Yeah! Them, too!
It was such an obvious joke I should have checked to see if anyone else had posted it, but to be fair, I’ve read all five books in the original Hitchhiker’s trilogy.
We don’t need book readers, you can stay home.
Any colony, lunar or martian or otherwise, will only happen if it is in people’s economic interest to do so. So unless we are implementing Heinlein’s penal colony on the Moon, the people that are there are not going to be Morlocks.
I don’t think most people have a good understanding of what a lunar Lava tube would be like. We’re not talking about cave dwelling here - we’re talking about environments that would look more like domed cities. A ‘cave’ with a ceiling a kilometer high and no walls for two kilometers in any direction is more likely to induce agoraphobia than claustrophobia. If you could pressurize one it could have lakes and rivers and farmland and even weather.
Seriously, if you wanted to build an off-world colony it would be hard to find a better place than a huge open space a kilometer high, five kilometers wide, and 100 kilometers long where the temperature is a constant -20 degrees and there is absolute protection from radiation, meteorites, etc. Bonus points for it being only three days from Earth. The Moon likely has hundreds of Lava tubes on that size order.
But no colonies are going to be built anywhere unless they can pay for themselves. The Moon at least has potential pathways for profitability. Water cracked into fuel and shipped to orbit could be one of them. Tourism is another. Large radio telescopes on the dar side and other scientifix installations are another, Lunar mining could easily become a thing.
Say a market develops for water to be delivered to Earth orbit, to be used by astronauts and for fuel for mining probes to the asteroids. That stimulates a rush to develop lunar water mining, which brings dozens or hundreds of people to the Moon. This stimulates research into habitats, lower launch costs, etc., which makes lunar mining feasible. Future huge satellites or space stations could be built by 3d printing them in space with titanium powder sourced from the moon, for example.
I don’t know of anything at Mars that could feasibly be turned into profit.
If anything, putting people on Mars will complicate any search for life. The human microbiome is enormously diverse including bacteria and fungi that could potentially survive in the Martian environment and make it problematic to find indications of native life past or present, and it is virtually impossible to keep equipment and samples uncontaminated while allowing astronauts any access. While the naive assumption is that people could go much further and observe much more on foot than a slow-moving rover, but the reality is that the issue that limits the speed at which a rover can move—available power—would be orders of magnitude greater with a human crew for which a habitable environment, consumable resources, and human-accessible interfaces have to be provided. The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are technological marvels containing a sophisticated laboratory of instrumentation on a mobile platform the size of a VW Beetle; an equivalent human-usable suite of tools would be vastly larger and require more power. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a benefit to having eyes and hands directly on the ground but that expectation has to be tempered by the reality that those eyes and hands are going to be enclosed in a bulky, mobiltity-restricting, and duration limited environment suit instead of the terrestrial shirt-sleeve environment that geologists and biologists are used to working in on Earth.
I have yet to see a persuasive argument for any profitable enterprises using Lunar resources to be sent back to Earth. The main reason to set up an infrastructure to extract resources in space is to support space-based exploration and exploitation rather than the costly endeavor of hauling consumable resources up from Earth. And while space enthusiasts have long envisioned human beings working as ‘asteroid miners’ and ‘space farmers’, the reality is that until there is a sufficient infrastructure to extract the resources that would be required to support large scale human habitation the vast majority of that work would have to be done through automated and remotely directed robots and probes. The Moon seems appealing because it is visible and relatively close but it is in many ways poorly suited for human activity from the fine, abrasive, electrostatically-charged regolith that is many meters deep and the four week “day/night cycle” that makes surface-based solar power and astronomy problematic to the 1/6 Earth-level gravity that would almost certainly be a physiological problem for long term inhabitants. It really makes little sense to plan for colonies on worlds that will never be Earth-like in significant ways, and the challenge of building terrestrial-like habitats, while feasible, will require the ability to extract and process materials from space-based sources in vast industrial quantities long before we can actually sustain large groups of people there.
As for exploration, on a cost basis alone uncrewed probes and rovers make much more sense; for the estimated US$500B+ cost of a single crewed mission to Mars we could send multiple probes to every planet and significant celestial object in the solar system without the risk to life or the cost of returning a crew and end of mission, notwithstanding all of the hazards like the intense solar particle environment within the orbit of Venus or the deadly radiation from Jupiter in the range of the Galilaen moons. Not only is it nonsensical to talk about colonizing the Moon or Mars with anything like the current state of the art, it isn’t even sensible to plan for crewed exploration without radical advances in propulsion, habitation, and space medicine technology.
Stranger
Yes, all those people who say “Coal mining is too froo-froo and girly for me–I want to mine water on the moon!” That would be a horrible job. Bad jobs on Earth are dull or deadly. Bad jobs on other worlds will be dull and deadly or double-deadly. “You want to explore the moon? Good, you better be a trained field geologist, because otherwise you are going to spend your space life assembling space widgets on a space assembly line in a sealed can. Oh, the glamour, the glory!”
It’s vastly easier to set up one of these paradises in Antarctica than the moon or Mars.
So if the argument is for the economic benefits, let’s figure out how a population can be self-sustaining (or at least with minimal re-supplies) in a particular inhospitable part of earth. Because as far as I know, we haven’t cracked that one yet despite the presence of easily available water and oxygen on a continent that should have exploitable resources (though we don’t necessarily want to tap into those for solid environmental reasons).
That said, if the reason is to work towards spreading humanity to other locations or for scientific discovery, there’s a solid rationale there. But the idea that colonies on other worlds will be any of cheap, fast, easy, or profitable is highly suspect for the foreseeable future.
Yes. Plenty of area to build underground tunnel homes in under the base of the Antarctic ice sheet. And much cheaper to reach and far more habitable.
So send a person on a one way trip, even if they consent to it seems problematic as consent can usually be withdrawn, then what? Is SpaceX on the hook to get them home, or the government? Or do we just allow them to live on mars against their will?
If a mountaineer is dying on top of a mountain on Earth, nobody is “on the hook” to get them home if rescue is just not feasible. I’m not sure why this is any different. The government is not constitutionally obligated to spend infinity money to rescue a citizen who has got themselves into a sticky situation and wants to come home. We generally just do everything we reasonably can.
I didn’t say anything about that. Nor am I saying that the moon IS profitable. I said there were at least potential pathways to profitable activity, whereas Mars currently has none.
For example, there could be a ready market in the future for water delivered to Earth or Lunar orbit. If we get a future of space hotels, larger space stations and the like, you could have a situation where at any given time there are 1000 people in orbit, with a water requirement of maybe 2 liters per day per person after recycling. 2,000 liters per day is 2000 kg/day of mass. Say it costs $500/kg to launch from Earth, but can be sourced from the moon for $250. That’s an industry that would be worth $250 million per year, just supplying water to people in orbit. But there may be much larger markets for water used to refuel satellites and spacecraft.
Then there is regolith mining. The surface of the moon is a harsh environment, but in some ways it’s a great place for mining because the environment nevee changes. A solar or nuclear powered regolith miner could be automated and run whenevee it has power. The vacuum on the moon makes it hard to cool things, but makes other processes like vapor deposition easier.
Each cubic meter of regolith can be processed to extract oxygen, iron, titanium, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, etc. Simple solar concentrators can be used to heat the regolith.
This material can then be used as feedstock for 3D printing, etc. A solar power satellite 3D printed in soace from lunar materials could be much cheaper than one built on Earth.
Then there’s tourism. A pressurized lava tube where you could play around in 1/6g coukx turn out to be very popular with people of means. In that environment you could strap on wings and fly like a bird.
We have no idea what the future will hold, and maybe all this stuff will never happen. But I do know that if any kind of profitable space evonomy emerges that drives construction of off-world colonies, it’s far more likely to happen on the Moon than Mars.
Lava tubes have none of these issues. They are the most protected spaces in the solar system. They have been stable for billions of years, they have a constant temperature of -20c, and are impervious to cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. The lunar dust problem doesn’t exist in them. They may also contain water ice and other valuable elements.
1/6 gravity may or may not be a problem. We have no real data on that. If it is, a future lava tube could easily fit centrifuges, and exercise routines can be used.
Pressurizing a lava tube is not within our near-term capability, but even a non-pressurized one could be worked in with space suits that are much more light and mobile because they wouldn’t need the protection from heat, cold, micrometeorites, etc. A tight fitting skin suit and some oxygen bottles, along with insulated boots would keep you confortable. Habitats could be simple pressure tents at first, without all the complexity of trying to live on the surface.
Elon Musk has a lot of money, even a great deal of money, but nothing even approaching the amount of money needed to get even a small suicide mission to Mars.
These dreams of his would eventually require the buy-in of several billion dollars from some government, probably trillions of dollars. And that is really, really, unlikely. When or if a government gets involved it will require measured, reliable, results. The exploration by unmanned spacecraft has many more stages to go through before even the idea can even be seriously proposed.
Elon’s Heinlein like The Man Who Sold the Moon is just a fantasy.
Kind of like Australia.
Free “Make Mars Great Again” hats. “Whites only need apply.” Soap root. Blanket trees and ham bushes. Bon voyage!
There are times when I see videos of efforts down at Boca Chica that I am more reminded of “The Marching Morons” than anything by Kim Stanley Robinson. But the efforts going on suggest that Elon will get his big rocket working. But, as above, actual use as a Mars colonisation system is just plain fanciful.
As a game changer for launch systems and the cost per unit mass to orbit, it may wipe the entire rest of the industry out and usher in a new age of cheap access to space (the one we were promised with STS half a century ago.)
My conspiracy theory is that the entire thing is actually a weapons system being built in plain sight, and it will be used to deliver huge numbers of kinetic weapons (aka rods from god) into orbit, yielding an unassailable military advantage to the US without using nukes. There is much wrong with this idea, but not as much as establishing a Mars colony.
If it’s essentially going to be a one-way suicide mission, then he shouldn’t be granted permission to launch such a mission. There’s no reason to rush to Mars. I read somewhere that Mars will be around for at least another decade or maybe even two. There’s plenty of time to create reliable support structures so that we can be reasonably sure that there’s a decent chance of it being a two-way trip.
How long does the mission have to be before it’s not a suicide mission?
The mission would need to last long enough for the person to die of reasonable old age rather than because of obvious failures in mission technology. If everything to support the base is built upon delicate, single-failure scenarios, then that’s unreasonable for human missions. (in my opinion) I can see the appeal of living out my life on a Mars base, but that lifespan should not just be a few weeks because there was some issue in a supply ship.
Now that’s just a trivially easy problem to solve. Simply recruit a bunch of nonagenarians for your crew!
Is there any insight about where Musk has these humans detained that he plans on shipping to Mars in 2026? If we could rescue them before they leave that may solve a lot of problems.
It’s almost certainly on a secluded private island or mountain top resort. Likely it’s young, exceptionally attractive couples with superior genetic makeup.
So Elon Musk is Mr. Roarke.