I don't take perspective this seriously for four reasons:
- its pursuit will lead to unintended tech advances
- it's such a small expenditure relative to other wasteful crap we engage in.
- there is a valid argument for diversifying life, the next gigantic asteroid isn't following your timetable
- it's private money and isn't negatively impacting you and doesn't have its hand in your pocket, as long as externalities are being taxed you're not worse off
I see so much hand wringing about this but I'm sitting here wondering why we are wasting so much money on movies and video games instead of these aspirational projects.
Colonizing Mars is a stupid, fundamentally impossible idea.
> I seldom hear "Maybe we should stop making movies until we get our shit together" even though Hollywood has a budget about the same size as NASA's or slightly larger.
People are somewhat free to spend their money on what they choose. Taxes, not so much.
I find the "asteroid" argument (and Musk's "multi-planetary species" argument) to justifying investment in Mars so strange. Mass-extinction-level asteroids hit Earth once in 100s of millions of years. And even when one does hit us, it'll be easier to find ways to make more of us survive on Earth (we'll see it coming, and can build whatever structures and equipment more easily on Earth than on Mars) than we'd be able to do so on Mars.
These arguments are the software equivalent of noticing the possibility of a super-unlikely bug (that probably won't happen to any customer in the software's lifetime), and then investing in a massive multi-month rewrite instead of a simpler one-day fix.
I'm not saying we shouldn't invest though: there's lots of positive side-effects to solving the requisite hard science problems, and to inspiring people with space exploration. Investment in Mars and cancer (and literacy, and a bunch of other important things for society) can happen in parallel. We're not yet at the point of exhausting our engineering capacity with just those things: and if we're running out of capacity, better to reduce our investment in the Nth messaging/photo-sharing/js-framework/... piece of software than to reduce investment in these ambitious pursuits.
I don't have much hope for Mars, considering we can't even take care of this planet. Moreover, prospects of living on Mars may make some even more lackadaisical about destroying earth. Instead of investing in this sort of research, we should invest more money in protecting oceans and habitats and living sustainably.
We tend to seek technological solutions to our problems, but where has that led us? Cars, fossil fuel use, massive cities, most people wasting away as drones for global corporations.
The problem behind this sort of technology is that it's just an intellectual exercise that is fun for researchers and is trendy because it's about AI, but I sincerely doubt it will contribute any good to the world.
That explains why humans want to live on Mars, certainly. But "we really want to" is not, on its own, a compelling reason to spend billions of dollars.
Totally. I am kind of surprised all this is generating so much discussion. Saying this is semi-meaningless given we don't have the needed technology. It's not even a nice vision. I don't know anyone how would want to live in Mars.
Habitat design wise, sure. But a lot of problems would be similar, especially if you were aiming to make it self sustainable. Growing food, living in close proximity to other people, only occasional resupplies....and benefits would be similar too. Technologies to maintain life in an environment absolutely deadly to humans, whatever tech we come up with to combat loneliness and proper nutrition.....
My point is - I feel like fixating on Mars is doing more harm than good in terms of our progress as a species. But you're right - it's not my money being spent.
> The "self-sustaining city on Mars" bit is a pipedream, and not something we should spend serious amounts of money on in the 21st century.
Compared to the roughly $100,000 billion/year combined GDP of all nations, the $8 billion/year [0] Musk is trying to make the Mars colony cost is a rounding error, not “serious” money.
[0] 1e6 people at $200,000/person, divided by 25 years for even the most optimistic timeline
It would suck a lot more if we wasted money on a mars colony, that will take hundreds of years to become self sufficient, if it is possible at all (I am still waiting for a solution to human bodies deteriorating in low gravity that is actually workable at scale), instead of using these resources to further develop things that have already had successful experimental runs.
The expenditure does not need to be justified to people like you or me; it is obvious to us that we should colonize Mars even if it is currently a dead sterile rock. Sadly however I have not yet become emperor (work in progress), and funding for space exploration often requires short-term tangible justifications. This becomes more true the more expensive it gets.
From a pragmatic standpoint, it is important that any life that may be on Mars is discovered so that we can use those results to push for more funding. Anything that could accelerate the process should be investigated.
If that is unsatisfactory for you, I'll point out again that it isn't just a matter of politics and funding. The discovery and study of non-Earth life would provide countless opportunities for the advance of biology. An advanced understanding of biology is essential to the core mission of colonizing and terraforming Mars, even if I am made emperor.
I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point. Most of the things you would do on mars, you could do them on Earth for much less effort.
Exceptions are studying mars of course, and enjoying low-gravity. I don't see either one as a life-goal thing and anyway they are not the motivations that transpire from what I read from mars enthusiasts.
Call it a strawman argument if you want, but it's not disingenuous in the sense that it's my genuine, honest opinion.
while i am hugely interested in space exploration and such, i find it a folly that we spend so much attention to going to Mars.. and going to spend billions (in the long term maybe even trillions) of dollars on it while our planet - a perfectly habitable home still - withers away by our doing.
imho we should get our priorities straight.. listening mr. Musk?
Just because something is valuable in the long term doesn't mean it's justifiable in the short term. Perhaps the route to colonizing Mars is to develop technologies that have nothing to do with going into space right now.
Certainly not. I'd rather see taxes lowered, so people can make their own decisions about how they want to spend their own money.
I'm perfectly happy to live my life on Earth. If they suddenly colonise Mars, and it's fantastic, and it makes you live twice as long and have superpowers, I would still rather stay here. I'm simply not interested in it.
People often cite the technological advances - "velcro" etc but I don't think you're getting value for money if that's your aim, and again, I think it should be done in the private sector rather than forcing people who have absolutely no interest in space, to pay for it.
Using mars as a long shot target to develop real affordable space capabilities which will help us learn how to stop asteroids and launch cheap internet satellites is cool. Being serious about living there being a near term important and realistic goal is lunacy.
We should look at it about as longingly as as an offsite backup for critical data. If you only have one habitable planet, you have none.
There's no need to romanticize our interest in Mars. It just becomes prudent at some point after becoming possible to evaluate other planets. Maybe we're close to that point, maybe not, but the only way answer that question is to begin the process of figuring out the cost to solve the challenges. The current equivalent GDP going toward Mars is rounding error on a rounding error on world total economic activity.
There's probably more economic activity on discussions about Mars than there is in actual work toward Mars.
That is not true. The tech required to maintain long-term living on Mars would be extremely valuable here on earth. It is directly relevant to many of our current goals for more sustainable lifestyles.
Much like the moon missions, the side-effect benefits that it encourages will likely end up making such a mission worthwhile for the tech alone.
I don't understand your criticism of starship though, would you clarify why you think it's not suitable?
The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air. Even the ISS needs resupply to generate breathable air. Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.
I'm also dubious of the economics of this venture. I simply don't understand how living on Mars is advantageous for anybody. Mr. Musk is welcome to set his money on fire if he wants, of course, but I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth, nor do I see paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to live a hard life and die in a frozen wasteland to be rational. I suspect after the initial enthusiasm dies down, very few people will choose this.
The money/resources necessary to put one million people on Mars with a self-sustainable industrial base would be better spent trying to stave off disaster on our home world. It's easier, cheaper and faster to detect and deflect asteroids than building that colony...
Not that building colonies in space wouldn't be a good idea for other reasons.
- its pursuit will lead to unintended tech advances
- it's such a small expenditure relative to other wasteful crap we engage in.
- there is a valid argument for diversifying life, the next gigantic asteroid isn't following your timetable
- it's private money and isn't negatively impacting you and doesn't have its hand in your pocket, as long as externalities are being taxed you're not worse off
I see so much hand wringing about this but I'm sitting here wondering why we are wasting so much money on movies and video games instead of these aspirational projects.
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