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Colonizing Mars?


Rapier
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It would be a waste of resources. We need to save our own planet first.

I'm a big space nerd, so I'd like to make a couple points:

  1. Research into space travel and colonization has direct benefits for life on Earth. The research that goes into building a rocket has applications for the military and aerospace industries. It's a boon for higher education, and thus the towns around them. University towns have many of the benefits of a large city, without the detriments, due to their unique demographics. As for actually colonizing a planet, the benefits for life on Earth are huge. Case in point: if you can survive on Mars, where the atmosphere is lethal, with the incredibly minimal supplies you receive from Earth, you can easily survive on a degraded Earth, where the atmosphere has sublethal effects, resources are diffuse but plentiful, and human capital is massive.
  2. The industrial effects are similar. If you can build a biodome and get it to Mars, which would most likely involve some amazing feats of modulation and/or 3D printing, you can absolutely build it on Earth for cheap. More importantly, once factories are up and running for those biodomes, or water filters, or whatever their role is, they can take advantage of economies of scale, so they'll have an incentive to sell those items to more than just a space agency.
  3. Space travel is one of the few areas where international collaboration isn't just encouraged, but necessary. The United States and Russia can never fully cut communications, because they both need the other's expertise and infrastructure. Maintaining that relationship obviously isn't either of those countries sole priority, but it still gives them another reason to keep a positive relationship.
  4. Research into space also has indirect bonuses. An algorithm to improve images taken by the Hubble Space telescope is also effective at identifying early breast cancer. It's impossible to predict what new discoveries an attempt to colonize Mars may lead to.
  5. One final point, people tend to shut down space research without offering any kind of alternatives. The truth is, space research benefits far outweigh the costs, but they're so widespread that it really takes some research to realize it. Saving our own planet is great (and encouraged!), but the best way to do that is by trying somewhere else. It's kind of like going on dates. Some people wait to go on dates until they meet the perfect person, then they find that person and realize they can't get a date with that person because they don't have any practice going on dates.
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It would be a waste of resources. We need to save our own planet first.

saving our planet is impossible. if we're to think far beyond the scope we're accustomed to, we need to think space.

there contain many challenges in a manned mission to mars. let me name a few:

--psychological trauma of being with the same 4 people in a confined space for at least a year.

--physical setbacks, including cosmic radiation and all of the normal issues an astronaut faces in space

--resource management

--cost

--priority

--beyond a manned mission, there are many, many more challenges.

the technologies developed in tackling these issues would have uses that extend beyond the scope of the mission itself. here are a number of technologies helped developed by nasa. 1 bn years from now, life is doomed because the sun will be too hot. but life will be doomed far, far before that due to limited resources. we need to prepare now so that we have more wiggle room in the future.

i highly recommend reading more about robert zubrin, who's spent most of his career fighting for a manned mars mission.

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It would be a waste of resources. We need to save our own planet first.

I don't think that argument is that good in long term. First, the Earth will always have problems. This cannot be an excuse for hampering scientific proggress and a possible expansion to Mars. If people thought like this during the Colonization era and never actually bothered to explore the oceans and discover new continents, History would've been much different and possibly worse than it is today.

Second, the Earth will have much worse problems in the future (60 million years from now, it's estimated that a carbon dioxide disaster will happen and it'll become much more difficult to live on Earth, and things only get worse from there on), the human race will definitely not survive if it stays on Earth for so long. I know, it's a very far future and we won't be here to see it, but it is definitely an issue.

Third, a colonization of Mars could potentially help when the human race grows even higher on numbers and resources become more scarce (with that said, I wish I knew if minerals and other useful resources do exist on Mars). Capitalism is a beast that feeds upon itself, after all, and a multiplanetary economy could help a lot in long term.

Also, it seems there is a period where Mars and Earth are close enough for a trip to be made in at least three months. I know this is still distant, but still not much different from what sailors went through the Colonization era, and with enough technology the trip can be much less taxing. I'd really like to see this work.

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I'm a big space nerd, so I'd like to make a couple points:

  1. Research into space travel and colonization has direct benefits for life on Earth. The research that goes into building a rocket has applications for the military and aerospace industries. It's a boon for higher education, and thus the towns around them. University towns have many of the benefits of a large city, without the detriments, due to their unique demographics. As for actually colonizing a planet, the benefits for life on Earth are huge. Case in point: if you can survive on Mars, where the atmosphere is lethal, with the incredibly minimal supplies you receive from Earth, you can easily survive on a degraded Earth, where the atmosphere has sublethal effects, resources are diffuse but plentiful, and human capital is massive.
  2. The industrial effects are similar. If you can build a biodome and get it to Mars, which would most likely involve some amazing feats of modulation and/or 3D printing, you can absolutely build it on Earth for cheap. More importantly, once factories are up and running for those biodomes, or water filters, or whatever their role is, they can take advantage of economies of scale, so they'll have an incentive to sell those items to more than just a space agency.
  3. Space travel is one of the few areas where international collaboration isn't just encouraged, but necessary. The United States and Russia can never fully cut communications, because they both need the other's expertise and infrastructure. Maintaining that relationship obviously isn't either of those countries sole priority, but it still gives them another reason to keep a positive relationship.
  4. Research into space also has indirect bonuses. An algorithm to improve images taken by the Hubble Space telescope is also effective at identifying early breast cancer. It's impossible to predict what new discoveries an attempt to colonize Mars may lead to.
  5. One final point, people tend to shut down space research without offering any kind of alternatives. The truth is, space research benefits far outweigh the costs, but they're so widespread that it really takes some research to realize it. Saving our own planet is great (and encouraged!), but the best way to do that is by trying somewhere else. It's kind of like going on dates. Some people wait to go on dates until they meet the perfect person, then they find that person and realize they can't get a date with that person because they don't have any practice going on dates.

Basically, all of those things dont affect me in anyway.

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I don't think that argument is that good in long term. First, the Earth will always have problems. This cannot be an excuse for hampering scientific proggress and a possible expansion to Mars. If people thought like this during the Colonization era and never actually bothered to explore the oceans and discover new continents, History would've been much different and possibly worse than it is today.

Second, the Earth will have much worse problems in the future (60 million years from now, it's estimated that a carbon dioxide disaster will happen and it'll become much more difficult to live on Earth, and things only get worse from there on), the human race will definitely not survive if it stays on Earth for so long. I know, it's a very far future and we won't be here to see it, but it is definitely an issue.

Third, a colonization of Mars could potentially help when the human race grows even higher on numbers and resources become more scarce (with that said, I wish I knew if minerals and other useful resources do exist on Mars). Capitalism is a beast that feeds upon itself, after all, and a multiplanetary economy could help a lot in long term.

Also, it seems there is a period where Mars and Earth are close enough for a trip to be made in at least three months. I know this is still distant, but still not much different from what sailors went through the Colonization era, and with enough technology the trip can be much less taxing. I'd really like to see this work.

mars is not meant to be a resource planet during a time of colonization. asteroids are where it's all at.

Basically, all of those things dont affect me in anyway.

that isn't true, and check the link. space research affects you in a profound way, even if you don't know it, and it's very useful for the rest of the human race as well.

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Also, apparently NASA has enough technology for a 30 minute trip to Mars (first video on the link). The most conservative position, however, claims it'll take 3 days max, which is still neat. There are no projects for employing this kind of technology on a mission to Mars, however.


mars is not meant to be a resource planet during a time of colonization. asteroids are where it's all at.

So in a far future Mars can provide significant resources to us? I understand that at a time of colonization it's going to be more of a burden than anything else because colonies are going to need lots of resources until they can actually produce stuff and become semi-autonomous/autonomous.

I'm interested on the asteroid part. How would it work? Judging from the speed they travel and that they're random rocks coming fast from random points, that seems hard. Also, how resourceful could they be?

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Also, apparently NASA has enough technology for a 30 minute trip to Mars (first video on the link). The most conservative position, however, claims it'll take 3 days max, which is still neat. There are no projects for employing this kind of technology on a mission to Mars, however.

So in a far future Mars can provide significant resources to us? I understand that at a time of colonization it's going to be more of a burden than anything else because colonies are going to need lots of resources until they can actually produce stuff and become semi-autonomous/autonomous.

I'm interested on the asteroid part. How would it work? Judging from the speed they travel and that they're random rocks coming fast from random points, that seems hard. Also, how resourceful could they be?

it's doubtful. basically, if you'll remember the rosetta mission (where we landed on a comet), we'd do that but be way better at it. how do we get better at it? spend more money learning about it and actually doing it, which is why it's so important to start early.

mars is a really shitty earth, but it's not too far away and is a whole world that humans can inhabit in the future. there's lots of types of asteroids--some are from the beginning of the solar system and haven't really been tampered with since. here's a pretty brief overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

asteroids, contrary to popular belief, aren't just boring rocks! they could indeed be very important to our survival in the future.

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If the supposed benefit of space research is branching it off to earth based applications, you'll generally be off cheaper researching it for use on earth. You know, by not first developing something with completely different (and much tougher) design parameters and then spending even more adapting it to earth.

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it's not as linear as you think, nor are the benefits reduced to that. people like me only say that to folks that say, "we need to spend money down here first."

discovery itself is one of the most basic human desires. it fuels motivation, wonder, excitement, etc. we'd never have movies like moon, interstellar, etc. if we didn't know the science. people like black holes and shit.

the science we gain is valuable. funding good science is funding good science, it doesn't really matter who is doing it. there are some things that can only be learned by looking out into space (gravitational waves, cosmic microwave background [for the most part], extreme effects of greenhouse gases, and many other things). solving a harder problem tends to lead to better results. "design parameters" aren't necessarily completely different (check link i posted). i'm getting pretty tired of people arguing things that don't make sense and make no attempt at learning new things. freeze dried food is very useful, and there aren't many differences in the methods of making it for space or earth.

we can argue for hours why my field is useless, but in all honesty, you'd be wrong.

Edited by Phoenix Wright
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If the supposed benefit of space research is branching it off to earth based applications, you'll generally be off cheaper researching it for use on earth. You know, by not first developing something with completely different (and much tougher) design parameters and then spending even more adapting it to earth.

As Phoenix Wright was saying, research and development doesn't work in a straight line. Breakthroughs in various fields can lead to innovation in entirely unrelated fields.

That said, the mentality stated in this topic, multiple times no less --we must save our planet first-- is a fallacious one. It presupposes first that the planet is on a fast track towards destruction --it is not-- and it assumes that research and development is somehow something that can be manually adjusted by a controlling force --it cannot. What are all of these naysayers' thoughts with regard to the amount of funds directed towards military spending as opposed to space exploration?

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If the supposed benefit of space research is branching it off to earth based applications, you'll generally be off cheaper researching it for use on earth. You know, by not first developing something with completely different (and much tougher) design parameters and then spending even more adapting it to earth.

The much tougher design parameters are where all the benefits come from. When companies design cars, they put them through stress tests that are much tougher than everyday use. Even when companies build chairs, they still put them through stress tests. The point being, if a product survives the extremes, it can survive daily use that falls well within those limits. R&D just doesn't work the way people who aren't knowledgeable about it think it does.

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As Phoenix Wright was saying, research and development doesn't work in a straight line. Breakthroughs in various fields can lead to innovation in entirely unrelated fields.

The problem with phoenix' case is that it doesn't make a case for space research. Just research in general. Same with castaigne, really.

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The problem with phoenix' case is that it doesn't make a case for space research. Just research in general. Same with castaigne, really.

The advantage of space research is that it's literally the most challenging design environment we have access to and it's a particularly fruitful area with high returns on investment. To think of it one way, every dollar invested in NASA generates $14 in revenue: http://www.21stcentech.com/money-spent-nasa-waste/

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The problem with phoenix' case is that it doesn't make a case for space research. Just research in general. Same with castaigne, really.

i'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion:

there are some things that can only be learned by looking out into space (gravitational waves, cosmic microwave background [for the most part], extreme effects of greenhouse gases, and many other things). solving a harder problem tends to lead to better results. "design parameters" aren't necessarily completely different (check link i posted).

unless you find pretty much the entire field of physics unimportant, it follows that studying physical objects outside of earth is important. your initial claim is wrong in the first place, as space research tends to ask different questions than "earth" research, and so links between the two can be found in unpredictable ways. read about the pacemaker.

without "space research," we'd never know how insignificant we are (pale blue dot???). we'd never know asteroids have valuable materials integral to our survival in them. we'd never know the universe is a dynamic system. we'd never know so many things about the natural world. a person that would rather be ignorant of these things clearly does not understand how powerful a tool science is.

also, let me make my positions clearer: i support manned exploration for survival purposes, not scientific purposes. more and more scientists agree that manned space travel is much too difficult compared to probes. with probes, you don't have to land to do science. you can do fly-bys, entry probes (literally built to gather as much data as possible before imminent destruction of the probe, really fucking cool), and multi-year missions. so, in terms of getting science done, i don't think our money is better-spent on sending humans out; however, there is something distinctly awesome about sending humans into space.

research involving space is easily worth it in every way. it helps generate new technologies, helps create new generations of curious people, aids the economy (via sci-fi and other things business related). it does it all. i'm not expecting you to become a space nerd, but i always appreciate less people spouting the drivel that it isn't worth it. science and discovery make it wholly worth it.

edit:

I'm interested on the asteroid part. How would it work? Judging from the speed they travel and that they're random rocks coming fast from random points, that seems hard. Also, how resourceful could they be?

oh, and just for the coolness of it all, asteroids aren't just random rocks coming from random points. looking at the asteroid belt, asteroids big enough to see have predictable trajectories when jupiter slings them away from the belt. even as far as the kuiper belt, where one would imagine that objects there are even more loosely bound by gravity, there is an order to the asteroids. even such that there may be another planet out there.

Edited by Phoenix Wright
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oh, and just for the coolness of it all, asteroids aren't just random rocks coming from random points. looking at the asteroid belt, asteroids big enough to see have predictable trajectories when jupiter slings them away from the belt. even as far as the kuiper belt, where one would imagine that objects there are even more loosely bound by gravity, there is an order to the asteroids. even such that there may be another planet out there.

That's nice to know, thanks.

tbh it seems like something that'll be really useful in the future. Living on a world with scarce resources that are supposed to supply infinite needs requires that we find more resources somewhere else. From what I've read from the wikipedia article, however, that seems too expensive and only a few asteroids are worth mining from a cost-benefit point of view. That'll probably change in the near future though, as science finds better and cheaper methods for space travel and asteroid mining. The problem is that it'll only begin when people stop thinking that it's a waste of time and start testing and spending money on such projects. They lack a long-term view perspective.

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Basically, all of those things dont affect me in anyway.

Given that you are posting on an Internet forum, using a personal computer, in a space that exists because of a series of video games, I think space research has a very significant impact on you personally and individually.

Computers, as we know them today, could not exist without technologies developed specifically as part of the Apollo (and Gemini) program(s). Two of the people who worked on the prototype portable computers that were absolutely required for the lunar lander to operate correctly went on to found Intel--the company that, in all probability, manufactured the processor your computer uses right now. The Internet, as we know it today, would not exist without the ARPA Net, which was created specifically by the US Department of Defense (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to link government-associated research groups, both civilian and military, to computing and data resources. ARPA only came into existence because of the US government not wishing to be left behind after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik; therefore, although not a direct result of the Apollo program itself, the Internet does indirectly owe its existence to the nationwide coordination of scientists, engineers, and government/military personnel that Apollo required to succeed.

I assume you have also, for example, used Google Maps at some point? Satellite imagery and the Global Positioning System only exist as they do today because of the Gemini program--which was the preparatory "test bed" for the technologies used in the subsequent Apollo program. Major developments in materials science (plastics, metallurgy, ergonomics) also owe their start to experiments and knowledge gained as a result of the successful Apollo missions--both the actual lunar landings and the prior missions.

Even beyond the clear, direct, applied results that we can point to from the Apollo program and its siblings, there is one simple fact: The number of Ph.D.s awarded in the United States in the years following Kennedy's 1961 speech tripled. Apollo didn't just give us new technology: it challenged us to be better educated, to be cleverer. And it acted as an enormous inspiration to generations of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who grew up during and after humanity touched the heavens.

As this post from NASA (written by the first geologist employed there) says, calling the indirect results of the Apollo program "spinoffs" is almost an insult to how pervasive and important these things have been for our modern lives. Your phone, your computer, your gaming consoles (and video games), your presence on an internet community, your access to and use of digital art...every single one of these things owes an enormous debt to the fact that the United States had the utterly insane "goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." Kennedy fundamentally understood what he was calling for--politically, scientifically, and socially. The benefits of investigating space, of facing the incredible challenges posed by that vast frontier, do not stop at the end of a successful mission, at the end of a successful program, at the end of a successful career. They live on. They live on and grow and plant their own new seeds, which in turn flower and spread the seed of development yet further. Knowledge, tested in the crucible of danger, becomes the platform of tomorrow's opportunity.

Does this mean I think it is practical to colonize Mars in the near future? No. It is far from practical: it is hardly better than a fantasy today. But so was going to the moon, and doing the other things in that decade. We did it then. We could do it again.

And in response to the "we should save our planet instead": considering how important the Internet is, and will be, for any effort that would address current Earth issues, who's to say Mars colonization and its ripple-out effects wouldn't have a similar effect? We need to learn how to use resources differently. We need to learn how to live off the land, how to make what we have work faster, better, lighter, cheaper, simpler. Anyone trying to live on Mars indefinitely, rather than carrying everything they need with them, will have the same requirements. Trying to alter or improve the Martian environment to meet human needs will be doing something very similar to what someone on Earth would be doing, in trying to change atmospheric chemistry. Travelling to Mars safely will require enormous amounts of available energy--perhaps in the form of fusion power, which, if it can be made practical, would help us reduce or eliminate our dependence on coal-based power (which is more of a problem than transportation generally, and much more of a problem than the emissions of regular cars vs. highway/long-distance transport vehicles e.g. semi-trucks and coal-powered trains).

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Some concerns:

-Mars is roughly a year away. Food, Water, and Air required to make such a trip poses a logistics problem. You could cut the required resource cost in half by making it a one-way trip, but that's quite the gamble, when we haven't even perfected moon missions yet.

-All we know about Mars is that "Water exists". No idea how much, how accessible, and whether or not it's capable of sustaining life (Toxic? Radiated? Too small in quantity?)

-We have never taken on a terraforming mission before. Starting with the moon would be much more practical. "How long does it take to set up a biodome? How well does it work? How quickly does it fall into disrepair? Is generating an atmosphere possible with our current level of science?"

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Well... maybe it could work in 100 years, but not with current technologies.

Right now it is a one-way mission to Mars, there are no ways to come back.

That said humanity should invest a lot of money into space and science programs. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Roscosmos, JAXA... Whatever country's space agency.)

Our specie really requires a goal, our very nature is to explore otherwise we would still be living in trees.

-

I liked Chris Hadfield's videos on Youtube too.

Edited by Naughx
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Would any of you actually want to live on Mars? Something about a desert planet capable of generating global dust storms and dust devils sounds unpleasant to me. The fluctuating ice caps are a nice feature if you don't mind temperatures around -225 degrees minus wind sheer. Visiting the planet for research is plausible but living there could be unpleasant to say the least.

mars-globe-valles-marineris-enhanced-br2

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Would any of you actually want to live on Mars? Something about a desert planet capable of generating global dust storms and dust devils sounds unpleasant to me. The fluctuating ice caps are a nice feature if you don't mind temperatures around -225 degrees minus wind sheer. Visiting the planet for research is plausible but living there could be unpleasant to say the least.

mars-globe-valles-marineris-enhanced-br2

That is my attitude about space travel in general. One of my favorite book series, the Mars trilogy, has a character who speculates that the very intelligent scientists who make up the crew of the first mission must be rather twisted to voluntarily choose the life that probably awaits them.

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