It’s completely ridiculous to think that humans could live on Mars

Wow, that was a sad read. I general tone was &quot;My god, our planet is on fire and you want to spend time and resources going somewhere else?&quot; Which I understand, after all we&#x27;re spoon fed that message every day, but if you think critically about it you realize that the species as a whole will have to figure out how to live on Mars or its doomed anyway.<p>I get the emotional angst, many people will remember that point where they realized &quot;Hey my parents aren&#x27;t going to be here forever, if I don&#x27;t get job and stuff I&#x27;m dooooooomed.&quot; It&#x27;s a scary thing because it involves doing something you may have never done before or may have tried to do and failed a couple of times. But once you internalize the fact that your parents are mortal and of finite resources and you <i>can&#x27;t</i> change that, you put that fear aside and start figuring out life &quot;for real.&quot;<p>The same thing is true with this planet. Our ability to monitor it and study it has reached a point where we realize the environment we currently live in is going to change, and change harshly. While we&#x27;re currently the proximate cause of that change we know there are many things that can cause that change and have in the past. Perhaps not in the living memory of our species but we&#x27;ve certainly seen the humans frozen in glaciers right? So at the end of the day, <i>it doesn&#x27;t matter why</i> the climate changes, we must evolve our thinking so that we can live on an airless moon, or a chilly planet far from oceans and abundant greenery.<p>And getting serious about it means picking a problem to solve and solving it. If we can create a self sustaining colony on Mars for example I have no trouble believing we can create cities on earth that survive what ever changes come in the climate. And if we have self sustaining cities on Mars and Earth then if one gets blasted by an asteroid (known to happen) the other one can help out instead of everyone just dying.<p>Its the difference between moving forward into the future knowing what you have to over come, and hiding in the past hoping to somehow prevent the future you fear.

&gt; But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity.<p>It is no where near the limits of our reach. We already have people living in space year round without any local resources. What we do seem to lack however is any faith in ourselves.

&gt; Our 12-year-old daughter who, like us, is a big fan of The Martian by Andy Weir, said, “I can’t stand that people think we’re all going to live on Mars after we destroy our own planet. Even after we’ve made the Earth too hot and polluted for humans, it still won’t be as bad as Mars. At least there’s plenty of water here, and the atmosphere won’t make your head explode.”<p>Kid has a good head on her shoulders. She sounds like an engineer.<p>I grew up dreaming about humanity exploring space. I majored in aerospace engineering in college. It was incredibly educational--it taught me we&#x27;re not going to Mars. Not in my lifetime, probably not in the lifetime of any of my descendants who still remember my name. It would be fantastically expensive and there would be no point. There are no resources out there that would justify the kind of economic investment necessary. Committing that money here on Earth would be transformative far beyond what it could be if spent on Mars.<p>Moreover, the technology has plateaued, leaving us with wildly unfavorable physical realities. You know how progress in CPUs has stalled? How the last several generations of Intel processors hasn&#x27;t really gotten faster, and all the focus is on making them cheaper and more power efficient? That happened to aerospace technology around 1970. Now we spend billions of dollars to eke out 0.5% gains in efficiency.

The author&#x27;s main argument seems to be that nobody will want to do it. But historically, there have been numerous cases of colonists giving up a safe, easy life to go live somewhere inhospitable and dangerous.<p>When I think about the first settlers that sailed across the Atlantic to colonize America, it seems amazing to me that people were willing to give up so much and endure such risks and hardships, but there have always been people that will go to great lengths to conquer new frontiers. I expect the first Martians will be no different in this respect.

One thing I think is important when considering colonizing another planet is that we have to drop certain expectations for the first few waves of colonists: e.g. the expectation that your lifespan will be as long as your Earth brethren.<p>By all accounts, the first colonists to the New World lived short, miserable, brutish lives and it was only well after sufficient infrastructure was established and European style civilization was properly bootstrapped could the average American expect to live as long as the average European.<p>Several early American colonies failed to last even a handful of years!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roanoke_Colony" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roanoke_Colony</a>

Think of all the great innovations that have come from people who realized that doing hard stuff is hard so don&#x27;t try.

Good points comparing colonizing Mars to colonizing places on Earth such as Antarctica, the Sahara, or the bottom of the oceans.

Every year, tens of thousands of people visit Antarctica, a place with nothing besides cold deserts and penguins.[1]<p>We are not making the Earth less inhabitable. More people live on the planet now than ever before. In fact, many really smart people over the years have told us that the planet would never be able to support the current population.<p>There&#x27;s an undercurrent in this article that&#x27;s extremely dour, depressing, and bleak. I take issue with that, but we can save that conversation for another day.<p>People will visit Mars. In fact, for many decades it looks like tourism will be the prominent industry.<p>Mars has water. Mars has CO2. We can make a breathable atmosphere and support ourselves, although it looks like living mostly underground is our best option for the foreseeable future. In my mind, what we need is cheap&#x2F;free energy.<p>Nuclear batteries look like the best option, at least initially. Also a modular, standardized deployment system where things plug into each other. It&#x27;d be good if for a while we equip every piece of gear going to Mars with power and an O2&#x2F;water generator.<p>No matter how it plays out it&#x27;ll be interesting to watch. Too bad it will probably take a long time before we see a sizable population there.<p>[1] Tourism in Antarctica. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tourism_in_Antarctica" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tourism_in_Antarctica</a>

It is ridiculous but at the same time tackling a problem of this size will provide so many new solutions to other problems as well innovations for new things that we might have not thought of. What we can gain from trying might be worth doing.

Yeah, let&#x27;s just sit here on our planet, posting cats on the internet and wait for the next extinction event.

If you ever want to go to Mars, establish a base on the Moon first and develop the ability to mine water, rock, and metal from the moon and close asteroids. If you can make propellant tanks and fill them up the trip to Mars will be a snap and there will be a lot of human experience in deep space so the first visitors won&#x27;t be setting endurance records

I don&#x27;t buy the author&#x27;s arguments in general, but I think the comparison to Antarctica is probably the weakest. First of all, people have actually made a point of traveling to and setting-up permanent base stations in Antarctica. Second, although the raw temperatures might be similar it is the <i>weather</i> in Antarctica that is brutal. Bryd Station exists in blizzard-like conditions 65% of the year [1]. Obviously this would not be a concern on Mars.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antarcticconnection.com&#x2F;information&#x2F;storms-and-blizzards&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antarcticconnection.com&#x2F;information&#x2F;storms-and-blizza...</a>

No, its not ridiculous. What&#x27;s ridiculous is our approach to the problem. Reconstructing Earth&#x27;s ecosystem away from Earth is a monumental task in any situation, whether you want to terraform a planet, build a orbital colony or just have a universe ship to send somewhere.<p>These are decades or centuries long efforts which are solely for the purpose of catering to the current, Earth-optimized human form. If you want to head out into the universe, develop a new form. Adapt humanity to the place you want to colonize, rather than the place to humanity.

I agreed with the author somewhat, up until here:<p>&quot;There is nothing wrong with being excited about exploring space. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming about setting up colonies in space either. But a colony on Mars would need to be a nearly perfectly self-contained, resource neutral system that harvests energy from the sun and is rarely or never re-supplied. That is currently beyond the reach of science and human ingenuity.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s completely within our reach if we prioritize it over other things, namely the financial cost.<p>There&#x27;s also the &quot;things sometimes don&#x27;t make sense&quot; aspect of space exploration. Do we NEED a space station doing space research? No. Did we need to go to the moon? Some would say yes, but if you look at the economic incentives, the answer is no. Not everything can be boiled down to cash in versus cash out.<p>I think space travel is worthwhile to invest in right now. To everyone squabbling that the money could be used to help people here on earth: no, it could not, because money does not flow around in the earth in a utilitarian fashion, it flows based off of where people think they can make more money or do something cool. The people investing their time and money in spaceflight are not going to be buying rice for the hungry no matter how much of a &quot;moonshot&quot; space projects are.

I think the article is not fully exploring the economic argument.<p>Triumph of the city&#x2F;network effect argument: Networking and connectedness into other people and increasingly into computer services around the world provide more intellectual satisfaction than surviving in the desert does. Mass of humanity produces more variety when it clumps together physically. Urbanization on the earth is driven by productivity growth from cities. Immigration to distant colonies could be justified with farmland and resources in pre-industrial society and industrial society. If post-industrial society with deceasing population builds distant colonies, it wastes resources.<p>After the thrill of interplanetary space travel wears off, Mars may have small outpost for geologists, geochemists etc. I think colonizing moon will be far more likely when technology allows it. You can have access to Earth and communication lag is acceptable. Moon colony may be economically profitable.

Its entertaining and has some truth in it but arguments about &quot;we should be focusing on [blah] instead...&quot; miss out on the benefits of the tech that exploration will bring. Going to Mars will help solve issues here and issues being solved here will help us succeed in living at Mars, eventually.

RemindeMe! 50 years

The idea is not to abandon Earth for Mars, rather it is to ensure that human life does not cease to exist. It&#x27;s very unlikely for a meteor or nuclear war to kill us all, but why risk it when we are capable of starting a colony now?<p>Everything I&#x27;ve said is much better summed up in this article. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;waitbutwhy.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;waitbutwhy.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...</a>

tl;dr: Its hard, and most folks wouldn&#x27;t want to do it.

I agree with the title; for now. In the near term, perhaps even the next couple hundred years, it is likely that a colony on Mars would make zero sense aside from scientific research (even that could be done without people on the surface themselves).<p>Beyond that, I won&#x27;t try to predict what will and won&#x27;t make sense 500 years from now, 1000 years from now. Mars may not have a lot of resources, but it does have one thing that could be useful to a much larger and much more space-capable human population in the future: room. There&#x27;s a lot of room there for people. We can argue all day whether that&#x27;s realistic or not, but we should never assume that it will never make sense in the future based solely on the resources and problems of today.

They threw in the usual one-or-the-other red herring. We can go to Mars, <i>and</i> learn to treat our own planet better.

Interesting usage here. &quot;Alphabet&#x27;s (formerly Google&#x27;s)&quot; calls back to the headline yesterday about Alphabet&#x27;s Google&#x27;s search engine. Some speculated that soon we&#x27;d be talking about Alphabet&#x27;s Google&#x27;s Youtube&#x27;s Youtube Red.<p>Now we can talk about Alphabet&#x27;s (formerly Google&#x27;s) Google&#x27;s Youtube&#x27;s Youtube Red.

It has always been ridiculous to think about something ambitious, until it gets done.<p>Ref: History of Humanity.

And yet Google has invested almost a billion dollars in SpaceX.

You have to die somewhere, why not die on Mars?