A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in around 50 years, with today's technology. It's not that we can't do it fast (within one average human lifespan), it's that the project would be very expensive and something like Nasa has a relatively tight budget.
I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to even start to think about getting to Mars in a reasonable timeframe and in reasonable numbers (to start a colony). We are not funding making our species multiplanetary for the last few decades because we were too lazy, how can anyone expect us sending anything to the closest star (other than the sun)... You can't.
Going to Mars seems pretty useless to me at this time. It’s a super hostile environment and we don’t have the technology yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades and progress in robotics will make a Mars base much easier. There is plenty of work to be done on Earth. We have to solve clean energy production and in general reduce pollution. These are massive technological challenges that deserve massive funding.
Going to {the Middle East, Europe / Asia, Australia, the New World, interior South America, the North American West) seems pretty useless to me at this time. It’s a super hostile environment and we don’t have the technology yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades and progress in {insert technology} will make a base much easier. There is plenty of work to be done on {current place}. We have to solve {current problems}. These are massive technological challenges that deserve massive funding.
... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in all that time, they've only ever been right about Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
Only one technology matters: that which enables transportation.
Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a chance on a better life?
You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica.
Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that.
It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs), raw materials that aren't locally available (which means almost all of them), and habitable structures.
At the end of that epic effort you'll have something that will barely have a toe-hold on long-term survivability. Possibly. If you're lucky.
Not only is Mars far colder, it also doesn't have air. Or surface water. So all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder.
And it's much much further away.
Rhetoric and wishful thinking are not going to give you a better life if you can't deal with the reality of the challenges.
At the end of the day, profit determines reality. And that's where futurists have always screwed up, because profit funds solutions.
Nobody has colonized Antarctica not because it's impossible, but because it's difficult enough and useless enough that we all agreed on a treaty prohibiting it.
In contrast, we constructed the 63 radars (some with bases) of the DEW line in the late 1950s in under 3 years, with part of the Air Force's budget. Because it was useful.
Establishing a Mars colony is not impossible, it's just extremely hard. Which means expensive. Which means it needs a justification. Which is what I think the knee-jerk is really about.
And is a fair opinion. You may think interplanetary colonization should not be a priority. I think it should.
Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported.
> nuclear reactors
Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars.
> nuclear and other fuels
The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long time.
> machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs)
Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality but you know what they do it anyways because some things are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what they could create from local resources or do without. They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or Antarctica with a single expedition.
> raw materials
Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate sources here because they are too labour or energetically or materially expensive but when they are your only option price and effort become less of a concern.
> all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude harder
No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.
> Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always alternatives.
Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life. At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer).
I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer) place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"
"We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if we don't then some commie bastards will get there first."
I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism.
I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.
Big picture, I think all this pushing to make everything perfect for every person on the entire planet Earth before expanding to space is a TERRIBLE strategy
Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means".
There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!
Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this".
Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.
Maybe I'm optimistic, but these are just problems to be solved. Space exploration is a big risk / big reward investment. Yes it would require a comparatively huge investment to mine an asteroid vs. open a pit mine in Brazil but "mining" an asteroid likely means carving off hunks of solid metal for transit back to the Earth's surface rather than processing megatons of rock by blasting, trucking, and smelting. Like many things about space, it boggles the mind that a single asteroid mining mission could produce more platinum group metals than have ever been mined on Earth throughout human history. How does the total amount of money and resources spent on mining those metals on Earth stack up against the cost of a single successful asteroid mining operation?
I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.
They are certainly easier, but how useful are they? A base on Mars will bring down the fuel requirements to exploring and exploiting the belt and outer planets tremendously. Missions that are impossible or uneconomical to do from Earth could be made possible and cheap if launched from Mars.
You need some way to make fuel and propellant, though. Phobos would be a great choice for a launchpad, but in such a scenario you would do ISRU on Mars and lift fuel and propellant there - which will be much more efficient than on Earth, since there's less gravity and less atmosphere.
Any fuel you could generate on Mars would be overwhelmingly easier and cheaper to ship in from Earth; and you wouldn't need to land a million tons of freight on Mars first. A million tons of fuel delivered to LEO would take you quite a long way, and you could start immediately.
If you want to go somewhere beyond Mars, stopping there and then starting again just sets you back. (Same goes for the moon, or lunar orbit.) "Stepping stones" have strongly negative value in space transport.
A million tons of fuel doesn't cut the delta v requirements down. You'd have to ship the required fuel to Mars orbit (or wherever you plan on doing refuelling) still.
If you need to refuel, send the fuel where it would be useful to get home with, i.e. where you are really going. Dumping it at Mars does no good. You would then have to stop at Mars to collect it.
That's assuming you have enough fuel to reach those destinations from Earth, let alone make it from Earth to there with enough payload for a return voyage.
I see you are finding this very hard. Try to think it through:
If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
If you will need extra fuel to get home with, sending it to Mars is completely useless, because where you need it to be is not at Mars, but at the place where you will be at the time when you need it. That place is not Mars.
Is this really so difficult? Stop, breathe, and think.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This simply isn't true. From Mars to Jupiter is a little over 6 km/s of delta-v. From Earth to Jupiter is almost 9. The latter is just barely possible with SpaceX's Starship. The former allows for not only some breathing room, but more payload.
If you will need more delta-V than you have on-board tankage for, sending another ship at the same time and acceleration, and refueling from it on the way, is overwhelmingly better than launching literally dozens of ships to get even more fuel parked at Mars, and then spending extra fuel stopping there to pick it up, and more again to get moving again.
If your true goal is to have crap on and in orbit around Mars, do that without pretending it has any other value. You don't fool anybody, but you make people wonder about you.
Or, hear me out, you get the available infrastructure set up on the surface of Mars to manufacture fuel and propellant, and then you can send a single ship from Mars to Jupiter. And, if you can bring payload, you can set up the infrastructure to do ISRU from one of the moons of Jupiter, and eventually bring your ships back with samples.
Versus, cannibalising several extremely expensive ships in order to get one ship to a destination it's never coming back from.
And this is just one example. The lower delta-v from Mars would allow extra payload to the belt, so if anyone ever intend to exploit those resources, starting from Mars will allow them to get heavy equipment there in less time and fewer trips (provided, of course, that they can manufacture that equipment on Mars).
You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars, while I do meaningful stuff at places that are not a waste of time and effort. By the time you are ready to supply fuel FOB at Mars, I have sent a million tons to places worth sending it to, instead.
Maybe my million tons of freight includes a liquid methane sump on Titan, where I don't even need to synthesize, never mind liquify the stuff; it is sloshing around in puddles everywhere. There is an interior liquid water ocean, and ice lava flows.
Seriously, if you need more delta-V for a Jupiter or Saturn trip than spaceship design A gives you, you are much better off making a spaceship design B with enough tankage to make the trip. (Maybe B is just A with an extra tank strapped on; or, a tug boosts A to escape velocity and then loops around Luna and back, aerobraking to LEO.) Park fuel depots at both low and high Earth orbits; you waste nothing by using those, unlike anything parked foolishly at Luna or Mars.
Luna, anyway, has stuff that is worth visiting, like craters in permanent shade at the south pole, and lava tubes where vapors have maybe drifted in and froze for hundreds of millions of years. Mars is the armpit of the Solar System.
You seem pretty contentious here; I'm just making a case that Mars makes sense as a destination, not trying to convince you that this is something you need to pay for. IMO, the numbers work out for it being a hub for traffic to the belt and outer planets. Maybe you don't agree. That's fine. Again, I'm not asking you, personally, to start backing this. Just stop spouting off nonsense like 'if you can't get somewhere from Earth, you can't get there from Mars'. It's a matter of fact that delta v requirements from Mars are lower than they are from Earth, and this would have been obvious if you had thought just for a second about any of this.
> You start by shipping a million tons of freight to Mars
The equipment for generating the electricity to perform ISRU on Mars is supposedly within the payload capabilities of a single Starship, 100-150 tons, not a million, and this should be enough for a ton per day, enough to resupply in the 26 month launch window. The equipment for collecting water and CO2 is another matter, and I don't see estimates on that, but with the above and some engineering margin, it seems plausible that this operation can get off the ground in under ten ship-trips to Mars.
I have said nothing even vaguely like that, and cannot guess where you got it from. But it is a simple fact that:
Any trip to the outer Solar System that stops at Mars is, energetically, much more costly that one which does not stop at Mars.
In addition, getting stuff to Mars is itself a huge expense that completely swamps any imagined benefit of extracting fuel and launching it to stop by for.
If you want to go to Mars, go without promoting obvious falsehoods about any value it has as a transport hub. It has none. Period.
If, to make sense, your Mars story needs for Mars to be a useful transport hub, then it fails, and you need a different story.
> If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars. Stopping at Mars costs extra.
This is as asinine as saying, if you can't get somewhere without a stop at the gas station, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at the gas station. Stopping at the gas station costs extra.
After all, it costs fuel to take an exit on the freeway and go to the gas station. It costs fuel to leave and go back on the freeway. It costs extra! Energetically, any trip where you have to make a detour to a gas station, costs more than a trip where you don't make a stop there.
Not must be. Is probably achievable, and is worth attempting, even at the cost of lives.
You can argue from either the perspective of futility of attempt (no chance of success) or futility of outcome (success wouldn't be worth it), but I'm pretty convinced both would be weak arguments, both logically and historically.
I'm probably an optimist on Mars travel. I think, with a fuck ton of starships, you could get people living on Mars. But there's some big asterisks on that. You'd more or less have to live in the starships, dependent on shipments from earth, with self sufficiency failing on pretty much every category. Over a very long period, most people would probably die a bit earlier from radiation and dust. Not much would be produced of value. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. And interest in it would rapidly decline.
The suspicion I have about self sufficiency pessimism is that it's an apples to oranges comparison. Are there any modern analogies? As near as I can tell, it hasn't been required after the 16th century, due to access to relatively timely transportation.
And if it hasn't been required, then how are we to look at existing practice and say we're bad at or incapable of it?
There is no survival advantage to us on Mars. What are we all arguing about? This site is staring to feel a bit unhinged when it comes colonizing the solar system. Like SGC Ori unhinged.
The fact that random groups people from the Old World decided to start colonies without any prior experience or preparation precisely shows that they didn't consider America to be "super-hostile".
It sounds like a very chicken or egg problem to me, who's to say that progress in robotics doesn't come from trying to establish a base on Mars? Progress is often times non-linear, I mean here we using computers and communication technology based on Integrated Circuits technology furthered by the Apollo program; say we never went to the moon, computing technology and Moore's law might have been set back a decade or two.
I am not against Mars but I just think it’s premature. Build up robotics for a while and Mars will be much easier. There is no rush to become a multi planetary species. There is no credible threat of a big asteroid or volcano in the next decades. All threats we may be facing are self made.
My favorite moonshot project would be to create robotics that can clean up the environment and handle recycling. Having the technology to pick up dog poop and plastic bags in an efficient and affordable manner or separating recycling items would be a huge technological challenge that would create a ton of spin-off opportunities including a base on Mars. Or clean up the pacific garbage patch with robots.
I think all of this is premature. Focusing on life extension technology and life science would see a lot of other technological benefit, and in the worst case just mean we can wait it out.
Mars can already be useful as a springboard for space exploration. It's a literal stepping stone, both closer to the belt and outer planets in terms of distance, but also in terms of delta-v, since both the gravity well on Mars is smaller, and it's higher up in the Sun's gravity well, too. Any future space exploration and exploitation will be made tremendously easier if you can launch from Mars instead of Earth.
Mars is, even at absolute best, a dump: dry, cold, airless, at the bottom of a gravity well, and subject to dust storms besides.
We can build much better outside of gravity wells. Whatever you would land on Mars is more useful in solar orbit, parked next to any convenient asteroid.
You can't do ISRU in orbit. I don't know of any resources available on the Moon that would allow you to do ISRU there either. Ceres might work, but the inclined orbit may make that impractical as a stop.
We do ISRU all day, every day right here, in the millions of tons.
"A stop" is not just useless, but is actively harmful in space transportation. You go, for free, until you get there, and then use up fuel stopping. Starting and stopping are exactly what costs. Stopping halfway makes the whole trip cost literally twice as much.
It's also 'for free' to continue from LEO to anywhere else, but it can still make sense to refuel in LEO rather than launch with all the fuel requirements you need for the mission from Earth surface. The delta v required from LEO to another body is lower than that from Earth surface there. Delta v required from lunar orbit to some non-terrestrial body is also lower than that from LEO, and it could potentially make sense to do refuelling from there in order to get the maximum possible delta v leaving Earth's gravity well. Finally, the delta v required to reach the belt and Jupiter from low Mars orbit is lower than that to reach them from Earth. That means bigger payloads can be sent to these destinations, or even potentially any payload at all; it is only barely possible to reach a Hohmann transfer to Jupiter from Earth with SpaceX's Starship's claimed delta-v, whereas from Mars there should be several km/s of extra delta-v to spare.
Refueling in LEO or high earth orbit is fundamentally different, in every single particular, from stopping somewhere halfway.
Until you understand this, everything you say about space travel will make zero sense, and furthermore will deeply embarrass you for long after you finally catch on. You make a fool of yourself by continuing in this vein.
You can do the calculations yourselves. Refueling in LEO is energetically more costly than a launch from the Earth surface to escape. You will end up using more fuel overall if you launch into LEO vs. if you take all the fuel you need from the Earth's surface in a single launch. If there is a difference, you haven't explained it.
No, you did not. You have made such false claims as 'If you can't get there without a stop at Mars, then you really, really can't get there with a stop at Mars.' This is a claim that is easily shown to be false by calculating the differences in delta v from Mars to belt/outer planet destinations vs from Earth. You then claimed what you meant was that it takes more energy - but so what? It takes more energy to refuel in LEO than it does to launch a ship from the Earth surface to escape. Basically this entire time you have simply just claimed 'no, you're wrong' without any calculation to back it up, and the few claims that you have made have been ludicrously wrong.
agree, extreme temp variations and a toxic atmosphere would make living there very difficult(not to mention the journey!). Much better to try a moon station first as its a few days travel and then compare what went right/wrong and then think about replicating that for mars. Having water on mars does help its case though..
Not to mention that you would need to figure out how to keep the humans from having a mental breakdown. Myself, I would probably be clawing at the windows for a look at a non-existent tree in about two days.
Do you expect traveling multiple light years to an alien world to be easier or less hostile? You have to start somewhere, and the selection is pretty thin.
Traveling multiple light years is out of the question. You can think about some concepts but it’s simple not doable at this point no matter the budget.
However, it's likely that one task (going to Mars, even sending a couple rich bozos there) is small enough that you can probably do that and work on fixing things "at home".
In fact, one could argue that one set of big companies that exist this decade that didn't exist last decade is just a shopping list of "Crap I'll need for my martian condo"
Makes sense though because earth is a dump and extremely corrupt. Even if you were able to substantially decrease military funding (the usual scapegoat) without massively changing the world order we still probably wouldn’t spend more on nasa, we would spend it on healthcare, infrastructure, economic bailouts, education, green tech, etc.
By all means, go. But pay for it yourself. If you can't personally afford Mars, the middle of the Sahara Desert is unoccupied and overwhelmingly easier and cheaper to get established in. Or, under the ice in Greenland. Or, revitalize an abandoned whaling station on an island off Antarctica. If those seem uninviting, I promise Mars will be a thousand times moreso.
Your "golly I'm on Mars!" euphoria would thin out very, very fast. "This place f'n sucks!" malaise would grow steadily and without bound.
I would not mind if they went somewhere. If they went to Mars they would immediately stop talking about what a great idea it was, even if they still had air. They would shortly thereafter try to get somebody to bring them back home.
So we have this thing called a government that we give money too. Different people want it to do different things. You can recognize that while you may pay for things you dont want, other people are paying for the things that you want but they dont.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious arguments because rockets are cool).
Basically, the tech you need to make a Mars colony truly self sufficient is something like a compact fusion powerplant.
Before we have that, no point in worrying about using Mars as a "backup plan", because if Earth was screwed, Mars would have a couple of years to live at most.
And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if Musk spent money on zero-emission large scale energy production, than on rockets.
- They don't need fusion. A StarShip can deposit hundreds of solar panels and put them on the ground. No, dust isn't an issue because they'll bring a roomba. No, this isn't a joke, NASA martian probes' solar panels were cleaned by a light Martian breeze.
- They will be able to become self-sufficient rapidly. They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan. SpaceX and Tesla have already demonstrated effective vertically integrated supply chains and manufacturing. They have the institutional knowledge to mine raw materials and build factories that build complex parts.
- There are plenty of other Earth-bound governments and billionaires that could devote funds to zero-emission large scale energy production projects. Musk, his companies and assets amount to a very small fraction of the global economy. Your ire is misdirected: your anger about the situation is properly directed at the rule of corrupt imbeciles and their questionable resource allocation decisions (Netflix, coal, etc.) here on Earth rather than one team of folks who seem extraordinarily mission driven and effective.
Mars has dust storms which last months or years, it has no ionosphere, and that dust contains enough perchlorates to poison anything we could eat, including us. Ok, that sentence went somewhere odd at the end but, it's true.
A large asteroid has only one of these problems, by virtue of not coming with any atmosphere, ionic or otherwise.
I kinda hope Elon is bluffing and actually plans to head to the Belt. I've penciled it out and and he'd have to be insane not to. Surely he has pencils as well.
The Martian dust storms are pretty tame. Nothing like portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere is 1% of what it is here on earth.
So while it is a “storm” it isn’t like a tropical force hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over time.
Mars is 0.3 G, which is just as hostile for long-term habitation. No human child conceived, born, and raised in that environment would have the ability to stand on Earth without an Aliens-style rigid exosuit. Their heart might not even be capable of pumping blood to their head.
Nobody knows what 0.3 g does to the body because we've spent 20 years on the ISS doing zero-g "science" even after the most important question was answered:
This wouldn’t work, asteroids are like gravel there isn’t really anything to hollow out and even if you did when you spun it the asteroid would just shoot these rocks out in all directions.
Is it? Assuming an asteroid of appropriate structural strength, it's just a question of time + propulsion. And acceleration adds up pretty quickly when you're in a vacuum and have all the time you want.
>They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan.
Can this happen? I imagine before we can settle on Mars we first should be comfortable flying there, and the latter should be sufficient for asteroid mining. But, right, our technology is just not at a comfortable level yet.
Comfortable comes much later than possible. When it's possible to go, that's the time to go. The early Atlantic crossings weren't comfortable, just possible.
Unlike Atlantic, Mars isn't habitable, you can't settle there with merely possible crossing. Maybe first establish a colony at 1km depth in the ocean; we are relatively comfortable going there, but what it takes to run a colony there and would it be possible with only possible crossing?
The Mars backup plan seems kinda dumb to me because Mars is worse as is than all but the very worst post-apocalyptic Earth scenarios.
Just build bunkers here and staff them in shifts. Much cheaper.
Your remaining threats for which Mars would be better than "ruined" Earth are something like a grey goo event, or an asteroid so large that it liquefies much of the crust (killing everyone in all your bunkers). So, a fair bit bigger than the one that killed the Dinosaurs.
I am very interested in watching people try to colonize Mars, but find the "backup for Earth" argument ridiculous, especially if presented as something urgent.
>And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if Musk spent money on zero-emission large scale energy production, than on rockets.
Classic zero sum thinking. Spacex doesn't cost money, it makes it. How much money do you think Musk put into it? The answer is ~100 million seed. It is now worth 35,000 million.
How far do you think that 100m would go to develop fusion. The ITER project alone costs 65,000 million.
There is a difference between buying something and putting in money.
If I buy a cheeseburger, I can't say I "put in" $5 to McDonalds and should have some ownership. If I pay my contract plumber to fix my toilet, I don't own their business either.
I think you will be hard-pressed to find any substantial examples where the US gov wasn't buying something from SpaceX.
McDonald's won't go bankrupt if you elect not to get the large fries. SpaceX would have gone bankrupt several times if NASA hadn't kicked in at a crucial moment.
> Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious arguments
because rockets are cool).
Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility.
As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say that we should instead spend resources on large zero-emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical, another problem that having a self-sustaining colony, outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.
In addition to the fact that there's almost nothing you could do to Earth that would make it less liveable than Mars, any political problem that plagues the Earth is going to plague Mars just as easily. Earth didn't create human political problems, humans did. The only way to keep political problems from plaguing Mars would be to keep humans off of it.
> The reason we didn't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical
Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined.
Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk?
We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path. Whether an alternative would have gotten the same outcome?
>We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path.
Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and the other the forces of nature.
I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact. Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in impact.
Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area.
If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world.
As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.
How would the increase in the number of nuclear power plants lead to more nuclear weapons? There is no direct connection besides edge cases like Iran using it as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.
Someone please correct me if I'm speaking inaccurately, but early reactor design (1950s/60s/70s) focused on light water reactors, which meant enriched U-235 fuel (@ ~3%?). By design, these reactors also convert a portion of their U-238 to P-239, only some of which is then consumed in the reactor.
Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).
Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state nuclear weapons development.
And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor technology works, especially with the limitations of the period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-resistance would have been to have some sort of global fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on the time period). Which sovereign countries would have likely felt some kind of way about.
The number of new nuclear reactors only stopped growing in the 80's. In any case I don't think access to material is the limiting factor in nuclear proliferation. If we're talking about the US and USSR, it's completely irrelevant, even if they had 100x more reactors since they already have more than enough bombs to more or less to blow up the entire world. Other western countries either have enough nukes already or don't need or want them and I don't see why would they export technology or material to countries which are hostile to them.
It's not obvious to me that having more nuclear reactors in the US, Britain or Germany would had made it significantly easier for rogue states like Iraq, Iran or North Korea to developed nuclear weapons.
Why is it anymore ethically dubious than having more solar or wind power in first world countries? But no, I'm not necessarily saying that. I just disagree with the claim that if nuclear power continued growing at the same rate as it did prior to 1979 that would somehow have lead to higher proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It's ethically dubious because solar or wind power wasn't an option in the 50s-70s. So you're effectively gating the majority of the world off from nuclear power, enjoyed by developed economies. Which would have developed economies of scale (see: France) with the end result of developed countries having access to cheaper power than developing ones.
And I'm confused. Your reasoning around why more reactors wouldn't have increased nuclear weapon proliferation was contingent on only the US, USSR, Britain, and Germany (and presumably countries like them, to an approximation) having more reactors.
Either you get to say that (a) all countries, or (b) only "responsible" (for lack of a better word) countries should have used more nuclear power.
If (a), then you have increased proliferation risk. If (b), then you're establishing (and presumably militarily enforcing) a two-tier ability to access cheap energy, that favors developed nations.
There are relatively few countries which wanted to develop nuclear weapons over the past ~60 years and were unsuccessful in doing so. I see nothing wrong with banning the export of technology and equipment needed to develop them to those countries (AFAIK: Iran, Iraq & Libya). In fact that is already the case and Israel and US already used/are using military or clandestine means to prevent those countries from developing them. So basically I find it hard to imagine that the situation would be significantly different than it is now.
But lets I assume you're right and 'a' is somehow correct (I don't agree with the premise that increase in global nuclear power generation capacity would somehow automatically result in a higher risk of nuclear weapons actually being used) that would still mean that the western world, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and all other countries in their sphere of influence or aligned to them would have access to cheaper power (which is at least 80-90% of the global population). And I don't consider 'because Iran does not have access to nuclear power then it would be unfair for anyone else to have' to be very good argument.
In fact even if only developed countries had access to nuclear power (which is obviously not fair and not realistic anyway, good luck preventing Russia and China export their reactor to whoever they want) I still think that would be preferably to nobody having it.
> As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster.
I mean, you would somehow have to make Earth less hospitable than Mars to make the effort worth it.
There is an inherent urgency in all of his plans, mainly because he wants to see it done within his lifetime. He's got 40 years left tops, but more like 20 during which he could still theoretically do anything significant in. Rockets take decades to develop.
One conceivable reason to colonize Mars is real estate.
Perhaps in the near future life extension technology will become common place, people may continue to have kids, but natural deaths may be rare; the human population will increase exponentially and need somewhere to live and something to do -- terraforming Mars in exchange for property may be reasonable.
I don't think that a compact fusion powerplant specifically is needed. But I do agree that a truly self-sufficient Martian colony (I.E. able to exist for more than a few years without ships coming from Earth) would need a gargantuan level of infrastructure to have even a small chance of being viable.
From a standpoint of reducing emissions on Earth, it would be cool to see Elon Musk's best take on how to build a practical fusion generator though. I've heard of a few potential paths that could lead to net power much faster and cheaper than ITER. Supposedly superconducting magnets have gotten considerably better since ITER was proposed, and since power output in a tokamak reactor is something like the third or fourth power of the magnet strength IIRC, there's potential for a newer and smaller reactor design to outdo it in both timeline and cost.
It is not possible to conceive of a path that would not lead to net power before ITER. ITER has no intention of generating so much as a milliwatt, ever.
Why is it weird that a private corporation is doing space exploration & technology? Most of the biggest sailing expeditions were undertaken by private individuals and companies (although often under the funding of a royal family). Locomotives and airplanes were also created and perfected by private individuals / companies.
The 1950s-2000s NASA model for space exploration was unusual in its centralized approach.
Most of those private expeditions were seeking short term profit (of course there exceptions like the Arctic/Antarctic expeditions but their budgets were relatively insignificant compared to the resources required to send several ships to India or the Americas in the 15th century or a spaceship to Mars. Even if colonizing and exploiting the mineral resources on Mars could be profitable in the longterm being the first on Mars (unlike being the first to sail to India) is definitely going to cost more than it's worth (in financial terms) so no rational private company would do this.
There's an argument to be made that some of the current largest market cap companies in the world are analogous to royal families, in terms of centralization of capital vs freedom of decision making.
Most premodern states (at least) in Europe didn't really have a monopoly on violence in the strict sense either. Kings were constrained by a variety of laws and customs which they couldn't easily change without triggering violent opposition and had to co-opt the local elites (who usually acted as independent actors) whenever they wanted to impose their will outside of the area they directly controlled. Even an 'absolute' ruler like Louis XVI had very limited direct power compared to many modern governments.
Fair enough, it seems that you are primarily attacking the word Monopoly. What if we were to soften the claim to dominance. Rulers always maintained power based on their ability to resist violence from within and without. Economic leverage only existed as long as one could protect themselves from violent opposition. A trade embargo meant nothing if the opposition can seize your assets and production by force.
In today's world, mega corporations have no defense if a government actor decides to use force against them.
This utter defenselessness against violence is the main difference between a modern corporation and a feudal actor.
I feel this is only a partially true, at least in democratic countries governed by rule of law, because the threat is mostly only theoretical. While modern states are significantly more powerful they are generally governed by more rational actors who (both because of that and better access to information) are much better at estimating the consequences of their actions compared to medieval kings or other autocrats. While the government could go ahead and take all the assets of Apple, Google, Facebook etc. both the government and the people in charge of those corporations know that that's extremely unlikely to happen, especially in a violent way, since the government has very little to gain and a lot to lose by doing that. So while modern corporations are technically utterly defenselessness against violence as you say, arguably this is by choice. Unlike feudal actors corporations have no reason to invest any resources in changing this since they are in a much safer position.
I think I totally agree, and see this as a substantial difference between corporations and feudal lords. They have entirely capitulated on force and are comfortable in this position. You say they only maintain this position by choice, but what choice do they have otherwise? It is hard to imagine Apple, Google, Facebook having any success if they changed their mind and decided to challenge national governments like US or China with direct force.
It has pros on both sides. MAMAA wouldn't have their profit margins if they had to fund a private security force to enforce their contracts and protect their assets.
They get the freedom to focus on their business, within the bounds of the law, by ceding violence authority to the government. And in return, the government establishes and enforces those laws.
We do in fact have another billionaire, Yuri Millner, to push humanity towards the goal of reaching other stars with his "Breakthrough Starshot" initiative.
Let's see... Neptune's orbital diameter 8.3 light hours.
At 10% c (speed of light) you would need 83 hours. Yes, insane speed, yet hopefully enough time to take quite a few pictures.
Also the plan is not to send a single "disc", but many (thousands?). Together they could potentially provide a treasure trove of data from within the alien solar system.
I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to even start to think about getting to Mars in a reasonable timeframe and in reasonable numbers (to start a colony). We are not funding making our species multiplanetary for the last few decades because we were too lazy, how can anyone expect us sending anything to the closest star (other than the sun)... You can't.