My point is quite simply that manned space exploration is orders of magnitude less efficient for gaining scientific knowledge. If you prioritize manned spaceflight, fine, but that is a feat of transportation and cultural pride, not science.
I am asserting that it’s the case now, and there are no foreseeable technological developments that will make it possible, not even on the horizon. It gets pushed even farther out if we insist that a human presence must be part of the mix.
I dispute that. In every way except travel, the ocean floor is far more hostile to humans than Mars. There is no atmosphere. Building structures to handle hundreds of atmospheres from the outside is vastly more difficult than ones that handle a fraction of an atmosphere from the inside. There is no day/night cycle, and no light. Solar is thus impossible, and you would need nuclear power for everything. There is essentially no food; maybe you could harvest enough deep-sea life to sustain a few people, but not thousands, let alone a million. Carbon in general is hard to come by. Radio doesn’t work between anything separated by water. It’s even more poorly mapped than Mars right now (Mars is easily mapped from orbit of course; the sea floor is not).
Antarctica is a little better, but only slightly. Solar is still useless because you only get it half the year. There is oxygen, but still almost no carbon, at least in the central icy region.
The fact that they are relatively easy to get to makes it worse, in a way. There is no forcing function to make an Antarctic base even remotely sustainable. They run on fuel oil delivered to them (McMurdo had a nuclear reactor once, but it was unreliable and it was retired in the 70s). Even the ISS is more sustainable–they get all their power from solar and recycle their water. They should be farther along, growing their own food, but we again run into the same problem–because food deliveries are still easier than a farm, that’s what they use. The forcing function for growing their own food isn’t strong enough.
A Martian base has to be largely sustainable, so it will be (it won’t happen at all if they can’t even do the basics). Water and atmospheric CO2 are prerequisites, as is solar power (maybe with some small nuclear reactors as backup). They’ll create oxygen, methane fuel, and possibly other hydrocarbons from the water+CO2. These are all significant engineering problems but not insurmountable ones. Musk at least seems prepared to spend a few tens of billions on developing the solutions.
Getting back to the OP a bit since this thread has gotten a little off track, I think. Let me give an example of the research and design work I was talking about regarding “vitamins”.
In front of me there is a computer keyboard. It required an immensely deep industrial base to construct: it’s made from a high quality plastic, which was injection-molded with big hydraulic presses and precision, CNC-made dies. The letting was printed on with some advanced machine. The keyboard controller is some custom bit of silicon. It has a printed circuit board that went through dozens or hundreds of automated steps to make. It has some stickers with high quality printing and some specific adhesive. It’s held together with screws made from steel, rolled threads, and a custom head cutting machine. It has internal springs made on another custom machine from special spring steel. And so on. To reproduce this entire chain of equipment would be impossible with just a million people.
And yet, it’s just a keyboard. It’s a pretty simple device if it doesn’t have to be quite as pretty. The plastic parts can all be 3D printed. The plastic itself can act as a spring. It doesn’t need a full-blown PCB: conductive plastic could be used for the traces, since they don’t have to carry much current (conductive plastic has a high resistance, which is just fine for button traces). Instead of screws, plastic clips.
There is still the matter of the microchip. They’re lightweight, so we could just bring a bunch. But a better idea is to bring something more generic, like the Arduino-compatible I have sitting next to me. It’s 72 MHz, 32 bit, has a built in power supply, USB controller, a bunch of IO pins, and a ton of other stuff. It’s probably 100x as expensive as the custom chip, but it can be used for basically any embedded application. It would be trivial to use as a keyboard controller.
The whole board is the size of a postage stamp and weighs under 3 grams, so if our shipping costs are $1000/kg (above what SpaceX intends to hit), it still only costs $3 to ship to Mars (that’s actually less than the cost of the device, though it would be cheaper in quantity). The average person might need 10 of these a year for various embedded applications, whether keyboards or thermostats or spacesuits or whatever. That’s basically nothing. Everything else in the keyboard can be produced locally (even the plastic, but if not the plastic can still be recycled from old, broken devices).
If that’s not enough horsepower, I also have a Raspberry Pi Zero W sitting next to it. It weighs 9 grams and is powerful enough to use as a desktop computer, or various other serious applications. It’s a lot less powerful than a normal laptop of course, but it’s cheap, weighs almost nothing, and has a power supply and display controller and USB hub and a zillion other features.
These are just examples of course; something destined for Mars could be made better yet. But they do have an advantage in that they already have a ton of software written for them and are designed to be easy to work with. They are too small to be easily repaired, but that’s ok–they’re so light and cheap that you ship a bunch. And they’re all interchangeable so if one goes kaput, you just grab a spare from the stocks, and never have to worry if you’re running low on that one special component.
The hard part here is that someone has to design the keyboard and the many thousands of other devices that would be needed by a civilization with a decent standard of living. I could probably design one in a year, but that implies many thousands of man-years of work in total. Someone has to do all this, and someone has to pay for it–which might be tricky since on Earth we already have injection molding machines and all that, and no one wants a keyboard that’s worse than the crappiest $5 special that also costs $50 in plastic and other components and takes many hours to print. It’s only relevant if you’re in a place where you don’t have access to all the niceties of an industrial base with billions of workers.
Someone said that Elon Musk is among the ten richest people in the world. He’s not. He’s worth $24.6 billion dollars, making him the 31st richest person in the world. I’m using the Forbes Billionaires 2020 list, which is usually considered the most accurate. It’s at Forbes Billionaires 2022: The Richest People In The World. Please note that to say that Musk is prepared to spend a few tens of billions on developing this project what is meant is that he is prepared to spend a few tens of billions of other people’s money on it. Even if one combined the total fortunes of the top 15 richest people in the world, it would be less than $1 trillion.
That’s out of date, since Telsa stock rose from $229/share to over $1400/share in the past year. He was the 5th richest person as of July 20 with a net worth of $74B. However, Tesla is a volatile stock and is down from their peak of >$1600/share. It’s certainly possible that they could crash and send him down in the rankings.
Why would Musk’s fortune nearly triple since March?
The question is why would Tesla stock have quadrupled since March. Musk is the single largest shareholder of Tesla, so he just came along for the ride (also he’s gotten some performance bonuses paid in stock). In fact over 100% of Musk’s net worth is in Tesla and SpaceX since he has taken out loans to buy more shares in them.
The answer is that no one has the slightest clue. Tesla has been doing well, though not enough to justify the increase. Personally, I think it’s a function of there being a ton of cash around and not many places to put it. People are stuffing money in any stock that isn’t wildly dysfunctional in the age of COVID. Tesla did not fare nearly as badly as other automakers in the last quarter.
There will never be a million people on Mars. I can’t see one hundred people there.
It absolutely would not. If there were an asteroid in the asteroid belt made of solid gold, it still would not be worth the cost of sending people to mine it.
All this “We’ll just go mine easily found stuff” idea suggests to me that people have never seen what a real mine or industrial facility looks like. A serious industrial operation isolated by itself will cease functioning in a week or two. Things break. All factories, mines and such require a constant amount of maintenance and spare parts; the receiving department is in a constant state of activity to bring in the stuff needed to keep the place working. The likelihood that you could maintain a functioning mine away from Earth for a long time without providing it with spare parts is zero, and the likelihood you could manufacture all the needed spare parts onsite is also zero. The complexity of maintaining even a simple industrial operation of any sort is mind boggling, but we don’t perceive it because the market, comprised of countless agents acting independently, takes care of it.
Describing this situation as “Relative ease” is… I mean, I don’t know what you mean.
Imagine, for a moment, the logistical difficulty we would have in setting up a colony of one million people on Antarctica. Just shifting a million souls to the Ross Sea shore and having them live there. What would that cost? A trillion dollars is a really low guess. It’s a pretty big logistical challenge to support research stations in Antarctica, and those house 10-100 people, not counting Things. To construct a city there the size of San Jose, and to supply it with the things that cannot be made in Antarctica, would consume a truly dizzying amount of resources. It would be the single most expensive ongoing project of any kind in the world. A city of a million people in a regular place - in India, or California, or Mozambique - is nowhere near being self-reliant.
To do this on MARS is - and I am guessing low here - ten thousand times harder, one hundred thousand times more expensive, and ten million times more hazardous. It is going to cost over $2 billion this year to send a one-ton rover, Perseverance, to Mars. Even giving SpaceX a fantasy-level amount of credit for cutting that per-kilo cost, the price of sending one million people and everything they need to Mars would cost more money than exists in the entire world and there would be no return at all on it.
Furthermore, if you send a million people to Antarctica, they’re going to have some struggles but will survive the experience. If you send a million people to live on Mars, they will probably all die. I am confident we can figure out a way to send a small expedition there and back and have a decent chance they’ll survive, but setting a base up there for permanent habitation is a straight up death sentence. There is no breathable air there. Are you 100% confident the atmosphere generation system will always work? When it breaks, everyone dies. There’s nowhere to run. There isn’t any comparison between then and exploration on Earth, because no matter where you go on Earth, you can breathe the air, enjoy the sunlight, and your muscles won’t atrophy in the gravity. Almost everywhere has something you can eat, and in 2020, if it doesn’t work out, you can go somewhere else fairly swiftly. We know 99.999% of how to keep people alive in Antarctica; to keep people alive for a long time on Mars we really don’t know everything because we’ve never done it before. Something would go wrong. I something goes wrong at Antarctica Metropolis 1, we send stuff to fix it. If it goes wrong on Marsopolis, they all die screaming and it’s the biggest catastrophe in human history.
This idea is just flatly, utterly insane. It is as fantastical as suggesting we build an actual, functioning Hogwart’s. This is NEVER going to happen, unless we develop technology as advanced as “Star Trek.”
The comeback to this is always: we’ll do it incrementally, over a century. Costs will come down over time and with economies of scale. Technology will improve. Supplies can be made locally.
Sounds good. Over a century that might sustain a scientific base.
Colonization? No. Look at the simple numbers. One million people over a century is 10,000 a year. That’s 100 trips with 100 people. Two trips every week, with no failures, the vast majority of them made when the planets are not at their closest, since that’s once every two years or so. It will be decades before one single ship capable of moving 100 passengers to Mars will be built. To do fifty trips of 20,000 people at closest approaches is fantasy. Will those 100-person ships be returnable? Probably not; too much chance of damage and the parts built into one will be too valuable to return. So, 10,000 non-returnable space arks.
Could you get the price of one down to a billion? Inconceivable. (And I do know what that word means.) Say you do, though. That’s $10T just for the ships, nothing else. Or $100B a year for a century before supplies, training, earthbases, and everything else needed. Where does the money come from?
Not Elon Musk. He’s going to die before the first 100-person ship can be built. Even if he shoves his entire fortune into a space trust, that’s a drop in the space bucket. Will the next generation want to spend that kind of money on Mars? I hope not. Because by then the costs of climate change will suck up every dollar humanity has. Nobody will vote for the hundreds of billions needed for a Mars vanity project. Nobody will buy the products of a trillionaire who stiffs the suffering billions on Earth to send a hundred people to Mars, twice every week.
Science, maybe. A small Mars project might be justifiable to learn something useful to apply to climate change. I have doubts. Robots are ten times cheaper and can do ten times as much science, undoubtedly conservative numbers.
But some chucklehead rowed across the Atlantic. A bananapants guy hiked across the Antarctic. A few scientists would give their lives to live on Mars, even if it were a one-way trip. The bottom line is that a Mars station is not just a crazy thing but a super-expensive crazy thing.
Unless unobtainium leads to a phlebotinum Buck Rogers special, the numbers can’t be made to work. And numbers are science.
The problem I have with the idea that the million colonists would be over a long period of time is that it’s hard to imagine a smaller colony sustaining itself without frequent massive deliveries of supplies.
Agree with RickJay and Exapno_Mapcase. Using money, manpower, and brainpower to solve pressing earthbound problems we have right now is preferable to establishing a bauble on the moon, much less Mars. The problem is that those issues are more mundane and just not as sexy and awe-inspiring as a rocket launch.
Although I agree that establishing a million-person colony on Mars is an unachievable fantasy; I do think it’s only fair to point out that you don’t have to send all one million from Earth; just a few thousand fertile ones.
You’re not going from a few thousand to a million within a century by natural growth. I don’t believe it’s ever happened on Earth with its unlimited resources, and I don’t understand how it can happen on Mars unless you start growing babies outside of wombs.
If you’re pushing the endgame out to a more realistic 500 years, then nothing we’re talking about here has any meaning. You could wait 100 years to start and the difference would be negligible.
Other than that of learning how to live in space.
I think that there are economical aspects to manned presence, eventually, once we get the cost down a bit.
There is tourism. I know that if I could, I’d save up for a lifetime for a week in space.
Then there is living. A retirement home in low gravity, don’t tell me that wouldn’t be tempting.
We don’t know the effects of low gravity on people, and the only way to find that out is to put people in a low gravity environment. If it turns out that anything less than 90% of Earth gravity is harmful, then that’s what it is. If it turns out that living in 1/3 gravity makes your heart work less, and lets people live longer more comfortable golden years, then there is going to be an incentive there.
And that’s not talking long term for when population pressures make us want to get out to where there’s some room to spread out.
I’ll agree that that is the case now, but I will not agree that there are not foreseeable technological developments that will make it possible. I also don’t think that a human presence needs to be part of the mix. The reason for it all is ultimately to create an environment for humans to live, but until we get to that point, then humans will just be in the way.
There are people working on this very problem, with enough confidence in it that they are investing quite a bit of real money into it. It is hard to say exactly how things will play out, as there are different proposals, some of which may work, some of which probably won’t, and others of which we will not think of until we try some stuff out.
Could we build a self-sustaining city of a million people anywhere on earth? Not even saying Antarctica? Let’s say Death Valley. They can only live there with what they can build, produce and drink.
The answer is almost certainly not, and it would be 1% (or less) of the cost.
A community of a million people could sustain itself if it had access to farmland and fresh water, of course. If cut off from the rest of the world the quality of life could not be kept at the standards most of us are used to, but they could remain alive.
Hawai’i has about a million people, and if cut off from the rest of the world they could certainly survive. Wouldn’t be as fun a place to live though. New Zealand’s South Island has about a million people and could survive by itself; so could Vancouver, or Trinidad, or Okinawa. Lower standard of living, but they’d live.
But those places have farmable land.
They have arable land and free fresh water, exactly. They could be self-sustainable at much lower level of technology
Living in Mars requires super-advanced technology to avoid dying every second. It will never happen.
Unlikely. You’ve more-or-less acknowledged that you haven’t followed Starship development at all, so this seems like a pretty ignorant statement unless you know something about Musk’s health that I don’t.
Starship is designed (ultimately) for about 100 people; that might be optimistic but they should get in the ballpark (it has a passenger/cargo volume of ~1000 m^3).
It’s made from cheap stainless steel. SpaceX is banging out prototypes every few weeks down in South Texas for such a low cost that it may as well be free (it’s not hard to keep track of the number of people and the material input). Starship has 6 Raptor engines on the upper stage, which are likely to cost well under a million each in production. The basic vehicle (sans life support) should cost <$50M (I agree that the ones destined for Mars probably won’t be coming back, though the vehicle is capable of it).
Life support will be harder, and maybe dominate the cost, but even doubling the $50M to $100M comes in very cheap compared to your $1B. And this is still just a first-gen version. Ok, we do still have to add fueling costs, since this has to refuel in LEO: but that’s cheap, maybe only $10-20M, since LEO and back is fully reusable and the fuel is basically free (~$1M per launch).
Ok, maybe this is all wildly optimistic. But SpaceX has a history of doing things extremely cheaply. Example: NASA used their NAFCOM model to estimate Falcon 9 1.0 development. This is considered an optimistic model, basically the minimum price that they would expect any contractor to hit (and inevitably exceed due to expected delays). It came up with $4B for F9 1.0 alone. The actual price that SpaceX hit was $390M for developing both Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 1.0. Over a 10x difference from what the model said.
Another example: the Starlink network, currently in production. Aside from the bankrupt OneWeb, the record for satellite production rate was Iridium, making 6 satellites per month. SpaceX is now manufacturing 120 per month (of satellites with similar complexity), at a price of around $250k each. A naive reasoning by analogy might have concluded that SpaceX would take over a century to complete a 12k satellite network; in reality it’ll take under a decade, and that’s only if they don’t further increase capacity and reduce costs.
So your “inconceivable” $1B price seems both pulled from thin air and at odds with SpaceX’s demonstrated cost advantages. Failure is still an option of course but it is not looking likely.
And of course Starship is just the beginning. SpaceX already has an 18-meter ship on the drawing board (Starship is 9 meters diameter). In many ways it’ll be an easier project once they get the kinks sorted out of Starship.
Starship is a long, long way from putting people on Mars.