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Ed Regis writes in the New York Times that today we an witnessing an outburst of enthusiasm over the literally outlandish notion that in the relatively near future, some of us are going to be living, working, thriving and dying on Mars. But unfortunately Mars mania reflects an excessively optimistic view of what it actually takes to travel to and live on Mars, papering over many of the harsh realities and bitter truths that underlie the dream. "First, there is the tedious business of getting there. Using current technology and conventional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars would be a grueling, eight- to nine-month-long nightmare for the crew," writes Regis. "Tears, sweat, urine and perhaps even solid waste will be recycled, your personal space is reduced to the size of an SUV., and you and your crewmates are floating around sideways, upside down and at other nauseating angles." According to Regis every source of interpersonal conflict, and emotional and psychological stress that we experience in ordinary, day-to-day life on Earth will be magnified exponentially by restriction to a tiny, hermetically sealed, pressure-cooker capsule hurtling through deep space and to top it off, despite these constraints, the crew must operate within an exceptionally slim margin of error with continuous threats of equipment failures, computer malfunctions, power interruptions and software glitches.
But getting there is the easy part says Regis. "Mars is a dead, cold, barren planet on which no living thing is known to have evolved, and which harbors no breathable air or oxygen, no liquid water and no sources of food, nor conditions favorable for producing any. For these and other reasons it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit." These are only a few of the many serious challenges that must be overcome before anyone can put human beings on Mars and expect them to live for more than five minutes says Regis. "The notion that we can start colonizing Mars within the next 10 years or so is an overoptimistic, delusory idea that falls just short of being a joke."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Tuesday September 22 2015, @10:40AM
I'm all for expanding the human species beyond Earth, but Mars or even the moon are pretty hostile destinations. In either of those you're going to be spending the rest of your life in tiny sealed-up cans anyway, so wouldn't it be better to have those cans orbiting Earth -- for now? A thousand copies of the space station would be easier and cheaper, plus when something goes wrong you aren't a year away from rescue.
Mine space objects for construction materials -- but don't live on them. Just because we grew up on the surface of a large rock doesn't mean that's the only option.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday September 22 2015, @12:01PM
That reminded me of an outfit I haven't heard much of lately. (It's quite possible that I've just not been following the right news sources.) I think it was Bigelow or something like that? They had inflatables that one could use for storage and/or habitat, at a much larger scale than the cramped quarters described in the summary.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @12:51PM
That reminded me of an outfit I haven't heard much of lately. (It's quite possible that I've just not been following the right news sources.) I think it was Bigelow or something like that? They had inflatables that one could use for storage and/or habitat, at a much larger scale than the cramped quarters described in the summary.
You remember correctly, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace [wikipedia.org]
The inflatables are interesting because they are lighter than their all-metal counterparts, pack smaller, and are thus cheaper to get out of our gravity well. I'm all for it, I hope they succeed.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:15PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:30PM
The thing about the zone is its a zone. We'd be fools not to build a monster station at the Earths semi-stable orbital Lagrange points. If we're willing to tolerate more instability and some minor continuous energy draw we can put space stations anywhere in the happy zone.
A cool engineering project to piss off the paleoconservative "must never change anything" environmentalists, would be to move the moon out of earth orbit into a solar orbit opposite the earth and terraform it. Having the atmosphere evaporate away in a couple centuries isn't an issue given an infinte supply of icy and rocky asteroids. I suppose you could soft-ish land asteroids until the moon was as big as the earth. WRT orbital stability it only has to be stable for a couple billion years at which point various solar developments make instability irrelevant.
Also we're the goldilocks zone for large dumb passive planets. The solar farms on Mercury are rockin, that planet (or its space station "moons") will be an industrial powerhouse someday. Sure it might be hot as hell for humans and not permanently inhabitable, but your average robotic assembly line wouldn't really care, and even a minor effort at technological active cooling would help quite a bit over "dumb rock" passive cooling.
I wonder if we could breed / engineer crops that take advantage of Mercury level light intensity to grow a whole season of wheat in a couple days. I suppose there are some inherent cell division speed limits such that maybe the greenhouses at Mercury would have to all be algae and then process the algae into useful stuff.
If I were more motivated, I could calculate a pattern of solar panels and windows such that in a Mercury orbit you'd get a smokin amount of electricity and the little windows or gaps between the panels would pass earth normal light levels. So you could have a combined greenhouse / solar plant.
So anyway the goldilocks zone is a zone not a piece of rock, and plenty of places outside the zone could be highly useful to non-lump-of-rock artificial environments.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:47PM
You couldn't terraform the moon, it has too little mass to hold an atmosphere and has no magnetic field. And Venus, Earth, and Mars are all in the goldilocks zone.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:28PM
That's your ticket for the B Ark. Enjoy your trip.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:09PM
> A cool engineering project to piss off the paleoconservative "must never change anything" environmentalists, would be to move the moon out of earth orbit into a solar orbit opposite the earth and terraform it.
Yeah, I'm sure all those hippy-dippy moon-huggers would make a big unnecessary fuss when you completely destroy the lunar tidal system that stirs the oceans and influences Earth's global weather system. They'd probably also complain when the tidal halt causes the bottom to fall out of the oceanic food-chain that underpins all life on Earth. Crybabies.
> I suppose you could soft-ish land asteroids until the moon was as big as the earth.
Not really. All the asteroids in the inner solar system combined (including Ceres & Vesta) wouldn't add much more than a pimple to the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt [wikipedia.org]
I suppose you could start raiding the Kuiper belt, but you'd be looking at thousands, if not millions of years to transport all that shit in. It's a long way away.
Oh, and there's the minor issue ofmoving the freaking moon. Quite apart form the fact that's it's beyond impractical with any technology we currently have or could dream of having in the next thousand years, one slight miscalculation and you have a massive lump of rock big enough to turn the entire planet Earth into molten slag floating about in a very dangerous Earth-like orbit. I'd love to see the OSH risk assessment on that project summary.
Maybe you can hand-wave these objections away, but honestly what's the point? If you have the tech and disposable energy to move that much material that far with such precision, it's probably easier just to build some kind of gigantic artificial habitat [wikipedia.org] That would house more people in a more efficient way. When you think about it, in terms of the material:living space ratio, planets are hugely inefficient. How many thousands of miles of rock are beneath your feet right now, just to provide you with appropriate gravity and atmosphere?
> Sure {mercury} might be hot as hell for humans and not permanently inhabitable, but your average robotic assembly line wouldn't really care, and even a minor effort at technological active cooling would help quite a bit over "dumb rock" passive cooling.
Actually, Mercury might not be all that bad, because it's tidally locked. Sure the face that's permanently pointing at the sun would be too hot, and the side that's in permanent darkness would be too cold, but there's probably a thin strip of land along the terminator that would be at a fairly comfy and consistent temperature. Cooling can be handled relatively easily by exploiting the temperature difference between the hot side and the cold side. More of an issue would be low availability of useful life-supporting elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and so on. A small colony could probably survive there, with abundant solar power for local use and a carefully managed/recycled supply of largely imported volatiles, but I'm not sure what such a colony would have to offer the rest of the solar system in terms of exports. I guess if the moon has been re-orbited off and terraformed, we wouldn't be able to get our Helium-3 from there, so maybe we'd have to mine it on Mercury.
> I wonder if we could breed / engineer crops that take advantage of Mercury level light intensity to grow a whole season of wheat in a couple days.
Heat would be your enemy. Plants on Earth run at such low efficiency (they use only a fraction of the heat that reaches them) simply to avoid overheating. By the time you've added an appropriate cooling system to your greenhouse, well you're just using extra energy. Then you have to use more energy to shift your crops up out of Mercury's gravity well and up the Sun's gravity well to wherever. That's a big overhead for the sake of growing crops a little quicker. Cheaper and easier to spend the energy to simulate Mercury conditions elsewhere in the solar system.
> If I were more motivated, I could calculate a pattern of solar panels and windows such that in a Mercury orbit you'd get a smokin amount of electricity and the little windows or gaps between the panels would pass earth normal light levels. So you could have a combined greenhouse / solar plant.
Reducing Mercury's solar capture to Earth-normal still wouldn't let you keep an atmosphere there, and there's precious little to build an atmosphere out of anyway. Bear in mind that only half of Mercury gets any sunlight at all.
If you're thinking orbital solar, you might as well just put them in Earth orbit as Mercury. The extra light intensity you gain from putting them in Mercury orbit isn't worth the effort of heading down in to the gravity well and transmitting the power back home. In fact, I suspect you'd run into engineering limits on your solar capture tech that would cause the extra light/heat to be wasted anyway, just like with the plants.
You think big though, I like that.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:21PM
> A cool engineering project to piss off the paleoconservative "must never change anything" environmentalists, would be to move the moon out of earth orbit into a solar orbit opposite the earth and terraform it.
Yeah, I'm sure all those hippy-dippy moon-huggers would make a big unnecessary fuss when you completely destroy the lunar tidal system that stirs the oceans and influences Earth's global weather system. They'd probably also complain when the tidal halt causes the bottom to fall out of the oceanic food-chain that underpins all life on Earth. Crybabies.
Tides do not only effect bodies of water. The gravitational force of the moon also causes the solid earth and rock under your feet to bob up and down as much as a foot twice a day. Moving the moon would likely cause severe outbreaks of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc., quite possibly in areas not currently experiencing them as well as in the usual areas, probably destroying life on earth, or at least any higher life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tathra on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:41PM
the problem with staying on earth is that we know for a fact that it won't last forever. if we do not leave the earth, humanity (not to mention all other life on earth) will go extinct, period. it may not happen for 3-4 billion years (sun entering red giant phase and consuming the earth), though it could also happen tomorrow (large asteroid/comet strike), but we know for absolutely certain that remaining here is a one-way ticket to extinction for all life on earth. we have to leave earth at some point for any of earth's life to survive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @03:46PM
We could help some of Earth's life to make its way to other worlds by sending out spacecraft laden with bacteria, fungi, algae and so on (as we've done unintentionally). Humans needn't come along.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:04PM
no, we don't need to come along, however the entire purpose of life and its instinctual drive is to reproduce and propagate the species. its in every single one of earth's life's drive to survive, but humans are the only ones with the correct anatomy (opposable thumbs, combined with brains capable of abstract thoughts and planning tens or hundreds of steps in advance, and millennia of accumulated knowledge) to accomplish it. it would be pretty stupid, not to mention contrary to our instincts, to build some kind of ark that would only transport simple, basic lifeforms, plus all of our knowledge would be lost without us coming along, and accumulating and propagating knowledge is just as important as propagating the species.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:48PM
Besides, if we only export the algae and bacteria, we'd likely inadvertently send it through some sort of worm-hole where it will establish itself in some galaxy some billions of years before humans ever descend from trees, evolve into a hateful, vengeful algae-humanoid-bacterial-swarm and return to conquer Earth.
We will never forget, never forgive.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:34PM
What arrogance is it such that you think that humans can and will be immortal?
"Oh noes, our life will come to an end if we don't" is no better reason for believing that we can build vessels that can house entire communities of humans, spiral out of Earth's gravity well, and roam the heavens than it is for believing that we can pray to a god, shuffle off our mortal coil, and go to heaven.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:56PM
What arrogance is it such that you think that humans can and will be immortal?
Well, it may or may not be arrogance. I would say that question is a matter for psychiatrists and psychologists, and if it impacts the person's life in a way they find negative, they can see such professionals and get treated.
But in terms of planning for personal survival, longer life, and longer and better life for one's offspring, I'd say it's completely immaterial. Whether the motivation is arrogance or indigestion or whatever, some people desire to go about the science of figuring out how to live longer and that scientific goal can be pursued whether or not the person pursuing it is afflicted with arrogance or any other personality disorder.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 22 2015, @04:42PM
The problem with that argument is that it assumes that leaving now is the best way of developing space travel. Since we went to the moon, we've made massive advances in materials science, computers, and so on, all of which have applications to building spacecraft. The earlier story about batteries is another case in point: we can manage far denser batteries now than the lunar lander had, for a fraction of the cost.
You have to do something that spurs demand for technology for the technology to be developed, but there's no compelling evidence that building space craft now will actually make building space craft in 100-200 years easier than if we focussed on other technologies.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:06PM
there is no such assumption or argument in my post. all i said was "we have to leave earth at some point", not "we have to leave now!" or "we have to leave in the next century". the sooner the better, since there could be a world-wide extinction event tomorrow, but on geological timescales "sooner" is thousands of years, not decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @10:27PM
In the next century? You didn't really fully grasp that whole Cosmic Calendar [nationalgeographic.com] thing, did you? Our entire species is like, 25 seconds into the next five months. You say we need to get out of here in the next 1000 years, 10000 years? How about a million years? Do you have any idea how big a thousand million is?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:39PM
NASA says we could visit Mars by the 2030s. [nasa.gov] One scenario has us visiting one of its two moons first. And you know what? I'll listen to NASA before I'll listen to some dumb reporter's opinion.
Why do I say "dumb"? Because of the dumb reporter's own words: "Tears, sweat, urine and perhaps even solid waste will be recycled, your personal space is reduced to the size of an SUV., and you and your crewmates are floating around sideways, upside down and at other nauseating angles."
First, has that dumbass never heard of the ISS? Second, does he not now that in microgravity there is no up, down, or sideways? As Bugs says, "What a maroon!"
There's a book I read a couple years ago, an SF title by Andy Wier The Martian. It was a great book (NASA astronauts agree) and the movie comes out Oct 2. The trailers look like it stays pretty close to the book, I'm really looking forward to seeing it. A NASA mission controller was the movie's science adviser. Wier did his homework and got all the science right except one thing that wasn't discovered until it was published - due to Mars' low atmospheric pressure, a 120 mph sandstorm wouldn't be dangerous.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 22 2015, @01:50PM
I wouldn't expect some random dumbass to understand anything about space. Sometimes, authors who really should have researched just a little bit, invent stupid, impossible situations. Like, the ship is on it's way to Io, and suddenly it runs out of fuel. Hole in a fuel tank, or some such thing, I can't remember now. So - the ship screeches to a halt, and they have to radio for help. The fool thought he was a science fiction writer? WTF? Yet another writer had a ship rocking and shuddering from near misses from guns. Had he specified that the shells were proximity fused high explosive, he might have got away with that - debris hitting the ship. But, elsewhere he had specified that the guns fired solid projectiles. Ooooops!
So many pure stupid things are found in stories, I guess I can forgive some dumb reporter for not knowing any better.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @03:18PM
There's a big difference between visiting and colonizing (i.e. "living, working, thriving and dying on") Mars. We've visited the moon in 1969. We've still not even close to colonizing the moon in 2015.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 22 2015, @02:35PM
Something that living on big rocks gives you that space colonies don't is an atmosphere and other resources readily at hand.
Now, they aren't the resources you need, exactly, but the idea that you couldn't turn what you have into what you need shows a lack of imagination. For example, Mars has no liquid water, but it shows every sign of having lots of water ice, and we know exactly how to turn water ice into liquid water. Mars is cold, but we know how to make a planet warmer - pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. It's red because it has a lot of iron around that we might well be able to do something with. It has all sorts of silicates, which, since many of them are common on Earth, we could develop processes to turn those into useful stuff like oxygen.
I don't think anybody thinks it would be easy, but it would be possible, and the benefits of having some portion of humanity relying on a different rock's resources are too big to just dismiss. I would fully expect at least a few utter catastrophes to be involved in the process, like there were for the Apollo and shuttle and Soyuz programs, and just like there were when Europeans first travelled to the Americas, but that doesn't mean we should give up.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 22 2015, @07:47PM
i would build on your idea - literally. pull a large rock into earth-orbit. burrow into it to create living/working spaces. use what materials you can from that burrowing process. grab some other, smaller rocks for additional materials. off the back of my head, i'd say put the large rock at the lagrange point between the earth and moon.