Colonizing Mars?

[Strawman]

If I had a science degree I'd apply for that one way trip to Mars in a heartbeat. Even with the risks.

Just imagine the firsts you would be achieving, all the experiences. It would be kind of sad to leave behind the Earth, but I could do it.

[CyborgZeta]

I think Mars should be colonized. Colonizing space is the future, not just for resources, but if we want to survive as a species. Who knows when an asteroid or Gamma Ray Burst could spontaneously kill us?

Mars is near by, and it's basically the only other object in the Solar System we could realistically colonize and survive on.

Would any of you actually want to live on Mars?

Absolutely. I see the idea of a human settlement on Mars as the equivalent of the Europeans leaving to colonize the New World. An opportunity to start a new life, away from the problems of the Old World (in this case, Earth).

[blah the Prussian]

Okay, let me jump back in. I don't doubt that space research is important. I see no benefit to space colonization. There are no resources on Mars. If we ever find a planet we can colonize with resources, I say go for it, but there is no actual benefit to colonizing Mars specifically.

[Phoenix Wright]

i think you skipped the part where i personally addressed that point. resources are on asteroids.

also, there's still lots of water on mars, so its got that going.

[Naughx]

i think you skipped the part where i personally addressed that point. resources are on asteroids.

also, there's still lots of water on mars, so its got that going.

Well... Saturn's moon Titan does have quite a lot of hydrocarbons, but not like it could be useful since it's so far.

Edited March 26, 2016 by Naughx

[Phoenix Wright]

i'm talking actual asteroids lol, not satellites.

[blah the Prussian]

i'm talking actual asteroids lol, not satellites.

Are asteroids even stable enough for colonization? That seems like a recipe for diasaster. I suppose you could use Mars as a base to collect resources from, but how long would it take to go from Mars to the Asteroid field?

[Phoenix Wright]

i'm unsure if you've been reading my posts at all.

mars = place to live

asteroids = things to mine

we don't need to go to the asteroid belt, as there's plenty of large asteroids that get slung by jupiter far closer towards the sun. we don't yet have the capability of farming handfuls of asteroids either, so traveling all the way to the belt and back is pretty useless; we'd stick to mining single asteroids for quite some time. i'd check the link i posted in an earlier reply, or simply google "mining asteroids" and checking out some of the links.

this isn't an impossible task, and not being able to do it right this second is not an argument for never doing it. we can land on asteroids, albeit with pretty small rovers, we just need to develop more efficient extracting processes. i'd also suspect that if mining solar system objects became a priority, asteroid capture and redirection are very real possibilities within one hundred year's time...

Well... Saturn's moon Titan does have quite a lot of hydrocarbons, but not like it could be useful since it's so far.

i think i just understood what you meant. apologies for my previous reply to you! yeah, titan is only interesting in that it could possibly (very small probability i'd guess) house life. it's much too hostile to earth's known life forms. Edited March 27, 2016 by Phoenix Wright

[amiabletemplar]

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?"

Just as Apollo had Gemini, where we proved we could *get into space at all* before we even attempted stuff like landing on the moon, so too would any Mars missions need a set of safer, test-bed missions somewhere closer to home. Building a facility on the moon would cover a lot of that. And don't forget: it wasn't Apollo 1 that landed on the moon. It was Apollo 11. We spent TEN "Moon missions" not even doing anything with the Moon itself. We got close to it; we orbited it; we tested separation and docking around it; we tested getting back to the Earth from it.

"Colonize Mars" would NEVER be the very first attempt. Trying to suggest otherwise is, honestly, putting up a strawman that's easy to knock down. Of course we're not going to leap straight into it.

As for the "year away" thing, actually there are responses to that, as-yet-untested developments ("experiments," if you prefer) in space propulsion that might be able to get people to Mars in as little as 3 months. As for the water on Mars itself, we'd know if it was radiated or not (we've done enough tests to learn that). A much better source of water will, most likely, be martian regolith--just as lunar regolith, if exposed to heat, can produce water and oxygen. It is possible to "live off the land" if you do it right--challenging, surely, but possible. With refinement and testing, we may be able to reduce that challenge to within acceptable limits.

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.

Would I? Certainly not. I like Earth just fine, thanks. But there are people who would jump at the chance, and a few of them are even qualified for it. Just as most people aren't really interested in visiting an airless lump of glass-powder and rock more than two hundred thousand miles (over 350 thousand km) away, where night is freezing death and day is raging radiation.

But we had people who would jump at the chance, and some of them were qualified too. People like Neil Armstrong. The fact that it's not a nice place for any given human to be has nothing to do with whether it is an *important* place for *some* humans to be, at some point.

Okay, let me jump back in. I don't doubt that space research is important. I see no benefit to space colonization. There are no resources on Mars. If we ever find a planet we can colonize with resources, I say go for it, but there is no actual benefit to colonizing Mars specifically.

You see no benefit to attempting to perform atmospheric engineering on another planet, to alter its atmospheric chemistry away from carbon dioxide and toward oxygen-and-nitrogen? Nothing beneficial about the biochemical knowledge they would need to maintain a sufficient supply of CO2/O2 converting organisms, or the materials knowledge to have enough shielding against the radiation from space? Nothing beneficial about the propulsion, energy, electronic, and software technology that would need to be developed to make such a mission viable? Nothing useful about the psychological benefits of studying a population in a tightly confined space where rigid regulations must be observed in order for all to live safely?

Perhaps the issue is not that there is nothing to learn, but that you are excessively skeptical about how the requisite techs can be applied to other current issues (a particular variant of the argument from ignorance).

Are asteroids even stable enough for colonization? That seems like a recipe for diasaster. I suppose you could use Mars as a base to collect resources from, but how long would it take to go from Mars to the Asteroid field?

Certainly some asteroids will be stable enough for short-term colonization, but as long-term habitats they're not especially good targets. They have very weak gravity, which makes them great for mining, but they have essentially the same problems as living on an orbital around the Earth, you'll slowly suffer muscle atrophy and bone density loss due to the lack of gravity. That said, a sufficiently-stable hollowed-out asteroid could make a decent platform for stuff like space-based refuelling/storage, which don't need to have permanent residents, just people taking a month or two time-shift on board kind of deal. Such a thing would be ideal, actually, if we can ever get space elevators working: keeping useful items in space-based storage is really helpful. (Note that I am not talking about using the asteroid as the anchor for the space elevator: just using asteroids as storage stations at distances nicely far away from the Earth.)

As PW notes, re-positioning an asteroid to a more-desirable position (such as orbiting one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points) is a thing we could do, and there are plenty of Near Earth Objects that we could use for that purpose (without needing to hit the asteroid belt).

[CyborgZeta]

To add to what's been said about asteroids, Phobos and Deimos could potentially serve as bases for carrying out asteroid capturing and mining operations.

Heck, the Martian moons could even be used as practice for landing and mining on asteroids.