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Stephen Hawking wants humanity to pursue a Mars mission in the mid-2020s rather than the mid-2030s:
Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years' time and send people to Mars by 2025. Prof Hawking said that the goal would re-ignite the space programme, forge new alliances and give humanity a sense of purpose.
He was speaking at the Starmus Festival celebrating science and the arts, which is being held in Trondheim, Norway. "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," he said. "I hope it would unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us all. "A new and ambitious space programme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology".
Prof. Hawking also talked about interstellar travel:
[We'll] never know how hospitable Proxima b is unless we can get there. At current speeds, using chemical propulsion, it would take 3 million years to reach the exoplanet, Hawking said. Thus, space colonization requires a radical departure in our travel technology. "To go faster would require a much higher exhaust speed than chemical rockets can provide — that of light itself," Hawking said. "A powerful beam of light from the rear could drive the spaceship forward. Nuclear fusion could provide 1 percent of the spaceship's mass energy, which would accelerate it to a tenth of the speed of light."
NASA usually talks about planning for "Mars 2035". Who is trying to get there by 2025?
A Mars mission architecture SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk will unveil in September will call for a series of missions starting in 2018 leading up to the first crewed mission to the planet in 2024, Musk said June 1.
Related: Elon Musk's Plans for Mars and Beyond Revealed
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:17AM
It's a whole other ball game.
1. Various technological developments (widespread nuclear fusion and cheap solar, advanced recycling, matter conversion, robots, lab-grown foods, etc.) make living on Earth a breeze. The cost of energy and food plummet. Maybe it will result in a utopia, maybe not.
2. Reusable rockets and other technologies make setting up a base on the Moon, Mars, Ceres, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan, etc. a "cheap" proposition. Nuclear fusion is used to provide energy for a base/colony and set up industrial processes on-site. That's especially important where solar power is ineffective. It is also possible to put bases on Mercury and Venus.
3. Spread out to any icy body. That includes Triton, Pluto, Eris, Sedna, Orcus, etc. You don't have to have a million settlers at each location, just robots and/or a small number of settlers is fine. Artificial gravity could really help in these locations, but we can't count on that. Terraforming may be possible on Mars or Venus. Paraterraforming (atmosphere filled domes) could be used on other locations.
4. By the time some centuries have passed, it should become clear whether interstellar travel is easy or feasible. Exoplanet targets will be well studied by this time, with surfaces and atmospheres characterized and life located if it exists. The benefit to humanity is that if a colony can be established on an Earth-like world, a greater population can reside there without having to live indoors and in low gravity conditions.
Generation ships are a last resort method of interstellar travel. We may find it possible to build ships that can reach 0.1c, which would take about a century to travel 5 light years (including slowing down). Combine that with life extension, and you can avoid the common generation ship perils. Only a small amount of settlers need to be sent since the first thing they will do when they land is direct robots to build robots/industry, and artificial wombs and digital DNA sequences can be used to start a population rapidly.
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