It doesn't make sense to send humans except many humans want to go. Those humans are working on the project to go to Mars, not send robots to Mars. We can do both of course.
I would like people to start a civilization on Mars. I would like to go to Mars. I will pay for the privilege to do so or see it happen for othera. Maybe it will. There are many people like me.
I think people are more enthusiastic about robots than justifiable, because they see things like the Atlas robot and imagine that's the future. In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes, or in all probability would in 50 more.
The fundamental problem is that moving parts break. This results in things like rovers being exceptionally conservative in both their design and behavior, out of necessity. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 7 limited activations, which then took a team of scientists 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.
Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also, broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.
Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.
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Beyond all of this, manned spaceflight is inspiring, extremely inspiring. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes. It'd be nice to live in a world where kids don't aspire to be friggin streamers when they grow up.
In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes
We can't be so sure. The probes have discovered that Mars has no channels and vegetation. That water is uncommon (then discovered that it is still there in some quantity). They found out precise atmospheric composition, mapped out all major surface features, observed the climate over decades. They discovered perchlorate toxicity of the soil for humans, something that would have been a nasty surprise to a manned crew.
Am not opposed to Mars expeditions in principle, it's an exciting thought. But I just can't see humans contributing all that much on the odd few landings, with a high chance of contaminating whatever traces of life there could be.
Initial manned missions anywhere will never depend on in situ resource utilization, like soil, anywhere. And they will also assume that the environment is toxic until proven otherwise. You want redundancy to ensure that when things go wrong, which they will, it doesn't necessarily mean everybody dies.
Of course though you're completely right that mapping out the rough surface and climatic patterns is critical, but that would have been capable with the first probe to Mars - launched some 53 years ago. There's just really extreme diminishing returns with probes and rovers. For instance these [1] are NASA's highlights for what Perseverance, the latest Mars rover, has achieved in 4 years. To call them uninspiring would be an understatement.
This is because there are increasingly fewer big discoveries to be made. No, an astronaut with a shovel won't excavate a lost Martian city, it'll be more of ISS science but in gravity and with sanitizer smelling dust.
We haven't even realistically begun to explore Mars. There are vast underground cave systems, it's still unknown what lays under the moist surface areas, and so on endlessly. Heck, we haven't even been able to expose subsurface strata. Even searching for metal deposits will be extremely important. But these are things we can't realistically do with rovers anytime in the foreseeable future.
What do you find the most compelling? IMO most of the article was well researched but leaned heavily in appropriate analogs, and it was also rather misleading in a number of areas, probably in an effort to support a conclusion that the evidence that did not actually support. For instance the author just completely hand-waves away the fact that most time on a Mars mission will be spent not in 0-g, but in Mars' 0.3g.
I do not, in general, find the article compelling in the least, but it spawned some interesting discussion!
For those that were able to attend last week NASA Ames and USGS held the Offworld Resources workshop. Mining companies, advanced sensor tech (like muon tomography), and even genetically modified organisms to capture metals. Many of the questions and thoughts posted in this thread were covered.
>The fundamental problem is that moving parts break.
So do human bodies, and the extensive life support systems they would depend on in space, which I think was the theme, more than anything, of this particular article.
The only unique think I can personally add here that we're probably a lot more comfortable with high failure rates for machines than even low rates of failure for humans.
This seems to be a problem with rocket/lander technology resulting in a ~900kg weight limit on Curiosity.
According to Internet searches, Starship can bright 100 tons to Mars surface.
A common large Earth backhoe seem to weight 20 tons, so with Starship you can just ship one and it will be capable of driving at normal speeds (up to 100km/h), excavating for meters and not centimeters, etc.
(obviously it would need adaptations since diesel engines need air that isn't present on Mars and EV batteries might have problems with the cold, but it would be a similar weight magnitude)
It's not just the lack of air. You'd need an entirely different power and hydraulic system. And any sort of maintenance, liquid changing, etc is completely out of the question. And you need to be able to ensure you can capably operate it with a ~40 minute round trip time between action and getting a response. And then you need to be able to do all of this with temperatures that regularly drop down to -60C with high radiation levels, and so on.
These issues are why things that act like really poor performing go-karts with a few gizmos attached end up costing billions of dollars and taking years to develop and finally manufacture.
Big part of the problem is how big of a hurdle it is to actually send a robot to Mars. I imagine that once we have a cheap and reliable platform to reach the surface, we could iterate the robots much faster.
If you had a budget for one human mission, or a dozen new robots every two years, which one would you consider more beneficial?
Yes, well, maybe logically speaking that would be true. Practically speaking hardly anyone blinks an eye when 'society' daily sends young (mostly) men into harm's way whether that be by employing them in known dangerous professions such as logging (etc.) or by sending them to war. According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, more than 526,000 people die each year because of the violence associated with armed conflict and large- and small-scale criminality [1] while the world just keeps on turning. Nobody would even blink an eye if that number changed to 525.000 per year by putting dangerous criminals behind bars and keeping them there or by eradicating some terrorist group somewhere nor would they loose sleep if it changed to 527.000 per year after some conflict somewhere flared up again. Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site. Seen in that light it makes a lot of sense to choose 1000 volunteers out of the millions who would show up if asked to go on a mission to Mars, success not at all guaranteed and quite likely to be a one-way trip for the foreseeable future. Mars has been explored by a multitude of probes and rovers so sending the next one, no matter how advanced, will not cause much of a stir. Sending 1000 people to Mars with the intent of establishing an outpost will 'rock the world'. If successful (which is not at all a given) it would be one of the greatest achievements of our species while a successful robot mission would just be another tick on the list.
I think the person you're responding to had a solid point, but he derailed it with his own examples. It's not about "throwing out the value of human life" but appreciating that risk is something that, in many endeavors, is going to remain relatively high even if you make every effort to minimize it.
When we went to the Moon, the obituary for the astronauts was written before they even took off. And the astronauts themselves felt they had somewhere from a 50% to 70% chance of success. Everybody was well aware of the extreme risks, but they still voluntarily participated, because they felt the achievement was worth the risk. And indeed those brave men inspired an entire generation to science and achieved what many believe was still the greatest achievement in humanity's entire history.
The first missions to Mars will always be high risk, because the fundamental issue is that you're always going to be doing a bunch of things that no other human ever has. There's just so many unknown unknowns there that we're going end up getting surprised by something. So all we can do is make sure we have highly capable people and try to prepare as well as we can. But in the end, even when you work to minimize risk as much as you possibly can, that mission will always qualify as 'risky.'
the reasons a person does something are important, because those reasons influence every decision that goes into doing that thing. the difference between the perspectives of "yes, we go into this knowing it is dangerous and that the challenge may be insurmountable, but we believe the potential rewards are worth that risk" vs "lives aren't actually worth much so why not spend them because we'll just waste them somewhere else anyways" is a gulf.
Conversely humans are absurdly bad at statistics - i.e. "an astronaut feels he has a 50 to 70% chance of success"...isn't a real prediction. It isn't based on any failure analysis.
The actual failure analysis and engineering was substantially more confident, because otherwise why go? 50% is a coin-flip, but those odds were already proven wrong by the missions before Apollo 11 anyway (since there was more then 1).
You're doing some improv here based on your intuition when history has a way of surprising us. So what was the "actual" failure analysis and risk percent? It didn't exist. "Mathematical risk analysis was used in Apollo, but it gave unacceptably pessimistic results and was discontinued." [1]
Of course there were working assessments internally and they generally put the figure at about 50%. That figure is from Gene Krantz's excellent book "Failure Is Not an Option." The reason you go is because you cannot find any other practical way to significantly reduce the risk, and are willing to accept the risk you end up with.
Also I feel you're somewhat denigrating the astronauts with your comment by saying their estimations weren't "real". These weren't just adrenaline junkies looking for a wild ride - they were extreme intellectual outliers with higher degrees in aerospace engineering and extensive backgrounds in the development and application/flight of all sorts of aerospace systems. Like that paper also mentions, "The only possible explanation for the astonishing success [of the Apollo Program] – no losses in space and on time – was that every participant at every level in every area far exceeded the norm of human capabilities."
You show a Hollywood quote, I'll raise you a better one:
Space: the final frontier. These are the continuing voyages of the starship Enterprise. Their ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before
You missed the 'volunteer' part it seems. People have volunteered for expeditions with uncertain outcomes since, well, forever. Some people do their utmost best to tempt fate by climbing skyscrapers and masts without any safety devices, they jump off cliffs in clothing which gives them a slight advantage over gravity, they get into devices which are supposed to keep them alive at depths which would crush them to ¼ of their size if they were to be exposed and more. People used to embark on sailing vessels to trek to unknown places, a practice which started when sailing vessels became a thing. People want to explore frontiers and some people are willing to take great risk to be among the first to do so.
No silly quote from a Hollywood production will keep them from following their drive to boldly go where no man has gone before. Or woman, for that matter.
General public interest will vanish once people realize that the journey will last two years and likely start 30 years from now. Oh, and they won't see the event live anywways.
The trip to the Moon was a free trip to Jurassic Park in comparison.
We are self-healing, regenerating, low-power, versatile, autonomous, and most of us have a pretty decent array of sensors built-in, along with some communications equipment that's capable of interpreting the signals from our sensors and transmitting that information to other humans in a remarkable variety of ways. All of these are approximate and relative of course, if someone replies with e.g., "but actually we're not as low power as...", it will be easy to ignore.
Specialized machines can do things humans can't, of course. No single human could have survived as long in the Martian environment as any of the rovers have.
But nobody has yet designed a machine that can do all the things humans can do.
Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck.
So, yes, from an engineering point of view, building new robots that can do things and shipping them to Mars to do those things presents a lot of very interesting technical challenges to solve. It's all endless puzzles and little unsung feats of science and engineering -- assuming there is a country left with both the will and the resources and the talent to pursue such things.
But from a human exploration perspective -- our instinctive drive, or compulsion, or whatever it is, that has spread our species across the entire planet -- no machine will ever quite satisfy the desire to have that experience with the sensors we were born with.
My enthusiasm for a human mission to Mars has waned quite a bit in the last few years, largely owing to its most vocal advocate. Still, all the same, I think we should acknowledge that robots are poor substitutes for geologists.
I can certainly agree that humans, regarded as perfected creatures of biological engineering, would make for an extraordinary Mars rover. You can make the case that we even the best among all animals for that job here on Earth (we are that good, a fascinating convo for another thread).
The trouble is space itself is really rough in new and different ways. Even if everything is going right, the radiation is extremely dangerous, both on the journey and on Mars itself. And there's bone decalcification which happens very fast. And life support systems issues become very quickly entangled with all the other engineering issues that can cause cascading failures between systems, so even if you didn't think of (say) engineering failures of how power gets to some component as a life support issue, it can become one due to the interdependence of systems.
> Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck.
Yeah, we’ve got great fine motor skills and high dexterity, but are obviously still too dumb to emulate those parts effectively.
We should never have sent humans to Antarctica. We should have relied on binoculars from ships and maybe some blimps with cameras, right? I mean, what can a human possibly accomplish that a machine can't.
Also, we didn't "send" them, the early explorers and bases were done by people who wanted to go and do research there. We have lots of people who want to go to Mars to do research or who want very much to benefit from the research humans can do better on Mars than current robots.
What's the timeline on "exhausting all the science collection abilities of robots?" Ten years? Fifteen? There are a lot of potential future robot abilities...
If you think robots should do everything then you might as well retire the human race. Why even bother to live. Why explore the stars when you can get a robot to do it for you?
If the goal is "put man on Mars" then that's what you gotta do. It's harder to make the argument that you need to do that in the service of science, or even offworld colonies, given the unsuitability and impracticality of those both.
Colonies on Mars are what drove the founding of SpaceX. Elon was looking up NASA's plans about sending humans to Mars and found that they simply didn't exist. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars while streaming its growth to get people inspired and thinking big again. NASA wasn't interested, Russia wanted too much $$$, so SpaceX was born. A colony doesn't mean you live there forever - it simply means a permanent human establishment. Some people will want to go back to Earth, some will want to stay on Mars indefinitely.
This is a big part of their obsession with lowering costs to space. When the launch costs are not such a huge economic factor, you have much greater leverage with doing things like building, resupplying, or even engaging in interplanetary commerce.
His main motivation was about making humanity a multiplanetary species, largely as a means of ensuring humanity's continuation. It sounds hyperbolic, but Earth has gone through multiple mass extinction events and we're rather overdue for another. And while those mass extinction events were all natural, there's also endless ways you can imagine us all managing to kill ourselves off. And, critically, all of these hyperbolic scenarios will seem extremely improbable up to the very day that one does inevitably happen. So the best time to start would be 50 years ago. But the second best time would be right now.
So the most logical place to start for this sort of 'humanity guarantee' would be Mars, which shares an oddly large amount in common with Earth. There's a verbose (and rather entertaining read) with lots of first party commentary here. [1]
This has been covered before but saying that Mars would be a “humanity guarantee” is actually extremely illogical, not the most logical. Short of the Earth getting blasted to tiny pieces in some way there is no scenario where Mars is more habitable than Earth. This is the sort of sci-fi Utopianism that this sober article is standing in opposition to. Mars may be the second most habitable place in the solar system and it’s infinitely less habitable than a nuked-out fallout-ridden earth or an overheated green house earth. There is no magic scenario where Mars suddenly ends up with a magnetosphere and an atmosphere.
Mars not having a magnetosphere isn't as short term a need. The atmosphere stripping away is on geologic timescales, not human ones. Even then, we could put a superconducting ring between Sol and Mars and get the same effect as far as solar wind stripping the atmosphere. It would be a big project, but not impossible. It's also a project that won't possibly start until people live there permanently.
Worrying about the atmosphere stripping away is akin to worrying about the smaller of Mars two moons being on a path that will impact in 100,000+ years with the surface of mars.
In many problem domains mars is an easier target for long term habitation than the moon, the biggest challenge is getting there. The retorts from people here about farming miss that we don't need 'soil' to farm, there are techniques that mostly just need water and vitamins that can dissolve into it. At Epcot they have a system to breed fish and use the fish waste for feeding plants to grow. Throw in mycelium for handling human waste and you have an efficient system for augmenting food production.
A serious effort for mars will have as many or more spinoff technologies as Apollo gave us. The computers we are using today are further along in development from the massive influx of effort to make computers that could fit in space capsules. With the acidification we are causing in the ocean, a reliable way of converting C02 to oxygen at scale might be needed here on earth to prevent an oxygen collapse within decades. Climate change is a bitch, and it could give an excuse to start charging people for breathable air here on earth so the cynics may be right about that eventually happening. That possible disaster just isn't on even most climate scientist radars yet.
There will be other spinoff technologies we just don't see yet. The large rocketry needed to get there also opens up resource extraction from near earth objects. There's massive material wealth just barely outside our present grasp. It would be nice for materials like platinum and gold to follow in the footsteps of aluminum in becoming common enough to be usable for trivial items. Aluminum was a precious metal just a few hundred years ago in its refined form. Gold nanoparticles look like a candidate that could make current GLP-1 drugs obsolete, it works in animal studies but not tested in humans yet. Manufacturing in space is also on the verge of practicality. Metal foams, ultra low attenuation glass and optically transparent aerogels can be made in microgravity that are superior to the versions that can be made here on earth. Metal foams would be ideal for making ships, cars and planes that are much lower weight than we can make now without loss of strength, less weight means fewer watts per mile and less material needed.
The people whining about the idea always seem to miss the secondary effects of making the effort and always see to paint the optimistic take as naive, really they are just demonstrating short sighted thinking.
This logic does not necessitate Mars ever being more habitable than Earth. Imagine one of the countless doomsday scenarios - a large asteroid impact. What kills you is not necessarily the asteroid, but it flinging debris into the sky that blots out the sun, not only creating a massive cold, but also rapidly killing all plants which starts a rapid series of extinction events on up the food chain.
If that happened Earth itself would still, even during the extinction event, be a dramatically more pleasant place than Mars. But nonetheless that event would kill off the overwhelming majority of people on Earth, and very possibly 100%, because it's such a significant change from the status quo we expect to continue on Earth. But having a parallel society or societies would ensure that even in the 100% scenario, life could get back up and organized relatively quickly. And even in the "only" 99% of people killed scenario, the outside help could help to reestablish order and kickstart society.
You could build a better 'colony' on earth to survive that event for way less money/effort/risk than a colony on mars. You aren't going to have a colony on Mars contributing back to the home planet in any meaningful way, and 1% of people left on Earth is still 80,000,000, many more than will be in a Mars colony.
> You could build a better 'colony' on earth to survive that event for way less money/effort/risk than a colony on mars.
How though? Not in terms of engineering, but in terms of politics and economics. The biggest charter city in the world just got ruled illegal and Honduras is about to take their stuff. Building colonies in Antarctica is forbidden by treaty. And much like Thoreau's cabin in the woods, if you try to make a self-sufficient colony somewhere that's not actually isolated, you might think you've succeeded but actually have been cheating all along.
Yes, objectively there are better options, just as e.g. ITER could have been built a lot more efficiently if most of the countries had agreed to pay one country to make it, instead of making precision parts in a bunch of different countries and having to assemble them together. But engineering and politics are the art of the possible.
Building colonies in-planet that could survive all possible scenarios would probably be impossible. But even if it were you'd face a pretty simple problem - who would ever want to live for there? You'd likely end up living in conditions that would make life on Mars look pleasant, without any of the upsides that might take people to Mars - adventure, ideology, commercial aspirations, perhaps even religious (you know the Mormons will want a planet or two), and of course 0.3g!
And who knows what the future holds in terms of population sizes? I also strongly disagree on the colonies not being able to engage in exchange. For a silly but very practical example sports in 0.3g are going to be insane. Jordan could jump something like 11ft and stay airborn for several seconds on Mars. That's going to be just be stupidly awesome to watch and play. MMA will look like a something out of a Chinese martial arts movie. For more mundane things, as the price of shipping cargo decreases the number of things available for trade increases. For example wine made in 0.3g will taste very different. Whether that's better or worse is yet to be discovered, but obviously such ideas will have no difficulty finding a market.
For better or for worse Mars (or the Moon) will also probably make amazing retirement places, especially if we can work on the scenery a bit. Taking that load of old bones might not only provide comfort but even increase longevity enabling a weaker heart to keep pumping a bit longer. And so on endlessly.
For me first logical step is to ignore the getting there part. And prove that we can actually build colony here. In suitable location say for example Sahara or Antarctica. After those technological challenges are solved next step is to see how to get it to orbit or make same in orbit. And then we can start thinking how to get all the stuff over there.
There's not really a plausible path to colonies on other planets (or on moons of Jupiter or Saturn) that needs to send humans there soon. Establishing such a colony and getting it working well enough to actually last would be a long term project, and it would be decades before it got to sending people.
Before that there would be a lot of work off Earth, including manned work, but it would be in space or on the Moon.
They key is Lagrange points. Each pair of bodies (Sun/Earth, Earth/Moon, Sun/Jupiter, etc) have 5 points where the gravitational forces from the two bodies balance out in a way that makes it possible for something to orbit that point, even though there is no massive body at that point.
Two of the Lagrange points are stable, meaning that if something in orbit around them is disturbed it still stays around that point. The other three are unstable. Disturbing something there will cause it to get farther and farther away.
You can use this to move things from Lagrange points of one pair (Sun/Earth for example) to Lagrange points of another pair (Sun/Jupiter say) very cheaply. Get it to the starting point, and then nudge it into an unstable orbit that will have it getting farther and farther away. We can calculate these unstable orbits well enough to pick one that at some point is nearly tangent to an orbit of the destination Lagrange point that moves toward that point rather than away. A little nudge them can move our ship into that latter orbit.
The catch is that this is slow. It might take decades or more to make the trip.
The way you would use this in a colonization program is to build a series of unmanned cargo ships. Say a new cargo ship is completed every year. It would be stuffed full of supplies the colony will need, send to an appropriate Sun/Earth Lagrange point, and nudged onto its journey.
Let's say these ships take 30 years to reach the destination. After we've been doing this for nearly 30 years then we'd send a ship with the colonists. That ship uses a fast but expensive orbit. It would only need to carry the colonists, the supplies they need during the trip, and fuel and supplies for an emergency return trip in case when they get there they find some reason that they cannot stay.
Note that it doesn't need to carry any material to actually build the colony, or food and water for the colony. All that is in the cargo ships that are now arriving yearly. (If we are sure that the cargo ships are making it the human transport ship could even omit food, water, and fuel for an emergency return. Those can be on the first cargo ship).
You'd want to build the cargo ships on the Moon, or build them in space using resources from the Moon, because getting from the Moon to Lagrange points takes a lot less energy than getting from the Moon to Lagrange points.
The most plausible path then is to greatly expand industrialization of the Moon and the space near Earth. Probably then expand that to include space bases at some of the Lagrange points.
Then it is time to start working on colonization.
Unfortunately we'd probably not do Mars this way. If I recall correctly the low energy Lagrange transfer orbits to Mars are particularly slow--over a thousand years if I remember correctly.
It just doesn't make sense to me to send humans. Exhaust the science collection of robots first.