of unguided metal on its territory ?
I think the whole idea of space/asteroid mining is to use them eventually in space based manufacturing.
The biggest cost of space exploration is actually raising a spaceship into outer space.
If you just build it up there it's very fuel efficient to transport between space and to other stations/planets.
There's literally 0 chance that mining anything on Mars and bringing it back to Earth would be profitable. Obviously mining is still going to be important to build things on Mars, but sending any metals over, no matter how rare, is just crazy.
I think the point is that while it may be worth $33 million, it would take much, much more than that to get it safely back to Earth.
Also, the price of platinum is currently driven by the knowledge that it's naturally scarce and the likelihood of a large amount of "new" platinum coming on the market is low. If this ever changes (we somehow figure out how to profitably bring back a tonne of platinum), then the price would likely crash, as the amount out there in space is essentially infinite.
If you bring back a tonne it would make the value plummet. And $33 million is still more than your average space mission, and this wouldn't be an average space mission.
Coat the metal in an ablative shield made of Martian rock (handwaving over how this is done), fire it to earth using a mass-driver, guide it in with an on-board chemical rocket engine, and drop it into the Pacific for recovery (more handwaving).
Like flying to the moon, colonising Mars isn't a 'bad' idea. It won't harm anyone, most of humanity will keep on doing what it's doing. It doesn't take away important resources from environmentalism or other pressing causes, that's a zero sum fallacy. Musk's point is to push forward relentlessly to a future which incrementally improves humanity's chance of survival. Even if we stop messing up earth, an asteroid or a north korean engineered super flu could still end us while we watch solar powered TV and eat kale chips.
Well I don't care about all you naysayers and negative nellies. I'm psyched as hell by this.
1/ Does humanity need to stop screwing up Earth? Yes. Does Elon going to Mars make that job any harder? No. Is claiming that people shouldn't try to make progress on issue X until issue Y is fully resolved total BS? Yes.
2/ Are planets the best place for human colonization off Earth? I have no idea. I find The High Frontier to be persuasive but I think we can all agree that landing a few people on Mars is easier than building an O'Neil Cylinder. Baby steps, people! Even if Mars ends up being a backwater, the infrastructure that Musk builds to allow its colonization will also allow us to start developing the rest of the solar system too.
Remember, Elon's going to build a giant reusable rocket that can lift hundreds of tons into orbit with each launch, and I doubt SpaceX is going to use 100% of that launch capacity. I'm sure that if Bezos, Bigelow, or some other billionaire wants to throw a 6,000 cubit meter inflatable space-hab at L5 as a starter-home for O'Neil colonies, Musk will be happy to sell him that launch.
3/ Will Elon terraform Mars within his lifetime? Probably not! Is that a reason to never start? No.
4/ Even if the colony doesn't work out, just think of the science! If Musk can put colonists on Mars he'll also be able to send teams of NASA, ESA, etc. astronauts for the Martian equivalent of McMurdo Station. And the same for Venus (in floating habitat at 50km altitude), the Moon, or even the larger asteroids or outer moons.
5/ If you have a rocket that big, and colonization makes the economics cheap, just think of the size of the telescopes you can put into orbit. Hubble, eat your heart out.
The guy that sells rockets wants us to embark on a rocket trip so unfathomably expensive that it could only be paid for by an international conglomeration? You don't say...
Look, I know that pie-in-the-sky science futurism is kind of our thing here at HN, but could we at least feign a little pragmatism every time Elon Musk pitches his plan to move us all to Mars?
Honest question - would you rather see our species capable of transforming Mars and building a colony there, or be able to create a realistic simulation environment, one that was capable of arbitrarily slowing down time.
It is really no different than it has always been. If a colony on Mars wants independence, it can draft a military to enforce its independence and/or seek the diplomatic approval of other nations.
Suppose SpaceX (or another operator) establishes a colony with people from various countries - what country (if any) is that colony subject to? Perhaps all the countries initially, but after a couple of generations?
SpaceX is an american company, so they are subject to their laws.
The situation is similar to Antarctica, which is home to a large number of small scientific settlements, each following the rules of the country that it is bound to.
A treaty that some countries have signed acknowledges some country borders, but they are not enforced in practice, and those territories are home to settlements from other countries — you even have multi-nationality settlements.
Humans belong to one of the most, if not THE most, destructive species on Earth. We exploit all resources we can lay our hands on and destroy plants and animals in the wake of our immense and selfish greed. We would serve the Universe best if we stayed here on Earth, and possibly even obliterated ourselves.
Every species on Earth exploits all resources it can lay its "hands" on and destroy plants and animals in the wake of its immense and selfish greed. We are just better at it.
I'm on the other side of this one, while I think it's stupid to wreck the Earth because we need it I don't see why we shouldn't expand out and use the resources, they are just rocks waiting for us to do something with them.
All the Whos in Whoville would beg to differ about them being "rocks waiting for us to do something with them".
Flippancy aside, just assuming there is no consequential life on any of those rocks just waiting for use to exploit is quite arrogant of us. I'm fully behind humans being multi-planetary to increase our bus factor and because it's just plain awesome. I also think some caution is needed to prevent us destroying signs of other life before we even know what we've done. But this is not some revelation, smarter people that me have already thought this stuff through. We just have to follow through on the protocols.
For the most activities we embark on, none of us is ready for. We just jump in and learn on the fly, the journey itself transforms and adapts us. So, maybe we haven't learned enough about taking care of a planet, but that's not a reason to hold ourselves back ...isn't it?
Think about 50 years from now, when we are expected to have a few more billion people living here on Earth. If you think things are stretched to their limit now, just wait.
It may be that the only way to save Earth is to give some of the 10+ billion another place to go.
There is an irony here in that we are the only beings we (yet) know of that in any way appreciate the universe on an aethestic level, on subjective criteria we have determined ourselves. So we would be obliterating ourselves to save the universe for... ?
But again, it is only us humans that value diversity. You would be obliterating the only species that would appreciate the thing you are obliterating them to preserve.
the youtube placeholder for the stream has some description[1]: "SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer Elon Musk will discuss the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The technical presentation will focus on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead."
http://qz.com/536483/why-its-compeltely-ridiculous-to-think-...
"""...we live on a planet that is perfect for us, and we seem to be unable to prevent ourselves from making it less and less habitable. We’re like a bunch of teenagers destroying our parents’ mansion in one long, crazy party, figuring that our backup plan is to run into the forest and build our own house. We’ll worry about how to get food and a good sound system later. Proponents of Mars colonization talk about “terraforming” Mars to make it more like Earth, but in the meantime, we’re “marsforming” Earth by making our atmosphere poisonous and annihilating our natural resources. We are also well on our way to making Earth one big desert, just like Mars."""