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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the never-say-never dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on Mars. Unless we radically adapt our brains and bodies to the harsh Martian environment, the Red Planet will forever remain off limits to humans.

Mars is the closest thing we have to Earth in the entire solar system, and that's not saying much.

The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth's. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun's harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it's only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:38PM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:38PM (#874324)

    Around the same time as the space race, undersea colonization was studied. Presently, it is rejected as cost ineffective. Colonization of Mars, on large scale, may actually be more cost effective than the ocean floors, same for the Moon. The pressure differentials are lower and access to solar power is easier. Not sayin' Mars is cheaper than the New Mexico desert, but... it is better insulated from Earthly problems.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:49PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @10:49PM (#874334)
    The Earthly problems will follow you to Mars.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:58PM (#874367)

      So began the great way to make all your base are belong to us!

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 02 2019, @12:33AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 02 2019, @12:33AM (#874382)

      Global warming is completely decoupled.

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    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 02 2019, @03:58AM (2 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday August 02 2019, @03:58AM (#874474)

      >The Earthly problems will follow you to Mars.

      Well, aside from plague, war, global environemental catastrophes, etc.

      Of course, Martians will have their own versions (well, war might take a while), but they'll be largely separate from the Earthly versions.

      Right now we're one especially virulent influenza mutation away from potentially wiping out most human life on the planet - we're just too interconnected to have any realistic chance of stopping a really contagious plague from spreading, no matter how lethal it is. Same thing with war - if the nukes actually start flying there won't be any corner of the world unaffected by the fallout. We're all trapped together under the same gravitational dome of sky.

      Mars though - nobody is going to bother to nuke Mars in a war on Earth. Mars has no tactical value, and is unlikely to have any real strategic value for a very long time. And the transit times for infected passengers will be more like early sailing ships to America - weeks or months of quarantine, and you let any surviving plague-carriers die in orbit.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2019, @04:13PM (#874686)

        Of course, Martians will have their own versions (well, war might take a while), but they'll be largely separate from the Earthly versions.

        They will likely involve struggling to survive in a habitat utterly hostile to all higher forms of life as we know them. There's also a decent chance that Mars will be highly dependent on Earth for many, many, many years; they'll probably last for quite some time, but ultimately they'll probably starve or suffocate (or perhaps simply be irradiated or freeze) for lack of spare parts or raw materials that can't be made on Mars. As "tough" as they may be, grit is not going to help you when there's no breathable air anywhere on the planet, or in the solar system. They would likely be well aware that they've got a few years left at best, then they all slowly die together. Even if they could survive longer it is highly unlikely they could survive to form a real civilization without utterly massive infrastructure that is likely going to have to be imported from Earth over the course of at least many decades and probably a few centuries. They can't just slap together a lean-to or a mud hut for a habitat and toss on some furs and call it done; they have to put together space suits and habitats which have billions of dollars invested into their supply chains. Each unit produced of either will likely be insanely expensive in Earth terms. Can you afford a space suit? I sure can't, and that's with the benefit of Earth's resources and population behind it, and without the shipping costs associated with extraplanetary travel. Actually making such things on Mars, assuming that the materials are even viable to derive from the planet itself, will take far, far longer.

        Mars may be a viable "plan B" for Earthly life one day. That day is probably going to be far further in the future than we are likely to see, even if we are fortunate enough to see man's first steps onto the red planet. I don't like saying any of this, but realistically speaking, it's something that has to be faced. This is probably why there's so much procrastination - it would take so long and an eye-watering sum of money, combined with the potential PR catastrophe attached to the fact that there is a pretty good chance that everyone from the first few attempts will die in the process. People are very sensitive to deaths in the space program and if they don't get it right the first time there... well, good luck getting together the funding to try again.

        I'm rather hoping I'm wrong... but I seriously doubt it. If there is ever actual hope for the future of space travel, some realism is going to have to surface somewhere, otherwise we're just going to be seeing more "Mars One" style snake oil bullshit slowly disillusioning those who might actually be able to make meaningful progress here.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:43AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:43AM (#874972)

          Mars is unlikely to ever be a realistic "plan B" for anyone but the wealthy - once things go pear-shaped on Earth(and it's only a matter of time - things *always* go pear-shaped eventually) there's unlikely to be enough time or resources to dedicate to transporting billions, or probably even millions, of people across interplanetary distances, even if there was someplace to live waiting for them when they got there.

          It would however be a meaningfully isolated society that would be only mildly affected by anything that happened to Earth, except as you point out, for trade. I really don't see bare survival being a big problem so long as at least some settlers approach it from a low-tech/bio-tech angle - which given the available resources early on will be an extremely viable strategy, I think. What do you really *need* to survive indefinitely once you've mastered living in a closed ecosystem?

          A radiation shielded habitat for yourself and other complex organisms (a.k.a. air-sealed caves), and large areas of air-and-water-tight low-pressure greenhouses spreading across the surface for your primordial slime to grow in. On Earth all animals combined are outmassed 35:1 by bacteria, which are themselves only outmassed by plants, at well over 6:1. Can you say algae (+etc) farms? It would seem to make sense to start out aiming for a ratio that we know works, especially considering how radiation resilient some microbes can be, and how well they thrive in an environment of benign neglect.

          Making those greenhouses from local materials, in a sustainably low-tech way, is going to be the challenge - but if your farms are providing a generous source of energy in the form of fuel and oxygen, that provides a really solid basis for everything else to build on - lowest-tech solar power there is, with arbitrarily high-tech power extraction.

          Ideally I think it would be some sort of tough transparent bag made from materials "mined" from the biomass - that would greatly simplify production, deployment, and recycling, as well as providing a versatile material for other purposes. All the way to at least minimally functional pressure suits - a very versatile enabling technology well-worth developing. And as a more immediate, rigid option, nanocellulose has some incredible properties that would be very useful as well - nothing quite like being able to make airtight "transparent aluminum" out of ultra-finely-ground algae

          It makes sense to start out in fancy high-tech tin cans and inflatable balloons - because that's what we can have ready made and waiting for us - but we're going to have to get quasi-low-tech really fast if we want to grow an ecosystem capable of supporting us. On the other hand, I imagine microchips will be imported for a long time to come. At least good ones. And that's the big problem with a Mars colony - It's got wonderful potential to be a thriving low-tech oasis in space, but no business case to get it off the ground. What could they possibly provide to Earth to pay for steadily shipping them all the materials they need?

          Asteroid mining on the other hand has a hugely profitable business case to exist, what with many of them almost certainly being unbelievably rich in many valuable heavy elements that are virtually nonexistent on Earth, through the simple expediency of having settled deep into the inaccessible core long before the surface solidified. And you're probably going to want to have at least a few humans on-site to deal with the inevitable problems in real time. And hey, if there's enough people out there in the asteroid belt, a garden planet that can ship out food, water, fuel and air a lot more cheaply than Earth might be worth something. Or maybe they do the same thing in giant space habitats, and Mars only later gets in on the action because the technology has gotten cheap and reliable enough that malcontents from Earth that still prefer having a sky overhead can afford to try to build something better for themselves there.