It's hard not to see this as a consolation prize. In 1969, we went to the moon.
In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.
But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.
I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. Been there done that. There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science). All the arguments for going to the moon need to be considered against everything else we can do - opportunity cost is real, but investing in the moon we are not investing in something else. (including less working hours...) Most of the things we developed for the moon would have been done anyway, and we don't know what things would have been developed sooner if we were not focusing on the moon.
Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.
I think this sort of view is quite myopic. In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. But we're not going to get to the endgame without playing the opening first.
The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our arms with various instruments attached and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.
We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.
You fail to comprehend just how large space is. Almost all of space is well out of reach. There is zero reason to think we will ever be able to overcome the laws of relativity, which in turn mean we will never be able to reach the stars. I know, this negative comment makes you mad, but there is every reason to think it is the case.
A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)
Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.
Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.
> It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation. [1]
> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)
Earth is by far the best we can get, but on big enough spaceships it is possible to create living conditions that are better than on any other body of the Solar System, except perhaps on a ship floating in the clouds of Venus.
The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.
On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.
Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
Well, the solar system itself is ridiculously huge - saying "lets don't bother" because interstellar flight looks cumbersome with current technology ? Seems like quite the premature optimization.
Yes, while for now there is no known method for useful interstellar flight, spaceships with nuclear reactors could reduce the time required for traveling through the Solar System to acceptable values.
I just made a comment in another thread that Cape York, a huge chunk of northern Queensland has a mere 18,000 inhabitants. It's more sparsely occupied than northern Alaska by nearly a factor of two.
Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.
It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...
Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.
If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
The desire to fly to space can be compared with such for going to Everest, the place less hospitable than Cape York, yet having quite an interest from all sides. However, exploration of space could be way more practical than conquering the highest point on Earth - it serves scientific goals, and after science often come applications. There are many useful technologies which grew from space exploration and particularly from manned space programs, and we can expect those benefits to follow those who keeps studying space and learning to live close to the object of study.
We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
I looked into going to Everest - it is possible for a normal person to go - you need to save up a lot of money ($10-20k) which is within reach of most people if you really want to go. However even if you are filthy rich you still shouldn't: there is a lot of litter on the mountain because it is almost impossible to make the whole trip without leaving things behind. Combine with the danger and you really should not make the trip. Instead a have few photographers and scientists (who have real science to do up there - I'm not sure what there is) make the trip, or better yet a robot - and then look at pictures/videos and read their reports.
The moon is unlikely to be self sustaining - gravity is too low. In turn that means that earth will forever be polluting the earths atmosphere (CO2!) to supply it.
No one has aspirations or desire to live on Everest. They just want to go there plant a flag and say they did it before rushing back to.Civilization. Hmmm kinda like the moon.
> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy
The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.
Population growth has been slowing for a long time, and is actually already below replacement level in most parts of the world outside Africa. It's unlikely that we will ever reach a global human population of even 11 billion. Some estimates put the peak at under 9 billion.
Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.
What's to disprove? They are prima facie false, not just formally (because "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations), but also empirically, here and now - mankind already needs more land than Earth has, and more energy than Earth can spare.
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
> "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations
I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.
> mankind already needs more land than Earth has
By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.
> more energy than Earth can spare
Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.
The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.
What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.
Not to mention that it seems more healthy to have a far off frontier for a human civilization. It makes it possible for people to try something new, something different, brings innovation, etc. Without it, some people might just be too unhappy in the regular society.
We'd be much better off building colonies on the bottom of the ocean than on the moon or mars (or a cylinder floating at a lagrange point.)
After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
> In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity.
Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.
Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
Why should we not expand into space? To make sure that all the lifeless rocks in it stay lifeless? If earth were twice as large would you say that logically we should only inhabit half of that earth or do you believe that human beings have a natural claim to everything that can be reached via boats and legs but not via rockets?
Personally, I would like a future where I can see other planets with my own eyes and dislike a future where the entire species is dependent on one planet being habitable.
Radioactive, toxic, dry, low-gravity and anoxic land isn't exactly prime real estate. Even the North Pole is a better environment for humans to live in than the Moon or Mars are.
> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy
...of a density so low that it is 0 on average.
space has practically infinite nothing.
I know the pretty pictures always show the planets all nice together, but in reality there's this huge, irradiated, projectile-infested nothing that you and I cannot deal with, even with current tech.
Well, the nothing part is an often forgotten selling point - that makes it possible to go really far, to send signals long distances & for the light of the sun to reach quite a large distance unobstructed. You don't get any benefits under a few km of water for example.
Even if you think a space industry is useful in general, there is no reason for humans to be involved. Robots are superior to humans for this application today and will only become more superior in the future.
Why pursue space exploration if all we can do is send robots there? The only meaningful thing for humanity is sending Humans to places.
Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.
Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth? Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about, and building a symbolic outpost serves no practical purpose.
Is that your litmus test--it has to have "value"? What's the value of Hubble? Of the Nancy Grace Roman observatory? Are you against those too? Maybe you prefer if they had left it as a spy satellite--at least that has real value.
Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.
> Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that?
Been there done that. Last happened in 1972, there is nothing exciting about it anymore. I have other things in my life that are exciting - things that really are exciting.
I'm taking my local scouts camping this weekend. Should be an experience (it is expected to rain all weekend).
I just finished helping my local high school marching band's annual event - I got to hear a lot of great music which I find exciting.
I slept in the zoo next to the fishes with the girl scouts not long ago.
You can guess by the above the ages of my kids - which in turn implies a lot of other excitement.
There are plenty of other things as well. My local town art festival is exciting to a lot of people even though I didn't care enough to attend this year. There are a lot of museums, parks, concerts, ... in my local area to be exciting about. I have a shop full of tools for my various hobbies that I'm excited about. If you can't find a lifetime of things to be excited about withing walking distance of your bedroom you need to learn to enjoy your life more. (with apologies to the disabled who can't leave their bed)
Also mass drivers so you can ship ridiculous amount of lunar oxygen, aluminium & even general dirt for shielding into the cislunar space. Not to mention any materials processed by high energy industrial processed provered by solar forges on the surface of the moon (both thermal & powered by locally manufactured solar panels).
I've heard a lot of arguments against human space exploration, but "We could put that energy into working less" is probably one of the more out-there arguments that's hard to take seriously.
Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
Good for you. And I hope you never get laid off, burned out, or anything else.
I however do not get my fulfillment via work. I work to live, and I do [mostly] enjoy my work. However I have a very long todo list that I'm not getting done in part because I don't have the time to work on it (and in part because I don't have the money for the tools/parts I need)
> If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that.
I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
> I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
like out-of-control global warming, depletion of freshwater reserves, destruction of soil, mass surveillance, extremely uneven distribution of resources. I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable, basically keeping the production-consumption machinery takes up all the surplus it produces, while depleting the resources we have.
The great achievements we have are much like the Moai statues on the Easter Island.
> I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable,
The bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians in America is one of periodic starvation. For the colonists, the bone evidence is one of extremely hard labor and short lives.
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
You could enslave someone and yet give them a greater standard of living than a medieval king. That would not mean that it is acceptable, or even better.
I suspect most of them would find being my slave better. By modern standards it would not be acceptable or better, but all evidence I've seen suggest most people in medieval days would consider then loss of freedom not that big of a deal (partially this is about how little freedom many of them had)
> I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment
Woah, really? More than cheap fuel, scientific research, social welfare, political work towards peace?
The only good thing I can think of that is actually directly caused by the way we employ people is that some things (delivery, food) are very cheap, cheaper than they would be if people worked at a sustainable rate. But that comes at the immense cost of the health and wellbeing of a vast underclass of people.
Nobody is talking about slavery here. You need to do something to feed yourself, otherwise you are making somebody else a slave to feed you. As a society there are some very disabled people we can accept this for, but when someone isn't supporting themselves that is enslaving someone else.
Not sure this reply makes much sense. I said that if we (humans) become more productive, i.e. that we can produce sufficient food/water/shelter/whatever with less effort, then the first goal after that should be to reduce the amount of drudgery the average person has to put up with, rather than (say) keeping the amount of drudgery the same and spaffing a bunch of fuel into space. I'm not sure where in that you see someone being enslaved to feed me.
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
>"There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science)."
The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
At that point though, there are lots of other romances to peruse. Somebody could go to the moon, but it won't be me. I could however go to my local art museum - at a much smaller costs than my share of sending someone else to the moon, but I'd get more value from my trip to the art museum than someone else on the moon.
Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear some great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.
People want to go to the moon, you could make your same argument for lots of things humans have done but at the end of the day science is not the reason 99% of people care about or want to colonize space. People have a desire to colonize space
Some people. I'm all for allowing those people do to it.
However the context tends to include I'm being asked for fund the dreams of those people (via taxes) and that impacts my ability to fund my own dreams.
While I agree that repeating a 60 year old achievement is pointless, one of NASA's goals for Artemis, etc. is having a platform for R&D for human exploration of Mars. There aren't other nearby large bodies on which, and around which, to work out and shake out all the new tech for Mars. R&D actually at Mars would be very expensive and slower.
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
A huge variety of tools and technology that billions of people use daily.
What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.
"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"
A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.
Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.
Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.
That remains a ridiculous argument. The thing about a race is you can always think of excuses for not winning. Plans for Mars were being met by all accounts, however Nixon still cancelled them because the Apollo victory was so decisive.
Nixon cancelled them because he was increasingly worried about a catastrophic accident and felt it could damage his political career and ambitions. Seriously. [1] If he only knew... Outside of that you're correct. We were already set for progress onto Mars. In a parallel timeline where one man's political ambitions, and myopia, didn't override the interests of an entire species - we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system, and perhaps already be flirting with abstract concepts of moving beyond just the solar system. We're left with our timeline, but hopefully people 60 years from now might look back at us more fondly for our actions of today, and tomorrow.
> we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system
This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both.
Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony.
The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid?
The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines.
I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind.
I have indeed read the book you referenced, at least as much as I could stomach. They're quite ill informed, and we can get into that but first on a couple of points you mentioned:
To start with Mars has practically endless water. That's rather evident on the poles, but we discovered back in 2013 that even the 'desert-like' images you associate with Mars, the surface regolith is surprisingly moist at somewhere between 1.5-5% water by weight. So a typical analog given there is that if you heated about a cubic foot of soil, you'd be able to evaporate out upwards of 2 pints (or 1 liter) of water. So the whole plot in "The Martian" about these esoteric things he had to do to just get water was just based on ignorance, which was the state of knowledge prior to 2013. Of course humans on the surface would have discovered this in a matter of minutes, but we're relying on probes and rovers - so instead it took us half a century.
Similarly, radiation on the surface of Mars is somewhat less than what astronauts are the ISS are exposed to. The huge numbers you're referencing are probably either from stuff like that book you mentioned, which is wrong about most of everything it claims and/or equivalently being quite misleading by e.g. referencing exposure levels during flight from a direct solar flare, which would indeed be quite toasty - but is something that can be easily worked around. Water itself, which we'll need to bring plenty of, works as an excellent radiation shield.
Near to every argument made in your referenced book, at least to the point that I was able to read, is mostly uninformed and/or disingenuous, but this already getting quite a bit longer than I intended. If you're into reading things that don't just confirm your biases then I might recommend this [1] book instead. And it's written by an aerospace engineer with an extensive background of research into the topic, instead of a comic book artist. That's not an appeal to authority, as there are plenty of people with no background in space who are extremely well informed. But it's also true that those who are misinformed, universally, have no relevant background in space.
According to [0], there's about 2% water by volume in Martian soil, and you need to heat it up to 800 degrees Celsius to extract it -- which means you need a power source capable of generating those temperatures on an ongoing basis, which is unlikely without massive solar arrays that would be constant covered with (and damaged by) Martian regolith. Oh, and Mars receives less than half the sunlight Earth does due to its greater distance from the sun, and dust storms could obscure them for weeks on end.
Or you could use hypothetical a nuclear power power plant that would be incredibly expensive to build, ship, run and maintain on a foreign planet.
You were right about the radiation! Kind of. There's "only" 50x more radiation on Mars' surface than on Earth's. You said this was less than what astronauts on the ISS are exposed to. How is that a meaningful comparison? You're talking about people living their entire lives in this environment, and presumably making babies who grow into adolescents and adults, all the while threatened by an amount of radiation we have no idea if a human child could live through.
The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that exposure to it will kill you. The level of radiation is so high that exposure to it will kill you, unless you lived essentially your entire life underground or in a bunker. The cold temperatures will kill you. The soil has perchlorate in concentrations that will kill you. There's basically nothing to do there -- no walks outside without a space suit, no nature to look at, no living beings (except perhaps soil microbes that would be instantly destroyed in the process of extracting water) -- nothing more available there than here on Earth except looking at the stars and dying. [1]
Every argument I've seen people make for colonizing Mars in the near term has been emotional. The arguments are all the more emotional for insisting that they are rational. We have no idea if we could grow food in a closed system indefinitely, or reproduce in space or on another planet, and the amount of research going into these literally existential questions is close to zero. Nor do the billionaires who claim to be obsessed with getting us to be a multi-planet civilization seem to give a shit about them. Colonizing Mars isn't a plan; it's a meme.
Finally, there's no thought given to how to deal with inevitable social problems that will arise if there are large (1000+) populations away from Earth: what to do with people who have psychological breakdowns? how do you prioritize if more people need to be sent home than there's space for on a return rocket? what are your responsibilities toward colonists who need expensive permanent care? what if they can't survive Earth's gravity due to physiological changes from growing up off-planet? What if an entire space colony will never be self-sustaining and they need to be supported with expensive shipments of food and supplies from Earth forever -- who will pay? Or will we?
Look, if you want to colonize Mars or other planets because you think it's a cool thing to do, at least that's an honest, personal opinion. But if you think putting a ton of resources into going to Mars anytime soon is a good investment -- when we aren't even mitigating an ongoing climate disaster here on Earth, the one environment to which we are exquisitely adapted and which is non-existent literally anywhere else in the known universe -- then you are fooling yourself.
I'm trying to keep this engaging/holistic and avoiding writing a rambling wall of text, but I also don't want to just cherry pick stuff. So if you think I'm ignoring something or whatever, please do feel free to point to it. I can certainly elaborate on just about anything on this topic. I find all of it quite fascinating and enjoyable to discuss (or debate)!
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Let me start with your water issue. It varies by area - the 2% came from Curiosity's region bearing in mind it moves at an aggregate rate of about about 1.5 miles per year. The up to 5% came from measurements from other devices on different parts of the planet. And in this goofy digital world we've created I think we're falling increasingly out of touch with the real world, and what we're capable of. You are implying generating 800C of heat is some technological issue yet a typical medieval style open forge and bellows can easily reach temperatures upwards of 1200C. Suffice to say there's a bit more refined methods developed in the past millennia!
The reason radiation levels matter is because radiation can do one of two things. If you have low enough radiation, then the worst you're looking at is something like a reduced life expectancy owing to increased rates of cancer. But high radiation can give you radiation poisoning and kill you in hours. Mars is much more of the former than the latter. For instance there's even one really interesting area on Earth - Ramsar, Iran. [1] It's a small town of a couple of thousand that has significant ambient radiation levels, with some smaller areas within it even experiencing higher than typical levels on Mars. You'd naturally expect that to, at the minimum, lead to increased rates of cancer but it based on limited data not only does this not seem to be the case, but there may already be radio-adaptive effects in play. It's phenomenally interesting!
The thing I'd make of this (and the water on Mars) issue is that it's impossible to know what you don't know. And right now we know basically nothing about colonizing other planets and ultimately I think the only way we're really going to find out more is by actually doing it. So for instance obviously fertility will be crucial, but all the experiments you do on Earth or the ISS aren't ever going to give you a definitive answer. You're only going to find out on Mars by actually doing it. And I think this applies to many of the issues you're mentioning.
The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme. It just doesn't work in the real world. This is precisely how SpaceX was able to go from a relatively broke startup to dominating the entire space industry. They worked towards the goal and tried their best along the way, but didn't let the possibility of failure get in the way of achieving success. And they ended up with not only the most efficient rockets in the world, but also have the best safety record as well. Kind of paradoxical in a way, but I think it also makes sense. In poker the best way to ensure you lose money is to try to avoid losing money. When fear of failure dominates your thought processes you, at some point, become incapable of making the best decisions.
I think some of the issues you bring up (as well as in the book you mentioned) are issues brought up just to have issues to bring up. So for instance, what happens if somebody goes crazy? To me this question is banal, because I just don't see there being any real discussion to be had. Obviously they'd immediately be locked up to ensure the safety of everybody else, and they'd be deported back to Earth at the first opportunity. Maybe there's some interesting nuance or whatever in these issues, but I'm not seeing it?
IMO he stopped it because Russia wasn't meaningfully threatening to field a Mars mission. The end was always artificial and if the USSR had beat the US to the Moon maybe we would have gotten a race to the first "permanent" base on the Moon or spacestation or even a rush to Mars. That's the point of the "did the US really win the Space Race?" question, it's about how the finish line was essentially always the next thing the USSR hadn't done yet.
Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass "
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
> But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing,
I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.
Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw
> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
The Soviets scrapped their N1 after multiple launch failures & then pretended they never were in the race. You can argue if US won, but the Soviets definitely lost the race.
First Lunar flyby, first Lunar probe landing, first photos from surface, first Lunar rover - all Soviets.
Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.
Sure, but another aspect of winning a race can be the other party quitting. The Soviets scrapped the N1 (like, they scrapped functional hardware, including many flight ready engines) and pretended they never were in a race to land on the Moon.
They did start on many LEO space stations that the US had no good answer to, but its questionable if this was still the same race or a race at all.
Many people expected the race to just go on - lunar bases, Mars, etc. Given that nothing like that really happened post US landing on the moon, one could really say the race was over the final victory belonged to the US.
This is such a bad response. The space race was to get to the moon. There is a reason the USSR dropped any crewed lunar plans instantly when the USA landed (also they couldn't get the N1 to stop exploding) and went all in on satellites. They also kept the crewed tests secret because they knew they were behind the USA and was embarrassing.
That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.
You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).
Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.
The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
I have always seen Moon as absolutely sore loser mentality. Ofc they have bigger propaganda and infinitely more gullible population and lot more money to waste on that propaganda so mind washing succeeded. But in the end they(USA) were the losers.
... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
The show For All Mankind is a truly bittersweet look at how space exploration could have turned out differently.
I’m sure the technical challenges are much greater than how they are portrayed in the show. But certainly there has been a lack of will and optimism and imagination as well.
Well, we had people swing by the moon for the first in decades this April, with a robotic mission planned for November & about 7 more robotic missions planned for next year:
But we are going back to the moon. By 2030, I would bet, humans will land on the moon again. Probably Americans first, but if not, definitely Chinese.
And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).
SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.
I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.
I think the problem is not the technological advancement, it’s the limits of physics which are the same as in today as it was back in 1960s.
We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives
That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.
Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game.
And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.
People think rockets use tremendous amounts of fuel, but a Falcon 9's fuel is only slightly more than half the weight of the fuel in a fully fueled 747. There's also a lot of oxidizer (about 2.5x as much as the fuel) but LOX is very cheap, the second cheapest industrial liquid after water.
You should look into the Artemis program! Not only are we going back, but we're building a base, which will effectively be the spiritual successor to the ISS.
I’ll have to see it to believe it. Artemis was slow but seemed to be making progress and now things have been shaken up again and plans totally changed. To me that seems like it’s not going to happen
There is a dumb ass simple explanation: in about the same time it took to build rockets that took people to the Moon, we figured out that there was nothing to do there for humans. Or anywhere in the Solar System for that matter.
I mean until 1960 people expected to find whole civilisation or at least intelligent life on Venus and until 1964, at least some life on Mars. By then, it was too late to stop Apollo, but already no point to go anywhere else or expand Moon presence.
Lunacies 5, 6 & 7 are the only things that make the Artemis program useful. Landing 1t on the moon is an expensive, useless, performative flags and footprints mission. Landing 100t keeps the other moon dreams alive.
I read this a bit fast and with half a brain (because I'm in a boring meeting), but I'm not sure what an "AI model" is over just a common or garden model.
I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?
did not know we have -246°c to play with, which means the potential for the whole set of usefull volitiles is there, not just water/O²/H², and given that there is also the potential for +121°c very close to cold deposits, gives most of the basics for refining a whole host of molecules and compounds.
Non of that changing the fact that bieng on the moon for any extended time is going to SUCK , the dust is horrible in every possible way, low gravity will weaken , radiation is heavy, and all of the many other risks will add up to a poor career choice, so the compensation will have to be
1 tour, and retire in guaranteed style.
Basicly flying a great big ass laser in a lunar polar orbit and zapping the shaded dark sections of craters while some other satelites watch the resulting gass plumes, and of course carve your initials while no one is looking.
The band where there is enough solar exposure for power and cold traps is going to be narrow and dramaticly reduce the number of candidates, which has very likely been figured out years ago, especialy for earth facing spots.
Still going to need the heavy lift of multiple starship landings and some kind of 'moon link' satelite network.
We may be approaching technologically to expanding into the universe but we are certainly not there spiritually. Not to say that we shouldn't pursue this, there are probably war races in space already, but it seems to me that a better path would be growing spiritually before we expand. I wouldn't like to be in a place where we have the technical capability to reach Mars before we learn to live in peace on earth and take good care of our home.
Going back into space will require doing so with a hard nosed commercial mindset. Things on that scale are done because they are profitable, not because of putatively higher minded considerations.
I think our collective spirit is in the best place it's ever been for actually going into space, it's just not the spirit you were probably imagining.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm closer to a conspiracy theorist and non-believer than I am to trust history on the moon landing stuff. Doesn't help that I wasn't alive when it happened, and that we haven't since gone again. It feels so nonsensical to me, I would love for someone to help me educate myself on it from a more grounded point of view that can satisfy my paranoia. Did we really go there? How come we (as in humanity, any other nation whatsoever) haven't gone again since?
Because instead of a gradual progression and space infrastructure building (as was the original plan before Kennedy set the goal to Lunar landing before 1960s are over, its well documented in NASA history pages).
As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.
There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.
What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.
Yes we really went there, quite a few times in the 1970s. We have been again, also several times, with rovers and landers. As for why not humans since then? There's bugger all there to justify the extreme cost (at this time). It's an unpleasant ball made from tiny abrasive dust particles that is more easily explored with robots. The prestige thing is done; until we set up some base there in support of some broader mission (scientific or exploratory) there isn't a reason to send people.
I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/
Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.
I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.
I don’t usually get parenting right but the stars lined up for this one: I got hold of the Lego Saturn V kit (1969 pieces!) and my two kids and I built it over a few days while listening to this in the background. Last piece on right about the time “the Eagle has landed.”
That's so cool. I feel like society did a bad job passing on the torch of that throughout history to the newer generation, especially outside the US (I'm not an American), so a lot of us are really disconnected with what went down outside of the US.
The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences.
The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.
Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building.
Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced.
It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so".
But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.
Yes, we really went there. There's zero legitimate doubt. If nothing else, consider: the Soviets were locked in a massive propaganda war with the US over the respective countries' space achievements, with the Soviets spending vast resources to show that their ideology was superior by showing what they could achieve in space. They had no trouble tracking American activity in space. If the moon landings had been fake, wouldn't the Soviets have brought their receipts and utterly humiliated their rivals?
We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?
The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.
It's hard not to see this as a consolation prize. In 1969, we went to the moon.
In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.
But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.
I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. Been there done that. There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science). All the arguments for going to the moon need to be considered against everything else we can do - opportunity cost is real, but investing in the moon we are not investing in something else. (including less working hours...) Most of the things we developed for the moon would have been done anyway, and we don't know what things would have been developed sooner if we were not focusing on the moon.
Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.
I think this sort of view is quite myopic. In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. But we're not going to get to the endgame without playing the opening first.
The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our arms with various instruments attached and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.
We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.
You fail to comprehend just how large space is. Almost all of space is well out of reach. There is zero reason to think we will ever be able to overcome the laws of relativity, which in turn mean we will never be able to reach the stars. I know, this negative comment makes you mad, but there is every reason to think it is the case.
A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)
Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.
Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.
Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
> It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation. [1]
> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)
[1] New York Times, 9 weeks before the Kitty Hawk's first flight (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/svc/tmach/v1/refer?pdf=true...)
Earth is by far the best we can get, but on big enough spaceships it is possible to create living conditions that are better than on any other body of the Solar System, except perhaps on a ship floating in the clouds of Venus.
The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.
On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.
Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
Well, the solar system itself is ridiculously huge - saying "lets don't bother" because interstellar flight looks cumbersome with current technology ? Seems like quite the premature optimization.
Yes, while for now there is no known method for useful interstellar flight, spaceships with nuclear reactors could reduce the time required for traveling through the Solar System to acceptable values.
I just made a comment in another thread that Cape York, a huge chunk of northern Queensland has a mere 18,000 inhabitants. It's more sparsely occupied than northern Alaska by nearly a factor of two.
Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.
It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...
Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.
If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
The desire to fly to space can be compared with such for going to Everest, the place less hospitable than Cape York, yet having quite an interest from all sides. However, exploration of space could be way more practical than conquering the highest point on Earth - it serves scientific goals, and after science often come applications. There are many useful technologies which grew from space exploration and particularly from manned space programs, and we can expect those benefits to follow those who keeps studying space and learning to live close to the object of study.
We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
I looked into going to Everest - it is possible for a normal person to go - you need to save up a lot of money ($10-20k) which is within reach of most people if you really want to go. However even if you are filthy rich you still shouldn't: there is a lot of litter on the mountain because it is almost impossible to make the whole trip without leaving things behind. Combine with the danger and you really should not make the trip. Instead a have few photographers and scientists (who have real science to do up there - I'm not sure what there is) make the trip, or better yet a robot - and then look at pictures/videos and read their reports.
The moon is unlikely to be self sustaining - gravity is too low. In turn that means that earth will forever be polluting the earths atmosphere (CO2!) to supply it.
No one has aspirations or desire to live on Everest. They just want to go there plant a flag and say they did it before rushing back to.Civilization. Hmmm kinda like the moon.
I think there are quite a few people would build a hotel on top if the respective nations controlling the area let them. ;-)
For the record, I would definitely visit such a hotel, even better if it included a super high altitude railway, Jungfrau Railway style!
Yes, but Everest brings back less in terms of science - it's a smaller place than space.
Moon was that in 1960s. Now we're talking about a McMurdo station, not a dash to the South Pole with temporary storages along the way.
> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy
The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.
Population growth has been slowing for a long time, and is actually already below replacement level in most parts of the world outside Africa. It's unlikely that we will ever reach a global human population of even 11 billion. Some estimates put the peak at under 9 billion.
Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
> high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect
So, SpaceX?
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Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.
That's 3/3 complete bullshit, and first two doesn't even take high school level math to disprove completely.
I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.
Feel free to disprove them completely since you're so confident
What's to disprove? They are prima facie false, not just formally (because "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations), but also empirically, here and now - mankind already needs more land than Earth has, and more energy than Earth can spare.
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
> "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations
I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.
> mankind already needs more land than Earth has
By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.
> more energy than Earth can spare
Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.
The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.
What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.
Not to mention that it seems more healthy to have a far off frontier for a human civilization. It makes it possible for people to try something new, something different, brings innovation, etc. Without it, some people might just be too unhappy in the regular society.
We'd be much better off building colonies on the bottom of the ocean than on the moon or mars (or a cylinder floating at a lagrange point.)
After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
Why not both ?
Infinite distance and travel cost too!
> In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity.
Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.
Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
Why should we not expand into space? To make sure that all the lifeless rocks in it stay lifeless? If earth were twice as large would you say that logically we should only inhabit half of that earth or do you believe that human beings have a natural claim to everything that can be reached via boats and legs but not via rockets? Personally, I would like a future where I can see other planets with my own eyes and dislike a future where the entire species is dependent on one planet being habitable.
The solar system has effectively infinite resources.
For a certain population smaller than n, Earth also has effectively infinite resources.
So again, it's a relativity, not a certainty.
Radioactive, toxic, dry, low-gravity and anoxic land isn't exactly prime real estate. Even the North Pole is a better environment for humans to live in than the Moon or Mars are.
> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy
...of a density so low that it is 0 on average.
space has practically infinite nothing.
I know the pretty pictures always show the planets all nice together, but in reality there's this huge, irradiated, projectile-infested nothing that you and I cannot deal with, even with current tech.
Well, the nothing part is an often forgotten selling point - that makes it possible to go really far, to send signals long distances & for the light of the sun to reach quite a large distance unobstructed. You don't get any benefits under a few km of water for example.
Even if you think a space industry is useful in general, there is no reason for humans to be involved. Robots are superior to humans for this application today and will only become more superior in the future.
Why pursue space exploration if all we can do is send robots there? The only meaningful thing for humanity is sending Humans to places.
Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.
Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth? Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about, and building a symbolic outpost serves no practical purpose.
> What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth?
The Jamestown colony relied on shipments from England.
> Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about
And look at what America became.
Jamestown went to a place where humans had lived for thousands of years. They used shipments from England, but they didn't need them at any time.
The colony would have failed without those shipments. They desperately needed them.
And yet other people were managing to live there just fine without shipments from Europe.
You have to starting somewhere.
Would not surprise me if people & robots did end up merging together in the long term for easier living in space.
> Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs
Very funny!
Is that your litmus test--it has to have "value"? What's the value of Hubble? Of the Nancy Grace Roman observatory? Are you against those too? Maybe you prefer if they had left it as a spy satellite--at least that has real value.
Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.
> Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that?
Been there done that. Last happened in 1972, there is nothing exciting about it anymore. I have other things in my life that are exciting - things that really are exciting.
Please share what you think is really exciting. Maybe I'll have something new to be excited about.
I'm taking my local scouts camping this weekend. Should be an experience (it is expected to rain all weekend).
I just finished helping my local high school marching band's annual event - I got to hear a lot of great music which I find exciting.
I slept in the zoo next to the fishes with the girl scouts not long ago.
You can guess by the above the ages of my kids - which in turn implies a lot of other excitement.
There are plenty of other things as well. My local town art festival is exciting to a lot of people even though I didn't care enough to attend this year. There are a lot of museums, parks, concerts, ... in my local area to be exciting about. I have a shop full of tools for my various hobbies that I'm excited about. If you can't find a lifetime of things to be excited about withing walking distance of your bedroom you need to learn to enjoy your life more. (with apologies to the disabled who can't leave their bed)
>There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon
Farside radio telescope:
https://www.colorado.edu/project/lunar-farside/
Also mass drivers so you can ship ridiculous amount of lunar oxygen, aluminium & even general dirt for shielding into the cislunar space. Not to mention any materials processed by high energy industrial processed provered by solar forges on the surface of the moon (both thermal & powered by locally manufactured solar panels).
Very few is not zero...
There is no reason the above cannot be maintained by robots, and many reasons it should be if we have it. We should also question if it is worth it.
I've heard a lot of arguments against human space exploration, but "We could put that energy into working less" is probably one of the more out-there arguments that's hard to take seriously.
Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
> Work is a necessary evil.
I get fulfillment via work.
> Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
> I get fulfillment via work.
Good for you. And I hope you never get laid off, burned out, or anything else.
I however do not get my fulfillment via work. I work to live, and I do [mostly] enjoy my work. However I have a very long todo list that I'm not getting done in part because I don't have the time to work on it (and in part because I don't have the money for the tools/parts I need)
> I get fulfillment via work.
Did you read the part where I said voluntary work is fine?
> A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Almost no work provides the people doing it with a sense of purpose. People have a purpose in spite of work, not because of it.
> If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that.
I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
> I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
like out-of-control global warming, depletion of freshwater reserves, destruction of soil, mass surveillance, extremely uneven distribution of resources. I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable, basically keeping the production-consumption machinery takes up all the surplus it produces, while depleting the resources we have.
The great achievements we have are much like the Moai statues on the Easter Island.
> I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable,
The bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians in America is one of periodic starvation. For the colonists, the bone evidence is one of extremely hard labor and short lives.
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
You could enslave someone and yet give them a greater standard of living than a medieval king. That would not mean that it is acceptable, or even better.
I suspect most of them would find being my slave better. By modern standards it would not be acceptable or better, but all evidence I've seen suggest most people in medieval days would consider then loss of freedom not that big of a deal (partially this is about how little freedom many of them had)
> I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment
Woah, really? More than cheap fuel, scientific research, social welfare, political work towards peace?
The only good thing I can think of that is actually directly caused by the way we employ people is that some things (delivery, food) are very cheap, cheaper than they would be if people worked at a sustainable rate. But that comes at the immense cost of the health and wellbeing of a vast underclass of people.
> There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal.
“the superfluous is highly necessary”
– Voltaire
Being forced to do superfluous things is not.
Is someone forcing you to fly to the moon?
They want to force me to pay to fly somebody else to the moon.
Work is a good.
Why is involuntary work a good?
Nobody is talking about slavery here. You need to do something to feed yourself, otherwise you are making somebody else a slave to feed you. As a society there are some very disabled people we can accept this for, but when someone isn't supporting themselves that is enslaving someone else.
Not sure this reply makes much sense. I said that if we (humans) become more productive, i.e. that we can produce sufficient food/water/shelter/whatever with less effort, then the first goal after that should be to reduce the amount of drudgery the average person has to put up with, rather than (say) keeping the amount of drudgery the same and spaffing a bunch of fuel into space. I'm not sure where in that you see someone being enslaved to feed me.
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
>"There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science)."
The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
At that point though, there are lots of other romances to peruse. Somebody could go to the moon, but it won't be me. I could however go to my local art museum - at a much smaller costs than my share of sending someone else to the moon, but I'd get more value from my trip to the art museum than someone else on the moon.
Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear some great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.
People want to go to the moon, you could make your same argument for lots of things humans have done but at the end of the day science is not the reason 99% of people care about or want to colonize space. People have a desire to colonize space
Some people. I'm all for allowing those people do to it.
However the context tends to include I'm being asked for fund the dreams of those people (via taxes) and that impacts my ability to fund my own dreams.
We all pay taxes for things we don’t agree with, such has it always been
> That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
What??? I bet you consume large quantities of art and romance, like everyone else. Like look at the tremendous choices you have for entertainment.
While I agree that repeating a 60 year old achievement is pointless, one of NASA's goals for Artemis, etc. is having a platform for R&D for human exploration of Mars. There aren't other nearby large bodies on which, and around which, to work out and shake out all the new tech for Mars. R&D actually at Mars would be very expensive and slower.
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
> endless money poured into innovation
The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
Pretty sure we are talking about the endless AI money glitch.
That's part of my complaint. More and more money is poured into 'innovation' across our society, but what do we have to show for it?
Bad "art" and annoying to read writing? Maybe slightly more software we don't really need.
> what do we have to show for it?
For starters, you are on HN amusing yourself in your free time.
A huge variety of tools and technology that billions of people use daily.
What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.
The Appolo Guidance Computer was one of the first applications of silicone integrated circuits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Logic...
"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"
A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.
I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that’s meant by someone writing about “innovation” in scare quotes and complaining about no more moon landings.
[dead]
The goal is entirely different.
Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.
Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.
https://www.planetary.org/charts/apollo-vs-artemis-spending
> won the space race
Some of it.
Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.
That remains a ridiculous argument. The thing about a race is you can always think of excuses for not winning. Plans for Mars were being met by all accounts, however Nixon still cancelled them because the Apollo victory was so decisive.
Nixon cancelled them because he was increasingly worried about a catastrophic accident and felt it could damage his political career and ambitions. Seriously. [1] If he only knew... Outside of that you're correct. We were already set for progress onto Mars. In a parallel timeline where one man's political ambitions, and myopia, didn't override the interests of an entire species - we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system, and perhaps already be flirting with abstract concepts of moving beyond just the solar system. We're left with our timeline, but hopefully people 60 years from now might look back at us more fondly for our actions of today, and tomorrow.
[1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...
> we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system
This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both.
Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony.
The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid?
The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines.
I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-m...
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_ma...
I have indeed read the book you referenced, at least as much as I could stomach. They're quite ill informed, and we can get into that but first on a couple of points you mentioned:
To start with Mars has practically endless water. That's rather evident on the poles, but we discovered back in 2013 that even the 'desert-like' images you associate with Mars, the surface regolith is surprisingly moist at somewhere between 1.5-5% water by weight. So a typical analog given there is that if you heated about a cubic foot of soil, you'd be able to evaporate out upwards of 2 pints (or 1 liter) of water. So the whole plot in "The Martian" about these esoteric things he had to do to just get water was just based on ignorance, which was the state of knowledge prior to 2013. Of course humans on the surface would have discovered this in a matter of minutes, but we're relying on probes and rovers - so instead it took us half a century.
Similarly, radiation on the surface of Mars is somewhat less than what astronauts are the ISS are exposed to. The huge numbers you're referencing are probably either from stuff like that book you mentioned, which is wrong about most of everything it claims and/or equivalently being quite misleading by e.g. referencing exposure levels during flight from a direct solar flare, which would indeed be quite toasty - but is something that can be easily worked around. Water itself, which we'll need to bring plenty of, works as an excellent radiation shield.
Near to every argument made in your referenced book, at least to the point that I was able to read, is mostly uninformed and/or disingenuous, but this already getting quite a bit longer than I intended. If you're into reading things that don't just confirm your biases then I might recommend this [1] book instead. And it's written by an aerospace engineer with an extensive background of research into the topic, instead of a comic book artist. That's not an appeal to authority, as there are plenty of people with no background in space who are extremely well informed. But it's also true that those who are misinformed, universally, have no relevant background in space.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
According to [0], there's about 2% water by volume in Martian soil, and you need to heat it up to 800 degrees Celsius to extract it -- which means you need a power source capable of generating those temperatures on an ongoing basis, which is unlikely without massive solar arrays that would be constant covered with (and damaged by) Martian regolith. Oh, and Mars receives less than half the sunlight Earth does due to its greater distance from the sun, and dust storms could obscure them for weeks on end.
Or you could use hypothetical a nuclear power power plant that would be incredibly expensive to build, ship, run and maintain on a foreign planet.
You were right about the radiation! Kind of. There's "only" 50x more radiation on Mars' surface than on Earth's. You said this was less than what astronauts on the ISS are exposed to. How is that a meaningful comparison? You're talking about people living their entire lives in this environment, and presumably making babies who grow into adolescents and adults, all the while threatened by an amount of radiation we have no idea if a human child could live through.
The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that exposure to it will kill you. The level of radiation is so high that exposure to it will kill you, unless you lived essentially your entire life underground or in a bunker. The cold temperatures will kill you. The soil has perchlorate in concentrations that will kill you. There's basically nothing to do there -- no walks outside without a space suit, no nature to look at, no living beings (except perhaps soil microbes that would be instantly destroyed in the process of extracting water) -- nothing more available there than here on Earth except looking at the stars and dying. [1]
Every argument I've seen people make for colonizing Mars in the near term has been emotional. The arguments are all the more emotional for insisting that they are rational. We have no idea if we could grow food in a closed system indefinitely, or reproduce in space or on another planet, and the amount of research going into these literally existential questions is close to zero. Nor do the billionaires who claim to be obsessed with getting us to be a multi-planet civilization seem to give a shit about them. Colonizing Mars isn't a plan; it's a meme.
Finally, there's no thought given to how to deal with inevitable social problems that will arise if there are large (1000+) populations away from Earth: what to do with people who have psychological breakdowns? how do you prioritize if more people need to be sent home than there's space for on a return rocket? what are your responsibilities toward colonists who need expensive permanent care? what if they can't survive Earth's gravity due to physiological changes from growing up off-planet? What if an entire space colony will never be self-sustaining and they need to be supported with expensive shipments of food and supplies from Earth forever -- who will pay? Or will we?
Look, if you want to colonize Mars or other planets because you think it's a cool thing to do, at least that's an honest, personal opinion. But if you think putting a ton of resources into going to Mars anytime soon is a good investment -- when we aren't even mitigating an ongoing climate disaster here on Earth, the one environment to which we are exquisitely adapted and which is non-existent literally anywhere else in the known universe -- then you are fooling yourself.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/26/nasa-curiosi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars
I'm trying to keep this engaging/holistic and avoiding writing a rambling wall of text, but I also don't want to just cherry pick stuff. So if you think I'm ignoring something or whatever, please do feel free to point to it. I can certainly elaborate on just about anything on this topic. I find all of it quite fascinating and enjoyable to discuss (or debate)!
---
Let me start with your water issue. It varies by area - the 2% came from Curiosity's region bearing in mind it moves at an aggregate rate of about about 1.5 miles per year. The up to 5% came from measurements from other devices on different parts of the planet. And in this goofy digital world we've created I think we're falling increasingly out of touch with the real world, and what we're capable of. You are implying generating 800C of heat is some technological issue yet a typical medieval style open forge and bellows can easily reach temperatures upwards of 1200C. Suffice to say there's a bit more refined methods developed in the past millennia!
The reason radiation levels matter is because radiation can do one of two things. If you have low enough radiation, then the worst you're looking at is something like a reduced life expectancy owing to increased rates of cancer. But high radiation can give you radiation poisoning and kill you in hours. Mars is much more of the former than the latter. For instance there's even one really interesting area on Earth - Ramsar, Iran. [1] It's a small town of a couple of thousand that has significant ambient radiation levels, with some smaller areas within it even experiencing higher than typical levels on Mars. You'd naturally expect that to, at the minimum, lead to increased rates of cancer but it based on limited data not only does this not seem to be the case, but there may already be radio-adaptive effects in play. It's phenomenally interesting!
The thing I'd make of this (and the water on Mars) issue is that it's impossible to know what you don't know. And right now we know basically nothing about colonizing other planets and ultimately I think the only way we're really going to find out more is by actually doing it. So for instance obviously fertility will be crucial, but all the experiments you do on Earth or the ISS aren't ever going to give you a definitive answer. You're only going to find out on Mars by actually doing it. And I think this applies to many of the issues you're mentioning.
The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme. It just doesn't work in the real world. This is precisely how SpaceX was able to go from a relatively broke startup to dominating the entire space industry. They worked towards the goal and tried their best along the way, but didn't let the possibility of failure get in the way of achieving success. And they ended up with not only the most efficient rockets in the world, but also have the best safety record as well. Kind of paradoxical in a way, but I think it also makes sense. In poker the best way to ensure you lose money is to try to avoid losing money. When fear of failure dominates your thought processes you, at some point, become incapable of making the best decisions.
I think some of the issues you bring up (as well as in the book you mentioned) are issues brought up just to have issues to bring up. So for instance, what happens if somebody goes crazy? To me this question is banal, because I just don't see there being any real discussion to be had. Obviously they'd immediately be locked up to ensure the safety of everybody else, and they'd be deported back to Earth at the first opportunity. Maybe there's some interesting nuance or whatever in these issues, but I'm not seeing it?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
IMO he stopped it because Russia wasn't meaningfully threatening to field a Mars mission. The end was always artificial and if the USSR had beat the US to the Moon maybe we would have gotten a race to the first "permanent" base on the Moon or spacestation or even a rush to Mars. That's the point of the "did the US really win the Space Race?" question, it's about how the finish line was essentially always the next thing the USSR hadn't done yet.
The public had lost interest in it, and so the political support for more was gone.
Thats a ridiculous comment. The thing about the space race is we were getting are ass kicked, then said 'Oh the finish line is actually this. Oh look we kicked your ass "
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
Actually, in Russia do they have a pitch for where they’d rather draw the finish line? I admit it is probably influenced by having a US upbringing, but “landing on the Moon” does seem like a natural finish line for a space race.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
Maybe they have some space-station based claim.
But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing, planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
> But the finish line did keep changing: first satellite in orbit, first living mammals in orbit, first human in orbit, multiple humans in orbit, spacewalk, moon landing, human moon landing,
I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.
Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw
> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
> first living mammals in orbit
And left to die in orbit.
Sure. So you could maybe add the first animals to safely return from space into the list too - the first win on the American side if you're counting sub-orbital flights, otherwise it'd've been Sputnik 5.
Russia has the first finish line -- Sputnik. You can pick a successor finish line to diminish the American accomplishment, but Russia will always have that first one.
Nah, the V2 was the first rocket to reach space.
While true, the Germans don't claim that first for obvious reasons, leaving the Russians able to claim the first achievement.
It doesn't matter what they claim. It's a documented fact.
Bragging rights are about bragging, not about facts. Facts make the bragging easier, but they are secondary.
You're supporting the USA decisive victory with this take. We are not disagreeing on the winner.
The Soviets scrapped their N1 after multiple launch failures & then pretended they never were in the race. You can argue if US won, but the Soviets definitely lost the race.
First Lunar flyby, first Lunar probe landing, first photos from surface, first Lunar rover - all Soviets.
Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.
Sure, but another aspect of winning a race can be the other party quitting. The Soviets scrapped the N1 (like, they scrapped functional hardware, including many flight ready engines) and pretended they never were in a race to land on the Moon.
They did start on many LEO space stations that the US had no good answer to, but its questionable if this was still the same race or a race at all.
Many people expected the race to just go on - lunar bases, Mars, etc. Given that nothing like that really happened post US landing on the moon, one could really say the race was over the final victory belonged to the US.
Well, President Kennedy kind of spelled out the finish line.
Although, to be specific, he did not say it was a race, but rather something the U.S. should strive for—even specifying a deadline.
This is such a bad response. The space race was to get to the moon. There is a reason the USSR dropped any crewed lunar plans instantly when the USA landed (also they couldn't get the N1 to stop exploding) and went all in on satellites. They also kept the crewed tests secret because they knew they were behind the USA and was embarrassing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regardi...
>The space race was to get to the moon.
That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.
You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).
Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.
The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
I have always seen Moon as absolutely sore loser mentality. Ofc they have bigger propaganda and infinitely more gullible population and lot more money to waste on that propaganda so mind washing succeeded. But in the end they(USA) were the losers.
That’s like saying the goal of the process is the process. It is a recursive definition and a pointless, expensive endeavor.
>and won the space race
... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
The show For All Mankind is a truly bittersweet look at how space exploration could have turned out differently.
I’m sure the technical challenges are much greater than how they are portrayed in the show. But certainly there has been a lack of will and optimism and imagination as well.
Well, we had people swing by the moon for the first in decades this April, with a robotic mission planned for November & about 7 more robotic missions planned for next year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#F...
I would argue that is something & that things are finally moving in the right direction for the Moon at a respectable pace. :)
But we are going back to the moon. By 2030, I would bet, humans will land on the moon again. Probably Americans first, but if not, definitely Chinese.
And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).
SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.
I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.
I think the problem is not the technological advancement, it’s the limits of physics which are the same as in today as it was back in 1960s.
We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives
cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rocket_propellant#Metha... cough
Bah, this is the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
(Unfortunately if you do launch from Earth, neighbors will likely by a bit annoyed).
It’s still a chemical reaction
Now estimate how much that propellant will cost per kg of payload to orbit.
The problem with expensive launch in the past wasn't due to propellant cost.
That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.
Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game.
And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.
People think rockets use tremendous amounts of fuel, but a Falcon 9's fuel is only slightly more than half the weight of the fuel in a fully fueled 747. There's also a lot of oxidizer (about 2.5x as much as the fuel) but LOX is very cheap, the second cheapest industrial liquid after water.
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You should look into the Artemis program! Not only are we going back, but we're building a base, which will effectively be the spiritual successor to the ISS.
I’ll have to see it to believe it. Artemis was slow but seemed to be making progress and now things have been shaken up again and plans totally changed. To me that seems like it’s not going to happen
Another good program to watch is Space: 1999. Just sayin'... :)
There is a dumb ass simple explanation: in about the same time it took to build rockets that took people to the Moon, we figured out that there was nothing to do there for humans. Or anywhere in the Solar System for that matter.
I mean until 1960 people expected to find whole civilisation or at least intelligent life on Venus and until 1964, at least some life on Mars. By then, it was too late to stop Apollo, but already no point to go anywhere else or expand Moon presence.
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Saddest part is that all the tech was apparently so utterly useless for anything that NASA lost it.
Tangentially related, these articles by Maciej Cegłowski:
* The Lunacy of Artemis – https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
* Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly – https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
Lunacies 5, 6 & 7 are the only things that make the Artemis program useful. Landing 1t on the moon is an expensive, useless, performative flags and footprints mission. Landing 100t keeps the other moon dreams alive.
I read this a bit fast and with half a brain (because I'm in a boring meeting), but I'm not sure what an "AI model" is over just a common or garden model.
I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?
did not know we have -246°c to play with, which means the potential for the whole set of usefull volitiles is there, not just water/O²/H², and given that there is also the potential for +121°c very close to cold deposits, gives most of the basics for refining a whole host of molecules and compounds. Non of that changing the fact that bieng on the moon for any extended time is going to SUCK , the dust is horrible in every possible way, low gravity will weaken , radiation is heavy, and all of the many other risks will add up to a poor career choice, so the compensation will have to be 1 tour, and retire in guaranteed style. Basicly flying a great big ass laser in a lunar polar orbit and zapping the shaded dark sections of craters while some other satelites watch the resulting gass plumes, and of course carve your initials while no one is looking. The band where there is enough solar exposure for power and cold traps is going to be narrow and dramaticly reduce the number of candidates, which has very likely been figured out years ago, especialy for earth facing spots. Still going to need the heavy lift of multiple starship landings and some kind of 'moon link' satelite network.
We may be approaching technologically to expanding into the universe but we are certainly not there spiritually. Not to say that we shouldn't pursue this, there are probably war races in space already, but it seems to me that a better path would be growing spiritually before we expand. I wouldn't like to be in a place where we have the technical capability to reach Mars before we learn to live in peace on earth and take good care of our home.
> spiritually
Going back into space will require doing so with a hard nosed commercial mindset. Things on that scale are done because they are profitable, not because of putatively higher minded considerations.
I think our collective spirit is in the best place it's ever been for actually going into space, it's just not the spirit you were probably imagining.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm closer to a conspiracy theorist and non-believer than I am to trust history on the moon landing stuff. Doesn't help that I wasn't alive when it happened, and that we haven't since gone again. It feels so nonsensical to me, I would love for someone to help me educate myself on it from a more grounded point of view that can satisfy my paranoia. Did we really go there? How come we (as in humanity, any other nation whatsoever) haven't gone again since?
Because instead of a gradual progression and space infrastructure building (as was the original plan before Kennedy set the goal to Lunar landing before 1960s are over, its well documented in NASA history pages).
As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.
There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.
What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.
Yes we really went there, quite a few times in the 1970s. We have been again, also several times, with rovers and landers. As for why not humans since then? There's bugger all there to justify the extreme cost (at this time). It's an unpleasant ball made from tiny abrasive dust particles that is more easily explored with robots. The prestige thing is done; until we set up some base there in support of some broader mission (scientific or exploratory) there isn't a reason to send people.
I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/
This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...
Both are worth a read!
Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.
Also to get the mood and sense how it felt following those flights media outlets back then there is great site
https://apolloinrealtime.org/
I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.
I don’t usually get parenting right but the stars lined up for this one: I got hold of the Lego Saturn V kit (1969 pieces!) and my two kids and I built it over a few days while listening to this in the background. Last piece on right about the time “the Eagle has landed.”
It is a fantastic site.
That's so cool. I feel like society did a bad job passing on the torch of that throughout history to the newer generation, especially outside the US (I'm not an American), so a lot of us are really disconnected with what went down outside of the US.
Thank you so much for this, I am super excited for this read, you made my day!
You are most welcome. Enjoy it!
The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences.
The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.
Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building.
Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced.
It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so".
But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.
Yes, we really went there. There's zero legitimate doubt. If nothing else, consider: the Soviets were locked in a massive propaganda war with the US over the respective countries' space achievements, with the Soviets spending vast resources to show that their ideology was superior by showing what they could achieve in space. They had no trouble tracking American activity in space. If the moon landings had been fake, wouldn't the Soviets have brought their receipts and utterly humiliated their rivals?
We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?
The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.