SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.